The Rending and the Nest

by Kaethe Schwehn

  Rodney grew very still. He kept his hands around his mug of tea but his eyes held Deborah’s. Steam drifted up and parted around the body of the bird. “Chummy would be so happy here, I think, on this branch.” As she moved Chummy up and down to show his enthusiasm for the proposition, two thin red lines appeared on Rodney’s cheek. Instead of moving the hand that held the bird, Rodney took Deborah’s other hand. Laverne’s weight, red and dangling from my notebook, felt immense.

  “I want to have a branch here too,” she moved Chummy away from Rodney’s face, pressed the wires to her own. “I want the birds to have a place to rest. I want to be a place for them to rest.” She was crying, rubbing Chummy against her cheek, trying to nestle the bird into her skin.

  “I think you already are a good place for the birds to rest,” I said. I unwound the wires of Laverne’s feet from the shoelace, passed her scarlet body to Deborah. “I think Laverne would be happier with you.”

  “Yes,” said Deborah. She took Chummy away from her cheek and tied both Chummy and Laverne to the handle of her coffee mug. “I think they need to sleep now,” she said, nodding, and we nodded back at her and then Rodney took my hand and we walked out of the Center, back to his house, and for the first time since we’d seen Deborah bathing in the river, we undressed. I kissed the scratches on his cheek. He cupped my breasts in his hands. Then the knobs of my shoulders. I held his heels. His ass. His testicles. Living skin below my palms.

  Cardinal, goldfinch, thrush I wrote in the back of my notebook when we were done.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Chester was the one who discovered her. He found Deborah hanging from a tree by the river. The slip knot was done with a tidy precision that seemed deeply unlike her. Deborah was hanging from the branch and Chummy, Laverne, and Oxtail were hanging from her sweater, each little body flipped so that its head was hanging down. They didn’t look like they were happy to have found a resting place. They looked dead, too.

  Chester didn’t take the body down. He thought it was important, he told me later, for everyone to see what it looked like to have something haunt you enough to make your own death.

  When Lana came to see the body she put her fist to her mouth but she didn’t cry.

  We’d never buried a Zionite before. A visitor had died a year earlier, just a few hours after arriving in Zion with an infected wound on his upper arm. Sylvia said it looked like someone had tried to saw through him with a bread knife but we never heard how he’d gotten the wound because he spiked a fever and grew delirious before either Sylvia or Ida could coax the story out of him. Tenzin and Rodney were asked to remove the body and they did—and most of us were happy not to know where they disposed of it. Though the next time we ate meat I did ask Lana, only half-joking, whether she thought it tasted like squirrel, possum, or visitor. She said, “One, that’s disgusting and two, I think we’d know if this was rancid human flesh. Unless you have some zombie tendencies you haven’t bothered to mention. Just ask Rodney or Tenzin if you’re so worried.” But I didn’t ask. Because I was hungry. Because I couldn’t afford to lose my appetite.

  Tenzin didn’t want Deborah buried or burned. He wanted her laid to rest, like some fucked-up version of Sleeping Beauty, in a four-poster bed in a house in old Zion. Apparently, he and Deborah had spent time exploring abandoned houses together and they’d loved this particular one—a two-story Arts and Crafts home, the entire front façade missing. “Deborah thought it’d be just like living in a doll house,” he said as we walked over. “We were planning to move here at some point, still be part of Zion but have our own space. She said it felt like home to her.”

  The ground had been saturated the night before so Tenzin made everyone remove their shoes when we arrived; then he forgot to remove his own and most of what I remember about Deborah’s funeral (though it seems strange to call it that) is the imprint of those boot marks on the beige rug of the bedroom suite. At least fifty of us fit into the suite, though we were careful not to stand too near the wall-less side—the other twenty or so Zionites stood or sat in the hallway. The room had been cleared of most useful items when we did our scavenging in the year after the Rending. There was a lighter patch of paint on one wall where a work of art or framed family portrait must have hung (I imagined matching checkered shirts, a field of winter wheat). Divots in the carpet marked where a dresser had stood, and maybe a love seat or a desk. The nightstand was still there, dusted and empty except for a pair of flesh-colored earplugs set upright like nipples. Under the window at the far end of the room was a lithe, taxidermied mammal—a weasel or a pine marten—and a fan with two blades hung above the bed. On the pillow, Deborah’s hair was arranged in an unnatural-looking sunburst.

  Everything felt wrong and strange. Not the house, exactly—all the houses after the Rending felt wrong and strange; that’s why most people chose not to inhabit them. It felt wrong and strange that this space felt like home to Deborah and Tenzin, two people I didn’t know well but had lived with for almost four years. And the whole room—the pristine carpet and the earplugs and the weasel and the empty walls and the divots they hadn’t bothered to snub out with their feet—all of these were choices they had made about the room and yet the space felt like nothing I understood, had understood, about either of them.

  Tenzin sat on the edge of the bed and took Deborah’s hand. He told us about her summers on Cape Cod, her memorized store of facts from the Guinness World Records book (longest fingernails, fattest man, largest number of offspring), that she’d sung “You Are My Sunshine” to her belly. He said that each evening they’d asked one another if they’d rather die but be given a last meal or keep living forever on sweet potatoes and ghost fruit. He said that he loved her. He chose not to offer prayers but when he was done speaking no one spoke or disrupted the silence for a long time. Finally, Chester offered a rolled fortune, which Tenzin pressed between Deborah’s stiff fingers. Ida cleared her throat and began singing “You Are My Sunshine” and we all jumped in and the second time through we started to file out. Tenzin stayed behind to clean his own muddy footprints; when I knelt beside him to help, he batted me away.

  I cried on the twenty-minute walk back to our Zion, slow, steady tears. Rodney’s hand was at the small of my back, tender but firm, guiding me forward. I cried for Deborah and for Tenzin, for the always-ache of hunger, for my mother and my father and Bim, for the distance I still felt from Lana and the strangeness of the earplugs on that nightstand. And I also cried because as strange and fucked up as that room had seemed, Deborah and Tenzin had gone off in search of something that felt like a life together. For the first time, Rodney’s touch felt insubstantial, as though if I quickened my pace even slightly we might lose contact altogether.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The funeral was on a Monday. Two days later, a few hours before the community meeting, Lana found me at the bottom of Larry unthreading ribbons woven through the spokes of a child’s bicycle. The tires I’d give to Asher, in the hope he’d make me a cart instead of the baby buggy I used for collecting purposes. I wasn’t sure who the ribbons were for yet but I was enjoying the ribbed, waxy feel on my fingertips, thinking of the way my mother would whiz ribbon over the flat side of a scissors blade to create a froth of curls.

  “Hey,” said Lana.

  I turned to look at her. Stopped myself from really looking at her and turned back to the bike.

  “Can I help?”

  I scooted over slightly. Patted the ground next to me. As she bent over the tire her hair, undone and unwashed, brushed the spokes. When she handed an unthreaded ribbon to me it was slightly sweaty from her palms.

  “Thanks,” I said. “Are you OK?”

  The question hung there, laundry saturated with rain.

  She shrugged. Rubbed the tread of the tire with her thumb. “Kind of. I will be.”

  I stood to put the ribbon in the buggy. “Your hair looks like shit.”

  She smiled up at me from the ground. The first smile i
n almost four months. “I know,” she said.

  We walked to the river, to the place where Deborah had been found, where the water slummed itself over a sandbar to make a six-inch-deep pool. Lana, on her hands and knees in the water, bent her head so that her long hair fell forward, the tips like the legs of water bugs skimming the surface. Water bugs, dragonflies, pill bugs, centipedes. Words I’d add to the list at the end of my notebook. Insects I hadn’t thought to miss until now. She didn’t flinch when I poured the icy water over her head, when it ran down the sides of her neck and soaked the collar of her Dodgers sweatshirt. Her belly hung loose and soft. I wanted to pull it up, cajole it back into its former place. When her hair was saturated I wrung it out as best I could. Then back in her room I braided it. Not the tiny knots she’d worn for as long as I’d known her, but a braid that started at her left ear and wound itself over her forehead, past her right ear and around the back of her head to end where it began. A crown. It took a long time to get it right.

  We walked to the community meeting together.

  At the front of the meeting room, beside Lana’s doll, Chummy, Laverne, and Oxtail lay on their sides. They had not been tucked into bed with Deborah. They looked stunned by a recent flight into a window, as if they’d mistaken a world behind glass for their own.

  Zephyr was the meeting leader. We breezed through Announcements and Rules; when it came time to move onto Issues and Ideas, Zephyr took out a card on which he’d written a few questions to start the conversation, questions so bland I don’t remember them now, though I do remember feeling sorry for him. Deborah’s absence was palpable. Across the room, Rodney was sitting next to Tenzin but not too close; there was enough room between them that Deborah could have squeezed right in. Since she was often late to our meetings, often entered saying “oops, oops, oops” under her breath, there was a sense in which we were all waiting for her, hoping that there was a different Deborah, one whose body wasn’t rotting in a four-poster bed, one who would enter as herself, who wouldn’t even recognize the goldfinch, the cardinal, and the thrush lined up in a row on the crate in front of Zephyr.

  “Is there a way to know if all the babies will be like this now?” Cassie’s hand was in the air when she spoke but Zephyr hadn’t called on her.

  Beside me, Lana focused on trying to tuck loose strands of hair into her braided crown. Asher swiveled the brim of his hat, front to back, back to front, and Rodney focused on unclogging bits of mud from the treads in his left boot.

  “Sylvia?” asked Zephyr finally.

  Sylvia was sitting in front of me, across from Cassie, her hair secured in the silver dragon clasp, her spine a scalpel line. “I’m not a fortune-teller. I don’t have a crystal ball.” She spoke carefully, clearly, as though we were strangers in town and she were offering directions. “It is likely that in certain cases I’ll be able to tell there isn’t a human baby developing inside.”

  “But you couldn’t tell with Lana.” Cassie stood then, likely to offer the effect of her five-month-pregnant belly.

  “I thought there was something wrong with Lana’s pregnancy,” said Sylvia, not turning her head to look at Lana, “but I’d never delivered a baby before. I’d never done a prenatal exam.”

  “So you were withholding information, then,” I said suddenly, heat rising up my neck, though I had intuited the exact same thing. Lana had pulled her hands into the cuffs of her sweatshirt. She was pointedly not looking at Cassie, Sylvia, me, or her Baby.

  “I know,” said Sylvia, still not turning, “that stress is bad for a pregnant woman. What could I have done? Even if I’d known.”

  “And Deborah?” said Cassie.

  “Deborah too.”

  Cassie stared at her. We wanted her to ask the inevitable question about her own pregnancy. But she didn’t.

  Ida raised her hand, just to the height of her shoulder. Zephyr nodded. “I understand why Cassie’s concerned. Obviously.” She waved her hand in the direction of Cassie’s belly. “But we don’t have much control over that right now. We don’t know enough. But it seems to me that we do have some control over what happens after the Babies are born, after they come out.”

  Talia’s hand shot up into the air. Zephyr ignored her. “Say more, Ida.”

  “Well, I don’t think we helped Deborah very much. I don’t think she knew how to relate to her birds. To her Babies.”

  Beside me, Lana leaned forward, forearms on knees. I put my hand on her back. Her breath was fast.

  Ida continued with her eyes on Lana: “None of us knew how either and I’m not blaming anyone, I’m just saying. Being with them all the time, being with the birds—”

  “Chummy. Laverne. Oxtail.” Tenzin said it quietly but Ida heard him.

  “Thank you, Tenzin. Yes. Chummy and Laverne and Oxtail. Being near them all the time didn’t seem healthy for her.”

  Lana stood suddenly, her hands still pulled into the sleeves of her sweatshirt. When she spoke her breath was ragged, asthmatic. “It makes me feel crazy to be near her,” she said, pointing at her Baby, “and it makes me feel crazy to be away.” She started to cry, big sobs that she didn’t try to hide in her hands or wipe away; instead she looked at each person while she cried. “Either way it is impossible. Being close or being far away. It could have been me in that tree. Just as easily. It could have been me.” I tried to take her hand but she pulled it away. Looked at me when she said “it could still be me in that tree.”

  She sat again and I took her hand. She let me hold it but kept it soft and lifeless. No one else spoke. Not even Zephyr to officially bring the meeting to a close. It was as if a light had gone out in the room, as though someone had given the order for us to leave in silence. I thought of Maundy Thursday and the stripping of the altar. We left the room that way. In ones and twos and threes. Lighting our candles from the fire. Disappearing into the night.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Rodney was waiting for me outside the Center. He tried to steer me to his room but I wasn’t interested. I stood on tiptoes and kissed him on the edge of his lips where the tiny buds at the end of the branch were stenciled into his skin. He smelled like fire and sweat and himself. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said. Then I walked across the quadrangle, through the curtain of beads, and into Chester’s room.

  Chester wasn’t there so I sat on an embroidered footstool and studied his bowl of treasures. In the light of my lantern the ridges pressed into the retainer looked lunar and the false teeth resembled a Paleolithic zipper. When Chester entered the room he seemed, as usual, completely unsurprised by my presence. He washed his hands in one of the silver bowls on his counter, dried them on his shirt, settled down across from me in his rocker, hands on the arms, gazing at me until I was ready to speak.

  “I hate not doing anything. To help. I hate not being able to help her.”

  Chester nodded. “I need a fortune,” I said, in the way cowboys in Westerns said they needed a shot of whiskey or rich housewives on reality shows professed their desire for wine.

  Chester leaned back and reached into the small pocket above the regular front pocket on his jeans. I’d always wondered what that tiny pocket was for and now I had the answer: that little pocket was for holding fortunes after the apocalypse. He handed it to me.

  I unfolded it and read without a trace of sarcasm: “Oh Mister Sun, Sun, Mister Golden Sun, please shine down on me.”

  Chester whistled a little of the Raffi tune.

  “Fuck you, Chester,” I said. “Seriously?”

  Chester stopped whistling but kept rocking. “You know, Mira, Raffi suffered from debilitating depression.”

  “Really?” I said.

  “I have no idea,” said Chester, “but it would make the song better, right?”

  This time I was the one not to answer. I stared at him. Didn’t realize I was crying until I wiped the tears off my cheek with the back of my hand.

  Chester came around to my side of the coffee table, sat cross-legged beside
the footstool, took my hands. “Mir,” he said, “we’re all broken. Or if we’re not yet we will be. Lana’s broken in a different way than she would have been in the Before, but it doesn’t have to be the end.”

  “You mean she won’t end up killing herself.”

  “I was going for vague and poetic. But yeah. That’s what I mean.”

  “So you don’t think she’ll end up dangling from a branch.”

  “I think Lana’s more of a pills kind of girl.”

  “So we’re safe because she can’t buy any Vicodin on the street?”

  “Maybe.” Chester offered a half-smile. “I don’t know, Mir, I think Lana’s stronger than you think.”

  I picked the false teeth from the dish, pressed them against my knee. “I can tell she’s hurting but it’s like I can’t get inside it. I don’t understand it.” I pressed harder on my knee until I could feel the bite of the teeth through my jeans. I wanted to leave a mark.

  On the other side of the wall, in my own room, lying on my pallet, I couldn’t get the Mr. Sun song out of my head. I thought of the sun: reprinted on logos for cereal, anthropomorphized in children’s books, scalded onto tourist paraphernalia. That’s when I thought of the wallet: ARIZONA with the fluorescent setting sun, the one in which I’d stored our ridiculous baby names, the scraps I knew I needed now.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  I went to Zephyr with a tray I’d found in the Piles, about eighteen inches in diameter. Into the tray he poured his thickest sludge, a slurry comparable to cement, and around the circumference I placed spokes from the bike Lana had helped me de-ribbon; they dried splayed out from the tray like the rays of a silver sun. Once the cement was dry and the spokes were fastened I wove the ribbon, waxy and ribbed, through the spokes, followed by all the fabric scraps I could find: nylon from pink ballet tights and the polyester shimmer of a woman’s emerald blouse, thuggish canvas and wraithlike silk. Onto the sharp tip of each spoke I pressed a child’s eraser, nubby seahorses and starfish, and then into the fabric I nestled the names, some of the scraps showing and others layered within creases and folds until I’d made a place where Lana’s Baby could rest.