Swarm (37 page)

“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.

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 hair. 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.

When Abby was nineteen, she fell in love with a boy from town whose parents ran the new general store. Their wedding was held on a warm afternoon in late August, a decade almost to the day that she'd come back home as a castaway, a feral child. The sky glowed bright blue. I helped her get ready in her bedroom at the Bobiwash house and then we walked outside, into the field that stretched behind her father's home. The turkey vultures tipped their dark bodies over us, temporarily disappointed, the tops of their wings burnished amber by the sun.

In the evening, after the ceremony, Marvin and I walked home along the wide dirt path that ran alongside the impassable asphalt road. We passed the wreck of the old Toyota where the bees had once settled their swarm. Inside, Phoenix's red scarf lay rotting on the steering wheel. A rosy dusk hung all around us, above the branches of the ancient oak, over our house, the wide lake beyond. We looked at the dark orange ribbons in the sky.

“Hopefully we get some rain tomorrow,” Marvin said as we walked down the path to the hives.

In the clearing, Marvin rolled a cigarette out of our homegrown tobacco. I used his match to light the half-burnt sumac stuffed in the tin smoker. I wanted to harvest a piece of honeycomb to give to Abby, for good luck, for fertility.

Before pumping smoke into the drift of insects, I laid a piece of peppermint cake on the nearest hive.

“There was a wedding today,” I said as the bees floated up and around.

Whenever I talk to the bees, I feel Thomson. He's there, underneath us, in the earth. Over the years, I've stopped missing him so much. Phoenix too. They're always with me. And you are also. Not Abby, but whoever I thought you were. A shadow. A band of sunlight that breaks through the clouds. A ghost. It doesn't matter so much anymore because I have stopped looking for the things that I don't have. Each year, as the seasons change, as the days grow longer or incrementally shorter, losing fragments of their light, I concede. To the paths that are drawn. To the places my feet fall. To life.

The University of
Guelph Creative Writing
MFA
program helped me immensely in honing my craft: thank you to profs and colleagues for enriching dialogue and specific feedback on early scenes. I'm deeply thankful to Susan Swan, who provided creative support, encouragement, and generosity with her mentorship over several months of this novel's growth. My agent, Samantha Haywood, has been an unfailing supporter, and I am truly grateful for her tireless work on my behalf. Editors Jane Warren and Anita Chong offered thoughts that certainly enriched the book. I'm especially thankful to Ruth Linka at Brindle & Glass and my editor, Lee Shedden, whose suggestions and astute observations helped polish those last rough spots.

Huge appreciation for my mother, Laura Carter, who read every single draft, offering thoughts, suggestions, and a listening ear as I wrestled with things. Nancy Jo Cullen provided perceptive notes, which I greatly appreciate. Thanks also to my stepfather, Ulrich Kretschmar, for corrections on bees and geology. I am blessed with incredible support from family and friends and am deeply grateful for my husband, Jason Mills, whose love and unending support (and kick in the behind when needed) mean the world to me.

Many resources inspired and assisted in the creation of this world and its characters, including
The Long Emergency
by James Howard Kunstler;
Why Your World Is About to Get A Whole Lot Smaller
by Jeff Rubin;
The Life of the Bee
by Maurice Maeterlinck;
Bee
by Claire Preston;
The Weather Underground
, directed by Sam Green and Bill Siegel;
The Power of the Powerless
, directed by Cory Taylor; and
A Place Called Chiapas
, directed by Nettie Wild. I am also indebted to the beekeepers I interviewed for various magazine articles, including Allan Sinton and Adi Stoer and especially Tom Morrisey of Lavender Hills Farm, who gave me a face-to-face tour of his hives. Any mistakes are my own.

The excerpt from the Zapatista writings comes from the Fourth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle, written by Subcomandante Marcos in 1996. “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law” comes from Aleister Crowley. Vaclav Havel's quote about ideology that Thomson paraphrases is from Havel's essay “The Power of the Powerless,” while the details of underwater Roman amphora are from an episode of
The Cousteau Odyssey
. The stories of lone survivors of collapsed civilizations are from
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
by Jared Diamond. Island history is drawn from
Exploring Manitoulin
by Shelley J. Pearen, on which my island is roughly based.

Material quoted within the text is reprinted with permission as follows: Rumi, excerpts from “The Spiritual Surgeon,” translated by Kabir Helminski and Camille Helminski, from
The Rumi Collection
, edited by Kabir Helminski. Copyright © 1998 by Kabir Helminski. Reprinted by arrangement with The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of Shambhala Publications Inc., Boston,
MA
. shambhala.com.