A Recipe for Bees Read Free Page A

every detail, then put it into an envelope that she sealed with an Easter Seal and mailed to herself, so the cancellation mark would date it.
    Then Gabe had the seizure. Sunday afternoon, three weeks back, he began staring over his right shoulder, with an expression on his face that Joy described as frightened, as if he were watching his back, as if he were being chased by some demon. “What’s wrong?” she’d asked him. “What are you looking at?”
    “I don’t know,” he said, and then he wasn’t able to say anything at all. Joy went into the next room to phone for an ambulance, and as she was on the phone she heard Gabe howl, an inhuman howl, and fall to the floor. She extricated herself from the emergency operator and ranback into the kitchen, where she found the table askew and Gabe thrashing around on the floor under it. “Just like a dumb hurt animal,” Joy told Augusta over the phone. “He wasn’t human. He wasn’t Gabe.”
    Augusta’s first love had howled like that before each of his fits. Tommy Thompson was an older boy who had shown no sign that he knew Augusta was alive. The other kids made fun of him. He was an epileptic, and as a young girl still in school she watched him slide into possession as surely as into the water of a river. He’d turn his head stiffly to look first to the far wall, then to the stove in the centre of the room, and finally to the line of pegs where they hung their coats at the back. He couldn’t stop himself from turning; nothing could make him look away. That was the warning.
    The other kids would giggle out of nervousness, because they knew what was coming. They called him
savage
on the school grounds during lunch break, and
wild man, crazy man
. Tommy Thompson, sitting at his desk, would open his mouth and out would come a noise that wasn’t a human scream or the cry of an animal, but something completely different, a noise that seemed to come not from him but through him, the sound of a soul departing under protest. Then he would fall heavily, with a thud like a sack of potatoes dropped on a kitchen floor. His body would jerk and thrash for what seemed like an eternity, while the teacher, Mrs. Sawyer, acting with the knowledge of the day, tried to force a spoon between his teeth to stop him from biting his own tongue. Mrs. Sawyer never succeeded, which was lucky for her; she might have choked him or lost a finger to his mindless bite. Some time laterTommy would stop convulsing and begin breathing heavily, nearly snorting, until he slowly came back to himself.
    After she got off the phone with Joy, Augusta immediately phoned Rose to tell her the awful news. “I’ll be right up,” said Rose. She barged into Augusta and Karl’s apartment, broke open the seal on the envelope in front of them, then waved her handwritten description of Augusta’s vision above her head, crying, “See! See! There’s proof!”
    Karl, sitting at the kitchen table with his arm around Augusta, stared at Rose, bewildered, as if to say,
What the hell is she doing?
Even so, he didn’t question her about her behaviour. So much went on around him that he didn’t understand, didn’t hear.
    Augusta hadn’t told Karl about her vision. Augusta had never had much luck discussing premonitions or ghosts with him, though early in their courtship she had believed he would have to be sympathetic, what with that phantom thumb of his.
    Now, today, Gabe was having brain surgery, of all things. It seemed to Augusta an impossibility, a cruel joke, something from a monster movie. He had been in that hospital for three weeks, undergoing test after test as the doctors figured out what was wrong. Augusta went down to Victoria to be with her daughter and Gabe right at the start, the day after Gabe fell ill. Rose volunteered to drive her, but Joy asked her mother not to bring Rose. “I don’t want to have to deal with strangers while all this is going on.”
    “Rose is hardly a stranger,” said