I looked at her and tried, for a moment, to see the mother I wanted to remember. She’d been the whole world to me, once. Now she was a stranger, pulling more questions to the surface than answers.
“What do I do?” I begged.
The aspens forming the shape of her groaned as she raised a bark-covered finger and pointed to the wound in Eva’s side.You heal.
I blanched. “I don’t know how!”
The spirit of the wood shrugged.
Eva’s words came back to me in a flash, stolen from years ago.I mend things,she’d said.
Her eyelids had closed and I felt her pulse growing ever fainter. There was no room for error, no time for mistakes. She had seconds, minutes at most.
Tenderly, I lifted a lock of hair out of her eyes. “You have to live,Ev.” A scant, delicate whisper as tears slid down my cheeks and dripped into her hair. “Please. Stay with me.”
I gathered her against me, my desperation lancing down into the rootscapes below, wilting the grass, then restoring it over and over. I was undone, unleashed, more broken than I had ever been. I was life and death, unbound by the sharp cut of my grief.
“Stay with me now,” I hoarsed out. “Stay with me forever, bee girl. I need to make things right between us. Don’t leave me before I get the chance.”
A nearby oak gave a loud moan as it crashed to the forest floor, the split of its trunk like snapping celery. Honeybees buzzed furiously overhead. One of them landed on Eva’s shoulder. Then another, in her hair. I held my breath and watched them gather, landing on her one by one. It was a strange and beautiful sight, and I watched, immobilized by the sudden, overwhelming feeling of sacredness settling around us.
Something changed.
The glow in my chest ballooned down to my fingertips. I couldn’t feel the monster, nor could I hear its voice, as sunshine and power poured into my limbs, filling my heart to bursting. I gathered all the love I could muster for Eva, all the years spent missing her, all the ways she’d changed me and made me new. The flowers around us seemed to sigh, the heartbeat of the earth so close I could taste it. I couldtakeit.
But I didn’t want to take things anymore. I wanted to mend.
A heady sensation filled the gaps in my mind where the darkness lay. But this was not my monster. It was sweet, and it poured through me, through Eva too, bright and sweet assticky, sugary gold. Every breath was honeyed. Every breath was life.
With a guttural pop, Eva’s ribs snapped back into place, expelling the lodged bullet into my palm. I gasped and dropped it in the grass.
Eva’s cheeks flushed pink. Her eyelids fluttered as she arched off the grass. I watched in awe as the skin around her wound knit itself closed, leaving behind a pale pink scar. Tears pooled in my eyes. Scars were okay. Scars were beautiful. Scars meant you still got to live.
“Ev?” I whispered, my voice shaking as I dragged her close. The world seemed to hold its breath as her eyelids fluttered, then opened.
“Arthur?”
With a sob, I gathered her to my chest. Eva clung to me, crying too.
My life had been a series of unsure things, the ground beneath me always shifting. I’d traversed the dark more nights than I could count and knew too well the clawing pain of doubt and self-loathing. But she was soil, a place where I could put down roots. I’d known eight years ago as surely as I knew it now, because even then, when I saw only the parts of me that were hungry and lacking and frail, she sawme.
“You’re okay,” I promised. “We’re okay, bee girl.”
It took a minute for the panic to leave her eyes as she looked from me to the empty clearing. “But… Lenny?”
“Ran off,” I murmured, thumbing the soft apple of her cheek.
Eva’s gaze flicked to my face, and she touched the trail of blood running down my temple. “Your stitches…”
“I don’t even feel them,” I said reassuringly.
Eva shook her head and touched my brow. “No, I mean they’re gone.”
“What?”
“The infection,” she said in growing confusion, her brows knitting as she sat up. “It’s healed.”
I lifted my hand to touch where she pointed, and felt my lips pucker in surprise. She was right. Where the skin had been swollen and hot to the touch, now I felt only the smooth slice of a healed scar cutting through my eyebrow.
