Swarm (32 page)

“Make amends,” said Thomson. “And then choose the prison you occupy.”

“What about Marvin?”

“We're not talking about him.”

By then he was tired. He struggled to breathe as he gripped my arm. He seemed like he was about to fall over, land in a gangly heap in the sand and tall weeds, so I steered him toward the trail. “Didn't anyone ever tell you to make the best of things?” he asked as we moved slowly up the narrow path. I stared down at the ground. We were obliterating our own footprints as we walked back to the house.

Halfway there, he paused, leaning hard against me and said, “If she hasn't come by now . . .” and for a brief insane moment I thought he meant Phoenix. “You need to let her go,” he finished, and I realized he meant you, my phantom, floating through the dark woods.

“She'll come,” I told him with conviction.

“What do you want from her?” Thomson asked, and if I'd had a chance to answer, I would have said, simply,
love
. A fantasy of you painting eggs at Easter while the television rattled on, of taking you shopping for your first training bra. The things I had. A second chance. But I didn't have the opportunity. His breath sputtered out in a barking cough and he kept coughing. Between the demolished hive and home, he laid a trail of oily blood. I helped him onto the chaise on the porch and said, “Hold on, hold on,” sobbing as he clutched at me, his eyes wide, flashing panic. His lips and chin covered in blood. I tipped his face into a dirty towel, rocking him back and forth. “Thomson, Thomson, stay, please stay.” When he died, it felt like all the air left the world, sucked out as his body sank back, like a boulder, like a felled tree, into that other, unknown place. His soul, like a bee, drifting upward. Invisible.

Time
passed. An hour. Two. The light, the forest, the birds moving around me. Thomson so still. Twitching at first for what seemed a long, desperate time, his body expelling its air, the blood settling in his lungs, a sediment he couldn't choke on anymore. When I was able, I lifted myself up. I went into the house and pulled a plastic bucket out from under the sink. At the lake, the walk long and quiet, I filled it. Carried it back to the porch, lathered soap onto a cloth and washed his face. Rusty swirls floated in the water. I pulled off his robe, tugged his T-shirt over his head. Threw them in a pile to be burned. I cleaned him. Under his arms. Behind his knees. Each slender finger. Everywhere. An intimacy with his body he hadn't had with mine, or anyone's for many, many years. I remembered him and Phoenix sleeping together, how odd I'd found it, the two of them sharing the same, square nest. But I couldn't judge because I barely knew them then. In total, I had known Phoenix much less than a month.

I pulled the sheets off Marvin's and my bed and carried them to the porch. I rolled Thomson's body to one side and shoved the edge under him, tipped him back, and did the same on the other side. An imperfect job. Once I was done, I realized I'd forgotten to close his eyes so I pulled the fabric off his face and found him, staring upward at the sky, still looking terrified from that final, hard journey. I wondered what he saw now, where he was, and started crying again as I closed his eyelids and again covered his face. Out in the dirt yard, the boughs of the Jack pine nodded in the breeze, bobbing over the flaking shingles on Marvin's shed. The chickens squawked so I stepped down into the yard and scattered the last of the feed. Soon we'd have to let them fend for themselves on green weeds and random seeds, or eat them. I walked away, up the drive. I heard a tinny, echoing drone and followed the sound to the car. Bees were drifting around the windshield. They slipped in and out through the narrow gap of the hood. I paused, turned to tell Thomson that they'd settled in the engine block, and remembered with a lurch that he was gone. The resetting of reality over and over again:
he's gone, is gone, is gone
. Aimless, I wandered down the trail to the shore. The boat still out. Marvin a small spot on the lake. My footsteps crunched and cracked against the silence, and I thought of Thomson's stories: about the last member of a tribe from an island off the California coast who survived on his own for almost twenty years, a woman in the 1800s cast off from her captain father's ship with the crewman who had impregnated her. For an entire winter, he'd told us, she lived on a sliver of water-bound rock, her lover and baby both dead. “How'd she get food?” I'd asked. He shrugged. “Gull eggs, plankton, whatever was close at hand.”

“But I'm not alone,” I reminded myself out loud, my voice a strange vibration in my throat. The water stretched before me, unresponsive. I walked back home. To Thomson, lying there, the sheets freshly stained from his body.

Marvin's shed was locked, with the shovel inside. I wanted to dig, to tuck Thomson safely into the soil and let him leave. That's what he'd asked of me:
Don't burn me. I want to feed the flowers, not drift off into ether.
Uselessly, I tugged on the padlock and then looked around. A pile of bricks stood stacked against the wall. I picked one up and slammed it against the old steel until the lock popped open. The smashing sound boomed through the silence. My ears rang and inside Marvin's shed the sudden darkness blinded me. I blinked and blinked again until the details came clear: a pile of unravelling yellow ropes, a coffee can of bent nails waiting to be straightened, a stack of magazines on the plywood desk. I flipped through old copies of
National Geographic
and
Mother Earth News
that we'd taken from the library. Near the bottom of the pile, a wrinkled paper stuck out. I lifted the magazines to reveal the Jump Ship manifesto, stained with spilled tea and age, the first part taken from the declaration of the Zapatistas, the rebels Phoenix had known as a child:
We were born of the night. We live in it. We will die in it. But tomorrow there will be light for those now crying in the night, for those to whom day is denied, to whom death is a gift, to whom life is forbidden.
I thought of you. I thought of all the nights you'd had to spend out in the darkness, alone. My eyes jumped down the page:
We are the peasants in the king's streets. He and his guests watch from their narrow castle windows, in between the entree and the dessert course.
And farther:
The wealthy live for what they can get in the current moment while we are focused on the questions of the future. How to improve life for our children? What is necessary is to hasten the collapse for all so that we find ourselves on an equal playing field. Only then, once we jump ship and swim for new shore, can we begin to rebuild . . . 
The word repelled me: sanctimonious and even untrue. Marvin didn't care about that anymore—children, rebuilding, creating a better life. All we worked for was survival, subsistence, hand to mouth. The kind of existence Phoenix had known as a child.

A movement through the dirty four-paned window caught my eye. A vulture's talons touched down in the yard. Dust clouded around it. It folded its wings back onto its body like tucking away a cape and turned toward Thomson. I ran outside and threw nails until it spread its huge brown-black wings and lifted into a pine. Its pebble eyes stared from the wrinkled red head. Another one landed in the branches. And they watched. Waiting. In the shed, I found the shovel hanging from a nail hammered into the back wall. As I lifted it off with one hand, my gaze fell behind a gashed water barrel, into the dusty corner, onto a stack of red paper plates.

Five of them. Licked clean. My sacrifice, my offering, stolen by Marvin. I stumbled back, the heavy shovel dropping. My free hand fumbled for the corner of the desk. All his arguments against feeding you flooded my mind. The way he positioned his body as he tried to convince me, leaning in, aggressive. And all the time, he was taking it, eating it, his lips greasy with his own greed. The food I had meant for you. Another betrayal. Another death because of him. My chest felt thick. The shed smelled of mould and autumn rot, the dirt in the cellar under our house. The door had closed behind me so I shoved it open, climbed out into the fresh air off the lake. With the shovel blade stabbed into the earth between my feet, I sat on the porch steps. My emotions swung from searing grief to rage as the vultures dropped from the tree, arriving like guests at a wake. I let them. They came closer and I called to them. Thomson behind me, clumsily shrouded in the flowered sheets.

“Try it,” I enticed. “Try it and I'll kill you. I'll feed you to Marvin.”

Suppertime had come and gone.

My anger woke the savagery inside me and I had stopped thinking of you at all. Except as something else I'd lost.

The
birds were still there when Marvin returned. Coming out of the woods, he saw us—them, me, Thomson. The pile of plates on the step like a buoy marking a treacherous rock. His eyes swung from them to Thomson and he released the long yardage of green net. It fell to the ground as he ran to the body, rushing around me like I wasn't even there. The plates scattered as he raced past. I watched them go, fluttering to the ground, flipped over, their undersides bright white.

Marvin pulled the sheet away from Thomson's face. He lifted his hands, moved them around, uncertain where to touch. Finally he knelt and leaned against the solid shelf of Thomson's ribcage, laid his arms around his waist and wept.

I had never seen Marvin cry. Not after Phoenix or anything else. His tough, tanned face collapsed at all the wind-carved lines, and I let him have his moment. The vultures shuffled at the edge of the yard as if made uncomfortable by Marvin's grief. When they got too close, I waved the shovel, waited, but Marvin kept crying until I couldn't take it anymore. The birds watched as I walked up the trail to where the hives had been, carrying the paper plates. There, I started to dig.

Into
that hole I put my anger, my guilt, my wasted life. I put the hope I'd felt for you, destroyed by Marvin, and my love for Phoenix and Thomson. The world had come unglued—all the pieces of my life drifting without connection—and that hole seemed to be the only central point. My arm ached from a torn muscle that had never properly healed, but I dug, throwing dirt, faces flickering in my mind. The travel agent, mascara clumped around her curious eyes. Phoenix. I remembered our garden. The first one we would have had. The seeds Phoenix and I had planted in the city. Tomato and cucumber that hadn't even had time to sprout. When we left they were just pots of soil in a tiny greenhouse Phoenix built using the plastic sheeting that had covered the diner's glass door. Her memory itself was like a softening seed, its walls cracking open, uncurling inside me. My lungs had to shift, my liver, my heart. It hurt, all that movement of things long fixed. I jabbed hard at the packed earth and the shovel broke and I sat on the edge of the grave with the wood handle in one hand, the iron blade in the other. Tears came, sputtering up like the poison in Thomson's lungs. What would I do without him, without you? Without her?

With my wrist, I pushed away the wet on my face, smearing grit over my skin. Marvin came down the trail, dragging another shovel, scoop-shaped, meant for snow. He inched out of the woods and stood at one of the forest's many openings. More and more the woods seemed like a maze. This one room—where the hives had been, where Thomson's grave would be—could have been the labyrinth's centre.

“What you did . . .” I said, lifting up the plates. I threw them and they scattered, polka-dotting the ground. Startled, the birds lifted from the trees into their safer arcs. They looked down, dipping lower, assessing. Did he even realize what he'd done, how he'd pushed you into exile, probably sentenced you to death? “Do you believe in anything anymore? Do you even have a conscience?”

“There's no more room for ideology,” he said, his voice cold.

“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.”

“That isn't what that means. It isn't so base.”

“Not like stealing food from a child.”

He banged a fist against his chest. “I'm real, Sandy. I'm taking care of us.” He came closer to me and I hardened, knowing I'd do whatever it took to keep him away.

“And what is she? A ghost?”

“Every day I go out on that boat, that tiny leaking prison cell, and bail like mad to keep from sinking. Fish and fish and fucking fish. I stink of it.” He glanced off at the open trail, the criss-cross of drooping goldenrod in full yellow bloom. “But I can't stop because the whole house of cards is built on my back. And then you take it all and start giving it away like it comes from nowhere, like it's this fucking magical bounty.” He was breathing hard by the time he finished.

“You think I'm home watching television?”

“Protein. That's the hard part.”

I paused. “So you went ahead and ate it.”

“I tried to stop you, but you wouldn't stop.”

“You condemned her, like you did him.” I jabbed at the shallow trough where Thomson would soon be lain out. In the silence, unspoken truths drifted between us: the others who had lost their lives because of Marvin. The forest shifted like the switching of a set.

“And me,” I said quietly. Her name hung between us. Finally I said it out loud: “Phoenix.” My eyes burned, dangerously hot.

“You came willingly,” he said. “You both did.”

“I didn't know what I was doing.”

“So it's my fault? You're a victim? An innocent?”

“You used me. I was a tool to you. Somebody to do your dirty work.”

He leaned toward me, his hands bunched around the shovel's handle, like cedar roots. “You were a grown-up, Sandy. You made choices.”

He looked like a stranger, like someone I'd never really known. I shook my head, broke a hard clump of dirt into powder under the heel of my hand. A blue jay screamed its accusations. My head was full of the image of him in his shed, acting in secret, like he had in the city. He and Walter, who had long turned to ash and that one claw of metal that had been his hand. Twisting wires, taping together explosive pipe. I thought about Thomson's words about forgiving him, making amends, and wondered how that would ever be possible.