Blaze Island

by Catherine Bush

  “Pressure’s still dropping,” Alan said, after checking the electronic barometer mounted on the wall in the utility room. “Really dropping, it’s plunging.” Then it was as if all the air was sucked out of the house. A great clobbering began from above. Never in Miranda’s memory of other storms had anything quite like this happened. Her heart boomed. The clobbering stopped. They were still here. She was. Her father. Frank. Ella. Let everything, everyone, every creature around them be okay.

  “How about a joke?” said Frank in a disembodied voice. “What did one hurricane say to the other?” He answered before Miranda could. “I’ve got my eye on you.” He winked.

  “We’re still standing.” Her father peered through the kitchen window, let out a ghost of a laugh. “It’s a full moon and high tide so waves will be high in the cove and likely spill into the fields, but they won’t reach us here on our slope. We’ll be all right.”

  They hadn’t lost power. Miranda poured more tea as her father asked Frank if there was a particular reason he’d decided to drive all the way from Boston, just ahead of the most massive hurricane to hit the North American east coast since weather records began?

  “Birds,” blurted Frank.

  “Birds,” said Alan, with a stir of incredulity.

  “Accidentals, ones that get tossed far off course, you know like Caribbean or European birds blown astounding distances, so you get singular sightings, ones for your life list, especially now, sadly, since bird numbers are plummeting. Once off the coast of Maine I saw a red-billed tropicbird.”

  “You’re a serious birder then,” said Alan.

  “Trying to be,” said Frank. “There’s an island near here, the Grand Funk Island, where there’s a bird sanctuary. I’m trying to get to that.”

  “You mean Funk Island,” said Miranda.

  “Oh, yeah, right,” said Frank as if caught out.

  “Once we saw a flamingo, out in the cove, after a storm,” Miranda told him.

  “A flamingo?” said Frank in astonishment.

  “Out there — you can’t see now, where you, where the brook goes out to the sea. It stayed for a day. At first we didn’t believe it.” She turned to her father for confirmation and found him giving her an assessing look. Pointing to the pair of binoculars perched on the windowsill, heat in her cheeks, she told Frank how they’d stared in wonder at the improbable bird, so pink it couldn’t be anything else, though too far off to photograph. Another time, they’d spotted a purple gallinule out on the rocks. When Frank looked puzzled, she told him this was a shorebird from the Carolinas and Florida — with yellow feet?

  At that Frank nodded vigorously and said he was sure he’d seen them in the past.

  “There’ve been more accidentals in recent years, given the new storms pushing up from the south, so you may well have come to the right place,” said Alan. “Though the middle of the night, you have to admit, is hardly the best time to look for birds.”

  Frank had an engaging smile, and some bravado seemed to rise in him in the face of her father’s persistence.

  “I figured I’d eventually find someone to take me in.”

  He was smiling yet not in the room. Black hair matted to his forehead, quilt pulled tight as he peered out above it, he looked as if the wind had forced its way inside him. Miranda wanted her father’s questions to stop.

  Lying in bed in the dark, her bedroom warmed by the wood stove below, she felt lonely, even with Ella’s body pressed against her, hard as a barnacle. The wind had swung around to the north. I will look after you. This had always been her father’s promise. On the other side of the wall lay Frank, in the bed that her father had brought into the house when the first of the three young scientists came to visit. Their beds faced away from each other through the wall, Frank’s head so close to hers she almost didn’t want to think about it. The mystery of her father’s phone call nudged her again, the words, How was your flight?

  Who else was here? Where were they?

  Frank creaked the mattress, startling her. Through the wall, came his muffled voice. “Good night, Miranda.”

  The wind had calmed when Miranda slid from bed, into the dove grey of early morning. Ella a shadow at her heels, she stepped outside as silently as she could. Small cumulus clouds scudded across the sky. Yellow burst over the grassy eastern hills that led to the village of Pummelly, beyond their own shimmery slope of alders. The wet roofs of their ring of outbuildings glistened. The green wind flag that her father had mounted when they first moved to the cove leaped softly atop its pole. The wind turbine stood in the field beside Pat Green’s sheep pasture, on the way up the lane, supported by cables and posts drilled deep into the ground, switched off by her father before the storm. The solar panels hadn’t fallen from the roof. The hens burbled in their house. In a moment Miranda would feed them, Rosie, the loudest, the bossy one, always the first at the grain. That nothing seemed fundamentally altered calmed Miranda to the bottom of her soul.

  Until she moved away from the house. In the distance, down in the cove, where usually pale sand formed a wide crescent, banked by flats of marram grass, spread water, nothing but water. That was the first shock. On the inland side, a torrent rushed out of the low spruce forest, a river so fierce it had cracked the road open, slabs of asphalt broken like teeth and tossed aside. In the froth lay Frank’s half-submerged car, shattered glass and bluish metal. Miranda’s breath caught. Somehow he’d pulled himself from that. A line of alders, thin black poles, stood between road and water, all that was left of the beach and the land behind it, the morning tide still rising. She squinted. The footbridge that ordinarily crossed the brook, on the shore side of the road, was missing. Most of the alders and dogwoods lining the road were underwater. Never in all her years in the cove, in all the storms she’d lived through, had the road been ripped open and the beach in Green Cove completely vanished.

  Swift and silent in his approach, her father, beside her, viewed the scene through binoculars with similar intensity. On the high hill beyond the cove, the highest on the island and the one that everyone called Telephone Hill, the cellphone tower leaned at a rakish angle, some of its support wires dangling, receptor panels askew.

  “Look at that,” Alan said.

  “Is he still sleeping?” Somehow Miranda couldn’t bring herself to mention Frank by name.

  “I believe he is.” Her father pulled out his phone. “It’s always cheering when a high pressure system follows a storm and the sun shines down on us, even though we’re without a road, not to mention no cellular or internet connection, it looks like.”

  Through binoculars they took turns examining the wreck of Frank’s car. And the gaping road and vanished beach and the broken cellphone tower on its hill above the flood, all laid bare by sunlight sharp as a knife. Lacking a cellphone, the disabled tower meant little to Miranda. No strange birds, only a pair of common murres flew past. Alan scanned the hills around them. Ella dove into the long grass.

  They had their own satellite connection, separate from the island’s large dish located in the town of Blaze, the biggest community on the island, and usually they didn’t lose the internet in storms. Pulling the extension ladder from the storage area beneath the house, Alan said he’d climb to the roof to check on the state of their smaller dish. Quietly. No sign of any problem with their connection, he told her as he descended, Miranda holding the ladder hard to keep it steady.

  The storm must still be messing up signals high in the atmosphere. Or there were problems elsewhere. Wherever their internet server was. Maybe in one of those places she’d glimpsed online. Washington, DC, where hundreds might be dead, she’d read over her father’s shoulder. Closer places. Drowned cars and flooded neighbourhoods in Halifax. The tidal marshes breached, cutting Nova Scotia off temporarily from the rest of Canada, making it another island.

  Likely the stranger, Frank, had followed the same roads they’d sped along in their own flight north nine years before — the journey her father i
nsisted they keep to themselves. They’d crossed the border from the United States into Canada, travelling on the all-night ferry from Sydney, Nova Scotia, then the second small ferry that, pointing out to sea, had brought them to Blaze Island.

  There had been brilliant skies the morning after Hurricane Gabrielle, which had ripped shingles from the roof of their vacation house in Provincetown. On the beach the next morning, sand crystals shining in the light, seven-year-old Miranda had walked wonderingly with her mother past house after house torn open by the storm’s ferocious tide. Every house beyond the breakwater had its seaward wall swept away, rooms exposed like underwear. Their house, the first within the breakwater, was spared. Her mother took Miranda’s hand and squeezed it. Then she gave an exhalation and darted off.

  When Miranda caught up to her, not far away, her mother was kneeling on the damp sand left by the retreating tide, digging with her long fingers, tugging at something small and white. She pulled out a slim tube with a little bowl at one end. A pipe, she said, a very old clay pipe. Eighteenth century, probably. There was more: shards of glazed pottery, pieces of beach glass in rare colours, red and blue. How had she known these things were there? A long time ago, Miranda’s mother said, people had tossed such things into the sea and the sand had swallowed them, but a strong storm tide will unearth them and return them to the surface. Storms stir up the past. She opened Miranda’s palm, dropping the objects into it, closing Miranda’s fingers into a fist to cup the treasures, her now-lost fingers making a heat around Miranda’s, as if she were removing the image of the violated houses and replacing them with this. Her mother had painted a version of that scene, them, the beach, the houses, flickering figures beneath shining, semi-translucent layers of colour; it was one of the paintings Miranda and her father had been forced to leave behind in their flight.

  Outside their house in the cove, her father was saying, “I’m going to head in to the cabin now to check on things there. Given the night we had, I’m worried about water damage. Any leaks would be devastating to the computer equipment. I won’t be long. Thing is, I also need to get hold of Caleb. He’s supposed to be running a rather urgent errand for me to Tom’s Neck this morning.”

  Miranda had the distinct sensation that her father was both confiding in her and not telling her everything. It was not an unfamiliar feeling. The cabin, forty-five minutes away on foot, less by quad, was where her father had taken to doing much of his work in recent years. His weather studying and weather monitoring.

  The afternoon before, he’d been out there, far off along the shore, when a small plane had buzzed as it circled in its descent, noticeable because such a rare occurrence. Working in the garden, Miranda had dropped her pitchfork at the sound. There were no regular flights to the island. Something medical, she wondered, cumulus clouds already gathering. Perhaps someone seeking safety before the coming storm?

  “You could stop off in Pummelly,” she said, though her father wouldn’t want to go by Caleb’s house, given the chance of encountering Sylvia.

  . . .

  Storms stir up the past.

  There was mist in the air as, for the last time, Miranda’s father locked the door of their house in Princeton, New Jersey, red brick with ivy climbing up the walls.

  Only one person had come to see them off that early July morning, weeks after Miranda’s tenth birthday. Her father’s colleague, white-haired Adolphus Rowe, marine biologist, once of Newfoundland’s Trinity Bay, leaned his bicycle against a red-brick wall. Just after seven o’clock, maybe it was simply too early for the neighbours to stop round to say goodbye. Their bags and boxes were already in the car, packed in the back seat, the trunk, the roof rack. All else that had belonged to Miranda was gone. Sold. Given away. How swiftly she’d learned that your life can be ripped without warning from your hands.

  In the driveway of the Princeton house, Adolphus gave Miranda a bear hug. He hugged her father hard as well, whispering something urgent in his ear. Knapsack in one hand, thermos in the other, Miranda climbed carefully into the front seat, trying not to disturb the weather all around her. Her haggard father said that it was her choice, to sit in the front seat beside him, since she was tall enough, or in the back where she always sat. Wherever she was, her mother’s absence in the front seat was the shadow in the car that neither of them could escape.

  The rain began as soon as they turned the corner from Prospect Avenue onto Harrison and grew heavier by the time they reached the interstate. The rain was all the tears Miranda couldn’t shed. She’d cried so much she no longer felt like crying. Rain punished the windscreen. Her father didn’t remove his sunglasses. He was wearing a ball cap, something he never used to do. And growing a beard. With wiry dark hair covering his cheeks he was barely recognizable as the father Miranda had known, which brought her equal measures of unease and relief.

  They had arrived in the US from England the year Miranda turned six, travelling across the Atlantic by steamer, which no one did anymore. Her father had insisted on it. When she was two, they’d flown to England from Canada but when it came time to return to North America, her father said there’d be no more flying. They had to keep their carbon budget down, all three of them together.

  Miranda remembered the week at sea, the swells, standing on deck with her mother, gaining her sea legs while staring at the horizon all the way from Southampton to New York. Manhattan-born Jenny was happy to be coming home, back into the orbit of her art school friends, the Chelsea gallery that represented her, her family. To Miranda, everything was new: their house in Princeton, people’s voices, the trips into the city, as her mother called it, her grandparents’ Upper West Side apartment. Even her father, appointed first director of the new Climate and Cryosphere Center at the university, seemed new and shiny, and there was something new in the way people looked at him, with wide warmth and thrilling respect, and the people themselves were new, these Americans. They invited the three of them to dinner. They didn’t hesitate to embrace Miranda.

  Yes, her father worried about the weather as he always had, but he was excited by his work, the centre, their life. A lot of weather made up the climate, he told Miranda. Climate was weather over long periods of time and this was what he studied. He’d always had a galvanizing energy. In Princeton this energy seemed intensified. Her parents biked Miranda to school each day, sometimes together, sometimes one or the other. Her mother, home from her studio in a building near the university, burst through the door in a rush. Absorbed in his work, her father looked up from his laptop at the sight of Miranda and held open his arms. Sweetheart, he said softly, as if he found something about her eternally surprising. And disturbing. She didn’t know what or why but she allowed the surprise to feel good and pleasure to ripple through her. Happiness flew between all three of them.

  Milan Wells met Jenny Erens by chance at an art opening. Once, Miranda’s parents had loved telling her these stories. Briefly at loose ends, Milan was just back from months on a field campaign drilling ice cores that told the story of ancient climate in the Arctic. Still with longish hair and darkened face, a snow-goggle tan that left him with white owl-like eyes, he walked into a Manhattan art gallery with the geochemist whom he was visiting. Five years out of art school, six months out of a relationship with another painter named Helen Krane, Jenny spotted him as soon as he walked in the door and sought him out as he stood, arms crossed, in front of a painting of an iceberg. Milan asked Jenny if she’d ever seen a real one. He showed her photographs of icebergs on his phone. So unlike the artists all around them, he told her stories about the world of snow and ice that he studied, the cryosphere, where he’d been weeks before. Abandoning the gallery, they walked to the river, imagining the warm world around them covered in ice as it had once been.

  At her loft in Brooklyn, Jenny showed Milan her museum-sized paintings of forests, cities, people, paintings whose transparent layers of radiant colour seemed almost as alive as the two of them standing close together, hands entwined, bod
ies rustling. He told her how his Czech-Canadian mother, Magda, after giving birth to him in a hospital in east-end Toronto, had named him for a writer whose work she loved. He had one name from each of his parents, Milan from his mother, Wells from his English father, both of them immigrants to the new land of Canada. Born in winter, in the midst of a snowstorm, Milan Wells had loved snow from the moment of his birth.

  He didn’t leave Jenny’s loft until he’d convinced her to run away with him, north to Waterloo, Ontario, where he was teaching at the university, and where, he told her, Amish drove around in blue clothes and hats in their horse-drawn buggies and lived in houses where they used no electricity at all.

  As Miranda and her father sped north up the interstate, I-95, she stared west towards the river and the misty towers of Manhattan where her mother had grown up. Shabbat dinner in her grandparents’ apartment, the five of them gathered around the table as her grandfather Adam lit the candles, gone. Her friends in Princeton, Uma Srinivasan, Ellen Markowitz, vanished behind Miranda like fluttering scraps.

  She had seen her grandparents only once since her mother’s death. Bones showed through the skin of her grandmother Sarah’s face and her silent grandfather’s long-fingered hands had stiffened. They barely hugged her father, as if, though they couldn’t say it, they blamed him for what had happened to their daughter.

  Uma Srinivasan, whose mother dropped her off and picked her up in a large white van, had loved to brush Miranda’s hair. They told each other’s fortunes, folding paper into triangles to make a fortune teller, Miranda sliding her hands into the paper folds. When Uma pointed at the four, Miranda walked her fingers back and forth. Unfolding the final tab, Uma read out the words, You’ll be famous. Then it was Miranda’s turn. Six. Blue. You’ll fall in love. How soft Uma’s hair had been between Miranda’s fingers. Before Miranda’s departure, they’d taken each other’s pictures on their phones, but then Miranda’s father had taken away her phone, which she’d only had for six months, downloading her photos and music onto his laptop. Rage and helplessness poured through her. She tried to squelch the feelings. He said they both had to give up their phones and numbers for security reasons. He looked like he wanted to say more but couldn’t. There was anger in him but it wasn’t directed at her.