by Beth Hautala
I stood staring up at the twilight sky, watching the patterns shift and change, and I was so lost in the beauty of it that I jumped when Sura broke the silence.
“The Inuit say that a great abyss lies at the edge of the world,” she said. “A narrow way spans it, and those who have died are guided carefully across to a place of great rest.” She paused. “There’s no pain or disease there. Spirits guard the way across the abyss, guiding souls to paradise and lighting the way with brilliant torches.” She smiled and looked up.
There was a quietness, a kind of deep-down stillness inside me as I watched the lights dance, backtracking, repeating themselves in indistinguishable patterns and shifting colors. They were so bright they actually cast a glow over the crusty, glazed snow.
As I stood there, I thought about Sura’s story. Mom had said that people make up stories to help them explain things they can’t believe, or to help them believe things they can’t explain. To help them understand. And people dying is a pretty hard thing to understand. It made sense that the Inuit had their own story for this very thing.
An hour later, when Dad still hadn’t called, I finally went to bed. I told myself that it was probably because he was on his way back. Why call when he would see me in just a few hours?
As I lay in bed, the aurora borealis dancing outside my window, I clutched the picture of my mom’s young face against my chest, against the necklace Dad had given me. And I fell asleep like that, holding onto both of them for dear life.
EVERY DAY NEW PEOPLE WERE arriving in Churchill, which was ironic because amid the dozens and dozens of new faces in town, the one face I kept looking for was still absent. I had hoped Dad would surprise me by returning early, even though it was unlikely, but he hadn’t come home yet and he still hadn’t called. Dad’s absence was beginning to feel like a toothache—always there, always throbbing and making it difficult to think about anything else for very long. And I was beginning to get worried.
I tried to distract myself by spending time with Simon. When we weren’t out bird-watching, we were people watching, and there was a lot to see. The tourists traveled by train or plane, and a few by boat. They came like they knew spring was only weeks away, eager to see the wildlife that would appear out of hiding as the snow melted. Eager for the promise of arctic adventure. They came to see the bears and to explore Churchill’s history.
But mostly, people came for the whales. They came knowing of their absence. At least, some of them did. A few were surprised and disappointed, but no one was deterred. It was the talk of the town, Churchill’s missing whales, and it created a contagious sense of mystery. Each morning people would line the shore along the bay’s estuary and wait, searching the cloudy waters for white whales.
Simon thought the tourists were silly. They were so excited about the absence of the very thing they’d come to see. But I think I understood how they felt, how just the hope of something can pull at you. I felt sorry for them. And I felt sorry for myself, because I was waiting, too.
That morning, as I tore another paper loop from my chain, I realized there were only seventeen loops left. It was the twentieth of June. Dad had been gone for twenty-five days, and out on the bay, the ice was shifting from opaque white to steel gray. It was getting thin, tired of fighting against the growing warmth.
Back in Woods Hole it was summer. Here in Churchill, spring was still on its way, but it was coming so fast I was afraid I might actually miss it. In the north, spring is already right on top of you once the ice breaks apart, running massive chunks aground as the tide goes out. But just before the ice begins breaking up, fierce warm winds come rushing out of the south. It was a sure sign of change, that wind, and it would blow warm and fast, eating up the snow and ice.
The spring winds arrived just after my birthday, and the morning they came, I knew something was different even before I got out of bed. I could hear the wind racing around the blue house, rattling the windows and skittering over the shingles. And when an especially fierce gust buffeted against the house, the staircase would let out a funny kind of groan, like it was protesting all the exuberance outside. Everything felt all stirred up and it made me anxious, like I needed to dance around, and I’m not normally the twirling type.
When I was little, Dad used to hold tight to my wrists and spin me around until my feet flew off the ground. I’d get dizzy and all twirled up, inside and out. All I could see was my dad’s laughing face and the world spinning away in a kind of breathless blur.
That’s what it was like today as I sat with Simon. A happy, breathless blur.
It had been a week since I kissed him and neither of us had said anything about it. The more time that passed, the more I was afraid I’d ruined something. Maybe Simon hadn’t wanted me to kiss him. He might even be mad about it.
I hadn’t done it on purpose, exactly. It was just that he was so great, and there on the shore after he wished for unicorns for me, my mouth just took over and did the kissing before the rest of me had a chance to decide whether it was a good idea or not. So I thought I should apologize. Plus I felt a little nervous and shy about the whole thing.
“I’m sorry I kissed you,” I told him.
“You’re sorry?” He looked so disappointed I realized maybe he wasn’t mad. Maybe I hadn’t ruined anything after all.
“Well,” I hesitated, “I guess I’m only sorry if you are.”
Simon grinned, running a hand through his hair until it stuck up on just one side, the way I liked it.
“I’m not sorry,” he said, still grinning. “You can kiss me anytime you like.” And he looked like he might burst into song.
I felt so relieved, I sat down next to Simon, feet dangling off the edge of the porch. Beside me, Simon strummed his guitar, singing softly under his breath. I closed my eyes and leaned back, hands folded behind my head.
“This is nice,” I said to no one in particular. It had been a long time since I felt this comfortable with someone. The only thing keeping it all from being completely great, keeping me from feeling completely at ease, was Dad. Every time I walked past the radio, I stopped and stared at it. At first I thought that maybe something was wrong with it. Maybe the battery had died or it was broken. Sura even asked someone from the CNSC to take a look at it. Just to be sure. But the radio was fine.
So I decided that Dad had probably just lost track of time. It had happened before. And it was probably hard to keep track of your days, pocket calendar or not, out on the open water. Or maybe Dad had finally found his little white whales, and in all the excitement he’d forgotten to call me. And because that was a much better alternative than any of the hundred terrible scenarios I’d imagined while lying awake at night, it seemed like a good idea to hang on to that one. Dad had found his whales. He’d forgotten to call. He’d be in off the ice in about two and a half weeks. Maybe less. And as long as I focused on that, and kept hanging out with Simon, things were okay. Easier.
Simon stopped playing and I opened my eyes, squinting up at him. He was staring at me kinda funny, and I pulled myself up on one elbow.
“What? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” Simon smiled and started strumming his guitar again. “I just thought you were sleeping and you looked pretty.”
“You think I look pretty?”
“Sure.” He kept strumming.
I stretched back out and smiled up at the sky, my insides swooping.
The screen door slammed behind us, caught by a gust of wind as Sura came out on the porch. She leaned over the rail beside Simon and me and stood there for several long minutes, smiling and taking in all of that warm spring wind. None of us said anything, we just looked out across the bay, quiet and windswept.
After a time, Sura spoke. “I love this weather.” She sighed. “And this wind. It’s like music. Different than winter wind. Softer. Have you heard of Inuit throat singing, Talia?” she a
sked, turning to me.
Her question seemed totally unrelated to the weather. I looked up at her, confused by the suddenness of it.
Simon quit playing his guitar and leaned back against the side of the house, his face expectant. “It’s really cool,” he said.
I watched Sura as she closed her eyes. She looked like she was listening for something. Maybe she was waiting for just the right moment—like Mom used to before she told a story.
After a few seconds of silence, Sura took a deep breath and broke into a low, eerie wailing sort of song. It was unlike anything I’d ever heard. Wild and rushing, like the wind. Part cry, part chant, she almost seemed to echo herself, repeating a single note and then instantly dropping to harmonize with herself. And with such fluidity that if I didn’t know better, I’d think there were two women singing instead of just one. When she stopped, she took one look at my face and burst out laughing.
“Where did you learn how to do that?” I asked.
“My mother taught me,” she said. “And her mother taught her, whose mother taught her, and on and on until at the very beginning, it was taught to us by the wind itself.” Sura smiled. “It’s a story of course, but it’s beautiful, don’t you think?”
It was a beautiful idea—that the wind could teach someone to sing. And if any wind could do it, it would be this warm, twirled-up wind. Spring was coming. It really was.
I wanted to laugh and cry at the same time. Joy and relief. But I was afraid, too, because that meant the ice could come off the Bay at anytime. And no matter what excuses I made up for him, if the ice went out before Dad came back, nothing I told myself could protect him from danger.
TWELVE DAYS LATER, ON JULY second, the ice on Hudson Bay finally gave way, piling on shore as the wind drove it out of the water or pushed it out to sea.
There were just four loops left on my paper chain. Dad had been gone for six weeks.
The day after my birthday, Sura had called the CNSC and talked to one of the guys my dad worked with on occasion. We thought maybe he would have some news of ice conditions or updates and reports from Dad’s team. But he hadn’t heard a word.
“Nothing? Really?” I said when Sura got off the phone. Disappointment and now fear felt like an actual thing lodged in the back of my throat.
“Your dad took a full team with him, Talia,” Sura said, her voice calm and steady. “He would really have no reason to call the CNSC or report any of his findings until he came back and had a chance to sort through all of the data they collected. And I’m sure there’s a perfectly logical explanation he hasn’t been able to call us, either. Perhaps the radio failed.”
That made sense. After all, the Birdman had said that Dad wouldn’t take any more risks than he needed to. And Dad knew I was here, waiting. But things that seemed so reasonable in my head didn’t necessarily agree with the things in my heart. I wanted something real, something I could hold on to.
I lay in the darkness that night and listened to the ice grinding and groaning out on the bay as it fractured and ran aground—ice against rock and rock against ice. It must have sounded like this, ages and ages ago, when glaciers of ice carved away the ground, moving earth and stone, pushing up mountains and hollowing out canyons.
Despite the thrill of the wind, the arrival of spring, and the ice going out, I felt hope slowly seep out of me, leaving me cold and empty. I listened as the ice heaved toward shore, little glacier upon little glacier. It would have been one of the best sounds imaginable, the sound of winter finally ending, had Dad been safely asleep in the room across the hall. Instead, he was out there somewhere in all that grinding, shifting ice.
I padded barefoot to the window and leaned against the sill, holding my breath so that I didn’t fog the glass. In the gray, dusky light of the midnight sun, Hudson Bay had emerged, and the water now moved and heaved under the fractured ice, throwing it off like a winter coat.
Dad and his team had planned for this. They traveled by airboats specifically for the break up. And even though I knew this, I couldn’t forget that Dad hadn’t called. Each small island of ice making its way either shoreward or ocean-ward sank my own personal airboat of hope just a little more, taking my dad down with it.
I’d been having trouble falling asleep since Dad left, though I’d never said anything to Sura. Even if she asked, I would’ve blamed the old hot water radiator in my room. I didn’t want to worry. I wanted to feel okay. I wanted my dad here and everything to be normal. I wanted him to sit out on the porch with me and listen to Simon sing and tell stories. I wanted him to be there when the Birdman took us out on bird-watching expeditions. I wanted him beside me at dinner, leaning back and stretching his long legs under the table. I wanted him now like I had wanted Mom. And didn’t have either one of them.
I stood at the window, panic churning in the pit of my stomach.
Dad had been out there for a long time, suspended on ice between the arctic sky and the Arctic Sea. And there’s a lot that can happen, even before the floes break up. Which is why Dad’s call-ins had been so important. The last time he called, his voice scratchy and tied up in radio airwaves, he told me again that he’d be back before the ice went out.
But he wasn’t back. And no one had heard from him.
Crawling into bed, I stared up at the ceiling. I tried not to let my imagination run wild. I refused to think about ice chasms and bitter storms that would make the already-chill temperatures drop even further. I refused to think about failing equipment, low supplies, or frostbite and hypothermia. But those things crept inside me anyway and pressed cold fingers against my heart till I could hardly breathe.
He isn’t alone, I told myself. His team is with him. They’ll take care of each other. They’d let me know if something happened.
But my fear hissed back, twisted and mean in the darkness.
Unless the equipment failed. Unless they’re all dead.
Fear always says the worst things in the dark. And though I never meant to, I’d invited fear in, and now I couldn’t make it leave.
FOUR DAYS LATER, THERE WERE no more loops left on my chain. I sat at the edge of Hudson Bay, facing north, knees pulled tight to my chest, my arms wrapped around them. I settled into the rocky shoreline. I would wait all day if necessary.
The warm wind pressed against my back as I searched out over the ice dams and across the open water for the tiny specks that I hoped would appear on the horizon—airboats bringing my dad home.
It was a strange sight, all that water dotted with ice. I’d never seen it before. Hudson Bay was vast. Not that the ice had made it smaller, just more crossable. Funny how just because I could walk on ice, it seemed less wild. Less dangerous. Like it was something I could handle. Something my dad could handle. But neither of us could walk on water.
The panic from last night had been replaced by the weight of emptiness in the pit of my stomach. It was the same feeling I’d had when Mom died, and I hated that it was there. It’s a terrible thing, really, being the one left behind.
Now it was Sunday, the day of our weekly call-ins. Dad made me promise only to call him in case of emergency, and Sura told me to give him the benefit of the doubt. I had listened to them both. But I couldn’t anymore. The first week of July was over, and still Dad wasn’t back. So if I didn’t hear from him at the usual time tonight, I’d radio in myself.
After a while, Sura came and sat with me. She brought my lunch out to the shore when I refused to come back to the blue house. Some kind of meat stew in an oversized tin cup. I had no idea what kind of meat it was. Caribou? Rabbit? Seal? And suddenly I hated it. I hated everything about it. It was bits and pieces of this rock-strewn, frozen, ice-bound Arctic. And I was supposed to swallow it down and like it. The stew. This place. This place that had stolen my dad and might not give him back. I couldn’t do it.
Before I could think of a reason not to, I threw the
cup and all of its contents down the shore as far as I could. I didn’t even care that Sura was right there beside me. I thought she would be mad, but she wasn’t. She just sat with me and didn’t say a word. She didn’t even ask me to bring back the cup. So I didn’t. I left it there on the shore until the tide eventually came in and carried it away.
Just before she left, Sura pulled something from her pocket and handed it to me. A small feather, no larger than my thumb, and white as the moon over Hudson Bay. Pinching my fingers, I zipped the feather through them, straightening all of the tiny shafts until not a single one was out of place.
“It’s the flight feather of an arctic tern,” she told me. “He dropped it and I thought you might want it. To help you practice your flying.”
I didn’t understand.
“We forget,” she said. “How to fly. It’s a fragile thing, and the weight of things—things that hurt—can make us forget how it’s done. We dream about it. We remember how it feels to be weightless. But once we forget, we have to spend the rest of our lives relearning how to take that leap and believe we can do it.”
Sura had been staring out at the water, but she turned to me now. “If you can practice along the way,” she said, “that first leap—the letting go—will be a little easier.”
I was still confused—let go of what? Fear? Hope? Dad?—but I brushed the feather across my cheek, taking comfort in the softness against my skin.
Later, a few hours after Sura left, and after Simon, too, had come and gone, the Birdman showed up. Together we sat watching the tide creep up the shore, and every once in a while we would throw a few smooth stones as hard as we could out over the ice dams and into the open water. Sometimes they made it. Sometimes they didn’t, landing among the embankments and steeples of ice with a hollow ricocheting sound.