They open Caroline’s casket for the ceremony—the Celebration—so that people can line up and pay their respects to the departed and the departed’s family. I can’t look at her, afraid she’ll still be trapped in that half-lidded stare, that smile. I can’t stop thinking about the candle she left for me. She wasn’t even at camp for a week, so she must have just made it. What was she thinking? Who was she by then, as the tumor grew?

The ceremony ends. Then, like a winding millipede, the guests merge into a procession with a thousand hands, each one reaching to touch me as people whisper more blessings and prayers and condolences. As a politician’s child, I have a lifetime of training in polite deflection, and I use all of it until finally—finally—the hands run out. The staff puts out coffee and a lunch buffet in the dining room. The parlor empties.

In the kitchen, my mother waves me down. She sits at the granite island with my aunts.

“Oh, Marshall, sweetie, I’m so sorry,” Aunt Michelle coos, pulling me into a hug. Then she catches herself. “Oh, I mean Mars. You’re going by Mars now, right? Sorry, dear, old habits die hard.”

I don’t remind Aunt Michelle that the family has always called me Mars, even in baby videos, because Grandma said it was the only way she could tell between me and her wrinkly little husband, Grandpa. Marshall Matthias the Second. I’m the third attempt, evidently.

I’ve only ever been Mars. Aunt Michelle’s just being an idiot.

“Either is fine,” I say, and she relaxes like I’ve just spared her life. I suppress an eye roll. I’m gender fluid, not a grenade.

“Mars, sweetie. Listen,” Mom says, rubbing my arms. “You don’t need to be down here if you don’t want to be. I know you didn’t want to have the ceremony in the house but …”

“Tradition. I know.”

“Yes. But traditions are for all the old people. And the important part is over now. Why don’t you make an ice run or something?”

I shrug. “But Dad.”

Mom shrugs. “I’ll handle Dad.”

“But you.”

Mom’s eyes are rimmed red, her skin paper-thin like the grief is dissolving her from within. But at my concern, she only smiles. She hugs me, rubbing my back through my starched white shirt. I’m conscious of the eyes watching the senator hug her child. Her only child now. I watch the crowd back, my eyes landing on Bria, Sierra, and Mimi.

Caroline called them “the Honeys.”

I pull out of the hug.

“I’m staying,” I say. I search my mom’s face for signs of relief, but I don’t find them. I put together too late that she was hoping I’d go. Vanish, like I usually do.

“If that’s what you want,” she says, and her performance is perfect. Caroline would tell me I’m being too hard on her, and maybe I am. I can’t help it. My mind has become a storm of doubts and cynicism these past days. My defenses against my natural paranoia are at their weakest right now.

Maybe I should vanish, after all.

I excuse myself from the kitchen. There are people everywhere, except the parlor. I duck in there, cross to the wide French doors without looking at the casket, and slip out into the solarium. It was my job to attend to the plants while Caroline was away this summer, and until she died I wasn’t too serious about it. Now I’m obsessed. I take my time checking soil moisture, watering, and snipping away dead growth. The bok choy keeps trying to flower, but I pinch off stalks like Caroline told me to. I collect the crushed bulbs and clippings in a battered bucket already half full of all the things I’ve picked away. It calms me down, and I’m about to reenter the parlor when I freeze.

Through the warped glass of the French doors, I see people bending over the open casket. It’s Bria, Sierra, and Mimi. The Honeys. Something about their posture makes me nervous. I think it’s the way they’re leaning in, like people inspecting a buffet, figuring out which morsel they’ll take for themselves.

Sierra and Mimi turn away, shielding Bria as she digs her hands into her black curls and removes her earrings. Then she leans into the casket and fastens the earrings to Caroline, tilting Caroline’s frozen jaw with sure hands, like she’s practiced this many times. The movement is so quick—so strange and invasive in the soft quiet atmosphere of the parlor—I almost doubt I saw it right at all.

The girls leave, pinkies hooked and swinging between them. My calm has evaporated into the hot air of the solarium. Sweat dots my upper lip. I slip back into the parlor and approach the casket. Whereas before I looked only at the mosh of flowers all around it, my eyes now finally fix on the pale thing within. Caroline. She is cocooned in pink and white. Everything about her looks wrong—her jaw is clenched and her skin is too rosy and her lips are slightly puckered. My mind flashes between this ugly, pretty thing embedded in softness, and the eerie smile she gave me among the crunching crystal and swinging light.

I lean in. For a moment I smell that horrible, sweet decay. The scent from that night, permanently woven into my sheets. I hold my breath and get even closer. I am inches from Caroline’s frozen face. Her makeup is fuzzy, like pollen. I can make out Bria’s fingerprints where she adjusted Caroline’s jaw. I reach into the casket and brush away Caroline’s hair, wincing when my knuckle grazes the cool, dead flesh of her cheek.

A small earring glints among her mouse-brown curls, pushed through the lobe of Caroline’s ear. It’s a golden bee, so finely detailed I expect it to move. Was it there before, or did Bria place it there? I know I need to stop, but I run a finger over the gold. It’s still warm. The warmth from someone else’s body.

And then something crawls from Caroline’s ear.

I snatch my hand away, jostling Caroline’s head, and out from the casket buzz a trio of black dots. They weave toward me. I bat them away, frantic, then lose them in the busy backdrop of flowers. I can hear them circling me. Then I feel something tiny and fast crawl along the ridge of my ear, like it’s trying to burrow beneath my bandage.

I cry out, clasping my hands against my ears, trying to crush it. Pain blossoms behind my eyes and I know I’ve reopened my wound. Arms catch me—people waiting. I flail until the buzzing goes away. I see the dark shape of the bees cut through the dim light above the casket, landing on Caroline’s throat, her lips, her eyelid.

And, though people are pulling me away, I am close enough to see the insects dart down the curve of her cheekbone and wiggle their way back inside her head.