“Dr. Wells?” Caleb said.
Arun flinched, offering no answer other than, “And now icebergs are everywhere.”
“I’d say,” Caleb said. “It’s a good year for them.” A wave of cold air blew at them from one distant blue mountain. He let the doctor thing go. Obviously the old man wasn’t an actual doctor.
Arun frowned. “Are they not from Greenland?”
“Most of them are, that’s right.”
“So it’s not good there’s so many of them, is it? Don’t you think precarious regions like islands ought to have the means to protect themselves from — from what might be coming? The floods, the storms, the rising seas?” Arun spoke in a fervent undertone, as if confiding a thought close to his heart. “At the very least we must find a way to call attention to our possibly terrible fates.”
Caleb wondered what Arun meant by possibly terrible fates. How terrible? He breathed in the scent of Arun’s skin. What the old man had said in the car about people making clouds that cooled fifty times more than the heat created by a ship at sea, that might be useful. What else had he said — there might be no more purely sunny days like this one?
“Thing is, I’d rather be on an island, this island, than anywhere else,” Caleb said. Sometimes he dreamed of travelling south, to places, islands where people might look more like him; each time, though, something tugged him back to this land.
“Pete Decker told me there are hundreds of icebergs stranded over on the other side of the island,” said Arun.
In Vera’s general store in Pummelly, Caleb had heard thousands, stretching as far as the eye could see, more than anyone could ever remember being calmed there. Dan McGrath himself had driven across to the town of Blaze to take a look at them. An idea sprang into Caleb’s mind. He’d been searching for weeks for a way to enact an extraordinary plan, a way to bring the girl closer than ever. Now the best course yet stretched clear before him.
He was on the government wharf in Tom’s Neck. The day after the unexpected storm. In searing mid-September sunlight. With the old man who, in his oilskin jacket and sunglasses, had swerved him away from the road, brought him down here, asked him something. The past was all around them. Caleb tried to push it away. The day he’d taken the girl out in speedboat to see the icebergs, she’d seemed less upset by the time they finally docked in Pummelly, and Caleb, who had turned the boat towards the far shore, true, and not listened when the girl begged him not to do this, had allowed himself to believe he’d been forgiven. Until a few hours later, when the old man texted him and ordered Caleb to meet him down at the beach in Green Cove. There, out of sight and earshot of all others, the old man reared up, and though he never touched Caleb, his anger was so strong as to make Caleb feel he were being whipped and shaken. There in the soft sand as the tide crept towards them. You crossed a line, Caleb. You know she’s not to leave the island. Taking someone somewhere against their will, that’s called kidnapping. Hitting them, it’s called assault.
Hitting them? On the beach, as the old man’s words sundered life as he knew it, Caleb’s shocked mouth opened in grief and despair and self-defence but only air poured out.
Nevertheless the old man hadn’t fired him. Nor, despite his pain, had Caleb quit his job because quitting would have been a worse fate. It would have cut him off even further from the girl.
He was on the wharf, and in an hour he was to meet the two men, Len and Tony. They were a thread leading him forward, into the future. Thankfully, Della’s car key was stuffed deep in the pocket of his coveralls, not clutched in his hand.
What was it the old man had asked him — where are you off to?
“To fetch something for Margaret Hynes,” Caleb replied, an answer, he hoped, that didn’t strain credulity too much.
“Did you entertain any thought of returning to Green Cove to let me know if you were able to deliver my message to Anna — ? How about filling me in on the state of things with our visitors, especially since I’ve recently promoted you and given you a raise?”
It would have been flippant to say, What was the point, since the old man was clearly not at the house in Green Cove, now was he?
“The windows — the new bow windows at Cape House, the ones we installed, they smashed last night in the storm.” All the desolation of this rose in Caleb again.
“I’m truly sorry, Caleb. That was a shocking barometric pressure drop, it took Mary Green’s roof, as I’m sure you know. I’ll come out and take a look if you like, but today I need you to focus on the tasks at hand. It’s critical.”
Hearing new warmth in the old man’s voice, the old man who never seemed to care about the colour of Caleb’s skin, Caleb kicked at the thick wood of the wharf. He explained about the men’s trip to the ferry dock with Anna, where they’d found a wisp of phone coverage and the man named Roy had picked up some messages, including one that said his son was missing.
At this the old man perked up, all his coiled physical energy a giant, magnetizing force. He even pulled off his sunglasses.
“What happened to him?”
“Roy thinks he got swept out to sea in a storm surge that came in over a wildlife refuge where he was.”
“Roy knows this how?”
“His wife sent him a text.” Roy’s wife had a foreign name. Japanese? Presumably the old man knew this already.
“I see,” said the old man with something of the energy a hive of buzzing bees might make. “Thanks for that information, Caleb.”
They were hard upon the White Foam’s moorings, the boat tugging at the creaking ropes. The old man was contemplating something with furious intensity, the creases at the corners of his eyes appearing and disappearing. The lines on his face were deeper than they used to be, his cheeks hollowed above his speckled beard. Whenever he was with the old man for any length of time, especially when the girl herself was nowhere nearby, a question took form in Caleb and began to press hard then harder against his tongue. Dare he ask the old man if he could speak to his daughter once again? Assert that his penance had gone on long enough?
“Any word back from Anna?” the old man asked.
She’d agreed to the further delay, Caleb told him, and decided not to mention Anna’s reluctance though he added that the men did not seem happy about being held up on the island for another day, not happy at all. In any case, they didn’t have enough fuel to leave, nor was Roy able to get a flight plan.
“It’s not likely they would be happy,” the old man said. “Roy especially, even more given his missing son. It’s perversely helpful that the hurricane is engineering delays for me, saving me from certain kinds of ingenuity. It’s a good thing for a man like Roy Hansen to discover he can’t always make the world do what he wants when he wants it.”
Long ago, in the days when he had first gone hunting with the old man, the two of them crouching together behind a gaze built of stones at shore, the old man had taken it upon himself to teach Caleb bits of science, things Caleb didn’t learn in school. Once, as they waited for a flock of eiders to appear, the old man had said that the world would be a very different place if the carbon particles accumulating in the atmosphere were something people could see, like a red mist spreading in the sky, growing redder year by year, if bright red trails poured out of jet engines. Now and again, Caleb tried to imagine a world like that. Red skies. Red mist. Growing redder.
The old man could be caring one moment, ferocious the next. And he harboured mysteries, as in what exactly he was up to with his visitors and all the computer equipment he kept stashed at his cabin, not to mention balloons in the sky and tubing. Caleb’s mother surely wasn’t wrong to be wondering, even if she didn’t know about the balloons.
“Alan —” It was the possibility of kindness that made Caleb speak the old man’s name, the most urgent question filling his mouth, “Did you come to Tom’s Neck to meet the men?”
“No.” A new concern gripped the old man’s face. “Don’t say a word to them about seeing me. I�
��m checking up on things. Checking up on you as it happens.”
“Why are the men here?” Caleb’s heart galloped as he asked this.
“To learn something about islands.” The old man spoke so quickly Caleb wondered if he was telling the truth.
Why was it so hard to utter the question he wanted to ask most of all? “Do you have any news from the other side?”
“I’m as cut off as you are.”
Now, the voice inside him kept urging — there was no one around them on the wharf as they stood close under the bright, redeeming sky.
Once, it had seemed like the old man was courting Caleb’s mother. Or his mother was courting the old man. Then things, which looked like they were going one way between the two of them had gone another, and despite a house full of his mother’s sorrow and rage, Caleb had breathed a huge sigh of relief. Because if the old man had really been on his way to becoming a father, this would have made the girl a sister. If so, what was Caleb to do with his dreams, the way he woke with a boner between his legs and the girl’s name on his lips, whispered aloud as he imagined licking every speck of her body?
So, while it had been a terrible thing when his mother and the girl’s father stopped speaking and began to act as if each were dead to the other, it had launched him into a wide new world of hope.
Once, as they stood together atop the grassy cliffs of the headlands, out beyond the trail that led to Cape House, the girl, with her soft breasts and sometimes feral manner, had blurted to Caleb that she thought he was more like her father than his own mother. A north wind punched their faces as they faced the churning sea and Caleb had to ask, puzzling, What do you mean? They were both wiry and muscular and had dark hair, the girl said. But there seemed to be more. Your moods, the girl blurted. Then Caleb did not know what to think.
“I have to go.” As he faced the old man on the wharf, a salt taste filled Caleb’s mouth. They’d gone to school dances together, himself and the girl. They’d danced, before retreating bashfully to the sidelines. He’d held her hand and he would do so again.
Yet there was also this: his hour was shrinking and he had to get to Cape House to prepare it for the men. Once he’d secured his investment, then, only then would he ask his question of the old man and go further: describe the beautiful future he’d prepared for his daughter. Storms or no storms. Surely then the old man would relent.
Caleb touched Della’s car key in the depth of his pocket, the balls of his feet pressed hard into the dock. “Is there anything else?”
“Stop by the house end of the afternoon, once you’ve done whatever you’re doing for Margaret. One last thing — have you by any chance seen Agnes Watson amid your wanderings?”
“No,” Caleb said truthfully, as everything in him wobbled with unease.
“Keep an eye out please. If you do, tell her to come to the house.”
Agnes Watson was the only other person Caleb had met whose footfall was as quiet as the old man’s. She’d surprised him, once, up in the snowy hills. He had finished checking his rabbit snares and was staring out at the white sea. The gulls were returning. He searched for seals. Someone stood beside him. He’d heard nothing. The woman staying at the Wells’s place, Inuk, the girl had said, who along with the old man had taken one of Pat Green’s seals the morning before, was wearing what must be the old man’s snowshoes. Their turquoise meshing glowed. She disconcerted him in a totally different way than the other woman, Anna. Agnes had a solid strength entirely different from Anna’s silvery gestures. It was like turning to discover yourself beside a caribou. When Caleb asked Agnes what she was doing on the island, she said something he didn’t understand. Sila.
“It means breath and air and mind and weather. The living world. A silanigtalersarput is someone who sees clearly in the darkness and knows the weather and ice.”
Agnes said, “There are people out there who don’t believe ice and snow are weather. We are entering times of dangerous weather and that weather is inside us as well as outside.”
. . .
Miranda came to a halt at the edge of the far field. Pieces of storm wreckage lay strewn about where the flooding waves had tossed them the night before: strips of aluminum siding, driftwood, a plastic fishing buoy, a toilet seat. Breath burst from her lungs. Having dashed away from Frank, she was not going to look back and see what he was doing. Sleeves still wet from pulling things out of his car, she tugged on her blue rubber gloves and set to work, dragging one end of the piece of siding to the place where she would make two piles, the burnable and unburnable. They would have to find a way to get rid of the unburnable later.
How far had the siding travelled, from Pummelly, the island, or afar? What about the toilet seat? She didn’t want to think about the fact that there had never been storm wreckage in this field before. It felt good to throw herself into movement, be only a swing of muscle, steer herself away from her cascade of feelings, the flux of everything in and around her. The altered world. She grabbed a piece of driftwood as Ella sniffed at it. Her mind would not stop racing over what Frank had told her — two Americans, why would Americans be on the island now?
It was impossible, dragging the driftwood, not to catch a flicker of lime green out of the corner of her eye. Miranda turned her back again. Haul, haul, haul. Clouds flew overhead. The reek of kelp was thick in her nose, rust-red kelp covered the rocks all along the shore, the air tugging at the salt smell. The kelp needed to be gathered before the tide rose again and pulled it all back out to sea. When she looked up, Frank was beyond the row of conifers, on the footpath that led into the fields. With a hitch in his stride, he stopped at the first weather monitor, Marty, the insect-like one, peered at it without touching. A ripple of emotion travelled through Miranda, misgiving and something else. The next time she looked, Frank was standing in front of the second monitor, inspecting the little white house on its pole, which was technically called a Stevenson screen but they called Iceland. Even farther out, the wind sock continued its jittery dance. Suddenly it seemed pointless to run away from him. She did not want to run away from him, even though she was glad he was a good distance off.
Closer still, Frank called out, “Miranda, do you need any help?”
“Not really,” she called back. She pulled off her gloves and wiped an arm across her forehead. “Except for the kelp.”
When Ella trotted up to him, tail wagging, Frank ruffled her black fur. Kicking at the toilet seat she’d dropped on top of the siding, he asked Miranda where she thought it came from.
“Hard to say. The sea brings strange gifts.” And then, “The water was really high last night, higher than it’s ever been.”
“Ever?”
Frank’s face kept shifting, it was full of so many things, maybe new vulnerabilities alongside old ones. He looked about to say one thing, then, with a quick frown, changed his mind. Something else opened in him, demanding her attention.
“Miranda,” he said. “Can I tell you something?” He didn’t wait for her reply. “I think my father’s on the island.”
“Your father?” Once more the whole world gave a great tilt.
“And my uncle. The Americans I was talking about, that’s them.”
His father. “Why would your father be on Blaze Island?”
“It’s kind of a long story. It’d be best if we can go somewhere we won’t be disturbed. I know we’re out in a field and all but if your father came back it would be awkward because I’d really like to explain all this just to you.”
“You told us you were looking for birds.”
“Let me explain some more, then you can judge me.” A gull flew overhead, its shadow travelling over them both.
A story came to Miranda, one her father had told her those first summers in the cove, lying in bed beside her, holding her hand. He said he’d heard the story long ago from Inuit hunters with whom he’d gone sealing while he, in return, had offered them stories about selkies who shed their seal skins and took human form.
Agnes Watson had recounted a different version of the tale on the day they’d processed the seal, after Miranda had returned from the shore with the forgotten knife.
A young woman refuses to marry any of the young men in her village. One day a good-looking stranger appears, and she agrees to marry him. As soon as they are married, her husband turns into a large seabird and carries the young woman away to an island across the sea. One day, missing his daughter, her father sets off across the sea in his skin boat. Upon reaching the island, he begs his daughter, who has grown bored of her life, fed nothing but fish and often left alone by her seabird husband, to come away with him. She agrees, but when he discovers the girl missing, her husband, a powerful magician, grows angry and flies after them, swooping so close to the father’s little boat that his wings cause a great storm. The father throws his daughter overboard, offering her back to her bird husband, but the daughter clings to the side of the boat, pleading with her father to rescue her. Her desperate father chops off the first knuckles of her fingers, which fall into the water and become seals. Still she clings to the boat, pleading. He chops off the next joints, which become walruses. Finally he chops off the last joints of her fingers, which transform into whales, and the girl sinks to the depths of the ocean to become Sedna, mother of the sea, stirrer of storms, and protectress of all sea creatures. When at last he reaches home, her father collapses on shore, filled with remorse, and lets the tide sweep him out to join his daughter.
Once, as he kissed her good night, Miranda’s father had added something else: The waters all around us, these are Sedna’s seas.
Still dizzy with Frank’s revelation, Miranda wedged her gloves under a rock, one that the sea must have moved, because it hadn’t been in the field the day before. It was as if she had come to a decision without knowing how. She whistled to Ella and called, “This way.” Filled with anxiety flecked with excitement, she led Frank past a copper-coloured pond frilled with tiny waves to the big mound of boulders where cove met sea. Here were the rocks she’d named as a child, Sharp One and Craggy, the one with flecks of quartz that she’d called Jenny after her mother.
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