Blaze Island

by Catherine Bush

  Once her father had explained to Miranda how all the carbon humans had put into the atmosphere was like water in a bathtub. Even if you turned off the tap, the water level wouldn’t go down or would at least take a very long time to drain, as if the drain were only open the tiniest bit. The past, human actions in the recent past, would linger in the sky above them. For a long time, he’d said. One day, left on her own, she’d gone leafing through one of his books and discovered the truth: some of the carbon gases would stay in the atmosphere for hundreds of thousands of years.

  “Was there more in the letter?” Miranda asked Frank as a flicker of disturbance passed through her.

  “It said this private company, Assisted Radiation Inter­ception Engineering Limited, ARIEL for short, is doing some research up on this remote island off the coast of Canada, private research, and my father had plans to go up there to meet with the company about investing in it. The letter even named dates. I had no idea why this person was writing to me, why they thought I’d want to know, if any of it was even true. But once I knew, I couldn’t unknow it. Knowing, I couldn’t ignore it, could I? There was no easy way to track this person down — no address of any sort. I couldn’t find anything online about the company either, which I guess isn’t surprising because if you’re doing this kind of research privately, you’d want to keep your operations far out of sight.

  “My father was supposed to be flying through Boston. Sometimes he texts me when he’s coming to town. Mostly I tell him I’m busy, but this time I suggested meeting up. Meanwhile, I was trying frantically to bone up on SRM technology — that’s solar radiation management in the lingo. I wasn’t sure exactly what I was going to do, but in this hotel bar I managed to ask him what he thought about it. Enticing, is what he said. He got this look on his face I’ve seen before. The next thing I know he’s asking if I’m interested in going on a little expedition with him and my uncle Leonard, who’s his younger brother and kind of his yes man. Maybe he thought I’d undergone a conversion, back to the techno-corporate side. He was cagey with details, but the dates matched those in the letter. Hurricane Fernand was already forming in the Caribbean. He said he was going regardless. I said yes, then, after this sleepless night, thought, I can’t do it.

  “The letter was still gnawing at me, though. It was like this person wanted me to go, complete with the instruction, Go to the end of the island. So I thought, maybe I should take off after all. I left, driving like a maniac, as you know, and here I am, despite almost dying in that flood. Maybe my father never made it. Or this project isn’t happening here? That makes no sense. Why am I here? Help me, Miranda.”

  She had no idea how to answer. How confused and helpless Frank looked, shoulders pulled tight as he faced her.

  Somehow they had ended up back in the field by the kelp-covered rocks. Her father had left her alone with this person, who, despite the awfulness of some of what he’d told her, did not sound despairing.

  “Why do you want to find your father?”

  “What he’s planning is so nightmarish it shouldn’t be allowed to happen.”

  “What if — if things get so bad we need something like this to protect us? At least for a while.” All around her swirled the turbulent haze of other people’s plans. Her own feelings were a pack of surging clouds. A mist of particles in the air: she tried to imagine it. A week ago, her father had come running up to the garden, where Miranda had been pulling up onions, and, face aghast, told her the museum her mother had loved more than any other, in the foothills of Los Angeles, where unstoppable brush fires had been razing neighbourhoods for days, had gone up in smoke. Panic lurched through her at the news. In far-off Australia, he said as if he couldn’t help himself, the city of Sydney was threatened by wildfires, too, its skies turned sizzling orange. “If it’s an emergency?”

  “Not like this, Miranda.”

  In front of them were the piles of storm wreckage she’d gathered, the storm-flattened grass, the rocks the violent sea had moved in the night. Frank walked to the shore. From the nearest rocks he scooped an armful of kelp and asked where he should put it. Carry it into the field, Miranda told him distractedly, gathering an armful herself and burying her nose in a reek so strong it made her forget everything else.

  “Do you think I should talk to your father about all this?” Frank asked.

  “Don’t do that.” She spoke faster and more firmly than she’d intended. Her first instinct was to protect her father, to deny his secrets, and in doing so protect herself. The trail that led around back of Green Cove Pond, the one her father had taken, would be muddy, and the flat bank of stratus cloud rising out of the south made it look like a shower was coming. Surely he’d be back soon. She could send Frank away. He’d be on foot and have no idea where he was going. All she had to do was point him in that direction.

  If he left, her world would contract again. Did she want that? Yes, and yet, in the deepest part of her, she did not. “Yesterday afternoon I saw a small plane coming in to land.”

  “You did?” Frank was all over her in an instant. “Where? What time? How small a plane? What did it look like? Are you sure you haven’t seen it take off?”

  A car, a rust-coloured compact, came speeding down the road from Telephone Hill, remarkable for being the only car Miranda had seen approaching the cove that day. Either someone didn’t know about the washout or was planning to inspect it. The car looked vaguely familiar, one she must sometimes have seen parked outside Pierce’s supermarket, a car from Tom’s Neck. Sensing the shift in her attention, Frank turned as the car vanished into the alder trees and mountain ash on the lower stretch of the slope near Cape House lane. It didn’t reappear. Without her needing to ask, Frank handed over the binoculars.

  Miranda searched for rust-coloured metal among the green. Something, no, someone was moving along the lane, dark head bobbing. Flattened by the binoculars’ focus, Caleb looked particularly purposeful and intense.

  “It’s Caleb Borders,” she explained, her head filled with a new throb, that Caleb was likely going to work on Cape House, that he must have finished whatever he was doing for her father.

  “What kind of work does Caleb do for your father, Miranda?”

  “Runs errands. Cuts wood, delivers things.” Describing Caleb with such dispassion made each word feel like a betrayal. Her heart flew out to him. Still, it was a shock to hear herself say, “We can ask Caleb if he knows anything.”

  Why? Why had she done that? Because Caleb might indeed know something about the plane or Frank’s father. Have heard something.

  And yet. Wasn’t it perverse to suggest speaking to Caleb when she wasn’t supposed to talk to him at all? Only she, too, needed to know about the plane and who was on it. Despite all that had happened between them, Caleb might understand this urgency and be entreated to help.

  Tucked up against the grassy mound of the root cellar in the near field lay their white punt, held down by stones lodged under the gunwales and magically untouched by the storm. With luck the two sets of oars her father had temporarily stowed in the dark, earthy cave of the root cellar would still be there.

  “Can you row?” Miranda asked Frank. Everything in her clarified around the conviction that she needed to find the courage to speak to Caleb herself.

  . . .

  From his perch on a ladder propped against the wall of Cape House, Caleb heard the most astonishing sound. A voice, tussled away from him by the wind and pushed out to sea, a voice that hadn’t addressed him in more than a year, was calling his name. A miracle. Pleasure and relief almost made him fall.

  He stumbled down the rungs. He’d been extracting the screws he’d inserted only that morning to hold boards over the now-exposed windows whose glass had broken in the storm. With a screwdriver, the cordless drill having run out of power. Because it made no sense to bring Len Hansen and Tony McIntosh to Cape House only to show them rooms shuttered in darkness while being forced to describe the thrill of the view.


  Walking towards him, Miranda was asking what had happened to his windows, had the storm broken them?

  “Yes,” Caleb said feverishly.

  His voice broke, happy in his throat, blood warming every part of him. Now, once more, he could say her name. Her dark hair flowed from beneath her blue wool cap. Her cheeks were pink, as if she’d been exerting herself, and no doubt because she was nervous, which aroused a tenderness in Caleb so huge it threatened to dissolve him altogether. In the months since he’d last had the chance to really look at her, she’d grown older, her face finding a new slenderness over the bones. Those lips. He reached out a hand. He would have knelt in front of her. Seeing her was like being pelted with stones. It struck him that she had appeared from the direction of the headlands, not from the side of the house that faced the road, which was unusual. Up on the ladder, back to the water, he wouldn’t have seen her if she’d come in boat.

  “Is it okay to talk?” The warmth of her questions was a resumption of all that was. Things that had been broken were unbreaking themselves.

  “Yes,” Caleb said again. He wanted to shout it.

  It didn’t matter what she had told her father about their journey out on the water that day. He would forgive her for it. Time curved around them like a bowl. Off to Caleb’s left, a chipping sparrow landed on an alder branch and a fox, curled with her bushy tail around her, flicked her ears at the rustle of small animals digging in the earth. He had to incorporate all this into the moment, these awarenesses that came to him unbidden, although when he had told Miranda about such experiences she’d said it wasn’t so strange. Caleb’s heart sang with the conviction, always held in his deepest places, that somehow they would find their way to this moment. The future thrummed in his body, their future knitted together out of the past. He loved her. He always had.

  Someone else was stepping out of the spruce trees and alder woods, from the footpath onto the grass. A young man, thin and long-limbed, with wind-strewn black hair and pale brown skin. His eager lope shattered the moment like glass.

  The hair rose at the back of Caleb’s neck. Was this the other American, the young fellow who’d crashed his car in the cove? What right did he have to be slamming into a moment as precious and longed-for as this?

  Miranda was saying something. It was hard to hear her over the pounding of blood in his ears. Frank. The stranger’s name, the stranger who was holding out his hand in the misguided assumption that he, Caleb, was going to shake it. A new unpredictability whipped around him. The stranger’s smile was full of the oppressive assurance of someone convinced that everyone he meets will smile right back.

  “Caleb, can you help us?” Miranda said.

  There was intimacy in her appeal, she was so close, even as the word us went ripping through Caleb. What did she mean by it? She was saying something about the airstrip, wondering who had come in on that plane. Her eyes were agitated, and for the life of him he couldn’t decipher what was in them.

  “Do you know anything?” she asked. “Frank’s looking for people. He thinks they might have flown in yesterday. I told him I thought you might know something about them, you might be able to help.”

  “Two Americans,” the young man was saying in his American voice, “very tall, one has this, like, shock of white hair.”

  It could not be that she had broken the silence between them, defied her father, simply in order to help someone else, even as Caleb quaked at the horror of this convergence — what did this stranger want with the other men, what did she want with them?

  “Why ask me? Why not ask your father?”

  What cracked, bruised part of him, buried deep inside, erupted in a shout?

  The shock of that shout was still in him when a rain cloud opened over Caleb as he pelted along Cape House lane, away from the house, away from the girl and the stranger, and all he felt, as the rain soaked him, was, I deserve this. He raised his face to the sky and yelled the words aloud.

  Shouting was the worst thing he could have done, yet he’d done it. Why? He ran until he found himself back at Della’s car, parked at the mouth of the lane. He tried to push away those terrible moments. On foot, he went on, in the direction of Pummelly, clambering over the washout’s jagged edge. Current swift against his boots, he grabbed chunks of concrete to keep his balance as he fought the water and rock-strewn ground, lunging his way across. He brought failure on himself. He wanted to step on rocks and crack his feet open. Sometime in the night, the stranger had escaped from all of this, why should he be the lucky one, his wreck of a car hauled out and glittering on the washout’s far side.

  Beyond a copse of alders, the cove opened, a mess of storm debris rising in the landwash, sticks, wood, more wood, nylon rope, plastic, and beyond it, slate-coloured water swelling over the place where the old man had once shouted at him. Out on the water, the girl — again it was too painful to say her name — and the stranger in the little white boat, pulled hard against wind and tide. She was out there, unreachable, unless Caleb ran down her lane and met the two of them at shore. Which was impossible. What was he going to say to her now? Shout at her again? Besides, her father’s quad was pulled up near the house, and the sight made Caleb gag.

  At his own house, no sooner had he tugged off his boots than his mother was looming in the kitchen doorway, like an island when the air pressure sank, the world still so full of parents. She must have been outdoors not long before because a trace of wind clung to her hair.

  “My, look who it is,” she said, Caleb’s breath still heaving.

  “How’s it going, Mom? Did you make it round to Mary Green’s?”

  “Now where would you be coming from in such a hurry?”

  “Fetching a few things.”

  She threw out an arm, barring his way. “Fetching what things, Caleb? For whom?”

  “Doing a bit of tidying up at Cape House.”

  She stood before him, tall and insistent, a keen one, his mother, with her sharp eyes and intellect and pride and temper, the flames of her hair streaked now with ashes. Hard to get anything past her, even as she relentlessly kept things from him.

  “Tidying, Caleb? What are you about?”

  He’d never been able to talk to her about his dream of a future with the girl at his side, at first because his own dream so hugely interfered with hers. And then because of her unvoiced disapproval. She might not like the father anymore but she liked the girl, she always had. So why, why would his mother not want him to love the girl and the girl to love him back and live with him in the house he was making ready for them both? He didn’t know why, only he sensed his mother’s resistance. With a dive, Caleb scooted under her outstretched arm, past the waving velvet curtain.

  “Fixing things up for my visitors.” He shouldn’t have said that.

  “Visitors? What visitors might those be? Caleb, please tell me this isn’t something Alan Wells has roped you into.”

  Thankfully the fridge was on the other side of the room. Dark when Caleb opened the door because there was no power. As fast as he could, he stuffed a packet of cheese in the pocket of his coveralls. Opened the freezer door. He was trying to come up with a plan, a Plan B, on the spot. A small bag of ice stung when he shoved it under his arm. He unhooked a small cast-iron saucepan from those hanging beside the stove.

  “Mom, listen, I’ll tell you everything when it’s over, all right?”

  She hated her library job because almost no one ever came to the library except for the girl and Charlize Petton, who claimed to have read every book on the shelves, and Joe Cluett, who didn’t own a computer or a cellphone, and himself sometimes to visit his lonely mother. The emptiness of the library made her despair.

  If this hadn’t been a day of storm cleanup, she might have been out in the hills or taking her brother Tom’s speedboat out to one of the uninhabited Little Blaze Islands in the bay to go berry picking. Though his mother had shown less interest in picking berries than she used to, last year and this. Oh, she still p
icked, but there was a listlessness in her, a hardness to her lanky, careless beauty, as if she were doing things now only because she had to, not because of her commitment to the old ways.

  The queer weather disturbed her, growing queerer with every year. She spent more time in her armchair, staring out to sea, or taking the car and driving off who knew where. The rain was no longer the same rain, she said. The wind, harsh as it was, used to be something you could depend on. Now, she said, it was as undependable as most human beings were.

  In the parlour liquor cabinet was a bottle of Scotch that Caleb knew she never drank. The old man had brought it long ago, in the days when he and Caleb’s mother would sometimes sit and drink together, the old man with his Scotch whisky, his mother her beloved Irish.

  “Caleb, put that bottle back.” A deeper sharpness had entered her voice.

  “You’ll never drink it. It’s wasted here.”

  “Put it back, I said.” She’d left the kitchen doorway and was striding towards him, and Caleb had the sudden fear that she was about to hit him.

  “I’ll put it back if you tell me who my father was.”

  This made her blanch as he knew it would and stopped her in her tracks. The skin grew tight across her cheekbones. “Caleb, you know I can’t do that. I made a promise.”

  “Bad promises aren’t ones you have to keep.”

  “He’s no part of our lives, that’s the way it is.”

  “Do you look at me and see him?” What did she see? How often he had wondered this even as the ferocity of her love wrapped him round.

  “Long ago, I had to make a choice, Caleb, between you and a man who told me he had no wish to be a father. Either it would break him, he said, or he’d inflict harm as he’d had harm inflicted on him. I’ve told you this. He agreed I had a choice, but if I chose you, he would disappear, and I’d have to do my part to make him disappear. So I’ve kept my promise to say nothing about him. I chose you.”