“Don’t worry,” Ibrahim says, nuzzling deeper into the sheet by her hip, “there’s still half an hour till breakfast. We’re good.”
She flops back onto the pillows, lying down next to him. Yesterday she was a virgin. Virgin. Is that still a word that means something to most people? Now that she’s not a virgin, has anything changed?
“How are you feeling? Other than the hangover, I mean.”
She opens her eyes. “Good.” Different but the same. The same, but different.
“Good,” he says, delaying, trying to find the right words. “I enjoyed last night,” he finally says, bringing his face closer to her face, putting his cheek next to her cheek.
She nods quickly. “Me too.” Then, looking at him sincerely this time, she adds, “Thank you.” She wants to ask him all sorts of questions—what does this mean, how many girls have you slept with, do you love me, will we be together forever—but knows enough not to. And besides, she is learning that want is different from need.
Ibrahim leans forward and kisses her on the mouth. “Hey, why don’t you read me something you’ve written, from before?” he asks.
She groans, a smile making plums of her cheeks. “I told you, I’m not a real writer.”
“Please. It could be anything.” His fingers stretch across the ivories of her ribcage.
“Okay, fine. I’ll go get something.” She hops up, and he admires her agility. She’s stronger than she looks. Wrapping his shirt around her body without buttoning it up, she goes through the adjoining door to her bedroom.
She comes back after a minute or longer. “I’ve got one poem I didn’t write, and another I did. The one I didn’t write is called ‘Silvia,’ and it’s by Shakespeare. It’s why I’m called Silvia.”
“Heard of him. Read the one you wrote.”
She looks at him. “I wrote this one years ago. In, like, my first year of university. Just don’t—don’t even say anything when it’s done. I don’t even want to know what you think.”
He closes his eyes and nods like a philosopher. Then she starts. He watches her read. Her mouth making shapes around the words. The whole thing seems fated, as though it couldn’t be any other way. It doesn’t even matter what the words are; he thinks she’s brilliant.
“What do you mean, not a real writer?” he says once it’s done. “You’re amazing.”
“Shut up,” she says, pleased.
“No, but really. Real—I mean what is real? If you’re not a real writer, then I’m not a real painter.”
“Yes you are!”
“Then what makes someone a ‘real’ artist?”
She looks up, around the room, at all his canvases propped against the walls, and his painting supplies scattered all over the place. “When you do it. Like you’re doing it, like this.”
“Well, look at you—you’re doing it too.”
“It’s not the same at all. This is one thought. It took ten seconds to write, I wrote it years ago, and I haven’t done anything else. I’ve never had one published.”
“Well, I’ve never sold any of my paintings.”
“Really?” She pauses and looks around again, trying to find the one he started of her last night, but she can’t. “Well, you could. You should. People would want to buy them. You can feel the . . . urgency of every single one.”
“Would your parents buy the one of you, you think?”
“I don’t want to think about my parents right now.” She is suddenly serious, and it startles him.
“Oh, sorry,” he says, and wonders if he should tell her about his parents, his mother, how much he loved her, and his father, how much he misses him.
“First,” she says, softening, “you’d have to put some clothes on me.”
“But I like you like this.” He puts his hands around her, all over her.
They begin again.
Silvia is twenty minutes late for breakfast.
XXX
MONIQUE AND SILVIA are paired together that morning to clean the kitchen. This is an easy job, comparatively, and Silvia’s happy to be inside today, as there’s a sharp wind ripping through the leaves, as if summer got cold feet. No matter the weather outside, though, the golden place inside Silvia is undimmed. She thinks about Ibrahim, about last night, and it glows.
The girls are gossiping about all the people there, and in talking about other people, they’re able to feel close to each other for the first time. When Monique laughs, it sounds like a pipe clanking; she doesn’t try to be quiet about it. Silvia notices the purple circles sagging under Monique’s eyes. They look pretty, though—gaunt suits her. She’s wearing very short white shorts and her legs are as thin as bamboo but stubbly.
“So,” Monique says. “What’s the story?”
“What?”
“Don’t what me, you know what I’m talking about. Ibrahim! I’m just two doors down.”
Silvia’s face peels open.
“Oh, don’t be a prude, I hardly heard anything.”
“Do you think Cynthia knows?” Silvia asks quickly.
“Knows what? Are you together?”
“I don’t know.”
Silvia is cleaning the sink when she sees Cynthia come out of the honey house. She’s wearing the same brown trousers she always wears, and a large straw hat that hides her face. She stops, her body facing the house—facing the reflective kitchen window that Silvia is standing behind, though she can’t tell where exactly Cynthia is looking. They could be looking at each other and neither would know. Both women are still for a long moment.
Then Cynthia looks up to evaluate the sky, holding on to her hat. Coming to some conclusion, she walks on.
The girls continue to work. Instead of rinsing the cloths, they fold them over and respray a new corner with Javex. The work goes quickly, pleasantly, until something in Monique shifts.
“This is bullshit,” she says suddenly, dropping her J Cloth. Her voice has gone up an octave.
“What?” Silvia stands up—she had been on her knees, scrubbing a patch of floor by the oven.
“Cleaning up after other people’s shit. I’m sick of it.”
“Yeah, but—”
“But what?” Monique snaps.
Silvia waits. “I guess, well, we have to earn our keep. Right?” Monique looks back at her blankly. Silvia wonders if Monique has ever cleaned her own kitchen. She could be either very spoiled or very dirty. Monique didn’t do her hair that morning, and Silvia thinks she looks like a leaking feather pillow, her hair mostly flat but with white tufts sticking out in the wrong places.
“Listen,” Monique says, coming close in a confidential way, “have you even used the pay phone yet?”
“No, actually.” She’s been avoiding calling her parents.
“You haven’t used a phone in how long—like, three weeks?”
“It’s been that long?” Silvia thinks, letting it settle in. “No, I guess not. Why, have you?”
“No! Why is that?” She sounds like she is trying to prove a point, as though she knows the answer and is just seeing if Silvia does too.
“I guess I haven’t thought about it.”
“Well, I hear it doesn’t even work.”
“Oh? Says who?” Silvia feels like it’s her job to placate Monique, to dispel this doubt and bring her back to where she was two minutes ago.
“Ben. He and Dan went to call their parents the other day and the phone just had that dead dial tone.” She pauses for effect. “And we don’t have Internet or cell phones or anything. We’re completely isolated in this backwoods, bloody-water, you know . . . It’s like . . .” Monique looks up, scanning the corners of the ceiling as if there might be security cameras there. “It’s almost like we’re trapped here.”
Silvia sees Monique’s eyes flash silver, like fish in water. “Trapped? Really? Do you feel trapped? I don’t feel trapped.”
“Maybe that’s ’cause you don’t even know what freedom is.”
With this sting, th
e girls turn their backs to each other and get on with their tasks. The static fuzz of passive aggression builds up; each scrubs harder.
But after a few minutes it seems as though the storm within Monique has calmed. It leaves as quickly as it came. Her eyes look normal again, no longer turbulent. From the way the trees are gently swaying, it looks as though the wind has calmed down too.
“Sorry about that,” Monique says suddenly, turning to Silvia.
“It’s fine,” Silvia says. She doesn’t want to push for reasons for Monique’s behaviour, but she’s a little unsure of how to act.
“I don’t deal well with isolation, apparently,” Monique explains, smirking. “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”
At that moment Cynthia enters the room and scans the stacks of unclean dishes and the piles of rags that Monique pulled out of the drawer, thinking to fold them later. “Is everything all right?” she asks, looking specifically at Silvia.
Silvia, strangely bashful, looks at Monique for an answer.
“Yeah, we’re fine,” Monique says.
Cynthia inhales. “Silvia, you’re looking a little tired. Are you feeling okay?”
Silvia blushes. “Yes, I’m fine.” She feels she should apologize, but refrains.
Cynthia maintains eye contact. “Why don’t you two take a break? It looks like you’ve done enough here for the morning.” She looks back and forth between the girls, then leaves.
XXXI
LATER THAT DAY Silvia walks down to the lake by herself. Though she still feels hungover, she is surprisingly alert. She wants to have a moment alone, truly alone, but more pressingly, she wants to see what the water looks like.
She passes the well on her way and stops to look down. Leaning on the stone structure, she sees nothing but tunnelled darkness. She whistles, then waits for the echo. Looking around, she finds a rock the size of her palm. She drops it, and counts:
One alligator
Two alligators
Three alligators
Four alligators
Five al-
Crazy.
The forest is calm. Nature feels almost sympathetic to her tenderness—the birds coo rather than chirp; the small creatures move slowly, and twigs do not snap underfoot. She looks up rather than down, and doesn’t see the creek she’d stumbled upon with Ibrahim.
There’s a huge tree that she hadn’t noticed the first time she came down here. She stares at it, moving slowly up from trunk to top, so high she can’t even make it out. She is still for a moment, thinking about this tree. It is solid in front of her, and there’s no reason to fear that it will suddenly stop being a tree.
But with the arrival of the slippery knowledge of doubt, she has come to know that this tree does have the potential to lose its treeness. It could be cut down by man or beaver, or felled naturally, by wind or lightning. And once it’s no longer standing, there are practically infinite things it could become. The vastness of paths for this tree, a formerly upright living thing—straight to the sun, its only job to grow—means that it has every choice and also no choice at all. It could become a chair. A house. A toothpick. A book. A box of pencils. A fire in someone’s home, anywhere in the world.
Who put this tree here? Why? Why is it even on this earth; how has it made its way here and survived long enough to get this far? What does that mean—does its time on earth account for something? Who does it belong to?
Silvia feels dizzy and sad and hopeless. She feels angry with her parents for telling her that a tree was just a tree, because how can she know any answers if she doesn’t even know the questions?
She gets to the lake before she realises it. It’s a murky brownish blue, swampy green at the edges. She crouches, touches her fingers to the earth. Wet, definitively brown.
That’s that, then. It must just be the quartz.
She takes off the cross necklace she’s worn since her confirmation and shoves it into her pocket.
XXXII
A SUNNY SUNDAY, a perfect day off. They’re all lying on blankets on the grass in the yard. Ibrahim and Silvia make a point of not lying next to each other.
Monique sighs so loudly she sounds aggrieved. “This is so blissful.” She’s wearing a white lace dress with a ripped hem, and her hair is damped down to her scalp. She looks like a punk Jean Seberg.
Bare legs exposed to the sun, open palms facing the sky, everyone lies there, not saying anything, thinking their thoughts, feeling their feelings.
Silvia is thinking about what Monique said earlier about needing “the freedom to make art.” She wonders if this, now, is freedom. And if so, will she—will they—have to start making art soon? Maybe everyone else is doing their thing in private, not talking about it. When Silvia is alone, though, she is either thinking, and not in any kind of “artistic” way, or sleeping.
Then the sound of someone singing comes in on the wind—the voice of a woman.
“What’s that?” Monique asks, looking up from MJ’s month-old copy of L’actualité. (She’s trying to practice her French.)
The rest of them prick their ears, like animals, to the sound. At first it’s just notes—so, re, re, mi, fa, so—la, ti, ti, do, re, do—then the notes string together into a song, a song none of them recognize but one that’s soulful, strangely moving. They can’t hear any words from where they’re sitting, but the melody carries them. The sound echoes throughout the house and spills into the yard.
“Who is that?” Silvia asks.
“It must be Cynthia,” Ibrahim says.
A collective pause as this registers.
Everyone looks up to try to see the source of the sound, but they can’t. They never do.
XXXIII
DOWN THE DRIVEWAY from the farm is a barn on the left partly hidden by a stand of trees—the kind whose leaves flicker with silver on the undersides when the wind draws its fingers through the branches. They don’t use the building for any daily tasks, it’s just where Hartford and Cynthia keep the car and pickup truck, and since it’s a little removed from the main circuit of greenhouse, gardens, and house, Silvia’s never really explored it before. She notices it now, for the first time really, on an afternoon walk. Having finished her chores for the day, she’s decided to try to find “inspiration.”
She’d looked up the word in the dictionary in the downstairs library and that’s actually what it said. Inspire means “to breathe into life,” or, more literally, “to give spirit.”
Then the Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground. He breathed the breath of life into the man’s nostrils, and the man became a living person. Genesis 2:7
So it’s true, she thinks, and inescapable: anything she tries to write will come from Him. In writing, she is creating; in creating anything, she is giving life to it. Can waking up every morning be an act of creation? Is she anything more than a vessel either way? She feels nauseous, powerless.
Approaching the barn she sees Cynthia, arms full of fabric, walking towards her.
“Hi,” Silvia says, glad to have something puncture her thought-spiral. “Do you need help with that?” She goes towards Cynthia and picks up a floppy piece of pink wool that’s fallen from the bundle.
“Thank you.” Cynthia smiles as Silvia places the material back on top of the bundle. “Are you busy? Would you like to come with me?” She nods towards the barn.
“Sure,” Silvia says. “I’m not busy.”
She follows Cynthia inside the barn. It’s dark and quiet, a totally different world from the golden, buzzing afternoon outside. Shafts of dusty light slice through the air; it smells of wood shavings. It seems bigger on the inside than it looked on the outside—the truck and car have their own space, misshapen hay bales teeter in the corners, and a bunch of unused farm equipment is rusting into paralysis along the periphery.
“I’m making a bed for the cats,” Cynthia says, answering Silvia’s unspoken question. “The mother will be back soon.”
“The mother?”
“And has her babies here?”
“For the last six years, yes. The biggest litter was ten.” Cynthia clears away some hay with her foot, opening up a patch of smooth dirt on the ground.
Silvia is still confused. Answering her next unspoken question, Cynthia continues: “They don’t stay. They’re wild. They carry on and we never see them again. Except Toby, of course. Here, take this.” She hands Silvia half the bundle of fabric, which she can now see is made up of sweaters.
Squatting from the hinges of her hips, back remaining perfectly straight, Cynthia starts placing the sweaters into a pile of flat layers.
“You don’t need them anymore?” Silvia examines the one she’s been handed—it’s cashmere the colour of cotton candy.
“They’re Hilary’s. She left them.” Cynthia reaches up and takes the remaining sweater from Silvia, then tucks it along the edges of the flat sweaters, creating sausagelike walls. “There we go,” she says, standing up to appreciate her effort. “The kittens will like that. Did you ever have cats, Silvia?” She looks Silvia in the eye.
“My mom’s allergic.”
“Oh, shame.”
“How long do they usually stay for?”
“Hard to say. Sometimes Judy leaves before the babies are ready. Twice I had to bottle-feed them for weeks,” Cynthia says, smiling at the memory.
Silvia looks at this cozy nest, hidden in the dark, safe from coyotes and bears and whatever else. She’s struck by Cynthia’s tenderness. The air in here is starting to feel velvety, dark and warm and the same temperature as her body. She feels so much more at ease than she did five minutes ago. Maybe, she thinks, the things we go looking for ultimately find us. She crosses her arms and looks at Cynthia, who’s still looking in admiration at the cat bed she’s created.
“Do you miss her?” Silvia asks, suddenly bold.
“Who, Judy?” Cynthia smiles at the joke. “Yes. This is the first year she won’t be here for the kittens.”
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