Waiting for Unicorns

by Beth Hautala

  I guess when it came right down to it, I was terrified by how uncontrollable things could be, and of how terribly small I was, right in the middle of them.

  I had no way to steady my heart against cancer, or shifting ice floes, or bear attacks. I wasn’t big enough or brave enough to never be hurt, or broken.

  It didn’t matter how tightly I clutched my fingers around whatever liferope I could find. There was just no way I’d be able to save myself, or the people I loved best, from getting shaken up and tossed around by things we had no power to change, or predict.

  But I wanted to try. I wanted to be there for the people I loved. So I took a deep breath and laid my hand on the doorknob. I could do this.

  I don’t know how long I stood there, listening to the voices on the other side. I kept trying to turn that doorknob. I kept trying to make my feet move, and make my heart quit racing.

  But somewhere between loving the people on the other side of that hospital door, and desperately needing to keep my heart from breaking into any more pieces, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t go in. I just wasn’t big enough.

  I turned around slowly and followed the diamonds and squares of linoleum back down the hall, one foot in each square. And then I was skipping squares. Faster and faster. Until I was running. Past the nurses’ station, past the waiting room and the front desk, straight through the double doors and into the arctic sunshine. And I didn’t stop.

  I ran back toward the blue house on the edge of town, and past it, down the road that ran along the water until I could go no farther.

  Standing at the very edge of Hudson Bay, I made another wish and wrote it on a tiny slip of paper in my mind.

  I wish I could fly.

  Waves lapped over the toes of my shoes and I fixed my eyes on that point of the horizon where the water meets the sky.

  As I stood there alone, I let myself wonder, How far would I have to go to get away from the things that scared me?

  THE BIRDMAN WAS IN THE hospital for three weeks. He had two broken ribs, a broken collarbone, puncture wounds to the chest, a collapsed lung, and forty-five stitches just above his right ear.

  Simon took the bear attack hard, maybe even harder than the Birdman himself. I understood why, though—everything had been just fine until suddenly it wasn’t, and it’s scary to think of how quickly things can change.

  Sura and Dad insisted Simon stay with us while the Birdman was in the hospital. And on the outside, I was glad. But secretly I was afraid to see him. I had been a horrible friend. I hadn’t been able to make myself go into that hospital room. Instead, I’d run away.

  Simon had been there for me right from the very beginning, when I had almost nothing but my loneliness to keep me company. I was sad, but he had stayed anyway. He’d done everything he could to try to make me feel better.

  When he climbed up the porch steps the following afternoon, I wanted to be there for him, but I didn’t really know what to do. So when he hugged me tight, I just hugged him back.

  “Are you okay?” I asked tentatively.

  He nodded, but an unfamiliar frown creased his forehead.

  “I’m all right,” he said. “Or I will be as soon as he gets out of the hospital.”

  Simon seemed different. Older maybe. Like the weight of what that bear had done had stacked a few extra years on top of Simon’s fourteen.

  Simon slept on the couch in the front room, his small brown duffel bag on the floor in the corner, and his guitar propped against it. Seeing it gathering dust in the corner bothered me almost as much as my missing unicorn whales.

  I didn’t know what to do with this version of my friend. The boy with the songs and stories, with the quick, easy smile, the way he could hug the breath right out of me, or how I would catch him staring at me sometimes—that boy I knew what to do with. I knew how to be his friend. It was as easy as breathing.

  Being around this version of Simon was much harder, and I felt myself wanting to run away at times. I was afraid of his sadness, his strange new quietness. I was afraid it would change him forever, slowly turn him into someone else—the way it had done to me—until I couldn’t recognize him at all.

  One afternoon, a few days later, Dad was at the CSNC, and Sura, Simon, and I were having lunch. Simon was particularly quiet and I couldn’t stand it anymore. As soon as I finished eating, I got up and left him to finish alone. I didn’t even answer him when he looked up from his half-eaten sandwich, startled by my abruptness, and asked me where I was going.

  Sura found me later, curled on my bed upstairs, trying to read a book.

  “Can I come in?” she asked, knocking on my door and opening it a crack.

  I closed my book and nodded, nervous.

  “Did you and Simon have an argument?” Her voice was quiet, and she studied the lyrics to “Baby Blue” pinned on my corkboard, written out in Simon’s slanted handwriting.

  “No,” I said, surprised. “Did he say we did?”

  Sura shook her head. “He didn’t say anything. You just seem a little at odds with each other.”

  I shrugged. “He’s just kind of hard to be around lately.”

  She nodded and sat down on the end of my bed, wrapping her sweater around her.

  “Yes. Well, sad people can be a bit hard to be around at times.” She ran her hand over the stitching on the quilt across my bed.

  I knew Sura was right. I drew my knees up to my chest. “I’m hard to be around, too, sometimes,” I said. We both knew it wasn’t a question. It was true.

  “People are usually sad for a reason, Tal. But you don’t have to be sad, too, in order to care for them. You don’t even have to completely understand.”

  I watched her long brown fingers trace patterns on my quilt. “In fact, when you do care about someone,” she continued, “it doesn’t matter if you understand or not. Loving someone means that sometimes you have to risk getting messy. It’s not always very fun, but it’s always better than being alone, or watching someone you love hurt alone.”

  Suddenly I wasn’t sure if she was talking about Simon, or me.

  “Simon doesn’t need you to be happy for him, he just needs you to be there for him. Does that make sense?”

  “I think so,” I said, trying to process what she was saying—about Simon, and about me. Sura smiled and patted my knee before getting up and going back downstairs, closing my door behind her.

  I sat on my bed for a while after that, thinking about what to do. Try to be a better friend, for sure. But I’d known that when I left Simon at the table.

  What I really needed to do was tell him I was sorry. Sorry for being selfish and for thinking there was no one else in the world with feelings as messy as mine. Sorry for believing I was the only person who understood what it felt like to be sad or upset about things. Sorry for not choosing to be brave.

  Simon was a good friend. And now it was my turn to be there for him.

  I found Simon out on the front porch, leaning against the rail and staring out at the bay.

  “Hey,” I said, leaning beside him.

  “Hey.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Simon frowned, confused. “For—?”

  “For being a lousy friend.”

  “You’re not a—” he started to protest, but I cut him off.

  “Just stop talking for a second, okay?”

  He grinned, folding his arms across his chest, and waited for me to continue.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t come to see your grandfather or you when Dad and I got back.”

  Simon shrugged. “It’s not a big deal, Tal.”

  But I shook my head. “No. It is a big deal. You’ve really been there for me. All summer you’ve been there and I should have done the same thing. But instead I ran away.”

  Simon’s eyes widened. “You ran away?”

&
nbsp; I nodded. “I did come to the hospital. I came and sat in the hall, just outside the door. But I couldn’t go in. I—I was scared, I guess. And it was selfish. I’m really sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” Simon said. “Some people have a hard time with hospitals.”

  But I shook my head, knowing he didn’t quite understand. I was going to have to explain about Mom.

  “It isn’t the hospital, exactly,” I said. “I have lots of experience with hospitals. That’s part of the problem. My mom died of cancer last year, and Dad and I practically lived at the hospital while she was sick.”

  Without looking at him I took a deep breath and continued in a rush. “I just kept thinking about her—losing her—and I couldn’t go in because I didn’t want to see one more bad thing happen to someone I care about. I hate watching pain mess everything up—break everything.” I glanced up.

  He didn’t look at me and he didn’t say anything right away. Maybe I’d said too much.

  “I know about your mom, Tal,” he said quietly. “I’ve known since that day we visited Miss Piggy. Sura told me. I’m really sorry she died, Talia.”

  I could have been upset with Sura for telling him, but I wasn’t. Not even a little. It was freeing, like a secret I didn’t have to keep anymore.

  “Thanks,” I said quietly. “So, you’re not mad at me? For running away?”

  He shook his head and stuffed his hands into his pockets and studied the tip of his shoe. “It’s hard to know what I’m feeling exactly, but I’m not mad at you. I’m just . . .”

  “Sad,” I finished for him.

  He nodded. “Yeah. And sort of scared, too, I guess.”

  I understood exactly.

  “It’s okay, you know,” I said. “To feel that way. It just means you love your grandfather. I think there’d probably be something wrong with you if you weren’t feeling kind of shook up about everything.”

  “Yeah, I guess you’re right.”

  “Also,” I said, reaching out and taking his hand. “You don’t have to be shaken up by yourself.”

  “I don’t?” he asked, holding my hand, tight.

  “No.”

  My stomach was jumping around like I’d swallowed a hummingbird.

  “Good,” he said. “Because everything is a little better when you’re around.”

  And for a minute, I was pretty sure I could fly.

  WHEN THE BIRDMAN WAS FINALLY released from the hospital, he and Simon moved back into the house they’d rented for the summer. The Birdman would spend the final weeks of his summer in Churchill just resting on his front porch. For a little while at least, he’d have to let the birds come to him.

  He hadn’t said very much about the bear attack—I think he knew it made me nervous, and when he did talk about it, he tried to make light of what had happened.

  “Darn bear tried to give me a haircut and got carried away,” I’d overheard him joke to my dad.

  But he never really fooled any of us. We knew the attack could have been much worse, and had it not been for that team of road workers, the Birdman’s bird list might have been permanently unfinished.

  One afternoon while Simon was out running errands, I sat alone with the Birdman on his porch. It was the first time we’d really had a chance to talk since he was released from the hospital.

  I made lemonade for us, and as I settled down into a chair beside the Birdman, I handed him a glass. He smiled, sipping appreciatively.

  Curling up in my chair, my legs tucked under me, I leaned back and gazed out at the blue water of Hudson Bay, trying to take it all in. Dad and I would be leaving soon, and I didn’t want to forget any of this.

  “So tell me, Talia,” the Birdman said, turning to me. “Have you found what you’ve been looking for, since coming to Churchill?”

  His question caught me off guard because until that point I hadn’t really thought of myself as searching for anything, just waiting. I didn’t say anything at first—I just thought about his question. Then suddenly, I needed to ask one of my own.

  “Do you believe in making wishes?”

  The Birdman stared out at the bay before answering.

  “I believe in hope,” he said at last.

  That wasn’t exactly what I wanted to hear. Hope wasn’t a very dependable thing. It had disappointed me on more than one occasion. Wishes were nicer because I could wrap my hands around them. I could write them on tiny slips of paper and keep them in a jar. I could control wishes.

  The Birdman knew nothing about my jar, of course. No one did. And it didn’t matter that he didn’t believe in wishes. Out of habit, I wrote a wish across a slip of paper in my mind, not caring that I was breaking rule number two again.

  I wish the Birdman a fast recovery.

  My jar of wishes was still lying in the bottom of my duffel bag at the back of my closet, but maybe I would pull it out when I got back to the blue house and drop this new wish inside.

  As I sat there, I glanced at the stitches that ran over the Birdman’s ear before they disappeared into his hair. They were healing, though that scar would never go away completely. He followed my gaze and gently ran his hand over the stitched-up place.

  “We all carry scars,” he said. “Some of them are just a bit more visible than others.”

  I fidgeted in my chair, running my finger around the lip of my lemonade glass.

  “But, Tal,” the Birdman continued, “it doesn’t matter how much time passes, or how many wishes I make. I’m not going to be able to change the fact that a polar bear tried to eat me for breakfast.” He was trying to soften his words, trying to be funny, but I knew exactly what he was getting at. He leaned back in his chair, gazing out at the bay again.

  After a while he said, “I like to believe that hope, and grace, too, are granting wishes on our behalf all the time. They might not always be the wishes we want, and they might not even be the wishes we’ve consciously made. Sometimes, we get so busy wishing for something big, we miss all the hundreds and millions of smaller but still-important wishes coming true right under our noses.”

  I thought about this as I stared out at the bay and spotted a tern hanging suspended over the water. And then it tucked its wings, plummeting toward the dark blue water, pulling up at the very last minute with a tiny fish in its beak.

  “See that?” The Birdman pointed.

  I nodded and watched in amazement as the little white bird suddenly sprang back into the air and hovered over the water as before.

  “Do you think the first time he did that, he knew he’d be able to come back up again?” I asked. “That he wouldn’t dive straight in the water and never come out?”

  We watched the little white bird as he hovered over Hudson Bay, beating the air with his wings and never seeming to tire.

  “I guarantee you he did not,” the Birdman said, and he turned to look at me. “But he did it anyway, and quickly discovered he was made to plunge and rise.”

  “That must have been such a relief,” I said, feeling tears begin to sting just behind my eyes.

  “I’m sure it was,” he said gently. “And do you know what else?”

  I shook my head.

  “It’s only because of his endless plunging and rising that he can fly as far as he does. Without that, he would never be able to make the journey.”

  Later that evening I left the Birdman sitting on his porch, but what he’d said kept echoing in my brain.

  Sometimes I forget that almost everything takes practice. That I wasn’t just born knowing how to do stuff, like read, or play the recorder, or go on living, and breathing, and loving stuff without my mom around. Sometimes you have to do things over and over again before you can do them well.

  I thought of that fearless bird and the tern feather Sura had given me. If it’s true that everyone knows how to fly, and we just forget
how it’s done, was I strong enough to be like that bird? To plunge and rise again?

  AUGUST SAILED INTO CHURCHILL with warm sunshine and cool evenings. We often bundled up in sweatshirts and blankets, building bonfires on the shore and roasting marshmallows late into the night. I loved sitting out there beside the water, the faces of my friends bright in the light of the fire.

  As the Birdman recovered, Simon began playing his guitar again, and he was even teaching me to play. His fingers were so strong and found their places easily, while mine felt clumsy and disconnected every time I tried to press them against the thin strings. I wasn’t very good, but Simon was patient.

  “It takes practice,” he told me, laughing when I got frustrated.

  Dad joined us on occasion when he wasn’t at the CNSC or with his research team, compiling data. He didn’t go out on the water again, but he was still distracted and focused on his work. I knew he wanted things to be different—better—between us, but they weren’t. Not really. Not yet.

  I wanted to talk, to try to close up that space between us some more—like we’d started to when we were out on the boat together. But Dad was too preoccupied with his reports and looking for his lost pocket calendar.

  Since he didn’t have time for much else besides work, I thought that if Dad and I could at least talk about the whales, maybe that would help.

  One evening, we unrolled maps on Sura’s kitchen table and leaned over them, our fingers tracing the whales’ routes from previous years as we tried to guess where they’d gone.

  “What if there are secret caves underneath the islands?” I asked, resting my chin in my hands. Dad sat beside me, pondering a map of the Baffin Island inlets.

  “Hmmm. That’s an interesting theory, Tal.” He cocked an eyebrow at me and smirked.

  “Or, maybe they really are magic,” I said, tiptoeing around the edges of my own secret hope. “Isn’t that what you said before? Maybe the whales just disappeared into the mist.”

  Dad looked at me from over the rim of his coffee cup.