“Hopefully smarter,” Phoenix said, flaking apart the tiny silver fish with the tines of her fork. She lifted a bite to his lips. He looked at her like he was wondering if she’d given him the right answer and then opened his mouth, chewed slowly, and took the fork from her to dig into the tin for more.
After breakfast I went with them to the diner. We moved through the quiet streets, down the same road I had travelled many times to gather water. It was strange being there without the busy structure of the soup kitchen, an agenda, a list of things to do. Without Phoenix bossing me around. Instead, she moved slowly, like we were passing through the humid, sticky centre of a heat wave. Thomson and I matched her pace. At the restaurant, the plywood Zane had installed over the front window lay scattered like a giant deck of cards. Phoenix climbed through the opening while Thomson and I used the door. Inside, fragments of shattered dishes covered the checkerboard flooring. I felt the crush and slide under the soles of my shoes along with the sticky remains of the soup. Spinach and mushy carrot chunks were smeared over the walls and counter. Potato chunks stuccoed the walls.
“They weren’t hungry?” I said. Neither spoke. “What a waste,” I mumbled, thinking of all the people we’d fed with one pot of that soup.
In the back room, the grasshoppers were mashed into the carpet. A few beat helplessly against the glass walls of the terrarium and Phoenix fished them out. We followed Thomson through the open sliding door to the toppled hives. Phoenix opened her cupped hands to let the grasshoppers go and they sprang down onto the sofa bed mattress that had been dragged outside and burned. Hive frames were scattered, the honeycomb loosened. Thomson picked up a piece and looked into its empty octagons. Honey drooled down, the remainder of their winter stores. He caught some with his finger and sucked it off, staring down the back alley that led to the street. It was the first time I saw him like that, his face clenched in anger. I thought that I might cry and I kicked the corner of the mattress, watched the carbon scatter into black dust. I couldn’t understand this kind of destruction—personal and pointless, a violent reordering for no apparent reason. I wondered what Marvin would say, but I could already hear his argument in my head: something about people finally getting angry at stop-gap measures, ripping off bandages. As long as we have these voluntary supports, governments don’t have to face the truth of widespread poverty . . . Blah, blah, blah. To him it wouldn’t be personal. I shook my head to clear it and noticed Phoenix watching me. But when she spoke it was to Thomson.
“Maybe the bees got their revenge.”
“Bees don’t understand battle.”
Her voice was quiet: “Of course.”
“It’s still possible they found a new home,” he said. A few buzzed around our heads, but there were hardly any, only three or four, and we watched their stumbling flight and knew that they’d soon die.
I helped them pack. Phoenix found a used garbage bag and we filled it with their towels, sheets, and clothing. Thomson gathered torn books and found the Buddha candle, scarred but intact. I dug through a drawer in the kitchen, pulling out tiny plastic bags full of herbs and spices, while he talked to us about the Roman Empire, how modern scientists had defined its vastness by the amount of recovered objects. Clay vessels used for shipping olive oil and wine discovered on the ocean floor in heaps, so many that the archaeologists stopped bothering to bring them all up. Useful things, he said, and with anxiety I thought of my own lost items, left behind at Margo’s and my old apartment, never retrieved. If I’d known that they were meant to last me the rest of my life, I would have tried to go back. I would have collected the items I cared most about: my grandmother’s aluminum applesauce maker, the curtains with the embroidered blue birds, books from my childhood like The Secret Garden and Harry Potter. Stories I could have read to you.
It was difficult to leave. The restaurant seemed like an empty shell, its fragile inner life killed off. Phoenix moved with her face and body hardened and Thomson seemed to grow even older as we went out the front door and left the soup kitchen behind, another place joining the general destruction. As we walked south, Thomson peered up at attic windows with panes popped out. I knew what he was looking for: the swarm. I wasn’t sure if he wanted to talk, but I asked him anyway:
“Where did you learn about bees?”
“Long story.” He paused and I thought for a second he wasn’t going to tell me. “In Chiapas, in Mexico, I lived with a family named Luna. My friend Ignacio kept bees the way they do, a traditional way, in a log hive. That’s a method we couldn’t use back here, in the city, so I had to learn the Langstroth hives, the box hives that you know.” He waved his hand as if physically scattering the distraction. When he spoke again his voice was quieter. “Ignacio taught me about the bees and how they fit in. Ah Muzen Cab . . .”
“Ah Muzen,” said Phoenix, correcting his pronunciation.
“Ah Muzen Cab,” Thomson repeated. “The god of bees and honey. His image is carved into the temple in Tulum.”
His voice faded away. “Was that your father?” I asked Phoenix.
“Grandfather.”
Thomson reached for Phoenix’s hand, squeezed her fingers and held.
“When he died we buried part of the hive with him and then I married his daughter.”
Phoenix stared straight ahead as if alert for danger. Over the lake, the clouds had thickened. An antique armchair lay on its side, surrounded by loose stuffing that scudded down the sidewalk as the wind picked up. All around us lay this ruined wasteland that I was fitting myself so snugly inside. Be careful what you wish for, my mother used to say, and when I thought of her I felt an ache of pain and guilt layered on top of all the other sadness. My throat burned. I blinked back the heat in my eyes, trying to cool it but I couldn’t. My vision blurred and I stopped walking, staring down at the sidewalk, at the long grass working its way through the cracks. Phoenix looked back at me. Thomson turned around. Both of them were staring at me and I waited but they didn’t speak.
“What happens now?” I asked, struggling not to cry.
“What do you mean?” Phoenix said.
I gestured behind us. “Will we rebuild?”
It was what I was holding on to: a montage of clips, like in the movies, the four of us working together, making something meaningful. Scrubbing floors. Hammering walls into place. Gathering the bees. Dropping into bed at night, exhausted but content. A family. A solid footing that didn’t require impossible demands.
“We?” Phoenix said, but Thomson gripped her arm.
“Of course,” he said brightly, but by the stiffness in Phoenix’s face I could tell that it was probably over, that part of her life, the last viable option I thought I had. The heavy garbage bag pulled my right arm down. With my left hand I covered my face. The explosion reverberated again in my brain and I realized I couldn’t stop it, that it had already happened, was real. Everything in me ached to go back to the beginning. I wanted to have stayed with Phoenix and Thomson, to have made my amends with her, broken up with Marvin, returned to my old apartment, relived it all and done it right. Called my parents. Held on to my things. Not planted the bomb.
Phoenix pulled a scarf out of her coat pocket. I pressed it against my face. The fabric smelled sour, like milk gone off. I could tell that was all she was going to give me. No protection, advice, a tampon compassionately handed over in an emergency: the things women expect from each other. But Thomson was there and as I blubbered, drooled snot into Phoenix’s scarf, I told him how much I wanted a home.
“Everyone does,” said Thomson. His voice was tender, worn from the earlier effort of talking about hard things. He curved his hands around my upper arms. “We’ll make one together.”
I looked at Phoenix, but she was staring over my shoulder. I glanced back and saw people, three or four of them, walking through the intersection. A man dragging a pipe that clattered hollowly over the broken asphalt. I wondered what we looked like, what I did. I hadn’t seen my reflection since the d
ay before when I’d fussed with my hair in the bathroom of that basement place before Marvin picked me up for the bombing, as if it had been a date.
“Come on,” Phoenix said. We hurried to Marvin’s squat. There was no more time for tears.
By the time we got back it was raining. We hurried around the side of the row house, our feet appearing as watery reflections in the cellar windows. The kitchen was silent and cold and I wasn’t surprised that Marvin hadn’t returned. I was used to him disappearing for days. I dreaded what he might tell me when he returned so part of me wanted him to stay away.
For lunch we split the second can of sardines and a box of half-crushed crackers Phoenix had found. The food supplies we’d retrieved from the diner would keep us going for a couple days—half a large bag of red lentils, potatoes that needed their vines cut away, seven or eight carrots. After we ate, we went into the living room, all of us wondering what to do, I think. It reminded me of those boring summer days when I was a kid and my dad would bring my mom and me to his high-school buddy’s trailer on the manmade lake near our farm. How I rode my bike around in endless circles on the narrow, gritty roads, walked as far as I could into tepid water, dove down to clutch at the bottom. My mother, on a blanket, stroking the dry grass, reading through dark glasses.
Thomson took the chair while Phoenix sat on the edge of their mattress. Over her head I could see the Jump Ship map and my fingers itched to take it down, use it as a fire-starter. Neither of them had said anything about it and I kept waiting for them to notice, step closer, peer into the sparkle of the stars and innocently ask, “What’s this?”
We made up jobs that day. Thomson thought the walls of the house were insulated, that we could pull yellow or pink fibres loose and use them to blanket the windows on either side of the hearth. They weren’t doing any good. “They’re just holes in the walls, sucking out the fire’s heat.”
It was a project for us.
Upstairs, in a bedroom at the front of the house, Phoenix and I broke open a wall. Scarves tied over our mouths, we used the iron poker from the fireplace to smash apart the plaster while Thomson watched. We found a tangle of yellowed newspapers, and the three of us sat on the dusty floor reading articles about an expedition to Antarctica and severe job losses after the Wall Street crash. Thomson pulled the papers apart like he was plucking feathers from a bird, delicately and with great care. He pointed out advertisements for automobiles, silent movies, kit houses, and syrups claiming to cure a wide range of ailments.
“Everything and nothing has changed,” he said.
We never did find insulation.
Like a mom, Phoenix asked me to set the table across the room from the fireplace. I used a hodgepodge of dishes from Marvin’s cupboards and spoons we brought back from the diner. Thomson even put his Buddha candle into the centre. He’d had it for years. Dust was caked in the crease of its belly, the wick frayed on top. With ceremony, he lit it.
“Impermanence,” he said as we ate the soup Phoenix had made for supper. We watched the fat, smiling face melt away. With the change in the weather and the damage we’d seen at the diner, we all knew the bees were gone. That was their funeral, I think.
After we ate, Thomson stayed at the table reading. Phoenix and I went to the mattress. The three of us solid within the shifting orange light of the fire. Phoenix pulled items out of her backpack, stuffed full from the diner. She sat beside me, and when she moved, I felt the springs give, the press of her leg against mine. Smelled her: sweat and a faint treacle of perfume, a different kind, one I hadn’t noticed before. She ripped apart a torn flannel shirt of Thomson’s, blue with black stains on the cuffs, brown spots freckled across the front, to show me how to make pads for when my period came. I felt embarrassed with Thomson there, but he didn’t seem to care. He was deep inside another book, although he hadn’t finished Black Robe. We’d seen it outside the diner, the cover torn off, pages trampled into the mud. I resolved to find him another copy but never have. Instead, over the years, we’ve talked the story through, drawing it to various conclusions—some happy, others terribly tragic. It doesn’t help that it was based on historical fact, with an ending already written.
Phoenix pulled out a pair of partially rusted scissors and a tiny sewing kit in a red plastic box. She asked me when my period would come and I told her that I didn’t really know.
“Maybe another week,” I said as she cut into Thomson’s shirt.
She showed me how to sew the pieces together. My silver needle slipped through the fabric, weaving a line of bright red thread. We worked awhile in a deep throb of silence, until Phoenix looked over and reached for the fabric in my hands.
“Your stitches are too loose. Pull them out and make them smaller.” She picked at the threads with her short fingernails before handing back my work. “Didn’t your mother teach you to sew?”
“Not really.” But I’d learned other things: how to plant corn, cook, care for men.
“Where are your parents?” Phoenix asked.
I felt a stab of grief. Remembered the phone, how it rang and rang before I’d left my last message.
I must have looked sad, staring down at my sewing, plucking out the tiny strands, because Phoenix said, “Are they dead?”
“No,” I said, surprised. The fire was burning down. I got up and laid a split length of door trim across the flames. When I sat down, she asked: “Do you want your own children?”
“Someday.”
“Not with Marvin?”
I smiled. I couldn’t imagine Marvin as a father.
Phoenix kept sewing, her stitches quick and close. I adjusted my arm to avoid the lift and fall of her elbow. “I don’t hate him, you know.”
“I thought you hated me.”
She paused with her arms resting on her knees. “I wasn’t sure what you wanted.”
“And now you are?”
She shrugged. “You’re searching. You moved here, didn’t you?”
I thought she meant Marvin’s. I wasn’t sure how that showed anything positive.
“From that small town,” she clarified.
Leaving home hadn’t seemed like a choice. That night my father hadn’t let me sleep. Even as I gathered all the items from my purse—loose sticks of pink gum, crumpled receipts, a comb woven with my long hair—he’d kept at me, telling me how things were, would be, everything in the world I had to be afraid of. I still felt it, the sickness in my belly, the bruises left from his voice.
When he finally went to bed, I stayed up with my mother arguing about the life I wanted. Over and over she asked me what I thought I could have. Did I imagine something spectacular? That was the word she used, gesturing at the curtained window, spit flying from the sharp consonants.
“I guess,” I said to Phoenix.
“It takes courage to leave, to try something new.” Her eyes drifted over to Thomson, who was watching us, the book flat on his lap, pages bright like wings. He shook his head. “No.”
“There’s nothing left here,” Phoenix said.
“There are still people who need us.”
“The ones who drove us out?”
Thomson stood up. “We talked about this. We rest and then we start again.”
Phoenix lowered her hands to her lap. The needle caught the light and shone like a delicate thorn. “How do we start again? Where?”
“It’s what I want,” Thomson said, lifting his book. From where we were sitting, it seemed to cover his face. Phoenix jabbed at the flannel, steadily working. Her face had hardened. We stopped talking and I focused on my task, squinting at the binding thread. After a while, Thomson said, “It isn’t just us anymore. We aren’t alone.” His gaze shifted from Phoenix’s downturned face to mine. Our eyes met and moved away and soon we settled back into our tasks. It was complicated, but it was love, the tender green beginnings, pushing hard through all the dirt.
21 Island
Supper as usual, but not enough for all of us. Thomson too sick to ea
t and I opted not to, nauseous with hunger as I made a plate for you in the kitchen. The jars you had stolen were enough to last awhile, but what if it wasn’t you? All I knew was that you’d been eating the meals I set out, that this link had been built, a bridge between your wild self and me. I had decided I would maintain it, despite Marvin, my sense of betrayal. No matter what.
Fried bulrush root, the last hunk of the trout we’d had for lunch. Half a tomato, the seeds gone black. I dug them out. I covered it all with a cloth, the ancient plastic wrap used up, and left it on the porch like a stubborn message.
Marvin carried the food back inside. The round, red plate hovering between us. “Why are you doing this?”
“Do you need to understand?”
He pointed at the fish. “I caught that. I slave over that. My fingers bleed from the nets.”
Thomson coughed. We turned to the sound, braced, shifted back to face each other.
“You want to be like an animal. Snarling over what’s yours?”
“If it comes to that.”
I waited, but he didn’t say anything else. “We can’t pretend she doesn’t exist.”
“I’m not pretending,” he said. He swung his hand up to gesture at the emptied pantry. “She’s made herself very clear.”
“She’s a child,” I said slowly, loudly, as if talking to someone who was deaf or didn’t understand the language.
“We don’t have the luxury of feeding every lost waif. How much wood do you think we’ve got left on the island? How many fish in the bay?” He rifled violently through the gold discs piled on the counter. Two fell to the floor. “How many usable tops for canning?”
His face had tightened like the hatch of our root cellar. No light showing through. My stomach growled, but I laid my hand on its concavity. I turned away, walked into the dining room, and headed for the stairs to our bedroom. Marvin followed me.
“I don’t understand what you’re doing,” he shouted up at me. The present tense was startling, as if you were the thing that demanded analysis, not the choices I’d made early on with him. What about that? The story I was trying to tell.
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