Copyright © 2021 Eileen Garvin

The right of Eileen Garvin to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

This Ebook edition was first published by Headline Publishing Group in 2021

All characters – apart from the obvious historical ones – in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library

eISBN: 978 1 4722 7 7831

Cover design by Vi-An Nguyen

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About Eileen Garvin

EILEEN GARVIN is a beekeeper and writer living in Hood River, Oregon. Her memoir, How to Be a Sister, was published in 2010. The Music of Bees is her debut novel.

About the Book

Set in the gorgeous, sprawling countryside of the Pacific Northwest, THE MUSIC OF BEES is about finding friendship in the most unlikely of places, and the families we choose for ourselves.

After the sudden death of her husband, Alice Holtzman finds herself a social outsider. Reclusive, middle-aged, childless, and with only 850,000 honeybees for company.

On the other side of town, Jake Stevenson and his enormous black mohawk had a bright future in front of them studying music, all until an accident at a high school party leaves him in a wheelchair.

So when Alice nearly crashes her pick-up truck, packed with thousands of restless honeybees, into Jake, the last thing she expects from the near-miss is to find that Jake has a gift: not only is he a natural with bees, but he can hear their buzzing as a form of music. . .

And when Harry, a twenty-four-year-old with debilitating social anxiety, also arrives at the farm looking for work, unexpected friendships begin to blossom.

As these new friends begin to heal one another, all seems right with their world - until the buzzing stops. With a pesticide company threatening the local honeybee population, and everything they have worked for, this trio must unite to defend their bees.

Praise for The Music of Bees . . .

‘It’s the bees, with all their wonder and intricacy and intrigue, that make this story sing’

Laurie Frankel, New York Times bestselling author of This Is How It Always Is

‘It’s simultaneously heartbreaking and uplifting, and I loved it’

Abi Daré, New York Times bestselling author of The Girl with the Louding Voice

‘Genuinely touching’

Publishers Weekly

‘A special treat for nature lovers, The Music of Bees is full of warmth and hope and decency’

Rebecca Hardiman, author of Good Eggs

‘The Music of Bees is an enchanting book of belonging, overcoming adversity and the journey to find a hive of one’s own’

Kira Jane Buxton, author of Hollow Kingdom

For all the wild creatures

and

everyone who loves them

· 1 ·

ORIENTATION FLIGHT

Those who suppose that the new colony consists wholly of young bees, forced to emigrate by the older ones, if they closely examine a new swarm, will find that while some have the ragged wings of age, others are so young as to be barely able to fly.

— A PRACTICAL TREATISE ON THE HIVE AND HONEY-BEE, L. L. LANGSTROTH, 1878

Jacob Stevenson had the tallest mohawk in the history of Hood River Valley High School. Even before it was listed as an official yearbook record, he was pretty sure about it. In his senior photo, it was a blue-black masterpiece that flared up to a height of sixteen and a half inches. Well, almost. It was more like sixteen and three-eighths, but close enough to silence any quibblers. Jacob had put six months into growing the spiky mass, which he sculpted into four sections, and it had reached its optimal height right before spring finals last year.

On this morning, he surveyed the masterpiece of his hair in the mirror and felt no little satisfaction that he’d managed to maintain it for more than a year now, despite unforeseen challenges. The undeniable truth of a mohawk was that you were always fighting gravity, and at a certain point, you lost. You had to be realistic. The idea was to aim for maximum volume that would hold over an entire day. A fallen mohawk would be a terrible embarrassment, especially for a boy of eighteen. Jacob had experimented with various products to maintain the loft. He’d tried egg whites, mustache wax, hair spray, and even some adhesive from wood shop—an unfortunate episode. All that experimenting revealed that a mixture of extra-firm sculpting wax and professional-grade hair spray was the best choice to sustain that sixteen-and-nearly-one-half-inch height of achievement.

Noah Katz had taken the official measurement the night of the spring jazz band concert. Both of them had been dressed in the traditional black tuxedos that members of the Hood River Valley High School jazz band had been wearing for the past twenty years. Jacob thought then that his hair contrasted nicely with the powder-blue cummerbund and bow tie. He posed with his trumpet as Noah snapped a photo, cackling, the phone dwarfed in his big paw. His cheeks shook as he laughed.

“Sick, Stevenson!”

Katz was a good-natured lumberjack of a guy. The two had become friends at May Street Elementary in fifth-grade band—Jacob on trumpet and Noah on trombone. Noah did not have a mohawk. Noah’s hair was crazy curly, and he referred to it as “The Situation.” Unlike Jacob, he did not need any product to make his hair resist gravity. He grew his curls up and out, chiefly to irritate his mother.

“Look out, ladies!” he crowed, tugging on his curls with one hand so that he resembled a human dandelion in fluff stage. He snapped a selfie. Then they hustled into Noah’s truck and sped across town to the high school. They had been late, as usual, and Mr. Schaffer was mad, but their band teacher seemed always to be looking for a reason to yell at the two boys, so it was no big deal.

Remembering that night made Jacob smile. He turned his head from right to left. On either side of the mast of hair he could see bits of stubble on his otherwise cleanly shaven skull. He turned on the faucet and dampened a washcloth under the tepid stream to wet his head. He squirted a soft puff of shaving cream into his hand and patted it on the stubble. The lemony white foam smelled institutional, like the hospital, and made him feel slightly nauseated. He breathed through his mouth and picked up his razor.

A mohawk took discipline. He had to wash or at least wet his hair, then comb it out, apply wax to the wet mop, part it into sections, and dry it with the high-power blow-dryer before spraying it into place and then shaving the stubble. The process made him sweat on warm days like this one. It was a big investment of time, really. But that was cool. These days he had nothing but time. Two hours to do his hair was no problem at all.

The reality of that hit him like a punch in the throat, as it often did when he sat in front of the bathroom mirror in the morning. The dark little hairs on his scalp poked through the white lather, standing up unwaveringly while Jacob Stevenson— or Jake, as everyone but his parents called him— could not. Jake swallowed hard. It seemed so stupid— the mohawk itself and the mohawk record, considering that in addition to having the tallest mohawk in the history of Hood River Valley High School, he was probably also the only kid there who’d ever had one in this farm town, which was short on punk and big on rodeo. It was also stupid because he no longer went to school there, having sort of graduated last spring. But mostly it seemed stupid because it was pretty much all he had to do on a given day, fix his fucking hair, now that the doctor’s appointments had tapered off and his physical therapy was down to once a month and he had all the time in the world to face the rest of his life in a wheelchair.

Jake pushed back from the mirror and looked at his body— lean and muscled in his torso and arms. His legs didn’t look terribly different than they had before. But sometimes he almost felt like they belonged to someone else.

The wheelchair was why he had “sort of” graduated. The school administration had mailed his diploma to his parents’ house while Jake lay in the hospital sixty miles away in Portland. His teachers had all passed him even though that was a stretch for a couple of classes, like PE, since he was in the habit of skipping to go to Noah’s house after second period to get high before lunch. He hadn’t darkened the gym door since before Christmas break. But even Mr. McKenna wasn’t enough of a dick to fail a PE student who was going to spend the rest of his life as a paraplegic. Irony, yo.

Jake’s mother had told him he’d be graduating when he was still doped up during those first days at the hospital. She sat next to his bed, her eyes puffy behind her pink-framed glasses. She tried not to cry in front of him, though she barely left the chair next to his bed. She sat for hours, holding his hand and murmuring that God was watching over him. She’d run through the list of people who had called and emailed to send their thoughts and prayers— his teachers, the neighbors, the mailman, people from church. People he’d never heard of, but he didn’t say that because it would have hurt her feelings. She brightened when she got to the part about the graduation ceremony, which, at that point, was still weeks away.

“We’re so proud of you, honey,” she said. “Your name will be in the program. They asked Noah to receive the diploma on your behalf, since you won’t be able to . . .”

Her voice faltered, and she stopped.

Jake winced, his smile a grimace. “Since I won’t be able to walk, you mean?”

His laughter came out in short barks, and then he couldn’t stop. He blamed the drugs, but there was more to it. He laughed and laughed at the word “walk,” which had taken on such a different meaning now that he had lost the use of his legs, his young, strong boy legs, legs that had skateboarded and run and climbed, legs he had completely taken for granted every single day of his stupid life until the day he couldn’t use them anymore. He couldn’t stop laughing even when his mom put her face into her hands and wept. He was such an asshole, he thought now, sitting in front of the mirror. He rolled forward and peered at himself, noticing how much thinner he was than he had been last spring.

He had laughed because the word “walk” had made him think of his father, Ed Stevenson, and his fleshy, angry face.

“The least goddamn thing you can do is walk your lazy ass down the aisle at graduation,” Ed had said. “You turn eighteen, we’re gonna give you a knife and fork and send you on your goddamn, merry way.”

That had been winter break of his senior year, when Jake realized his grades didn’t matter, now that he’d lost his music school scholarship, and it seemed like he might actually flunk out.

“Don’t worry about me, Ed,” Jake replied.

He’d begun calling his father by his first name when he started high school, knowing it bugged him.

“I’ll be out of here so fast you won’t even see me go.”

Jake had decided to move to Portland after the dream of music school faded to impossibility last year. He figured he’d work in a music store or a coffee shop someplace near the eastside clubs. He hadn’t worked out the details, but how hard could it be to get a job in a city that big?

However, since Jake had injured his spinal cord, his lazy ass was firmly stuck at his parents’ house. He wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon, and there was nothing Ed or anyone else could do about it.

He touched up the right side of his head, toweled it off, and started on the left, dragging the razor along the curve of his skull. The scraping sound was half-thrilling, half-sickening.

His father was part of a six-man building crew for Klare Construction. That meant he worked long hours on weekdays like this one, and those hours, even when they yawned wide and empty, were a relief to Jake. Weekends were harder, when Ed parked himself in front of the TV with a half rack of PBR and a bag of peanuts. Then Jake stayed in his room, listening to music or surfing the web. His earbuds muffled the sound of his father’s rattling cough, the ping of peanut shells into the bowl, the white noise of screaming fans, which always sounded the same whatever the sport or season.

Jake looked around the bathroom at the lowered sink and mirror, the shower chair, grab rails, the widened doorway. An experienced carpenter, his father could have easily made these renovations in a couple of days to prepare for his only son’s return from the rehab center, where Jake had gone after the hospital. But Ed hadn’t lifted a finger. His mother’s church group had done it, all eager to help Tansy Stevenson, their pastor’s administrative assistant, during this difficult time with her son. They took up a collection to pay for it and assembled a volunteer work crew before Jake returned home.

His mom told him this when she came to visit him. She sat next to the therapy table in a flowered dress and sensible shoes, an outfit usually reserved for church or holidays. He could tell she hadn’t wanted to make too much of the renovation to save his pride. But Jake knew his mom read it as a sign of God’s love that all those people had come out to their crummy double-wide to help Tansy Stevenson by helping her son. Jake lay on the table and his PT showed his mother the exercises she’d need to help him do to prevent contractures— permanent shortenings of the muscles that would make him even more of a freak. He watched his foot move toward and away from his face in the PT’s hands. He didn’t ask if Ed had sat in front of the TV sipping tall boys while the earnest members of the congregation remodeled the bathroom. He didn’t have to ask because he knew Ed wouldn’t even have had the decency to leave the house while they were doing the work he should have done. That must have been hard on his mother too. Anyway, he was grateful he could use the damn bathroom by himself.

Jake cracked the window and heard a car rattle past, its radio blaring Mumford & Sons’ “I Will Wait.” That song. His stomach dropped. He swiveled the chair and reached for the hair spray. He surveyed his bare chest and shoulders in the mirror, flexed his biceps, and smiled grimly. His upper body was stronger than it had ever been, as he’d started lifting weights to fill the long days.

When he’d returned from the rehab center last fall, his mother tried to get him to keep going to his support group in Portland. She nagged him to call the local mentor he’d been assigned— a Paralympic skier who lived nearby in Mosier. She stood in the doorway of his room, her purse over her arm, as she got ready to leave for church.

“You should get out of the house, Jacob,” she said. “You need to see people and start getting on with things.”

Getting on with things. His body flushed with anger, but he didn’t say anything. He just stuck his earbuds in and turned back to his computer. He was playing Tomb Raider and winning— a hollow victory since he was playing against himself. At least he didn’t say something horrible to her. She was sweet, his Jesus-loving mom. It wasn’t her fault that her only son, who was kind of a screw-up to begin with, had fucked himself up so badly.

They hadn’t been drunk, not even a little buzzed, on that weirdly warm April day last year. Someone had set up a Slip ’N Slide in the yard at Tom Pomeroy’s house, and they had taken turns belly-flopping down the slick yellow plastic. There were about twenty people, all juniors and seniors. The guys whooped and the girls screeched as they careened down the lawn. When Jake threw himself into the wet tongue of the slide, he felt a streak of joy. He let himself forget about the pressure of life after graduation and the stress of finals that he was pretty sure he would fail. He pulled his thoughts away from the lost scholarship to music school, which had hurt so much at first and finally settled into a dull ache that he could ignore from time to time. As he walked among his friends in the warm sunshine, he felt like a kid again. He went up onto the porch as someone cranked the stereo. Mumford. That song. It was just a few moments, an ordinary collection of seconds that had an extraordinary impact on his life.

Jake grabbed a beer out of the cooler and bummed an American Spirit. He didn’t smoke, but it was a party, so why not? He climbed the stairs to the second floor behind Megan Shine, who was telling some story about her spring break trip to Mazatlán, where her rich parents had taken her and her sisters. Megan was super nice even though she didn’t need to be because she was also gorgeous. Cheerleader hot. Blond and all that. Not his type, but still. She laughed at something he said and took his beer away from him, tipping her head back to drink, and he snuck a look at her beautiful breasts. Surely she wouldn’t mind even if she noticed his eyes diving down into her bikini top, her lovely flat stomach, her short pink shorts. Someone grabbed him from behind. Pomeroy squeezed Jake with one arm and gave him a playful smack on the side of his shaved head.

Pomeroy was a good guy, if kind of an ape. He was one of those dudes who always had to be doing something physical— a push-up contest or jumping off the train trestle into the river or skateboarding through the Mosier tunnels in the dark— and rallying everyone else to do the same. Nothing fazed him. The guy was always doing shit that should have gotten him hurt, but he was like a cat, always landing on his feet.

He was bigger and stronger than Jake. Pomeroy played football, so Jake would usually have dodged this kind of wrestling match. But for some reason, he dropped his cigarette and spun around to grab Pomeroy’s meaty torso. Maybe because Megan was watching and laughing. Jake threw himself at the bigger boy, wrapping his arms around Pomeroy’s waist. His friend staggered under his weight.

“Christ, Stevenson!” he yelled as he slipped.

It would have been no big deal, except they were standing on the second-story roof over the patio. Jake fell, his body twisting in the air, and landed with a sickening thud on the low wall separating Mrs. Pomeroy’s rose garden from the driveway. He looked up and saw Megan and Pomeroy peering over the edge of the roof. He wanted to laugh up at them that he was okay, but he was not. And things would never be the same again.

Unlucky, the doctors told him later. That was what they called his incomplete spinal cord injury to T11 and T12 in his lower back.

Jake felt sick remembering. He took a deep breath and wheeled himself down the hall to his room. The loop had started in his head.

He would never walk again, the surgeon said, but at least he had good control of his upper body since the injury was only partial. “You can be grateful for that.”

Jake had stared at the guy. Grateful? Gratitude was far, far from his mind then.

He pulled on his favorite gray Dickies shirt, buttoned it up, grabbed his backpack, and slung it over his chair.

He was lucky to have the use of his hands and arms, the redheaded nurse had told him, despite the asymmetry of strength on one side.

He slid his sunglasses into his shirt pocket.

He was young and otherwise healthy, his PT said over and over again. He could have a really great life.

Jake lifted one leg onto the foot rail with both hands and then the other. He pulled on his Doc Martens, laced them up, and wheeled through the house, out the door, and down the ramp.

“A successful career,” his therapist said.

He put on his sunglasses and stuck in his earbuds. He turned up the volume on his iPhone, and the familiar rasp of ska-punk filled his head.

“Computer programming, maybe,” his mom suggested, nodding at the social worker and then at Jake. “You like those games so much, don’t you?”

He maneuvered his chair down the gravel driveway and out into the bike lane that snaked along Belmont. His wheels kicked up dust and bits of gravel. He smiled at his speed. The chair was pretty fly. His classmates had taken up a collection for it. Otherwise he’d have the crap-assed one his dad’s insurance would have covered. They had announced it at graduation, Noah told him. He was glad he hadn’t been there to have to thank them, which would have been so humiliating, though he was grateful for it. He would spend the afternoon, as he had been lately, now that the spring rains were tapering off, out near the orchards where he knew he wouldn’t run into any of his friends. Those who weren’t at college— like Noah, who was working to save money to travel— would be at work or hanging out at the skate park.

The air smelled green and fresh. It pricked something in his heart. This season— when unexpected rain showers swept across the valley floor and the wind turned the orchards into waves of blossoms— had always filled him with hope. The chorus frogs sang in the irrigation ditches, and the days lengthened imperceptibly. Hawks perched along the fence line of county roads, and tiny finches darted through the air. Flickers keened in the shadows of the forest. He never told anyone he noticed these things. But spring always brought him a secret joy, the promise of something new. Now he felt his heart try to rise toward it and fall back defeated.

He turned up the music. It was Spring Heeled Jack’s Connecticut Ska, which launched the band into the U.S. punk scene in the early nineties, just before Jake had been born. Jake would focus on Pat Gingras’s trumpet and parse how the band’s sound was changing before Gingras was replaced by Tyler Jones. He would make up arguments in his head, today taking the position that Jones’s style maintained the band’s classic ska-punk sound, but who believed that, really? If you had any ear at all, you could hear Spring Heeled Jack working toward the mainstream sound of the Mighty Mighty Bosstones, which would eventually swallow some of its members. Other days he would conjecture that Gingras’s sound was authentic and true to the real mission of the music, which was what he really believed. So did every other genuine ska fan. It didn’t matter. It was like his Tomb Raider games. Just killing time in the jail that was his life. This life had replaced the life he was supposed to have— one of music and promise, the other life that now felt like something he had imagined.

Jake’s musical ability, which had been obvious from an early age, was a mystery to his parents, who were not musical people. Luckily his teachers noticed and had suggested he join the school band. He’d been playing trumpet since middle school. He couldn’t remember life without music. He didn’t have words to explain it, this vivid thing that lived in him.

In the fall of his senior year, Jake had been offered a three-quarter scholarship to Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, mostly based on his musical ability and letters of recommendation. If his grades had been better, it might have been a full ride, but 75 percent was enough. He was going to study music theory, history, and performance with trumpet as his primary instrument. He kept the acceptance letter in his trumpet case for months and pulled it out to reread when he was alone even though he pretty much had it memorized.

“Dear Mr. Stevenson, It is with great pleasure that we welcome you into the Cornish College of the Arts community . . .” The words made him giddy. But then, when it came time to send the school a down payment on the balance, his father had refused to lend him the money. Ed wouldn’t listen to his wife’s pleading and barely took his eyes off the TV to respond.

“Music school? Please,” he scoffed. “I was working full time at his age.”

Case closed. Jake didn’t want to think about it, that crushing loss. But under the wail of Gingras’s trumpet, his mind was invaded by questions with no answers that played in an unending loop: What if his father had lent him the money? What if he’d earned more than a 2.3 GPA and gotten the full ride? What if he’d worked a weekend job and saved some money of his own? How pathetic to have this thing he’d so wanted slip away because he hadn’t tried harder a little earlier.

The questions unraveled from there like always, becoming more and more impossible. What if he hadn’t been at Pomeroy’s that day, but had cleaned up the yard for his mom, like she’d asked? Instead he stepped around the rake and leaf bags, promising himself he’d go to the party for an hour and finish the yard before she got home. What if he hadn’t been showing off for Megan Shine? What if he could do it all over again?

Jake turned up the music to drown his thoughts. He hit the bottom of the hill by the Indian Creek Golf Course and threw himself into the climb. The clouds had lifted, and the sky was turning from orange to yellow over the ridgeline. The apple and pear trees had unfurled into an embarrassment of beauty, their blossoms rippling along the valley floor to the foot of snowcapped Mount Hood. The temperature dropped, and Jake inhaled the wet green scent of the irrigated orchards. He could taste the faint, acrid tang of whatever they sprayed on the trees in the back of his throat. He told himself the pesticides were making his eyes sting.

He sailed down the next hill, ignoring the old dude who had stopped his golf cart to gawk at the boy with the mohawk in the wheelchair flying toward the four-way intersection. Don’t worry about me, old man, he thought. The worst has already happened.

Was that true? Maybe the worst thing was that nothing else was going to happen in his miserable life. A month from now, Hood River Valley High School would host another graduation. Class of 2014. Hip, hip hooray! Two hundred young people would move forward in their lives to college or work or at least someplace other than this hick town. He’d been thinking about it all week. It was right there in his face, the anniversary of the day his life stopped. Nice job, Jake. You fucked up. Just like your old man has been saying your whole life. Nice job, fuckup.

The afternoon deepened into dusk, and Jake sped past the old Oak Grove Schoolhouse, which cast long shadows into the apple orchards. Out in the trees he watched lights coming on in the fruit workers’ shacks. He could see figures up on ladders, their shadows lengthening between the rows of trees. He rolled south toward the shape of Mount Hood, which was kissed with alpenglow against the green-yellow horizon.

“Give you a knife and fork and send you on your goddamn, merry way.”

The words echoed in his head, and he turned the music up as loud as it would go. He could smell his sweat, which was different now than it had been before. He smelled like an old man, like someone sick, like a stranger to himself. He tried to focus on the white line of the road, which wasn’t a bike lane this far outside of town in the orchards, just a skinny shoulder.

He fought a flood of images: Megan Shine’s smile and the sun bright on her bikini top. His fingers flying along the valves as he blasted a trumpet solo with his heart in his throat at the state jazz band competition. Watching Noah rip the half-pipe at the skate park. Passing around a can of chew in the back of the band bus. Running after his brindled dog on the sandbar. All of it gone. Those things were part of the life he used to have, the one that was lost to him. His heart ached, and he hated himself for it. He hated the tears that were coursing down his cheeks, which he could no longer pretend were sweat. He hated what he had done to his stupid life and that he had no one else to blame. In that moment he felt broken in a way that could not be undone.

Jake was turned so far inward that he didn’t hear the sound of the pickup truck coming up behind him. He was facing away and wouldn’t have seen one wheel riding inside the white line of the shoulder. A truck whose driver didn’t see the boy in the dusk until the headlights hit the back of his chair. Then Jake heard the squeal of brakes over the sound of the music and everything stopped.