by Maile Meloy
The others were in chaos, shouting commands at each other. Benjamin started to slip from my arm, and I was going to lose him. He was too heavy, and the helicopter was tilting too sharply towards the waves below. Finally I had to make a choice: the seat belt or Benjamin. I let go and grabbed his other shoulder, and we slid towards the open door.
There was a sickening plunge, and then we hit the water and sank below the surface. It was like being immersed in icy slush. I kicked to the surface, my arms still tight around Benjamin’s chest. When I got my head above water, I tried to breathe, but the muscles in my throat seemed to have seized up in the cold. I tried not to panic.
The swells were so big that I couldn’t see where the helicopter had crashed in the water, and I couldn’t see the shore. I held Benjamin’s head up and started to kick in the direction I thought the shore might be. I tried to remember how far from land we had been—a hundred yards? Two hundred? I had no idea. My throat relaxed enough to let a little air through, but my legs were so cold that they barely responded to my brain’s commands. In junior lifesaving, back in Los Angeles, they had taught us to take off our heavy, wet clothes in a rescue, but that was in warm California, in summer—I didn’t dare do it here. I’d need the clothes if we ever got to shore.
I kicked and pulled and sank, and fought my way up to the surface, where I caught a glimpse of the island, but it didn’t seem to be drawing any closer.
Another wave came over both of us, dark and salty and freezing, and I kicked to the surface again. I heard Benjamin cough and sputter, regaining consciousness.
“So cold,” he whispered.
“I know,” I cried. “Kick! Help me!”
He seemed to grasp the situation, looking around at the waves as I struggled to tow him. “I can’t,” he said. “Let me go.”
“No! Kick!”
“Let me go, Janie,” he said. “Save yourself.”
“Kick!” I screamed, drowning him out. But I knew he was right. I was going to have to make a decision. My hands and feet were completely numb. I might still be able to save myself, but if I kept trying to save him, we were both going to die. The most important thing is not to become a victim yourself—the lifeguards had taught us that, on those giggling, sunny days at the beach, when the very idea seemed impossible.
“Please, Janie,” Benjamin said, and then another wave came over the top of us.
It tumbled us down, filling my mouth with salt water, and we sank. The water was so dark and cold. I tried to kick towards the surface, but the surface didn’t seem to be there. I felt myself drifting, still holding on to Benjamin’s chest, feeling oddly calm. At least we would die together.
And then something caught me by the hair and pulled me up, and my face was above the surface again. I gasped, choking, as I was dragged backward across something hard. I tried to hold tight to Benjamin, but he was being dragged up, too—I didn’t have his whole weight in my frozen arm anymore.
We were in a boat. It was narrow, and a man with a fur hood around his face had pulled us into it. He had a coat made of skins and a double-bladed paddle, and when he had stashed us both in the bow, he started to paddle hard towards the shore. My wet eyelashes froze in the wind, and I couldn’t see clearly, so I closed my eyes, just for a second, to melt the ice.
Then I sank into a darkness far deeper than the cold ocean, and everything was gone.
CHAPTER 36
Escape
The voyage to Norway is, to this day, like a terrible dream, only partly remembered. I was in and out of consciousness, sometimes shaken awake by someone who wanted to feed me or to know that I was still alive. I was dimly aware of being in a smoky hut, wrapped in blankets and warmed by an enormous white dog lying on top of me. There was a round-faced woman who gave me soup. I saw Benjamin’s face, unconscious and pale, cocooned under a second dog. Then I was in the bow of another boat that rode low on the water, hearing the sound of paddling behind me, and feeling rocked by the swells.
I woke when the sun rose, and saw that our rescuer was asleep sitting up, with his paddle resting across the gunwales. He had a round face like the woman who had fed me, although he was taller than she was, and he had dark skin with mottled marks across his cheekbones from frostbite or sunburn. His fur hood was tied tightly under his chin, and his mouth was set in determination, even as he slept. The boat was like a canoe, and one of the white dogs was in the stern behind the man. It lifted its head and whimpered when it saw I was awake, then settled its chin back on its folded paws.
Benjamin slept beside me in the bow, wrapped in blankets. The sea was vast and blue-grey in all directions, and I felt very small and insignificant. No one would notice if a wave swallowed up our little boat, and no one would know if Benjamin slipped away into his fever. He looked terrifyingly grey. I felt his forehead, which was cold, and he didn’t respond to the touch. His eyes stayed closed.
Our rescuer woke up and said something in his language.
“I don’t know what that means,” I said. “Do you think he’ll live?”
The man didn’t understand what I’d said.
I pointed. “Benjamin,” I said. For some reason it seemed important, if Benjamin was going to die with only two witnesses, that both of them knew his name.
“Benjamin,” the man repeated. Then he put a hand on his chest. “Hirra,” he said.
“Hirra,” I said. I touched my coat the same way. “Janie.”
“Janie,” Hirra said. The js in both of our names seemed to give him trouble. He reached forward to feel Benjamin’s forehead, then made a longish statement. I decided he was saying something hopeful, even though his tone wasn’t reassuring.
I pushed Benjamin’s fever-damp hair inside his fur hood, curled up close to him, and slipped back into a hallucinatory sleep.
The next time Hirra shook me awake, I saw a boat towering above us, and voices were shouting from her rail. I struggled to sit up, thinking that the Soviet destroyer had found us, but then I realised that the boat was red, not grey. It was the still-disguised Anniken, and the apothecary and Count Vili were calling to us over her rail. I had a hazy memory of trying to describe the red icebreaker to the Samoyed woman who gave me soup, and trying to draw a map of Kirkenes on the floor, but I hadn’t really thought we would get there. Some kind of hammocklike rig was lowered to the kayak, and I was put into it and lifted up into the boat, still wrapped tightly in blankets. I tried to tell the others that Hirra had saved our lives, and that Benjamin needed medicine, but people kept hushing me.
The last thing I remember was being carried below to my old cabin and put in my sleeping bag, and the apothecary measuring something out of a little bottle in the lamplight. The other bunk was bare.
“Where’s Jin Lo?” I asked.
But the apothecary only gave me something bitter to drink, and then I was asleep.
When I woke, we were on a tiny aeroplane, and the apothecary was sitting beside me. He was grim-faced and remote, and he was writing in a notebook in a tiny, crabbed script that I recognised from the margins of the Pharmacopoeia. Benjamin was bundled in blankets, asleep on the other side of the narrow aisle. My mind felt clear for the first time since I’d fallen to the sea from the crashing helicopter.
“Will he be all right?” I asked.
“The fever has broken,” the apothecary said, as if he had no faith in predictions, only in facts.
“Did you give him something to heal him?”
“I did,” the apothecary said. “But it wasn’t easy. He was very close to death.”
Vili took up two seats in front of us, and he seemed to be asleep, too. Jin Lo wasn’t on the plane, and I feared she had died on Nova Zembla and no one had told me in my vulnerable condition. I looked to the apothecary and he seemed to read my mind.
“She’s fine,” he said. “She’s staying in Norway for now. It’s safer for her there. She’s too recognisable to the authorities in London.”
I breathed again, relieved.
“You understand,” he said, “that we stood no chance against a Soviet destroyer.”
“I know,” I said. “You made the right decision.”
The apothecary shook his head. “Benjamin took the extra avian elixir to go back for you. I should have known he would. I can never forgive myself. I made so many mistakes.”
“But it all worked out.”
The apothecary made a gesture that was both a shrug of assent and a head shake of dismissal. “I’ll do better next time.”
The idea of a next time made me feel tremendously tired. “Can I go sit with Benjamin?” I asked.
The apothecary nodded. I was amazed how weak my arms felt, pushing my body out of the seat.
“Janie,” the apothecary said. “The police will be looking for us in London. Our forged papers identify us as a family. When we arrive at Heathrow, my son’s name is James, and you’re his sister, Victoria.”
I smiled. “I’ll see if we can work up some kind of spat.”
“Good. Oh, and Victoria—”
“Yes?”
The apothecary’s eyes were serious behind his spectacles. “I can never thank you enough for saving my son’s life.”
But I didn’t need any thanks. I slid into the seat beside Benjamin’s sleeping body and slipped my arm under his. After a few minutes, he stirred and interlaced his fingers through mine, and turned to look at me.
“Janie,” he said hoarsely.
I was so happy to hear his voice that tears came to my eyes. “You’re awake!”
He tried to sit up straighter, then winced as if moving hurt. “Ow,” he said, reaching for his forehead.
“Don’t move,” I said. “Just sit.”
He closed his eyes again. “You’re here,” he said. “My father didn’t want to go back for you.”
“He was trying to save you,” I said. “But you did come back.”
“I couldn’t stay a bird. I tried, but I was falling.”
“I know.”
“I keep having dreams about it.”
“Me too.”
“But we’re safe now?”
I nodded.
“And the others?”
“They’re fine. Jin Lo’s in Norway and Vili’s asleep. Your father’s here. He’s so happy to have you back.”
The apothecary handed me something across the aisle in a little brown bottle, for Benjamin to drink. After a few minutes, I could see the colour coming back to his cheeks, and he was able to sit up straight without wincing. By the time the plane shuddered to a stop on the runway, he was able to walk off by himself.
We moved slowly through Heathrow Airport, and through customs, and my heart pounded as an official glanced at our forged papers. I hoped I wouldn’t have to put on an English accent and say my name was Victoria. But the official asked us nothing. He stamped the papers and handed them back, looking bored.
As we left the terminal, we passed the portrait of the young Queen Elizabeth II that my parents and I had seen on our arrival in London, only a month before. I remembered my father saying that things could be worse—I could be queen. But the queen looked very warm and dry and clean, and not wanted by the police. It didn’t look so bad.
“What are we going to tell my parents?” I asked the apothecary.
“What do you want to tell them?”
“Everything,” I said. “But I don’t think they’ll believe it.”
He nodded. “We’re all very tired,” he said. “We’ll take you home, and you can sleep. We’ll meet tomorrow to tell them the whole story. Perhaps your friend Pip could come, too.”
CHAPTER 37
The Wine of Lethe
We took a taxi to my parents’ flat, and I went in alone. I expected them to be furious, but instead they caught me up in their arms, first my father, then my mother, crying and holding on to me as if they would never let go. I started crying, too, just because they were. They didn’t seem to notice that my clothes smelled of seawater and reindeer fat. My father was so overwhelmed that he couldn’t speak right away, a rarity for him.
“We were sick with worry, Janie,” my mother said, wiping tears from her face. “That ridiculous Mrs Parrish said you were staying with someone named Sarah, but the Sarah we found at your school said you’d gone on a boat trip with someone’s uncle. But whose uncle? What boat? The school knew nothing! How could you just go off like that?”
“Benjamin’s father wants to meet tomorrow,” I said. “So we can tell you everything.”
“I’m going to wring that kid’s neck,” my father said.
“He saved my life,” I said. “You’ll understand when they tell you the whole story.”
“When we went to the police, they said you’d been arrested,” my mother said. “They said you’d been released to a teacher and then vanished, and they threatened us with deportation when we couldn’t tell them where you were. But we were asking them! Janie, we’ve just been sick.”
“I know, I’m sorry,” I said. “But I’m so tired, I couldn’t begin to tell it all. And I really, really want to take a bath.”
They seemed to be afraid I might disappear again if they denied me anything, so they agreed. I understood, as I filled the tub, how truly luxurious it was to have a private bathroom in the flat. I was careful not to kick the drain lever, and I took my first bath—alone, in hot water, without Benjamin and Pip waiting for me to become invisible—in what seemed like a very long time.
When I was out and dry, my parents kissed me good night and said again how terrible it had been, and extracted promises of the whole story, no omissions, in the morning. Then I climbed into bed. My diary was tucked beneath the mattress where I’d left it, and I brought it up to date, from sneaking Benjamin through my window a million years ago to the flight home. I fell asleep with the little red book still in my hand.
The next day was a Saturday, and I woke to yellow sunlight streaming through my window. I stretched my arms and legs, happy to be in a bed, in London, in my parents’ flat: I almost thought the word home, which I never thought I’d use for any place except Los Angeles. My mother made scrambled eggs for breakfast, and they were the best things I’d ever eaten, hot and salty and delicious.
The telephone rang, and it was Benjamin. “My father and I will be in the newsreel cinema at Victoria Station in an hour,” he said. “Can you and your parents come?” He sounded odd, but I couldn’t put my finger on exactly how.
“Are you all right?”
“Just tired,” he said. “We didn’t get much sleep. Listen, you know that diary you keep?”
“Yes.”
“Will you bring it? There are some things I want to check against my notebook.”
I should have been suspicious right then. I should have been more wary all along. But I was so glad he was safe and healthy, and I wanted so much to see him and talk about everything we hadn’t gone over yet, that I would have done anything he asked.
There were early daffodils blooming in window boxes as my parents and I walked to the Underground. The weather was brisk and cold, but it was balmy compared to the Arctic, and it was good to be outside on a beautiful day. My parents were eager to hear the apothecary’s story, and were in surprisingly buoyant moods, as if he had already slipped them a potion that produced a happy complacency. They had even started speculating about what the nature of my absence might have been.
“You joined a traveling circus,” my father guessed.
“You joined a band of wandering troubadours,” my mother said.
“You were an elephant tamer?” my father said. “Or a tightrope walker. I can’t decide.”
“Just wait,” I said. “It’s much stranger than any of that.”
At Victoria, we went into the darkened newsreel theater, and I spotted Benjamin and his father sitting with Pip in a back row, in the flickering light of a news story about fighting in Korea. Pip grinned and waved at me, from down the aisle.
“Were you followed?” Benjamin whispered.
>
“I don’t think so,” I said. My parents and I slid into the seats at the end of the row.
The first newsreel ended, and another began. It wasn’t about a foiled nuclear test in Nova Zembla, but about new ladies’ fashions. The models wore full skirts with tiny belted waists, like Maid Marian had worn when I’d first gone to Riverton Studios such a long time ago. The voice of the newsreader described the remarkable imagination that went into these new skirts and dresses. My parents were getting restless.
The apothecary must have been satisfied that there was nothing in the newsreels about us, because he stood. “Let’s go to the refreshment counter,” he whispered.
The theater was on a sort of mezzanine above the train station, and the tables were empty at that hour, and hidden from the crowds below.
“Thank you for helping us escape on the dock,” I said to Pip.
“I shouldn’t’ve—I missed ev’rything!”
“Did the policemen catch you?”
“Course not. Fat old coppers.”
“This is our friend Pip,” I told my parents. “Dad, you already know Mr Burrows, the apothecary. And this is my mom, Marjorie Scott.”
“I’m so pleased you’ve come,” the apothecary said. “I owe you both an explanation.”
“You bet you do,” my father said.
“Please, sit down. Pip, will you fetch some glasses?”
We took a table, and my mother unwrapped her scarf, her face alert for lies. My father, too, surveyed the apothecary with scepticism and curiosity, deciding how trustworthy he was. I felt protective of him, and hoped he would live up to my parents’ standards. Benjamin looked healthier than he had the day before. His freckles had gotten back some of their colour.
“First, a toast,” the apothecary said. He uncorked a bottle of champagne and poured the golden, fizzy liquid into the small glasses Pip brought. “I think it will be all right if the children have a sip today. We have so many reasons to be grateful.”