Waiting for Unicorns

by Beth Hautala

  Strumming a final chord, he closed with that sweeping bow of his—one arm flung out behind him. This time I clapped. He seemed like the sort of person you needed to clap for. And besides that, he was actually pretty good. Even though I’d only ever played the recorder for band, I could recognize talent when I heard it.

  “Talia Lea McQuinn,” I said, standing up and sticking out my hand, just like I’d done with his grandfather.

  “Yes,” he said. “I know.” And he took my hand. But instead of the shake I expected, he bent over and kissed it, the way men do in old movies. I snatched it away and jammed both hands deep into the pockets of my flannel pajama pants.

  Laughing, he thumbed toward the door. “I’ll wait here. You should probably get dressed.”

  Of course, if I’d known he was coming for breakfast, I would’ve. This wasn’t the sort of first impression I’d had in mind—me in my pajamas. But I just nodded, taking the stairs two at a time.

  Long underwear, wool socks, jeans, and two sweaters later, I pulled my coat from its hook on the wall, laced up my boots, and waved good-bye to Sura. Then I followed the Guitar Boy out into the arctic morning.

  The average temperature for Churchill this time of year ranged anywhere from three degrees below zero to thirty degrees above. Today it was on the colder side of that range and I was thankful for my layers.

  “So, who is your Muppet friend?” I asked.

  The Guitar Boy smiled and with a kick, sent a little chunk of ice skittering down the road. I walked beside him, my mittened hands in my pockets and my red hat pulled down over my ears. The wind pushed at our backs as we trudged down the road, cold, but not unkind.

  “You’ll see.” The Guitar Boy grinned at me, secretive.

  I glanced away, burying my hands deeper into my coat pockets and peered anxiously into the scrub. Surprises made me uncomfortable, and I was terrified we were going to get one from a bear.

  I fell in step a little ways behind Simon. I kept pausing to listen for growling noises, or the sound of branches breaking, just in case something was trying to sneak up on us.

  After we’d gone a bit farther, he stopped and turned around. “Come on already!”

  “Coming,” I said, glancing up. I wasn’t sure what I’d do if I actually saw a bear. I read once that if you were ever attacked by a bear, you’re supposed to drop down and cover the back of your head with your arms. But this seemed pretty stupid to me. In theory, it was supposed to protect the most vital parts of your body. But I figured if a bear was interested in any of my vital parts, covering the back of my head with my hands wasn’t going to make much of a difference.

  Simon waited while I scrambled up after him, carefully navigating a pile of rocks. We’d left the road, but the footpath we were on seemed well traveled enough.

  “I doubt we’ll see any,” the Guitar Boy said. “Bears, I mean.”

  Dad told me my face was easier to read than the alphabet, and I frowned. Simon seemed to know exactly what I was thinking, and that was a little embarrassing.

  “How do you know?” I asked. “How do you know we won’t see any . . . bears?” I lowered my voice at the end in case they were listening and felt inclined to investigate.

  The Guitar Boy seemed pretty confident, but I wasn’t that trusting.

  “It’s too early,” he said, readjusting his guitar strap.

  “Yeah, but what if we do? You don’t have a gun or anything.” Somewhere in the darker corners of my imagination, I was terrified I’d die beneath the claws and teeth of nanuq.

  “Not true.” The Guitar Boy paused, digging into his pocket, and tossed me a small black canister.

  I caught it clumsily and turned it over. “Are you serious?”

  The small red-and-yellow label read Mace. The Guitar Boy laughed at my skepticism and continued on ahead.

  I should have just left it at “gun.” He didn’t have a gun. End of story. Pepper spray didn’t make me feel any safer. And now I didn’t know whether to try and find my way back alone or follow him. We were out in the middle of nowhere, about to walk right between a mother bear and her cubs for all I knew. I’ve heard this is about as close to a death wish as a person could get, and our only defense was a can of Mace. Suddenly, I wanted to pick up the pace.

  “Here—maybe you should hang on to it.” I hurried after Simon, thrusting the Mace into his hand, and he shoved it back into his pocket before throwing his arm over my shoulder.

  “Don’t you worry,” he said. “I’ve got you covered.”

  We walked for another half hour or so with no sign of bears, and then finally, cresting a little rise, I got my first look at Miss Piggy.

  “There she is.” The Guitar Boy nodded.

  “So, not a Muppet,” I said.

  “Nope. Not a Muppet. An airplane. Or what’s left of an airplane. An old Curtiss C-46 Commando. She was operated by Lamb Air back in the sixties and seventies,” he said. “She crashed when her left engine failed just outside of Churchill in 1979. The wreck is a pretty big deal here. People visit the site all the time.”

  “Why is she called Miss Piggy?”

  “Because she was able to carry so much freight,” he said. “And because at one time, she actually hauled a load of pigs. Or so the story goes.”

  I wrinkled my nose. That couldn’t have been a pleasant flight.

  “She used to be red and white,” the Guitar Boy said. “But one side of her was painted gray several years ago when she was used as part of a movie set.”

  Miss Piggy had crashed on the edge of a rise, in a pile of glacial rock. Her wings were barely attached to her body, collapsing down the slope. She looked like a giant bird splayed across the ground. And suddenly, I wanted to reassemble her pieces and send her back into the sky where she belonged.

  As Simon and I climbed up one of the wings, making our way toward the empty cockpit, my excitement faded and a sort of uneasy weight settled in my chest. Hunching my shoulders, I ducked my chin into my coat collar, shielding myself against the cold. Mom always said I had an overactive imagination. And I don’t think she thought it was a good thing. At the time it made me mad, because really, what’s so bad about an overactive imagination? But she was probably right, because I had a tendency to scare myself.

  As the wind blew up over the rise, I was certain I heard the frantic voices of Miss Piggy’s crew echoing in the hollowed-out belly of the plane. The grinding gears of a failing engine screeched in my ears, and in my mind, I saw the plane plummet toward the ground. I shivered and rubbed my arms.

  The inside of the plane was completely empty, its naked spars and ribs curving up over my head. I felt like Jonah inside the belly of a whale.

  People had been here with paint cans and sprayed graffiti across the floor and along the walls. But I couldn’t read any of it because it was in a different language. Inuktitut probably. What was so important that someone needed to say it here, in paint, in the hollowed-out belly of a plane wreck?

  Simon jumped into the cockpit and hunched over the empty face of the control panel. Buttons and dials, the instruments, everything was gone—gutted and hollowed out by time and the curiosity of tourists. Even the pilot’s and copilot’s seats were gone. I stood where the copilot’s seat had once been bolted to the floor, and stared out the glassless windshield over the rock-strewn tundra.

  Grabbing an imaginary wheel, Simon pulled an imaginary radio from the ceiling.

  “Mayday. Mayday. Mayday,” he said, his voice urgent. “This is pilot Simon Wendell, C-46 Commando with Lamb Air. We’ve lost pressure in our left engine. Requesting immediate assistance.”

  I blinked, feeling the weight of what he was saying. All around me, I could hear the piercing screams of frightened passengers. I glanced at Simon and took a deep breath, trying to erase the images my mind had created. It didn’t work.

  Simon shot me
a frantic are-you-ready-to-land-this-thing? look, and then abruptly dropped the charade. My face must have given me away again.

  “Jeez, Talia, I’m just messing around!” Jumping up, he stood there, awkward and apologetic. The imaginary airplane faded around him, turning back into the empty wreck. But it had been too real. I felt sick, like I needed to throw up. I took a few deep breaths, frustrated with myself.

  “Sorry—I just, I don’t know. It’s just sad and terrible. Or something.”

  Sitting down on the edge of the plane’s open cockpit, I let my feet dangle and breathed in the cold arctic air. Since Mom’s funeral, I couldn’t bear to think about death. Pretending it was a game was even worse. If you’ve never seen the face of someone you love, all cold and quiet, and gone, then it’s a little hard to explain.

  “No one died, you know—in the crash,” the Guitar Boy said as he sat down beside me. “There were only three crew members, the pilot and two others. Two of the men were hurt, but they recovered just fine.”

  I just nodded and looked out over the landscape. Rolling tundra scattered with glacial rock and scrub pine stretched into the distance before sinking toward the white frozen surface of Hudson Bay.

  “Sorry—” I began, but he cut me off.

  “Nah, it’s all right.” The Guitar Boy grinned, and then because he seemed more comfortable using other people’s words to say what he meant, he pulled his guitar around and broke into song.

  Up till now, Simon had only sung one song I knew. I’d only just met him and I’d already lost track of the number of songs he’d played today, spontaneously pulling his guitar around from where it hung across his back and bursting into song. But now as he began strumming, I recognized the melody as something Mom used to sing along to on the radio, and the force of it was so heavy and sudden I almost clapped my hands over my ears. If this song had come waltzing out of the speakers, I would have turned the radio off. Instead I took a deep breath and clenched my hands together in my lap. Though I didn’t really want to, I forced myself to listen as that song floated out into the crisp morning air.

  Surprisingly, it didn’t make my chest ache like I thought it would. This boy and his guitar were different. I might have even gone on listening and actually liking it, but he didn’t get very far into the song before a sudden twang interrupted him.

  “Oh man.” He fingered the long string that dangled, broken, from the neck of his guitar. “I hate it when perfectly good things break, ya know?”

  “Yeah.” I did know.

  “Oh well.” He shrugged. “Sometimes broken things are better for other stuff.”

  Loosening the key, he unwound the broken string, took my hand, and wrapped it around my wrist, twisting and securing it into a bracelet. I stared at it for a minute before glancing up at him.

  “Thanks, Simon.” I tried out his name, feeling self-conscious as I fingered the broken guitar string.

  He smiled and slung his guitar over his shoulder again, twisting it around till it hung across his back. Then Simon jumped down onto the wing of the plane, and waited, humming, while I scrambled down after him.

  THAT FIRST WEEK without Dad dragged on, though the Guitar Boy and the Birdman made things seem a little less bleak. Long days never seem quite so long when there are interesting people in them, and my new friends were definitely interesting. Still, I needed to keep track of my days.

  Dad had taken his pocket calendar with him and I didn’t have one of my own. So instead, I made a paper chain, one loop of paper linked through another, and I strung it around the corners of my window alcove. I’d tear one loop off every day until he came back. That way I’d be able to count down the days until Dad returned, and I could forget how many he had been gone. I didn’t know the exact day Dad would be back, but he expected the ice to go out the first week in July. So I gave him till July seventh. That morning, June fifth, I tore the eighth loop from my chain, leaving, hopefully, only thirty-two loops until Dad came back.

  I should have been used to Dad being gone. He’d been away for a lot of my life. But I missed him. I missed the idea of him and all that that meant. Home. Mom. So when Sura invited Simon and his grandfather for dinner that eighth-loop night, at first I thought she was just trying to make me feel better. But as I watched the three of them around the table—Sura, Simon, and the Birdman—I realized they would have been here whether I was part of the mix or not.

  The Birdman had been coming to Churchill for years. Fifteen to be exact, and he and Sura had been friends for most of that time. Simon had started coming with his grandfather a couple years ago.

  “Mom is big on real-life education,” Simon told me over a game of rummy later that evening. “I’m homeschooled, you know.”

  I looked up. “You’re homeschooled?”

  He nodded.

  This surprised me. The homeschooled kids I knew were super smart, but kinda quiet. Simon was smart, but he was the furthest thing from quiet I’d ever met.

  “Yep, I’ve been at home since second grade. Anyway, Mom and Dad are always trying to make sure I get a lot of real-life learning. And real-life environmental and cultural science experiences are sorta hard to come by when you’re moving around a lot. My dad’s in the military.”

  Simon laid down a red six, playing off the run I’d laid down on my last turn.

  “I’m not about to argue spending the summers with my granddad in Churchill. Pretty sure it’s the best real-life education I’ll ever get.” He grinned, and I glanced over at the Birdman, deep in conversation with Sura.

  What would it be like to have someone like him for a grandfather? I didn’t have any grandparents left, and what little I remembered of them had more to do with nursing homes than bird-watching and arctic adventure.

  “Your turn,” Simon said.

  Smiling, I carefully laid down a run of spades and two kings, emptying my hand.

  “I win.” I leaned back in my chair and folded my arms across my chest.

  Simon ran his hands through his hair until it stuck up on just one side.

  “You’re either really good at cards or really lucky,” he said. This was the third time in a row he’d lost.

  “My mom and I used to play a lot.” I bit my lip. I hadn’t meant to say anything about her. “And I—I guess I’m lucky.” I fumbled over the words. I didn’t want to leave anything about Mom hanging out there in space like an unanswered question. Simon would ask me about her, I knew he would, so I waited. But he never did. He just shrugged and gathered up the cards.

  “Well, I think I’d better steer clear of you when it comes to card games,” he said. “Not sure I can take losing like this every time.”

  “I guess I could let you win sometimes,” I shrugged, relieved. “Maybe.”

  He laughed. “Wow. Maybe? That’s super generous.”

  And it was my turn to laugh.

  “Well, I have to be good at something!” I nodded at his guitar. “You’ve already got the music scene covered.”

  “Fair enough,” he said, grinning. Then he pulled his guitar from where it hung on the back of his chair and broke into song. He made it look as easy as breathing.

  We sang and played card games late into the night. And from that evening on, Simon and I spent almost every waking minute together. We did a lot of exploring and some bird-watching with Simon’s grandfather, too. Even Sura came along a couple times, which was actually kind of nice.

  Sura and I hadn’t really talked about things since Dad left—about Mom, or even about how Dad was this sort of present-yet-absent force in my life. We didn’t need to. Sura just seemed good at understanding. Or maybe she and Dad had talked before we came, so she knew about some of our brokenness. But if Dad had said anything to Sura, she never mentioned it. And I never asked.

  Before Dad left, I’d been worried that Sura was all determined to be some kind of fill-in mom.
But the better I got to know her, the more I realized that Sura wasn’t actually treating me any different than she treated everyone else. She took care of people, loving them with the food she made and other things she did for them. Like when Dad came back from his first scouting trip on the ice. The special dinner Sura had made for us that night gave me a pretty good idea about what she thought of us. And on top of that she just sort of mothered everyone. Sura was one of those people who seemed to know what others need and wanted to do something about it. Once I figured this out, it didn’t bother me quite so much. I wouldn’t say we were best friends or anything, but I felt like we were starting to understand each other.

  It was surprising. I didn’t expect to like Sura very much—to like being around her. I’d been so sure that spending my summer with a stranger would be one of the worst parts of this whole thing. Maybe I’d been wrong about that.

  When I wasn’t with Sura or out exploring with Simon and the Birdman, I studied my wishes and waited anxiously by the radio receiver. Dad was good about calling in on the days we’d agreed upon. And every time the receiver crackled to life, my heart jumped into my throat, and relief would race clear to the ends of my fingers. Our conversations were always the same.

  “VE4 portable W1APL, this is Dad. Over.”

  “Go ahead, W1APL.” I’d say this into the radio. Then Dad would give me his location and I’d pull out the coordinate ruler. Lining it up with the grid marks on the map that hung over my desk, I’d make a mark where the latitude and longitude coordinates intersected, just like he’d shown me. With each new mark I made, I drew a line from the last location Dad had given me, charting his course across the wall. It was like playing connect-the-dots, only I couldn’t tell what sort of picture would emerge from all of those connected lines. Maybe it would be a picture of the one thing we were both looking for and couldn’t seem to find.

  “How’s the weather down south?” Dad would ask, his voice crackling over the radio static. I’d laugh and tell him I was wearing my sundress and flip-flops, which of course I wasn’t. I couldn’t even imagine myself in a sundress. I couldn’t make that picture fit in this place of snow and ice, no matter what the sun might eventually do to warm things up.