Miranda didn’t want to move. There was secrecy in her father. Her toes curled tight. She didn’t want to be left in the room with Sylvia’s anger either.
“Lead you on?” Miranda had never seen her father shout at Sylvia. Something in Sylvia froze, as if aware she’d gone too far. “I’ve never done that. You know what, Sylvia, I’m fed up with all the innuendo and haranguing. Good night.”
In the breezeway, stumbling after her father, Miranda fumbled for her skates in the dark. She was in the yard, which was darkening, Sylvia calling her father’s name at Miranda’s back. The rooster crowed. The tears in her eyes might be Sylvia’s tears or even her father’s. A fist pummelled her stomach from the inside. Could they not go back in time? Five minutes, a month, a year or two?
Their old car, running off its electric battery, was quiet as it reversed across the yard, so quiet that perhaps Caleb didn’t hear it until he stepped out of the shed, the doorway lit behind him, something small in his hand, likely something he’d carved. He’d begun to whittle creatures out of pieces of driftwood: a crouched fox, loping wolf, diving seal, swimming polar bear. Cutting boards shaped like whales and dried salt cod. He’d sell them too, setting up a summer stand at roadside, though he’d told Miranda tourists sometimes found it odd to buy souvenirs from a local who looked like him. A silhouette in the doorway, it was impossible to see his face and impossible not to feel how his initial pleasure and expectation as he stepped through the door immediately turned to distress as the car tugged Miranda away from him.
Her father didn’t stop. Perhaps he hadn’t even seen Caleb. Past Christine Brett’s B&B they went. Mrs. Magdalene’s boarded-up house was a smear on the far side of the road. The snowy yards. Her father remained silent and closed in on himself. Something was being broken. Miranda’s hands closed into fists. She wished to be far away, out on the ice with the seals, away from this moment, which she would mark in her notebook, date, time, the storm of it.
. . .
Seated on his quad in front of Teresa Blake’s guest house, Tony and Len having disappeared back inside, Caleb wondered where he was going to get a car, not a quad or a truck. What he needed was a vehicle big enough to carry the two men, yet small enough that no one in Tom’s Neck, seeing him sail by at the wheel, was going to swivel their head and say, What’s Caleb Borders doing driving Earl Patton’s Dodge Ram out of town? And who’s in there with him?
Anna had expected him to go back to Pummelly but he wasn’t going to do that. With a glance over his shoulder, Caleb set off on foot across the lawn. Inside the back door of Bakeapple House, he placed his big boots beside a pert black pair with chains looped around the heels that had to belong to Margaret Hynes’s niece, Della Burke, working in the kitchen alongside Margaret. When Caleb looked up, Margaret herself loomed on the far side of the kitchen doorway, a thick orange extension cord snaking past her feet, knife brandished in her hand, while, outside, the generator roared.
“Caleb Borders, if you come any closer, a gulch is going to open up and swallow you whole.”
“How’s it going there, Margaret?” Caleb had to raise his voice to make himself heard above an ocean of sound: generator meeting kitchen hubbub. Margaret wasn’t tall but she emanated strength, her bottle-brown hair snared within a hairnet.
At the far counter, red kerchief tied over her hair — saving her from the fate of having to wear a dreaded hairnet like her aunt — Della turned. Mouth open in surprise, she was on the cusp of dropping a spoonful of whiteness onto two crab cakes cooked to a golden crispiness. Beside them lay a pale nest that to Caleb’s eye looked suspiciously like caribou moss. Was it? You had to boil that moss before you ate it. Otherwise it was poisonous. Presumably Margaret knew to do that.
“Well, then, are you gone yet, boy?” Margaret barked, knife held high.
In the background, Caleb’s ear brought into focus another sound. A radio. Yes, a small battery-operated radio was propped on the windowsill beside the stove — Teresa had spoken of one that morning. At this distance, it was impossible to hear anything more than a buzz and crackle adding to the general uproar: whirring fan, spit of grease.
“Any news from out there?” Caleb asked Margaret.
“Not good,” she said. “Now go.”
“Anything from the Avalon, Gander?”
“Surely you have a fondness for that head of yours and those fine hands. Della, grab those cakes before they burn!”
“I need to speak to Della,” Caleb cried, distracted nevertheless by the word of no good news, because, from the coverage of previous hurricanes and other natural disasters, he knew how reports began with one confirmed death or two before climbing into the hundreds, even thousands. This one had begun in the hundreds so now what? And here they were still trying to hold onto the ordinary.
He’d hooked Della’s attention at any rate. “It has to do with the guests,” he called across the gulch separating them. “The very important guests.”
Margaret lowered the knife. “One minute, then,” she said, grabbing back her spatula in disgust as Della hurried to join Caleb, stepping over the extension cord that powered the fuse box, pulling her T-shirt down over the black leggings that clasped her wide thighs.
He wasted no time. “I need to borrow your car.”
When he saw how instantly crestfallen she looked, he realized Della must have thought he had a specific plan for her, something that might lift her out of the drudgery of her aunt’s kitchen. Beyond Della, Margaret was nudging more crab cakes onto a plate with the tender devotion others reserved for babies.
“I need to take them somewhere, and it’s too far to walk. One of them’s already going off with the blonde woman, Anna, in Teresa’s car. It’s for the other two.”
“There’s a sinkhole down along the Pummelly Road, in Green Cove.”
“You think I don’t know that? My car’s on the far side of it. I have a can of gas, Della. I’ll replace any I use and more.”
In school Della Burke, shy as she was, would have ignored him, like all the others. It was something agreed upon by everyone. Was it because of his missing father, the colour of his skin? He was the castaway. Sensing this had made Caleb cranky or mute, which only made things worse. His solitude grew profound. With all their classmates gone, though, things were different. There was a vulnerability, an ache in Della, owner of a little Chevy four-door.
“Be a sweetheart, Dell.”
“If anything happens to my car, Caleb Borders, your arse will be whipped.” But she was still plump Della Burke, scrabbling obediently in her shiny black handbag, which hung from a chain that matched the ones on her little black boots. From the bag she pulled a car key.
“You’re a wonder, Della,” Caleb said, as she handed the key over.
“We’re hardly finding a station on that radio,” she told him with sudden, conspiratorial gravity. “Nothing at all.”
He didn’t drive the quad to Della’s house, figuring it would attract less attention if he left the quad where it was. As Caleb hurried along the main road, he grew aware of footsteps, swift-paced, approaching from his rear. Someone with a spectacularly quiet tread was sticking close, not trying to make a wide berth around him.
Hunched in an oilskin jacket, brimmed cap pulled down over his forehead, sunglasses a mask across his eyes, the old man pulled in stride with him. The old man’s furtiveness did nothing to cancel out his air of authority. “Now where are you off to?” he asked softly, so close in Caleb’s ear that Caleb’s heart sprang from his chest.
They were coming up to the turnoff that led down a slope to the government wharf, its long arm stretching into the harbour. Two boats were moored alongside the wharf, the cabin cruiser that Owen Freake used for tours whenever eager visitors came to the island and Pete Decker’s small fishing boat, White Foam. The aluminum speedboats often berthed at the wharf had been pulled to land before the storm. Across the harbour, at the fish plant, Tom Borders’s longliner and others waited in a row for the sea
, which still had the force of the storm in it, to settle. Those boats — the money they cost. Caleb had heard his uncle muttering about the expense of fishing these days.
The old man’s touch, neither rough nor gentle as he steered Caleb by the elbow onto the turnoff, made Caleb recoil. On the wharf they would be less observed. There would be no one to overhear them.
A little over a year ago, though it seemed much longer now, one very early July morning when the sky was still dark and the moon full and shining, they’d come down to this wharf together, Caleb, the old man, and the old man’s third visitor, Arun Mudalnayake. That time, too, there’d been secrecy.
Before dawn, they’d arrived in the old man’s car, the old man and Arun in the front, Caleb in the back, balancing on his lap a mysterious object with gauges and computer readouts, a small solar panel, and a row of tiny nozzles. It was about the heft of a medium-sized dog and the old man had been constructing it all winter in his store, as he’d constructed a smaller version the year before. Don’t let it jiggle or bounce, he’d warned, only half-joking as he entrusted what he called the module to Caleb for the journey. In the face of the old man’s obvious anxiety, Caleb was as careful with the peculiar object as if it were made of glass.
Arun had arrived the previous day. Caleb had been the one to drive across and pick him up, a slim figure waiting by the Gander airport curb in down jacket and gloves, despite the relative mildness of fifteen degrees, his skin a good shade darker than Caleb’s, which aroused Caleb’s interest. Arun hadn’t said much on the rainy drive back to the coast, preferring to stare out the window or doze. He must have been older than he looked, which was about fourteen. A faint scent of cologne hovered about the collar of the crisp white shirt glimpsed beneath his jacket. He’d flown up from Boston. He did say that he worked in a lab at a university and that, in another year, he was supposed to move back to Colombo, Sri Lanka, to help run his father’s computer-chip factory. Last summer, the grass in Colombo had been so hot it burned his feet, he said, the blades as sharp as glass. The huge floods from Cyclone Mala — had Caleb heard about them, how they’d crashed like the long-ago tsunami over the southern coast. On the ferry Arun didn’t want to leave the car until Caleb told him they all had to go upstairs.
With the old man, as they made the drive through the dark from Pummelly to Tom’s Neck, Arun was more talkative. Perhaps because of the dark and because he had nothing to add to the conversation, they spoke as though they had forgotten Caleb was there. About sulfate particles versus calcium carbonate or diamond dust or water droplets when it came to optimal reflectivity and dispersal rates, the question of dispersion in the troposphere versus the stratosphere, whether to create more clouds at lower elevations that cooled with their albedo or a thin, high reflective haze that would enclose the Earth. There’d be losses, inevitably, as well as gains. If a haze, then no more pure sunny days, for one. Sulfate particles might eat away more of the ozone layer, calcium carbonate particles wouldn’t.
“There it is, there it is, the double-edged sword of the sulfate particle,” exclaimed Arun, the dark hair at the back of his neck bristling as he spoke. “Exactly what it is that got me thinking, can we engineer a particle that will take the good stuff from the sulfates, the reflectivity, na, the uniformity of dispersal, the ability to stay aloft for some time? And not the bad.”
“It’s a clever name you’ve given your nanoparticle, Skyspex,” — or was it Skyspecks, Caleb had no idea — “I presume you’ve taken out a patent on the name as well as the idea itself,” the old man said.
Outside the car window, blue ponds and moonlit trees flew past.
“I truly hope, based on the modelling and the lab results, it will rival the sulfates for dispersal and staying aloft, but in the lab of course we’re not able to simulate all the interactions —”
“— of the air. Ah, indeed, there’s the rub,” said the old man.
“Yes, yes, the mysteries of cloud and aerosol interactions —”
“Anyway, I’m glad you were willing to come all this way to have our conversation. The sprayer’s rudimentary but functional, proof, fingers crossed, it’s still possible to build something useful in a shed. I’m fully aware of the restrictions about actual geoengineering experiments in the field, don’t think I’m not. Of course, one can’t go out and start chucking particulates into the atmosphere — on the other hand, people have been making clouds for a long time. Those guys pumping smoke from a boat to mimic shipping exhaust, who made enough cloud cover to create a cooling effect fifty times greater than the warming from their emissions? Basically a geoengineering experiment. Even artists have made clouds. All we’re trying to demonstrate is that the sprayer functions. And gather, as I mentioned, some necessary documentation.”
They made the turn and were gliding down towards the government wharf where Pete Decker stood waiting for them. The floodlights picked out his stocky figure pacing beside his truck. In the car’s back seat, his skin blue in the dark, Caleb touched the metal of the module gently, musing on what he’d heard. He assumed the old man must have paid Pete Decker handsomely for whatever they were up to and likely for his silence.
As Caleb and Arun unloaded more equipment from the trunk, two pressurized gas cylinders, boxes, and, from the trailer hitched to the car, a wooden spool wrapped with coils of extremely thin lime-green tubing, the old man stood on the wharf directing them, all the while cradling the module.
“This is for the weather monitoring then, is it?” Pete Decker said amiably. Caleb had to presume this was what the old man had told Pete, even though part of his mind went, Weather monitoring?
Weather monitoring was what the old man had told him to offer his mother as the reason for this early morning trip. Tell her I need your help. But the old man had not wanted Caleb to tell his mother that he’d picked up Arun Mudalnayake while on the Gander run to buy supplies. Let’s keep that to ourselves. It was awkward navigating between his mother and the old man now that the two of them no longer spoke. There’d been other arguments before the one that broke them. His mother had called the old man shifty to his face. Able to think only for himself. After they stopped speaking, Caleb sensed he was overhearing an internal conversation his mother was having as she shoved a pan into the oven or boiled goat milk for yogurt at the stove. He knew she felt aggrieved. Betrayed. Something had happened that she couldn’t or didn’t want to get over.
The old man had secrets, true enough. The fact that he seemed to be entrusting Caleb with some of them made Caleb feel close to the old man, honoured and emboldened and gratified, likewise closer to the girl. Even if the girl didn’t know everything he and the old man did together, a magical web spun itself around the three of them.
From the deck of the White Foam, Pete held out a hand and helped Caleb scramble aboard. With the greatest of care, Arun and the old man passed the module into Caleb’s waiting arms.
They were lucky. The weather had turned the day before. It was clear and likely to stay so for a few days. With a thermos of coffee at his side, Pete settled himself in the wheelhouse. They set off as the light grew. The Little Fish Islands, materializing as a dark line of rock on the horizon, looked a thousand kilometres away. In the cabin, Arun and the old man set to work inflating a small weather balloon with gas from the smaller of the cylinders. They attached the module to the balloon and the lime-green tubing to the module; a line of tubing descended from the module to the spool, now locked to a winch on deck. It would be Caleb’s job to turn the winch.
Water droplets, the old man said, pointing to the larger cylinder, as if he wished to make sure Caleb understood this. Once the length of tubing had been unspooled into the air, the droplets would be pumped up through the tubing to the module where a blower would push them into the sky, the nozzles being no wider than two human hairs, droplets so tiny they would rise even higher and hang suspended.
We’re studying clouds, the old man said to Caleb, again as if he wanted to make sure this was cl
ear and perhaps so that Caleb didn’t imagine other things.
The sky had turned pink in the east. Farther out at sea, icebergs floated past, one shaped like a horse, another a fish, mauve and turquoise in the dove-coloured light. The old man was gruff with his instructions, no doubt because he was caught up in what they were doing. As Caleb turned the winch, lifting balloon and module higher, he excused the gruffness. Slow down, Caleb! For God’s sake!
Arun, who had pulled his hood over his head and tightened it under his chin, nervously eyed the module and the swell of the waves through his tinted glasses. They were settled out on the water, the motor quieted. Once the tubing was extended as far as the old man wished, and attached to the second pressurized cylinder, it was Arun’s job to monitor the pump while the old man checked readouts on a small computer pad, calling out, Size of vapour plume! Rough number of particulates! Every few minutes he stopped to take photographs.
Caleb’s hands grew cold. There seemed to be a problem with the readouts. The old man’s head and Arun’s knotted close. The ocean rose and fell beneath the deck. Speckled cod flicked through the deep water and part of Caleb descended with them, down to the dark ocean floor, the pressure of water a weight all over his limbless body, gills puffing like tender accordions. Farther out, humpback whales exhaled umbrellas of vapour. Would the Coast Guard wonder what they were up to? All at once Caleb was instructed to reel the module back in. Gently! Gulls flew close, curious to see if they had caught anything edible, which made the old man mutter nervously and shout at them. It turned out, after some discussion, that one of the nozzles was blocked.
As more icebergs floated past, Arun came to stand beside Caleb on the rear deck while the old man went to consult with Pete up in the wheelhouse. Arun said he’d never seen an iceberg before the previous evening when he’d walked into Green Cove with Dr. Wells to inspect a small one beached on the sand.
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