“Wait,” I said as I looked back and saw the trail of it, fat, red spots marking our escape. “Put her down.” My voice shrill, scared, but he ignored me and we moved under the overpass, across the clearing, until we reached the chain-link fence. Smoke trickled out of the barrel, but the fire had gone out.
Beside the overturned steel sink, Marvin laid her on the ground.
“Phoenix,” I said. Over and over.
As I’d seen on TV, I asked her questions: how many fingers am I holding up, do you know where you are, what’s your name, what’s your real name, where were you born. She didn’t answer them. She struggled to sit up, pulling at the clothing around her waist, her fingers fumbling on the button of her jeans. Marvin laid his hand on her chest to push her down. I could tell she wanted to look, to see what had happened, so I tugged up on her long black sweater. Marvin fished his cigarette tin out of his pocket and tried to light a match. His hands were shaking. The third one took and we saw. We saw.
A shard of glass stuck through her pants, into her upper thigh. Not large, maybe the size of a pencil worn to a usable stub. Marvin reached for it.
“Don’t,” I said, lifting one hand to stop him but I couldn’t. Like a stinger, it came out easily. Then, black like oil, the widest tide of blood.
I bent over her, held on, my arms around her shoulders. She pushed me back and then lifted her hand to awkwardly touch my face. There was blood over everything so her finger slipped into my wet nostril and we actually giggled before I spoke, sobbing, saying only her name and I love you. I love you. I love you. The words in my mouth like a last hard sliver of candy, about to disappear.
“Oh, Jesus Christ,” Thomson said as Marvin and I carried her inside. My hand was under the hem of her sweater, sliding on the blood-wet skin of her waist. We laid her on the mattress. Thomson stared at her, covered his face with his hands, lowered them. Turned away, turned back, as reality grabbed hold.
I didn’t notice when Marvin left but some time later, an hour, maybe less, maybe more, he blasted through the front door. Our heads swivelled his way. I stifled a laugh. Hysterical.
He went into the kitchen and came back carrying his backpack. “Sandy,” he said. “Sandy.” His eyes wouldn’t look at Phoenix. Thomson stared at him. “We have to go.”
Phoenix was laid out, her hands layered on her belly, set there by Thomson. He sat beside her, his palm cupping her fingers’ hard bones.
“No,” he said.
“Sandy,” Marvin said. “Get up.”
I didn’t move. I sat cross-legged at the end of the other mattress, my gaze glued to Phoenix, as if magnetized. Thomson kept talking to her, telling her good things, guiding her spirit to whatever came next, when all I could do was cry and cry.
“Thomson,” Marvin said. “Thomson.”
Thomson stopped talking. After a moment, he looked at Marvin.
“Do you want this for Sandy? Or for me? As soon as Walter’s e-mail goes . . .”
“I don’t care what happens to you,” Thomson said.
Marvin flinched. A brief hardening of his face. He gestured to me. “Well, what about her?”
Thomson glanced at me. My face a blotchy mess, eyes blunted from what I’d seen. I made a noise in my throat that was supposed to be words but didn’t sound like anything.
“We have to go,” Marvin said, rattling the map in his hand.
I gathered some things—Phoenix’s scarves, her lavender oil, a few books. All shoved in Marvin’s backpack. We took the wind-up flashlight, blankets, and what food we could find: plastic bags of cumin and cayenne stolen from the restaurants where Phoenix had once worked, lentils, dented cans of ham. Thomson wanted to bring Phoenix’s body with us, but Marvin said no. Before we left, he set fire to the patchwork on the walls, the edge of the Jump Ship map, but it didn’t take, kept extinguishing into acrid smoke. In the end we left her there, like something too expensive to keep.
We used money from Marvin’s mother to fill the gas tank of the stolen car. For hours, we drove north. On that journey, Marvin hardened up, cast in his seat like bronze.
Thomson sat up front, bent forward, the seat belt wrapped twice around his still-bloodied hand. From behind, I laid my hands on his shoulders, rested the side of my face on the seat back, held in my own sorrow. The three of us were silent for a long, long time.
After a while, we reached a place of absolute darkness. The only light came from the car, pointing into a tunnel of snow.
Thomson navigated, following the flashlight’s yellow circle on the map I’d taken from Walter’s old apartment. He gave Marvin instructions. At the turn-off to the island, Thomson pointed left and Marvin swung onto the narrow street and the car slid over a patch of ice. He pumped the brakes until we came to a stop, sideways on the empty road.
“Are you sure about this?” he asked, and all Thomson said was “Go.”
We wove through strange white mountains lit by the first pink of dawn. The forest on either side so thick it looked like walls. The car scraped over frost heaves and lurched through potholes and any town we went through seemed empty. Thomson turned to check on me in the back seat. I was holding on to Phoenix’s red headscarf, the one printed with skulls and cobwebs, wet with tears I couldn’t remember crying. He reached back and squeezed my arm with his thin fingers, a grip so hard it hurt.
We drove for hours more. Until we reached the other end of the island, until we found the lighthouse, until we couldn’t go any farther unless we dropped off the limestone cliff, into the deep, cold lake. The water was silver in the daylight, shiny as a skyscraper. I had never seen such a beautiful place. So beautiful that even in the midst of all that pain, I felt it take my breath away and stir my shattered heart.
27 Island
That is the story, laid bare to you, Melissa. My own. Who I was and who I am. You, I have realized, never existed except as a shallow trough in the earth, a footprint that started this journey. I kicked it in. Obliterated the toe-marks, the heel. A burial.
Of course, there was grief in that for me. A letting-go. A new understanding of aloneness. But then Marvin called out for me, at the lighthouse, that night. He gestured with his bloody fingers to Samuel’s hand shakily manning the flashlight. I left the girl and the baby and steadied the trembling beam by wrapping my hand around the boy’s wrist, holding it still.
“Don’t look,” I whispered to him while Marvin pierced his father’s skin with the curved needle, running the black thread through.
Melissa was the girl I thought I was feeding. The phantom.
But the one who exists, who I saw in the cave, flesh and fiery blood, gave me her name that night, in the lighthouse.
“I’m Abby.”
She watched. Standing in the doorway, awkwardly moving her baby sister from one skinny hip to the other. Her gaze followed Marvin’s fingers and occasionally jumped up to her father’s face. Jack bit down on a towel. The fingers of his right hand dug into the dirt.
Eric and Graham drifted off to the steep edge of the shore. They stared at the black nothing of the lake, stretching out into the rest of a world that they would probably never see. Abby had seen some of it. I wondered what had happened to her after she’d left the island, a sleeping, sick toddler carried by her mother. Where had she gone? I thought of her in that cave, the dead woman decaying in the heat, and I realized that must have been Mona. Mona, my old friend. Abby’s mom. “Hold it steady,” Marvin said, and all eyes looked at me as I blinked back tears.
We stayed at the lighthouse that night. Jack couldn’t walk so Marvin and the boys and I carried him inside. We laid him on the kitchen floor, and Marvin gave him one of the precious penicillin pills from the first aid kit. Abby pulled a blanket off the bed upstairs and folded a sweater for him to use as a pillow. She lay there with him while the boys watched her. As the night deepened, Eric and Graham gathered closer to their stranger sister. By dawn they were sleeping in a clump, like kittens.
I didn’t sleep. I stayed o
utside with Shannon. She had refused to go in. Not with any words but only by lying there, like a slab of soundless rock, millions of years old. In the yard, I watched the bats swoop around us. When it got late and they slid into their hollows, I looked at the reflections of stars in the waves. My mind kept turning to you and then remembering and then seeing the emptiness that was there. I thought of Thomson and Phoenix. I thought of the travel agent and wondered who she’d left behind, what lives I’d played my part in damaging. More tears dropped on the knot of my hands. As if on a widow’s walk, I stared out at the water although I felt I wasn’t searching anymore.
Dawn came, deep streaks of red in the east. The eight of us started walking home. Shannon trailed behind like a squid’s defensive ink. The boys and Abby closed around Jack. Marvin carried the gun. At the laneway to their farm we all stopped, except for Shannon, who rushed by and went into their house. The baby sputtered in Eric’s arms.
“Abby shouldn’t be here,” said Jack.
“Should any of you?” Marvin asked.
Jack shrugged. “We’ll see.”
“Abby can stay with us,” I said. Marvin looked at the ground. Another mouth would take Thomson’s place and for now it would be all right.
“Wash that out,” Marvin said, pointing at Jack’s leg, the skin exposed under the large rip in his pants. Jack nodded. It was him who’d taught us: use water boiled with a small bit of cedar bark as antiseptic.
Abby’s face looked even paler in the morning light. Stricken white. Dark circles like blotches of soot under her eyes. She stared at the distant door that Shannon had slammed shut. Jack put his arm around her and whispered into her ear. Graham kissed her on the cheek. The four of them started up the laneway, and I stood by her but she didn’t acknowledge me. When my hand cupped her shoulder, she turned like a startled cat. I expected her to bolt, run off into the woods again, but she didn’t. Fear vibrated through her body so I started speaking to her, telling her everything would be all right.
“You’ll see your father every day,” I said, but she still cried as we set off to walk the couple miles to our house. I didn’t know what to do. I was not her mother. I had never been a mother. After a while, I gave up trying to soothe with words and just laid my hand on her back, between her shoulder blades, and kept it there as we walked. I felt the movement of her small body, the resistance, and the stubborn pushing forward, and felt proud of her. All she’d been through and still more to come. Really, we were strangers. She didn’t know us: we were only people she stole from who had then tried to keep her away.
On our way up the laneway, I felt her start to pull away again. I took her hand, but she tugged against me, leaning toward the woods. She recognized the garden, I saw it in her face. Those tiny footprints, I remembered and looked down at her feet, dressed in a pair of dirty sneakers without any laces. She would never go back to living wild, I promised myself. There would always be food for her, no matter what. Marvin went ahead of us and opened our front door and waited. We offered her fish and potatoes, the leftover baked apples still sitting on the table, a warm bed to sleep in. Stories to be told. After a little while we went forward. Up the stairs, across the porch marked with Thomson’s blood, inside.
“You knew,” I said to Marvin the next night. I had opened a precious bottle of dandelion wine, wishing we’d had a drink or two with Thomson in those last days.
He twirled the golden liquid around in his glass. The night was cold so we’d lit a small fire in the living room hearth. Abby, upstairs, in bed. A sliver of contentment pierced the grief in me. I had hope.
Marvin nodded.
“When?”
“Not until that night. After the funerals.”
“When our food was gone.”
“Yes.”
He sat on the brick hearth, feeding the fire with pickets we had harvested from a collapsed fence. He looked so much like he had—his young self costumed with the greying beard, the salt and pepper in his hair, the lines worn into his face from the weather. It was eerie, like seeing a ghost.
“Jack didn’t know until that night either,” he said. “All I knew was I found our food at the lighthouse and there were other things: clothes adjusted to fit, a pair of little kid shoes.”
He cleared his throat. The words, the confession, came slowly.
“And I saw her. One eye peeking around the door frame, lost in its socket.” He lifted his gaze to mine. “I couldn’t take from that.”
“That?”
“Her,” he said. “Her.”
“But our food?”
“Jack said he’d replace it.”
“But you didn’t want to tell me?”
He shook his head. “Couldn’t.”
“You don’t trust me.”
“You would have been over there, kidnapping her.”
“No,” I said, but perhaps he was right.
I picked up my wine.
“Do you trust me?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. Twice our story had been told; three times, if you count this writing. I wondered if I could let it go, bury it, let it finally rot. Forgive.
“And the plates? The food I left out for her?”
“I ate it,” he said. Eyes on the floor, he held his glass loosely. I watched the liquid tip like the whisky had so many years ago on my first night with Phoenix and Thomson, when I stayed there, when I tried to establish a new life. Marvin finally spoke and his voice was tight.
“I’m sorry,” he said, and the regret moved in him like a rockslide. I listened until the rumbling stopped and all was quiet again.
Epilogue
Abby stayed with us for several weeks. She helped us salt and smoke the fish and turn the rampant crop of zucchini into jars of relish. When I decided to trap the swarm and re-establish the hive, she helped with that too, pumping Thomson’s smoker to sedate the bees. Marvin rebuilt the box hive and we stood it in the clearing, over Thomson’s grave. He had argued against it, saying the mites were a losing battle, but I had decided that you didn’t throw a bounty away because of the problems it presented, the required hard work.
Two weeks later, Shannon died of an overdose of Thomson’s pills.
We buried her at the edge of the trees in the field that once grew hectares of wheat when Jack’s grandmother was still alive. Samuel pounded a crude cross into the ground. I spoke about watching her give birth and about how brave she was. Tears were shed, which was good. No one spoke about relief.
That autumn, the boys and Abby worked hard to bring in their harvest of squash and corn and Marvin and I helped when we could. I continued tending to our own garden and looked after the baby, who Jack named Melissa after all. I found a woman in town whose baby had died and she lived at the Bobiwashes’ house as a wet nurse until Melissa was weaned. She was pale and slow, shell-shocked by what had happened to her, and her hands only lifted the baby, fed her, set her down with the same kind of detachment Shannon had. It was up to us to give Melissa love. Sarah gave me tinctures and Melissa grew stronger. As she grew older, she was over so often she was practically our child. She would always be sickly, but you wouldn’t know it by the way she flashed through the forest with her brothers, playing games in the summer.
“You spoil her,” Marvin said often. Each time, I asked him how he thought that was possible. In the way that we lived, with so little, to be spoiled meant getting a second helping of rhubarb and honey or finding a bounty of raspberries in the woods. As she grew, her birthmark slowly faded, and I told her about her mother in the kindest way I could.
A few years later, Samuel married Albert’s granddaughter and brought her home.
In October of that same year, Abby turned sixteen. For her birthday, I gave her the locket that Margo, Walter, and I had stolen. I told her that the pictures inside were my grandparents because I wanted to pass something on, even if it was a fictional lineage, even if we weren’t blood. She fastened it around her neck and the chain glinted under her deep brown ha
ir. At first I missed it, the embossed surface that I was used to worrying with my fingertips, but after a while my hands became still.
The supply ship came just before ice-in, two months after Thomson died. When Marvin saw it moving across the bay like a shadow from another time, he rowed along the shore to the pier to meet it. He came home with flour, aspirin, and news of the world. As he talked to me about swaths of suburbs taken by fire and a religious order moving into empty big-box stores, I remembered Thomson’s story of a place he’d seen in Israel, where stone pillars had stood for centuries before an earthquake covered the city in dirt. Thousands of years later, it was unearthed by a man digging up his sewer system. Archaeologists excavated and there were the ancient buildings, the shops, the amphitheatre with seating for a thousand that had been filled in with silt. Thomson had walked the streets, stepping over grooves worn inches deep by the wheels of Roman chariots, thinking about the people who had lived there long ago.
Other ships have also started coming—lowering their sails to drop anchor in the bay and rowing to shore with items to trade. Oranges came one spring. Marvin and I traded several jars of honey for two and brought them to the Bobiwashes’. We split them into segments and watched Melissa, Abby, Graham, and Eric suck the sweet juice from the pulp. I told them stories about how it had been for us, when we were their age and the bright grocery stores were full of everything you could imagine: clothing, cat food, greeting cards, oranges, avocados, papaya full of clotted brown seeds like fish eggs. Fingers busy, they listened, wishing, I could tell, for that world, for all that was behind us. “Who wouldn’t?” I said to Marvin when we left, and it was like what I’d said in the botanical gardens, a hundred-odd years earlier, but this time he listened and I could feel in him the regret and I felt it too. I reached for his hand and we walked like that, a rare and comforting thing.
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