Swarm (10 page)

“It's not for sure,” I started to say, but my mother leaned forward, eyes squinting. Concern emerging in her expression.

“You're bleeding,” she said and touched her own nose. I felt the hot trickle running out of my nostril and excused myself. In the bathroom mirror, my face seemed sharper, more real, compared with hers on the computer. The blood a bright spot of colour on the white, white toilet paper. That other room, seen through the screen, a grainy, muted blur, as if it was already vanishing.

I don't really
like Shannon. She's bitter. She complains a lot, talking often about her old life on the mainland, all the tips she made waitressing as a teenager. The way she says things you'd think Mr. Bobiwash kidnapped her, that she didn't have a choice in how her life ended up. She answered the ad that Mr. Bobiwash ran, looking for a new wife. He put it in the newspaper Thomson and Albert, the former museum curator, started eight or nine years ago. But then the antique printing press broke and that was the end of that.

Once, I asked Shannon how she felt about what had happened to Mr. Bobiwash's first wife, Mona, disappearing like she did with his youngest. Shannon just looked at me vacantly, as if she couldn't hear, as if she was preoccupied, sort of like my father whenever I offered counter-arguments. Now I don't speak much. If she offers me tea, I sip the hot, watery liquid and listen to the kids playing outside, the baby's strange hush, allowing her whatever complaint she wants to make. But I also feel pity. I watched her give birth in the woods with only a stained blanket over her shoulders. She screamed and wept as if caught in a trap and I remembered my mother saying,
Childbirth is natural
. But, Melissa, death is too.

There are times I miss Mona—especially when I see the two women in contrast. Shannon doesn't know what to do with the boys, that wild trio, and she treats them with indifference, barely ever touching them, while Mona was so affectionate. A heavy, fleshy woman, she made feasts for all of us out of the turtles and fish we'd bring over or the deer Mr. Bobiwash shot. He was happy, especially when his daughter was born. Abigail, Abby, her eyes bright blue but soon bloodshot with sickness. They decided Mona should take her south, to her parents, her father a doctor. I thought about going with her. For days I toyed with the idea of leaving the seedlings unplanted, the garden to grow over with weeds. But in six months it would have been winter and all I could imagine was Thomson wasting away and me lost again down south, hiding out in another dirty squat. It was too late. Despite whatever I'd once wanted out of life, I had made my reality. Mona left and didn't return. She waved from the deck when the boat took her, the baby held in one crooked arm.

Why he ran the ad, I don't know. We all could have moved in together, like we'd tried to do in the dark zone. A community.

Before I went to the Bobiwashes', I left Thomson on the porch as he'd asked.

“I won't be long,” I told him. The sun hung over the garden, muted by watery clouds. Halfway up the drive, I looked back and saw that he hadn't moved.

At the Bobiwash house, flies buzzed around a heap of wet diapers in a hamper. While I waited for Shannon to open the door, I felt Mr. Bobiwash's other two boys watching me, staring from their hiding spots. An incomprehensible shout blasted out of the bushes from Graham, the mentally challenged one, who had been five when their mother left. I knocked again.

“Shannon?” I tried the doorknob. It seemed stuck.

“I've got it,” Shannon said, and when I let go, she pulled the door open. The daylight hit her green eyes and lit them. They looked a lot like Marvin's. Her forehead gleamed. The front of her plaid shirt was dark in spots, soaked. A rag hung from her hand, dripping. It was like she'd swum up from underwater, broken through the surface of the lake. She waited for me to speak. I held out a tattered plastic bag containing bunches of herbs—raspberry leaf and wild mint. She took it, stepped back into the house.

“The floor's wet,” she said as I followed her. I stopped in the kitchen doorway and saw the prints from her bare feet appear across the linoleum and quickly fade away. Kneeling beside an aluminum bucket, she scrubbed at the tile with a bunched-up rag. Elastics around her forearms held her shirtsleeves up. One arm stretched across her breasts, holding them in place. Tendrils of black hair curled around her face, drawn in concentration.

“You're busy.”

“The house is filthy. It's always filthy.”

I stepped back into the hallway. “Where's the baby?” She didn't answer so I walked from room to room, looking.

Stretched
across the baby's cheek, the red mark looked like a wing. Her eyes fluttered open and closed and she smacked her lips, the bottom one marked by a white worm of skin where it was chapped. Carefully, I lifted her small, warm body off the quilt pushed into a blue recycling box and carried her to the kitchen, her tiny, hard head cupped in one palm. Her left arm pinwheeled and she released a puff of air. Standing at the counter, Shannon filled the kettle from a plastic jug and brought it to the electric stove, fuelled by power from their solar panels although the battery banks are beginning to corrode. Still, I'm jealous because all I have is fire. Dirty, slow to heat up. I cooed to the baby, brought her face closer to mine.

“Don't wake her,” Shannon said as she spooned a powder of roasted dandelion root into a mug. A green cabbage, small, not even ripe, sat on the counter.

“Yours are ready?” I asked, although I knew they weren't, that she'd harvested it early.

“That's what Sarah told me to do,” Shannon said, turning to face me. She pulled open her shirt to show the wrinkled edge of a cabbage leaf sticking out of her yellowed bra. The skin on her chest was flushed red. “It isn't working. Big surprise.”

“Maybe it takes time.”

I cooed at the sleepy baby and she said again, her voice edged with warning: “Don't wake her.”

Light shone through the clean windowpanes. The bulrushes that Eric had cut were in a bunch on the counter, their tops lopped off and the outer green peeled away. The white had started turning brown. I didn't want to ask for them, despite Mr. Bobiwash's offer.

Steam lifted around Shannon's head as she filled a mug. From outside I heard Eric and Graham calling to each other through the fields. The sounds of a game, a pretend battle, or negotiations over a job they had to do. As she carried the imitation coffee to the table I thought of telling her about you, but her face was grim, deep lines bracketing her mouth. I stayed quiet, leaning against the door frame, the baby a weight in my arms. She sat down and I realized she hadn't made a drink for me.

“What else did Sarah say?”

“Nothing,” Shannon said and blew on the surface of her drink. She stared into the corner at a crate of empty jars, ready for autumn preserves, their glass walls dusty from storage. “Jack thinks it's just a rash. Just a temporary thing.” Her gaze slid over to me and stopped on the baby. “But it's so fucking red it's like a bull's-eye.”

“He's worried about you.” In my voice, I heard the argument, the pitch of imploring, and I thought of my dad—trying, over and over again, to convince him it would be all right, that we'd be okay without the farm, and how nothing I said ever seemed to help him. He was sunk inside himself, imprisoned. I couldn't help him and I couldn't help Shannon either. Suddenly I felt very tired and refocused on the baby, that child, you, all our new beginnings. They needed such care, such cautious attention, lest we poison them with our old diseases. I thought of leaving, backing out the doorway with the baby in my arms, running up the road, and I wondered if Shannon would bother to follow or if she'd be relieved.

“He went to find the doctor,” I told her. She sipped the drink without acknowledging me, like I wasn't even there. I tried again. “We'll find him,” I said, the sort of false reassurance I'd learned to offer to women. A lie. Shannon pursed her lips. “We have to,” I added.

“We? What problems do you have?”

“Thomson,” I said, too loud. The baby woke, her lips sputtering as she started to cry. Shannon pressed her fingers against her forehead. When she took her hand away I saw tiny crescent moons pushed into her pale skin.

“I forgot. I forget things all the time.” She glanced at me as I jiggled the baby, trying to calm her. “But those boys. They devour everything.” The baby's cries rose to a high-pitched panicked scream. I rocked her back and forth, unable to soothe her with a name because she didn't have one. Shannon sighed but didn't move from her chair even as the wrinkled face grew furious and hot.

I don't know what it's like to have an infant. I was an only child, born years after my parents deliberated over whether to have kids or not. My cousin Emily, ten years older than me, happily became a mother, making jokes about how exhausted she was, sleeping when she could, tending easily to her newborn son. Shannon was different; she scared me. The baby wailed, arched her back like a cat intent on getting away. She wrinkled and squirmed. My hand felt wet. A bad smell rose from the small body.

“She does this,” Shannon said, looking over at us with narrowed eyes. “She does this to me.”

“Where are the diapers?” I asked, my stomach in a knot, but Shannon didn't answer. Calmly, she set down her mug and stared at the window above the sink.

“Shannon,” I snapped, but she wouldn't speak. Entranced by something I couldn't see.

They weren't by the makeshift crib in the living room. I couldn't find them. Outside, the boys were in the yard, Graham kicking his legs out and circling in a strange dance and Eric, the youngest, squatting on the ground, untangling a trapline. He led me upstairs to his parents' room and took the baby from me. He laid her on the bed, undid the safety pins, and changed her by himself. Methodical, effortless, as if he had been doing it for years.

“Is your stepmother okay?” I asked him in a whisper, but he didn't answer me either.

Downstairs,
I carried the baby back into the kitchen. I expected Eric to follow, but the front door opened and closed and I heard the sound of his footsteps crossing the porch, racing away. “Eric changed her all by—” I started to say, but stopped when I saw Shannon, leaning against the counter with her shirt open. Her left breast exposed. The wide nipple chapped and bleeding. A drop of milk like a strange tear, turned pink.

“I wanted you to see.” The baby screamed again, writhing in my arms, as if she sensed the proximity of her mother's milk. What I wanted was to put her down, anywhere, in the sink even, and leave. But I felt her agony. The small cage of her ribs, wrapped around her hollow stomach. I took a breath and walked over to Shannon.

Together
we fed her. Slowly, painfully, Shannon's fingers gripping the edge of the table as the small mouth suckled. A hot cloth to bathe the nipple.

“Are you okay?” I asked over and over. Not once did she answer. Her eyes were stuck on my necklace, the heart-shaped locket that dangled over the baby's head. Coveting, I could tell, and I slipped it under my shirt. She had a tattoo, a small black and orange snake wiggling at the top of her breast. Warped from the swelling, its belly looked distended, like it had swallowed a rat. I touched it with my finger. “When'd you get that?”

Shannon shrugged. “A long time ago. My sister. Her biker boyfriend.” With the back of one hand she pushed wisps of hair off her sticky forehead and we switched breasts. As the baby latched on, Shannon sucked her breath between her teeth.

Keeping my voice light, I asked, “Have you thought any more about names?”

Shannon laughed derisively. “He wants to name her Crow. What kind of a name is that?”

I liked it but didn't tell her so.

When
we were done, I carried the baby into the living room. She was smiling, a slight new flush in her sunken cheeks. One fist closed around my locket and tugged until I forced each finger open, pulled her hand away. I talked to her, the small, sad body, as her eyes drifted over my face, the whites slightly yellow. I wanted to carry her away, bring her home, but I knew that even if Shannon didn't fight me, Mr. Bobiwash would, the boys. A girl was an asset—any child was—and she wasn't mine to take. I put her on the couch and stood while Shannon sat beside her and laid her hand on the child's belly. She stared at the mantle over the fireplace and I turned and saw old family photos. Children I didn't recognize. A young, chubby girl, standing beside a motorcycle with a man. He wore a cowboy hat and the two of them were laughing. “Is this you?” I asked Shannon.

“Mona. The love of his life.”

“I'm sure that's not true,” I said.

“But he especially loved Abby. He'd trade me for her like that.” She snapped her fingers and the baby stirred under her hand. I sat on the edge of one of the chairs, wondering when I could leave. Her shirt gaped open; her hair lay matted against her skull. She smelled sour. I knew I could never tell her about you. I wondered how she'd even survive.

“You know I didn't ask for any of this,” Shannon said, her eyes bumping over the mantle and moving through the room like a snake over a rock face. Branches of light came through the crack in the drawn curtains. Dust sparkled in the air. “Like my granny. She lived in Newfoundland. Wife of a fisherman who went down with his ship.” I winced, but Shannon didn't even see. Her gaze had slumped to the floorboards, stuck there as she spoke. “We went there once. Beautiful place. Like Ireland, I guess. The same continent cut in half. That was our last vacation. We even flew.” When she said that, her chin lifted, something to be proud of. I smiled slightly, a small offering.

The baby squirmed. Shannon's hand fell away weakly when I picked her up to lay her in the recycling box. I pulled back the curtain and saw that a light rain had started, the first drops marking the dirt in the yard like a tally. The boys were gone.