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  “After that, a lot of us started squatting down here,” Thomson told me, reaching for one of Marvin’s cigarettes. “And the company gave up because they knew it was too late.”

  “Too late for what?” I asked as Thomson leaned into the flame from Marvin’s match. He inhaled, and when the smoke streamed out of his mouth, he coughed, bending forward, his fingers gripping the edge of the table. He was coughing too hard to answer. Phoenix took the cigarette and dropped it into her mug. I heard the hiss of the ember against the remaining dampness. She filled my empty cup with water from a jug on the counter.

  Marvin nudged his shoulder against mine. “Solar,” he grunted.

  “What?”

  Thomson drank, finishing the water, handing the cup to Phoenix for more. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “It’s too late for solar,” he said, and when Phoenix set the mug down he ignored it. Instead, he returned to his soup, sloppily shoving the spoon into his mouth like he was all of a sudden starving. I heard the metal clang against his teeth. Drops of broth fell on his chest and I noticed the holes in the weave of his sweater. His grey hair hung down to his collar. There was a smudge of black dirt on his bald spot. Late fifties or early sixties, I thought.

  Marvin slid his tin of cigarettes into the top of his pack. He was getting ready to leave. Suddenly I felt tired. All I really wanted was to go home, to sleep. I had no means of making money, feeding myself, paying the rent. I realized this as if the fact was only just coming true. I thought of telling them about my situation, but our conversation had taken a long time. It was after 1:00 AM.

  Thomson wiped his mouth with a towel Phoenix had brought over. The red broth smeared onto the fabric from his lips and facial hair. “What do you think of this?” he asked me. “Our project.”

  “It’s great,” I mumbled.

  “We should go,” said Marvin, standing. I nodded and pressed my hand against the torn vinyl and slid to the edge of the bench, but Thomson persisted.

  “What do you like about it?” I thought about it. My mother always used to say a change is as good as a rest and that’s what I liked. Going down there was different, entirely new, a foreign landscape. It had helped me stop focusing on my own miseries. But I knew I couldn’t say that. I dug around for another reason. And when I said it—“You’re doing something meaningful, you’re making a difference”—I realized I meant it.

  “Marvin’s found a nice girl,” Phoenix said. She sounded sarcastic. My face grew hot. It was like she could see through me, to my soft life, the frailness of my reasoning. When we said goodbye they hardly even looked at me. Phoenix had turned her back to finish the last of the dishes and Thomson was counting his dark dollars, licking his finger to move through the stack.

  When we walked away I considered all the things I could have said to impress them. The things I knew how to do, the skills I had. How to force rhubarb. How to save the best of the crop for seeds. Canning. Even making butter.

  Maybe I could help them.

  But Marvin broke into my thoughts. “They think you’re simple, but I know you’re not.” And he took my hand. Not like a lover but like a brother. Fingers folded over mine as he led me deeper into the dark zone.

  Along the street, nearly every neon store sign had been smashed, their letters broken into brightly coloured pieces that crunched as we walked. Nobody else was out. Up the way, I saw a dog and then another, working their noses in gaps under separate doors before coming back together. I pressed closer to Marvin, wanting him to take my hand again, to slide his fingers between mine, but his hands were shoved into his pockets. In a quiet voice, he filled me in on the neighbourhood’s history.

  “After the city cut power to the neighbourhood, most of the stores and houses were looted. I came down a few months later.”

  “How do you know them?” We’d moved into the middle of the street, crossing to head south. Frozen tufts of pink insulation skidded past.

  “He’s my uncle. In a way.”

  Thomson had come from the Czech Republic, Marvin told me. “Czechoslovakia then. He was a dissident. He and his friends fought for the revolution. They rallied in the city squares with Vaclav Havel until communism fell.”

  “Who’s that? Havel.”

  “Playwright, dissident, first president of the Czech Republic.”

  “Oh,” I said, and he continued.

  “They were happy. Thomson and his friends. Those who wanted the change, who wanted freedom. But then capitalism moved in and he saw Operation Desert Storm T-shirts fill the shop windows. McDonald’s. KFC. Then he heard about his cousin Katja. Her husband had died in a labour camp before the revolution and she needed money so she did what women can do—she went to the German border wearing sexy clothes. Germans crossed over, probably still do, and picked them up and fucked them behind the border patrol buildings where the guards used to stand and shoot you if you tried to run across.”

  He glanced at me. I didn’t know what to say.

  “People needed money,” Marvin said, as if defending her. “They need to eat.”

  As if I didn’t know that.

  We turned the next corner. My eyes moved from one window to another, most of them empty pits, a few glowing with a dim internal light.

  “So Thomson decided to travel,” Marvin continued. “He ended up here as a student. He met my mother at school and she sponsored him to stay.”

  “Why was he so mad at you?”

  Marvin shrugged. It was clear he wouldn’t tell me.

  “And Phoenix?”

  Marvin stopped to straighten a bent cigarette. “She’s just a bitch.”

  “I didn’t think so.”

  “No?”

  “No. Who is she?”

  Marvin stuck the smoke in his mouth and mumbled around it. “His one and only. The apple of his eye.”

  “His daughter?”

  “Stepdaughter. Born in Chiapas. Her parents were activists. Well, everyone was, unless you were military or a landowner.”

  I didn’t know where Chiapas was, but Marvin didn’t give me time to ask. “You know you don’t have to prove anything to her,” he said, stopping at the last in a line of row houses. “You don’t even have to see her again.” I followed him up the path and through the front door, already aware that was the opposite of what I wanted.

  People don’t always have reasons for what they do, Melissa. I left the diner knowing I would sleep with Marvin that night. Partly because I liked the feeling of his hand on my back and the heat of his confidence but also because the evening demanded it. I had never slept with a guy so quickly before, but Margo did it all the time and constantly told me to loosen up, be more spontaneous. Maybe it was out of character for me but since everything else had changed, I thought that could too. The box that had been my life—job, home, regular routine—had caved in, and going back to Marvin’s squat was just the breaking of one of the seams.

  The house was freezing cold and smelled musty. Marvin dumped his backpack on the floor. I heard the snapping of a match as he lit a candle lantern and the flames stretched every shape into large shadows. I saw a table with five chairs. Three books piled next to a typewriter. A black sleeping bag coiled on a mattress on the floor. The walls were covered with newspaper, cardboard, a blue tarp, and strangely shaped patches of plywood. In the mix a map was pinned up. Shiny red, silver, and gold stars formed a circle on streets north of the dark zone and the empty spot that was the lake. They glittered in the jumping light. They caught my eye, and I started walking over to look but Marvin said, “Come over here.” When we met in the centre of the room, he put his cold hand on my neck and a tremor went through me. He leaned his face toward mine and when he kissed me, it was like the opening of a black hole, hot and magnetic, sucking me in.

  5 Island

  After Marvin rowed the boat into the bay at dawn, I went outside. A few of your footprints were on the far side of the garden fence. You wouldn’t have been able to climb it and I ached for you, your h
unger, your helplessness, but the plate was also gone from the porch. I hoped that was enough. Like the fish, beets are good for iron. Greens are plentiful in the fields. Dandelion leaves, although the flowers have gone to seed so they taste bitter. Still, they’re better than nothing. If you don’t know what to look for I will leave a little bit out and you can learn.

  Mr. Bobiwash came when I was peeling the thin skins off the Roma tomatoes and sterilizing the jars. Mid-morning. Marvin back home and in the shed. Thomson made a sound like a woman starting to sob but fell silent when the knock came. Red pulp smeared on my apron, I opened the door. Mr. Bobiwash and his eldest son, Samuel, stood with guns balanced on their shoulders like sticks. They looked like hobos seeking work during the long-ago Great Depression I’d read about in newspapers in the dark zone.

  “The cranes are back,” Samuel told me, excited. They come every year, at the beginning and end of summer. Hundreds land by the stone foundation of an old barn up the road. They move on their stick-thin legs, their brown bodies hovering above the milkweed pods and rust-coloured grass. I’d already heard them. They were calling the day before when I was in the kitchen, cleaning last year’s jars. Their strange, prehistoric warble. Thomson was too sick to walk up the road to see them so I laid down my barbecue tongs and went into the living room and opened the door.

  “Listen.”

  “The dinosaurs,” he said and closed his eyes. Gently, I wiped a bubble of spit from the corner of his mouth. He twisted away from me.

  Have you heard them, Melissa? They are on their way to the Gulf of Mexico, a thousand miles south. Once upon a time we would have thought nothing of travelling such a distance. Now it’s hard to imagine going such a long way away or even what it’s like there, the mazes of salt marshes still tarry with oil from the spill that happened when I was just a girl, probably no bigger than you.

  “How’s Thomson?” Samuel asked. He put a hand on his father’s arm and bent sideways to look around me. I stepped aside so he could see. The bald top of Thomson’s head. Liver spots and wispy white hairs.

  “Not so good.” I wiped the sweat from my face with a clean corner of my apron. “We’re waiting for the ship.”

  Mr. Bobiwash walked around the easy chair so he was facing Thomson.

  “Jack,” said Thomson, lifting an arm, his fingers crooked.

  Mr. Bobiwash squeezed Thomson’s hand. “You’re a lazy son of a bitch.”

  Thomson laughed, a weak chortle. Samuel stood in the doorway, watching.

  I heard the hiss of the water as it boiled over onto the hot top of the cook stove. My jars rattled violently against the sides of the aluminum pot. “Marvin’s in the shed,” I told them, but they followed me into the kitchen. I held a spoonful of sugar out for Samuel although we didn’t have much left. He grinned but shook his head and I realized how old he was getting. Almost sixteen, nearly a man. Mr. Bobiwash gestured to the kitchen door, the garden outside. “That’s a big fence.”

  “Deer,” I lied, scooping boiling tomatoes into the hot jars. Samuel screwed on the lids.

  “Don’t burn yourself.” I glanced at Mr. Bobiwash. “How is Shannon?” I wanted to change the subject. Only a few weeks ago, his wife had squatted between two poplars, her hands holding their narrow trunks, and delivered her baby. The small head crowned as blood gushed onto a carpet of pine needles. I helped Sarah, the midwife, by pulling the sharp knife from her leather satchel and boiling it clean so she could cut the cord. We talked about how hospitals used to be. All that shiny, functional steel. Clean green uniforms. Masks and disposable latex gloves. Babies died now. More than before.

  Afterwards, with the tiny, purple infant in my arms, I thought about my mother. How she would have been proud. Not a flinch in me. Just this eager humming. The sound in your ears when you’re running hard but happy. She was proud of me when I lived in the city. Proud that I worked for Parthenon. But that was before I was let go, before the dark zone and Walter and Phoenix. Before I irrevocably faded from their lives. I didn’t even know if they were still alive. I tried not to think about that.

  “The baby’s got that red stain,” Mr. Bobiwash said, gesturing as if removing a mask.

  “It’s just a birthmark.”

  “It’s dry. I think it’s itchy.”

  “The salve isn’t helping?” I wiped spilled tomatoes off the counter.

  He shook his head. He stared at the jars that filled the counter, which would sit until their lids popped. “She isn’t feeding either.”

  “Can Sarah help with that?”

  Mr. Bobiwash wobbled his head, staring down at the ground. I didn’t want to pry so I stopped asking questions. I knew Shannon—her suspicions, how she called Sarah “the witch doctor.” She’d tried to get the doctor from the supply ship to do a Caesarean rather than rely on Sarah’s help. “Too dangerous,” he’d said. “Inadequate facilities.” The hospital in town operated with no power, all those bulky machines heaped up in a kind of scrapyard that overtook the parking lot.

  Marvin came out of his shed. Through the window we watched as he clicked the padlock closed. I put the pot in the sink and we went outside, wandering over to the garden where the last of the lettuce had gone to seed. I picked at bits of tomato skin stuck to my fingers. Thomson’s blood-stained handkerchiefs flapped on the line like prayer flags.

  “I’m going into town,” Mr. Bobiwash said as Marvin approached.

  “No wagon?”

  He shook his head. “Walking. We’ll see more.”

  Town was five miles away. A community of about two hundred. A church we never went to, sticking instead to the market, the occasional dance. For years we’d hidden on its edges, but as things unravelled we grew braver, not so afraid of being caught.

  “I’m going to meet the boat. Find the doctor.”

  “It’s here?” I asked, eager.

  “Every day,” said Mr. Bobiwash. “I go every day.”

  “It’s been late before,” said Marvin. Mr. Bobiwash picked up the gun, balanced the stock on his shoulder. Marvin was right, but those times we had known where it was, could follow its progress. The only shortwave radio on the island had melted in a fire during a cold snap last January.

  Samuel walked up one side of the garden, dragging his foot in the dirt, making a line. The chickens crowded behind him, pecking at the exposed bugs.

  Mr. Bobiwash turned to me. “Eric picked a load of bulrushes yesterday,” he said, referring to his middle son. “There’s lots.”

  I knew this was Mr. Bobiwash’s way of asking me to stop by his house, to check on Shannon. He closed his free hand around the fencepost and turned to Marvin. “I’m stopping at the Sharmas’ place.” His hand pulled on the wooden stock of the gun so the barrel gazed up at the sky. “Something’s been eating out of their garden.”

  A crow called, landing on the peaked tin roof of Marvin’s shed. “It’s just deer,” I said, but Mr. Bobiwash ignored me.

  “Carrots pulled out. Eggs gone. The Sharmas shot a mess of ducks and offered me one.”

  Marvin was already nodding as he spoke. “To look for whatever it is.”

  “It’s a deer,” I repeated, as if Mr. Bobiwash would believe me. I pushed Marvin’s arm, trying to get him to agree with me, to tell Mr. Bobiwash the same thing.

  “They’ve set traps.”

  “Traps?” said Marvin.

  “Box traps.”

  None of us spoke. The wind moved around us. A blue jay scolded from its perch on a jack pine.

  “The Sharmas are old people,” said Mr. Bobiwash. “They don’t have a lot. Their son probably needs most of their food. He works hard.”

  “You can’t kill it,” I blurted.

  Mr. Bobiwash settled his brown eyes on mine but didn’t say anything.

  “All right,” Marvin said. “I’ll go.”

  “I’ll come with you,” I told them.

  Marvin turned to me. “You have to stay with Thomson.”

  “He’s sleeping.”
/>   “Sandy . . .”

  I walked away, opened the plastic ice cream pail of corn and crushed clam shells and saw that it was almost empty. The crow cawed into the heavy air. It was humid, rain hanging in the sky. Another bird answered. Waking you from your daytime sleep in the dark rock hollows, telling you to watch out.

  In our bedroom, I sat on the mattress while Marvin changed from shorts to a pair of corduroy pants. Stop him from hunting her, I wanted to say, but he glanced at me and said, “Don’t.”

  “What?”

  “You signed up for this.”

  “Who would sign up for this?” Our rumpled bed, the hardwood floor rotting where it meets the walls.

  “All I’m doing is trying to protect what’s mine. I’m a man. It’s what men do.”

  “And what will you do if you find her?”

  “She’s a thief.”

  “And we were terrorists.”

  His jaw went hard.

  “Promise me you won’t tell him. Just for a few days.”

  He didn’t say anything as he walked away. I heard his boots pound down the stairs and Thomson speaking to him in the living room. Marvin responded, but I couldn’t make out what they said. The words were quiet enough that I could imagine whatever I wanted. Thomson asking him to protect her and Marvin simply agreeing, out loud. A scenario that would never be. The front door slammed. Through the window, I watched them go. The two men and the boy, ambling up the driveway like a family, like they were all related. Far above, three turkey vultures circled, tipping toward the west.

  6 City

  I woke on a cold mattress, not knowing where I was. Slowly the strange puzzle of the walls came clear. The windows on either side of the fireplace sparkled with frost and I shivered from the chill. Marvin’s shoulder blades pressed against my breasts and that was the only part of me that was warm. Still, I pulled back, unlooping my arm from around his chest as I remembered the night before. I hadn’t slept with him. I’d chickened out. After we’d climbed into bed and taken each other’s clothes off, I’d stopped him, alarmed by how quickly things were moving. We’d gotten dressed and gone silently to sleep, gradually embracing each other in order to stay warm.