Swarm (3 page)

The backpack bounced on his shoulders as we went outside. Writing was scrawled on the canvas and I squinted but couldn't make out the words. He zipped up his jacket and I looked south, in the direction of Margo's and my apartment, but didn't move. Instead, I waited, hoping that he'd offer to walk me home so I wouldn't be mugged for the handful of rattling change in my pocket, so I didn't have to be alone.

When he stepped down the stairs, I followed.

“Which way are you going?” I asked, the words big in my mouth. He nodded toward the intersection with the leaning streetlight, the echo of red lights all the way south to where I lived. “Me too,” I said, inviting. Like a magic trick, he slid a cigarette out from behind one ear. “I have things to do,” he told me. He sounded sober.

I thought he was trying to get rid of me so I nodded, ready to grit my teeth and get myself home. “See you later then,” I said and started to walk away, but he spoke my name and when I looked back, he squinted through a plume of smoke.

“Do you want to come?”

Like a little kid, I giggled. It embarrassed me, but I couldn't help it. If I'd been forced to explain I would have told him that it was this sense of newness that I hadn't felt in a long time. Like a door had opened and I'd decided to plunge right through, moving in a direction other than the one I'd planned: lurching home on the sidewalk, fixating on my narrowing future, worrying myself to sleep.

“It's a long walk,” he said. “And we'll end up at my place.” He looked serious. I couldn't tell if he was hitting on me or just telling me the truth of what would happen. Either way, it was an adventure. Margo was always telling me to seize the day, so I decided to do that—or simply not resist.

“Okay,” I said, and I'm sure we both knew right then what would happen. But not the extent of it. Not how we would change each other's lives.

Thomson
often tells me that people most often make choices out of desire, but to be honest, Melissa, at that moment in my life I wasn't sure what I wanted or what I would be able to get. I knew what I didn't want—to have to move home, to go back to my parents' tiny apartment that felt like a prison, a place I couldn't leave even to go to the corner store without uncertainty shadowing my father's face. A year earlier I'd run away, bolted free, broken one of my grandmother's good china teacups in a rage when I'd come home from a date and my father tore my purse from my hands, emptied it out on the kitchen floor, looking for cigarettes or condoms, and finding only panty liners, pencils, my
ID
loose like playing cards. Eventually my mother calmed him, but in the morning, the birds singing when it was still dark out at 4:00
AM
, I threw socks, underwear, extra pants and shirts into a cloth grocery bag and left with a hundred dollars in an envelope marked
GROCERIES
in my mother's boxy handwriting. From the city, several hours east, I called her, crying, and instead of telling me to come home as I'd expected, she gave me the phone number for her old friend Sissy, who worked
HR
at a housing developer. From those beginnings, I started building a bit of a life that was, that night, as Marvin and I walked east, through the downtown canyon I'd left earlier that month, about to become something entirely new.

You might have
noticed that Marvin stays home on Sundays. The boat by the shore is turned over, its tarred keel like a sea creature's spine. He says he needs a day of rest so he might as well follow the Christian tradition. But that morning he didn't sit idle. He tore out the waist-high pickets from around our garden and hauled cedar posts from the collapsed fence up the road into our yard. When I heard the shovel, I went outside and found him digging a hole in the corner of the garden plot.

“What are you doing?”

“Building a higher fence.” His foot pushed the rusted blade deeper into the soil.

“Why?”

He didn't answer. While he dug, I tried to think of something to say, a way to defend your stealing without confessing that I knew where our food was going. But I could tell he wanted me to go inside, to leave him be. Over on the porch, I heard Thomson coughing, his lungs grinding, making a sound he used to call
the minutes
. He hasn't said that in a while, and I can't help but think it's because he knows his time is running out, that he's on the final rotation of the clock's hands.

“Sandy,” Thomson called from the porch. I turned around and saw him fumbling to sit up.

“We aren't losing that much,” I said.

Marvin stopped shovelling and stared at me. “We barely have enough. Last winter . . .”

I dropped my eyes. I tried not to think of those days, late February, early March, when we'd eaten the last of our fish, dug into rotten stumps for grubs to fry, made soup out of frozen roots and the inner bark from the yellow birch. The snow came and came. Usually Mr. Bobiwash brought us rabbit or deer that he'd managed to shoot, but he didn't show up for weeks. His wife, Shannon, was hugely pregnant, eating twice what she normally would. Angry at everyone, unwilling to share.

In bed, at night, my fingers compulsively found my ribs, running over them like a silent instrument, amazed. My mind moved from clarity to cottony dullness. And then the wild leeks sprouted and the sun shone and the soil loosened and the seeds went in and we were okay for another year.

This is different
, I wanted to tell Marvin as he threw a shovelful of dirt onto the pile, but I couldn't. I didn't know if he would care that you were not an animal burrowing instinctually for buried food. Instead, I said, “We don't have cement for those posts.”

“I'll bury them deep.” Thomson shouted out my name again, a high-pitched urgency in his voice. I turned and ran to help him with whatever he wanted: to go to the outhouse, get a drink of water. Something simple that he couldn't do on his own anymore.

While
Marvin worked, burying the posts and stringing old chicken wire, I sat beside Thomson on the porch. I read to him from a book we'd found weeks earlier, a mystery novel with pages torn out to start fires so we had to make up bits to link the plot.

In his thin, gruff voice, Thomson placed the detective in an underworld the author hadn't even hinted at. Somehow the change made sense. “You should write the books,” I told him, and he smiled. I often told him that. Whenever the Bobiwash kids came by, their brown eyes fixed on his face as he spoke about the places he'd been. Israel, Greece. They listened, popping blackberries into their mouths, under the scarves we made them wear to visit Thomson when his sickness re-emerged. Their faces filled me with yearning.

I tried to have children. Our third spring on the island, I started watching my cycle like Phoenix had taught me. Writing dates down on the bumpy plaster of our closet wall. Whenever I attempted to talk to Marvin about it, he refused, his voice hammering out those solid words: “No. There isn't enough.” So I didn't tell him. Still, nothing happened. Every month, my imagined baby melted away in a stain of slippery red on my fingertips and finally, after years of that, more than a decade, I gave up.

And now you've come.

As I sat with Thomson, I stared into the woods, at the trail lined with goldenrod that leads to our single beehive. Past Marvin's head, to the backdrop of wide water like an extension of the sky. I knew you were out there, listening to the story through the strikes of the hammer on the fence posts.
Come closer
, I said in my mind.

After
his nap, Thomson shuffled up to lean against the couch cushions on the chaise lounge. His baggy shirt twisted around his waist. I lay the book open on the floor of the porch and helped him tug the shirt out from under his skinny buttocks. The pants were belted with a blue computer cable. When he was settled, he stared across the yard at Marvin, who was plucking rusty nails from his mouth and hammering the wire against the wood.

“I'm not happy about this,” I said, following Thomson's gaze.

“Why not?”

I shrugged, nervous about telling Thomson the truth. He had enough to deal with without thinking about another mouth.

“Things have changed, Sandy.”

“I know.”

“They were easier back then.”

I glanced at him, his hands in his lap, one knotted around the other. In earlier days, he'd lived with the poor, helped overthrow a regime, monitored a fledgling revolution in Mexico, finally moved down to the dark zone with Phoenix to start a soup kitchen. Lost people he loved. How was that easier?

“Marvin is doing what he thinks is right,” he said. I stared at him. How was that a good thing? It certainly hadn't been back in the city. But Thomson was recalling our new lives, how Marvin had settled us here, working in a kind of trance to patch over the holes in the roof and reframe the broken areas of the house with Mr. Bobiwash's help. He'd surprised me; I'd expected him to start talking, soon after we arrived on the island, of going home, getting back to the city, planning a way around our fugitive status. But he rooted down, we all did, sending shoots into the rocky terrain turned organic from the memory of the bodies we'd left behind. Those first few years we hid in our work, moving in a manic effort to simply stay alive. Often I thought of Phoenix, how she would have thrived. It was hard to get her out of my head. Maybe we all felt that because we never spoke of her. Time tried to bury her, like skin growing over shrapnel.

“We can't feed every small thing,” Thomson said.

Was that what you were? A small thing?

It
was time for Thomson's walk so I helped him as he swung his legs into a sitting position. I took his bony elbow and pulled him to standing. We climbed down the steps, his feet in a pair of torn boat shoes. Marvin touched the head of the hammer to his forehead in a kind of salute. Thomson turned right, toward the clearing in the pines occupied by the last of our honeybees. Mites or sudden, strange vanishings had killed most of them. We had one hive left, full and functioning but neglected.

“Let's go to the lake,” I said, turning him around. When Thomson had been well, he had visited the hives every day. Inspecting. Pulling out the brood frames to check for those tiny black specks, the earliest sign of catastrophe. Mites. But Marvin and I hadn't been looking after the hive. A losing proposition, Marvin called it. Too much work for too little return. “We need protein, not sugar,” he said. Despite my desire to care for them, to continue Thomson's legacy, I found myself drifting away, willing to accept Marvin's reasoning if it meant less work. The gardens exhausted me: the canning, the cooking, the effort to make our way into town at least once a month and trade what we could. Wild mushrooms with their fleshy, white fins, fish, greens gathered in the woods.
A million people make honey
, Marvin says, and I don't argue although I know how Thomson would respond:
The people don't make it, the bees do
.

“The lake's a long way,” Thomson said, stopping before we reached the trailhead.

“Tell me if you get tired.” He needed the air, the exercise.

We didn't fit side by side on the trail so I walked behind him. I found a stick in the woods because we'd forgotten his cane. The bugs were out and strangely thick for late summer. We paused so Thomson could roll his sleeves down and button the cuffs. I tucked his pant legs into his socks. I was still wearing the thin cotton pants of my pyjamas, which the mosquitoes bit through. I longed to run, to break into a sprint and burst through the trail opening, into the wind off the lake, but Thomson inched forward, nudging his shoulder up to his neck to push the bugs away. I waved my hands around his head until he told me to stop. And then we were stepping carefully onto the sand near the boat and in front of us were three delicate footprints. Thin slivers, moonlike, as if you barely touch the ground. Thomson stopped and stared at them, leaning on my arm.

“What's that?” he said, poking the imprints of your toes with his stick. I held my breath. His eyes lifted to find my face and I saw the old shine in them.

In
June, Thomson had been well enough for us to bring two passengers home after the last supply ship had docked. We gave them a meal and a place to stay for the night before the boat left in the morning, heading farther up the coast into deeper wilderness in the north. They had come from a squat in a suburb on the edge of the city we used to live in. At night, they told us, they'd barricaded themselves in and waited for morning when a Baptist Church group sometimes delivered food and water. Once, they opened the door when they shouldn't have. Men with guns took three young children and a woman. “Probably to be sold,” Marvin said.

“Maybe that's what she ran from,” I suggested to Thomson as we walked back to the house.

Things like that happened. At times I was relieved that we'd escaped early enough, left the city before all the lights went out, or most of them. The majority of the population toiled now in the dark where violence flourished like a night plant. Our island was calmer, quieter, hidden away.

Thomson pushed along the trail, wobbling over fat ridges of cedar roots.

“Maybe she was taken and then she escaped from the boat,” I said. He stopped and put out a hand, curving it around the wrinkled trunk of a beech. I fidgeted, dancing inside the cloud of bugs while Thomson leaned his shoulder against the tree, breathing heavily.

“She?”

Why had I said that? Because I know you by the slim indentations of your footprints. By your thieving sleight of hand. Lighter, more delicate than a boy.

“I think.”

“She is the one taking our food?”

I nodded.

“An orphan?” Thomson said. A shimmer moved across his face, like glee.

“Maybe.”