Swarm (14 page)

Plastic is easy to find, and that's what we'd come for. Hunks of heavy sheeting to fasten over cedar boughs, cut grass, whatever we can use to insulate the north wall of the living room since Thomson was sleeping there. A ragged corner was sticking out of a puzzle of mouldy tile board and drywall and I started to dig. Plaster crumbled in my hands. I refastened the scarf around my mouth to keep out the dust and mould spores and worked slowly, trying not to think about rats. When I pulled the piece clear, I saw that holes from old staples scarred the edges but those could be patched with spruce pitch. Satisfied, I stuffed it into my backpack on top of some walnuts we‘d found on the walk, earlier, before the argument had bubbled up. There was a harvest there, once they were hardened by frost.

Objects tumbled as I climbed a high pile, gently setting my foot on a rusty oil tank and stepping on the side of a washing machine. I reached for a barbecue, the kind that you fill with charcoal briquettes, but the steel handle snapped off and the bottom broke away, eaten by rust. The handle, a curve of shiny steel, could be fastened to a homemade bucket or used another way so I kept it.

I dug farther, pushing past an old printer, a twisted fan, a cellphone that I pocketed to show the boys. A microwave with a tightly latching door—ideal for storing food.

Dust and sweat made a sticky paste on my face. With the long tail of the scarf that covered my mouth, I wiped my forehead. Leaving my backpack on a dried slurry of mashed paper, I walked around to the other side, to find Marvin, to tell him I was leaving. He was crouched on another pile, spinning a white bicycle tire. Small purple and pink plastic balls fell down the silver spokes. When I called his name, he looked up, squinting. The sun lit the metal spokes. He swivelled his head back and forth, trying to find me. I waved my hand in the air. “Here.”

“Are you behind that fridge?”

I hadn't even noticed the fridge. A big white box. Door removed. Two shelves inside, crooked, probably bent by a bear. I climbed up, two steps, three, and pulled out one of the grill-like racks as Marvin continued taking things apart. Excavating. He tossed something to the ground and dragged another object down the side of the heap. In the corner of my eye, I saw a flash of purple tinsel.

“Come here,” he shouted, and as I turned I expected the mother­lode, the thing I'm always hoping for, although I'm not sure what that would be. Something impossible: a feast of calamari and pistachio ice cream. Oranges and avocados. An afternoon exploring a strange city like when Margo and I went to New York, even though things were too far along for it to be much fun. Thomson's medicine: a twenty-year supply. You, curled up, calling on us for rescue.

When I was still ten feet away, Marvin tossed a backpack to me—small, meant for a child. “You could give this to her,” he said. A mermaid smiled up at me, her skin cracked, flaking off like a zombie. A rusty orange liquid stained my palms, dribbled down onto my pants. Disgusted, I dropped it, and he lifted a kid's bike into the air. From the bent wheel, one rubber tire sagged away, the inner tube flat as a ribbon. All that was left of the streamers were two sparkling tufts sticking out of white hand grips. He cupped his hand over the dented metal pole where the seat should have been. “She can ride this around the neighbourhood,” he said and laid it on its side like we'd learned to do when we were kids. I'd had a bike. I'm sure he'd had several.

I wiped my hands on my pants. Marvin threw the bike and it crashed against a dented filing cabinet. As the sound faded away, we stood there, staring at each other, surrounded by debris. His eyes searched my face, waiting for me to realize he was right, as I had in the past. I stared back at him, wanting to remind him of the times he'd failed, the terrible outcomes. His voice when he spoke was gentle: “I'm just trying to show you that this idea you have of some happy family—” I lifted up the backpack and threw it at him, hard, but he jumped to the side and it slammed against a mangled plastic garden bench, splattering orange. “Sandy,” he shouted as I turned and ran, my feet pounding against a skin of crushed juice boxes and disposable diapers and half-buried black bags. “It's the truth,” he called after me.

His truth.

In the trees, a fish aquarium with one intact glass wall stuck out of the debris. I knew I shouldn't. I knew that the glass could be used for many things and that because of my choice the world would be a more dangerous place, but I did it anyway: swung my leg back and slammed my boot right into the centre of the pane. It shattered. Before the noise fell away, a movement flickered in the corner of my eye. I turned fast but saw only the forest, the leaves shifting in a slight breeze. A crow called and flew across my line of sight: a glossy black gap within the world.

I sank onto the corner of an old mattress, folded in half, the springs frozen with rust. Garbage all around, like the aftermath of an explosion.

I put my head in my hands and pulled them away when I realized how dirty they were: the lines on my palms darkened in orange. Marvin wouldn't look for me and that was what I wanted. To get away from him; to be free. I thought of my mother. Her stories of flying to foreign countries before she married my dad, stepping off the plane into different seasons and smells. Ecuador. India. Spain before the European Union collapsed. A round purse made of woven grass, embroidered with red and black beans, hung in the dining room. I remembered a photograph of her with a monkey on her shoulder. There were other photos too. One my father brought out to show me how I looked like my great-grandmother, same fair skin, hair the colour of spelt bread. In it, she stood on the wooden veranda, one hand around the railing, a pane of the front window broken. My baseball went through it, my father told me most times we hunched over the black pages of that album, the silver corners coming loose. That's how I remembered them—my father a series of interactions, his rough fingers fastened around my bare toes on the couch while we watched television and his voice sank into my ears, one prediction of doom after another. My mother a machinery of tasks: slicing a roast, cleaning mouldy soup from the fridge, flicking the broom over the tiny apartment floor. In motion, always, as if to deflect his words, draw them into her gears and grind them into powder so she could look up and say,
What's that, dear?
, and he'd turn again to me, speak to my still face. I missed them. Nearly two decades since we'd spoken or seen each other. But that was ancient history. Ruins under the dust of my grief.

It must be true that when people have children they start thinking differently about their own childhood because that's been happening to me. I think about you, Melissa, out there in the woods, and I realize that my parents did the best they could. If my mother felt for me as I feel for you—this agonizing pull, like our skin is attached—letting me go must have been the hardest thing she ever did. Not that she had a choice. One day, late winter, sleet streaming out of a pewter sky, I vanished, never to be seen again. As if I'd joined a cult.

Tears came. Afterwards, I rubbed the rough vines on the gold heart that I wear around my neck and wondered what my mother would have thought of you. No matter what, I had to find you. You had to be real.

Dead leaves from the previous autumn covered the forest floor. I picked one up and tore it in half, dropped it, and found another. “Demolition helps me think,” Phoenix once said when we were breaking open walls to scavenge insulation. Back then we'd had a lot to think about. Now life is about survival, making it through each day, with no time to consider whether or not I'm happy. Every little break in routine means less time to put up my beets, harvest zucchini, clear away the weeds from the pumpkin patch, watch over the hens so the animals don't steal our eggs. All while Marvin is out in the boat. There is no way I could ever leave him. He is my lifeline and I am his.

It's been that way for a long time—since we got to the island and spent those first few years looking over our shoulders. Hiding. A beard disguising his face. My hair cut as short as we could with dull scissors. All three of us shell-shocked, grieving, numb. Pushing down a past that was now bubbling up. Ghosts rising to the surface, bones coming into the light, like the skulls and femurs found in the caves on the island's south shore that Mr. Bobiwash told us about. Holes in the limestone cliffs where the Ouendat found shelter from the Iroquois. They were trapped. At the turn of the last millennium, skeletons were still being found.

I stood up.

I grabbed my backpack and pushed through the woods, to the road, the scrap of fabric breaking apart in my worrying fingers. Had it come from your dress? Or another little girl's, long since taken to the mainland or dead from starvation or flu? Were you dressed in rags, your hair dirty, shorn from your scalp like the children I'd seen in the dark zone, lined up with their parents for soup. If I could see you, I'd know what you need. I'd talk to you. Understand you. Help you.

I moved quickly over the broken asphalt, down the shattered yellow line. A row of rocks lined the field, piled by a farmer who had cleared his land by hand more than a century ago. The thick cedar forest on my left seemed impenetrable. Toward the shoreline, turkey vultures circled in graceful, dipping arcs, their heads a dim, distant red, like Mars. I ran.

I hadn't been
asleep very long when the springs on the sofa bed screamed from the release of Phoenix's weight. A grey light sifted through the glass door as she kneeled in front of the stove and I felt relieved. All night, I'd lain on my side, tightly curled, trying to keep warm on the thin, narrow mattress on the floor. Phoenix's olive skin turned the colour of toffee as she added a slim length of wood to the fire. I sat up, hugging myself against the air's sudden cold.

“Good morning,” I whispered, and my breath steamed in front of my face. Phoenix glanced at me.

“This will take a while to get going,” she said before she shut the door and stepped back to the bed. Thomson groaned a few unintelligible words before Phoenix shushed him. I lay back down, felt the heat gather slowly at the soles of my feet, and didn't wake again until the room was so hot I had to shove off the sleeping bag for relief.

It
was like that down there—a constant swing to extremes. Plenty of vegetables or beans and meat for soup or none at all. When in my normal life I'd often been entertained by shows and movies stored on the Internet, we had the evening's deep silence, followed by the chaos of the soup kitchen. On those nights, about three a week, up to a hundred people could show up. Zane, whose belly hung over his suspendered pants, who lived up the road and kept to himself, let twenty in at a time through the single door while Phoenix dished out soup or assigned duties. It was hers and Thomson's project, but Phoenix oversaw it all. That became apparent pretty quickly.

That
first morning, Phoenix made tea out of peppermint from their summer garden.

“I miss coffee,” Thomson said as I curled my hands around the warmth of the mug. In the kitchen, Phoenix dished chunks of potatoes onto three plates and then carried them over with a jar of sprouts. As she set the food on the table, I wondered if I should have offered to help. Something bit at me, and I reached down and scratched my knee. Thomson stabbed at a potato hunk, set it down, and sliced off a rotten spot.

“These already turning bad?”

Phoenix glanced up from her food. “It's damp down here. Cold.”

“We should keep them in the back room.”

“Too warm and they'll sprout.”

Thomson shook salt on his potatoes. “Sometimes I wish we'd stayed there. The coffee, fresh fruit, honey, heat.”

“Hurricanes,” Phoenix said, but Thomson didn't seem to hear her.

“Much easier to live off the land.”

“We're not living off the land,” said Phoenix. “Barely.”

Thomson pushed the rest of the potato chunk into his mouth.

“We couldn't have known,” she said.

“Known what?” I asked, lifting a pinch of sprouts to my mouth. The water in them was icy, sent shivers through my jaw. They both looked at me. Thomson's blue eyes and Phoenix's black, considering how to answer. Finally Thomson spoke.

“Everything,” he said and laughed.

While
we ate, Phoenix outlined the day's chores. Put on bones for broth, pick up the vegetable donations, collect wood from wherever we could find it. Thomson said he'd take me to get the day's water and Phoenix nodded like he needed her permission. Before we left, a few people came in—one of the men I'd seen at the gate and a woman with a green scarf on her head tied turban-style, like Phoenix wore hers. They hugged and I turned away, swallowing the last gulp of my tea while I wondered where Marvin was, when he would stop by, if we would be together again—but really, Melissa, what I wanted wasn't so base. It was that: those two women, standing with their hands on each other's elbows, speaking about the next steps to take. Phoenix smiled and I saw how all the complicated lines on her face relaxed.

Outside,
a grey haze of smoke hung over the rooftops. Thomson cleared his throat several times and spat on the ground, barely missing my shoe. He carried two green pop bottles and I swung a blue bucket, a small jar of iodine pills rattling inside. He must have noticed me looking around.

“It's an adjustment. Think of it as waking from a dream.”

I thought of Marvin's speech about the bubble bursting. “That's what Marvin says.”

“Yes? What else does he say?”

“A lot.”

We laughed, stepped into the road to walk around a puddle.

“I hope you're being careful with him?”

I blushed.

“He's passionate,” Thomson said, and my cheeks burned hotter but Thomson didn't notice. “When I was his age I was at student demonstrations. A hundred thousand people in Wenceslas Square. Havel and his group stayed away because it was our turn.” His voice was adamant, almost angry. “You know Vaclav Havel?” he asked, and I nodded, because I did, at least what Marvin had told me.