Swarm (25 page)

I
heard Shannon before I saw her. Grunting from exertion; glass smashing. The baby was screaming inside the house. I jogged up their short driveway to see Shannon lift her arm like a baseball pitcher. An object flew out, hit their garage door, and shattered into shiny fragments. I expected food to slop out: my tomatoes and strawberries, mushy white slabs of zucchini, but as I got closer I heard wood snapping and nearly tripped over a pewter frame. Shannon pulled another picture out of a box beside her. The boys were in the yard, Eric with his hands over his ears, Graham relentlessly spinning.

“What are you doing?” I called as Shannon hurled the second picture. The glass smashed, the pink frame split at all its corners, the photo curled out.

“Cleaning house,” Shannon said as I walked closer. I saw that the picture was an image of Mona, baby Abby on her lap.

“Let's go inside.”

“Mind your own beeswax.”

“Where's Mr. Bobiwash?”

She crossed her arms, still dressed in the plaid shirt she'd unbuttoned at the funerals, the white gridded lines showing like slim edges of glass. Her eyes slid across the hem of trees at the end of their field. The coyote called again, and Graham moaned but Shannon didn't notice.

“Jack,” she said. “Fucking call him Jack.”

“Come on,” I told her, losing patience. I was surprised when she did. We left the mess she'd made for morning: the photos spread on the ground like frost.

Eric
calmed the baby while I made tea. Peppermint, the last of the bag that I'd brought days earlier. Their supplies were very limited and I wondered if they were being stolen from as well. It chilled me because of the mouths they had to feed: three boys and the baby. I wondered how much you could eat.

“Did he go to the lighthouse?” I asked as I carried two mugs to the table. Shannon sat with her feet apart, boots still on. The pills were there, the single bottle they'd taken. I could steal them, I realized, easily slide them out from under Shannon's dull gaze. But when I looked back she was staring at me.

“God knows. He was gone when I woke up.”

“Has the baby fed?”

She nodded absently, and I didn't know if she was telling the truth.

We sipped in silence. The tea was tepid because I'd shut the stove off early, saving power, so I swallowed as quickly as I could, mindful of getting home. There were no lights on, no candles or kerosene lanterns. If they were like us, they'd be conserving the kerosene because the boat brought it.

After a few minutes I said, “Maybe you should see Sarah.”

Shannon stared at me. I leaned forward. “She has herbs: St. John's wort, valerian.”

She smiled, a hard, disbelieving grin. “And that'll help with the children?” The door clicked open. I pushed my chair back and looked through the doorway. Samuel held a finger to his lips and slipped upstairs. When I turned back, Shannon said, “You can't understand. You've never been a mother.”

I felt angry and then embarrassed, and then a strange absence of emotion. The way she'd said it was matter-of-fact, telling a truth. She put the tea down and pushed it away like she didn't want it anymore.

“It's like this. They need you. Like parasites. You're the host.”

Her eyes focused on mine, seeking sympathy. And it was then that I told her about you, partly to show her that I did understand, that I had a child to care for and feed. She listened carefully as I called you Melissa, as I described you as my own.

Back
home, Thomson lay on the couch, damp and quaking, his fever back. My fingers jumped away from the heat on his forehead. Marvin came in from the kitchen as I was peeling the covers off to change him into dry clothes. Thomson pulled at the torn satin hem of the pink blanket, fighting me. I felt panicky. My fault, my fault, and my guilt came out in a blast of anger.

“Help me,” I shouted at Marvin. Together we stripped off the damp cotton of Thomson's T-shirt, peeled off his sticky pants.

When he was settled again, I twisted open the bottle of pills and fed him one. The doctor had told us to use only the two medications together. I remembered that day—the boat bobbing up and down, fastened to the cement pier with fat yellow ropes wound around iron cleats. The vertical line in the doctor's forehead had deepened as he spoke. “We're working with a limited supply,” he'd said. “We're back to the Stone Age.” But I hadn't wanted to hear.

In the kitchen, I crumpled stained pages from an old news magazine and piled them in the cookstove under a tepee of kindling. When bubbles filled the bottom of the pot of water, I made tea as I had at Shannon's, but this one out of a mixture of mullein and thyme and mint, ingredients we still had. Marvin pulled Thomson up, one large flat hand holding his back while he put a pillow under his head with the other.

“Does he really need
tea
right now?” he asked sarcastically, but I ignored him. Kneeling, I spooned the tepid, green brew into Thomson's mouth. When he tried to speak, it dribbled onto his neck.

“Alive,” he said, and I shushed him. Marvin stood back, watching like a new father, unsure what to do. Thomson laid his hand on my forearm, those long, slender digits, fingernails dirty because I didn't clean them enough. “Who has time for a manicure?” he'd joked with me the other week when I came in from snapping the suckers on the tomato plants, trying to get all the fruit we could, only days before you'd showed up. Thomson tried again. His eyes swam over mine, trying to focus. Like a drunk, he carefully enunciated.

“The hives.”

“I know,” I told him and wiped the wetness from his lips with my sleeve. The sound of the swarm came back to me: that insistent hum as they held their formation without any walls, no neatly structured home.

How did they do that? I had never asked and now Thomson was beyond such conversations, opening his mouth for the spoon like an infant. When the cup was half done, I set it down, and he slumped back but then opened his eyes again, surprising me. I readied another spoonful.

“I see her,” he mumbled, rippling the surface of the tea.

“Who?” I asked as Marvin walked over and turned the lock on the door. Had you been there while we were out?

When
Thomson was asleep, Marvin told me he hadn't found the food.

“Where did you look?”

“The caves, the lighthouse.”

“When were you at the lighthouse?”

“Why?”

“I was there. I saw a candle.”

“When?”

“Tonight.” I waved my hand. “Earlier.”

He glanced at Thomson and I knew what he was thinking.
You left him?

“I didn't go in,” I said.

“Probably Sam,” Marvin told me. “Maybe he meets a girl there.”

I didn't believe that. “We'll keep looking,” I said, but Marvin shook his head.

“It's long gone.”

I curled a fist against my mouth. Seeing the slender supplies at the Bobiwash house had scared me. How would we get by, keep Thomson alive through the winter? Was it you? And why, when I was already sharing with you, inviting you into our family, our home? For the first time in many years, I felt like Marvin and I were on the same side: you had betrayed me.

It was dawn, the first fragile light like the inside iridescence of a shell. We'd been up all night.

“Bed,” Marvin said.

“You go,” I told him, drinking the rest of Thomson's tea. He looked at me with suspicion, but I saw the heaviness in him and he hoisted himself up the stairs. I sat in the armchair, watching Thomson sleep. A couple hours later I woke as Marvin clomped across the floorboards to go fishing. Later in our bed, I dreamt there was a flood. We rushed to the attic to keep from drowning, and through the window, I saw Phoenix. She was naked and hugely pregnant, her bellybutton popped out. Her face and swollen body were illuminated by angles of light slicing down through the water. She looked happy. I struggled to open the window, but it had been painted shut and then she was just gone, swallowed by deep green at the edge of the sea.

The day after
Margo visited me Marvin took me for a late lunch. It was our first real date. When he came to get me I went into the bathroom and put on the lipstick Margo had brought with my things. He didn't notice. His eyes flicked around the place, moving from the nest of blankets on the couch to the jug of milk sitting out on the counter. We stood awkwardly in the kitchen, trying to find words because the connection between us had changed. After the Empire Tavern, I'd told him how I thought I felt and I couldn't take the words back. I felt vulnerable and he was all business—slipping the milk back in the fridge, crackling with his unspoken expectations of me. I admit it was exciting to have him there, especially after the deadening, lonely blur of basement living, but as he leaned against the table, watching me, there were gaps between us, like the spaces between those Russian dolls. He hadn't kissed me. I wasn't sure how we fit or what he wanted or how we'd ever get around to speaking about the bomb.

On the way to the restaurant—a glossy place with a patio full of steel and glass bistro tables—we talked about how warm it was. The crocuses were already beginning to bloom, their purple heads hovering over the dirty remains of the snow. The weather would be good for Phoenix and Thomson, I thought, remembering the pots of herbs they grew outside the back glass door. The hives.

It had been a long time since I'd eaten a good meal. I had to intentionally slow down, stop myself from stuffing the fresh baked rosemary bread in my mouth, sucking the marrow from the chicken bones. When we finished, I dipped my fingers in the bowl of warm lemony water the waiter delivered and watched as Marvin fished three bills out of an envelope full of money.

“Where'd you get that?” I asked, reckless, and wasn't surprised when he ignored me. It was from his mother, I know now, a psychotherapist who lived near one of the city's ravines. The house he grew up in was built in the 1920s and had stained-glass windows and the tulip trees in the yard that Phoenix had told me about. Marvin only told me about his family that first winter, when the three of us filled the cold nights with bits of our stories, thinking we weren't going to survive.

After lunch, Marvin led me down a side street and turned west along an alley. We popped out at a quiet intersection and crossed diagonally to a coffee shop called Galaxies. He wasn't talking and his silence seemed purposeful, as if it was carefully aimed. As soon as I saw Walter, I knew.

“Now?” I hissed, but Marvin only smiled. He hadn't prepared me or even asked me, only dragged me into his trap. The place was crowded. I couldn't say anything. In the back, we found a table near Walter but pretended not to know him. I watched him, reading one of the community papers. He rubbed the side of his nose, and I noticed the slant to it and wondered how it had been broken. We sat there a long time, nearly an hour, until the three of us faded into the background and no one noticed us anymore. All the while, Marvin played with my hand, rubbing my wrist, whispering praise like a doctor doing an examination—
just relax, you're doing great, don't look around too much, that's right
. Any resistance I had, he softened it, and when Walter finally downed the last of his drink and walked out, I moved with Marvin to his table. Marvin read while I chewed on the straw in my lemonade. And when he smiled at me, I stood with him, and he pulled a black backpack out of a shadow under the table where Walter had left it.

Down the street, we stopped and he slid it on my shoulders. My arms thrust back and through the straps. Breath held. A weight I didn't know how to refuse. If I put it down, where would I have gone? A question that is simple to answer in retrospect: to my parents, despite their deep imperfections, or somewhere, anywhere, else.

We walked a long way, passing through the city's silver high-rises to get to the poorer side of town. I wanted to ask questions, but Marvin had started talking a lot, lecturing me about people he knew, friends of his mother's, who paid small fortunes to escape the hard winter, burning barrels of oil for one fun week in the sun.

“They feel nothing. There's no moral obligation. No concern for the future.”

I wondered how he knew that.

“Your children,” he said. “Mine.” I heard the division there, and because, for those last few moments, those final city blocks, I was still a young, naive girl, I thought I knew what he was trying to tell me.
We're not together; there's no future here.
I felt angry. My eyes scanned the details of the street: the doorways that opened as we walked by, a blond woman carrying her shopping bags, a store window that displayed fake white furs and recycled red leather shoes. Eventually I blurted out a question.

“What happened with you and Margo?”

“Christ, Sandy. Really?”

“Yeah.” I shifted the backpack, gently, like a baby.

“What are you? Fifteen?”

“Were you ever with Phoenix?”

He pulled a hand-rolled cigarette out of his pocket and stopped walking to light it. I regretted bringing her up, but all he said was, “What do you think?”

Under the tight strap, I shrugged. I didn't meet his eye; instead my gaze followed a woman in a belted fuchsia dress on the other side of the street. People were happy in that neighbourhood, I realized. It was a part of the world that seemed intact, without worries, apart from the security guards standing in the shop doorways, the cameras perched over us that Marvin had told me to ignore. It was wealthy.

“She's like my sister,” he said, and when I didn't reply he nudged my shoulder with his own. “Relax,” he breathed, exhaling a thin stream of smoke. That wasn't possible. My limbs moved stiffly, my back tensed under a backpack weighted down with a pipe bomb attached to a modified cellphone, hidden in a resin-hardened book.