“What?” she says, her voice sleepy.
“You have life inside you.”
“So what?”
“So what? What do you mean, so what?”
“Why does that mean you can’t draw me?”
“Because . . . because you’re this whole new mystery with a tiny human growing in your belly, and I don’t know what that means! I have to understand something, or feel like it’s possible to understand it, if I’m going to paint it.”
She turns onto her side, towards him.
“I’ve been thinking about something,” he continues. “I think Cynthia needs to know about the baby. I mean, she is going to know eventually. And she’ll probably be helpful, can help us plan for . . . I don’t know, I just want to make sure everything will be—”
“Ow, fuck.” It’s rare that Silvia curses, and she sounds ashamed but purposeful.
Ibrahim looks up. “What?”
“This fucking candle.” She squeezes the top of her right index finger until it swells with blood, then she pops the tip in her mouth.
“What—what happened?” He goes over to her; the wool blanket scratches his knees.
“Beeuuund,” she slurs, her tongue compressed beneath her finger.
“Show me,” he says, holding out both his hands.
She plucks her burned finger from her puckered lips and places it, already a little pruney from the hot dampness of her mouth, into his cupped palm.
“How did that happen?”
“I just—I just reached for it. I didn’t meant to touch it—I thought it was going to fall.” Her face is like a freshly painted doll’s and her voice is mournful.
“It’ll be okay,” he says. He puts her finger in his mouth.
They stay like that for a while, him sucking her finger, her naked and sullen and cross-legged.
“Do you want me to read to you?” he says, returning her finger with a kiss on its tip.
“I’m not an invalid, Ibrahim.” She wraps herself in the tartan.
Another candle goes out for no reason. From seventeen to fifteen, but still it’s bright.
“Do you ever think about the others?” he asks, zipping up his hoodie. “I sometimes wonder what they’re doing, what their normal lives look like.”
“No,” she says. She misses them but doesn’t think of them.
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing.” Everything.
“Do you want to go for a walk?” he asks, though he doesn’t want to go for a walk.
“No,” she says. Then: “Why are we staying?”
“Silvia. Come on.”
“Why are we even here? How did this happen?”
“Do you want me to answer that?”
“That’s why I asked it.”
“Well . . . why not?”
“That’s not an answer.”
“Why do we do anything? Why did we come? Why do we go places? Why do we fall in love? But we’ve got something here. Maybe that’s all it is—that we’re used to it or something—I don’t know, but I like it. I’m working well, I’m with you, I love you, and life here is free, Silvia, you can’t underestimate that. We don’t pay any bills. They buy our food, we don’t have any responsibilities—”
“But we do have responsibilities, don’t you see? To stay, that’s our responsibility. They don’t want us to leave.”
“Come here.” He scoops her up and takes her, so tiny, to cradle her in his lap, and weaves her long hair through his fingers. He strokes her forehead unconsciously, as though she is a child and he is a father already.
Her tears make a wet patch on the thigh of his corduroys. Her whole body shudders, obeying its own rhythm.
“Hey.” He tilts her face up towards his own. “Look at me, come back to me.” He’s staring at her intensely, trying to see through the veil that’s formed over her irises and find her again. He kisses her ear, salty, and then her cheek, shiny wet.
“Sorry,” she says, her voice a wave crashing onto the sand. “I’m sorry.”
Her body is pliable and it bends as he stands, holding her the way a husband carries his wife over the threshold, and takes her to the bed. “Sorry for what? Sorry for nothing! Everything’s fine!”
Her body is soft; she seems not just to welcome him but to need him to fill her up.
She tilts her head to the side and feels her tears slide down her cheek. The drawing Ibrahim was working on is propped against the wall, abandoned at the point of the burn but finished enough to be recognizable. She recognizes her shoulders; he caught the circular slope of them. She would never have thought about parts of her body like her forearms, but there they are, and in seeing them she realises that she does know them after all.
She closes her eyes when he enters her. Hard in soft.
She feels skin and sweat and fear and guilt and the throbbing pain in her fingertip. Will this affect the baby? Does that matter? The tears are running down her neck and puddling in the cavity between her collarbones.
She opens her eyes and meets her drawn self, unfinished and larger than life. She’s been split in two.
III
HARTFORD HAS MADE porridge for breakfast. The oats are overcooked and blurry, no longer the shape of oats. “Morning,” he says cheerfully as Ibrahim and Silvia walk into the kitchen. “Coffee?”
“Please,” they say at once. The whites of their eyes are pink and the skin around them puffy; they hardly slept.
There are dates, almonds, and raisins on the table. Milk and honey to add to the porridge. The garden has yielded almost all it will this year; the season for fresh fruit is over. Bananas and oranges—the imported, thick-skinned fruits—are all that’s left.
“Sleep well?” Cynthia asks.
“Fine,” Ibrahim says quickly, trying to cover any doubt.
“What happened?” Cynthia asks, noticing the white pad of dead flesh on Silvia’s right forefinger.
“A candle,” says Silvia.
“Oh no. Does it hurt?”
“A little, yeah.” She is using only her left hand to hold her mug, her spoon, her glass of orange juice. Everything takes longer.
“Wait a second.” Cynthia puts down her coffee and goes to the cupboard. She takes a pot of creamed honey, a roll of 3M medical tape, and some paper towel. “Give me your finger.” She holds out her hand expectantly. “Honey is good for burns.”
Silvia hands over her wounded finger and Cynthia presses the blistered pouch lightly, examining the severity of the burn with the tender precision of a mother. “Not as bad as it could be.” She opens the jar and takes a glob of the sponge-coloured honey on her finger, then smears it onto Silvia’s.
“Feel good?” she asks.
“Yeah, actually.”
“Good. Honey is cooling. And antiseptic.”
“Honey cures everything,” Ibrahim says, his half-laugh stilted, awkward.
When Cynthia has finished, she wraps a rectangle of paper towel around the burn and seals the whole thing off with tape.
“That’ll do you,” she says with finality.
“Thanks.” Silvia stares at her mummified finger as though it doesn’t belong to her.
They all eat quietly except for Ibrahim, whose life is always out loud. He’s even able to chew oats at a volume; his sips and swallows are equally amplified. Silvia feels like the opposite of him in every possible way.
“Looks like a nice day today,” Hartford says, gazing through the screen of the back door. It keeps swinging open and banging shut with the small breathing of the wind. “Any plans?”
Ibrahim and Silvia look at each other. Ibrahim wipes away his milk moustache with the heel of his palm. “We’re having a baby,” he says, then rushes on. “Well, Silvia’s having the baby, but yeah, we are going to, together, be—yeah. A baby.”
Silvia’s expression peels open. Her eyes are still shrunken from the night of crying. She stares at him, begging the question: Why didn’t you wait for me?
Hartford
lets his mouth hang open as this sinks in. “Congrats!” He swallows, then looks at Cynthia.
Everyone looks at Cynthia.
Her face has all the nuanced drama of a sunset. “What wonderful news!” she cries. “That is wonderful news.” She looks at Silvia’s belly and pauses in thought for a moment. She softens her voice, and as Hartford shakes Ibrahim’s hand, she asks Silvia, “How are you feeling?”
“Oh, fine. I’m good.”
“Is this what you want?”
Silvia nods. “Yes.” She looks at Ibrahim, who looks back at her. “It’s what we want.”
“Good.” Cynthia says. “So where will you have it?”
“We haven’t really discussed that yet,” Ibrahim responds for them.
“Well, you should stay here, of course,” Cynthia says. She reaches out to grip Silvia’s unbandaged hand and clasps it tightly, encouragingly. “My offer is still on the table. Of course. The air is good here,” she says. “Fresh. You must stay—the calm will be good for the baby. For your pregnancy. We have everything you need here. There’s a midwife in town and a doctor just outside Smooth Rock. If there’s any emergency there’s a big hospital in Timmins, but that surely won’t be necessary.”
“Oh,” is all Silvia can say.
“Where else would you go?” Cynthia asks, probably meaning only to be polite. Silvia thinks she looks like . . . like a young girl. Expectant, hopeful.
“You’ll save money staying here too,” Cynthia continues after a moment. “No rent, of course. And I could even hire you two to help Hartford and me with some work. We can get the Internet, start selling online—we’ve been planning that for a while, and you two would be so good at that, young technophiles . . .” Her eyes start to bulge with excitement.
As Cynthia continues, Silvia thinks in the back of her mind that it’s a little odd that Cynthia seems to have this all planned out.
Then Silvia remembers something she learned in a high school drama class, about how all characters are motivated by either love or power. When the students were preparing for their roles, they would have to decide which one motivated their character and explain why. It was subjective, of course, and a certain amount of crossover was expected, but to simplify and strengthen, and possibly even subvert, the students had to argue—and then exaggerate—just one.
Juliet: power.
Evita: love.
Joan of Arc: love.
Delilah: power.
Silvia wonders which one she’s driven by, and which drives Cynthia.
IV
SILVIA AND IBRAHIM go down to the pay phone to call their parents. It was his idea—he can’t wait to tell his father—but she didn’t disagree. She recognized it was necessary, though she didn’t tell him just how much she dreaded delivering this news.
Silvia goes first, and while she stands inside the phone booth, Ibrahim watches her from outside. He looks through the glass to try to assess her face for reactions. She holds the receiver to her ear, listens more than talks, and after around two minutes she hangs up.
“What did they say?” he asks, antsy, when she comes out.
“Nothing much.”
“Really? It looked like it got kind of . . . intense?”
Silvia shrugs. “I have a headache. Do you mind if I head back?”
“Oh.” He thought she’d want to wait for him, as he’d wanted to wait for her. “Sure,” he says, and kisses her cheek. “Get some rest.”
Ibrahim cannot understand how Silvia’s parents could be so removed. From the little he knows of them, or maybe just from his impression of religious parents in general, he’d have thought they’d be opinionated, at the very least.
For his part, his father is angry not to be more involved. “You should come home,” he says. “You should have the baby in the city. You should introduce me to your wife.”
“She’s not my wife, Abouya.”
“Where are you, anyway? You’re in the middle of nowhere! It’s not natural! So much isolation. What will the baby think?”
Despite these protestations, Ibrahim the Younger can hear the joy in Ibrahim the Elder’s voice. The Abdullah line will continue! From Ibrahim’s infancy, this has been his father’s ultimate wish.
“I have to tell you,” his father says, and when his voice becomes magnified and echoey, Ibrahim can tell that he is cupping the phone in case any of his other children are listening at his door (which of course they never would), “I’m glad for this news, to be quite honest, because I don’t know where else a progeny would come from. I think your brothers might be homosexuals, Ibrahim. And your sister is such a feminist.”
“Dad.”
“Hey!”
“Sorry, I mean Abouya.”
“So yes, I am glad you are here to continue the family tree. Inshallah, he will be a healthy boy.”
“Silvia wants a girl.”
“The Abdullahs have boys. Tell her. Did you tell her that?”
“I did.” Ibrahim looks through the glass wall of the phone booth, instinctively wanting to see Silvia, having forgotten that she’s not there.
“Siiiiiiiillllllllviiiiaaaaaaa.” Ibrahim the Elder stretches the name slowly. “Not Jewish, you said?”
“No.”
“Muslim?”
“Da—Abouya. Silvia? A Muslim Silvia?”
“Well, you never—”
“No.”
“So Christian?”
“Does it matter?”
“She’s Christian?”
“Her parents are.” Ibrahim the Younger sighs. “She’s figuring it out.”
“Figuring it out? Well, what is she in the meantime?”
“I don’t know—nothing. What are people who are nothing?”
“They are nothing.”
The line is silent.
Then Ibrahim the Elder forfeits. “What does she look like? Silvia.”
“Oh she’s beautiful, Abouya.” Ibrahim smiles, seeing Silvia in his mind. “Light brown hair—you can tell she was blond when she was little. It used to be short but it’s grown out now, curls a little round her shoulders. Good bones in her face. Pale eyes that always change colour.”
“You must be careful of that, Ibrahim. Changelings. Can be bad news.”
“A little nose, a good chin. She’s so small all over, but she’s really strong, actually. Light-footed, like a dancer.”
“She’s got the recessive genes, then. Fair, small. Good. The boy will be dark and strong like you.”
“And she’s smart, and curious, and open-minded. She loves things, she isn’t critical, but she’s thoughtful, you know? Reminds me a little bit of Ma sometimes in that way, actually.”
There is silence on the line. Ibrahim knows this particular silence.
Abouya finally sighs. “Is she an artist?”
“No. I mean, well, yes. She’s a writer.”
“Novels?”
“No, not exactly. She reads them. She writes . . . poems.”
“She’s a poet? Oh, Ibrahim.”
“She’s not really a poet. Not like that.”
His father’s sister is a poet, and she drowns everyone else in her sorrows. Ibrahim the Elder has an understandable prejudice.
“She doesn’t even really write poems, she just likes them. She hasn’t written much yet.”
“So she’s not an artist?”
“Well . . . I guess not really. Not at the moment.”
“Does she understand you, Ibrahim? You need someone who can. I was never able to.” His voice fills with flamboyant sorrow.
In his mind, Ibrahim sees the memory of Silvia rather than the way she is right now. He sees her as a naked angel on his tartan rug, as a girl who asks him questions; he sees her reading to him, her mouth making the shapes of the words as if she were a small child learning to speak. He holds this memory above the current murky shape of her. She will grow back into this person, he thinks. He trusts.
V
THIS IS HOW Silvia’s side of the conve
rsation went:
“Hello?”
“Mom?”
“Silvia! Oh my dear Lord, we were just talking about you! Honey, honey, it’s Silvia—”
“Wait, Mom?”
“Pick up the phone. Honey?”
“Actually—Mom, stop—can I just talk to you for a second? I have to—”
“Hello?”
“Hi, Dad.”
“Silvia! Where on earth have you been?”
“Did you get my letter?”
“Of course we got your letter. Silvia, what are you running away from? I don’t understand. Why won’t you come home?”
“I’m still here, Mom. On the honey farm. I would have told you guys if I’d left.”
“This is ridiculous—what’s going on? Do we need to send someone, the police?”
“It’s autumn now, you need to come home, life can’t—”
“It’s been almost six months, and—”
Silvia inhales. This kind of thing is like a Band-Aid, really: all about the ripping. “I’m pregnant.”
Silence.
More silence.
“And I’m having the baby.”
“You’re pregnant? But—”
“Who’s the father? I’ll kill him.”
“Sweetie, we’re just a little . . .” She can hear tears in her mother’s voice.
“What’s his name?”
“Ibrahim.”
“He’s a Muslim?”
“Dad, please.”
“I’ll kill him. Did he do this to you? Did he—”
“Dad. Stop it. We’re together, and we’re having this baby. Together.”
Her father’s gruff breathing comes through the line. Silvia knows he’s huffing so she’ll know exactly how he feels about this: Not Good. Not Good Enough for his littlest, preciousest, onliest daughter. “We’re going to come,” he says. “We’ll come to get you, won’t we, Miriam?”
“No! No, Dad—”
“Yes, honey,” her mother says, her voice wavering. “Yes, we’ll come to get you and bring you home. We can find a place for you to have the baby, nobody has to know, and God forgives all those who seek repentance. We’ll come get you and sort out everything.”
“No!”
“You’ve been abducted, Silvia.” Her father sounds calmer, having taken away his daughter’s responsibility in the situation and thereby also removing her guilt. “You’ve been brainwashed there, at this honey cult—it’s not your fault, you’re not in your right mind. We can sort this out and everything will be fine, I promise. We’ll get on a plane to Ontario tomorrow and come, we’re coming right now—”
The Honey Farm Page 19