Phoenix was in the bedroom. Nervously, I watched her, waiting for what she would say. Did she know? She stared down at the mattress, stained with a rust-coloured circle.
“I’m okay with that,” she said, and we tipped the bed on its edge and carried it awkwardly out of the apartment building. Phoenix in front and me trailing, shuffling up the street to Marvin’s squat, my latest home.
19 Island
When we arrived on the island, it was the first week of March. The ides, Thomson called it. Everything behind us, the whole long drive, had happened in the dark. I’d never been in a car so long or travelled so far. After we crossed the bridge, Marvin drove us along the island’s stony length, a limestone ridge rising in the middle like a spinal column, before we came to the flat lands where it is possible to farm. At the lighthouse, we found food in the kitchen cupboards. A can of beef ravioli that Marvin tapped open with a bent nail and a rock because the only opener was electric. Underneath the sounds of greedy eating and the constant crash of water lay a bedrock of silence. It felt like we were waiting for someone to tell us what to do and that someone turned out to be Mr. Bobiwash.
Without him, we would have either died or never stayed. We might have tried to leave, walked for a month with our fugitive faces somehow hidden, to get back to that dangerous city. A journey like my mother told me my great-great-great-grandmother made when she was separated from her husband in the 1800s. Travelling through winter forests still as tableaux, threading the edge of the Niagara River. How would we have done that? Needing to stay secret, with no food, no knowledge of what edible plants grew in the ground? Drifting, as if only air could keep us alive.
The morning after the funerals, it was white outside. A mist spread over the bay like icing. Thick enough that I knew Marvin would either be home soon or buried inside it, lost until it cleared. Thomson’s fever continued to burn so I changed him again. Tossed his shirt into the pile with the clothing from the night before. There was laundry to do, vegetables to be plucked off the damp ground, raspberries rolled off their cotton-white posts. My eyes burned from sleeplessness, but I went about my chores: setting a fire in the cookstove to boil water for tea and warm the oven. I had to make bread before weevils crept into the last of our flour.
When Thomson murmured into wakefulness, I brought him a bowl of Solomon’s seal root and oats from the southern farm fields. We had no milk. I spooned the mush into his mouth, but half the time he didn’t want it, pushed me away, stuck out his tongue so mushy gobs tumbled out. Scraping the food off the bony table of his chest, I plugged his nose so he had to open up and then stuck the spoon in. The steel clattered against his teeth. It was force-feeding and I hated it. When the knock came it was a relief, even though I knew who it would be.
Mr. Bobiwash stood on the porch, staring into the yard. Hands in his pockets, back turned. His hair, light brown, streaked with grey, pulled into a ponytail held with a rubber band. Mona used to cut it short but after she left he stopped bothering. He turned around and our eyes touched and bounced away like opposing magnets. The mist was cold on my face and hands. My lips felt stiff with anger. He looked over my shoulder and nodded toward the couch.
“How is he?”
“Not good. Not good at all.”
I crossed my arms against an urge to cry. Mr. Bobiwash held out a jam jar, the lid glinting like a gold ring, and I almost started to laugh. Thomson’s life traded for blueberry preserves, I thought, but he opened his fingers and showed me the clear glass. Pills inside, dark red like blood. That was how he’d brought us seeds, in the beginning. Tiny white flakes that became tomato plants. The larger, spotted beans.
“Thomson knows he’s old.” I didn’t know if that was an excuse for Shannon’s actions or the reason he was there, helping us.
“But what gives her the right—”
“It seems we’re living more by natural laws now.”
“So there are winners and losers.”
He said nothing. It reminded me of Marvin, years ago, telling me the bombing wasn’t personal. Mr. Bobiwash held out the jar, and as I reached for it I felt the wet mist on my bare arm. I stepped back from the door, gestured for him to come inside.
With Thomson in the middle of the room, unconscious on the couch, we talked around things. The weather, Marvin’s whereabouts. That’s how it’s done. I remembered my aunt, my father’s sister, dying of breast cancer, planning a trip until she passed away, her new hair a downy mess. How my mother helped with her denial, bringing her glossy catalogues for Alaskan cruises and bus tours in the Orient, right up to the end. Stifling a yawn, I went into the kitchen. The bread was rising on the stove. I pulled a drowned daddy longlegs out of the water bucket and filled a cup.
In the living room, I rattled Thomson’s pills into my palm—a red one that Mr. Bobiwash had brought and one of the others. I pushed them between Thomson’s lips one at a time while Mr. Bobiwash watched. He drank sloppily from the water I tipped into his mouth. As I mopped his chin with my sleeve, I asked more about Shannon.
“Is she taking the pills?”
“I don’t know.”
“They won’t do her any good.”
He shrugged. “She thinks they will.”
“I don’t know what will help her,” I said, and I told him about seeing her the night before smashing all the photos in their yard. I wanted to ask him where he’d been, to say that maybe if he was home more and helped her out—but I didn’t. He sat down in a chair across from Thomson. “How’s the baby?”
He paused. “It’s hard to tell.”
“The pills might hurt her,” I said, but he didn’t answer. We couldn’t look it up on the Internet or ask a pharmacist.
I saw the concern in his face. The skin around his mouth sagged; there were crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes. He looked a lot older than when we’d first arrived, fifteen or so years earlier, and I started to speak, to offer to ask Sarah for help, to bring her to Shannon, but his gaze shifted over to Thomson and he said, “Feverfew. Do you have some?”
You’d taken it: a full jar of mixed crumpled herbs, Thomson’s fever tea.
“No,” I said. “We hardly have anything. There’s hardly anything left.”
I thought to tell him about our stolen food, about you, but I didn’t want him heading out there, pushing through the damp, waxen world to haul you out of it. Not that I thought he’d hurt you. I wasn’t sure what he’d do. He’d set traps the other day, at the Sharmas’. Big enough for a child?
Together we looked at Thomson. His face the colour of cold ashes, hollow triangles sunk in his cheeks. He stirred and groaned something about diameter or Demeter.
“He wants us to tell the bees,” I told Mr. Bobiwash, but he didn’t respond. I wondered if he already knew, if he already understood. “He’s almost gone,” I said, and then I said a whole lot more. The whole story gurgled up in my mouth, thick like excess saliva. I told Mr. Bobiwash about Phoenix, about most of it, except you. I talked and talked and cried and swallowed some of the sticky mass down and said, “People died.” Mr. Bobiwash held up his hand. It hovered between us. Long fingers, a wide palm full of lines like the map of an estuary. Thomson had settled into a calm sleep, on his stomach, his knuckles resting on the floor. The story hung in the air like an eclipse. I felt his eyes on me, dark and intense like Phoenix’s, but when I glanced over I saw that he was actually watching Thomson: his pale cheeks, the flutter of his straw-coloured eyelashes. Nervously, for something to do, I went into the kitchen and built up the fire again, dunked a mug into the tea. The porcelain cup hit the aluminum pot and the clanging sound broke the stillness, startled me. Mr. Bobiwash drank it at the window, looking out at the last opaque heaviness in the air.
“Then you came here?”
“And you saved our lives,” I added. He glanced over and his face gave nothing away, but I realized there was nothing he could give. No forgiveness or condemnation. I was alone with my story. I dropped my eyes to the floor, to Thomson
’s hand jerking against the rough boards. Gently, I lifted his arm, turned his body over, heard his breath widen like a wind running from forest to roof, the fine whistle. Mr. Bobiwash watched me.
“You know my name’s Jack,” he said, and when I smiled, I felt the crust of the tears I’d shed crack open on my skin.
We went outside and as Jack stepped down into the yard, Marvin came out of the trees. I saw him look at Jack, then me, and his gait slowed and then sped up. He lifted his hand to show four large fish hanging off a stringer, their tails glistening.
“Lake trout,” Jack said. “They must have been deep.”
“The fog brought them up,” Marvin said. “Hold on.”
He went into the kitchen and wrapped one of the fish in the pencil-stained pages of a child’s math workbook. I stood on the porch, watching the yellow finches flutter bright as crayons around the trees. I felt awkward, uncertain what to say after my morning’s confession and I wished I’d said more, not kept you a secret but let it all out, opened the walls that were secured around Marvin and me. Jack took the fish and started to leave, and I opened my mouth to tell Marvin about the pills but he went away from me. The two men moved together down the lane. Halfway to the road, beside the wreck of the car, Marvin lifted his hand, laid it on Jack’s shoulder. They faced each other, Marvin’s mouth moving, and I knew he was talking about you.
“You told him?” I asked when Marvin came back into the house. I’d started making bread and my hands threw ingredients around: a yellow scattering of yeast like bee pollen, white explosions of flour on the floor.
“Be careful,” Marvin said.
“You didn’t even ask me!”
“You don’t own her. She’s taken half our food. It’s time to do something.”
“And I’m not the person for the job.”
“Apparently not.”
“Asshole.”
“You should get some sleep. You look like hell.” His own face was reddened by the wind; his hair pulled back into a greasy, greying ponytail. “I’ll watch him,” he said.
But I wasn’t ready to let it go.
“And what’s the plan? Give her to Shannon?” Marvin didn’t answer. He’d gone to the door. He was looking into the living room. My fingers were covered in flour and I held them out from my sides. “I’m sure she’ll do a great job.”
Thomson started coughing and then he choked, sucked in a long breath and held it, and we ran into the living room. His lips puckered as he tried to find air. Marvin pulled him into his arms and Thomson’s breath rushed out and he coughed hard, his mouth filling. “A cloth,” Marvin shouted and I grabbed a T-shirt from the heap on the ground. A smell of rot rose to my nose and I jerked my head away as the shirt filled with grey mucus, spots of black blood against the white smears of flour from my hands.
20 City
Marvin left in the morning. The mattress shifted as he got up, but I didn’t open my eyes until the front door closed with a quiet click. I knew where he was going—to find out what had happened at the travel agency, to learn what people were saying about us—and I was glad he’d gone. Talking to him would have brought it all back when I wanted to pretend that the night before had happened to someone else, that other people were responsible. Going to sleep I’d tried to still my mind by focusing on the hiss of wet wood as it burned in the hearth, the sturdy presence of Thomson and Phoenix on the other side of the gap between our beds, Marvin’s body held in the arc of my own. I knew I was cornered, but I was convincing myself that I could make that corner comfortable: wallpaper it, drag in a comfy chair, feed the fire, have friends over. Like I still had choices.
I pushed off the slippery sleeping bag Marvin and I had tugged between us the whole night and sat up. Only Thomson was there, sleeping on his side. The thin skin of his eyelids tinted yellow like old paper. His mouth had fallen open, and even from a few feet away I could smell the sourness of his breath. I stood up, pulled on my hoodie, and went outside.
It was cold. A crust of frost shone on the green grass growing around the billboard posts. In the outhouse, I hurried, rubbing my hands against my naked thighs, thinking about what I’d do that day. I hoped Phoenix had a plan, that she’d set me to work so I could move on autopilot, shut down my brain.
Thomson was still sleeping when I went back to the living room so I tried to be quiet as I built a fire. I made a teepee out of kindling, but the paper basket was empty. Walter had burned the rest of the pirate novel the last time I’d been there. He’d burned a lot, even slid delicate prints of red and white roses from the upstairs bedroom into the flames. They were pretty and I’d felt an urge to stop him, but we were all too far gone by then so I’d just watched the petals turn to black with the rest of them.
Near the front door, the map I’d found lay on the floor, fallen from Marvin’s jacket pocket. I wondered if he’d seen it as I tore a strip off the western edge, the area I’d grown up in. The ripping sound woke Thomson. He came to blinking, saw what I was doing, and told me to stop.
“I don’t care about shitty novels that never should have been written, but maps?”
It was too late. I’d tucked the single strip—a ribbon of small towns and cornfields—into the wooden tent and set it ablaze.
“Let me see.” I carried over the rest of the map and he spread it across the bumpy blankets. Lying on my stomach, I showed him the blank spot where I’d grown up, wishing I hadn’t burned it. His finger followed a road from the city, through the land’s nearly blank interior to arrive at an island, shaped like a leaf, floating on the edge of a huge bay.
“I know this place. In another life, I visited there.” He described the empty farmhouses of the original pioneers, how they stand in fields all over the island, falling down.
“With Phoenix?” I asked.
He nodded, still staring down at the map.
“We should go there,” I said. “All of us.” It was easy to imagine: the four of us moving into a place where we could plant a huge garden, buy chickens from a local farmer, eat eggs and fresh meat. I thought of the perfume of blooming apple trees, the crackle of cornstalks in the fall. Phoenix and I braiding garlic. Catching fish on sparkling lines. Babies. Beautiful things that seemed a long way away but possible.
Thomson straightened and his back cracked. “Do you know about the Crusaders?”
I shook my head.
“They left France and other places to fight in the Holy Land, but when the Muslims forced them out they couldn’t find their way back to their towns and villages, their families. They just wandered until they died because they had no way of knowing where they were.” He handed the map back to me, the whole unruly sheet. I struggled to fold it, creasing it incorrectly so I had to start again. Thomson turned away, went onto one knee like he was proposing. I tried to help him stand, but he pushed me back, one hand sweeping through the air.
Phoenix wasn’t in the kitchen. Thomson went outside, and as I followed him with my eyes I saw her, walking across the clearing with two bottles cradled in her arms. She wore a jean jacket, a bright pink hood casting her face in shadow. Behind her, a bank of grey clouds stood in the west like a landmass. The faces on the billboard stared down like gods as she passed underneath them.
“Good morning,” I said when she came in the door. She didn’t answer, only smiled, that same thin smile that was like a branch snapping back in the woods. I didn’t let the sting stop me. “How did you sleep?” She set the bottles on the counter and pushed the hood off her head with the heel of her hand. She didn’t have a scarf on and I saw that her hair was growing in, a slick of black against her skull like a seal’s skin. From outside I heard Thomson peeing off the porch.
“Not well,” she said. “But I don’t. You?”
I shrugged. “Okay.” She turned away, poured water into a pot, and put it on Marvin’s cookstove to boil. The burning gas roared and it was too loud for us to talk. I watched as she searched through Marvin’s things for teabags and cups. A final bl
ue flame puffed when she shut off the stove. Thomson came into the room, standing in sock feet, his belt undone, the buckle clattering as he moved forward to claim a cup of tea. Phoenix pushed his hand away. She was using a single teabag for all three cups and hadn’t finished.
“What happens today?” Thomson asked.
Phoenix turned to me. “Can you look for something to eat?”
I nodded and assessed the kitchen—a useless green refrigerator, the closed cupboards. In one, I found two cans of sardines and an old apple, its skin tightening into wrinkles. Marvin’s food. I wasn’t sure about eating it, but decided we had no choice. I didn’t say anything about the cellar preserves Margo and I had found, covered with dust in the stone-lined basement and dated. They were decades old. Walter had thrown a few jars into the street, making a mess of corn relish and crab apples, since washed away by the rain.
I set the items I’d found on the kitchen island. Phoenix sliced the withered apple into wedges and I opened one of the cans of sardines and started on the second but she told me to save it. “The hive back at work,” Thomson said while I looked for a fork.
“You know the worker bees are all female. The males impregnate the queen before they’re driven out of the hive. The queen lays her eggs and the nursery bees care for them.”
Phoenix bit an apple slice in half. She watched Thomson without reaction, her dark eyes almost cold. She already knew about the bees. I stood to the side, listening, somehow hidden. She slid the sardines over to him, but he ignored them. He pulled out a handkerchief and wiped his lips. I saw the weakness in him and recalled that he’d been coughing in the night, a sound that had drifted into my dreams, became the strange call of a giant bird.
“It takes a mass of thousands to build the hive society and one or two humans to destroy it,” Thomson said, and his eyes found mine. I dropped my gaze, uncomfortable. “But then they begin again.”
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