Swarm Page 15

  I went back to the shore. I hoped I wouldn’t find any more bodies as I looked for footprints in pockets of sand among the rocks. All I saw were the men’s large tracks so I turned inland and pushed through the cedar bush toward the lighthouse. I stopped when I saw it: that white tower with its fading red trim. We had lived there the first spring, sleeping in an old bed below the room with the heavy glass lens. The wind off the water shook all the windows in their frames and the dampness of the lake crept in. It wasn’t a good place for Thomson so we’d spent the last of our gas driving the short distance to our farmhouse, parked the car, and stayed.

  Inside, my feet crushed crumbled plaster on the kitchen floor. The walls were covered with pockmarked graffiti from teenagers who once had nothing to do. Upstairs, a quilt and pillow lay on the bare mattress, ones I hadn’t seen before. They smelled musty and old and I couldn’t imagine them being used for a child. I lifted the blanket in my hands and saw holes made by moths, maybe the large green lunas that look like fairies as they drift over the milkweed.

  In the yard, I stepped into the overgrown garden and gathered herbs—mint, roots of red baneberry, tall buttercup—to show Marvin that I was contributing and to keep the secret of my search. It was frustrating, this lack of evidence, of signs. Night after night I left out plates and in the morning they were always gone but there were no more footprints. You really were like one of Mr. Bobiwash’s ancestors, the Natives who slipped into those caves and never came out again. If I hadn’t seen you I might have believed you were a ghost. But now I knew exactly who you were—a shipwreck survivor, a castaway—and still it didn’t help.

  By the time I got home, Marvin was back, loosening tomatoes in his spidery fingers. A bowl sat in the squash vines, half full. He watched me walk to the house before standing from his crouch. I saw that he was angry so I held up the bag, a black fabric one.

  “Herbs.”

  He gestured to the ground, to the red and yellow orbs, scattered on the earth, spotted with black. “What about all this?”

  “I just did a bunch of canning.”

  “Then do some more.”

  “There are other things I want—”

  “You want,” he said. “Jesus Christ.” He glanced into the woods, into imagined winter, and I saw it too: the forest clotted with white. Us, snowbound in the house. If we were lucky, if we’d prepared, we’d survive by opening jar after jar of green beans and pickled onions. Eating hens’ eggs and salt fish and canned tomatoes and dried zucchini, rehydrated in melted ice.

  “I have to get out there,” he said, sweeping his arm along the horizon line of the lake. “I have to cut the fucking wood. The apples are dropping. And now there’s this.” The bodies, he meant. The dead like another harvest that couldn’t have waited. “I can’t do everything.”

  Then help me, I wanted to say, but instead I told him, “We’re fine. We have a lot.”

  “We never have a lot.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  Marvin dropped the tomato into the bowl. “I’m not really sure I do.”

  I paused. “I want to find her.”

  “Is she worth dying for?”

  “Were we?”

  I stared at him, all that history between us. Quietly he looked away. “Get ready for town,” he told me, “and help Thomson.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said and walked into the house.

  I buttoned Thomson’s mustard-yellow dress shirt as he stood, balanced with his hand on the back of the couch. He stepped into his black corduroy pants, puckered at the knees from darning.

  “You know you shouldn’t come,” I said, tying his belt. He sat down hard on the recliner. “Especially now.”

  “Why now?”

  “With the doctor gone.”

  “That’s why I’m going. To pay my respects. It’s civilized.”

  He pulled his scarf from between the couch cushions. It was Phoenix’s old orange one, patterned with large black stars, shot through with a silver weave that had snagged and broken over the years.

  “It’s worse when people just disappear,” Thomson said but in such a low voice I pretended not to hear him. He didn’t look at me as he tied the scarf over his mouth. I knew he meant Phoenix, how we’d just driven away afterwards, but his muffled voice said, “Like with the flu.” Those times we have to bury people quickly, without ceremony. I thought, too, of Mona and Abby. How they faded away, their flesh-and-blood bodies vanishing into the mist over the lake. His eyes sank away from mine. “He was a good man,” he said. “It’s important to acknowledge his life.”

  In the kitchen, I nearly ran into Marvin. He stumbled backward so Thomson’s tea sloshed over the side of the mug. I reached for the cup.

  “I’ll take it,” he said, pushing past me.

  On the porch, I ate a meal of applesauce and Solomon’s seal root. The crows stood in the branches of the trees. One lifted into flight, spreading the fingers of its wings against the sky. I wondered if I would see you in town. If you would stand like a shadow on the edge of the crowd and say goodbye to the doctor and the five strangers and the woman from the cave. Were you grieving? Could I comfort you? Would you let me hold your hand and not vanish from my grasp?

  In town, Mr. Bobiwash parked the wagon beside the playground and led Caesar, his donkey, to the water while Marvin, Thomson, Shannon, and I walked into the park. The baby lay in a navy blue sling, fastened against Shannon’s chest, and I resisted the urge to worm my arms into that warm hollow, pull the skinny body out, and run. Eight funeral pyres were set up near the marina building, which was half sunk into the lake, a faded sign in the broken window advertising FREE INTERNET WITH COFFEE PURCHASE. The bodies were laid out on piles of white driftwood. Anil Sharma moved between the shrouded corpses, building tents of kindling on their ribcages. His father, Anthony, followed, laying bouquets of goldenrod and tiger lily and purple bog aster. I could see his lips moving, mumbling prayers to his gods, his convictions stronger than ours. Many had only come because there would be a distribution of salvaged supplies—the few containers of damp flour and clothes and other things from metal bins found on the island’s rocky edge. We didn’t know if all the shipwrecked supplies had been found, or all the bodies, but there were no reports of survivors. I didn’t tell anyone else about you. I kept my eyes on Marvin and scanned the slim crowd. A gang of children ran around. The Bobiwash boys hadn’t come or else they would have been playing, except for Samuel, who was too old for that.

  Thomson hoisted his cane to wave at Albert, standing guard over the boxes of rations piled in the picnic shelter. We knew mostly everyone. About three families keep the town going, living in the empty stores along the main street that were looted years ago when the power went out and didn’t come back on. They run the weekly market where Marvin trades fish when he catches more than we need. In the Stedman’s store, its red sign smashed to shards, the shelves are filled with refurbished tools and other scavenged items alongside useless things like ice cube trays and DVD players and even a collection of credit cards in a pocket of aluminum foil. Meant for toys, I suppose, or artifacts. Beside Stedman’s is the old library, a limestone building with a single intact stained-glass window. In the beginning, Thomson and I went there to save books fallen in heaps from the tipped-over shelves and dotted with mouse droppings. I found Homesteading for Dummies, several volumes of Forest Plants of North America, and a few issues of Mother Earth News, although the pages ripped when I tried to peel them apart. Thomson collected novels. One, Fugitive Pieces, we’ve read many times. In the story, a little boy hides in a hole in the dirt during a long-ago war and a man rescues him and raises him as his own. “It was a kind of rebirth,” Thomson said. “Like this.” He meant our coming north. I could save you like that, Melissa. I could pull you from that damp cave, that crypt.

  Sarah, the midwife, was standing in the crowd. I waved and she walked over, carrying the leather satchel I’d found for her one day at the dump, the strap broken, a useless laptop st
ill inside. It had been a few weeks since I’d seen her. Not since Shannon’s baby was born and then, days after, when she came to treat a fungus on Marvin’s foot. She asked about that and about me, my periods, but I didn’t want to talk. Instead, I told her about Thomson, how his pills had been on the boat and were melted away in the big water by now. Red pellets fed to the fish. On her face was a stern expression, a sort-of serious helplessness. I realized that she didn’t know what to say so I smiled and turned toward Thomson, his clothes hanging from him like robes, his hand gripping the back of the bench.

  “Sit down,” I said, and he surprised me by not arguing. I sat beside him and put my bag on the ground as Sarah wandered off.

  Across the field, Anthony and his wife, Deepshikha, sang while Anil poured liquid from a green wine bottle onto the blue sleeping bag wrapped around the woman’s body. Above the scarf tied over his mouth, Thomson’s eyes glowed in their pronounced sockets. His fingers rubbed at the scar of a heart carved into the wooden bench. TLND. True Love Never Dies. I stilled his hand with my own. His knuckles rough and cold. I wanted to speak, but I didn’t know what to say. The woman we found in the cave wasn’t alone, I could have told him. The child was there. Marvin’s and my child. Melissa. Something to give him hope.

  Anil set fire to the dry wood. The flames jumped up, orange and yellow, green at their base. The sour smell of burning hair and flesh quickly filled the air. Blood seeped through the blackening sheets. It boiled, foamed, seethed like a lake in hell. I stared down, at my hands curled around the edge of the bench, the worn patch of dirt under our feet.

  “I’ve missed so many funerals,” Thomson said. “My parents’. Probably my sister’s. The only one I remember is Maria’s.” Phoenix’s mother.

  A dozen kids were playing on the rusty, spider-shaped jungle gym and I watched them. One hung upside down from her knees, long blond hair tumbling down.

  “We kept the candles burning for three days. And we couldn’t sweep the floor. That’s how they do things.” He pointed at his face. “A jade bead in the mouth as currency for the afterlife.”

  I didn’t speak. I felt his daughter’s body between us, a hard thing of bone and muscle that might not have ever decomposed.

  “Don’t do that to me,” Thomson said.

  “Do what?”

  He nodded toward the fires. The bodies, shrinking to sticky carbon, floating ash. “That.” And he counted off the steps on his fingers: “Take my clothes off. Put me in the ground. And tell the bees.” He cleared his throat and I braced for his choking cough but it didn’t come. “People used to do that. If someone got married, they’d bring the bees a piece of wedding cake. When a family member died, they draped a black cloth over the hive. I want you to do that for me. It’s bad luck not to.”

  I thought of all the things I was supposed to say. You’re not going to die. You’ll get well again. Lies. My eyes stung from the smoke and I wiped at them. “All right,” I said.

  He shrugged. “It’s a ritual,” he said, as if I’d asked why.

  We fell into silence. I watched the crackling wood, a scene I once would never have imagined. Had that woman been your mother? Your aunt? A friend from the crossing? She’d been too decomposed for identification by anyone and didn’t have any ID. Now she was gone, as if she hadn’t even existed. It could happen so easily. You could lie down in the woods over winter and melt into the silent world. Vanish, like Phoenix had.

  “There’s something else,” said Thomson.

  “Yes.”

  He breathed in and I heard the rattling start in his lungs. He sputtered and I waited, following his gaze to see Shannon, standing near the picnic shelter, staring at the men as they sorted through the boxes. “Feed the girl more,” Thomson said. “Give her my share.” I looked at him, saw the purple bruising under his eyes, the jagged red lines floating around his pupils. He squeezed my hand. “I don’t need so much.”

  “But you do.” He needed fish soup, softened greens, berries, beets, more than he was already getting. On his good days, he polished his plate and held it out, wanting more and ended by licking it off. That hadn’t happened in a while, but how could I take from Thomson to give to you, barely more than a phantom?

  “It’s what I want,” he said.

  “I don’t know,” I said, but Thomson crossed his arms and, as if we were on summer vacation, spending a week at the cottage, he said, “I’m getting a bit tired of fish.”

  I shook my head. “You can’t give up.”

  The fires made two tiny flares in his pupils. “I’m hoping she can help you.”

  “Help me?”

  “Move on. Maybe even forgive.”

  He drew in a deep breath and I knew whatever he had to say would be important, part of his final words. “Marvin. Yourself. When I’m gone—” he started, but something caught in his throat and the scarf billowed from the force of his hacking cough. He bent forward, pushed his stick in the dirt. Gaining leverage against the violence of expulsion, his lungs working and working to push out the rot. I rubbed his back, looked around for help, and spotted Marvin and Shannon arguing by the picnic shelter. Shannon half turned away, her face red, her fingers like bars around the baby’s form.

  When he had finished, Thomson pulled his scarf down and spat on the ground. A clot of blood, dark like a period at the end of a long thought. A fresh slick of sweat covered his bald spot. Marvin ran over and I pushed the blood into the dirt with my shoe, burying it, making it into nothing but a smear of dark mud.

  “Look at this,” Marvin said. Two bottles of pills rattled in his cupped hand. I reached for them, but they vanished into the side pouch of his cargo pants. “Albert found them in a ration box. They weren’t even with the doctor’s stuff. We might not have even gotten them if the boat had come in like normal.”

  He was looking at me, his face glowing like a kid’s. The medicine would keep Thomson going. Hope prickled in me, but Thomson was bent forward, elbows on knees, taking long breaths that sounded like someone filing down a rough edge. Marvin tipped one pill from each bottle into his hand. He tugged Thomson’s scarf down and fed them to him, Thomson’s lips working Marvin’s palm like a horse.

  “We should get home,” I said as Shannon’s voice carried across the clearing, angry, arguing:

  “That medicine’s for everyone.”

  I had an urge to run. To take the pills and leave. I’d walk home if I had to, along the south shore. I’d go into hiding. In the caves. At the lighthouse.

  Shannon rushed toward us, the baby a lump, like a growth, that she ignored. She held out her hand and said, “Give them to me.”

  I stared at her. “They’re his,” I said. “Without them he’ll die.”

  “Not the Rifadin,” said Shannon. “Anyone can use that. You can keep the other.”

  “It won’t work on its own. It’ll wreck his kidneys.”

  Her eyes were bright green, like the deepest part of a fire. I tensed, unsure what she was capable of. The baby arched its back, its small wrinkled face blazing red, and I suddenly wondered if I could use the pills for you, to keep you healthy. Crush them into your food, into the extra rations.

  “They’re his,” I told Shannon, with anger powered by guilt.

  Shannon ran a hand through her dirty hair, pulling it off her face, forming troughs, while we waited for her next move.

  “Water,” Thomson said, tugging on my sleeve. I pulled a jar from my bag and handed it to him. Shannon watched as he drank, hunched over, the liquid spilling from his lips to the ground. The jar was too heavy.

  “Help him,” I said to Marvin at the same time as Shannon started to speak.

  “He’s old. He isn’t the only sick one.” She pulled the sling aside, tugging at the baby, and started to unbutton her blouse.

  “Oh my God,” I said, stepping forward but unable to stop her from pulling open her shirt, folding down the nursing bra that Sarah had made for her. A red nipple appeared, encrusted with pus. I turned away, embarr
assed for her, enraged, and saw the men staring, even Thomson, the jar lowered to his knee. All of them, frozen, except for Mr. Bobiwash, who raced across the lawn toward her. The warped tattoo writhed as Shannon hoisted her breast. The baby screamed, shoved awkwardly against her mother’s bony side, reaching for the available breast. The sound seemed to break the spell. Shannon tipped her chin up, smiling, proud.

  “All right,” said Marvin, his voice choked.

  I swivelled to face him. The jar leaned precariously on Thomson’s knee, about to empty down his leg. I grabbed for it as I said Marvin’s name, but his hand was already slipping into his pocket. Shannon opened her fingers, the lines on her palm drawn in dirt. Marvin put the pills there as Thomson coughed again, a hard hacking. Mr. Bobiwash slid his arm around Shannon, but it was she who turned them away, moving toward the wagon.

  “She can’t take those,” I shouted as they left. The prayer group looked over but I didn’t care. Those people were already dead. I started to follow but Marvin grabbed my arm and I felt Thomson, too, fumbling for my fingers, his hand damp, clutching like a child. He held on to me as they walked away.

  14 City

  I woke in the bed where I’d fallen. The empty jar inches from my face, its wide mouth reeking alcohol. Reaching out, I shoved it aside, heard Margo groan from deeper in the bed as the glass clattered across the floorboards. Marvin loosened his arm from around my waist and turned over. We were crowded together and his shoulder blade jabbed into my arm. I shifted away from him as scenes from the night before sharpened into focus in my mind. A clunking noise came from the kitchen. I sat up. Steadied the boulder of my head. Found our clothes, my jeans and Marvin’s, Margo’s shiny silk top, all heaped together like fruit at the base of a tree, still damp.

  Walter was in the kitchen, his naked ass a fat white moon as he dug around under the sink. All the cupboard doors and drawers were opened. I remembered the look on his face, that slim, doubting smile while the three of us watched Marvin standing on a chair, his leather jacket flapping open, eyes lit wildly from the wind-up flashlight shining under his chin, as he read out pieces of his manifesto—for a long time we have walked the cliff’s edge of resistance, always mindful of the steep drop a single crumbling footstep away . . . Half naked, he’d gone on and on. Margo beside me with the tip of her finger between her teeth.