Swarm (30 page)

“I keep wondering if I'll see her.”

I didn't need to ask who. I wrapped my hands around his tea, keeping it warm.

“Phoenix. Imagine that.” Thomson didn't really believe in an afterlife, in anything past death, but I didn't argue with him. “Like your little girl,” he said. “Slipping out of the shadows.”

“Melissa is real.”

“Phoenix is too.”

I straightened. “You've seen her?”

He glanced at me and his head shifted slightly. “You know what I mean.”

Not flesh and blood. Not anymore. My eyes searched the ceiling's corners, cobwebs I'd missed with my infrequent cleaning, hanging in swaying lines. I remembered how you looked in the cave, that sudden flash of your face. I froze the moment in my mind, saw you there, stilled, and pulled you out of the horror of that place like cutting a rose from a thorny bush. If only it were that easy.

Thomson
made me leave him. Insisted I return the pills. I thought about holding on to them in secret, pressing them into his mouth when he was delirious and couldn't tell the difference. But he was right and I knew it. The medicine would do more good for the baby, might mean the difference between her life and death. Might help Shannon. I thought of Jack, bent over in our living room, a great burden balanced on his spine. Up the laneway and onto the road, the pills rattled in the glass jar. I hurried because I needed to get home, didn't feel right about leaving Thomson alone. It felt like a long way, and as I went I sang a few songs I'd made up over the years, a way to dispel boredom. But my voice grew quiet as I neared their house and saw the wagon moving toward the road, Jack in the driver's seat. I lifted my hand to wave, expecting him to turn toward me, headed for our house, and past us, into town. Instead he swung right, leaning to the edge of the wagon seat, the inner rein pulled hard in his hand. I stopped. In minutes all that remained was a faint cloud of dust rising off the road.

I
followed. At the end of the main road, a narrow dirt trail led into the forest. I kept to its edge, moved through the thick hem of trees, until the white building appeared through the branches like pieces of a puzzle. Mr. Bobiwash, Jack, moved in the scene, crossing from his wagon to the lighthouse, the shotgun leaning on his shoulder. Before he went inside, he turned and looked behind himself. I tucked myself behind the wide trunk of a beech tree. When he pushed through the door into the kitchen, I crept closer. Through the window where I'd seen that glowing yellow light, watched until it went out, I thought I saw the small curve of a face, a body turning away, but when I squinted to see, it vanished. The glass obscured by the oily sheen of the morning sun and the twitching reflections of flickering leaves. If you were inside, you were silent and still, almost invisible. I waited. Pushed my palms against my ankles to keep away the bugs. Sat there for what felt like hours, until worry about Thomson overtook me and then I quietly backed up the trail and walked home uncertain what I'd seen. At the Bobiwashes', I slid the jar of pills into the mailbox without a note or any mention of why we were returning his gift.

Phoenix nudged me
awake with the cold steel barrel of a gun.

“Up, up, lazybones,” she said as I rubbed my eyes. They opened painfully, stung by the smoke that was always around, that gathered in my face when I bent to blow smouldering kindling into flame.

“What's with that?” I asked.

“It's a gun.”

“I know that.”

The corners of her closed lips nudged upward; a rare smile. “Hunting.”

“For what?”

She stirred my sleeping bag with the iron tip. “Whatever we find.”

It made me nervous, but I got up. Through the small windows beside the fireplace, the light glowed purple. A bruiselike smudge of dawn in the sky.

“What time is it?” I asked, an old habit. The only clock they'd owned had been smashed into a mess of black numbers and white plastic gears at the diner.

“Early,” said Phoenix, standing there while I put on my shoes. There was no reason to dress because I'd slept in my clothes as we all had, as we did every night. Together we looked at Thomson, curled on his side, asleep on the original mattress, where I'd first slept with Marvin. I wondered where he was, if he had gotten into trouble. If I'd ever see him again or should be afraid and go deeper into hiding. It was crude how we'd done things, how Marvin had used me, put me in harm's way because I was innocent, he later explained, a new face, and I wouldn't have been suspected. But all was quiet in the dark zone, apart from nighttime when we'd lock ourselves in, listening to the shouting that echoed through the fenced-in neighbourhood.

“Should we wake him?” I asked.

“Let him sleep,” Phoenix said, and we left through the kitchen door.

Phoenix
led me through the clearing behind the house. The earth was scraped and piled into patches where we'd been breaking it up, preparing for a garden. I'd shown them how to save seeds, digging into cucumbers with dented skins and withered hothouse peppers spotted dark purple. We laid the tiny fragments out to dry in the sun hoping that, when the time came, they'd sprout.

We passed the hulking box of the lamp factory. With Marvin, that first morning, I'd turned left to meet up with the fence, but Phoenix brought me along the lakeshore to an inlet that fed into a sluggish, muddy river. The shore was clotted with willow trees, their branches draping down, stirring the brown surface. We walked along the water's edge into a park I'd never been to before. Close to a huge oak tree Phoenix stopped and held her hand out for me to do the same. She lifted the gun and peered down the barrel. It cracked. A black squirrel fell from a fat branch, landing with a crunch onto a puddle that had frozen in the night. Phoenix ran. She picked the dead animal up by the back leg and I saw how her face glowed like lit copper. Like a happy kid. I had never killed anything, not like that, but by the time she handed the small body over to me, I was smiling too.

She shot two more and then lined them up on the ground. I watched as she pulled a jackknife from her pocket and crouched over them. Their blood sank quickly into the snow and pink innards gathered in the melted hollow. Her hands worked confidently—skinning, slicing, gutting—and her face stayed focused on the task. I thought by then that I knew her but realized that I didn't. There were angles to her, facets I hadn't seen yet.

On the way back, I carried the meat, wrapped in a plastic bag we'd pulled out of a clutch of frozen reeds.

“Where did you learn that?”

“We took a course. Hunting and skinning small animals.”

“You and Thomson?”

“Me and my boyfriend.” I glanced at her. “My ex. And Marvin too. It was a wilderness survival thing.”

I had a lot of questions, but I knew that Phoenix only talked when she wanted to. I held up the small package of meat and started to say something about the meal we would have, but she interrupted me, her words rushing out.

“Marvin had this huge energy.”

I wondered what was coming—something about the two of them, how they'd been together, deeply in love. I looked at the red wall of the factory, coloured brilliantly with hundreds of graffiti tags. People marking their places. I had the feeling that whatever she was going to tell me would send me away, would kill another idea of home.

“We talked a lot about changing the world. At the Pantomime. Drinking. Smoking.” A smile appeared on her face, slight, marked by past injury, it seemed. “We had this idea that everything needed to be broken down in order to be built again.”

I stopped walking.

“Let the ship go down,” she said. “Stop bailing.”

“Jump Ship.”

She nodded.

“What happened?”

“You know. We blew things up.”

She looked down, at the bag, blood in its pinched corners. I wanted to stop her. I felt like I was being shut inside a box. The truth a close compartment when all along I had assumed it was wide open. The six of us rammed against one another, circling around the same fate, when I thought there'd been space between us, that we were individuals, that Phoenix could take me away from the madness of Marvin and the others. Save me. Show me something new. “I met Walter through Marvin. They were in a class together.”

“Walter?”

“Dialogues of Dissent, Modern Imperialism.” She waved a hand. “Something like that.”

“You met him—”

“He's my ex.”

“Walter?” My voice shrill with surprise.

“You know him?”

I paused. “No.” Then, “Yes.”

Phoenix laughed. A small explosion of sound.

“He's—”

“Crazy?”

“So you left,” I said, wanting her to nod and smile and avoid all the middle part. She didn't know about the travel agency. Did we need to learn these things about each other?

“No,” she said. “Not right away.”

She looked past me, out at the choppy lake. I saw it reflected in her eyes, the chaos of light and motion and sound, unstoppable. “I know, Sandy,” she said. “I know what happens when people insist on how right they are . . .”

I waited.

“You know that first explosion?”

The bank machine. It had happened before I left home. Phoenix's face was flushed, a sudden brightness in her eyes. “It was thrilling. How right we felt we were. The power. Watching that sudden shattering. We were this force.” She kicked her foot against a drifting bit of garbage, a hunk of oily Styrofoam. “You must feel that.”

I couldn't find any words.

“With Marvin,” she said.

When I didn't answer, she kept going. “But then the next one. The car dealership, where Walter lost his hand.”

My mouth opened. Quickly I closed it, stared at the ground as she described it all: the panicked race through dark streets, Walter's gushing hand.

“Marvin and I took off our shirts to staunch it. There was blood—”

She swallowed, glanced at me. My face pale, I'm sure, watching our four shoes. “One of the guys at the Empire was a medic from the war and he helped us and then asked a lot of questions and then said he wanted in. Other cells started up.”

The house I'd stayed at. The basement. The Jump Ship map.

“I got out. I argued for something else, something like what Vaclav Havel would . . .”

Her voice faded to silence. She paused for a long time. I thought she was finished.

“You know the rest. Thomson was in that awful rooming house.” Her hand went to her chest, laid there, flat. I thought she was going to cry. “We came here. We started the soup kitchen. For a long time I could believe in that, but now . . .”

I wanted to tell her. To confess. Explain about the bomb, that mysterious throb of light, Marvin. I wanted to move closer to her, curl in the hollow under her breasts, lay my head on her belly, and tell her how we were the same. But I didn't. I stood very still and said, “It's sad” because I didn't know what other words to use.

She took my hand, as if we were linked, sisters or something else, but I still felt a betrayal. When I let go, I saw smudges of blood on her fingers and how they had transferred to mine.

I
couldn't fit it all in my head. The relationships between everyone had shifted and spun. I remembered Margo's nasty words about Phoenix, Walter talking about her in the car, all the lies about Walter's hand. At home, Thomson studied me. He could tell something was wrong, but he didn't say anything, didn't ask any questions. Phoenix went outside to set up a spit for the squirrels, and I slid the sleeping bag off the mattress and dragged it up the rotting stairs.

“Careful your feet don't go through,” Thomson called after me.

I
lay on the hard floor. The window looked out onto sky, a wide emptiness without obstacles that felt like a relief. I fell asleep and in my dream I was home, not in my parents' apartment but at the farm, banging a nail into the wall to hang a painting of white stone ruins. The nail kept wobbling, bending, as if it wasn't solid. I couldn't get it in right. The plaster smashed into a white powder that fell to my feet. My father stood in the doorway, a dark shape giving directions, but I couldn't understand what he was saying. Phoenix came through the back door, the one that looked out over my mother's large vegetable garden and the cornfields beyond. A scarf of thick black lace tied tightly around her head. She took the hammer and laid it on the table. The painting leaned against the wall and I remember how she smiled at me, gleeful, innocent, like she looked when she'd killed the squirrel, and she swung her boot back and kicked in the glass.
What are you doing?
I asked and then I realized we were somewhere else, in a greenhouse my mother used to bring me to where I learned to rub the leaves between my fingers and take away the scents. Lemon verbena, chocolate mint, licorice, lavender. I woke to her arm wrapped around my middle, the fire a dying red throb in the hearth, but it was just another layer of the dream. When I really came to, it was still day. Phoenix stood in the corner of the room. I started when I saw her, as if she was a ghost.

“You were making noises,” she said.

I told her about my dream—the black scarf, the broken glass—and that's how I'm able to remember it, all these years later.

“What do you suppose that means?” The sun glowed on her face, cast her half in shadow, so it looked like she was partly made of gold. I shrugged. She smiled and looked around the room, at the walls covered in a print of pink roses climbing wooden trellises. Long ribbons of wallpaper hung off the damp plaster. “Look at this place,” she said, touching one of the roses, a closed bud. “It must have been nice.”

I nodded.

“Did you just need a break? Is that why you're up here?”