“You’ve been already? When?”
“A while ago, with Ibrahim.”
“Oh, with Ibrahim,” Monique says.
The three of them walk down, Monique and MJ following Silvia. Butterflies float above the ground. Song comes from invisible birds. On the ground, the levels of life are stacked on top of one another. From the pine needles grows a carpet of vibrant moss, and from the moss spring clumps of wide, rubbery leaves. And above all that, of course, the trees stretch high as skyscrapers. The air is still, and the heat of the sun penetrates even the shady parts of the canopy. Light fights shadow, darting along the forest floor.
The first lake is farther than Silvia remembers, and when they arrive, it’s smaller too. “I think it shrank in the heat,” she says.
“This drought,” says MJ, shaking her head, sad but noncommittal.
“God, it’s hot.” Monique sticks out her tongue like a panting dog to illustrate the heat. She is taking off her short shorts, now her T-shirt. “Aren’t you guys coming in?” she asks, already running. She’s naked but for the scarf-turban. A splash. “Cold!” she squeals, but pleasurably. “Oh, it feels so good.”
Silvia looks over at MJ, who shrugs. “Sure,” MJ says, and, her cargo shorts and tank top suddenly in a pile, she follows Monique into the water, wearing only her underpants.
So now Silvia has to follow the others. She takes off her clothes slowly, folds them carefully, and lays them on a rock. Should she keep her underwear on? Which will be less awkward? Whose side does she want to be on?
She slides into the water, the colour of tea, with her arms stretched out before her and bends her neck backwards to keep the water out of her face. Monique is right: it is cold, and it does feel good.
“Am I the only one skinny-dipping?” Monique sees that Silvia has kept on her underpants and bra. “Oh well, your loss,” she says, and plunges under the surface. She’s so skinny she hardly even has boobs; her red nipples are almost as wide as each whole breast.
The lake gets deep towards the centre. The pond-weed tentacles at the water’s edge fall away; out here, Silvia’s legs don’t reach the bottom. She opens her eyes under the water and sunlight filters through as if through smudged glass. All the life that lives here, the life that she can’t see, is silent but pressing. It doesn’t feel so cold anymore. She surfaces to take a breath. “It does feel good.”
The girls swim silently, in peace, for a few minutes.
Then something brushes up against her leg. Something small, wriggly, hard. At first she thinks it is a fish, but then the thing surfaces, moving quickly: it’s moss-green with spots the same colour as the lake, its eyes above the water’s surface like an alligator’s. Then she feels another one touch the side of her body with the texture and pressure of a fly swatter. It’s a frog. Suddenly there are dozens, all swimming towards the water’s edge.
“Hey!” Silvia cries, her specific surprise at being touched rapidly turning to general panic.
Monique is floating like a starfish on her back; MJ’s swimming laps. Both stop what they’re doing and face Silvia.
“Do you see that?” She points to the exodus of frogs—there are now as many as fifty, sixty little heads bobbing along on the surface. There’s a series of tiny thunks, like the vibrations of a skin drum, as they glide.
“What?” asks MJ, scanning the water blindly.
“Ugh, what is that?” Monique is vertical; her scarf, wet, has fallen into a collar round her neck.
“Frogs,” Silvia says.
The three girls swim back to the shore as quickly as they can.
Now there are hundreds, and the frogs move faster than the girls. Propelled by their webbed feet and springy legs, they move as quickly outside the water as in it. It’s as though they’ve all instantly changed from tadpoles and they too are running for their first taste of freedom.
Their croaks alternate between a cow’s moo, the chirp of a cricket’s string quartet, and a teenage girl’s drunken laughter. The cacophony swells; the sound is all around them.
“They’re fine so long as they’re not touching me,” MJ says. “I hate the feeling of things touching me in the water.”
“What the fuck,” Monique says. “This is fucked up.”
“This is nature,” MJ says. “Animals do get born.”
“This many, though?” Silvia asks. “All at once?”
MJ shrugs.
“And why only frogs?” Silvia asks, though nobody has the answer.
They watch the frog migration from the rocks: hundreds and hundreds more little amphibians emerge from the water and disappear into the forest. It seems as coordinated as a military invasion but for the noise.
The frogs are all the same colour—moss, mud, grass—and the same size—no bigger than a robin’s egg. At one point there seems to be an infinite number of them, and the next moment there are none. The sudden return to silence is confusing.
“I hate animals. You just never know what they’re thinking,” Monique says. She massages her ankles, rotating them on their joints with the elasticity of a science-room skeleton.
Silvia clutches her clothes against her, not bothering to put them on. There’s something funny flipping around in her stomach. Lighter than sadness, simpler than nervousness. Unease.
The three girls walk back to the farm in silence, following the path the frogs took, each thinking about how she will tell the unlikely story of the amphibian exodus.
XXXVII
CYNTHIA IS AT THE FRONT DOOR when the girls get back. She emerges onto the front step, holding out three clean towels. “Hartford said you girls went swimming,” she says. “Wasn’t it too cold?”
Silvia is first to get to her, and Cynthia wraps a towel around her shoulders like a cape. “No,” Silvia says, aware that she’s wearing only her damp bra and underpants as Cynthia rubs her back. “Not too cold.” She’s wondering how, or even whether, to mention the frogs when Cynthia moves on to Monique and wraps another towel round her.
Silvia notices the sound of bees, a low, pervasive whine stitching a web in the air.
DRYISH, STILL IN HER UNDERWEAR but with the towel wrapped around her chest, Silvia runs into Ibrahim in the hallway near their bedrooms.
“Hey,” he says, pleased to see her. “How’s it going?”
“We went swimming,” she blurts.
“Cool,” Ibrahim says.
“And all these frogs came out of the lake, hundreds of them.”
“Really?” Ibrahim is unsure why she’s uneasy. “Well, it is nearly summer, I guess,” he says. “This is when they come out of hibernation, right? I think?”
“But what should we do?”
“They’re not dangerous, are they?”
“They’re coming through the woods—they’re on their way to the house.” She speaks with great urgency.
“It’s fine, we’ll just clear them out. I’m sure Cynthia has nets or something.”
“But aren’t you worried about what their coming means?”
Ibrahim pauses and tries to tune into her wavelength. “You mean, like, climate change or something?”
She shakes her head. “Never mind.” She looks behind her, down the hall. “I’m not that hungry,” she says, “I’m not feeling great, actually. I think I’ll skip dinner and just go to bed.”
“Oh.” Ibrahim follows her gaze, trying to find what she’s looking at. When he turns, Silvia is already walking into her room. “I hope you feel better, then,” he says, finding himself staring at her shut door.
Inside her room, Silvia opens her notebook and spreads the pages flat. She wants to write about the frogs. The way their eyes appeared above the surface of the water; the way their rubbery, muscular legs felt against her skin; the way their orange eyes stared off into nothingness in the same way Toby the cat’s do. Her pencil is in her hand, but nothing comes out.
She turns instead to Cynthia’s book of poems. She cracks the spine and flicks through the pages, yellowed but fresh.
&nbs
p; XXXVIII
SILVIA IS NO LONGER READING but swiping her phone open, locked, open, locked. She keeps it charged—most people do—as a timepiece, as a habit. Sometimes she listens to songs she’s already downloaded. Sometimes she hopes she might catch a wave of errant signal and receive all the texts and emails suspended in the ether since she arrived. Her homescreen is her favourite view of the harbour, and seeing it now, for the first time in ages, she finds she doesn’t miss it. She feels blinkered to the present in a way she never truly has before.
Then there’s a tap at her bedroom door.
“Hey, you awake?” It’s Monique.
“Yeah. I can’t sleep either.”
Monique scuttles into the dark room wearing a baggy purple T-shirt that says Make Muffins Not War. “Ugh,” she says, shuddering as she hops into Silvia’s bed alongside her. “Fucking frogs.”
The girls sit hunched with their knees up under the thin comforter. The sound of croaking permeates the air. It seems as though the frogs are everywhere, invisible in the tar-black night: in the ceiling light, in the window frames, in the trees. And maybe they are, Silvia thinks. Stranger things have happened.
“It’s weird, isn’t it?” she asks.
“Ugh, everything is weird here. Don’t even get me started.”
“But, like, this is different weird. Weird like the blood in the taps.”
“I know, that’s what I’m saying—this place is fucked up.”
“Do you think it’s the drought?” Silvia asks, hoping Monique thinks so.
“How should I know?”
Silvia looks at Monique, her profile glowing in the light of the stars, silver hair electrified at all ends. She feels such fondness for this girl who was a stranger only weeks ago. Monique might be crazy, but she’s so profoundly herself. Silvia has never met anyone like her, and she feels as though, if it were really to come down to it, Monique would protect her from anything.
“I’m heading out tomorrow.”
“Out?”
“Yeah.”
“For, like, ever?”
“I can’t be here anymore.” Monique shakes her head. “Bad vibes.”
Silvia is startled but tries to be cool. “Where are you going?”
“My last apartment was in Toronto, but I sublet it and don’t get it back until the end of the summer. I don’t know—I’ll figure it out once I’m on the road.” She is quiet for a second, and Silvia doesn’t say anything either. “Don’t tell anyone, though. I hate goodbyes.”
“Oh,” Silvia says, not hiding the disappointment in her voice. She wants to ask more, she wants to ask why, but Monique seems to fall asleep instantly, and her ragged breath weaves into the sounds in the night. Frogs, wind, leaves, breathing.
Silvia doesn’t sleep for hours, Monique’s body an unfamiliar shape next to her, the sound of the frogs mounting as they get nearer and nearer. She tries to repress the feeling that they’re coming for her.
XXXIX
BELL. 5¢, 10¢, 25¢, $1. Do not deposit more money until operator asks for it.
Silvia is standing in front of the pay phone at the end of the road. With an automated motion, she feeds the box some coins and dials the number (the line, contrary to what Monique said, is unfortunately not dead).
“Hello?”
“Mom?”
“Silvia!”
“Hi.”
“Honey! Honey, it’s Silvia, Silvia’s on the phone, pick up! Honey, I’m getting your father. Silvia, where have you been, we’ve been worried sick—”
“Silvia?”
“Hi, Dad.”
“Silvia, where are you, we’ve been worried sick.”
“Haven’t you been getting our emails? Our letters? What’s going on?”
“Emails? No, sorry, there’s no Internet on the farm, but—”
“No Internet? Where is this place?”
“I haven’t received any letters either . . .” Silvia trails off, wondering.
“Why haven’t you called?”
“I’m calling now.”
“We were worried sick, honey, your father was concerned that—”
“Sorry, there’s no cell reception either. I’m calling from the pay phone at the end of the—”
“No reception? Silvia, have they abducted you? We called the police, but they said they couldn’t do anything since you told us where you were and had chosen to go yourself, so we were just about to come out ourselves.”
“Dad.”
“Silvia, I’m so glad you’re fine. What your father is trying to say is just that we would have appreciated—”
Silvia holds the phone away from her ear for the duration of two whole breath cycles. In, out. In, out. When she puts it back they’re still talking over each other. She coughs. “Hello?”
“Hello! Can you hear me? Silvia? Honey, I don’t think she can—”
“I can hear you, I can hear you, can I just talk for one second? This phone is eating up all my money and I want to actually talk to you.”
“Yes, please, talk to us, honey, of course, we just—”
“Okay. All right? I’m sorry for not calling. Really. But it’s only been like a month, and—”
“Seven weeks, Silvia, honey—”
“As I said, I’m really sorry you were worried. I’m sorry I made you worry. But I haven’t been abducted, and I mean, you know exactly where I am, and I’m really enjoying myself. I like it here. Things are good.”
Remarkably, for a moment there is silence at the other end of the line.
“When are you coming home, Silvia?”
“I told you, Dad—I’m staying for the summer. It’s better than a job here, better than camp or a coffee-shop thing anyway, I have zero expenses, I have my own time, and I—”
“Have you found a local church? Bruce hasn’t heard from you either. I spoke to him just the other day, and he asked—”
“There’s a church in town, I think, yes.”
“Oh good, that’s good, honey, isn’t that good?”
“What have you been doing?”
“Are there many people there? Are they Christian?”
“Did you get the Bible I left in your bag? I want to send you—”
“Are you writing anything?”
Her parents’ questions interrupt each other, as though the answers aren’t as important as the asking. She knows they love her, of course they do. But she’s realising that perhaps love means something different to them than to her.
“It’s beeping, the phone. I’ve run out of coins, so I have to—”
“Honey? I can’t hear you, it’s beeping.”
“We’re praying for you, honey, we love—”
And then over.
SHE WALKS BACK to the farm, feeling vaguely but distinctly sad. Sad because she knows she’s letting them down. Sad thinking of the sadness they would feel in thinking their daughter won’t be “saved,” that she’ll end up in their worst visions of hell for the choices she’s making. Sad for not feeling as guilty as she should about that. Sad for being reminded of why she’d said she was coming here: because it was an “artists’ colony.” And sad because after seven weeks she has nothing to show for herself: no product, no art. Sad because she didn’t get to talk about any of the nuances, any of the sort of’s, any of the strangeness or specificity—in brevity, everything had to be just good, fine. Sad because parents remind us of who we once were and who they expect us to be. Sad because of the distance between that and reality. The sadness comes in waves and then leaves like the tide, so gradual you can’t see how dramatically it moves.
She sees the farm up on the hill, the same way she saw it when she first arrived. It’s the same building and the same vantage point, but everything’s different now.
Silvia wonders why Monique left, really. If it was only because she was restless or if, like Toby the cat, Monique could perhaps see something that none of the rest of them could.
XL
THERE ARE HUNDREDS,
maybe even thousands, of frogs hopping around in the garden. They’re underfoot in the kitchen, croaking in the bathroom sink. The terror they arouse is effectively eight hundred times their size.
The men are charged with their removal, both inside the house and outside it. It’s strange that the frogs made it all the way up here, especially since there is no body of water within the limits of the property: ponds are where frogs live, and there is no pond here. Removal tactics include snake repellent and butterfly nets, but mainly the men just have to catch the little buggers with their hands.
Ben, Dan, JB, and Ibrahim spend a whole day running around, chasing the hop-hopping amphibians as they aimlessly try to escape whatever fate to which they’re doomed.
“Do you think this is why Monique left?” Ibrahim asks.
“What do you mean?” asks Dan. He’s on his hands and knees, rummaging in the low leaves of the zucchini plants, trying to see if any frogs are hiding there.
“I don’t know—all this?” Ibrahim isn’t looking at Dan; none of them are looking at each other; they’re all pursuing their victims. “This . . . stuff? She completely freaked out over the red water. Now frogs . . .”
“I think Monique was lonely and we were not enough,” JB says.
The others are struck silent for a second.
“Whoa,” Dan says, moving from all fours onto his knees and sitting back on his heels. “Deep.”
“Shut up,” says Ben.
“I don’t know,” JB says sensitively. “This life, it is not for some people.”
“Do you think it’s for you? For us?” Ibrahim asks. He has an irrepressible belief in other people’s insight.
“I cannot say.” JB shrugs. “It’s fine.”
Ben is holding his spritz bottle of snake repellent like it’s an AK-47. “Monique was right, though. I mean, it isn’t normal.”
Ibrahim doesn’t know what’s normal and what isn’t—he’s not used to country life, after all—but also he’s too busy to consider it. He and JB are lumbered with the ineffective butterfly nets, and the two of them pace up and down the herb patch. The sun is going down so they’ll have to finish soon, whether the frogs are gone or not.
The Honey Farm Page 13