Blaze Island

by Catherine Bush

  Storms can arrive without warning.

  One day back in February, her father had walked into the kitchen of the Princeton house, where at the wide butcher-block island Miranda’s mother was helping Miranda with a page of Spanish homework. He spoke in a voice Miranda had never heard before: “Jenny, someone’s hacked into my email account — either it was an inside job or whoever did it leaked what they stole. Because stuff from my emails, it’s all over this climate-change denier’s blog, from my correspondence with Ian Petersen about our research — sections, phrases taken totally out of context. Someone forwarded the link to Paul Fletcher and he sent it to me. The guy’s twisting things, making it sound like I’ve altered data to show warming. It’s all lies. He’s misusing words like proxy. You know these guys, they pull their own graphs and numbers out of nowhere, or it might as well be nowhere, but they have a way of sounding convincing. I’m worried.”

  “It’s one man’s blog,” Miranda’s mother said. “Is it that big a deal?”

  “Yes,” Miranda’s father said in his newly unrecognizable voice, sounding as if someone had squeezed their hands around his neck and, when they let go, left his vocal cords raw and bruised. “The New York Times just called.” He stood in the kitchen doorway. Miranda touched her own throat softly. “He’s a big deal among the deniers, and they’ve got big money behind them, the fossil-fuel companies hiding behind fake scientific institutes. They’re all desperate to undermine us because getting off carbon means rewriting the geopolitical landscape, not to mention our whole economy —”

  “Ian Petersen, Paul Fletcher, the others, the scientific community will support you, won’t they?” said Miranda’s mother. On her feet, she pressed Miranda’s father’s cheek with one hand, kissed him, messed with his hair.

  “Yes, but the ones I’m closest to, my colleagues, they’re implicated, Jenny. Don’t you see? These guys, blog guy, they want to sow doubt any way they can, they’ll play dirty, they don’t care, and people don’t want to believe the truth. I stuck my neck out by saying climate science is a moral issue, we can’t ignore the numbers going up and up —. Now they’ve targeted me and this thing’s going to break —”

  “Don’t let the bastards grind you down,” said Miranda’s mother.

  In response her father’s face made the strangest contortion, a ripple of volatility and panic.

  What Miranda knew was this: her father was director of the centre but he was also principal investigator of several research campaigns and the lead author of several important papers. When she was younger and they lived in England, he’d gone away a couple of times for months, from spring into summer, up onto the Greenland ice sheet to drill down into the ice and pull up long white cores that were a record of deep time, tens of thousands, even a hundred thousand years. He studied the bubbles of gas in ancient air trapped in the ice, how these changed through time, including recent time.

  The summer after they arrived in Princeton, he went north once again. And the summer after that. Her mother, seized by a new restlessness, said it was necessary. He was doing important work. He took ships to reach Greenland, not planes, and a reporter wrote an article about his unwavering commitment to the implications of his research. In the accompanying photograph, her father looked charismatic and dashing. But he was very far away. Meanwhile Miranda accompanied her mother to her studio, where she sat in a corner and drew while her mother painted: a skyline overlaid with miniature human figures and smooth blue water, layer upon layer of shining paint; tiny, ghostly wolves running along an avenue of towers, among the blurry yellow taxis; paintings that made you look close to see what they were hiding. The two of them went into Manhattan by train, tried on vintage dresses in small boutiques that smelled of old perfume, hung out in boisterous cafés with Jenny’s artist friends, sometimes staying overnight at Miranda’s grandparents’ apartment, sleeping together in her mother’s childhood bed.

  Her parents limited Miranda’s online access but sometimes, wistfully, she looked her father up. He had his own website. So did her mother. Miranda looked her up, too.

  Her father’s interests were: understanding natural and anthropogenic climate and environmental change through the lens of atmospheric composition and chemistry; the atmospheric CO2 budget; interactions with atmospheric, cryospheric, and ocean systems. She understood, from her mother, that he was lead author on a particularly important paper showing evidence that certain gases, once stable, had begun to rise sharply in the atmosphere. People need to do something about the rising gases, Miranda’s mother said. That’s why her father had sounded the alarm, as other climate scientists had tried to do before him. We’re in deep shit, he’d said in an interview after the important paper was published. Miranda found this online, learned that his blunt words were repeated everywhere. This was why journalists had called and sent him hundreds of emails. It was brave of him, Jenny said to Miranda, but there are risks. Ordinarily scientists are supposed to keep quiet and stand behind their data. When Miranda asked what the risk was, her mother said with a grimace, Of saying things people don’t want to hear.

  What entranced Miranda most on her father’s website were the photographs: her lean father bundled deep in a red parka against a bright white landscape, little orange tents dotting the flat white land, a snakelike river of blue winding through thick grey ice, her father pulling a core of ancient time up on a pulley. In the first photograph he stared narrow-eyed out of the frame, peering urgently at the world as if from far away, the father she knew and not the father she knew.

  In the wake of the email hacking, people were saying other things about him. Even her classmates seemed to know something had happened. It was in all the papers and everywhere online and on TV. From the seat in front of her, Nathan Reid, who’d never liked her, turned and announced, Your Dad’s a liar. No, he’s not, Miranda said. Maybe he got something wrong, said Cassandra Leon, who sometimes gave Miranda candies, and sometimes laughed at her accent.

  One day Miranda came out of her bedroom as her father stepped from his second-floor study, saying goodbye to someone on his phone. Startled, his eyes darkened, as if he were holding a secret only it wasn’t a secret he wanted to be hiding.

  “Hello, Miranda,” he said. Talking to her seemed painful, as if someone still had their hands gripped around his neck. “I’ve been summoned before the board of my research centre. They’re concerned about the hacking, but they aren’t so kindly disposed to my having told the world we’re in trouble. Apparently my message is too negative. It attracts the wrong kind of attention. Somehow that’s my fault.”

  His laugh rose into a high octave, into that nearly strangled place. Miranda reached out a hand, and to her surprise her father took it. The tips of his fingers were as cold as ice.

  “The university administration wants to meet with me. Next it’ll be Congress. The accusations are a joke, yet everyone’s taking them very seriously.” He squeezed her hand, then dropped it as if it were a hot coal. “I shouldn’t be telling you these things. Go out and play.”

  Their house held a new, tense quiet: Miranda entered rooms in which subdued conversations between her parents lingered. They’re saying proxy means fake when it just means we have to rely on evidence to infer temperature. You can read about it in fucking Wikipedia. Sometimes they raised their voices at each other, which made Miranda’s stomach hurt. Don’t be reckless! she heard her mother shout. Her father’s words, We’re in deep shit, echoed inside her. Were they? Some days she couldn’t eat anything at all. Her mother’s plan to bring home a parrot faltered. Her father was suddenly around the house all the time.

  He told Miranda in a brusque yet mournful voice that the university had asked him to step down temporarily from his directorship while they investigated the allegations against him. He said it was an official process; it didn’t mean they believed the lies. Yes, other scientists had spoken out in support of him but there was bound to be social push-back when you assailed the status quo and what you said m
eant people needed to alter their lives radically. The deniers were in bed with the biggest companies and politicians who couldn’t stomach the scale of intervention required, who wanted to go on making huge sums of money from oil and gas instead of keeping the fossil fuels in the ground. Banks, the whole financial system, were sunk deep into fossil fuels. Meanwhile her father wandered about, upstairs and down, wearing a tuque and down vest indoors as if some penetrating cold had entered him. At Miranda’s bedtime her mother curled up beside her in her little bed and sang her lullabies.

  One night Miranda and her mother came home to find her father sitting on the bottom stair in his tuque, cradling a glass of whiskey. “I’ve agreed to go on the Julio O’Brien Show along with the guy who first accused me, blog guy,” Miranda’s father announced with a frown.

  His words made her mother go still. “But there’s no debate, Milan,” she said. “It’ll be ugly. Don’t do it.”

  “Do I have a choice?” Miranda’s father replied, as an ugliness passed across his face as well.

  Miranda’s mother didn’t want Miranda to watch her father on the Julio O’Brien Show with the man her father sometimes called the worst of the deniers. It was on a school night, far too late, but when Miranda wouldn’t stop crying, her weary mother relented.

  And there her father was, shining with handsomeness, debonair in his sleek suit, the fake studio skyline behind him, seated next to Julio himself, the man with the biggest gestures and knowing smile. The other man, in the rumpled jacket and tie, with a bulldog stare behind dark-rimmed glasses, was Canadian, as they were, her father had told Miranda. How an economics degree gave him climate science expertise, her father had no idea, though this man kept interrupting him —

  “You make these outrageous statements, Millie, based on dubious data. You have no proof —”

  “The data’s only dubious because you say it is,” said Miranda’s father, and despite his obvious frustration there was still swagger in him, which made Miranda’s stomach spark. “Science provides consensus, Tony, based on the organized accumulation of data and the continual scrutiny of evidence. We have consensus.”

  “Like I said, you have no proof —”

  “No one can prove anything about the future,” Miranda’s father said with a shaft of anger. His face went still, as if he wished, more fervently than anything in the world, to retract what he’d just uttered.

  Because the man in glasses and rumpled suit, waving his arms like a conductor, repeated the words as if his own certainty were a form of salvation, until the studio audience took them up like a chant. No proof. No proof. No proof.

  Their voices seared into Miranda, as Jenny leaped from the sofa, remote control in hand.

  The next day and the day after, Miranda didn’t try reaching out to her father. There was something newly frightening about him, which made her fear that any comfort she had to offer would fail, and then what would happen? She overheard him on the phone muttering about someone threatening him with a lawsuit: The bastards aren’t just lying about me, they’re trying to muzzle me! Another time she entered the kitchen as he said something about an envelope of white powder delivered to his office. The university’s talking about giving me a security detail —

  As soon as he saw her, he broke off.

  . . .

  First thing in the morning, Caleb went to see how the animals had weathered the storm, up in the small, ochre-coloured barn tucked into the hillside beyond the house he shared with his mother at the end of Little Harbour Road. He forked the goats some hay from the loft and asked them how their night had been. Gabby and Jewel seemed restless in the wake of all that wind. Noelle was eager to press her head against him and have him rub her nose, while Fleur’s yellow, square-pupilled eyes met his as she mashed at a mouthful of hay. Caleb released the girls into their paddock and scattered a bowl of food scraps from his great-aunt’s kitchen for the chattering hens.

  The power was still out but the house and stores were untouched, only a few loose roof shingles scattered on the ground. Impossible to know how far the outage extended, whether around Pummelly, across the island, or beyond. Or where the damage was. There was no television or Instagram to tell him. Not even his phone seemed to be working now. It wasn’t the battery, he couldn’t get a signal. He switched it off, desperate to get out to Cape House as soon as he could.

  When he’d left the old man’s place at the end of the previous afternoon, after picking up the visitors from the airstrip and delivering them to their guesthouse in Tom’s Neck, the old man had asked him to return first thing in the morning. Now it was the morning after a storm worse than either the old man or any online weather report had predicted. Surely everything would move more slowly because of it.

  The old man. For the past year, Caleb could no longer bring himself to say the name of the man who’d once been almost a father to him. Weather watcher, hunter, builder of homes and wind turbines, a man whom Caleb had known most of his life and would once have said he loved. My boy, the old man had been accustomed to calling him: Do you want to come out and set some rabbit snares, my boy? I’m going in to the woods to cut firewood, my boy, do you want to come with me? And Caleb, who had lived all his life with a father-sized hole in him, who as long as he could remember would stand in front of mirrors touching his own face and wondering about the missing man who’d fathered him, who whenever he went to St. John’s searched the streets, his eyes casting restlessly over every brown-skinned stranger, had swooned towards these words.

  Now — the girl’s name, too, was a sharp pain on his tongue. So — Caleb shut the door to the goat barn, its painted white star visible in darkness or fog — better to avoid their names altogether.

  In his great-aunt Christine’s kitchen, Caleb’s uncle Leo, his mother’s older brother who lived farther along Little Harbour Road, was leaning against the counter, boots off, ball cap glued to his head. Brassy hair in tufts, still in her quilted nightgown, Christine had pulled out the propane camping stove once used at the cabin built by her husband, the cabin Leo and his family frequented now. A blue jug of water stood on the counter. The mood in the room was cheerful. They were islanders, used to weathering storms. No power outage thwarted them. From the table, Sylvia, dressed in sweater and jeans, handed Leo a can of Carnation milk and mug of tea.

  “If the power stays out,” Leo, the tallest of the three Borders brothers, was saying, “I’ll get the generators going here and at our place. Have some of last year’s wild meat in the freezer I’d rather not feed to the gulls.”

  “Leo says road’s washed out in Green Cove,” Sylvia called to Caleb. She was still beautiful, threads of grey in her long red hair, strong enough to haul Caleb in from the storm the night before, but he glimpsed gauntness in her at certain angles and there was a self-protective hunch to her shoulders that never used to be there.

  “That’s right,” said Leo, who worked for the island’s road crew, who was sometimes cool to Caleb one-on-one but on the whole accepted him. “Pat Green says culvert’s washed out in the brook, road’s gone, beach gone, cell tower took a hit, brook’s higher than he’s ever seen it. Can’t get a call in to the town or RCMP, but those on the other side will figure it out soon enough.”

  “The road’s gone,” Caleb echoed.

  “Yes, boy,” said Leo. “Some young American drove right into the flood last night. Buddy’s some stunned. Car’s a wreck, still in the brook, but he got out, Pat says. Made it to the Wells’s place. I’m off to take a look, fetch some water from the pond if I can. Windward side of Pat’s mother’s roof tore off in the night. Must have been that great gust. Pat was on his way there when I met him.”

  “That one, oh my goodness, yes,” said Christine. “The door burst open, the wind sucked the water right out of the toilet bowl, and the weather glass, never seen it drop so low, right to the bottom of the dial.”

  Warm air forced up over colder, that’s when a barometric pressure drop formed. So the old man had taught Caleb.
The girl said she felt those pressure drops right inside her spine.

  “There’s no getting out of town,” Caleb said to his uncle.

  “That’s right,” said Leo. “According to Pat. Wind’s too high yet to go anywhere by water. You’ll have some trouble getting around the brook. More than a trickle, I’d say. So until we muster a crew to tackle the road, we’re on our own out here, right at the edge of the things, just like in the rare old times.”

  “Not quite like the old times,” Sylvia said acidly, under her breath. Then, turning to Caleb, “Where do you have to be to in such a hurry?”

  She had, as ever, a penetrating stare. She didn’t like the fact that he still worked for the old man. No, he’d have to say, her feelings were stronger than that. She didn’t trust the old man at all. She was full of questions about what he was up to. Was it really just weather monitoring as he said? If so, why was he so secretive about it? Back when they still talked to each other, he never would answer her questions, that much was for sure.

  The night before, she’d asked Caleb if he had any idea who’d flown in that afternoon. Not in a plane with propellers. Everyone wondered, since flights were so few, and word travelled swiftly around the island, faster than a car could drive across it. Why are you asking me, Caleb had replied, shifting under her gaze, her curiosity that bordered on suspicion, as if his mother had sniffed out that he knew something he wasn’t going to be able to tell her.