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  “You brought a guest,” he said to Margo, frown lines dug into his cheeks like bits of flint. She slid into a wooden chair, the legs rocking against the floor tile’s broken grout.

  “I knew you wouldn’t mind.” She glanced around. “Where’s Walter?”

  Without answering, Marvin roughly folded his map and I heard the sharp tear of a seam giving way.

  “Sit,” Margo told me, but I stayed where I was. The men at a nearby table looked over, one wearing a parka with its hood half torn off, the other hunched forward, tugging a blue hoodie tight to his chest. He winked at me and I pulled my jacket zipper close to my throat. When I turned to go to the bar, I could tell Marvin was watching me. My ass in the tight jeans with glittering pockets that Margo had bought me back before my body was so scrawny. I strained to listen to them talking—their words a messy collage of hissing whispers—as I ordered us a pitcher of beer that Margo would pay for.

  When I got back, Marvin was friendlier, or at least accepting of my presence. He finished rolling a cigarette, licking the edge of the paper to seal it shut. He offered it to me, but I shook my head. There was a weird silence between us, as if none of us knew what to say, and I tried to break it by asking Marvin what he did, if he’d grown up in the city, but he didn’t seem to want to talk. The woman behind the bar turned on the television and a rumble started up, the picture sliding in and out of static. A litany of bad news—China banging war drums, forest fires out west, the crude bomb detonated a few months earlier at a gas station by a group called Jump Ship, the investigation ongoing. They hit randomly, that group. I remembered their first couple strikes, half a decade earlier, at a debit machine and a car dealership. How excited my father got when we watched the news coverage together, as if they were helping him take revenge. But then they seemed to go silent. Until a couple years ago, when they started up again—hitting the lobby of an oil company and then the gas station.

  We all watched. No sound in the bar but the rattle of the TV until a voice—raspy, nearly a growl—sounded behind my back. “Nobody hurt,” it said. “That’s all they fucking care about.” I turned and saw a man with the beginnings of a bald spot, hard blue eyes in a wide, pale face. His lips were chapped, a spot of blood on the bottom one. He reached his right hand out to greet me, the skin on his arm mottled pink and red, shiny and scarred.

  “Walter,” Margo said, and his palm was bone dry against mine. When he sat down, I watched as he reached for Marvin’s tobacco pouch with his other hand, a metal claw that caught the colourful lights. Margo pulled out her own cigarettes, store-bought, and slid them over to him. I tried not to stare as he pulled one out, popped it between his lips, and snapped a match. The tip ignited, crumpled into orange. When his eyes met mine, I quickly looked away, settling on the nearly empty pitcher of beer. He smiled, his two front teeth speckled with bright white spots.

  “More?” Marvin asked, standing, his body beside my face. That was before he wasted away, went skeletal, when he was lean and tall and good-looking and knew it. Blushing, I turned to Margo and her lips stretched into a narrow, mischievous smile. Something brewed in her—I could sense the simmer before full boil. “Why not?” she said. Margo’s way was to plunge ahead, leap into frothy water; mine was to look for rocks.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Come on. It’s on me.” She turned to Walter. “This girl got laid off.”

  “Shots,” he bellowed, so loud I jumped in my seat.

  “Got it,” Marvin said and walked over to the bar.

  “Margo,” I said and turned to call out to Marvin to just get me some water. I hated spending her money. But she laid her hand on my arm, misunderstanding. “You’re going to be fine. Everything happens for a reason.”

  Marvin carried back a clutch of treacly brown shots. He sat them down, and tiny rivulets ran down the sides, making the glasses sticky. We each reached for one, held them chest level, ready to drink, until Marvin said, “What will you do now?”

  I shifted in my seat. “Find more work,” I said and set the shot down, sucked the liquid off my finger. Sweet and sharp.

  “A lot of people are in the same boat. What’s unemployment at now?” The question hung there. It was weird because we were all waiting to drink. I looked at Walter, then Margo, but neither of them answered, both waiting for Marvin to finish. Walter pushed the moment forward, lifted his shot glass into the silence, and said, “Viva.”

  Margo and Walter drank. Marvin was still watching me, the tiny glass of alcohol ignored. He leaned forward, bent his head almost horizontal with the table. “It couldn’t have been a surprise.”

  It’s stupid, but I hadn’t been expecting it. I thought the company might tremble around me but ultimately remain standing, my job intact. The early tremors had been there: phone calls from banks, meetings cancelled, our hours reduced. I’d told all that to my mother and she’d convinced me to give up my cellphone to save money. “Not at all,” I told Marvin and threw the liquid into my mouth.

  After that, we ordered more beer, and Marvin kept offering me cigarettes. Finally I took one and felt the brush of his fingers against mine. When he scratched a match to light it, the flame leapt between our faces and I felt a shiver of expectation move through me. But Walter wanted attention. With his claw he held out a tiny mechanical beetle, a delicate thing with legs of soldered steel and a carapace of hammered tin clipped from a soda can. Wires connected to a battery made up its innards. When he hit its “on” switch, it climbed over Marvin’s tobacco pouch, Margo’s wallet, even tried to mount my extended finger.

  “Walter built that,” Margo said, her voice firm with pride. He didn’t look up. I felt sorry for him, for his disfigurement. But what did I know? A few weeks later, I would be several hours north in a stolen car fuelled by gasoline bought by Marvin, looking back through a blur of tears, Walter dead, my heart irreparably broken.

  It wasn’t very late when Margo and Walter stood up from the table. The lights were dim in the bar by then so I didn’t see the look on Walter’s face when his chair fell over and crashed against the hard floor. He grabbed at Margo, shoving his intact hand through the loop that her elbow made. Margo had her fingers over her mouth, suppressing a laugh, and she stumbled against him as he pulled on her. I thought they were going to dance, but Walter breathed some words in Margo’s ear and pulled her toward a flight of stairs on one side of the room. They were together, I realized, and felt stupid that I hadn’t seen it before. It didn’t surprise me. Margo marched to a different drummer, as my mother used to say. She glanced over her shoulder at me and wiggled her fingers in the air to say goodbye and I knew I’d have to find my own way home.

  Marvin split the foamy dregs of the beer between our glasses. We finished it quietly, beginning to build the silence that still lives between us. I was a bit drunk, my tongue thick in my mouth, so I didn’t speak, afraid of how my words would slur. When his glass was empty, he packed his rolling papers and matches into a battered silver tin and slid that and his tobacco pouch into the top of his canvas backpack. He stood, so I did too.

  The backpack bounced on his shoulders as we went outside. Writing was scrawled on the canvas and I squinted but couldn’t make out the words. He zipped up his jacket and I looked south, in the direction of Margo’s and my apartment, but didn’t move. Instead, I waited, hoping that he’d offer to walk me home so I wouldn’t be mugged for the handful of rattling change in my pocket, so I didn’t have to be alone.

  When he stepped down the stairs, I followed.

  “Which way are you going?” I asked, the words big in my mouth. He nodded toward the intersection with the leaning streetlight, the echo of red lights all the way south to where I lived. “Me too,” I said, inviting. Like a magic trick, he slid a cigarette out from behind one ear. “I have things to do,” he told me. He sounded sober.

  I thought he was trying to get rid of me so I nodded, ready to grit my teeth and get myself home. “See you later then,” I said and started
to walk away, but he spoke my name and when I looked back, he squinted through a plume of smoke.

  “Do you want to come?”

  Like a little kid, I giggled. It embarrassed me, but I couldn’t help it. If I’d been forced to explain I would have told him that it was this sense of newness that I hadn’t felt in a long time. Like a door had opened and I’d decided to plunge right through, moving in a direction other than the one I’d planned: lurching home on the sidewalk, fixating on my narrowing future, worrying myself to sleep.

  “It’s a long walk,” he said. “And we’ll end up at my place.” He looked serious. I couldn’t tell if he was hitting on me or just telling me the truth of what would happen. Either way, it was an adventure. Margo was always telling me to seize the day, so I decided to do that—or simply not resist.

  “Okay,” I said, and I’m sure we both knew right then what would happen. But not the extent of it. Not how we would change each other’s lives.

  Thomson often tells me that people most often make choices out of desire, but to be honest, Melissa, at that moment in my life I wasn’t sure what I wanted or what I would be able to get. I knew what I didn’t want—to have to move home, to go back to my parents’ tiny apartment that felt like a prison, a place I couldn’t leave even to go to the corner store without uncertainty shadowing my father’s face. A year earlier I’d run away, bolted free, broken one of my grandmother’s good china teacups in a rage when I’d come home from a date and my father tore my purse from my hands, emptied it out on the kitchen floor, looking for cigarettes or condoms, and finding only panty liners, pencils, my ID loose like playing cards. Eventually my mother calmed him, but in the morning, the birds singing when it was still dark out at 4:00 AM, I threw socks, underwear, extra pants and shirts into a cloth grocery bag and left with a hundred dollars in an envelope marked GROCERIES in my mother’s boxy handwriting. From the city, several hours east, I called her, crying, and instead of telling me to come home as I’d expected, she gave me the phone number for her old friend Sissy, who worked HR at a housing developer. From those beginnings, I started building a bit of a life that was, that night, as Marvin and I walked east, through the downtown canyon I’d left earlier that month, about to become something entirely new.

  3 Island

  You might have noticed that Marvin stays home on Sundays. The boat by the shore is turned over, its tarred keel like a sea creature’s spine. He says he needs a day of rest so he might as well follow the Christian tradition. But that morning he didn’t sit idle. He tore out the waist-high pickets from around our garden and hauled cedar posts from the collapsed fence up the road into our yard. When I heard the shovel, I went outside and found him digging a hole in the corner of the garden plot.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Building a higher fence.” His foot pushed the rusted blade deeper into the soil.

  “Why?”

  He didn’t answer. While he dug, I tried to think of something to say, a way to defend your stealing without confessing that I knew where our food was going. But I could tell he wanted me to go inside, to leave him be. Over on the porch, I heard Thomson coughing, his lungs grinding, making a sound he used to call the minutes. He hasn’t said that in a while, and I can’t help but think it’s because he knows his time is running out, that he’s on the final rotation of the clock’s hands.

  “Sandy,” Thomson called from the porch. I turned around and saw him fumbling to sit up.

  “We aren’t losing that much,” I said.

  Marvin stopped shovelling and stared at me. “We barely have enough. Last winter . . .”

  I dropped my eyes. I tried not to think of those days, late February, early March, when we’d eaten the last of our fish, dug into rotten stumps for grubs to fry, made soup out of frozen roots and the inner bark from the yellow birch. The snow came and came. Usually Mr. Bobiwash brought us rabbit or deer that he’d managed to shoot, but he didn’t show up for weeks. His wife, Shannon, was hugely pregnant, eating twice what she normally would. Angry at everyone, unwilling to share.

  In bed, at night, my fingers compulsively found my ribs, running over them like a silent instrument, amazed. My mind moved from clarity to cottony dullness. And then the wild leeks sprouted and the sun shone and the soil loosened and the seeds went in and we were okay for another year.

  This is different, I wanted to tell Marvin as he threw a shovelful of dirt onto the pile, but I couldn’t. I didn’t know if he would care that you were not an animal burrowing instinctually for buried food. Instead, I said, “We don’t have cement for those posts.”

  “I’ll bury them deep.” Thomson shouted out my name again, a high-pitched urgency in his voice. I turned and ran to help him with whatever he wanted: to go to the outhouse, get a drink of water. Something simple that he couldn’t do on his own anymore.

  While Marvin worked, burying the posts and stringing old chicken wire, I sat beside Thomson on the porch. I read to him from a book we’d found weeks earlier, a mystery novel with pages torn out to start fires so we had to make up bits to link the plot.

  In his thin, gruff voice, Thomson placed the detective in an underworld the author hadn’t even hinted at. Somehow the change made sense. “You should write the books,” I told him, and he smiled. I often told him that. Whenever the Bobiwash kids came by, their brown eyes fixed on his face as he spoke about the places he’d been. Israel, Greece. They listened, popping blackberries into their mouths, under the scarves we made them wear to visit Thomson when his sickness re-emerged. Their faces filled me with yearning.

  I tried to have children. Our third spring on the island, I started watching my cycle like Phoenix had taught me. Writing dates down on the bumpy plaster of our closet wall. Whenever I attempted to talk to Marvin about it, he refused, his voice hammering out those solid words: “No. There isn’t enough.” So I didn’t tell him. Still, nothing happened. Every month, my imagined baby melted away in a stain of slippery red on my fingertips and finally, after years of that, more than a decade, I gave up.

  And now you’ve come.

  As I sat with Thomson, I stared into the woods, at the trail lined with goldenrod that leads to our single beehive. Past Marvin’s head, to the backdrop of wide water like an extension of the sky. I knew you were out there, listening to the story through the strikes of the hammer on the fence posts. Come closer, I said in my mind.

  After his nap, Thomson shuffled up to lean against the couch cushions on the chaise lounge. His baggy shirt twisted around his waist. I lay the book open on the floor of the porch and helped him tug the shirt out from under his skinny buttocks. The pants were belted with a blue computer cable. When he was settled, he stared across the yard at Marvin, who was plucking rusty nails from his mouth and hammering the wire against the wood.

  “I’m not happy about this,” I said, following Thomson’s gaze.

  “Why not?”

  I shrugged, nervous about telling Thomson the truth. He had enough to deal with without thinking about another mouth.

  “Things have changed, Sandy.”

  “I know.”

  “They were easier back then.”

  I glanced at him, his hands in his lap, one knotted around the other. In earlier days, he’d lived with the poor, helped overthrow a regime, monitored a fledgling revolution in Mexico, finally moved down to the dark zone with Phoenix to start a soup kitchen. Lost people he loved. How was that easier?

  “Marvin is doing what he thinks is right,” he said. I stared at him. How was that a good thing? It certainly hadn’t been back in the city. But Thomson was recalling our new lives, how Marvin had settled us here, working in a kind of trance to patch over the holes in the roof and reframe the broken areas of the house with Mr. Bobiwash’s help. He’d surprised me; I’d expected him to start talking, soon after we arrived on the island, of going home, getting back to the city, planning a way around our fugitive status. But he rooted down, we all did, sending shoots into the rocky terrain turned o
rganic from the memory of the bodies we’d left behind. Those first few years we hid in our work, moving in a manic effort to simply stay alive. Often I thought of Phoenix, how she would have thrived. It was hard to get her out of my head. Maybe we all felt that because we never spoke of her. Time tried to bury her, like skin growing over shrapnel.

  “We can’t feed every small thing,” Thomson said.

  Was that what you were? A small thing?

  It was time for Thomson’s walk so I helped him as he swung his legs into a sitting position. I took his bony elbow and pulled him to standing. We climbed down the steps, his feet in a pair of torn boat shoes. Marvin touched the head of the hammer to his forehead in a kind of salute. Thomson turned right, toward the clearing in the pines occupied by the last of our honeybees. Mites or sudden, strange vanishings had killed most of them. We had one hive left, full and functioning but neglected.

  “Let’s go to the lake,” I said, turning him around. When Thomson had been well, he had visited the hives every day. Inspecting. Pulling out the brood frames to check for those tiny black specks, the earliest sign of catastrophe. Mites. But Marvin and I hadn’t been looking after the hive. A losing proposition, Marvin called it. Too much work for too little return. “We need protein, not sugar,” he said. Despite my desire to care for them, to continue Thomson’s legacy, I found myself drifting away, willing to accept Marvin’s reasoning if it meant less work. The gardens exhausted me: the canning, the cooking, the effort to make our way into town at least once a month and trade what we could. Wild mushrooms with their fleshy, white fins, fish, greens gathered in the woods. A million people make honey, Marvin says, and I don’t argue although I know how Thomson would respond: The people don’t make it, the bees do.