Swarm (29 page)

“We?” Phoenix said, but Thomson gripped her arm.

“Of course,” he said brightly, but by the stiffness in Phoenix's face I could tell that it was probably over, that part of her life, the last viable option I thought I had. The heavy garbage bag pulled my right arm down. With my left hand I covered my face. The explosion reverberated again in my brain and I realized I couldn't stop it, that it had already happened, was real. Everything in me ached to go back to the beginning. I wanted to have stayed with Phoenix and Thomson, to have made my amends with her, broken up with Marvin, returned to my old apartment, relived it all and done it right. Called my parents. Held on to my things. Not planted the bomb.

Phoenix pulled a scarf out of her coat pocket. I pressed it against my face. The fabric smelled sour, like milk gone off. I could tell that was all she was going to give me. No protection, advice, a tampon compassionately handed over in an emergency: the things women expect from each other. But Thomson was there and as I blubbered, drooled snot into Phoenix's scarf, I told him how much I wanted a home.

“Everyone does,” said Thomson. His voice was tender, worn from the earlier effort of talking about hard things. He curved his hands around my upper arms. “We'll make one together.”

I looked at Phoenix, but she was staring over my shoulder. I glanced back and saw people, three or four of them, walking through the intersection. A man dragging a pipe that clattered hollowly over the broken asphalt. I wondered what we looked like, what I did. I hadn't seen my reflection since the day before when I'd fussed with my hair in the bathroom of that basement place before Marvin picked me up for the bombing, as if it had been a date.

“Come on,” Phoenix said. We hurried to Marvin's squat. There was no more time for tears.

By
the time we got back it was raining. We hurried around the side of the row house, our feet appearing as watery reflections in the cellar windows. The kitchen was silent and cold and I wasn't surprised that Marvin hadn't returned. I was used to him disappearing for days. I dreaded what he might tell me when he returned so part of me wanted him to stay away.

For lunch we split the second can of sardines and a box of half-crushed crackers Phoenix had found. The food supplies we'd retrieved from the diner would keep us going for a couple days—half a large bag of red lentils, potatoes that needed their vines cut away, seven or eight carrots. After we ate, we went into the living room, all of us wondering what to do, I think. It reminded me of those boring summer days when I was a kid and my dad would bring my mom and me to his high-school buddy's trailer on the manmade lake near our farm. How I rode my bike around in endless circles on the narrow, gritty roads, walked as far as I could into tepid water, dove down to clutch at the bottom. My mother, on a blanket, stroking the dry grass, reading through dark glasses.

Thomson took the chair while Phoenix sat on the edge of their mattress. Over her head I could see the Jump Ship map and my fingers itched to take it down, use it as a fire-starter. Neither of them had said anything about it and I kept waiting for them to notice, step closer, peer into the sparkle of the stars and innocently ask, “What's this?”

We made up jobs that day. Thomson thought the walls of the house were insulated, that we could pull yellow or pink fibres loose and use them to blanket the windows on either side of the hearth. They weren't doing any good. “They're just holes in the walls, sucking out the fire's heat.”

It was a project for us.

Upstairs, in a bedroom at the front of the house, Phoenix and I broke open a wall. Scarves tied over our mouths, we used the iron poker from the fireplace to smash apart the plaster while Thomson watched. We found a tangle of yellowed newspapers, and the three of us sat on the dusty floor reading articles about an expedition to Antarctica and severe job losses after the Wall Street crash. Thomson pulled the papers apart like he was plucking feathers from a bird, delicately and with great care. He pointed out advertisements for automobiles, silent movies, kit houses, and syrups claiming to cure a wide range of ailments.

“Everything and nothing has changed,” he said.

We never did find insulation.

Like
a mom, Phoenix asked me to set the table across the room from the fireplace. I used a hodgepodge of dishes from Marvin's cupboards and spoons we brought back from the diner. Thomson even put his Buddha candle into the centre. He'd had it for years. Dust was caked in the crease of its belly, the wick frayed on top. With ceremony, he lit it.

“Impermanence,” he said as we ate the soup Phoenix had made for supper. We watched the fat, smiling face melt away. With the change in the weather and the damage we'd seen at the diner, we all knew the bees were gone. That was their funeral, I think.

After we ate, Thomson stayed at the table reading. Phoenix and I went to the mattress. The three of us solid within the shifting orange light of the fire. Phoenix pulled items out of her backpack, stuffed full from the diner. She sat beside me, and when she moved, I felt the springs give, the press of her leg against mine. Smelled her: sweat and a faint treacle of perfume, a different kind, one I hadn't noticed before. She ripped apart a torn flannel shirt of Thomson's, blue with black stains on the cuffs, brown spots freckled across the front, to show me how to make pads for when my period came. I felt embarrassed with Thomson there, but he didn't seem to care. He was deep inside another book, although he hadn't finished
Black Robe
. We'd seen it outside the diner, the cover torn off, pages trampled into the mud. I resolved to find him another copy but never have. Instead, over the years, we've talked the story through, drawing it to various conclusions—some happy, others terribly tragic. It doesn't help that it was based on historical fact, with an ending already written.

Phoenix pulled out a pair of partially rusted scissors and a tiny sewing kit in a red plastic box. She asked me when my period would come and I told her that I didn't really know.

“Maybe another week,” I said as she cut into Thomson's shirt.

She showed me how to sew the pieces together. My silver needle slipped through the fabric, weaving a line of bright red thread. We worked awhile in a deep throb of silence, until Phoenix looked over and reached for the fabric in my hands.

“Your stitches are too loose. Pull them out and make them smaller.” She picked at the threads with her short fingernails before handing back my work. “Didn't your mother teach you to sew?”

“Not really.” But I'd learned other things: how to plant corn, cook, care for men.

“Where are your parents?” Phoenix asked.

I felt a stab of grief. Remembered the phone, how it rang and rang before I'd left my last message.

I must have looked sad, staring down at my sewing, plucking out the tiny strands, because Phoenix said, “Are they dead?”

“No,” I said, surprised. The fire was burning down. I got up and laid a split length of door trim across the flames. When I sat down, she asked: “Do you want your own children?”

“Someday.”

“Not with Marvin?”

I smiled. I couldn't imagine Marvin as a father.

Phoenix kept sewing, her stitches quick and close. I adjusted my arm to avoid the lift and fall of her elbow. “I don't hate him, you know.”

“I thought you hated me.”

She paused with her arms resting on her knees. “I wasn't sure what you wanted.”

“And now you are?”

She shrugged. “You're searching. You moved here, didn't you?”

I thought she meant Marvin's. I wasn't sure how that showed anything positive.

“From that small town,” she clarified.

Leaving home hadn't seemed like a choice. That night my father hadn't let me sleep. Even as I gathered all the items from my purse—loose sticks of pink gum, crumpled receipts, a comb woven with my long hair—he'd kept at me, telling me how things were, would be, everything in the world I had to be afraid of. I still felt it, the sickness in my belly, the bruises left from his voice.

When he finally went to bed, I stayed up with my mother arguing about the life I wanted. Over and over she asked me what I thought I could have. Did I imagine something spectacular? That was the word she used, gesturing at the curtained window, spit flying from the sharp consonants.

“I guess,” I said to Phoenix.

“It takes courage to leave, to try something new.” Her eyes drifted over to Thomson, who was watching us, the book flat on his lap, pages bright like wings. He shook his head. “No.”

“There's nothing left here,” Phoenix said.

“There are still people who need us.”

“The ones who drove us out?”

Thomson stood up. “We talked about this. We rest and then we start again.”

Phoenix lowered her hands to her lap. The needle caught the light and shone like a delicate thorn. “How do we start again? Where?”

“It's what I want,” Thomson said, lifting his book. From where we were sitting, it seemed to cover his face. Phoenix jabbed at the flannel, steadily working. Her face had hardened. We stopped talking and I focused on my task, squinting at the binding thread. After a while, Thomson said, “It isn't just us anymore. We aren't alone.” His gaze shifted from Phoenix's downturned face to mine. Our eyes met and moved away and soon we settled back into our tasks. It was complicated, but it was love, the tender green beginnings, pushing hard through all the dirt.

Supper as usual,
but not enough for all of us. Thomson too sick to eat and I opted not to, nauseous with hunger as I made a plate for you in the kitchen. The jars you had stolen were enough to last awhile, but what if it wasn't you? All I knew was that you'd been eating the meals I set out, that this link had been built, a bridge between your wild self and me. I had decided I would maintain it, despite Marvin, my sense of betrayal. No matter what.

Fried bulrush root, the last hunk of the trout we'd had for lunch. Half a tomato, the seeds gone black. I dug them out. I covered it all with a cloth, the ancient plastic wrap used up, and left it on the porch like a stubborn message.

Marvin carried the food back inside. The round, red plate hovering between us. “Why are you doing this?”

“Do you need to understand?”

He pointed at the fish. “I caught that. I slave over that. My fingers bleed from the nets.”

Thomson coughed. We turned to the sound, braced, shifted back to face each other.

“You want to be like an animal. Snarling over what's yours?”

“If it comes to that.”

I waited, but he didn't say anything else. “We can't pretend she doesn't exist.”

“I'm not pretending,” he said. He swung his hand up to gesture at the emptied pantry. “She's made herself very clear.”

“She's a child,” I said slowly, loudly, as if talking to someone who was deaf or didn't understand the language.

“We don't have the luxury of feeding every lost waif. How much wood do you think we've got left on the island? How many fish in the bay?” He rifled violently through the gold discs piled on the counter. Two fell to the floor. “How many usable tops for canning?”

His face had tightened like the hatch of our root cellar. No light showing through. My stomach growled, but I laid my hand on its concavity. I turned away, walked into the dining room, and headed for the stairs to our bedroom. Marvin followed me.

“I don't understand what you're doing,” he shouted up at me. The present tense was startling, as if you were the thing that demanded analysis, not the choices I'd made early on with him. What about that? The story I was trying to tell.

The next morning, after Marvin had left, the food was gone. I chose to believe that you took it, that you'd eaten your share.

Thomson
rallied.

“I thought I was a goner,” he said as he looked around the room. Purple spots the size of plums dotted both cheeks, although the whites of his eyes were still yellow. Both of the pill containers sat on the scarred table, next to the cup I put down. I wondered if Marvin had given them to him the night before but didn't bother asking. Thomson wouldn't remember.

“So did we,” I said, my voice catching. I cleared my throat and his gaze swung over to me. If he thought I was getting sick neither of us admitted it. For a while, in the beginning, I'd tied a scarf over my mouth but it got in the way.
My nightingale
, he called me then, when he wasn't in remission, his voice thick with delirium.

Thomson's legs, knotted in the coiled blanket, swung off the couch as he sat up. We rearranged the bedding, put a pillow behind his upper back, and I helped him hold the tea. Four hands lifting it to his mouth. His Adam's apple bobbed sluggishly in his skinny throat. He looked slowly around the room like he was a visitor who had just arrived. When his eyes reached the coffee table, he pulled away from the mug. The thin green liquid dribbled down his chin, spotted his shirt. “What are those doing here?”

The pills. Bright red dots in the clear glass jar. Only six left.

“Mr. Bobiwash,” I said. “Jack.” His name a new motion in my mouth. “Brought them. For you.”

Thomson shook his head, a constant swing, even as he spoke. “They're not mine. They're not meant for me. I don't want them.” He coughed, hunched forward. I laid a hand on the back of his neck.

“It's only a few—” I started to say. A few days. A few days of life.

But Thomson shrugged my hand off, pushed me away. His voice was gruff. “I don't want them.”

My bottom lip trembled. A burn of sorrow behind my nose, in the centre of my head. Thomson touched my arm.

“I'm more curious than afraid,” he said.

Tears threatened, but I held them back with a quaking wall, eyes closed until the footings took.