Blaze Island

by Catherine Bush

“It’s lunchtime,” said Len.

  “Margaret’s creating a feast.”

  “We’ll tell Roy we’re setting off on a stroll.” Len shook himself into resolution, drawing himself to his full height. “After lunch. To see some more of the island, that kind of thing.”

  “I’ll look into procuring a vehicle,” said Caleb, despite himself.

  “Now we’re talking.” Tony’s smile was thin and wide. “So we reconvene here in, like, an hour.”

  On the quad, Caleb sat, key in hand. He didn’t start the engine. What had just happened? Here was his clearest thought: somehow he’d find a way to drive the two men along the road as far as it went. They’d get to talking, friendly and the like. The Hansens, Len Hansen, definitely had money. He, Caleb, needed money. He’d coax the men along the lane to Cape House up on its rocky height. The beauty of land and sea would draw them on. Tony had been talking about an investment. Wasn’t an investment exactly what he, Caleb, needed?

  . . .

  Early one July morning, a month after she turned thirteen, Miranda hurried up to the vegetable bed to check on the seeds that she and her father had planted. There were the first feathers of carrots, and lettuce leaves that looked like lettuces. Everything had survived the sharp night. Achy with the world’s promise, she raced back to the house. Inside, she tossed off hat and gloves. At the kitchen table, her father went on staring at whatever was on his laptop. The wood stove sparked. There was oatmeal on the electric stove, and it was burning. Miranda yanked the saucepan from the element. Coming up behind her father, she saw an image of water filling his screen, smooth and pallid under a pale sky. There was a pole in the water, a metal wand pointing up at a jaunty angle, from some kind of buoy, with a sign attached to it, which read, North Pole.

  Only then did she notice the tears streaming down her father’s cheeks. In the past she’d seen him sob with grief but not in a long time, and not these silent, steady tears, which threw her out of herself. When she reached to touch him, he scrubbed a hand across his cheeks and slammed the lid of the laptop so hard the computer leaped as the watery image disappeared.

  “The oatmeal burned,” Miranda said quakily. “I’ll make some more.” She wanted to comfort him. They were living the life he’d promised her, a life she loved. Wasn’t part of the promise that they were to look out for each other and not be drawn away by things from elsewhere? That’s what her father had insisted. He shouldn’t break the rules he’d made for them both.

  “What were you looking at?” she asked as her father stumbled to his feet.

  “It’s very warm in the north. It’s been eighteen degrees in Iqaluit for days. It’s above freezing at the pole. And only six degrees here.” He gave an unconvincing laugh. “It shouldn’t be nearly the same temperature here as at the pole. The warm air seems to be parked there.”

  “Is that really the North Pole?”

  “It’s a pond of melt water, from melting ice, not sea water, yes, at the pole, bigger than it’s ever been. It’s only July, the beginning of the melt season —”

  He broke off and wouldn’t meet her gaze. Occasionally her father said things that Miranda had the feeling he didn’t mean to say to her, spoken because she was the only one nearby, words that he then wished to evade or deny. About thick, multi-year ice only being found in certain places now, near Greenland and Baffin Island, not all across the Arctic Sea. She’d caught him staring at a photo of a giant cruise ship floating on open water with jagged icebergs all around, the biggest cruise ship yet to make its way through the Northwest Passage, he said. One day he told her wistfully that he wished he could give her the air of the planet of his youth, air that had so much less carbon in it. When she pressed him, he said people were taking action to change things, just a little more slowly than he hoped.

  For a year now, at her own insistence, Miranda had gone to school in the centre of the island, where, one day in the spring, their social studies teacher, Mr. Crosbie, had spoken to them about the gases accumulating in the atmosphere and warming the Earth. Tapping his paunch, Mr. Crosbie told them to turn off lights when they weren’t in the room and avoid plastic bags when they shopped. When Mr. Crosbie asked if there were questions, Miranda kept her mouth shut. She tried not to think about melting ice. Already she was not like the others. She’d known it from the moment she entered the school, alongside Caleb. She didn’t have a phone. She didn’t watch YouTube. Everyone seemed to know she lived in a house with a wind turbine and helped her father gather weather measurements. The other girls didn’t make fun of her but they left her to herself.

  She had her father and Caleb and Sylvia for company, though it was impossible to imagine describing to anyone, even Caleb, what truly transfixed her father and troubled him sometimes. There were moments when simply by her presence she was able to comfort him. By bringing him tea, touching his shoulder, reminding him it was time to make supper. And sometimes not.

  Standing in the middle of the room, her father looked so forlorn it frightened her.

  “No one is doing anything —” he shouted.

  He was out of the room before Miranda had a chance to catch her breath, the back door banging behind him.

  By the time she made it out to the bridge, he was striding away through the field that led to the shore. When she called out, he didn’t stop or turn, he raked a hand through the air, as if waving her away. The gesture gutted her.

  She was used to him going on walks by himself. He’d pack a water bottle and a piece of cheese or slice of jam bread and hike off on the track across the road that led inland, or along the path that led in a great circle around the headlands on the far side of the cove. Sometimes he took known trails and sometimes he broke them, came back covered in twigs and moss. He said he liked to walk until his very sense of time and self dissolved into rock and air. It was a good feeling, he said, a calming, even a necessary feeling, to lose the human self. When he returned after these particularly long walks, there was something cleansed and settled in him. Miranda, too, knew a version of that feeling, walking the shore path between cove and village, when she could gather herself into a still point that opened to every whisper of the land. Together they hiked out into the treeless barrens, to trout ponds and swimming holes where the water was dark and coppery. The lesson he wished to teach her above all was kindness, her father said as they lay drying themselves on the rocks beside a pond one day. To be kind to all things.

  But he’d never left her like this. Far off now, he strode across the cove, his feet biting the hard-packed sand of the low-tide beach. Still he didn’t turn. Then he was gone. Helplessly, Miranda waited a moment more: only the sound of waves breaking against rocks came to her.

  Back in the burnt-smelling kitchen, she emptied the charred oatmeal into a bowl, told herself she would bring it to Caleb and Sylvia’s yellow-eyed goats. The tea in the pot was cold and there was a skin forming over the tea in her father’s abandoned mug. Miranda rinsed out the pot and set the kettle on to boil once more, every frail gesture existing only on the surface of things.

  Her father’s laptop lay on the table, a small flame. On her own laptop, an old and slower one that had once been her father’s, she went mostly to sites about gardens. After an hour the Freedom timer stopped her from going anywhere at all. Sometimes her father showed her photographs — of Arctic landscapes, the ice he loved so much. Blue and sculptural. Blue ice came from older, deeper glaciers, he told her, the pressure of hundreds and thousands of years forcing the air out of the ice and leaving fewer reflective surfaces so that the red spectrum of sunlight was absorbed and the light released blue-green.

  With her father gone, she could do what she wanted. Except there would be traces of any online path she took and she didn’t know how to erase these traces. Gingerly Miranda opened the lid of the laptop. The image on screen blinked and refreshed itself. The pole. The calm, vast pool of water. Behind it — she pressed the cursor — her father’s screensaver image of her laughing, dark-haired mot
her. Were things getting worse? With the weather? The world? Worse than her father let on?

  He’d told her how, as a boy, he, Milan Wells, had always been the first out the door after a snowfall to shovel the walk and the driveway of their suburban Toronto bungalow, not just theirs but the sidewalks and drives of their neighbours and their neighbours’ neighbours, too. He didn’t care about getting paid, just loved being out in the snow. His two younger brothers, the uncles Johan and Simon whom Miranda had met long ago, thought him foolish and let him exhaust himself. One year, her grandparents, Magda of the gruff voice and wild-haired Richard, bought skis for the whole family and whenever it snowed took the boys skiing in the ravines near their home. They cut their own trails. All of them, even his parents, ignored the No Trespassing signs and scaled the fence of the local golf course, dropping their skis inside. They made great, gleeful circles around the golf course’s sand traps and fourteen holes, now a tundra-like expanse. The golf course expeditions were some of his happiest childhood memories, her father had told her. They would have been possible only on a rare winter day now. As he grew older, Milan Wells realized that what he wanted more than anything was to learn about snow and ice, about polar ice and how it formed. This love was not like his love for her, Miranda knew, but it was profound.

  One day, back in the old life, after he’d spoken out about the warming but before all their subsequent disasters, she’d come upon her father in his study. Setting aside his work, he’d talked to her about the problem of Arctic amplification: how the gases accumulating in the atmosphere created feedback loops that warmed polar regions more intensely than elsewhere. There was a record of this warming in the ice cores that he and his field team drilled: thick, blue layers of solid ice near the surface, a sign of longer and stronger summer snow melts that refroze as ice; all the coring revealed the same results, evidence consistent with the climate data.

  Back up in the garden, alone among the lettuces, Miranda stared at all the small green things but her heart would not leap into them. Her lost mother’s face appeared before her, more real than her own face, and Miranda called out, “What should l do?” Longing for her mother swept through her, an anguish so strong she doubled over.

  At lunchtime, while she was cooking herself some scrambled eggs and wondering if she’d be able to eat them, the back door opened. When Sylvia came around the corner into the kitchen, in a man’s jacket filmed with rain, disappointment lashed Miranda. There were more eggs in the wicker basket Sylvia carried, a jar of goat milk, and though Sylvia was drawing her into a strong hug, part of Miranda remained teetering on the other side of the room.

  “You’re on your own, are you, this fine morning,” Sylvia said, rain shining on her cheekbones, speckles of rain in her flame-coloured hair. She glanced around the room, sharp-eyed, with a flicker of regret at Alan’s absence. “Where’s your father to?”

  “Out for a walk,” Miranda said as lightly as she could.

  Only a few weeks before, the four of them had gone out on the water together, Sylvia and Caleb, Alan and Miranda, in Sylvia’s brother Tom’s speedboat, across the water to the Little Fish Islands — the last land before the vastness of open sea that stretched all the way to Greenland. No one lived on the Little Fish anymore, no human company for the puffins and turrs and eagles, though some families still kept fishing cabins and stayed overnight in the summer. They docked at a rickety stage, climbed up among the moss and harebells and eyebright, and while Caleb and Alan gathered driftwood from the little harbour, Sylvia and Miranda kept climbing, up to a stony lookout where the view was blustery and forever, sky and grey unfurling ocean, and Sylvia told Miranda something of what it had been like to go fishing, the hard work of it, out on the water for days. There’s a place, she said, about thirty kilometres offshore where the smell of the land hits you, the smell of blackberries, we calls it, and oh how you welcome it after the cold air of the sea. There were some fish left, Sylvia said, but not like there’d been in the old days when her father and grandfather had fished for a living.

  The four of them gathered around the leaping fire that Alan and Caleb had made, Sylvia nestling a blackened frying pan over the flames. She stirred salt pork in the pan until it crackled, before adding potatoes, onions, and fish that Alan and Miranda had caught on one of the food fishery days, out in a boat with Tom Borders. They’d both jigged, dropping the nylon line to the sea bottom, slipping it into one of the notches carved in the boat’s side, pulling the taut line back and forth.

  There used to be so many puffins, Sylvia said as she stirred, huge flocks of them everywhere. Nevertheless there were still puffins: a pair flew past, wings windmilling.

  Almost like a family, the four of them gathered around the fire to eat Sylvia’s delicious stew. Afterwards Alan stretched out, grinning like a contented cat, and complimented Sylvia on the food.

  Leaving their parents behind, Caleb led Miranda up another slope, across the beautiful, desolate land, to a shed, unlocked, inside of which they found a Formica table, two chairs and a pair of foam mattresses in sleeping lofts tucked under the roof, an open package of PG Tips tea on a shelf beside an unopened packet of Purity biscuits. As they sat in the chairs of someone else’s abandoned life, for a moment it was as if they became the parents, or adults anyhow, and this small shed on the edge of the ocean became their home. The possibility of a future hovered about Miranda, a life that was hers, theirs, whatever the weather, a life she could sense even if she couldn’t yet see all of it. She and Caleb smiled at each other as these moments stretched all around them.

  One evening, a few days after that, Alan came downstairs in a clean shirt, hair and beard washed and trimmed. He said that he and Sylvia were going out for dinner to the Chinese restaurant on the hilly road to the fish plant in the town of Blaze. “Call if you need me,” he said quietly to Miranda. “I won’t be late.”

  He stalled for a moment in the doorway before entering the sitting room where Miranda heard him whispering, as if to someone else. Perhaps he stood in front of the large painting by Miranda’s mother that he’d hung there, the one of ghostly wolves running up Sixth Avenue.

  After her father left, Miranda could have gone to see Caleb but her own confusion was something, along with her past, that she didn’t wish to talk about. Abandoning a movie about dogs, she lay stretched out in bed. What did she want to happen? Sylvia had trained as a massage therapist. After dinner, would she offer Miranda’s father a massage? He’d take off his shirt. Sylvia would rub his body with fragrant oil. Did Sylvia love her father? Did her father love Sylvia? And when her father did come back late, moving softly through the house, Miranda held her breath, sensing his furtive movements, the weight of his foot on the stairs, listening for some alteration in it.

  At midsummer, a band came up from St. John’s to play in the Parish Hall, and everyone in Pummelly danced, even Mary Green and old Wince Osmond. Alan and Sylvia danced together, Sylvia with rangy elegance, Alan with a stiffness he never used to have, and people made space around them, a promising space, until Miranda, who’d been dancing with Caleb, took her father’s hand and he began to dance with her.

  From the utility room, where she was stacking eggs in the egg tray, Sylvia called, “I’ll be going to Pat’s later to fetch some more wool if you wish to stop by.” They’d already made one trip to Pat Green’s to pick up big green garbage bags full of the wool that he’d sheared from his sheep. Sylvia was teaching Miranda how to card tufts of wool, washed but still greasy with lanolin, to prepare them for spinning. She’d given Miranda a pair of knitting needles.

  “I can’t today,” said Miranda.

  “Is everything all right?” Sylvia asked from the doorway.

  “Yes,” Miranda said. The cold wind jiggled the windows. A distant crow gave a guttural shriek. Her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth, fixed there by Sylvia’s penetrating stare. The melting waters at the pole spread all around them.

  Sometimes Miranda wondered if Sylvia’s kin
dness to her was all because of her father. Sylvia’s longing was like another body in the room. But no, Sylvia’s warmth was undoubtedly a true thing, the calm intimacy they shared when out foraging, the straightforward way that Sylvia had spoken to Miranda about menstruation, not, Sylvia said, because Miranda’s father had asked her to do so, though when Miranda told him they’d spoken, he seemed glad.

  Telling Sylvia that her father had run off after looking at a North Pole turned watery as far as the eye could see felt too risky. Sylvia might ask questions that Miranda was not prepared to answer.

  Outside, perhaps an hour after Sylvia had left, when Miranda turned to face the far field where the weather monitors stood, beyond the black rocks, out on the grey ocean floated an iceberg. Sliding southward, big as a castle, the water aquamarine and steely against the grey-white planes of the old ice. Glacier ice. White sky. Ice from Greenland that would keep travelling south until it melted.

  There were more icebergs now than there used to be, Sylvia had said, at least some years. This summer, their third on the island, there had been a steady stream of them. The daily sight had turned Miranda’s father brooding and quiet.

  Surely he would be back in time to take the weather measurements. Four o’clock came and when he didn’t appear, a deeper fear entered Miranda. Almost nine hours had passed. She grabbed the extra key to his office from the back of the kitchen utility drawer. Here in a place where no one locked their doors, where their own back door was always unlocked, he kept the office door locked at all times. Entering the small room gave her goosebumps: there was the line of black notebooks, their daily weather records. The notebook marking sea levels in the cove had its own shelf. Another, called The Book of Storms, was pressed beside a binder full of printouts of other people’s weather stories, most of which Miranda had transcribed from her father’s tapes. He’d created the online version of the Blaze Island Weather Atlas, uploading records and documents, tales of blizzards and gales and ferocious blows, which Miranda sometimes scrolled through, filled with private satisfaction, though, online, his name and hers were nowhere to be found. She wheeled past her father’s two dulled computer screens, frantically turned over scraps of paper scattered on his desk, but nothing, nothing told her anything she wished to know. Notebook in hand, she hurried along the path to the monitors, past the wild phlox, the blue flag, the buttercups.