Time of the Locust (3 page)

Brenda felt her blood pressure worsening as she walked down the hallway to her office. She had forgotten to fill her prescription again. The white slip was still crumpled at the bottom of her purse. She hated those water pills. They seemed to make her gain even more weight. Pounds atop the heap she had constructed to insulate her from the past. She sighed and focused on getting to the office. Her beacon was the water fountain, the last five meters.

She arrived at her desk and collapsed into the chair. The date on the calendar glared at her from the wall. Seven years today, she thought. She looked at the peanut butter candy bars in the open desk drawer. The need to cover it all over and put a gravestone on the memory of things always seemed to make her want to eat. Food was there for her with open arms and offered itself to the great pit at the core of her soul. And every time she bit into peach cobbler, shoveled seasoned pork roast into her mouth, or spooned a gallon of ice cream, she was able to bury just a little more of the memories that kept resurfacing, of Horus rising from the past.

Closing the desk drawer, Brenda thought of how Horus looked when he came home the night that ended their lives. He arrived in their bedroom like an ominous sky just before a storm, his hands shaking but with nothing to say. Quiet. Struck. Waiting. His face was stone. “Jack Thompson” was what he said when he did speak, then sat down on the bed. He said it so calmly, sinking into the ­mattress, staring at the curtains billowing in the window. Brenda waited for him to say something—anything else—but he did not.

What about his father, Jack Thompson? As Brenda stood staring from the frame of their bathroom door that night, she couldn't understand if he was talking to her or to himself, and it wasn't until the next moment that she realized Horus had said his father's name but meant something more.

Then came the sirens and lights that she expected to be on the way to someone else's house but had stopped in front of theirs.

“Horus?” said Brenda.

The sound of footfalls approached like the headless horseman, louder and louder.

“Horus?”

A knock. Then silence.

“Horus?”

Another knock.

Brenda had blacked out the rest. The things she felt between her husband looking at her and opening the front door to let the police in, between the handcuffs flashing under the living-room lamplight and the pregnancy test in the bathroom trash can. Until that day in their bedroom, with the walls washed in red and blue, she had thought of vengeance only as an abstraction. Years later, she would tell herself that vengeance had somehow become a living being to Horus and that it possessed him in some way. That it was a thing that had been growing inside of him since the beginning. A lethal thing that would claim them both.

Brenda snatched a tissue from the box on her desk and wiped her wet forehead. She had tried to get Horus to talk more about his childhood, but it was like a forbidden room in a house. She later came to respect his silence about his deceased parents and ignored his evasions about his boyhood. She dismissed the oddness of him having a brother in the same city whom she met only once before they married. And she made the ancient mistake with Horus that women make with men: belief that she could renovate him. She believed that her love could make whatever it was Horus chose not to talk about go away. She thought that a new life could be painted over the old one. He was tender and quietly devoted, and he loved her. She would love him and fill in the rest.

Brenda opened the desk drawer, looked at the candy, and closed it again. In the end, she had not been able to compete with the past. Her love for Horus had not been enough to stop him from pulling the trigger. It had not had the reach of justice and retribution. How could she judge him—as society had—for his need to bring his father's killer to justice by his own hand? And she wondered what it all had gotten him and if a ruined life was the reward. She still wasn't sure, and it troubled her that she could not see past the great wall of despair that hid the answer from view. Sundays became anathema to her. Going to church as a means of coping did not soothe her eternal distemper, and in her mind, that place was a graveyard of women banking a river of tears. Each woman's misery sloshed and overflowed and spilled out over the ruined mess of the others, commingling in grief, in wretchedness. She didn't want to see all of that every week.

The telephone on Brenda's desk rang, drilling through her thoughts. Sighing, she picked up the receiver. “Hello?” she said.

“Mrs. Thompson?”

“Speaking.”

“Good morning. This is Dr. Susan Watson at the Autism Center.”

Brenda tensed when she heard that springtime bounce in the young doctor's voice, so full of things that were nearly weightless, light and airy problems like what color to have her study painted and whether to plant tulips when a thaw breaks. She remembered Dr. Watson telling her just a few weeks ago, apologetically, that she had once put in for a transfer to a different facility in Virginia. That she thought she could handle the unbreakable silence of these children at the Autism Center and the stillness that was interrupted only by their sudden outbursts. After three years, she hadn't understood them any more than on her first day at the center. The children ignored her still, and she had grown tired of the feeling of always talking to herself. But she couldn't let these children down, she'd said.

“Is everything OK with Sephiri today?” Brenda asked. She picked up a pencil, gripping it so tightly that it snapped in two.

“Yes, Mrs. Thompson. He's fine. I'm not calling about a problem. It's just that . . . your son did something today, something we've never seen happen before here at the center. I really don't know how to explain it.” There was a long pause. “As you know,” she continued, breathless, “we've had Sephiri since he was three years old, and we have been able to monitor him steadily. We feel we know him and understand the spectrum of his condition quite well. But today he has been different in some really rather remarkable ways. We think at this point, we should all sit down and talk about it. You and me. And his father.”

There was a pause for reasons neither woman spoke of aloud. Because there was no living father for Sephiri in the sense of the word. Because Sephiri's father was underground, among the Paleolithic mineral deposits embedded in the earth. There was only the shadowy figure of Manden Thompson, the boy's uncle and reluctant stepfather, who appeared occasionally. Manden held the role only in title. Only in an envelope with a check in it that he volunteered every month. Only in situations like this, when a child's “father” had to be summoned. Time and again, Brenda penciled in Manden's name on forms and registrations. She could not bear to leave that line next to her name blank and be newly reminded of what was gone forever.

Brenda knew that there was a file somewhere in the young doctor's desk with the details of Horus Thompson's incarceration. She continued to use her married name, even though the title no longer held any meaning. It remained with her like the feeling of a limb still there after amputation. So when the young doctor spoke of Sephiri's father, Brenda felt a twinge as she thought of the scope of what was there and what was not, a half-truth, with the other half capable of devouring both pieces if brought to the fore. She could almost believe when on occasion she spoke of it in the presence of those who did not know that Manden was really Sephiri's uncle. The lie sparkled boldly in the half-light of the pause with the young doctor.

“Is everything OK with Sephiri?” Brenda asked again, louder.

“It's nothing bad. As a matter of fact—”

“In what ways is he different now, Dr. Watson?”

“Well, he's drawing, which is something he's been known to do before. But not like this. Nothing like this. What he did today . . . It's just better discussed in person, Mrs. Thompson. I'd like to set something up with both of you as soon as possible. Today, if you can.”

Brenda's throat was dry, and she struggled to control her nerves. She wasn't ready for more issues with Sephiri. She was already overwhelmed by the state he was in now. She could not do any of the things that mothers were normally compelled to do with their children in tow without grave consequences. Simple things like trips to the aquarium or the petting zoo. Even the parks held myriad challenges. She could not take Sephiri grocery shopping with her. All the smells and crowds at supermarkets seemed to trigger his mania. The beeps of the scan machines, the opening and slamming of cash registers, the incessant bell of the sliding automatic doors as customers came in and out seemed to disorient him, so that he became quickly agitated and broke into high-pitched keening, spinning, and knocking things over.

If she attempted to troll the aisles, Sephiri would fixate on a row of something on a shelf, becoming as immobile as a statue, staring and staring, while she tried to pull him away. It took nearly an hour to put ten things into the shopping cart. Other times, he would take the melons, tomatoes, and green apples—always something round, anything round—from the produce bins and arrange them in a long line on the floor down the center of the aisle. If Brenda tried to stop him, he would rage and thrash around on the linoleum, with the old women shaking their heads in disgust and the young mothers looking on with thinly veiled arrogance and pity in their eyes. If one thing changed even slightly in her routine of getting him out of the house and in front of the stop where the van from the center came to pick him up, all efforts were lost to wild tantrums or “accidents” in his pants. What else could it be now? Brenda wondered. Weren't the daily chases, the screams, the silence enough? She was already overwhelmed. There wasn't room for more.

“Mrs. Thompson? When do you think would be a good time?” the doctor asked.

“I'll call you back in a bit to arrange something,” Brenda said. Before the doctor could say another word, she hung up the phone.

Brenda heard someone come into the large department space and settle in another cubicle somewhere beyond the view of her own. There was the sound of a photocopying machine sputtering to life. The doctor's request for a meeting churned in her mind. What was to be arranged now?

And his father . . .

She thought of the day she'd received a petition for divorce from Horus's attorney, thirty days after he had been interred at Black Plains Correctional Institute. “No contact from family.” That was what the note read that the attorney attached to the divorce papers according to Horus Thompson's request. The attorney urged her to grant it, saying that it had been his “final wish.” She had not wanted to believe that the black ink on that line was his signature, the letters slanted and curled in that familiar way. But what was left to believe? Everything they did and planned together was swept aside in one day. The future of the child that was growing inside of her was doused by his father even before birth.

She kept the divorce papers under her mattress for another six months before she was able to open the envelope and read the words, to stare at his signature again. She signed on the line and went to the bathroom to vomit. She signed the papers and screamed and cried in the shower, with Sephiri bawling in his crib in the next room, with the scalding water raining down on her scalp. Since then, her rage had burned down and was molten now. She was too tired, too weighted with unhappiness, to fuel a bonfire of hate anymore. She thought of her signed copy of the divorce papers, buried still in the basement, under the tiles she had ripped up with the end of a hammer, yellowing on the concrete foundation.

Your son did something today . . .

Brenda sank back in her office chair, her face newly coated with sweat. Sephiri. His very name meant “secret place.” And that had been true since his conception. She did not have the chance or the heart to tell Horus she was pregnant. After the verdict, after the devastation, Brenda spent days wandering the city and the grounds of the national monuments, haunting the botanical gardens and the corridors of art galleries. She stood in front of a hanging tapestry for hours at a museum, a sprawling emerald world of rolling hills and valleys of flowers, the Indian Ocean crashing on the shores of the South African coast. “They call it Sephiri,” a voice said from behind Brenda that day. A museum guide smiled at her when she turned around. “It means the hidden place that exists in your heart,” he said.

And Brenda stared at the green tapestry and rubbed her pregnant belly for a long time after the guide had said this. In her mind, she walked into that tapestry, into the downy valley of tender grass and through the meadow of white arum lilies. She knelt at the foothills of Outeniqua and dug a hole with her hands. There she laid the life she was never to have with Horus to rest and covered it over with dark soil. For his body was laid in state someplace else. He was now buried beneath the barren, rocky soil of the Black Plains Correctional Institute, to asphyxiate slowly on what he had done, to starve from what he had left undone.

These were things she once thought happened only to other men and women. And every time she looked at Sephiri's face, the guilt of what she kept from Horus cut into her like bits of glass. Should she have told Horus about his son? As he was led away to face the beginning of the end of his life, should she have told him that a part of him would still linger among the living? Would that have offered him a final psalm to carry through the gates of oblivion? Or would telling him have quickened his death, killed him twice over with the knowledge of something that was evidence of both his power and his powerlessness? She didn't know. She had never been able to understand which would have been better, and now she could only mourn what could never be salvaged.

“Your boy, Horus,” Brenda whispered, looking at the calendar tacked to the wall of her cubicle, her tears blurring the date, her body numb. “What about Sephiri?”