Blaze Island

by Catherine Bush

  Later, out on the bridge, hugging her knees to her chest as the wind whipped up around her, she allowed herself the scariest thought: what if he didn’t come back? Once her father had told her a story about a man in the Arctic whom a storm had driven so mad he’d tried to eat the wind. Here on Blaze Island, a man had walked into the woods in a snowstorm and was never seen again, according to old Harry Pratt. If she went out searching for her father, he might come back and find her missing, head out once more and lose himself. Yet out there, up among the tuckamore, the trout ponds, along the shore cliffs, something had happened to him.

  At ten o’clock, clouds a thickness above the western horizon, a red band of light beneath, Miranda crawled into bed, shuddering as the house grew hollow around her.

  Their first summer in the cove, back when she was ten and her father and Pat Green were renovating the small white house, Pat had loaned them a punt. After the men finished work for the day, Alan often liked to take the boat out and row the two of them, himself and Miranda, across to Seal Cove, a small half-moon of beach tucked along the cove’s far shore. He would steer the boat towards the slip of sand where he and Miranda dragged the punt ashore. Spreading out a blanket, they drank homemade spruce-bud tea and ate biscuits. While her father read a magazine, Miranda gathered the tiniest shells and held them silky in her palm before bringing them to show her father.

  One afternoon, Alan looked into the west and said, “Hey, Miranda, hop like a gazelle back into the boat, will you? That’s fog, coming over the land, one of the new land fogs Harry Pratt was telling us about.”

  They were out on the water, halfway across the cove, when the fog reached them. They were in it, a cold room with no windows or doors. Not even a room, it was like being inside a body, swallowed. The moist fog touched Miranda’s skin. It amplified the slop of water as her father lifted the oars and dove them back beneath the surface, the creak of the oars’ wooden pegs turning on their tole pins. All other sounds retreated. Her father, who rowed with strong strokes, stared at the shore they’d left behind, while Miranda, in the stern, faced him and the land where they were headed. Which had vanished in the fog.

  Her father held the raised oars, dripping, said he was listening for the sound of the far shore, asked Miranda if she saw anything. She didn’t. Her father glanced over his shoulder. “It’s a cove. We’re halfway across. We have to hit the shore soon.”

  He kept rowing. Soon he was sweating, despite the cold, for the sun had gone and the temperature dropped. Miranda wrapped the blanket they’d brought around her shoulders. They were alone in this altered world, barely speaking. She kept her eyes on her father.

  He stopped again, asked if she heard the sound of waves against the shore, yet no matter how hard she listened, all Miranda heard was the trill of water along the sides of the boat. The wind picked up, slapping water at the boat’s wooden hull. The tide was going out, tugging at them, swells beneath them rising. Her feet grew cold. All this made her uneasy even as she told herself they’d be fine. Her father had promised to look after her.

  “Can you tell me what time it is?” her father asked, his mouth sounding sticky and dry.

  He’d left his cellphone behind because it needed recharging. Instead he’d removed the battery-operated clock from the kitchen wall and stuffed it in a plastic bag. The clock lay at Miranda’s feet, ticking. When she pulled it out of the bag its ticking grew louder.

  “Almost four.”

  They’d been out on the water not quite an hour. Would they miss the day’s weather measurements? What would happen when it grew dark — if they were still out on the water? Why had they not reached the shore?

  At last, Alan lifted the oars. Off to Miranda’s right, not in front of them as they’d expected, water chugged and gurgled against rock. Ferociously Alan rowed towards the sound as Miranda craned into the fog’s grey swirls. Black rocks loomed out of the blankness. She gave a shout. When her father looked, his body went rigid, before, with even more speed, he turned the boat around so the rocks were on Miranda’s left, a craggy tumble veiled, revealed, as she held out her hand to keep the rocks in sight and stop them from coming too close, her father rowing against tide and wind, alongside the land.

  Although it seemed like the rocks would go on forever, at last a stretch of stony pebbles appeared, and the white bobs of Martin Green’s lobster pots on the water, the known world once more: this was the stretch of shore where they launched the punt, where they kept it hauled up in the grass beyond the landwash. Her father slid the bow in, pebbles scrabbling against hull. Stumbling into the knee-high water, he pulled Miranda and the boat to land. Her hair and skin were wet and Miranda held the blanket tightly around herself as she jumped from the bow. The relief of arrival was astounding. There, through the fog ahead of them, hovered a glimpse of white in the grey, their house, her home, and her heart leaped wholly towards it.

  In her bed, in the empty house, curled under her quilt, Miranda cried. Two years before, they’d rowed themselves home, not out to sea. They’d come through that danger together yet where was her father now?

  A little after eleven, the back door opened. She was downstairs in an instant, throwing herself at him in the indigo twilight. He smelled of the sea, salt air, spruce and juniper and lichen, there were twigs and stiff bits of dried moss in his damp sweater. He said nothing at first, simply held her tight.

  It was as if he hadn’t spoken in a long time. Running his hand through her hair, he said at last, “I’m here, Miranda. I love you so much. I will look after you, I promise.”

  She inhaled him through her shock, feeling the weight of his taut muscles within her embrace.

  “Where did you go?”

  What had he thought of doing? What had the weather made him think of doing? Whatever it was, he hadn’t done it. I will look after you whatever the weather. He had made this vow before, yet it was as if he was saying the words for the first time. Something beneath his skin felt different.

  For the rest of that summer and into the fall, Miranda watched her father carefully, the way you observe an animal in the wild. At first he was subdued, sapped back into a sadness he kept trying to yank himself out of. He went on long walks by himself, always telling Miranda in advance in which direction he was headed. Sometimes she’d catch him staring at desiccated fields in the Middle East on an online news site. Or raging wildfires in Australia or British Columbia or California. A new reticence took hold of him around Sylvia. He spent more time alone, holed up in his shed office. Did he dream of leaving the island, Miranda wondered. Sometimes she heard him shouting through the walls. He and Sylvia took fewer walks, the difference noticeable enough that one afternoon, as Miranda helped Sylvia make marshberry jam in her kitchen, Sylvia broke out with, “Your father seems preoccupied.”

  Painfully, all Miranda could do was agree.

  All through the pack ice season of early spring, he busied himself drawing up plans for a cabin. In May, he and Miranda lit a candle to Jenny at the site, a remote spot close to the empty shore, along a path through the barrens and scrubby alder woods. With Pat Green’s and sometimes Caleb’s help, Alan began building. Other families had cabins dotted through the woods so to Miranda her father’s plan seemed a hopeful thing. He ferried supplies in a wooden wagon hitched to the back of his quad: more solar panels, a composting toilet. The cabin, when Miranda visited, was smaller than their house, a main room, only one small bedroom. One afternoon, back at their house in the cove, Miranda came upon her father and Caleb loading the wooden wagon with more boxes. Computer equipment, Alan explained. As if trying to lessen her surprise, he said that he had an idea for a new weather monitoring experiment and would be using the cabin to work on it.

  As if seeking to mollify Miranda’s disappointment, he threw himself into building a chicken coop with a slanted roof in their yard. Soon they would have their own chickens, he promised. He transplanted saplings from the alder woods by the brook, snugging them into a row of holes he’d dug
in the slope beyond the house. July came, and the fourth anniversary of their arrival.

  A week later, as Miranda was laying kelp on the potato beds, wheels crunched to a stop on the gravel at the top of their lane. She started up at the unusual sound, just as a woman, slim and young, in a yellow rain jacket, climbed out of a parked white car. Though the stranger was still some distance off, Miranda sensed something purposeful in her manner. Checking a piece of paper, knapsack over her shoulder, she set off down the lane — their lane, in the direction of their house. No one from away had ever come to visit them — and the woman, wind tangling her sand-coloured hair, was surely not from the island. Miranda knocked over the bucket of kelp in her flight.

  Her father had been scything in the yard. Strands of long grass lay all around yet there was no sign of him. She hammered on the door of his study just as he stepped out of the house in a clean T-shirt, his damp hair on end.

  “Someone’s coming,” Miranda cried in alarm, but her father’s eye was already caught, excitement erupting on his face, not dismay.

  “Anna —”

  On the far side of the yard, the woman dropped her bag, her face transforming in surprise as Alan strode towards her open-armed. “Milan, it’s you. You’re the one who asked me to come. You wrote me that letter.”

  They were inside the house, all three of them, the young woman touching the white walls, the wood stove, the fisherman’s daybed under the cove-side window as if astonished to find herself where she was.

  “Alan, I’ll have to remember that, won’t I?” Her accent was English mixed with somewhere else. When she smiled, her teeth shone. Girlish yet perhaps not as young as Miranda had first thought.

  Alan flipped on the electric kettle. He set Anna’s knapsack at the bottom of the stairs. This gesture sent a new pulse through Miranda. Was the stranger staying the night? It was late afternoon. Having just arrived, she was unlikely to be catching the last ferry off the island. Alan said he’d bring her rental car down the lane and park it beside theirs in the yard, out of sight.

  “I met you once,” Anna said to Miranda, loosening the wind from her hair with darting fingers. “You were quite young. It was at a garden party in Norwich, at your parents’ house. You were rather amusingly running about holding an antique-looking house key. I was one of your father’s post-docs at the East Anglia Climate Research Centre in those days. You’re so grown up now.”

  The kettle had boiled but it was as if Miranda did not know how to make tea for someone who was a stranger to her, yet knew her father, who came trailing the past, who spoke the word climate, which she was not allowed to speak. Alan returned, a new lift in his step. Anna was the one taking mugs out of the cupboard while Miranda stalked into the utility room to fetch milk.

  “I invited Anna to visit,” her father called as Miranda returned, banging the milk jug onto the table. His gaze expanded beyond her to include Anna as well. “My invitation was a bit cryptic so I wasn’t sure you’d show up.”

  “Grief will do strange things to you, really,” Anna said. “I receive a letter from an unknown person, telling me it will be worth my while to find my way to some remote island on the far side of the Atlantic, and though I barely fly these days, I’m deranged enough to do as it says.”

  “Wise woman,” said Miranda’s father.

  “Helpful that I have sort of a thing for remote islands, and I could stop off en route to a Polar Council conference, which, incidentally, is something I almost never do anymore, conference-going, I mean,” said Anna, flashing her white smile once again. “Mostly we do these things via online video.”

  The three of them sat down to a dinner of capelin fried with butter, capelin that Miranda had gathered with Caleb and Sylvia only that morning. Right after breakfast Caleb had called Miranda, beyond excited. In the old days, the capelin, the little fish that whales feed on, used to wash ashore every year. Now it was a rare thing. Because the ocean water was warmer, Tom Borders had explained to Miranda, the capelin didn’t need to come ashore to spawn. But when they did come, everyone in Pummelly grabbed plastic bags and buckets and raced out to UpABack Cove to gather them by the handful. Miranda had filled a bag with tiny silvery fish, thanking them softly, and another bag with salt-scented kelp, sensing Sylvia’s disappointment because her father hadn’t come with them.

  Now something fundamental about their life was altering, and without warning. There must be a reason her father had invited Anna to come all this way. The air was pregnant with unspoken things, with Anna and her father’s desire to be alone together even as Anna told Miranda how she, too, had grown up on a tiny island, off the coast of Norway. If you kept staring out to sea, beyond Iceland, you’d come at last to some humps of land, including an island named after the weather. Her mother was an oceanographer, Anna said, her father a fisherman. The first time she saw a tree bigger than a shrub she was thirteen. Her parents had taken her to the mainland and the sight of these tall beings filled her with terror. She was convinced they were going to fall on her. The sound of wind through a forest was an incomprehensible roar.

  Upstairs, the door to the spare room was pulled nearly shut, as it had been for days, though Miranda had not paid much attention until this moment. Something made her push the door open. Inside, the boxes were gone and there was a bed where there had never been a bed, an old wrought-iron frame, one she might have seen leaning against the outside of Leo Borders’s house, only now the frame held a narrow mattress with a quilt tucked over it.

  Her father might not have known for certain if Anna was coming, but he’d planned for her arrival. In the room, Miranda touched the quilt, the pillow, like a cat rubbing her scent on things. The smell of coffee wafted up through the floorboards into her own room directly above the kitchen, Anna’s voice, and her father’s, drifting up through the open seam around the metal chimney that climbed through her bedroom into the attic. They were washing dishes. Perhaps her father did not know how audible their voices were. When would he have stood, as Miranda was doing, listening to a conversation taking place beneath him?

  “Did you burn the letter?” Alan kept his voice low, but it was impossible for Miranda not to hear his words.

  “Of course,” Anna said quietly. “Those were the instructions, weren’t they, along with coming all the way here because the mysterious person who wrote the letter had something very important they wished to discuss.”

  “For various reasons I’m trying to hide my traces. I’ve always trusted you, Anna. You’re a brilliant modeller and you go out in the field, that’s a rare combination. I’ve always sensed the feeling in you too. When everything went down, Ian Petersen wrote to me — did you know this? — and told me I shouldn’t have said what I did, that we’re in deep shit. But we are. Come on. I know he was frightened, even suicidal after the attacks on our research. I know he spoke out in my defence, but these were his exact words, You won’t inspire anyone. I’m sure things were tense in Norwich — I can’t claim to know because I haven’t been in touch with him or anyone else —. I left Princeton determined to ditch as much of that world as possible, find somewhere to be with my daughter that’ll be safer when the truly bad weather hits. I’ll abandon the science and concentrate on leading the kind of life we all ought to be living, that’s what I told myself — then, last summer, when the temperature at the pole was so high, for days, and I thought, In a few more years most if not all of the summer sea ice will be gone — I broke down. I couldn’t see my way forward —”

  Miranda climbed quietly into bed. Should she squeak the mattress springs? Or cough? She pressed a pillow over her head until she couldn’t breathe. When she pulled it off again, gasping, they must have returned to the table. Glasses chinked. Their soft voices only made her hearing grow more acute. Perhaps her father wasn’t thinking about her at all.

  “— in the spring, with Fletcher,” Anna was saying. “We’re trying to do as much as we can with wind and solar up on the ice sheet, but we have to fly in, don’t w
e, and this spring, coming up the coast to Ilulissat, there was nothing but black water down below. On the ice so much of the surface is grey with soot from last summer’s forest fires, and mushy, the sound of rushing water is everywhere. I heard it even in my sleep. Ten billion tons of ice lost every day — you know the figures. We need ground data desperately, remotely sensed data isn’t enough. We never used to include ice sheet melt rates in the climate models because the melt happened so slowly but now we have to, don’t we. The melt is happening so fast we can’t keep up. Even if we can’t say we believe a total retreat of the ice is inevitable — we deal in probabilities, and God forbid we should compromise our data — it’s what I believe. What does one do with such a thought? With all the panic and the rage? When I come back to Norwich, everywhere I look I see ice melting while everyone else hops into their cars and orders their takeaway and flies off to Ibiza, all the silent deniers believing life can go on as usual. One night I woke up screaming out of a dream about a tidal bore of ocean water pouring over me.”

  The quilt pulled all the way over Miranda’s head made the air stuffy even though the cloth around her was a comforting cocoon. Leaving her body behind, she floated out the window, into the night, skimming through the hills to Sylvia’s house, to the room at the top of the stairs where Sylvia kept her folded-up massage table and where Miranda sometimes spent the night, where, from across the hall, Caleb occasionally moaned in his sleep and Sylvia slipped quietly from bed as the sun rose.