Swarm (27 page)

“What did Thomson mean about the bees?”

She told me, explaining how they swarm.

“Should we look for them?”

“We'd hear them,” she said, glancing into a garage with the door ripped off. We kept walking and I started listening. I heard the crackle of the sidewalk's debris under our feet. Distant sirens. A baby crying and the occasional sound of a person scurrying through the streets like a rat, exactly the same as we must have sounded. In my mind, the swarming bees formed a golden column, a sacred thing, a thing that shouldn't die. I don't know why I would have thought that, when I'd faced that living woman and heedlessly laid a bomb at her feet. By the time Phoenix turned up the walkway of the apartment building, I'd forgotten what it was we were doing.

“You think they'll be in there?” I asked, meaning the bees.

“Who?”

“Never mind.”

It smelled like mould inside. My nose instantly started to run. The lobby was full of the wreckage of ripped-apart furniture. Chunks of yellow foam like the remains of a hail storm. Rusting springs. Phoenix stopped so she could wind up the flashlight and the sound rattled down the long hallway. We followed the light to a door that she unlocked. In the shifting glow I saw black spots polka-dotting the walls and ceiling where water had come through. Cans of food were spread on the kitchen counter.

“They're all opened,” Phoenix told me. In the living room, the walls were covered with newspaper articles. We stood together, reading about old crimes: the collapse of an oil rig off the Falklands, the violent demonstrations against the tar sands, groundwater contaminated by fracking. Phoenix pressed a finger against one article, securing its floppy corner. It was a story about Jump Ship's first action, an explosion at a debit machine. I moved. I stepped to the side and focused on a map tacked onto the wall.

“I used to live here,” she said. “In this apartment, with my boyfriend.”

“Your boyfriend?”

She nodded.

“Where is he?”

The flashlight beam made a lemon-coloured circle on the floor. When she looked up, her face was shadowy and I couldn't make out the expression in her eyes. “There is a right and a wrong, Sandy. You know that?”

“Of course,” I said, but the truth was that, no, I wasn't so sure about that. I thought morality was malleable, that you could be convinced of either side, that it only depended where you stood. After all, we lived in an age of moral ambiguity. The
TV
heroes I'd grown up with were drug dealers, vampires, serial killers.

Phoenix pushed a tack into the loose corner of the newspaper clipping. The illustration showed a blasted-out hole where the bank machine had been. “Because this isn't the way,” she said in a way that made my stomach drop.

“I didn't mean . . .” I blurted out, but she walked away before I could finish, leaving me with my guilt, a huge rationalization stuck in my throat. I didn't mean what? To fall for Marvin? To become a kind of terrorist?

I looked at the map. It was bigger than just the city. There were no gleaming stars stuck to it. The red roads all led out of the city. Chest tight, I unpinned the four corners, folded the large paper into a small square, and stuffed it in the pocket of Marvin's coat.

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.

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.