Swarm Page 12

  “Come on,” he said. “We aren’t hosting a state dinner.” It felt like that, as if every day we were readying for an important occasion: a dinner with royalty, a political summit.

  Already I’d been to fetch another round of water and it was now nearly gone. I didn’t want to go again. I moved closer to Thomson, although I didn’t even know what he wanted me for. She looked at me, studied my face.

  “Fine,” she said, sounding annoyed, and examined the gleaming blade before setting it down to work on the next dull tool.

  Outside, Thomson and I walked along the empty storefronts.

  “I thought you could use a break,” he said.

  Gently, I slid my hands into my pockets. They hurt from the bleach. I stared down the street at the park at its end, the city beyond.

  “This is how she moves forward,” Thomson told me. “How she makes sense of things.” When I didn’t respond, he said, “She must always be giving.”

  I nodded, but I was thinking that it would be great to be on the receiving end. I felt like a slave. Even my paying job hadn’t been so hard.

  “Shouldn’t people be allowed some freedom?” I said.

  Thomson stopped. We stood beside a smashed-up Starbucks I hadn’t noticed before.

  “You came to us, remember? She isn’t the enemy.”

  Still, I felt afraid of her, her sternness, the stubbornness of her walls. I wondered if we could ever be friends. Thomson turned the corner and I followed. My eyes filled with tears—mostly because I was exhausted, my hands hurt, I didn’t know how much more I could take. I hadn’t even contacted Margo. Looking back I realize that was the beginning, Melissa: my initiation, my first understanding of what adult life would be like. Things that you grew up learning: how difficult it is to exist on this earth, to survive.

  But Thomson didn’t give me any sympathy. “It’s only been a few days,” he said, and I pushed the heel of my hand against my cheekbone, wiping away the tears.

  We were at the hives by then, down the laneway where I’d first knocked on their window, wanting in. Thomson pushed the last slivered ridge of snow off the white box. His knuckles were covered in scars and one fresh wound, red and scabbed over. Although the nights were warming up, it was still too cold to expose the bees, but I listened as he named each part: hive body or super. Frames, foundation, brood chamber. He laid one hand on the top of the hive and before he could speak, I said, “Home.”

  We didn’t have enough food to host the soup kitchen that night and the freedom felt like a snow day had when I was a kid. We did have bones, though, and Phoenix set a stock to bubbling in a huge pot, mixing in carrot shreds, broccoli stalks, and a clove of garlic. The hot plate stayed on low, using a trickle of energy from the solar-charged battery pack that had been sucking up the sunlight on the springlike days we were having. The smell made my stomach growl. I was always hungry because of how hard I was working. That day, after the hives, I’d helped clean the chimney and then had gone for more water after all.

  Phoenix brought tea into the back room while Thomson stayed in the kitchen. I sat up to accept a cup, leaning my back against the closet door, which pushed inward from my weight. Phoenix’s cup cooled on the coffee table as she worked on mending one of Thomson’s shirts.

  When I was tired of the silence, I asked, “What’s the plan for tomorrow?”

  “More of the same.”

  I nodded. Tiny leaves bobbed on the tea’s surface.

  “Does Marvin ever come by?”

  “You’re still thinking about him,” she said, and I pushed my shoulders up in a shrug. It was true: he ate at me, partly because I felt forgotten.

  “He’s good-looking,” Phoenix said.

  “Yeah.”

  “And he knows it.”

  “I guess you know him well,” I said. She didn’t answer so I took a breath, about to dive. “He told me about you, in Mexico.” I nudged my head to one side. “Before.”

  The shirt slumped on her lap. It was blue, the kind a businessman might once have worn: a pointed collar, wide cuffs. “He’s quick to share everybody’s stories but his own.”

  “You don’t like him, do you?”

  She shifted. I saw the slight give in her face as she decided to answer.

  “We have history.”

  Sounds came from the kitchen: the splash of water, the ting of hard things—fingernails, Thomson’s ring—against the aluminum bowl used as a washbasin. Her eyes lifted, met mine.

  “Not like that. Not sexual.” She picked out a thread. “Thomson knew Marvin’s mother from university. They’d been lovers, then friends. We moved in with them when we came from Mexico. We were children, like brother and sister.”

  I hadn’t seen any sibling closeness between them, only a kind of wrestling, arguments over principles.

  “I understand him,” she said, “but I can’t help him.”

  Marvin seemed like the last person who needed help, who needed anything, actually. We were silent, breathing in the scent of mint. The night had settled. She sat against the black square of the doorway, like an actress on stage.

  Finally I said, “Tell me where you come from.”

  Candles cast drifting veils of light over her face. I watched the slow reveal of her wide forehead, cheeks, lips, as she told me about the hollow, breathy howl of jungle monkeys, her parents’ stuccoed house where spiders crawled out of the cracks, how they’d run a stick around the rim of a log hive and pull out drooling honey. The story looped back, skipping over her mother’s violent death, to the cold Canadian November, Marvin’s mother’s home, the tulip tree in the front yard with its huge pink blooms turned to frosted clumps. In the kitchen, Thomson sang in Czech. Phoenix’s voice dropped so I had to lean forward to hear.

  “We had to come here,” she said. “At his rooming house there were used needles on the floor and everyone smoked and his . . .” she swallowed hard, sat back, and I saw her start to stiffen. “It was in the news, all about this place; how could we not help?”

  Her gaze fell away. Abruptly, she stood, took my cup, and it clattered against her own.

  “It’s history,” she said—meaning, I think, and the rest is history—but I didn’t correct her. When she left the room, I pushed down inside my blankets and curled onto my side, a trembling vibration inside me, and brought Marvin into my mind, remembering how he’d kissed me, and more.

  I slept well. The weather was warm enough that we only needed a fire in the deepest part of the night. In the morning I found Phoenix in the kitchen, scattering tarragon over the surface of the soup, white bones set aside on a plate. Thomson and Zane stood at the front of the diner, draped in bright light from a hole in the wall that had been the rest of the window.

  “What happened?” I asked, and as Thomson turned my way I heard the glass crunch under his shoes. “They came back?”

  “It’s all right,” Phoenix said but with an angry snap in her voice. Was it Marvin? I wondered. Had he done this?

  All day long I tried to ask her, but she kept her distance, avoided me when I attempted to catch her eye. I focused on following instructions and did extra things like cleaning the counter without being told and washing out towels, but throughout the long morning and into the afternoon, she ignored me. The openness she’d shown me the night before had closed.

  Then, shortly before the soup kitchen opened, she finally spoke to me.

  I was peeling carrots, three bags of them, their caps a tangle of pale yellow roots. She came in and out of the room and finally I saw her fill a kettle with water and place it on the free burner. As I worked at the counter, she walked up to me and said, bluntly, “I think it’s time to wash.” Eyes on mine, she waited for me to catch her meaning. At first I thought she meant the carrots and I moved quickly to the basin of boiled, treated water, but as I dropped in the handful of orange sticks, I realized she meant myself.

  “Oh,” I said, tightening my arms against my sides, trapping the smell, and she left me there to a
nswer someone’s question. My face burned red. For days I’d been so caught up in the work, in answering her needs, that I hadn’t bothered with the demands of my own body. Luckily, my period hadn’t come.

  Did I hate her then? Yes and no.

  She returned, arriving in silence beside me.

  “So let me help,” she said and carried a silver bowl of hot water into the back, beckoning with her head for me to follow. I didn’t. Not right away. Really I wanted to run away, let my humiliation lead me back to Margo and complain about this bitch with the weird name who I didn’t understand. But I followed.

  She put the bowl on the coffee table, a towel on the floor for me to stand on. I crossed my arms over my chest.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “You didn’t realize?” That was Phoenix. Honesty like a razor-sharp stinger. “Sandy,” she said, like I was a child. Emotion clogged my throat. I didn’t move.

  She tapped a few drops from a brown bottle into the water. The scent of lavender drifted up. I did what she wanted: unfastened the buttons of Thomson’s old cardigan and pulled off the long-sleeved shirt that said OCCUPATION EARTH in cracked orange letters. I wasn’t wearing a bra. Phoenix nudged a piece of wood into the morning’s coals to start the fire again while I took my pants off and my underwear and socks. Goosebumps stood out on my skin. Did she look at me? I don’t remember.

  From the restaurant, I heard Thomson cough. I must have looked nervous because she smiled and said, “It’s fine.” She rubbed soap into a cloth and ran the warm water up my spine, scrubbed behind my ears. I could have done it myself, but it felt good, her attention, the careful, tender touch she gave me that seemed so different from her fierce everyday commands.

  When she left the room, I cleaned between my legs. After she came back, I kneeled on the towel and let her wash my hair.

  “We should cut this. You’ll only get lice.”

  “All right,” I said, soapy water running into my eyes. I reached for a towel. My fingers closed around my shirt and when I brought it to my face I found the awful smell. The door swung open. Eyes cleared, I lifted my head to see. Marvin. He looked at us. Phoenix’s hands in my hair, a half-smile on her face. A red tint to mine. I think he knew right then how I felt, even before I did, but he’s never said anything. Not once, in all the years. I understand why. To begin that discussion is a step down a path he doesn’t want to travel, a trail toward his own guilt. And perhaps more than that: grief.

  My first instinct was to cover my breasts. Phoenix’s hands remained where they were, her fingers scrubbing at the roots. He closed the door and was gone.

  She leaned back from the sudden force of me. I pulled the stinky shirt on, jeans with no underwear, and shook her off when she reached for my slippery fingers. I went after him, running barefoot through the restaurant. Everyone watched. The street was crowded with people waiting for the soup kitchen. I didn’t see him, not even slipping around the corner toward his squat.

  Returning, I plucked the shirt away from my wet nipples. No one said anything. They were all wondering, I could tell, but I kept walking, my arms wrapped around myself, shivering from the cold.

  In the room, Phoenix was cleaning up. My underwear and socks kicked in a pile by the folded bedding, the towel tossed beside the washbasin. She gathered cups, including a mug containing a sticky pool of whisky. I wanted a drink.

  “Find him?” I shook my head. I wanted to leave, have a night off, head over to his place . . .

  “Start cutting some bread,” she ordered, moving toward the door. It was too much for me.

  “In a minute,” I snapped, and Phoenix turned so fast I felt the wind made by her body.

  “Marvin is a chicken-shit,” she blurted, and I almost laughed at how her accent made the slang seem crisp and artificial. “He’s scared of what he can’t control.” We stared at each other. “You see how he comes only when he feels like it. But you seem okay with that.” She left then. I stood there, skin clean under my filthy clothes. The fire hissed. I kicked at the bowl of water, spilling it. What I didn’t want to admit was how my body still hummed.

  Surprises exist, Melissa. We are never everything that we think we are. Even in a single lifetime, we are capable of shifts as huge as history. But that doesn’t mean that everything works out. Sometime I will tell you the story of the Titanic, an ocean liner they said couldn’t sink and it did. Sucked more than two miles down, to the bottom of the sea.

  Changed, wearing a pink top that looked like pyjamas and a pair of too-tight jeans stiff from being hung on a line, I went back. Phoenix was at the hotplate, a crowd of people around her. They pulled back, holding bits of food between their fingers, and as I got closer I saw the uncertainty on their faces. A huge frying pan spat and hissed, and Phoenix reached into a jar and dropped in another handful of squirming grasshoppers. They browned quickly.

  “Want one?” she asked as I walked by, but I ignored her. Someone else was cutting the bread. I went to the chalkboard where the jobs were written out. My name was on the bottom. Sandy: Dishwashing.

  It was the worst job—grease and vegetable bits and soggy bread crumbs accumulating in tepid water that could rarely be refreshed. The sting of bleach on my still raw hands. I turned to the sink and rolled up my sleeves and that was how I spent the night: staring down into dirty water, cleaning the mirror surfaces of the bowls.

  11 Island

  I ran home. Down the long, empty road with the huge blur of nature on either side. The backpack bounced on my shoulders. I wanted to drop it off and check on Thomson before moving up the coast to the caves. Once again, the house was empty. The chaise lounge and couch unoccupied, blankets dropped on the floor. In Thomson’s room, the stripped mattress was bare. Books, with creased and torn covers, piled on the side table. I spun around and went outside. An electric hum was in the air, like the sound that streetlights used to make, and I raced up the trail, through the pines to find Thomson standing in the clearing. Both hands wrapped around the handle of his cane. The pointed tip sunk into the sand.

  “You can’t keep coming here,” I started, but my voice faded out as I followed his gaze. A thick carpet of bees covered the face of the wooden hive. I moved to grab the smoker off the rubber bin, but Thomson stopped me. “That won’t help,” he said, and I remembered. So close to swarming, that was all they could think about: packing up, moving out. There wasn’t time to consider enemies. The smoker hung from my hand.

  “I didn’t get all the queens,” I said.

  “No.” He watched the buzzing crowd while I watched him. It took him a long time to speak. I was about to give up, grab his arm, try to force him back to the house, and leave to look for you, when he said, “We could try to kill the new queen. But they’ll die defending her. We’d get a lot of stings.” My head bobbed in useless agreement. We stood there watching and finally I said, “I think I know where she is.”

  “The queen?”

  “The girl,” I told him, and under my breath, because I wasn’t sure I wanted him to hear: “Melissa.”

  He glanced at me, eyes clouded, the whites yellowed. Lifting his stick, he swung the end toward the hive. “This is what’s happening,” he said, without moving his gaze from the hive.

  Chastised, I stood and watched. Don’t you care? I wanted to ask. I wondered if Marvin had gotten to him, if they’d been gossiping about Sandy’s delusions, if they knew something I didn’t. Thomson shifted, spread his legs in a V so he could stand more solidly. He switched his walking stick to his other hand so he could curl his fingers around my forearm. I felt his weight as the bees crowded closer, their sound growing louder. Their bodies glistened like facets in a slab of quartz. We wouldn’t have any more honey, not even the tiny supply we’d harvested the summer before and burned through quickly in winter. All the things the bees gave us would be gone and into my mind stormed images, things I tried not to think about: Phoenix, our past history, life a continual process of letting go. I leaned over to say that to Thomson, but he was f
ocused on the hive, waiting for the swarm to lift. His fingers white from holding tightly to his cane. Not wanting him to tire out, I ran over to the house and returned with a chair and a blanket to spread over his knees. As I sat on the ground, the dampness seeped through the seat of my pants. Finally I pulled the lid off the blue plastic bin and sat on it. “Can you settle?” Thomson said, his voice snapping amid the buzzing drone.

  “Sorry,” I muttered, but the truth was I didn’t want to be there. Inside me I felt the same frenetic energy as the bees, intent on going elsewhere now that I thought I knew where you were. But the longer I sat, Thomson silent in his chair, staring at the crowd of insects, the more I doubted myself, the more I thought you’d be gone, vanished, a fantasy that could no longer exist, once I climbed through the stone mouth of the cave.

  I pushed myself into a squat, ready to bolt. “Thomson?” He didn’t reply. The bees pressed tighter, the queen at their centre, preparing to move as one. Crowded at the hive’s opening, they grew louder and Thomson reached for me. His fingers tight around my own, his eyes glowing as several thousand bees lifted in a buzzing cone and floated over to the yellow goldenrod, the forest beyond. He pushed off the chair’s edge to stand. I helped him. Together we followed, our feet snapping fallen twigs, crushing pine cones. They were too fast for us. The colony drifted quickly away and finally disappeared.

  Thomson smelled. I’d been neglecting him. Lost in my reveries, as Phoenix would have said and Marvin had implied at the dump. Silently, we went back to the house. Thomson slumped against me, my arm around his back. He was as narrow as one of Mr. Bobiwash’s kids by then, but unlike them he had the stench of illness on him, of fever-sweat and rot. The caves would have to wait.