Swarm (31 page)

“I guess so.” I ran a hand through my greasy hair. It was getting time to cut it. Phoenix came closer. I pulled the sleeping bag into my lap, piling it, bunching it with my fist.

“I shocked you,” she said. “About Walter. All that.”

“A little.”

But of course it was more than that—it was Marvin lying to me, not halting even after blood and injury. It was whatever I'd stumbled into. Calculated, clearly thought-out actions that felt to me as accidental as tripping and skinning my palms on the pavement. I let the slippery fabric go and crossed my arms.

Phoenix sank to the floor beside me, sat on the edge of her hip with her legs curled to the side.

“I didn't know what I wanted, who I was.” Her dark eyes were on mine, so deep I couldn't meet them, could only occupy the edges, glance carefully inside. “I wasn't even Phoenix then.”

“Who were you?”

“Nelli,” she said and lifted two of my fingers with her own. Her hand was warm. A current swirled in me, but something hard clenched shut in my throat, damming the flow. I pulled my hand back.

“I'm not like that,” I said and flinched because the words were harder than I wanted, more convinced. I didn't actually know what I was like, who I really was.

She laid a palm on the floor. “Right,” she said and pushed herself up. “How stupid of me.”

Her words stung, and when she left the room, I wanted to call her back. It took until she was halfway down the stairs and then I shouted out her name. Her footsteps paused. I felt the shudder in the floor as she came back up.

“I don't know,” I said. I was starting to cry, my eyes hot puddles.

“It's all right,” she said and touched my dirty hair, ran her fingers down the side of my face, stroked my bottom lip so lightly I had to scrape away the tingling with my teeth. When she crouched down and kissed me I could hardly kiss her back. We spent an hour like that, cautiously touching, twin blooms stirred by strong wind.

Marvin
came back that afternoon. After Thomson had called upstairs to Phoenix and me, reminded us of the work that had to be done. I was pinning a wet shirt to the rope line strung between the porch and the outhouse when I saw him loping across the clearing. He held his heavy coat over his shoulder because the day had grown warm. Part of me was glad to see him, relieved that he was okay, but I also felt a raft of other emotions. A thrilling confusion over what was happening with Phoenix. Anger at what he'd held back, the whole history Phoenix had shared. He'd only told me the good things, to get me interested.
No one gets hurt
, I remembered them saying, with Walter right there. Did Margo even know what had happened?

Marvin's face was pale and there were circles the colour of charcoal smudge under his eyes. He looked older, even though it had only been five or six days since I'd seen him. I left the clothes in a heap in the basket and glanced back at the door, the empty porch, the closed kitchen window.

Quietly, I said, “Why didn't you tell me about her?”

“Phoenix?”

I nodded.

“Which part?”

“Walter,” I said coldly. “What's with all the fucking secrets?”

He sighed and shook his hand like he was waving away smoke. When he said my name and stepped closer, I knew he had bad news. I braced myself. The silence was marked by the soft patter of the wet clothes, not wrung out enough, dripping on the dry earth.

“What? What is it?”

I was still waiting when Phoenix came outside, carrying a shovel to dig a fire pit under the spit. She moved down the porch stairs and I turned around, blocking her view of Marvin. I wanted to push her back, stand between them, pry the two worlds apart. But I think she saw the guilt on our faces.

“What are you talking about?” she asked as Thomson appeared, holding a dresser drawer to turn into kindling. The door slammed shut behind him, closing on our snug, private home. I flinched at the blast of noise.

Marvin stood apart from us and told them about the bombing. His voice a monotone, speaking in a way that meant it didn't matter anymore because it had already happened. It was fact. Nothing could change that. I wrapped my arms around myself, unable to stop him. Thomson and Phoenix listened, and when Marvin finished, Thomson threw the drawer onto the floorboards of the porch. The rectangle shifted into a diamond shape.

“Are you incapable of change?” he called down to Marvin as if from the deck of a ship.

“This isn't about you,” Marvin said. “You had your time; you did things your way.”

“You think my complaint is about ego?” Thomson yelled.

Marvin held his hands up, palms turned outward, giving up. Phoenix stared at me.

“This morning . . .” she said.

“I was going to tell you.”

“The fire, the night you came down.” Her mouth moved into a half-smile. “Shit,” she said, and she crossed her arms around the handle of the shovel. I saw the walls that had so recently dissolved between us reset themselves. Thomson's cheeks seemed to collapse, as if a sinkhole had opened inside him. He was shaking his head, his mouth the worm of a scowl.

“Thomson,” I said.

“There's something else,” Marvin said loudly, staring straight at me.

“The travel agent?”

The others watched. Marvin shook his head, staring down at the ground. “She's fine,” he said and lifted his eyes to look at us. “It's Margo.”

A shivering terror went through me, like that feeling in a nightmare when you realize the bad guys are right behind you, ready to crawl up your spine.

“That night.” He sighed and ran his fingers through his hair, tugging at the tangles as he tried to find the words.

I was already ahead of him. I breathed his name: “Walter.”

Phoenix looked at me, then back at Marvin.

“They took off, but he wanted to go back.”

“He always got too close,” Phoenix whispered.

“They hid out across the road, but then she went in and the ceiling caved in on her. They got her out in time, the paramedics, when they finally got there, but it seems . . .” His head tipped forward, hard, like his neck had suddenly stopped working.

“What?”

His hand lifted, a finger tapped the hard bone around his eye. “She's blind.”

He had stepped closer so by then we were almost within arm's reach. I wasn't sure how I'd ever touch him again, how I'd ever find my way back to any life like the one I'd had. Suddenly I was looking around, realizing I recognized nothing. No landmarks. No familiar features.

“Why did she go inside?” I asked. Only Margo. Stupid, risk-taking Margo.

Marvin shook his head. “I don't know.”

Phoenix's shovel clanged against the wooden porch. “You have to do something. Call the police.”

“What will that do?” Marvin said. “They'll arrest her. And us.”

“And him,” she nearly shouted.

I looked past Marvin, toward the lake. The water like steel under the bright sun. When I shifted my eyes, transparent yellow spots hung over everything. Marvin had come right up beside me without my noticing. I started to shake and he touched my arm.

“Christ,” Phoenix said, turning away. I heard the door slam from a vast distance. He asked if I was all right and I told him that I was but I knew I never would be. I would carry those circumstances like the heavy lead X-ray robes they used to make you wear, back when doctors could take pictures of your bones, see everything inside you.

Thomson
cooked the squirrels on a spit in the backyard, and the four of us ate supper quietly, as if after a funeral. Marvin's fingers held tightly to the tiny bones. I hadn't seen him like that before, like a small boy. My reflection was a blur in the metal fork, and I kept sneaking glances at Phoenix but she wouldn't look at me. I saw the hardening of her jaw when Marvin started to talk.

“We've made a difference,” he said. “You should see what's happening up there.”

“Haven't we seen enough?” said Thomson.

Marvin acted like he hadn't heard him. “This group threw buckets of blood into seven banks across the city.”

“Whose blood?” Phoenix asked.

“Chaos,” Thomson said. “And casualties.”

“Walter says that,” said Marvin.

“Thomson doesn't mean it in a good way,” Phoenix said.

“And Walter does? His fucking girlfriend's blind. Look what he's lost.”

I pushed a pile of tiny ribs around on my plate.

“You're not hungry?” Thomson asked me, and I shook my head.

Phoenix's knife shrieked against her plate. Marvin looked up at her. “He's committed to what he stands for.”

“Where's Margo?” I asked, but Thomson talked over me, squinting at the front door like he was waiting for someone to come in. “‘Ideology gives people the illusion of behaving morally and having an identity while making it easier for them to give those things up.' Vaclav Havel.”

Marvin stared at him. “Is that how you felt, when you were revolting?”

“Those were different times.”

“Yes, you had a whole world waiting, that blissful reality on the other side of the wall.”

“A different jail cell.”

“All we know about what's next is collapse and whatever hard world comes after that.” His words were clear, but I heard a softness in his voice, like his foundation had grown punky, holed by soft rot. “But the band keeps playing as the ship goes down.”

Phoenix interrupted: “So it's okay if people die.”

“No one's died yet,” Thomson said, like he could see Marvin's side.

Marvin stood and his chair fell back, booming against the hardwood floor. I stared down at a shiny island of grease on my plate as his boots pounded upstairs. He went to the room Phoenix and I had been in earlier that afternoon, where the pigeons lived and the other creatures that came through the broken windows, the gaps in the eaves.

Thomson was crossing
the yard when I returned. Consciously planting one foot in front of the other, his robe swishing around him like the rough-edged feathers of a crow. As if he really was a bird, I approached slowly, not wanting to startle him. I caught his arm but this time there was no chastisement. I did not try to stop him. I knew where he was going, where he wanted to be. We walked through the forest, to the bees that had been left behind.

The
remaining hive was toppled. Thomson pulled on me as he rushed into the centre of the clearing. That was it: both sides of the colony were gone.

“Who did this?” he hollered, and his voice sputtered into a cough. He grabbed the back of the chair I'd brought out days earlier. My hand hovered around his elbow, waiting to help him. When he finished, he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, watery blood smearing across the grey stubble on his chin, and said, “Your kid.”

I started to defend you, but he swung toward me, the robe filling with air like the whirling dervishes he'd told me about a long time ago. “This is your fault.”

“I didn't do this.”

“Your neglect did this. Wandering all over looking for what you want.” He poked his finger at me, word by word.
Want
echoed in the clearing before his left food lifted and slammed down, crushing an angular chunk of honeycomb. I didn't know how he'd found the energy. “This is where you are, Sandy. Stop looking for ways out.”

“She's not a way out. She's a person.”

“An obsession.”

I didn't answer.

“A reverie, a fantasy.” He reached for the chair and hung there, his back curved, body starting to sag. “You go blindly into things. You don't consider the consequences.”

Phoenix, he meant. I knew he meant her. Grief rose in me like something loosened from the lake bottom, bobbing to the surface. Thomson reached out and his fingers felt bone dry, already skeletal. When he said my name, I leaned awkwardly against his thin arm and cried as he stroked my hair, his long fingers tangling in the knotted ends. Snot bubbled in my nose. Angrily, I wiped it away.

“I meant the girl.”

“I've considered the consequences. Her dying alone in the woods. You would help her—or you would have.”

“I wouldn't keep her a secret. I wouldn't try to do it alone.”

Thomson's gaze wandered to the broken box of the hive, clobbered into splintered boards. He pushed away from the chair and bent to pick up part of a frame, the honeycomb splitting off it, the whole thing covered in honey. When he stood, he spread his legs to regain his balance. The kimono rustled, flapping open so I saw his skinny, naked thighs, a flash of more. I looked away and he glanced down, realizing, and moved quickly to redo the tie. When he stumbled, I reached for his arm and he dropped the frame and half-tied belt and the robe opened wider.

“Oh, fuck.”

“Stand still,” I said and secured the belt with a hard knot.

“Now I won't be able to undo it. You'll have to cut it off me. All for fucking Christian modesty.” The last he said loudly, head back, barking into the sky. When he dropped his face to mine, I noticed the brighter blush in his cheeks. His eyes shining like mercury. He stood close enough that I hung upside down in his pupil, a tiny doll.

“You know, I've never seen you naked.”

“Thomson,” I scolded, and he blinked, bent his head, and then looked up again, and around, as if confused.

“I love you,” he said, on the verge of begging.

“I love you too.”

“Despite everything. Despite what you took from me. Despite your lack of sorrow.”

“I feel sorrow!”

“But it was you.” He was yelling again. “You left the soup kitchen, you joined Jump Ship, you planted the bomb, you watched it all happen, and never said no.”

“Please stop,” I said. I didn't know how he knew everything because I had never told him. I pressed my hands against the sides of my head, stared down at the wreckage of the hives without really seeing it. The silence throbbed in my ears. I couldn't believe he knew it all. I couldn't believe he had never said anything. That we had simply gone on, the whole mess shoved deep inside each of us like the contents of a sunken ship. You, a diver, prodding the weakening hold.