Waiting for Unicorns

by Beth Hautala

  PHILOMEL BOOKS

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  Copyright © 2015 by Beth Hautala.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hautala, Beth.

  Waiting for unicorns / Beth Hautala. pages cm

  Summary: “After her mother dies, twelve-year-old Talia McQuinn goes to the Arctic with her father, a whale researcher. Over the course of one summer, and through several unlikely friendships, Talia learns that stories have the power to connect us, to provide hope, and to pull us out of the darkness”—Provided by publisher.

  [1. Grief—Fiction. 2. Arctic regions—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.H2886Wai 2015 [Fic]—dc23 2014007441

  ISBN 978-1-101-61998-8

  Edited by Liza Kaplan.

  Map illustrations © 2015 by Matt Farleo. Text set in 11.5-point Baskerville.

  Version_1

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Maps

  Prologue

  Moving North

  Churchill

  Polar Bear, Polar Bear

  Moraine

  Full of Snowflakes

  Missing

  Jar of Wishes

  The Little White Horse

  Out on the Ice

  Unicorns of the Sea

  The Guitar Boy and the Birdman

  Good

  Miss Piggy

  Distractions

  The Stretch of Distance

  Uncharted

  Birthday Wish

  Gifts

  Spring Winds

  Ice Out

  Empty

  Cut Short

  Narwhals

  Pancakes and Things Worth Wanting

  Hope is a Bird

  Unfair

  The Birdman and the Bear

  Uncontrollable Things

  A Good Friend

  Rising

  The Magic of Churchill

  Three Little Words

  Believing

  Acknowledgments

  To my husband, Aaron, and our beautiful children.

  Your names are on every wish in my jar.

  And they have all been granted.

  THE INUIT WOMAN TOLD ME that if I ever saw a unicorn, to close my eyes. Tight.

  “Unicorns break your heart,” she said, all the warmth seeping out of her voice. She was warning me against the very thing I was dying to see.

  But that’s the trouble with things like unicorns. You get hungry for the impossible and it eats at you. Pretty soon, all you can think about is that thing—the thing you’re supposed to shut your heart to, pretending you never actually cared about it in the first place.

  But I did care. And I told myself that when I saw a unicorn, I’d keep my eyes wide, wide open, and just let the sight of it pour into me, breaking up whatever wholeness was left of my heart. And I’d make my wish.

  IN EARLY MAY, WE MOVED.

  It was the first time I’d ever left home for someplace else, and, of course, Dad said it’d be great.

  “It’ll feel like home in no time,” he said.

  I didn’t believe him, but I didn’t tell him that, because it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. Home is only home when the people you love live there, and the only person I had left to love was Dad. So I guess home was anywhere he was. Which was fine and easy to say while everyone and everything was familiar. But whether I wanted to go or not, we were leaving the familiar behind. Even the normal end-of-school routine would be different. I’d finish seventh grade far away from the rest of my class and turn in the last of my assignments by mail.

  Before we left, Dad and I packed for three days straight. We taped over the seams of a couple-dozen cardboard boxes, then shipped them away on a cargo plane, and drove north. We were leaving behind our house in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, which was far enough north already in my mind, considering it was only about a five-hour drive to the Canadian line. But one mile-marker at a time, we went right on over the border toward Churchill, Manitoba.

  I’d never crossed the border before. It’s all very official and serious. The men and women in uniform with stern faces and clipped questions and the Canadian flag flying high over the border station made me nervous. Guilty. Like maybe the stuff we were taking into Canada might be illegal or something. But all I had in my pockets was some ChapStick and a candy wrapper. Our duffel bags were just full of clothes, and I guess we must not have looked too suspicious because they didn’t ask us to get out of our vehicle for a search or anything.

  The border patrol has an interesting job, I think. All the pictures they look at every day—how many driver’s licenses and passport pictures do they see?

  The photo on my passport wasn’t great. I looked too excited about getting my picture taken. My eyes were wide and there was a surprised look on my face. I looked like I thought my whole life was bound to be one big unexpected thing after another. But I don’t like change too much, or the unexpected, and it was frustrating that Dad somehow thought all this was a good idea in the first place. Nobody drags their kid to the Arctic for the summer. But my dad was doing just that, and it was surprising how fast my entire life suddenly felt unsteady. Like one big gust of arctic wind could sweep it all away.

  Of course, the border patrolman didn’t care about any of that. He just asked for my name and matched it to the name printed on my identification. And if he noticed the funny look on my face at all, he probably just thought the lady at the passport office had been quick with her snapshot finger.

  “What are you doing in Manitoba?” the patrolman asked.

  “Whale research,” Dad said. And I was thankful he left it at that, because once he got started talking about whales, there’d be no stopping him.

  The patrolman waved us through, and I turned around in my seat, watching as the gate lowered behind us. The border station shrank smaller and smaller as we drove. The road pulled us away from that invisible border line separating the United States from Canada—separating home from everything else. And when I finally turned back around in my seat, it felt like we were going in reverse because I’d been watching the road move away from us for so long. That’s what leaving is like. Watching things slip away from you until your insides ache and everything feels backward.

  Dad and I drove until we reached Montreal, where a man waited to buy our truck.

  “We won’t be able to drive past Thompson, Manitoba,” Dad said. “No one can, because the roads actually end. And there’s no point in having a truck you can’t use.” He’s practical like that.

  After Thompson, the roads leading north just stop, giving way to arctic peat bogs and ocean inlets. I’d spent the past few weeks poring over the pictures I’d found online, trying to see it all in my head—something I could barely imagine. I tried to picture the bog lakes and stretches of tamarack trees. In
the fall, the trees would trade their green summery clothes for needles the color of saffron—a spice Mom kept in a small glass jar in the spice rack.

  But winter was still in charge where we were headed. In the Arctic, things stay cold a whole lot longer than other places. It’s too far north to thaw when farther south everything is getting on with the business of spring.

  The Montreal man who bought our truck seemed nice enough, though I don’t remember very much about him. The only thing that really stuck in my mind was his hair. It sprouted wildly out of his head, and once in a while he ran a hand through it, trying to calm it down. But it wouldn’t be calmed and kept falling into his face, where it got mixed up in his eyebrows. There was even hair coming out of his ears and poking up through his dirty flannel shirt where he’d left it unbuttoned, and though I tried to ignore it, out of his nose, too.

  I didn’t think I’d care who bought our truck. But when it came right down to it, I did. I guess I’d envisioned people like us having the Ford, and somehow, I couldn’t make this man and whatever family he might have fit that picture. It made saying good-bye to the old green truck even harder than I thought it’d be. Strange, how you can get attached to something that’s done nothing but carry you from one place to the next.

  The Ford had carried me to school on snowy days when Mom and Dad didn’t trust the buses.

  It had carried us to Dairy Queen on hot summer nights. Dad would let me ride in the back, just as long as I sat down and leaned against the cab. He would take the back roads and roll the windows down so that his country music could pour out into the summer air. Mom would sing along, letting the wind carry her voice. She always opened the back window so I could sing along, too, and she held my hand through the space there, like she was afraid I’d blow away in all that warm summer wind.

  And of course, the Ford took us to the hospital and back, over and over again, when Mom got sick.

  But we left the Ford behind, along with all those memories, and boarded a plane that would bring us closer to Dad’s whales. We would have to take two of them: a big plane from Montreal to Winnipeg, and a smaller one from Winnipeg to Churchill.

  And as our plane bounced once before lurching into Canadian skies, I wondered what would be carrying me around next.

  WHEN HE WASN’T OUT ON expedition, Dad taught at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, which meant that sometimes he had a normal everyday job like other dads, and sometimes he didn’t.

  This summer the marine biology department had offered Dad a fantastic opportunity—they were sending him and a small team of researchers into the arctic waters of Hudson Bay and the Baffin Island inlets to do whale research for three months.

  But it wasn’t the first time Dad had been to Churchill to study the whales. He’d actually been there a bunch of times. In fact, this is where he started his whale research, way back when he was an undergraduate at the institution. So Dad knew people in Churchill. He had friends here—people he’d known for a long time. And he had a place to do his work. The Churchill Northern Studies Centre, or the CNSC, would serve as home base for Dad and his team while they did their research. But I’d never been here before and everything was strange. There were no familiar faces for me and no familiar names. Nothing but the unknown.

  Even though Dad had been to Churchill on plenty of expeditions in the past, this was the first time the institution had ever offered to fund one of his expeditions. And it was the first time I’d ever come along. Sometimes, Mom and I had gone to visit Dad while he was away on trips like this one, though never to Churchill. And those trips had always been a kind of short vacation for us. We’d never stayed for an entire summer.

  When Dad told me about our summer plans he said they were only temporary. And I know he was trying to make me feel better. But it didn’t work, because all I could think about was how the permanent things were slipping away. Just this year, I’d said good-bye to all my friends, and my home, now our green truck, and Mom. Even though we were only leaving for three months, I couldn’t help but feel like the only things left were temporary.

  Churchill, Manitoba, sits all huddled up on the shores of Hudson Bay, where ice and snow try to keep it in deep freeze. But the boreal forest—old and green with lichen, black spruce, highbush cranberries, and the tundra—strewn with glacial rock as old as the earth itself, makes the place more than just a tiny arctic community on the edge of the great cold.

  “It’s a beautiful place, Tal,” Dad said over the whine of the airplane’s engine. “People come from all over to visit because it’s magic, you know.” He winked at me. I rolled my eyes and looked out the window.

  I couldn’t see much down there, just a shift in colors as we went farther and farther north. At first there was only green, the soft new kind—new leaves and springtime spread out below me. All the trees at home had thrown on their springtime dresses weeks ago, but these trees wore the fresh green of brand new leaves. As we kept going, the forest underneath us got darker and richer. Dad told me the names of those dark green trees as we flew over—evergreens. “They will never lose their leaves as the seasons change,” he said. “That’s how they got their name. But there’s also spruce, cedar, red and white pine, and redwoods down there, too.” He was so in awe of this place. I just nodded.

  After that the landscape changed even more dramatically—the old green shifted to white until there was only a blanket of snow beneath us, stretching out in all directions. And that’s all I’d see until we landed in Churchill. People who come here for fun must be crazy. Why would anyone want to go someplace so far away from absolutely everything? So cold, and white, and winter?

  I knew why people came to Churchill, of course. They came for arctic adventure. They came to see the polar bears and the rare arctic birds. Mostly, they came for the whales. I knew this because that’s what Churchill’s official website said, under the “Things To Do” section. I never would have come for these things, but I didn’t have a choice in the matter. Even if I did, Dad and I wouldn’t be doing any wildlife tours together. I’d be stuck in town while he was out on the ice, because even though I was here for my dad, he was here for the whales. You could have tossed out every other interesting thing about Churchill, and he’d still come. That’s how much those whales mattered to Dad. Lucky for him, Churchill is the self-proclaimed “Beluga Capital of the World.”

  To the south of town, the Churchill River runs wide-mouthed into Hudson Bay. And it’s there, at the mouth of the river, where thousands of little white whales come up out of the Arctic Sea. The water is warmer where it empties into the bay, and June through August, belugas come here to feed, give birth, raise their babies, and catch up with each other. By late August there can be more than three thousand belugas in the Churchill River estuary.

  Dad’s heart belonged to the whales. It always had. Mom told me she knew this when she married him.

  “I’d rather he be out there, doing what he loves, even if it means being away from us and missing us, than if he did something he hates closer to home. Wouldn’t you?”

  “But it’s lonely without him,” I protested, and she agreed.

  “I wish he was closer, too. But we all do the best we can. And he’ll always come back to us, Tal. You can count on that. He will leave those whales of his—let them go off without him, and hurry home to us because we’re his family.”

  Mom had been certain family meant more to Dad than anything else. I wonder what she would think if she could see us now.

  Dad and I sat crammed together in our uncomfortable airplane seats trying not to crowd one another, which was pretty much impossible. There was only one armrest between us and I didn’t know if it was his or mine. He didn’t seem to know either, so we both just avoided it. An armrest-shaped wall between us.

  “People used to believe whales were magic, too,” Dad said.

  I waited for him to continue, to explain which whales, a
nd why people thought they were magic, but he never did. Dad did that a lot—started a thought and forgot to finish it. I think he forgot I was there, listening, waiting for him.

  Mom never did that. She always finished her thoughts, always finished her stories. She collected them, studying languages, people groups, and the tales that, she said, tie us all together. And when she got down to the business of telling a new story, you might as well just drop everything. She wouldn’t stop till it was over, and you wouldn’t be able to focus on much else until she did anyway.

  She always started exactly the same way.

  “I’ve got a new one for you, Tal,” she’d say. And she’d pause, long and hard. When I was little, I used to think she paused like this because she was making things up in her head as she went, or because she wanted to be certain I was paying attention. Now I know she paused because she was feeling the story’s weight.

  “A story never belongs to just one person,” she explained to me. “It belongs to every person who has ever told it, and to every person who has ever heard it. And that makes storytelling quite an important thing.”

  But as I stared out the plane’s window watching the topsides of clouds floating past, I shook off thoughts of Mom. Sometimes it just hurt too much to remember.

  We arrived in Churchill on May fifteenth. I watched Dad mark off the day in his little green pocket calendar before tucking it back in the front pocket of his shirt and patting it reassuringly. Dad has carried a pocket calendar with him for as long as I can remember, marking off the days as we lived them.

  He said it was easier to carry all of your days when you’ve got them with you. But I wondered if he kept his little calendar because it made him feel like he was big enough to go on without Mom. Did he mark the days since she’d been gone, like I did?

  Our first night in Churchill, when the arctic wind beat against our motel, and the sound of my dad snoring came clear across the hall, I felt the weight of our days myself. My chest ached from the strain of a million held-back tears, but I fought to keep them in. And in the early spring darkness, when the purple and green aurora borealis washed against the arctic sky and the still, frozen surface of Hudson Bay, I remembered Mom’s stories.