Swarm (19 page)

It was Walter who opened the door. “Welcome, wanderers,” he said.

A huge fire burned in the hearth. Its heat and light mesmerizing in the damp and shadows. Water dripped through the ceiling, and we ran around finding bowls and mugs and empty paint cans. The pinging drops made a kind of music as Walter opened up a glass jar of moonshine he had, made in a still at his rooming house. He handed it to me. His blue eyes seemed to pulse as the liquid prickled in my mouth. “Get ready for Waltered States,” Margo said, reaching for the jar, and it was the funniest thing I'd ever heard. I laughed until I cried.

Margo took her wet coat off and threw it in front of the fire, beside Marvin's mattress. It landed in a heap. I kicked off my shoes and stripped my socks off. The guys watched. I'd hung my own jacket on the hooks by the door like a good girl, the nice girl Phoenix had judged me as on the first night we'd met, saying it like an insult. My shirt was drenched and so I simply followed Margo's lead and took it off and within moments we were topless, the fire shining on our skin, the boys watching. A greed in their eyes without end.

The darkness came,
like the end of the day we left Phoenix and ran, ran. Bodies hauled onto stretchers made of saplings and the remains of old sails, carried, crashing, through the woods. A lantern swung from Samuel's hand. Bats dipped for bugs in our yard while I stayed with Thomson, his lungs grinding within the damp box of our house, the walls held with their internal weave of hidden wires. I could not leave even though I felt as if the thread that tied me to you was weakening. You were gone: vanished into the grainy, black world. Like static on an old television set. But still, I thought, I made myself think, I'd seen you. You were real.

I
woke when Marvin moved in the bed beside me, his rough palm curving around my waist and down onto my hip. Gluey from sleep, my eyes wouldn't open.

I spoke toward his presence—“Did you find any more . . .”—but his lips silenced mine, his mouth hot in the cool night air of near autumn. The bodies were in the yard, I remembered, coming fully awake to meet Marvin's force with my own, arching into him, clasping the hard muscles of his arms. Moonlight scattered through our window like sulphur. He climbed on top of me and I opened my legs and he entered me as Thomson's choking cough started up and sputtered on like a useless engine. I tried to ignore it, but he moaned in pain below us, and I felt my grief rise. I wanted you. I wanted you. The you who Marvin refused, the child he turned his back on. I couldn't do it. I pushed him off, felt the break in his thrust, and ignored him when he said my name. He would not beg. We wanted too much from each other for that. He lay back as I set my feet on the cold wooden floor that had been painted blue in better days. Neither of us spoke as I went downstairs, trailing one of our blankets.

In
the morning, sunlight blasted through the window. The door opened and closed and I sat up from my bed on the floor, in the corner of the living room. My back hurt and I twisted, trying to undo the knots. On the couch, Thomson was reading an issue of
Popular Mechanics
from the 1970s, pulling on the glued-together corners, his fingers awkward, like a child's. Mr. Bobiwash's wagon was in the yard, the mule shifting its feet as the hens scampered away, fussing with their wings. The boys and Mr. Bobiwash slid a body in the back, wrapped in a tattered sleeping bag I recognized from Thomson's old room. Marvin turned to me, his eyes set in dark hollows like he hadn't slept at all. “They found more.”

I raised my eyebrows. More food, more medicine, more things that we could use?

“More bodies,” said Mr. Bobiwash. “Corpses washed up on shore. And there was one in one of the caves.” I covered my mouth. The smell of rot hung in the air. Mr. Bobiwash nodded toward the body, disguised by its shroud, only the feet sticking out: one splotchy and blue, the other clad in a worn black shoe with no laces.

“She baked awhile in that cave.”

“Who was she?” I asked through the gaps in my fingers. I thought I saw him stiffen as he shook his head and turned away.

After
the wagon lurched out of our yard, it was quiet. The men were bringing the bodies to town so I knew they'd be gone awhile. Thomson didn't want to eat, but I made him, holding slivers of fish in front of his mouth no matter how much he turned away.

“I'll sit here all day,” I said, and he asked me if I'd washed my hands. “Of course,” I lied, and he drew the fish from my greasy fingers with his fumbling chapped lips. When he wanted a fork, I knew he'd found his appetite so I got him one from the kitchen and asked if he'd be all right.

“You're leaving?”

“I've got a few things to do.”

“Me too,” he said, setting the plate on the couch. A raspberry tumbled off, adding a red smudge to the rest of the stains. “The swarm.”

“They're gone,” I told him, picking up the berry and pushing at the mark with the pad of my thumb.

Thomson shook his head. “The hive splits. The original community remains.” Slumped into the corner of the couch, he stared at me. A brown arm, gaunt, sticking out from one rolled-up sleeve. His shirt flared open to show his chest, withered, covered with a tangle of hair, soft like fuzzy white mould. His eyelids fluttered, a reprieve from the intensity of his stare, and I knew he couldn't go anywhere. I stuck the berry in my mouth and lifted the blanket off the floor.

“I'll check on them,” I said as I laid it over Thomson, helped him lengthen his body, lie down. Before I left, he grabbed my arm.

“Don't give up,” he said as firmly as he could, but I wasn't sure what he meant.

I
had no intention of going to the hives. No matter what Thomson said, Marvin was right. Over the years, the battle with the mites had worsened, demanding more time than we could give with all the other tasks we needed to do. In the beginning, we'd had the sugar, had brought it from the city, and scattered it into the frames so it coated the bees and caused the mites to fall off. But then we'd run out and our five hives diminished to one and it was time to give it up, despite what Thomson wanted. What I wanted was to find you—and I was willing to go hungry in the process.

I
went back to the shore. I hoped I wouldn't find any more bodies as I looked for footprints in pockets of sand among the rocks. All I saw were the men's large tracks so I turned inland and pushed through the cedar bush toward the lighthouse. I stopped when I saw it: that white tower with its fading red trim. We had lived there the first spring, sleeping in an old bed below the room with the heavy glass lens. The wind off the water shook all the windows in their frames and the dampness of the lake crept in. It wasn't a good place for Thomson so we'd spent the last of our gas driving the short distance to our farmhouse, parked the car, and stayed.

Inside, my feet crushed crumbled plaster on the kitchen floor. The walls were covered with pockmarked graffiti from teenagers who once had nothing to do. Upstairs, a quilt and pillow lay on the bare mattress, ones I hadn't seen before. They smelled musty and old and I couldn't imagine them being used for a child. I lifted the blanket in my hands and saw holes made by moths, maybe the large green lunas that look like fairies as they drift over the milkweed.

In the yard, I stepped into the overgrown garden and gathered herbs—mint, roots of red baneberry, tall buttercup—to show Marvin that I was contributing and to keep the secret of my search. It was frustrating, this lack of evidence, of signs. Night after night I left out plates and in the morning they were always gone but there were no more footprints. You really were like one of Mr. Bobiwash's ancestors, the Natives who slipped into those caves and never came out again. If I hadn't seen you I might have believed you were a ghost. But now I knew exactly who you were—a shipwreck survivor, a castaway—and still it didn't help.

By
the time I got home, Marvin was back, loosening tomatoes in his spidery fingers. A bowl sat in the squash vines, half full. He watched me walk to the house before standing from his crouch. I saw that he was angry so I held up the bag, a black fabric one.

“Herbs.”

He gestured to the ground, to the red and yellow orbs, scattered on the earth, spotted with black. “What about all this?”

“I just did a bunch of canning.”

“Then do some more.”

“There are other things I want—”

“You want,” he said. “Jesus Christ.” He glanced into the woods, into imagined winter, and I saw it too: the forest clotted with white. Us, snowbound in the house. If we were lucky, if we'd prepared, we'd survive by opening jar after jar of green beans and pickled onions. Eating hens' eggs and salt fish and canned tomatoes and dried zucchini, rehydrated in melted ice.

“I have to get out there,” he said, sweeping his arm along the horizon line of the lake. “I have to cut the fucking wood. The apples are dropping. And now there's this.” The bodies, he meant. The dead like another harvest that couldn't have waited. “I can't do everything.”

Then help me
, I wanted to say, but instead I told him, “We're fine. We have a lot.”

“We never have a lot.”

“You know what I mean.”

Marvin dropped the tomato into the bowl. “I'm not really sure I do.”

I paused. “I want to find her.”

“Is she worth dying for?”

“Were we?”

I stared at him, all that history between us. Quietly he looked away. “Get ready for town,” he told me, “and help Thomson.”

“Yes, sir,” I said and walked into the house.

I
buttoned Thomson's mustard-yellow dress shirt as he stood, balanced with his hand on the back of the couch. He stepped into his black corduroy pants, puckered at the knees from darning.

“You know you shouldn't come,” I said, tying his belt. He sat down hard on the recliner. “Especially now.”

“Why now?”

“With the doctor gone.”

“That's why I'm going. To pay my respects. It's civilized.”

He pulled his scarf from between the couch cushions. It was Phoenix's old orange one, patterned with large black stars, shot through with a silver weave that had snagged and broken over the years.

“It's worse when people just disappear,” Thomson said but in such a low voice I pretended not to hear him. He didn't look at me as he tied the scarf over his mouth. I knew he meant Phoenix, how we'd just driven away afterwards, but his muffled voice said, “Like with the flu.” Those times we have to bury people quickly, without ceremony. I thought, too, of Mona and Abby. How they faded away, their flesh-and-blood bodies vanishing into the mist over the lake. His eyes sank away from mine. “He was a good man,” he said. “It's important to acknowledge his life.”

In the kitchen, I nearly ran into Marvin. He stumbled backward so Thomson's tea sloshed over the side of the mug. I reached for the cup.

“I'll take it,” he said, pushing past me.

On the porch, I ate a meal of applesauce and Solomon's seal root. The crows stood in the branches of the trees. One lifted into flight, spreading the fingers of its wings against the sky. I wondered if I would see you in town. If you would stand like a shadow on the edge of the crowd and say goodbye to the doctor and the five strangers and the woman from the cave. Were you grieving? Could I comfort you? Would you let me hold your hand and not vanish from my grasp?

In
town, Mr. Bobiwash parked the wagon beside the playground and led Caesar, his donkey, to the water while Marvin, Thomson, Shannon, and I walked into the park. The baby lay in a navy blue sling, fastened against Shannon's chest, and I resisted the urge to worm my arms into that warm hollow, pull the skinny body out, and run. Eight funeral pyres were set up near the marina building, which was half sunk into the lake, a faded sign in the broken window advertising
FREE INTERNET WITH COFFEE PURCHASE
. The bodies were laid out on piles of white driftwood. Anil Sharma moved between the shrouded corpses, building tents of kindling on their ribcages. His father, Anthony, followed, laying bouquets of goldenrod and tiger lily and purple bog aster. I could see his lips moving, mumbling prayers to his gods, his convictions stronger than ours. Many had only come because there would be a distribution of salvaged supplies—the few containers of damp flour and clothes and other things from metal bins found on the island's rocky edge. We didn't know if all the shipwrecked supplies had been found, or all the bodies, but there were no reports of survivors. I didn't tell anyone else about you. I kept my eyes on Marvin and scanned the slim crowd. A gang of children ran around. The Bobiwash boys hadn't come or else they would have been playing, except for Samuel, who was too old for that.

Thomson hoisted his cane to wave at Albert, standing guard over the boxes of rations piled in the picnic shelter. We knew mostly everyone. About three families keep the town going, living in the empty stores along the main street that were looted years ago when the power went out and didn't come back on. They run the weekly market where Marvin trades fish when he catches more than we need. In the Stedman's store, its red sign smashed to shards, the shelves are filled with refurbished tools and other scavenged items alongside useless things like ice cube trays and
DVD
players and even a collection of credit cards in a pocket of aluminum foil. Meant for toys, I suppose, or artifacts. Beside Stedman's is the old library, a limestone building with a single intact stained-glass window. In the beginning, Thomson and I went there to save books fallen in heaps from the tipped-over shelves and dotted with mouse droppings. I found
Homesteading for Dummies
, several volumes of
Forest Plants of North America
, and a few issues of
Mother Earth News
, although the pages ripped when I tried to peel them apart. Thomson collected novels. One,
Fugitive Pieces
, we've read many times. In the story, a little boy hides in a hole in the dirt during a long-ago war and a man rescues him and raises him as his own. “It was a kind of rebirth,” Thomson said. “Like this.” He meant our coming north. I could save you like that, Melissa. I could pull you from that damp cave, that crypt.