The Bumblebee Flies Anyway (27 page)

Anguish filled her as she stared at herself in the bureau mirror, saw her mouth open but wordless, her eyes wide with the despair and desolation that gripped her, overwhelmed by the knowledge that Alberto, her brother, her twin, her other self, was dead, gone.

What about me?

But suddenly it doesn’t matter about me.

Turning from the bureau, she was alive to a thousand sights and sounds springing to life around her. Could hear her veins and arteries churning through her body, her heart pulsing its marvelous rhythms, aware of light and color, everything vivid and dazzling, the glow of the lamp stunning her eyes, the air sweetly stinging her flesh, her body singing like a harp string plucked by knowing fingers. Whose fingers?

Ah, but she knew Whose fingers.

And that’s all she needed to know.

T
HE
Bumblebee never stopped flying.

He had a trick he had learned, and the trick was the blinking of his eyes and in the blinking came the memory of the Bumblebee, gliding down the roof as if in slow motion, sleek and gleaming in the moonlight, gathering speed, wheels flashing as they turned.

He remembered clinging to Mazzo’s body, ignoring Billy’s voice calling from the skylight, and watching the Bumblebee’s course, unstoppable, not to be denied this flight to glory.

Free of the roof, the Bumblebee hung in the air for a sweet split second, suspended in time and space, the way a dancer pauses in a soaring leap, breathless, denying for a precious moment the laws of gravity, untouchable and unspeakably beautiful.

Then the Bumblebee disappeared, one moment there and the next moment gone, as if removed from Barney’s sight by some marvelous, mysterious act. He listened for the crash of the Bumblebee, the smashing and splintering of wood as it struck the ground below. But heard nothing. He laughed, delighted, knowing that the Bumblebee still flew, soaring out into space, unending in its flight.

In the bed he now occupied he was surrounded by a grayness, and out of the grayness came faces. The faces were always sad and unsmiling. He wanted to tell them: Hey, laugh, or at least smile a little, because the Bumblebee is still flying and we made it fly. Often, in the grayness, he searched for something, lost, beyond his reach. A face he had known. He tried to summon the face but couldn’t. Her face. But there was only a blankness in the grayness and a terrible loneliness and longing. He wanted to cry out for—who?

He watched and searched and listened in the loneliness, and heard another voice. It was voice that was familiar, but he could not identify it.
Is there anything I can do to help, Barney?
But the voice couldn’t help. It was the wrong voice, anyway. There was another voice that could help, a low sultry voice like a singer he had heard once but could not bring back now. Nobody could help anymore. Only the blinking could help.

He was grateful for the blinking. He didn’t know what he would do without the blinking. He got ready for the blinking by saying his prayers,
In the Name of the Tempo and the Rhythm
, repeating the prayer over and over,
In the Name of the Tempo and the Rhythm
, and then blinking rapidly, furiously, blink:
Tempo
, blink:
Rhythm
, and that’s when he saw the Bumblebee again, breaking through the grayness and the loneliness, glowing and glistening as it moved off the roof and across the sky, out into the stars and the planets and beyond, always beautiful, always flying, always his.

Robert Cormier (1925–2000) changed the face of young adult literature over the course of his illustrious career. His many novels include
The Chocolate War
,
Beyond the Chocolate War
,
I Am the Cheese
,
Fade
,
Tenderness
,
After the First Death
,
Heroes
,
Frenchtown Summer
, and
The Rag and Bone Shop
. In 1991, he received the Margaret A. Edwards Award, honoring his lifetime contribution to writing for teens.