Swarm (16 page)

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 answer 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.

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 focused 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.

In the house, Thomson slept while I built a fire and set our blackened soup pot on the stove. While the water warmed, I went outside, wandered around the garden, examined smudges in the sand by the fence footings, places where the chicken wire could be pulled up and you might be able to crawl beneath. I made the gaps wider. When the pot wobbled from the force of the bubbling water, I woke Thomson and we moved slowly to the wooden chair in the kitchen. Gently, I opened the top of his robe and let it fall to his waist and pulled off his shirt. I mixed the hot water with cold, soaked the green washcloth and squeezed it out. “Okay?” I asked, rubbing hard soap made from ashes and animal fat onto the fabric. He nodded and I slipped the cloth under his arms, over his chest. I dipped it and squeezed it over and over again, dirt appearing in the water, colouring it grey. When I sponged the skin of his stomach, the meagre folds, he said, “Phoenix used to do this for me.” Outside, the birds sang. A chickadee, calling into dusk. “When I was first sick.”

“I remember.”

He looked confused. “You don't. You weren't even there.”

I didn't tell him how I'd been thinking about her, the circle of time.

The water dripped onto the linoleum, which was worn through to the floorboards beneath. I wiped it up, worried about mould setting in, the poisons brought by moisture.

“Let's talk about her,” he said. “We never do.”

“We do,” I said, even though he was right. I handed him the cloth and turned away as he sponged his limp penis, his grey pubic hair. A lump had hardened in my throat and I squeezed it with my thumb and index finger, tried to rub it away. Through the kitchen window, I saw the clouds, coloured like limestone, a band of light stabbing through.

I helped him stand. Cleaned his back, behind his knees. He kept talking. “She comes to me sometimes. When I'm far gone. When I'm thinking that's it, I'll never make it to morning.” I pushed Thomson back to sitting. By then, the water was black. I dipped the cloth in, let it steam off the heat. Thomson chuckled at a secret joke.

“You're almost done,” I said, and he blinked like I'd jolted him out of a daydream.

With a blanket over his shoulders, he sat while I worked on his feet with the last of the clean water. Dirt stained the skin between his toes. The washcloth pulled out pine needles, grains of sand. Thomson's eyes stayed on the top of my head, waiting, but I couldn't talk out loud about Phoenix. Instead I wanted to think about you.