The Migration, page 23
After I’m finished I find Bryan in the living room, where he has opened all the windows and got a small heater going to dry my clothes. He takes my shirt and cut-offs, and hangs them on a rack. A small puddle begins to form beneath the edge of the pane, and he sets out an old cake pan to catch it.
The T-shirt is long, but it doesn’t leave much to the imagination. My thighs prickle with a shivery warmth. I take a seat on the ground, enjoying the coolness of the floorboards. The heady smell of naphtha fills the room, reminding me of the camping trips my family used to take to Algonquin, good memories.
“I’ve always loved this smell. It reminds me of autumn, going back to school. I was always excited about September.”
“Never was much for school,” he says. “Except for sports.”
I try to imagine him hurtling down the field, tussling with the other boys on the team. It makes me smile. “Our street always smells like this, you know.”
“It’s the houseboats. They use lamps like these.”
He shifts next to me. There’s an undercurrent between us, as if the air itself is vibrating. “Freakazoid,” I whisper.
Bryan’s mouth relaxes. The ghost of a smile, but it’s enough.
“I was wondering…” I’m looking for words now. I know nothing has changed between us but something has changed inside me. I don’t want him to hold back. All I can do is trust these moods, the impulses, trust where they are taking me. “Yeah?”
“Can I kiss you? Would that be all right?”
“That’s not why I brought you here!” he said in a half-strangled voice. “Not for—that.”
“Even so. I want to.”
He sits perfectly still as I pull myself an inch toward him. The floor is sandpapery, grit in the crevices between the floorboards. The rain drips into the cake pan, ping ping ping. I rest a hand on Bryan’s knee, then I touch his cheek. His eyes are very wide, but he doesn’t stop me.
“You have to give me permission. Okay?”
“Yes,” he breathes.
Gently, I touch his lips. He tastes rich and earthy. I lose myself in the sensation of it. Flecks of emotion, like fireflies sparking in my brain. Mine or his, I can’t tell.
“Is this—?”
“Yes,” he says in a different pitch than I’m used to. “Yeah, it is.”
The warmth from the heater is sweltering, crisping my face. This should be easy, I think, easier than it is. How do I summon him out of himself? The two of us are satellites, half glaring, half in shadow, as we circle one another. But then his mouth fits against mine, his tongue brushes the inside of my lower lip. My senses expand to take hold of everything: the chipped-lacquer lamp, a tablecloth slipped too far at one end, the size and shape of every room above us, around us, beneath us, the water whispering through the pipes.
He leans toward me, covers my body with his. My shoulders touch the floorboards and I’m finding it difficult to breathe. I’ve never been kissed like this before, never felt another body pressed against me this way, the crook of his hips, the velvety hairs on the back of his neck.
He slides off the T-shirt and kisses my shoulders, my neck. His blunt nails graze my nipple. Oh.
“I thought you didn’t want this,” I whisper, which is stupid, because I don’t want him to stop. But there is an image in my mind of someone a year older than me, pretty. Very pretty. Skin like silk when he touched her.
“I never said that.”
A faint popping noise, then all the lights in the room flare on at once. The radio crackles to life, spitting out static and then the hint of a melody, words floating: I always knew you’d take me back.
“Bloody hell,” he murmurs.
“I thought it was your mum!” I start to giggle.
“Let me check the fuses.”
“No. Stay.” Jangly pop music fades in and out and for a moment he doesn’t move.
“Sophie…” He rolls off me, kills the radio. Blood rushes in to fill all the squeezed out places. The heat is intense but I feel colder without him.
“Do you want to kiss me again?” I ask. His hesitation is back, that wariness you see in certain trapped animals torn between fight or flight.
“No. Yes.” And then, thuddingly: “No. I want to—”
“You never manage to find your way to the end of that sentence.” I balance on my knees beside him, reaching for my own shirt. The heater has made it brittle without drying it all the way through.
“Let me try, will you? Please?” He tugs me down next to him onto the blanket. “It isn’t just…this.” He holds out his hand for me and it’s shaking. “I was in love once.”
“I know.” I can’t help the hurt from creeping into my voice.
He sits up. “Have you ever been in love before?”
“No.”
Bryan brushes a lock of hair behind my ears and gives me a happy-sad look.
“You don’t know what it’s like then.”
“So tell me.”
His eyes cloud over, lost in his own thoughts. “I didn’t always live out here. When I was growing up we lived out in the woods. In a house surrounded by bluebells, woods—an old gamekeeper’s cottage. In the springtime it was lovely. You could hear muntjac deer calling. Ha-ha! Like someone breathing. I hated it when they were out in the night. I’d lie awake listening, thinking there were people outside. In the winter the lake would skim over with ice. If you tossed a coin on it would ring like a bell.”
He’s never talked much about his childhood. It makes me realize there’s so much I don’t know about him, about who he was before he was sick. “Go on, Bryan. Please.”
“I loved it out there but it was lonely. There weren’t many buses. We moved here a few years ago. Mum thought it would be easier for me to go to school. But I was never good at making friends.”
“You didn’t want to go to university?”
“Astrid was accepted here but there was no way my grades were good enough. I didn’t have much saved up so I thought I would work for a year. I loved her. She was this bright, fantastic force in my life. She brought me out of myself. When she—died, I fell apart. I didn’t go to the funeral, couldn’t bring myself to. Her father came round, but I couldn’t talk to him. I couldn’t speak to any of them, not one. It was as if I’d fallen into a dark hole. I could see people around me, could hear them, but I shut them out. Didn’t know why talking about it would even matter.”
“How did she die?”
“It was August of last year. There hadn’t been many JI2 cases here in Britain. Or maybe there had been others but they hadn’t been diagnosed. It was sudden. An ischemic stroke. They said it was very rare for someone as young as her. Anyway, the doctors weren’t checking for JI2 back then—so her parents had her buried, see? When the cremation order came through, it…had to be applied retroactively. They had to dig up anyone who might’ve had JI2. Astrid was one of them.”
“Oh.”
“Her da came to me. He said he wanted me to come when they reinterred her ashes. I never got to see her body.” Neither of us says anything for a while. “That’s why when I saw you with Kira—”
“You helped me save her.”
“Sometimes I think about what it must have been like for Astrid, underground. I used to have these dreams, you know? That I was trapped in this black space, burning up. Every part of me hurt. I could hear voices. And now I wonder if that was her. If she was trying to tell me.”
“You couldn’t have known. What could you have done?”
“I could’ve done what you did. I don’t have those dreams anymore. Not since they cremated and reinterred her. Her da was glad I was there. Her mum? She hugged me, but it was cold, you know? I don’t think she wanted me to come. And I can’t blame her.”
I reach out and touch his hand. His knuckles are laced with small cuts from the work he’s been doing on the paramotor. His body is close to mine, but his mind is far away, drifting. And when I withdraw my hand he looks at me as if he’s seeing me for the first time.
“What was home like for you?”
“Different. Normal, I guess. Dad was always working long hours and Mom didn’t like it. At school things were fine but…” Back then high school had been everything: me dreaming about whether Markeys would kiss me, Jaina egging me on. “It seemed like there was so much I was supposed to do. There were all these straight lines between one point and the next. Volunteer work. Sports. Projects for extra credit. Life was happening around me, happening to me. Until Kira got sick.”
He nods.
“At first it was almost exciting. Suddenly we were special. But then things dragged on and on. Mom was always after the doctors for a diagnosis, Dad wanted to pretend it wasn’t happening. No one knew what was wrong with her and when they figured it out no one knew what it meant. So they got scared—first of her, then of me.
“The only person who stuck by me was Jaina. She was—well, cool.” Her close-cropped hot pink hair, the jut of her chin when she was angry. Dimples when she smiled. “I had a letter from her. It sounds like things are pretty bad back home. And there’s no way for me to talk to her now.” He folds his fingers around mine. “You know, I would give anything to stay here with you.” I mean it.
“But?”
“Don’t you feel it? This…can’t be forever. Maybe the world worked one way for our parents, for their parents—but not for us. It isn’t the same.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do, though. We’re at the start of something new.”
He touches my hair, smooths it back and the feel of it makes me shiver. “The way you look at me sometimes, it’s like lightning. But I’m afraid of something happening to you.” A long pause, then: “I don’t want to die, Sophie.”
“Me neither.”
“It seems like you’re rushing toward it. As if you’re waiting for it.”
“I’m not.” Thinking about Liv and the choice she has made—Kira too, that look in her eyes as she slipped from the bank. “But I’m not turning away, either. I’m not pretending.”
“I never used to be afraid of dying,” he says. “When I was a kid people would say it was like going to sleep, and if that’s what it was, I thought, why are people so afraid? And as I got older I figured maybe it wasn’t so bad if you just—stopped. No heaven, no hell. The lights go out and you’re done. It meant how you lived was the important thing, not because of what happened after, but because of what it meant to the people around you.” He grits his teeth. “But when Astrid died it was as if she’d never existed. Her family was devastated and it nearly destroyed me. We couldn’t just take the good things and move on with our lives. And I’m afraid of what’ll happen if I die, how much it’ll hurt the people I love.
“When I saw the nymph I felt something—I know it wasn’t as strong as you but it meant something to me. It means something comes after. It isn’t over. Still I’m scared because I don’t know what they are. What we might become.”
I squeeze his hand. “I know. It’s why I want to go up there. I just feel like a candle, you know. Melting away. Like my time is running out.”
“It doesn’t seem as if there are any good choices.”
“Maybe not.” A shudder runs through me, sweet, but also sad. “So maybe we should just grab hold of what we can while we’re still here.” I kiss him softly and when I pull away, I can still taste him on me, salt and copper—a good taste.
He brings his lips to mine again, with more urgency, and a warm shiver runs down my spine as if I’ve slipped into a hot bath. “Will you stay?”
“For a little while.”
36
It isn’t like I thought it would be, like I used to imagine it would be. Bryan is very, very gentle so much so that eventually it’s me who pulls him close, helps him ease into me. It’s strange and it’s sweet and it hurts more than I thought it would. When I’m ready, he begins to rock into me. At first I don’t feel anything but the pain of it—then something in my body shifts. It’s as if my body is a bell that’s been struck, singing out one long note.
We have to remove the sheets after because of the blood. It scares Bryan, seeing it there, and for a moment it scares me too. I wonder about anti-coagulants, how what we just did must be dangerous. It was for Liv. But I don’t regret it.
I stay over. Some time after, the power goes off and Bryan rests fitfully as I listen to the rain slamming against the roof. My body aches with a pleasant dullness. I watch his chest rise and fall as he sleeps. There’s a kind of magic in the intimacy he’s granted me.
In the morning we’re both awkward with each other. He makes something he calls builders’ tea on a camp stove. I cradle my mug against my belly, imagining what Liv might have been going through, why she was willing to take the risk. The longer I stay with Bryan the more I have to lose.
But I don’t want to leave yet.
When Bryan takes my empty mug I pull him close and kiss him. I laugh as he strips my shirt away and neither of us flinches at each other’s scars. We make love again, and it’s better than the first time. We’re both more certain of ourselves, less self-conscious.
Mom and Aunt Irene will be wondering where I am but my time with Bryan is running out. I want to seize hold of it while I can.
* * *
—
It’s late morning when I finally head home. The rain has nearly stopped and the sunlight is just a smear of light on the wet pavement. The footbridge over the Thames is slippery, pounded by the rain and the thin spray thrown off by the churning river.
I walk my bike along the towpath past the derelict mill buildings. Raindrops splonk into the river beside me, stippling the surface. In the distance I spot two emergency service officers in bright, Day-Glo vests. One of them, a woman in her forties with a ruddy complexion and fawn-brown hair pulled back into a ponytail, waves me toward her. “What’re you doing out here?” she demands. “Where do you live?”
“South Street.” A tight feeling in my chest. “On Osney Island.”
“We’ve just come from there. Have you checked in?” I shake my head and she scowls. “You need to get home as soon as you can. They’ll be evacuating Osney soon. We’re going door to door to let people know, in case they haven’t heard the announcements.”
“What announcements?”
“There’s a major storm coming.” Her partner’s lips are compressed into a hard line. “We’re worried the flood defences might fail. With what happened in London…if the rain keeps coming down like this, it’s going to get a lot worse very quickly.” I want to ask her more but already she and her partner are shouldering past me.
God, I think, oh god. It’s happening.
* * *
—
When I make it back to the house, Mom is pulling open a suitcase on the kitchen floor.
“What’s going on?” A tipped-over dresser worth of clothes lies in piles. My eyes land on a cream blouse with bright pink trim—Mom used to wear it at home in Toronto all the time. I didn’t know she’d brought it with her.
Aunt Irene rushes into the kitchen carrying a giant stack of papers. A binder skitters out from where it was wedged under her arm and smacks onto the tiles. “For chrissakes, where have you been? Turn on your damn phone, will you? I’ve been trying to call you for hours.” I look and she’s right: there are over thirty missed calls.
“But what’re you doing?”
“We’ve been ordered to evacuate, Sophie. So get moving, please,” Aunt Irene says.
I pick up the binder and flip it open: lists of names and dates, a copy of the map of England that hangs in her office with the old county lines and towns, some of them crossed out, others circled.
“The rail link north has already been flooded out,” she’s saying. “Didn’t you see it? Tewkesbury is practically underwater, and the power is out as far as Cheltenham and Gloucester. They think the Thames will burst its banks here.” Aunt Irene clamps down on my wrist, surprising me with the strength of her grip. It hurts.
I gawk at the wreckage of the house. “But—you said we’d be coming back.”
Aunt Irene takes the binder and slips it into a duffel bag where she’s stacked dozens of them. She and Mom exchange taut glances.
“Please, Sophie,” says Mom. “We don’t have time to discuss this. The roads will be dangerous soon. Take what you need, okay? Only what’s important.” She pushes me up the stairs, calling after me as an afterthought, “Everything’s going to be okay.”
A lie—we both know everything’s falling apart.
* * *
—
The wind whistles, squeezed through the hollow spaces of the house and into my bedroom. Outside the rain is slowing, now a grey curtain over the river, but I know it’s a brief lull. The quality of darkness shifts, expands. Sandbags and slats of wood have been laid across doorways to catch the mud and detritus. Soon these homes will be as empty as the villages on Aunt Irene’s map. I pull my dusty suitcase from the closet. How did those people choose what to take with them? What was necessary?
I pick up my favourite sweater, a pilled, sheepy grey thing with extra-long sleeves. Do I need this? The shelves are crowded with keepsakes. A charm bracelet with a jewelled heart that Jaina gave me for my fourteenth birthday, a straw hat I wore camping in Algonquin, a frayed toque with a ratty looking pompom. I swore I would throw it out, but I never did. Not those, what then? I yank out a cream-coloured sweatshirt with an appliquéd owl on it that says “Owlsome.” It’s so dorky, when would I have ever worn this? Then I remember—Dad gave it to me. Why didn’t I keep anything else from him? The sweatshirt goes into the suitcase as well. I could leave all of this behind. None of it really matters. But at the same time I want to take all of it, to hoard these memories.
