The Rending and the Nest

by Kaethe Schwehn

  for Peder

  and

  for Anjuli

  in memory of

  George Thorkelson and Graham Thorkelson

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  Tailings: A Memoir

  Tanka & Me: Poems

  CONTENTS

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Part Two

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Part Three

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  A Note on the Author

  Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen?

  —Romans 8:24

  I gave my love a cherry that had no stone

  I gave my love a chicken that had no bone

  I gave my love a baby with no crying

  I gave my love a story that had no end

  How can there be a cherry that has no stone?

  How can there be a chicken that has no bone?

  How can there be a baby with no crying?

  How can there be a story that has no end?

  —“The Riddle Song”

  There is a gold light in certain old paintings

  That represents a diffusion of sunlight.

  It is like happiness, when we are happy.

  It comes from everywhere and nowhere at once, this light,

  And the poor soldiers sprawled at the foot of the cross

  Share in its charity equally with the cross.

  —Donald Justice, “There Is a Gold Light in Certain Old Paintings”

  The most dangerous thing of all is the absence of a story, a narrative to explain what is happening to you. A why with no edges. Because someone will always arrive to invent one. Then you will be at the whim of someone else’s story, you will be swept into a current that is not of your own making.

  It wasn’t fire or ice. Wasn’t a virus or global warming or a meteor. Wasn’t an atomic bomb or a tsunami or a sulfurous-smelling ape. It was a Rending, a split. Ninety-five percent of the earth’s population and the vast majority of the animals, food, and goods—gone. We were left with each other and the Piles. Later, the Babies. And we were left without an explanation.

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  It wasn’t a surprise, exactly, that Lana got pregnant first. In fact, it was something of a surprise that it took three years for anyone in Zion to show the signs. In all our searching and scavenging, we’d discovered very few condoms and those had been used quickly. On the day Lana told me she was pregnant, after her quick and fairly ambivalent declaration, she followed me out to the Piles. She mumbled something about needing to release negative energy.

  I wore a pair of white Keds for scavenging, the sole thick enough to give me cursory protection from exposed edges and thin enough to squeeze into narrow gaps between the objects. Lana stood at the base of the Pile while I worked, her arms wrapped around her gray Dodgers sweatshirt, kicking, half-heartedly, at a hard-sided suitcase with one of her mustard-colored flats.

  “Fuck,” she said. “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.” The suitcase made little echo-grunt sounds in return.

  I was ten feet above her, trying to free a piece of PVC pipe from between a child’s scooter, a lawn mower handle, and a faux-distressed wood sign with an inspirational saying. I assumed it was inspirational. All I could read was TIME IS A ROAD THAT. Asher, the closest thing Zion had to a plumber, had asked me to be on the lookout for pipe or things that could be used as pipe, since our water catchment system was leaking.

  “Mira, are you even listening?” said Lana.

  “Yes.” I was lifting the sign with my right hand while trying to make sure that the strain of pulling the PVC out of its hiding place didn’t upset my center of balance. “You were saying something about fuck.”

  “Not funny,” she said. She started to pull the suitcase from its position.

  “Lana, don’t mess with that, please.”

  “It’s not your Pile, Mira. The Pile does not belong to you.”

  “I know. But I’d rather not have the Pile start sliding. It’s a balancing act.”

  “Yes, I know, a gigantic Jenga game,” she said, putting her hands on her hips and nodding her head forcefully as, apparently, I did when I described the Piles as a gigantic Jenga game.

  “Here, put this in the buggy,” I said, tossing the PVC pipe toward her.

  “It’s really more of a perambulator than a buggy,” she said. “Something out of Peter Pan. Remember Peter Pan?”

  “Yep,” I said. To my right, a length of some kind of flexible tubing dripped flaccidly out of the mouth of a ceramic cookie jar. I inched my hand toward it.

  “I always wanted to be Tinkerbell,” she said. “I suppose every girl wanted to be Tinkerbell.”

  “I wanted to be Wendy,” I said. “Oh, fuck me!”

  “Are you OK?” asked Lana, cupping her hand over her eyes to shield them from the sun. As if there was a sun.

  I took my hand out of the jar so she could see the blood running down my palm. “It’s nothing. My own fault. I should have looked.” I wiped the blood on my shirt as best I could and climbed higher so I could see the jar from above. “Knife,” I said, pulling the blade from the jar and dangling it between my thumb and index finger.

  “Come down,” she said. I did, the handle of the knife clenched in my mouth, enjoying the way the fibers of the wood gave in slightly to the pressure of my teeth. She took it from me and studied the handle. “It looks hand carved.”

  Two years ago one of us would have wondered aloud who the knife had belonged to, who had carved the undulating sea serpents, the tiny crests of wave. I would have guessed salty fisherman and she would have guessed CEO taking a “whittling as meditation” class. We didn’t spend the energy wondering anymore.

  “At least the blade’s not rusty,” Lana said. I sat down next to her and she dabbed at my injured hand with the corner of her sweatshirt. “Rodney will be glad to see it. You gonna deliver it personally?” She nudged me suggestively. I ignored her.

  She stopped dabbing and sighed. “Mira, what am I going to do with a baby? What if I die giving birth to a motherfucking baby?”

  “You’re not going to die,” I said, though the thought had crossed my mind.

  “Do you think Ida and Sylvia cou
ld get rid of it?”

  “Would they get rid of it if they could?”

  “Fuck,” she said. This time her voice was clogged with sadness. I rubbed some slow circles into her upper back with my uninjured palm. She bent over to let me rub lower, her head with its twelve neatly coiled knobs of hair almost touching the earth. Even as I touched her back, felt in myself the fringes of her grief and fear, I was jealous of the way her body could bend so effortlessly, a svelte Gumby doll. The tiniest shard of me smiled in anticipation of the way she’d have to learn to carry more weight than she desired, glad she’d need to alter the way her body moved, to adjust to its new boundaries.

  “Do you know whose it is?”

  She shook her head, then named a few of the men, her regular clients, the words muffled slightly by the ground below her.

  For the rest of the afternoon she lingered at the bottom of the Pile, occasionally easing herself into Downward Dog or Warrior Two, sometimes watching me, calling out objects she wasn’t sure I could see. As the sky sullied from gray into darker gray she began singing “Hush Little Baby,” trying on different accents, though they sounded imperfect, distant, strange. Had there been an England, an Ireland, an India? Then she replaced the objects in the song with ones she could see in the fissures of the Pile. “Mama’s going to buy you a window screen, a ceiling tile, a crap shoe rack.” From the top of the Pile, forty feet above her, I studied her splayed legs, the knobs of hair on her scalp, the skirt blooming around her. I closed my eyes and her wavery voice came to me. Accents and silly words forgotten, she was trying on nostalgia and intimacy, fear rubbing against a sliver of hope.

  When the buggy and my backpack were full we walked the objects over to the area behind the Clinic, where Rodney and Asher were attempting to install a cistern that would direct water to a sink in the examination room. Rodney had the cistern (actually a stainless-steel garbage can) tipped back against his body, holding it so that Asher could attempt to work the end of a vacuum cleaner hose into the hole he’d cut at the base of the can. Behind them, through the pane-less window of the clinic, I could see the curve of a man’s head and Sylvia’s profile, bent to study something along his hairline. Rodney tipped the can back down when he saw us and rested his arms across the top. In the gloaming the inked branch along his jaw was barely visible so it was simply the outline of his form—breadth of shoulders, hulking height—that struck my chest like a soft mallet and would, continually, until I walked away from him.

  “What’d you find? Anything good?”

  Lana bumped my shoulder. “Something in here should work,” I mumbled.

  Asher sauntered over, lifting his hat to run his fingers through his curly red hair. He chose a couple items from the buggy, the PVC pipe and the flexible tubing from the cookie jar. “Thanks, Mir,” he said, kissing me on the cheek. Asher had changed the least in appearance since the Rending. He still wore the same pair of khaki pants he had on the day I met him, though now they were considerably frayed along the bottom and patched at the crotch with a candy-cane print fabric. The baseball hat was the same, too. Minnesota Twins. The white inside band had darkened to gray and stalagmites of salt reached up the contours of the middle. He basically looked like an older, impoverished version of his former preppy self. Of all the men in Zion, he was the most openly flirtatious with me, but he was also gay, so it was an easy relationship for both of us.

  “Anything else?” I asked. “If not we’ll take the rest to the Sorting Stations.”

  “I think we’re good,” said Asher.

  “We’re good,” said Rodney, looking directly at me, his stare carrying far more weight than his words. I had to turn quickly, the blush creeping up my neck.

  “For tomorrow?” I plucked the pen from the coil of the small spiral notebook that hung around my neck.

  Asher shrugged. “More of the same.”

  “Maybe one of those recliners. The kind that give you a massage,” said Rodney.

  “Yeah, and maybe a couple beers,” added Asher.

  “Maybe a keg.”

  “Maybe the two thousand nine NFC championship game on a flat-screen TV.”

  “Maybe just Brett Favre.”

  “Yeah, Mira, maybe just find Favre so we can talk to him about why he threw the ball directly into Porter’s hands.”

  From inside the Clinic, the edge of Sylvia’s voice interrupted the banter: “This window has no glass, you know.”

  Lana made a tsk-tsk sound. In the frame of the window, the wide moon of Ida’s face appeared.

  “Visitor?” I whispered.

  Ida nodded before rolling her eyes at us and draping a curtain over the empty hole. As though bunnies parading across flannel would protect the visitor from our commentary. But in the split second before the curtain closed, the visitor turned his head toward us and I saw his eyes. They looked shallow. Dead. The scrubbed bottom of a cast-iron pan.

  I grabbed the handles of the buggy.

  “And …” prompted Lana, clearing her throat and plucking at the front pouch of the backpack where I’d stashed the knife.

  “Oh,” I said. I turned so that the backpack was facing Rodney and then backed up until the front pouch was right in front of him. “Here.”

  He slid the zipper open. “Thanks,” he said. “I’ll put it—”

  I turned and nodded severely in the direction of the flannel curtain.

  “I’ll put it where it belongs,” he finished.

  “And I’ll push,” said Lana, taking the buggy handle from me. “It’s good practice.”

  “Ha.”

  “Ha.”

  At the Sorting Station we placed the remaining objects in the appropriate areas: household, construction, apparel, et cetera. I left the buggy there and we headed over to my room so I could change out of my gathering shirt and into something with less odor worked into the fibers below the arms. While I changed, Lana bent from the waist and swayed side to side, letting the backs of her knuckles sweep the floor.

  “How long do you think it will be until I can’t bend over anymore?”

  I shrugged. Realized she couldn’t see the shrug. “Who knows. How far along do you think you are?”

  “Three months. Maybe four. My periods aren’t very regular.”

  “You have to let Ida and Sylvia check you out.”

  “I know.”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Soon.”

  She stood, face flushed with blood. “You’re getting buff, Mir.”

  “You’re changing the subject.”

  “You are.”

  I rarely got to see the entirety of my body anymore. Lana had a mirror in her room, one of the few in Zion. There was another in the Center and a third in the Clinic. Lana’s claim was that she needed it to correct her yoga poses but I knew she also used it when she entertained, knew that men liked to watch themselves enter her, the smoothness of her back before them, her face reflecting the fervor of theirs. One man liked to drape a paisley scarf over her back, to set a portrait of his wife in a tiny frame on top. To enter and exit her body slowly enough that the portrait of his wife didn’t tip, remained steady and smiling. She wouldn’t say who. She was generous with details but always circumspect about identity. I admired this about her.

  I didn’t have a mirror and most of the time dressed quickly, not paying attention to my body, thinking about the Piles, committing to memory the location of a set of bedsprings or a lampshade or a sheet of corrugated tin. Part of my job was knowing where things were located so that when a need arose, I could fetch what was necessary. I carried that inventory of objects in my head, saw them the same way I carried Rodney’s body, what I’d seen of Rodney’s body: back of the neck, swell of the biceps, curve of the calf.

  But Lana was right; I wasn’t buff exactly, but my body had changed since the Rending, narrowed by the scarcity of the first few years and then tightened by climbing the Piles. My thighs and breasts were still “womanly” (as a friend of my father’s had said once af
ter two rather stiff Manhattans), but the flesh around my bones didn’t ripple when I moved. It stayed steady, fixed by muscle to my frame. Ironically, I would have killed for this version of my body when I was seventeen. GOD MADE YOU PERFECT, ONE OF A KIND! said a poster in the youth-group room of my father’s church. My church too, I guess. The words were in black script over a sloping green hillside speckled with lavender. A blue sky brushed easily overhead. Back when a blue sky was an easy thing, something that appeared overhead eventually, if you waited long enough.

  I hated the poster. I was a junior in high school and the only reason I agreed to the weekly youth meetings was because of the new youth minister who wore Chaco sandals and Carhartts rolled up to reveal his muscled calves. He often asked me to turn the pages of the sheet music while he strummed his guitar. I couldn’t bring myself to look at him—we were too close—so I’d stare at his ankles and calves; the brown hairs curling there looked so old and masculine. His breath smelled faintly of coffee and he picked songs that only skirted the edges of Jesus: U2 or Mumford and Sons. His name was Tony. Or Tory. Or Toby. I can’t remember. Only Tony/Tory/Toby’s abrupt disappearance from youth group and his disappointing replacement (a man named Kurt, who was bald and insisted that we start each gathering by talking about the high point and low point of our week).

  The week Tony/Tory/Toby left I went to my first high school party with my friend Kat. She handed me a red plastic cup, whispered “jungle juice” like a secret password, and promptly settled herself in a La-Z-Boy recliner with a boy named Zach who wanted to show her a meme of cats playing pianos on his iPhone. I didn’t know anyone else very well so I tried to look haughty and cool instead of pathetic and lonely. The party wasn’t nearly as full or busy as I’d anticipated. I’d imagined bodies pressed to bodies inside a sauna of pot smoke and cheap perfume. Instead it was mostly just people hanging out, their actions made dumber and louder by the alcohol. A few guys from my Spanish class were watching a football game, throwing pretzels at the screen when a player made a particularly dumbass move. In the kitchen, a guy and girl stood over a cookie sheet lined with rows of Dixie cups. They were trying to figure out the best way to get the Jell-O out of the cups but from a distance they looked more like they were collaborating on a science lab.