Swarm (33 page)

“I know you wish it was me and not her. As if the three of you could have survived.” He laughed: a dry outburst of air.

“We were doing fine.”

“Right. I shouldn't have bothered coming back.”

“Do you want praise for that?”

I didn't want to delve into history, think about what might have happened if Marvin hadn't returned to the dark zone that last night. Looking back with him was like a dangerous crossing on a rickety bridge.

“The girl,” I said, my voice strained.
She could have been mine
, I wanted to say but couldn't. That pain was a hole I couldn't show him. Behind me the tall, straight pines creaked like the sound of someone crossing an old wooden floor.

“She's fine,” Marvin said.

My eyes jumped to his face. “How do you know?”

“There are things I know. There are things you can trust me with.”

“Tell me.”

He looked away. Anger roared up in me. I sucked in my breath and hollered into the woods: “All your fucking secrets. You're allowed to have them but I'm not.”

He didn't speak.

“I can't do this anymore.”

Marvin scraped the shovel along the rectangle of dirt I'd outlined for Thomson's grave, loosening another layer. “Really? Where would you go?”

“I don't know. Town. I could go to Mr. Bobiwash. Jack.”

Marvin considered me. “Jack,” he said. He bent over and picked up the smoker, its side caved in. “And Shannon?”

I shrugged, staring at the sunset, bleeding red through the trees.

“You have two choices, Sandy. Stay or leave. Decide.”

He started shovelling, tossing dirt at the base of the pines. I knew what he meant:
live or die
. There was once a time when we could have had it all, gambled for the chance at something better like I'd done by leaving my parents—setting out for greener pastures. But Marvin supported me, fed me, kept me warm and alive, and I him. Long ago, in that fire-lit city, my fate had been determined. It was how things were in my great-grandmother's time. It's how they were again. Still what I wanted more than anything right then was to leave, seek out that other life I was always supposed to have. Marvin stopped, the shovel blade half buried in a heap of earth.

“You know you can't lay everything on me. You still think there's some magic doorway.”

“And to you it's all doom and gloom. Shatter the illusion until we have nothing left.”

“That's not what I mean.”

“It is what you meant. Wasn't that why we did what we did?”

“That's not what I mean now,” Marvin said more gently. “Things are what they are.” He kicked at the ground. “Life.”

“How very Buddhist of you.”

He glanced away, toward the house, the few birds spiralling like sparks from a fire.

“Thomson would say,
Look at how the birds are trying to eat me
.”

“Don't,” I said, flinching. “He wasn't just meat.”

“I fucking know that, Sandy. Christ.”

He pushed the snow shovel back in, awkwardly breaking away the inches. I shoved in the metal blade, loosening the soil's hard weave. When Marvin stopped, his forehead gleamed with sweat.

“But you know there are some tribes that eat their loved ones after they die. It's a sign of respect, of the great circle.”

I stared at him. His eyes shone. The low sun lit the waxy skin of his cheeks. I noticed the sharp point of his elbow, the skinny trunks of his legs. He grabbed at the taut skin of his stomach. “And if you're hungry enough,” he said. “If you're fucking hungry enough.”

I saw, finally, that he wasn't far from that, but when I spoke, my voice was hard.

“She was hungry like that too.” He blinked once. His gaze slid off into the bone forest.

“I know,” he said as I left him on the edge of the grave.

Eric
and Graham were standing in the yard. Clumped together, staring at Thomson's body on the porch. The birds gathered at the peripherals, lifting their wings as if they'd been invited to supper and made to wait. I rushed over to the boys.

“It's all right,” I said as I slid my arm around Eric's narrow shoulders and tried to pull him against me. He tugged away from me and ran off, around the side of the house. Branches cracked as he entered the forest. My thought was that he'd scare you away. But then I remembered that you were not here. You never had been. The plate, the offerings of food, taken by Marvin and gobbled up in the shadows of his shed. Like a burrow for an animal.

“Eric,” I shouted after him. Graham went to Marvin's shed, scaring the vultures away. He leaned against the corner, staring. I covered my mouth with my hand, trying to contain my grief. That morning came back. How I'd asked Thomson to stay, to hold on, instead of helping him leave, saying goodbye. It had been chaos, like it was with Phoenix, not a desirable parting.

Eric walked out of the woods, staring sideways at Thomson's body, afraid. He came to me and I put my arm around him again. Graham stomped on loose nails, slivers of shale that had worked their way up from the water. Those boys had seen so much. I pushed tears into the skin of my cheeks as I led them through the kitchen door to find something to eat. We should have been laughing around the table like family, friends. Not retrieving corpses and burning them. But death was everywhere.

Inside, I used the last of the water to wash my hands.

“You know he was very sick,” I told the boys. “He's in a better place now.” The words came automatically, like I remembered my own mother talking about my aunt, others who had passed away.

“Can we see him?” Eric said, surprising me.

We walked through the house to the front door. Dusk shadows filled the front porch, but we approached Thomson together and I let them look, uncertain what to say. After a minute or so I tugged the sheet off, briefly, so they could squint at his pale face, the mouth slack. I was glad I'd cleaned him. Marvin came out of the woods then, the front of his shirt stuck in the waist of his pants, the back trailing like a tail. Eric looked at him.

“Dad sent us,” he said.

“Everything okay?” Marvin asked.

“Shannon—” Eric started, but Graham interrupted him.

“Hungry,” he said, one hand flat against his belly, palm cupped over the knot of the blue rope that held up his pants.

“What about Shannon?” I asked.

“She's crazy,” Eric said, his eyes large, and Graham laughed, a high-pitched, half-mad little giggle that usually made me smile. Marvin gestured at the flies landing on Thomson's face and I waved them away and replaced the sheet.
The bees
, I remembered then, and told the boys how they had made a new home in the car engine as I led them back inside. Marvin grabbed a pickaxe and went back to finish digging the hole as night came on. Inside, the boys and I made what we could for a late supper. We didn't have a lot, but we cored a few apples and stuffed them with the last of our beet sugar and I had Eric light a fire in the cookstove. While we worked, I told them about you, the shadow girl who moved through the woods. I made it sound like a story, but when I finished, I asked them if they'd seen you, if they knew about you, and they both said no. I wanted to ask more—what was going on with Shannon, if they knew why Jack had been at the lighthouse—but it was Thomson's funeral so I decided to wait. At least until we were sitting down, our stomach rumbles quieted by supper, or until I tucked Eric into bed, if they stayed.

When Marvin came back, his hands and neck were smeared with dirt and his armpits wet from sweat. “We're ready,” he said as he went to wash his hands and discovered that the water bucket was empty. I didn't look at him; I didn't care what he needed or wanted. The apples were wrinkled and steaming on top of the stove. Graham whimpered. When Marvin got back from the lake, the four of us went outside and circled Thomson. I fought not to cry.

“Can you carry him?” I asked Marvin.

“We all can.”

“The boys shouldn't have to,” I said, but Eric stepped forward, tugging Graham's sleeve. Marvin lifted Thomson's shoulders and I supported his middle while the boys carried his legs. Clouds covered the half-moon so we moved slowly, creeping along the trail to the hives and the hole at its end. The flashlight, tied to Marvin's belt, scattered bits of diminishing light. I wished we could have waited until morning but that wasn't what Thomson had wanted.
Right away
, he'd said.
Plant me like a hungry seed.

“Slow down,” Marvin said, and I heard him skid his foot over the ground, searching for the hole. When he found it, we manoeuvred ourselves around the grave, the body hanging between us.

“Okay,” Marvin said, and as I kneeled to lower Thomson in, the boys let go and Thomson's shoulders slipped out of Marvin's grasp. The sudden weight pulled me down and I fell in the grave, tangled with Thomson, my arm pinned under his waist. I felt his body beneath mine, his hip joints poking into my thighs. My stomach pressed against his. Thomson's last lesson: Sooner or later, this is where we all end up.

Dirt tumbled in on me. Dry clods falling on my arms and legs as I lay there. My face was close to his, but there was no breath coming out of his mouth. His body felt fragile beneath mine, like a rotted floor that could easily give. He had been my teacher, my friend, the father I'd hardly had, but he wasn't anything now except a memory, a form that would be gone by spring. The sobbing came like coughing, an expulsion I couldn't control. Part of me wanted to be buried with him, but I pushed off his chest and saw their three faces staring down.

“I'm okay,” I said, wiping my wet face on my sleeve.

Marvin's flashlight illuminated the arteries of cedar roots in the soil surrounding me. When his hand came down, fishing for me, I grabbed on to it. My fingers were slippery from tears, but our grip held and he pulled me from the grave.

At
the table, we ate as if in ceremony, a special family dinner. The boys split open the soft yellow flesh of the baked apples with tarnished dessert spoons. I pushed an underdone potato, dug up early, around on my plate. We had half a smoked fish, split in four. The flesh of it like cold metal on my tongue. The only sounds were the boys' smacking mouths and Marvin's knife blade scraping against the ceramic plate and Graham humming a rhythmless song while he ate. My eyes avoided the empty couch. Marvin and I were silent, but I kept thinking about the story he'd told over Thomson's grave, one I'd never heard before, about Thomson taking him and Phoenix to the city zoo. “He showed us the elephants,” he'd said. “And told us how they work together, even grieve for their dead, visit the graveyards of their ancestors' bones. But we were teenagers. We thought we were too cool for that.” I felt the boys, listening hard, and thought about all that had come after that, for Marvin and for me. “Elephants,” I heard Eric mutter, and Graham's clammy hand had fumbled for mine in the dark. It hurt me to sit at the table, thinking, buried in the same heavy fog that had lived between Marvin and me for years. I wanted to leave, like we'd left the city that night, our pasts falling away in a mess of glass and blood and bombed-out wreckage. Or so I'd thought. I hadn't realized the wreckage had stayed, still intact, like a bee colony's abandoned home. I laid down my fork and looked up.

“There's something I have to do.”

In
the bedroom that I'd first claimed as my own, before Marvin and I began occupying the same one, I opened the closet and pulled Marvin's backpack off the shelf. The words were still there, written on the outside flap. Inside were the few things I had gathered in my final minutes in the dark zone. Over the years I'd taken items out, like spices and books, but others I'd left as mementoes. The bottle of lavender oil. Phoenix's scarf, the skulls and cobwebs marked with a black-edged burn hole and stained with her blood. Throat hardening, I pulled it all out, everything, piece by piece.

I don't know
what time it was when I went after Marvin. The others were asleep and I had been too, all three of us under the same blankets.

A nightmare woke me, a dream about driving into light so bright I couldn't open my eyes and stumbled the car into a forest fire. I lay there awhile with my arm around Phoenix's skinny body, leaning into the lavender smell from the scented oil she smeared in her armpits, thinking. After supper I'd gone into the kitchen to talk with her while she and Thomson did the dishes, but I hadn't really known what to say or how to explain the choice to go along, bring the bomb inside that building, stand there as it detonated. She'd done it too, so she might have understood, but I knew she was angry at me for not telling her about it, not fully opening up to her even though we had been together. I felt the hardness in her that I had known from the diner, heard it in how she banged the dishes around, her back turned to me.

I didn't know what I would say to him, but I got up and went upstairs. Marvin was awake, smoking by the light of a candle pressed into a pool of wax on the floorboards. He reached out and pulled me toward him and I let him kiss me. It was different from Phoenix. With him, it was like the quick, close gathering of heat before a fire ignites. We were bound by what we had done so it felt natural to make love again, with all of that history already between us. Although I felt guilty. I didn't know how I'd tell her, how I'd reveal this other self.

Afterwards, we lay in the cold dark and I watched the ember of his cigarette lift and fall. The smoke hung over us like a gloomy fog.

“The travel agent,” he said. “I'm sorry. She died.”

I pushed myself up on one elbow. The sleeping bag slipped away and the cold air stung my bare skin. A sound came out of my throat as I realized what he'd said. How he'd lied. Her face appeared in my mind, but I couldn't do it, couldn't remember, couldn't look at her. It was too much so I shoved her down like a weight dropped into deep ocean. I squinted at him through the sudden wet blur in my eyes.