Judy protectively stretches out a paw to herd in her litter, covering them from the looming strangers now encircling them.
“You shouldn’t name them,” Cynthia says, crouching down to stroke Judy’s head—a sign of trust—before she gently scoops up the dark grey kitten. “They’ll leave as soon as they’re ready. It’s best not to get attached.” She holds the grey baby up to her chest so tenderly, so carefully, it’s as though it will replace her heart.
Silvia watches Cynthia hold the baby cat and kiss its damp forehead and becomes aware, as if for the first time, that there is so much outside her control. That you become a hostage to fortune when your heart is outside your body.
“If they all leave,” Ibrahim asks, “why did Toby stay?”
Cynthia is quiet for a moment, still absorbed by the kitten she’s holding with both hands, then belatedly registers the question. “Toby was attacked by a coyote when he was just a few days old. That’s why we had to chop his tail off.”
Silvia is taken aback by this news; she’d presumed an entirely different narrative.
“He never wanted to leave after that,” Cynthia says, gently placing the grey kitten back down at its mother’s belly. Everyone is still staring at the kittens, which are taking turns falling asleep and falling on top of one another, nursing and finding their voices. “Well.” Cynthia stands up, still looking at the babies. “I think the kittens need some alone time with their mother now.”
They all look at each other, remembering that the day of work is still ahead of them. JB, nearest to the door, leads them back out into the world to start the day. Silvia has a feeling that they’ll each carry this moment with them for a long time.
“Do you think she loves them?” Ibrahim asks Silvia as they walk back to the house.
“I don’t know if it’s about that,” Silvia says. “I think it’s about something more than love.”
XLVI
IT IS NOW early July and the solstice has passed, unremarked. The drought has now persisted for five months and six days.
“We haven’t had a drought like this since 1954,” Hartford says at the dinner table that night. “That one had lasted seven months.”
“We?” Ibrahim asks. “How old are you?”
“I mean the region,” Hartford explains, impatient.
Cynthia interjects to say that there was a twelve-month drought—longer—in 1931, and another in 1952. Several shorter droughts—three months, four months—scattered in the seventies and again, more frequently, throughout the nineties.
“But we’re still here, right?” Ibrahim says. “The world didn’t end.”
“Most droughts end by March,” Cynthia continues. “March is the most reliable wet month.”
“Surely we can last until March, no?” JB says, mouth full.
“We won’t be around to see what happens then,” Ben says, “but yeah, I’m sure the world of Smooth Rock Falls will not end before March.”
Silvia wonders where she’ll be in March. The distance between now and then seems insurmountable. The future feels like one unified, unknowable thing, like Europe, though she knows it’s all composed of minutes and days, like today and tomorrow.
Everyone eats their spaghetti squash in silence.
“The Cochrane Farmers’ Market is next Saturday,” Hartford says. “It’s a nice one, very big. We’ll need all your help to sell the latest honey harvest.”
“Hey,” Silvia says to Ibrahim, “why don’t you frame some of your paintings and take them to market?” He has nearly thirty canvases now, and Silvia keeps telling him that this means something, that it all adds up.
“With the vegetables and artisanal cheeses?” Ibrahim asks, putting down his fork.
“Well, it might not be a gallery, but it’s a start. People will see your work.”
“I don’t know. They’re not done.”
“Ibrahim.”
“How would we even transport them?” he asks, “They’re huge, and none of them are framed.”
“I could help with that,” JB says. “And we could bungee them to the roof of Hartford’s car.”
“But it would have to be sunny,” Ibrahim says, hesitating. “It couldn’t rain.”
Eventually, somehow, he concedes.
THEY GET TO WORK after dinner, everyone teaming up for a common cause. The atmosphere is immediately lighter. Ibrahim dances circles around JB, who stands still as a flagpole, welding gear in hand and mask over his face.
“Je sais ce que je fais,” JB says. When he’s concentrating on anything else he can’t concentrate on English, and now he’s concentrating on welding an iron frame for one of Ibrahim’s canvases. JB’s beard is so long now that it inverts the proportions of his head.
“Holy,” Ben says, his camera right up next to JB’s iron.
“Careful,” says Dan, nodding to the camera, “the sparks.” Ibrahim sees them: flickers flying like miniature fireworks.
“Yeah, careful!” Ibrahim looks tortured. “The sparks! My painting!” All his muscles are stretched like elastic bands about to snap.
But Ben stays in his place, and JB explains that the sparks lose their heat quickly. “C’est bon. T’inquiète pas.”
Silvia sees Ibrahim flapping helplessly like a bird in a cage, splays her book on the floor, and goes to him. She wraps her arms around his waist, strapping his arms to his sides—she doesn’t know this is the manoeuvre to immobilize a maniac, she just does it out of instinct—and leans her head on his back, her ears at his shoulder level. “Come on, he knows what he’s doing,” she says, then repeats it, rubbing Ibrahim’s upper arms, nuzzling into the space between his shoulder blades.
Then: “Ow! Oh, oh, ouch!” Silvia pulls her hand close as though recoiling from a flame.
“What?” Ibrahim asks, and they all look at her.
She inspects her palm, trying to find something between the lines. Then she sees a bee on the floor, nearly dead, still fritzing with a dwindling buzz. “I think I got stung.”
“By a bee?” Ibrahim asks, incredulous.
“Of course by a bee,” she says, nodding at the dying insect on the ground. “I didn’t even notice it.” Silvia juts the heel of her hand into Ibrahim’s face to show him the spiky black stinger sticking out like a splinter. “Look.”
“You’ll be fine, babe,” Ibrahim says, and though he says it lovingly, he doesn’t do any more to console her, absorbed as he is in his own drama.
Nobody else is paying her any attention either.
“I’m gonna go find Cynthia,” she says, irritated with him, with everyone.
CYNTHIA IS SITTING at the kitchen table with a notebook, her back to Silvia. Silvia stops for a second before announcing herself, not wanting to interrupt, but Cynthia turns before Silvia can even say anything.
“Everything all right?” Cynthia asks.
“Yeah, fine. Well . . .” Nervously, Silvia puts her hand forth and follows her palm to Cynthia. “I got stung. By a bee.”
“Really?” Cynthia looks astonished. Bees sting only when the hive is in direct danger from an intruder, in order to protect their colony. Cynthia knows this; Silvia knows it too. “Does it hurt?”
“Not really.” Silvia lies. “I’m not allergic or anything.”
“In that case, I’ll remove the stinger and then we’ll get some ice on it.”
Cynthia gets the first-aid kit from underneath the sink and extracts from the red plastic box a long needle. She uses the needle to open the skin enough to prise out the stinger. A fine sheet of white cotton smudges away the blood that blossoms at the prick. Silvia is too riveted by the procedure to feel any pain.
“Look,” Cynthia says, holding up the slender specimen between her thumb and forefinger. It’s as long as a fingernail clipping. “I have some cream we could put on it if you like. Homeopathic, a traditional beekeeper’s trick.”
“Sure.”
Cynthia asks Silvia to accompany her to the honey house, and Silvia follows in her wake as if they’re bi
rds and she’s riding in the vortices of Cynthia’s wings. Out the front door, across the yard, down a gravel path she’s never trodden on.
Looking straight ahead, Cynthia speaks in a confiding tone. “Have you any sisters, Silvia?”
She hesitates before replying no.
“Me neither. I’ve never had a sister,” Cynthia says, as though this is a distinction from not having one currently. She swipes a bee away from her shoulder without touching it.
The women arrive at the door to the honey house. Plain wood, a simple lock, a slot below the handle like an extra-large mail flap. Cynthia slides her hand underneath her collar, along her breast, to fish something out. The key. Without removing the thin white string, newly visible, from around her neck, she lowers down to keyhole height so as to unlock the door. At the click, she replaces the key in its place under her shirt, over her heart. “Wait here a moment, will you?” She opens the door and goes inside.
Silvia waits, feet planted in a dancer’s third position on the gravel path. She doesn’t feel anything resembling irritation or even curiosity; she accepts the situation as readily as she accepts the weather. She feels comfortably aware of information that she is outside of—the honey room, this conversation—but it’s more like an iceberg than anything else. Though we only see the top of it, there’s always the full knowledge that the greatest expanse of ice is unseen.
“Here we are.” Cynthia is back already. “Sorry about that. We’d do this inside, but it’s just utter chaos in there. Can’t see a thing.”
“It’s fine.” Silvia looks up to the periwinkle sky.
Cynthia has a squidge of jelly on her finger and a small square of porous gauze draped over her wrist. “Give me your hand,” she says, holding hers out.
Silvia surrenders the wounded palm and watches as Cynthia performs her nurse’s work.
“There we go,” Cynthia says, patting the top of Silvia’s hand. She looks at the girl for a moment, then says, “I know how hard it must have been for you, Silvia, to leave your old life behind. It’s the kind of thing that stays with you, isn’t it? But I want you to know I think you’re adjusting brilliantly. You’re doing so well.” She pats Silvia on the arm maternally, then she touches her heart, feeling the key there: reassurance. “Thank you, Silvia.”
“Oh. Um, no problem. I mean, thank you.”
Dismissed, Silvia goes back along the gravel path, wondering what it is exactly that she has to be grateful for.
XLVII
“LAST NIGHT I dreamt I murdered everyone here. Hartford, Cynthia. You.”
“God.”
“I know.”
“Why did you do it? In your dream.”
“I don’t know.”
“Was it scary?”
“Yeah.”
“So were you alone at the end?”
“No.”
“Then you didn’t kill everyone?”
“No, I did, but I had a baby. I was pregnant when I did the murders and then I had a baby right after. But then I killed us both.”
XLVIII
IBRAHIM IS THRIVING on the farm. Now that he’s gotten used to the seclusion, now that he’s not expecting anything else, now that his time is only his. He works constantly and feels it all, everything, moving inside him, as if his blood is red paint.
He no longer misses the messy movement of the city or the detritus he used to take and make new. He’s found a replacement for this in the forest. Bark, moss, mushrooms; leaves, eggshells, twigs. And unlike cardboard, there are so many different kinds of bark, so many different colours of leaf.
When he can’t sleep, or if he’s working through the night, he goes out to sit in the yard to take his mind off things. The stars are like nothing he’s ever seen in the city. From the lawn, any time of night, he can see the smooth-speckled Milky Way clotting near the North Star. And Silvia taught him how to find Cassiopeia and the Pleiades, the seven sisters.
To really comprehend the fucked-up magic of the universe, someone once told him, you have to look up at the sky and think about the fact that you’re actually looking down.
It’s the middle of the night and he’s just gotten back to his studio from one of his night walks. Working, not insomnia. He’s covered in paint—even the skin underneath his clothes is blue- and yellow-freckled—and his studio is covered too: canvases are propped on all the walls, cardboard palettes lie half abandoned, paint crusted over, all of them unusable but undiscarded in the event that he runs out of any of the colours squirted on them, in which case he’ll revitalize the shellacked splatter with some paint thinner and scrape it off the soggy board.
He’s been up for twenty-nine hours.
He has been working constantly to finish (“finish”) enough paintings to show at the market. He’s been painting through the night, through the morning, had just one little power nap in the afternoon, and then started again in the evening. Even if he hadn’t actually done much to them—he knew Silvia, for example, wouldn’t notice any changes at all—he needed time to look at them, tweak them, daub on black and white for hints of light and shadow, and spend time considering them as full, complete. But at this rate he’ll have Yves Kleined his body before finishing any one of his paintings.
Spinning in a slow music-box circle at a fixed point in the middle of the room, Ibrahim lets his eyes fall and then stick on one of his smaller paintings, propped in the corner by the window. He stops spinning. Something is off. He stares at it, takes one step back.
Green. It needs emerald green. Where’s his tube of emerald green? He marches to the other end of the room and looks behind the canvases on the wall there. How can he not have any emerald green?
Before he can rage there’s a knock at the door. He doesn’t answer. He takes a thin brush from behind his ear.
Another knock.
“Hello?”
It’s Silvia’s voice. He doesn’t turn.
“Ibrahim? Please come to bed.”
“I’m working.”
“You’ve been working for two days straight.”
He turns. “And I only have one more day to finish all this.”
“Exactly, you have a full day. So come to bed. Please. You need sleep.” She’s leaning against the doorframe, wearing only his T-shirt. “I get it, I do—but you’re not helping anything by not sleeping.”
“But—”
She walks into the room, avoiding the spots of wet paint on the floor. Even though he doesn’t walk towards her, she hugs him, rests her head against him. “It’ll be fine. I promise.”
“You don’t get it. It’s not like—it’s the first time this is going to be outside my head, in the world, you know?”
“I do know, I do.”
“How would you know?”
Silence.
He shakes his head and shakes her off him. “Sorry, sorry, I didn’t mean that.” He runs his fingers through his hair and, having forgotten his body for too long, feels a loss when he finds it short. “I’m just—I guess I am tired. I’ll be right there, okay?”
She nods.
He says, “Really, right there,” and looks into her eyes as a promise.
She slinks back to bed. She doesn’t fall asleep, though: she listens to him continue working, grunting, breathing, moving. The moon is new so the sky is dark, and the room is less visible to her than she’s used to. She thinks about what Cynthia said about leaving her life behind and for the first time since arriving thinks about how she’d like to, maybe, find the local church. An anchor could be helpful.
XLIX
MARKET DAY IS BRIGHT, and Ibrahim and Silvia wake up at the exact same moment with the sun waterfalling through the window.
“Sleep well?” he asks, kissing her warm shoulder.
“More weird dreams.” She presses her ear into the pillow, not as quick to alertness as he. The events of her dreams have disappeared and left her with only an unsettling, transient feeling.
Ibrahim kicks off the blanket and goes, naked and
unusually sprightly even for him, to flip around a canvas that had been facing the wall. “Check it out!” he says, trying to bring Silvia along with his enthusiasm.
It’s the painting of her. “Is it finished?”
“Yeah, I’m really pleased with it.” He looks at it. “I’ll get them to add it to the stack to take to market.”
She feels extremely exposed. The painting is amazing, but it’s confusing. It’s her, naked; it’s him, honest; it’s them, a blend of them, together. Silvia wraps the comforter around her like a cape and moves until her face is in the warm yellow light of the sun. “I’m glad you’re happy,” she says.
“Get dressed!” Ibrahim says, wandering around the room looking for his favourite shirt. “Or we’ll be late!”
BREAKFAST IS SIMPLE, serve-yourself, as everyone is getting ready to go to the market. Hartford has already left with Ibrahim’s paintings, and Cynthia is preparing paperwork in the office. The silence that presses around them is easy as heat.
In the presence of others, amid the buzz of productivity, Ibrahim is suddenly much calmer. He’s making jokes and chatting, but she does notice that he doesn’t eat any of his cereal. As some of them finish up and start putting their dishes in the sink, Cynthia enters, hands in her pockets.
“Good morning, everyone.”
“Morning,” they mumble.
“Silvia,” She goes over to Silvia and sits in the empty seat next to her so she doesn’t have to speak so loudly. “I’m wondering if you would stay behind to help me. There’s a special harvest that needs to be done today, and I’d really appreciate your help.”
Silvia looks at Ibrahim. He stares back at her, with an “obviously not” look on his face. She wants to go with him, she wants to see the people who look at his paintings, she wants to see how much everyone loves them. But she also knows that Cynthia wouldn’t ask for her help if she didn’t need it.
“Can I think about it?” Silvia asks, looking at Ibrahim. “It’s just that I was looking forward to, uh, to the market.” To seeing a new place, to spending time with Ibrahim outside the purview of the farm, to seeing if a little bit of distance from this place will help settle her heart.
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