Waiting for Unicorns

by Beth Hautala

  I WAS IN CHURCHILL FOR three whole days before I saw a bear. I was kind of surprised it took so long because besides whales, Churchill is famous for polar bears, and I am terrified of them.

  Despite what you might think, they’re not cute, or friendly, or wary of people. They’re just hungry. You might as well be wearing an “Eat Me, I’m Tasty” sign.

  Manitoba Conservation even employs a bear patrol year-round to help keep the bears out of town—all twelve hundred of them. And Churchill is a pretty small town. Less than a thousand people live there. So, if you were going to be picky about the math, there were enough bears for every person to have one. And some people could have two.

  The bears are always there, but they don’t wander into Churchill very much until bear season begins in October, when they come in off the tundra and wait at the edge of Hudson Bay for ice to form. Then they head out on the floes to hunt seals. I knew this because that’s what Churchill’s official website said about the matter, and I’d read as much as I could. Just to be certain I was prepared. Being prepared is sort of important, if you think about it. The more prepared you are for things, the less chance they have of surprising you. Or scaring you. Or breaking your heart.

  But no amount of preparation could have helped me feel ready for the actual sight of a real, live nanuq. Dad and I were on our way to the airport to pick up our boxes, snug in an old Suburban we’d found to handle the icy roads and snow, when a big white polar bear strolled lazily across the road, pausing to study us. Dad slowed down to a full stop. I tightened my fingers around the edges of my seat as my heart started jumping around in my chest.

  “Tal, look at her! She’s beautiful. Beautiful!”

  Tall and almost lanky, she seemed cool and indifferent. She might as well have owned that road. Her face was long and narrow, and her eyes seemed very dark and tiny against all that white fur. She was impressive and terrible, that’s what she was. But Dad would have been disappointed if I didn’t look excited.

  “Uh-huh. Beautiful,” I said, chewing on the ends of my hair.

  Until then, the closest I’d ever been to a polar bear was at the zoo in Massachusetts. I’d watched an old bear named Bjorn swim around his glass-walled enclosure, and I’d pressed my hands to the glass, measuring their size against the bear’s paws, surprised to find myself so small.

  As I sat beside Dad, and as that big white bear examined me from the other side of the windshield, I felt that same smallness and fear creep back in. I tried to ignore what I’d learned—that a polar bear can run up to twenty-five miles per hour—fast enough to catch our Suburban before we could really pick up any speed. Not that it would actually chase us down the road or anything. Still, Dad’s reassuring hand on my shoulder was nice, and the rifle stashed under the seat made me a tiny bit braver. That gun was one of the first things Dad had picked up once we arrived in Churchill, along with the Suburban. Even before we got groceries or anything. It was for emergencies. We were prepared.

  Our cardboard boxes were waiting for us, neatly stacked in the airport’s cargo terminal, and a bittersweet, homesick feeling rolled around in the pit of my stomach at the sight of them. Our handwriting was familiar, reminding me of their contents. But the boxes seemed out of place, as if they’d time-traveled—small, square packages full of home, way out here on the edge of the Arctic.

  Dad and I were quiet as we drove away from the airport. He must have been thinking about Mom, because at one point he reached over and tugged on my ear, like she used to do. It bugged me.

  “I’m all right you know,” I said, leaning my head back against the seat, out of his reach. He just nodded.

  Sometimes I thought I could fool him—thought I could pretend hard enough to convince both of us. Over the last few months, we’d grown so busy trying to convince each other that we were all right—that we were doing okay without her—that now there was this space the exact size of Mom standing between us. And no amount of pretending could fill it.

  There’d always been a kind of space between Dad and me, maybe because he was away so much. But now that Mom was gone, that space seemed like a dangerous thing. What if it got bigger? Losing Mom was bad enough. I didn’t want to lose my dad, too. I wasn’t even sure if he felt that space. Maybe it only existed from my side and he couldn’t feel it. Or maybe it was all in my head, like that warning on the side-view mirrors of a car: “Objects in mirror are closer than they appear.” But that space certainly felt real, and I didn’t know how to close it up. Especially now that we’d be apart for most of the summer.

  We were renting two rooms in a house right on the edge of town. Dad had stayed there before. He was friends with the Inuit woman who lived there. And while it was nice of her to welcome my dad and me into her house, I wasn’t exactly excited about spending my summer with a stranger while Dad was out on the ice.

  “I’ve been friends with Sura for a long time, Tal,” Dad said. “Your mom, too. We came to Churchill together a couple of times before you were born,” he said. “She and Sura knew each other. She never told you?”

  I shook my head. Mom had told me things about Churchill, but she never told me she’d been here herself. I just figured she knew things because of what Dad had told her, same as me. It was a new thought. My mom had been here, sat beside my dad as they drove along these roads. She’d seen these same trees and glacial rocks, the same sweep of the shore, ice-locked and covered in snow.

  I held that thought, clung to it as we pulled up next to the house, the back of the Suburban loaded with our boxes. Instead of clapboard siding, the house was covered with blue asphalt shingles from peak to porch. The whole structure seemed to sag a bit, as if it were leaning into the wind whipping shoreward off the frozen surface of Hudson Bay.

  “So what do you think?” Dad asked, reaching over and patting my knee.

  “It looks good,” I said, and I scrunched up my mouth into what I hoped looked like a smile.

  He studied my face for a minute and sighed. Then he nodded once like he’d made up his mind, and got out. The cold air whooshed into the warm cab as he slammed the door behind him.

  The engine ticked quietly, cooling in the arctic air. My breath fogged up the windows, making everything seem calm and far away through the cloudy glass. I sat in the car, waiting for just the right moment, taking in the sight of the place that would be my home for the next few months. I wasn’t ready to jump right into this new life just yet. So I took that pause. The same one Mom used to take before she began a story. Then I took a deep breath and opened the door. It screeched wide on frozen hinges.

  The wind whipped around me, stinging my face and bare hands. I dug into my pockets for my mittens and tucked my chin into my coat collar. Anything to protect myself from the cold.

  Dad didn’t seem to mind it, though. He was waiting, one hand stuffed deep into his pocket, the other ready to land on my shoulder. I dodged his arm, and we walked to the front steps with a Mom-sized space between us.

  A dark-haired woman in a yellow sweater stood on the porch. She was a splash of color in that cold, drab world, like that jar of saffron in the pantry.

  “Welcome back, Thomas,” she said to my dad, taking his hand in both of hers. I stood behind him on the steps, one hand pressed against the railing to steady myself.

  Her voice was surprising. Deep and rich and smooth as chocolate. She was nothing like what I’d expected. She was quite pretty. Her skin was darker than mine, and her eyes were smaller. Her hair was black and shiny and fell thick just past her shoulders. And she was younger than I thought she’d be, not much older than my mom, actually. In my head she’d been old and gray haired, her skin wrinkled like the paper we’d packed around our belongings from home. All of a sudden I had to rearrange some of the things I’d been imagining about her.

  “Sura, this is my daughter, Talia Lea McQuinn,” Dad said, gesturing awkwardly as I joined them on the porch.
She knew who I was, of course, just like I knew her. Dad had spent the last several weeks talking about her, where she lived, how her culture was different than ours. He was preparing me, I suppose.

  I did my best to return Sura’s warm smile, but the cold had seeped into me, slowing everything down, and I couldn’t seem to get my lips to move much. I leaned against the house, comforted by the shingle siding, rough as sandpaper under my palm.

  “Blue, like the bay in August when the ice is out,” Sura said, nodding at the siding.

  She could have told me how good it was to finally meet me, how much she hoped Churchill would feel like home, or what great friends she knew we were going to be. But she didn’t. Maybe Sura knew better than to pretend. She traced the edge of a blue shingle with her fingers and then glanced out over the snow and ice to where the vast expanse of Hudson Bay finally met the horizon.

  I could live here, if I had to, in this house that leaned into the arctic wind. It wasn’t home, but it was certainly better than the hotel where Dad and I had been staying for the last three days while we waited for our things to arrive.

  “Welcome to Churchill, Talia Lea,” Sura said finally. Her words gently broke the silence that had crept into all of us, standing out there on her porch.

  Her English was smooth, though I could tell she used a different language more often than the one I was familiar with.

  “It’s just Talia,” I said. Her gaze and unexpected warmth made my face feel hot.

  She nodded and held the door wide, leading Dad and me inside.

  THE BLUE HOUSE WAS TALL and skinny with two bedrooms on top and two bedrooms below. The bathroom, kitchen, and main living spaces were all squeezed onto the main floor. Dad and I would sleep upstairs, and Sura downstairs, leaving one room empty. She would rent this out to tourists later in the season.

  My bedroom was exactly the same as Dad’s—small with low ceilings. Dad could only stand upright in the middle of the room, where the ceiling rose up to the peak of the house, otherwise he bumped his head. It was easier for me because I was smaller, but I still had to watch my head around the window alcove.

  The blue house sat on the edge of town, and when I craned my neck just right, I could see Hudson Bay from my bedroom window. It was frozen solid, which is how it would stay until July, and I tried not to be too discouraged about that.

  “By July things will warm just enough to break up the ice,” Dad said, his voice echoing in my small, empty room. “And it will begin to form all over again just a few months later.”

  He wanted me to be as amazed as he was. It was pretty amazing that a place could spend so much time frozen solid and still live. But all I could think about was how cold it was, and how cold it was going to stay. I don’t like having to pull on layers of socks and sweater after sweater until my body feels thick and I can’t bend my elbows very well. Even in mid-summer, temperatures in Churchill hang right around sixty-two degrees. I wouldn’t need my bathing suit.

  Breathing on the window, I made a small patch of fog and wrote my name on the glass with my finger. Then I drew a sad face. Dad cleared his throat and I turned around, kept my gaze on the small bed frame and mattress, the dresser, and the empty bookcase before meeting his eyes. My dad stood with his hair brushing against the ceiling. A giant man in a tiny room full of echoes.

  “Whad’ya say we bring up our stuff?” he asked, motioning toward the door. I followed him downstairs and out into the cold.

  Until Mom got sick, I never really had to think about how much stuff I owned. I had tons of collections; Mom called me a pack rat.

  “Look at all of this junk, Talia!” she said one afternoon. I was supposed to be cleaning my room, but I’d gotten distracted.

  “It’s not junk!” I said. “These things are important!”

  “Well, if you don’t get all of your important things picked up before dinner, I’ll take care of them myself.”

  “You mean throw them away.”

  She folded her arms across her chest, which was all the answer I needed. Mom was generally pretty understanding when it came to my collections. She had some herself, but when things started sprawling over into places they didn’t belong, she got rid of them.

  “Tal, you don’t even need these things.” She picked up an old plastic Easter egg full of Scrabble tiles, and a broken compass. “Why are you saving these?”

  “Those are from the time I got bingo.” I nodded at the Scrabble tiles. “They’re lucky! I played every tile on one turn.”

  She rolled them around in the palm of her hand. “And what was the word?”

  “Moraine.”

  “Moraine?”

  “Yeah. The stuff that’s left behind when a glacier melts.”

  She sighed, then dropped the tiles into my hand, like my answer had just given them meaning. “And the compass?”

  I shrugged. “It used to point north.”

  “But Tal, it’s broken. The needle just spins.”

  “I know. But it used to work. And that counts for something, right?” She shook her head like she thought I was a little crazy and handed me the compass. Sometimes she just didn’t understand.

  After Mom died, Dad and I moved out of our house to a smaller apartment. There just wasn’t enough room to take everything with me, so I’d thrown a lot of my stuff away. I didn’t need it. It was just clutter, really. Things that reminded me of other things. And some of them I didn’t want to remember anymore. But I saved the Scrabble tiles and the compass.

  At the time, I remember being surprised by how easily my entire life fit into boxes, and now, as Dad unloaded one carton of our lives after another, that same feeling washed over me again. Our entire life had been reduced to a load small enough for one man to carry.

  My name was written across my boxes in permanent marker, and I picked one up, being careful to knock the snow from my boots before carrying it into the house. It felt nice, having my own familiar things back.

  Sura held the door for us as we traipsed in and out, making small talk with Dad. I knew she knew about Mom, though she never actually said anything. You can always tell when people are trying not to talk about something. Their voices are too bright and don’t match their words. But I’m glad she didn’t ask us how we were. People asked that all the time, expecting it to be an easy question to answer, but I never knew what to say, so I usually just kept quiet.

  While Dad and Sura chatted, I climbed up and down the stairs in this strange new place, each box held tight against my chest. When I had carried everything up to my room, I began peeling back the tape and opening them up.

  Clothes and blankets came first, followed by shoes and the red wool hat my neighbor had made for me. I pulled that hat on and tugged it down over my ears before digging back into the rest of the boxes.

  Books and photographs were next. There were photographs of school friends, of Dad and me at the state fair, him, me, and Mom standing in front of our old house. And there was one of Mom looking over her shoulder, laughing as she walked away from the camera. I picked up that picture, studying it.

  Everyone said I looked like her. I had her same wide-set eyes and turned-up nose, and I liked that. Our hair was the same, too—long and brown and straight. When I was little, I wore it short—bobbed at my chin. But it was long now, partly because Mom was the one who used to trim it for me, and partly because I wanted to look like her as much as I could. I wanted to hold onto her every time I looked in the mirror. But sometimes, when I saw my mom’s face looking back at me, I wondered what else we shared. Would I get her cancer, too?

  After I unpacked the photographs, I opened a box of random stuff I hadn’t wanted to leave behind. There was a valentine from a boy at my old school, a pencil holder I’d made out of Popsicle sticks, old diaries, and a few stuffed animals.

  I put my things away, stacking books on the wobbly bookcase, hangin
g my clothes neatly in the closet, lining my shoes along the floor, and spreading my quilt from home across the bed.

  Lastly, I unwrapped a sheet of crumpled packing paper from around a large glass mason jar half full of little paper slips. It didn’t look that impressive, but this jar—these slips of paper—were the most important things I owned. My wishes.

  I held the jar up to the window. The light seemed to collect inside the glass, illuminating each paper slip. I shook the jar, shifting the slips around, rearranging them, settling them. I wouldn’t take them out tonight. I’d let them adjust to our new room first.

  I pushed the jar under my bed and leaned back against the bed frame, checking my work.

  “Better,” I whispered.

  It was less full of echoes, but it wasn’t home and I knew it never would be. I just had to get through the next few months. Then Dad and I could go back to Woods Hole and I could forget this place and finally start over.

  I WOKE THE FIRST MORNING in the blue house and lay very still in my bed, staring up at the ceiling. It was dark, but the light from the hall spilled under the crack in my bedroom door. The old cast-iron radiator in the corner of my room clunked and gurgled. It had made those noises all night long. Sura warned me it would, but it still sounded strange. We’d had central heat in our apartment back home, and the baseboards would tick as they warmed up, but they were polite about it. This old thing was downright ridiculous. I glared at the radiator as it clunked and gurgled again.

  The smell of coffee climbed the stairs, and Dad’s bedroom door across the hall creaked open on rusty hinges. His footfalls were quiet, but the floorboards still squeaked under his weight as he made his way down the stairs. I heard his muted voice greet Sura, and her muffled response.