When she’s gone, he continues to stare at the painting. He’s captured something of her on his canvas, definitely. Not a strict likeness, but an attitude. He’s got her movement—formal and balletic—and a certain feeling that comes off her. It’s hard to describe the feeling. There’s that quote he often thinks of—though he can’t remember who said it—about how portraiture is always a study of the artist rather than the subject, and while he doesn’t agree, he does think it true that it’s all a question of perspective.
The painting is tense and mysterious, but its energy is self-contained. It’s complete. Her black body, hardly even a body while the same time nothing but a body, on a grey-white background. Her wings, so subtle you wouldn’t ever call them that. It’s funny, he thinks; he wonders why both Cynthia and Silvia had wings when he painted them. Cynthia’s eyes—two black dots—are the same size as the brushstroke, as the red dot on her head. All three have the same weight and create a perfect constellation, an equilateral triangle that anchors the painting right in the middle. He tilts his head.
Nice. He likes it best when things like this happen unplanned. Lightness gasps in his chest, clear and shocking as if a light bulb had popped.
XVII
RAIN IS PUMMELING the dried-up land, beating a rhythm into every day. Silvia hasn’t been outside since it started. Since she left the last time. Every day means the same thing to her, rain or no rain. During the drought everything was one thing, and now it is all another thing, but maybe those things are actually the same thing in that neither affects her at all.
She’s gotten better at being comfortable in nothingness. She used to be propelled by hunger, a fast-moving fluidity that made adapting to change easy, and an appetite for the future that allowed her to put out of her mind any complications of the past. She was never a nostalgic person, but she wasn’t exactly goal-oriented either. She also didn’t “live for the moment” in a learned, New Age way. So which domain did she occupy? She thinks that it must have been a future-present sort of space, the place just in front of her nose where the carrot usually dangles from its stick—future as five-minutes-from-now.
But now she dwells in oblivion. In the space between her ears, behind her eyes; in the unimaginable, unlit vortex of her own brain.
She’s standing in the hallway outside her room, looking out the window from which she, months ago, saved the bee. The view is the same but different. Same hills, same trees, but now everything looks dead. Brown grass, no leaves. She can feel her heart beating and looks down, her chest thin as the skin of a drum, as her black T-shirt lifts and sinks with the rhythm. If her heart stopped beating, would she see it? How much time would elapse between her being aware of its ending and the moment of her death? Is the heart more like a motor or more like a seed? She stops looking at her shirt and looks outside again, through the wall of water warping the landscape behind it. It’s March—is it March? She thinks so—and she knows that life is lying latent in this land, buds dormant in the branches and roots and seeds lying in wait under the surface of the earth, but for now it’s all invisible. It’s hard to keep what’s out of sight still in one’s mind. This is where her faith used to come in.
She remembers her realisation about the tree. A tree used to be a tree, but then suddenly a tree could be anything. But now, this minute, the trees she sees are all just nothing. Dormant, invisible, irrelevant. Their treeness doesn’t matter; it doesn’t change anything.
She looks down to make sure her heart is still beating, her shirt is still moving. It is; they both are.
She can hear Ibrahim working in the bedroom that has become his studio. She steps towards his door, four paces down the hall, and looks inside.
“Hey.” He turns around when he sees her shadow cast across his canvas.
“You’re still working?”
“Yeah, it’s the one of Cynthia. Want to come see?” He steps aside; she can tell he’s eager to see her. She hasn’t seen him, properly seen him, in a few days. She doesn’t know why, really, though she assumes he’s been busy with this portrait. She doesn’t know what to say to him.
She stays leaning against the doorframe. The canvas he’s working on is the same size as the first portrait he did of her, but this one gives a different impression—it feels bigger. It’s darker and brighter at the same time, more abstract but also providing a more specific feeling of the subject. Maybe that’s just because she can recognize Cynthia better than she can recognize herself.
“It looks good,” Silvia says.
“What’re you up to?” He comes nearer, a fistful of paintbrushes in his right hand.
“Nothing.”
“You doing okay?” He takes her hand in his.
“Yeah.”
“Do you need anything? Want to stay and keep me company?” He knows Cynthia told him to give Silvia some space right now, and he’s trying, but he wants to make sure she knows that he’s there for her if she wants him.
“No, I’m tired. I think I’ll just go to bed.” She wishes he would come with her, but she can’t bring herself to ask. She feels she has no right to anything.
“Oh.” He lets go of her hand and pushes his hair behind his ears. “Well, sleep well, then.”
She goes into her room, their room, and lies on the bed, on top of the blanket. The rain is even louder here than in the corridor, something to do with the lack of insulation where the roof slopes; it’s so loud it almost drowns out her thoughts. Her eyes are open, but she’s looking at nothing, at the space in front of her nose, remembering the time when her mother let her stay home from school even when she wasn’t particularly sick. It was early spring, probably around March too, and Silvia was in grade three. The day was this same deep dark grey and Silvia had woken to the sound of rain, falling just as hard as it is now. Little Silvia lay in bed feeling not quite right and realised after a few minutes of lying there that the feeling was sadness. She wasn’t used to it. It felt slippery, as though it could uproot her. For a few seconds the feeling would go away but then it would come crashing back, this time stronger, just like the waves by their cottage in LaHave, down the South Shore. But even then Silvia knew that sadness wasn’t grounds enough to miss school, and she also knew that it was something she would never be able to explain properly to her mom. Maybe to anyone.
When it was nearly time to catch the school bus, Silvia called her mom up to her room and, from her turtled position under the blankets, told her in a rushing voice that she’d hardly slept, that her head hurt, that she felt like she was going to throw up.
Her mom looked at her deeply for a long moment. Silvia was sure she could see right through the weak excuses, but she just said, “Okay.” She let Silvia watch Disney movies on repeat all day and made her plain toast and chicken soup. It made Silvia feel better, but more importantly, it didn’t make her feel worse.
During the end of Beauty and the Beast, her mother came and sat on the sofa with a blue plastic bucket she normally used for hand-washing her pantyhose. “How are you feeling, honey?” she asked.
“Okay,” little Silvia said, pulling away reluctantly as the candelabra transforms into a man. “Better.”
“I brought this in case you need to throw up,” her mom said, patting Silvia on the back.
Silvia looked at her and then at the bucket and was aware of the sensation of being rubbed between her shoulder blades, being cared for so tenderly. She took the bucket into her lap, and as her mom’s hands continued to pat a soft rhythm through her pyjama top, Silvia, who had been feeling perfectly fine physically up to this point, vomited neatly into the blue bucket.
“There’s a good girl,” her mother said, and took the bucket away.
Silvia fell asleep before the end of the movie, knowing very well how it would end. And by the next day the feeling had passed.
XVIII
THE RAIN STOPS after seven days and then the skies are a perfect blue, as though nothing had ever troubled them. Tentatively, Silvia goes out to the gard
en, where repercussive rain filters through the branches, making cymbals of the leaves, and the earth soaks up water like someone thirsty for love.
The earth heals itself as the body does, and both refuse to give up their secrets.
XIX
AFTER WHAT FELT like an infinite, impossible winter, spring manages to find its way through, and with all the usual proclamations of light and leaf, too: flowers are pulsing within their buds, tight like fists; bees are buzzing again, searching for life outside their tarpapered hives. The fuzz of new bloom is like champagne froth in the trees. Everything is just on the edge of bursting.
First spring morning: a tentative sun, warm on her eyelids. Silvia is in bed, head where her feet normally are so as to be closer to the window, open for the first time since the cold snap in September. A warm, gentle wind brings in the smell of everything, waxy and new. Fresh shoots through dark soil are growing so quickly she feels she can hear them: a subtle buzz. There is an ease to warmth that she had forgotten. Part of the struggle of living has gone.
“Silvia?” There’s a tap on her door, and Cynthia opens it expectantly. “Are you sleeping?”
“No.” She props herself up on her elbows.
“Wonderful! I wondered if you wanted to come for a walk.”
“Oh.” Silvia looks at her feet, as if to see whether they’re up to the task of leaving the bed—something they haven’t done much for a few days. “Okay, sure.”
“Wonderful.”
Cynthia carefully guides Silvia down the steps, through the kitchen, and out the back door to the garden. Silvia’s belly is enormous; she has to go slowly. She wonders where Ibrahim is, knowing that wherever he is, he’s probably great. Better than great—perfect. She shouldn’t begrudge him this. She tries to bend her envy into hope.
Outside, the sky too is perfect, the sun is perfect, the vegetable patch is perfect in its own prelife way. There is no breeze; the leaves are unruffled. Everything is perfect, and outside her. Silvia almost feels like she’s looking at a painting in a museum—she can’t be a part of its perfection. Even Ibrahim, perfect in his own way, is removed from her.
She puts her face to the sun, feeling its heat with surprise, and revels in the guilty pleasure of accepting, without acknowledging, the miracle of spring.
As the women walk towards the back of the lot, Cynthia still supporting Silvia’s unbalanced weight, the number of bees quickly multiplies. Silvia can feel them coming before she sees them. Two, then thirty; then, the next minute, there are hundreds. They’re walking towards a moving Milky Way of honeybees, each one bumbling, darting, as if the women don’t even exist.
“Don’t worry,” Cynthia says, “they won’t come near.” She waves her arm and the bees part to let the women pass.
“I know. They do that for me too.” Silvia stretches out an arm and a straight line of bees comes towards her. “It feels funny,” she says.
“Funny how?”
“Not the feeling of them on my skin, but when they come. I don’t know how to describe it. Like how I can feel it beforehand.”
Cynthia nods. She watches Silvia’s face as the bees land on her arm and march slowly towards her elbow. Cynthia looks as though she has an unscratchable itch.
“Is it like this for everyone?” Silvia asks, curious.
“Not at all. It takes a particular kind of person.”
Without thinking on it further, Silvia moves the line of bees down from her elbow and into her palm, along her middle finger, and back into the air. A smile crosses her lips unconsciously as she feels them depart, as though there’s still a string inside her that connects her nerves to theirs.
“You did that very well,” said Cynthia. “Your confidence is growing.”
Silvia looks at Cynthia and smiles, proud.
XX
THE NEXT MORNING Silvia wakes up nauseous and goes immediately to the bathroom, where she spends the rest of the day lying, clothed, in the empty tub. These days her body seems to be responding to its own tidal patterns; one moment the water is down, and she’s happily walking in the shallows, but the next it’s so high she can hardly keep her head above the surface. She doesn’t know what she wants. Even if she did know, she wouldn’t have a choice, a chance to change any of this. She watches a light flicker on the wall and tries to find where the reflection is coming from. The light is the slippery, luminous thing that bounces off water or metal, but she can’t see any of either.
“Hey.” Ibrahim comes in, knocking after the fact. “The painting of Cynthia is finished and hung. Want to come see?”
“Oh.” She opens her eyes, not realising until that moment that they’d been closed. “Sure.”
Silvia’s skin is no longer dewy, as Ibrahim once thought. It’s dulled, gone ruddy in a rundown, adult way. Thin frown lines are starting to make their mark on her forehead, tracing all her worries. And from the face down, her body has dramatically changed too—and not just her belly. Her ankles have disappeared into the straight stretch of calf; her thighs are thicker, heavier; her breasts look like they’re about to burst, her nipples are dark and long, thick as a pinkie finger; and her hair, which used to be so soft and downy, has gone dark and wiry. He still loves her, of course, but he does hope her body will return to the way it once was.
He comes over to help her out of the tub. “You good there?”
She nods, squinting a little with the pressure of being vertical.
He guides her slowly into the library, where Silvia steps back with a start when she sees the portrait of Cynthia. It looks so similar to her own, but at the same time completely different. There’s something about it that follows her.
“How many paintings have you made since we’ve been here?” she asks. “Forty, fifty?”
“I don’t know—about that I guess. There are a few that aren’t quite finished, though . . .”
She wonders if he feels worried, if he ever has doubts—if not about God, then about life, about his art, about this baby, about her. He must. But she doesn’t know how to ask about this. She’s not even sure she wants to know. She’s learning—or trying to learn—the value of unknowability, which is different from having faith.
“Forty paintings,” she says quietly. “And I’ve done nothing.”
“That’s not true, Silvia—you’ve done so much.” He rubs her belly.
She lifts his hand off her. “Incubating another life doesn’t count. Different sort of product.” She goes to look at the painting up close, seeing the life within the paint. It’s mostly black and white but somehow feels full of colour. It doesn’t look very much like Cynthia, but she can tell, she can feel, that it is Cynthia. “It’s beautiful, Ibrahim, really. You’re so talented. I’m so happy for you.” Pride and jealousy aren’t mutually exclusive.
“Thanks,” Ibrahim said. “I’m just glad Cynthia likes it.”
As though her name has summoned her, Cynthia walks into the library with the kind of confidence that can only come from ownership and goes straight to Silvia. “How are you, sweetheart?”
“Fine.”
Cynthia places her palm on Silvia’s watermelon belly. “Is she kicking?”
“Not now.”
Cynthia moves her hand over the expanse of Silvia’s stomach like a diviner, or a cartographer. With intention. She goes slowly, her palm flat but her fingertips lifting. Silvia wonders what she’s looking for.
“This is going to be so wonderful.” Cynthia sighs, looking into an abstract middle distance between her painted eyes.
XXI
IBRAHIM IS SITTING on the back step outside the kitchen, looking out over the backyard. It’s the beginning of May, nearly a year to the day since everyone arrived, and he’s noticing the thin clouds that have formed a low-hanging ceiling over the world. The bright grey quality of light has a dizzying effect; he feels nauseous, but that might just be in sympathy with Silvia, whose morning sickness has never gone away.
Cynthia invited him to come investigate the hiv
es for the first time that morning, opening them up after they’d been sealed all winter. Less than half the bees died this year, so on paper they did better than last, but last season she’d bought twice as many hives, she explained, so there had actually been a greater quantity of death. She’ll have to hope to catch more swarms this spring, but you can’t trap queens, “of course, since bees only swarm when queenless—a queen must be either bred or bought,” she tells Ibrahim.
He hears Hartford walk in through the front door, back from doing the weekly shopping in Smooth Rock.
“Cynthia?” Hartford calls.
Ibrahim hears her footsteps. He then realises that they don’t see him, though he isn’t trying to hide. Still, he doesn’t make his presence known. He feels like a little kid hiding from his parents.
“You got the folic acid?” she asks. “And the lavender oil?”
“Yeah,” he says, “and I saw Meg in town. She said she could come by any time this week just to check everything’s going okay.”
“Right, thank you.”
“She said to just give her a call.”
“Yes, thank you, Hartford.”
Ibrahim can hear Cynthia walk across the kitchen, creak open a cupboard, plunk a glass on the counter, open the fridge, and—this part is conjecture, but his mental image is clear from memory—pour milk into the glass.
“I’ll take care of it.” The fridge shuts.
Then a ruffling of newspaper.
“There’s going to be a total solar eclipse tomorrow,” says Hartford. “First time in nearly seventy years. The weather conditions are going to be perfect, apparently.”
Silence. Footsteps. A chair pulled out from the table; someone taking a seat.
“Are you going to be all right, Cynthia?”
Quietly: “What are you talking about?”
“When she leaves. When Silvia leaves, with the baby. After Hilary, I just . . .” He trails off.
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