“That’s right,” said her father, who, if surprised by her outburst, didn’t show it.
Frank’s face transformed again, this time into an expression of childlike wonder. He pulled the nearly melted chip out of his mouth.
“We gather the bits that come ashore in summer,” Miranda said.
“No point in wasting the wreckage,” said her father. “Better to honour it somehow before it goes. Here, look.” He poured a glass of water, dropped in a piece of ice and held the glass to the light. “See how the ice fizzes and bubbles? That’s little bursts of ten-thousand-year-old air being released, air that has far less carbon dioxide in it than ours today. In a sense, from where we are, in this room, staring at those bubbles, we’re looking across the stretch of time in which humans have enjoyed a stable climate here on Earth.”
The bubbles rose to the surface and burst, air of the past dissolving into air of the present, as the ice melted in Miranda’s mouth and in the glass. Something that had existed for ten thousand years suddenly no longer was: it was jolting to imagine. And, the word her father had forbidden her from uttering since coming to the island, climate — her father had just spoken it.
“Only I’m afraid the stability of this climate will not be something you’ll inherit,” he went on quietly. “As more and more of the ice melts. We need the ice to maintain our elemental home, Frank, and we may need to do whatever we can to preserve it. Those of your generation, both of you, may be required to show ever greater ingenuity and resolution when it comes to caring for it, it and the rest of this good world —
“Anyway, thanks for allowing me to indulge in this odd little ritual. Let’s all close our eyes — you, too, Miranda — and contemplate the ice as it dissolves in us, ancient microbes and all. Let your boundaries blur, Frank, let yourself become transformed by the ice, and when you go back into the world, remember the ice, consider how whatever you do will affect it. Up here in these parts, facing the North Atlantic, it’s harder to forget.”
“Ancient microbes,” said Frank after a moment, eyes still closed. “Do I need to be concerned about them swimming inside me?”
“When I used to work up on the ice, leading research teams in the Canadian Arctic, or in Greenland, drilling ice cores to study their climatic record,” Alan said, “we boiled our water from glacial snow, drank glacial runoff when we could. Think of the cleanliness of that water, Frank, how little plastic is in it.”
These words, too, were astonishing, her father pulling back the cloak in which he wrapped himself to let a bright piece of his past shine through. He’d never done this with anyone other than Anna and Agnes and Arun since he and Miranda had come to Blaze Island. Other borders seemed to be breaking down. Cores brought to the surface. And he’d done this in front of Frank, of all people.
“So you are a scientist,” Frank said meditatively, as if the ice were working on him like a drug.
“I was,” said Alan. “I am.”
“I spend a lot of time thinking about social injustice and the redistribution of capital,” Frank murmured, eyelids twitching, “and what it will take to achieve it. Sometimes I think it will take an epic disaster, I even find myself wishing for that. But then the disaster’s already happening, it’s been happening for a long time, so I guess the question is, how bad is it going to get?”
“Hard to know,” said Alan.
It was as if they were talking only to each other now, her father fixed on Frank’s intent face, Frank focused on the ice. Miranda slipped from the room. Even when her father called her back, she kept going.
The trip had started out beautifully enough. July month, an afternoon so calm it was astonishing. Caleb had called Miranda on the land line, caught her just as she stepped into the house. “Let’s go see all the icebergs stranded in the bay, Miranda. We may never again see the like.”
She’d heard about the hundreds of icebergs, and so, abandoning her gardening gloves and shovel, she said yes immediately. With an old, brimmed ball cap planted on her head, she set off at a run to meet Caleb down at Pummelly’s government wharf. She’d turned eighteen the month before. Sometimes, on a calm day, Caleb was able to borrow a speedboat from his uncle, and her father made no objections as long as Caleb had his phone and they actually wore their life jackets and didn’t go too far. Caleb had made a point of learning the water by heart, pestering his uncles until they taught him the old names of shoals and trap berths, the places you needed to know before GPS. Sometimes he recited these to Miranda: there’s Turrs’ Rocks, there’s Muddy Ledge, out there’s Round Head Ground, Shoal Spot, Green’s Ground, The Razor, The Stone, Eastern Shoal. They’d motor into coves reachable only by water, spots Caleb knew about, pull up the boat and picnic.
The previous summer, sitting with arms wrapped around folded knees, wind freshening over them, they had talked about their plans for when school ended, neither of them with any intention of leaving the island. Miranda, her body simultaneously restless and calmed, spoke of her desire to farm, and Caleb about his new plans for Cape House. They were on a small, rocky islet in the middle of Shallow Bay the day he suggested they might farm together. There were all the untended fields on his side of Green Cove where the Borders family had worked their plots for generations. There was loneliness in him and desire. She, too, had wondered who his father was. As he spoke, Caleb stared at the rock on which they sat as if he were contemplating a move he couldn’t bring himself to make. Squall clouds blustered out of the south. His voice stumbled, his hand reaching out. “And we can do more together, if you wish, Miranda.”
It was a long way around the island to where the icebergs were, past Sheep’s Cove and Auk Point and Tom’s Neck, past the wide mouth of Shallow Bay, past Herring Cove, the green mound of Bear Head, then the hilly harbour of the town of Blaze. It was hard to talk while in the boat, Caleb at the tiller in the stern, Miranda on the bench in front of him, riding the swells like the wild creatures they were, their speed creating its own wind, the constant thwack of wave against boat a percussive register of their passage. Not speaking hardly mattered — she was happy to drink in the air and be splendidly free from all that usually surrounded her.
Far at their backs, icebergs floated slowly past out on the Labrador Current, shimmering in a heat haze at the horizon. When they came at last around the volcanic mound of Blaze Head, rising like a giant’s skull out of the water, there were the masses of icebergs that Caleb had promised and that Miranda’s father had mentioned at supper the evening before: icebergs filling the entire breadth of the bay, stretching northward as far as the eye could see, so many, it was impossible to count. Large ones tall as houses, small ones like pale creatures. The blue of the sky had turned dull white under a haze of cirrus cloud and still the icebergs glistened, every colour in the spectrum of blue and green: cobalt, turquoise, aquamarine, emerald. From one angle they looked like one thing, from another something else. As the icebergs turned, they revealed arches, hollows, ponds, fissures. It was hard to know how to describe them other than to compare them to other things: this one’s a castle, no, no, a dragon. There were no words. Some swayed, unbalanced by their melting. Drafts of cold air billowed from them. For long moments, the two of them sat in the boat, motor idling, and, awed into silence, they did no more than stare.
The icebergs were as old as the ice her father had once studied. Could some of them actually be the same ice? Layers of thousands of years, their own lives nothing but a film on top, yet the icebergs had come here to dissolve. How little time it took for eternities to vanish. Gone. The thought sank into Miranda. Could you say an iceberg was dying? They’d come here to die? Her father might say so. Or Anna Turi. Or Agnes Watson. Here they were, witnessing that death. The death of the world. Their world. Them? This was what her father feared. The death of the world as they knew it. The icebergs floated mutely in the heat. Their presence seemed to speak and pose a question.
Miranda asked Caleb to go closer, could they. Mindful of the depths that lay
beneath the icebergs’ surfaces, the risk that one might tip and founder, he motored slowly in among the nearer ones. Her body quailed and yearned — for what? Something turned over deep inside her. The air was colder now. The icebergs creaked. Some distance off, a crack sounded, harsh as a bullet, and a chunk broke from a great crag and with a crash tumbled into froth, its fall pushing the whole mass sideways, a wave surging in their direction.
Swiftly, Caleb turned the boat and drove them away from the icebergs, southward, into the open water of the bay. Miranda swung a glance over her shoulder. Shouldn’t they be going the other way, back, which meant northward around the island and so home? When she shouted at Caleb, asking him where he was headed, he seemed not to hear. Nor did he stop but kept motoring into the bay, the bow now fixed on the distant green shore. Tensing, Miranda shouted again and this time Caleb cut back the motor. With a bright smile, he said, “I thought we’d take a little trip. An adventure, Miranda. It’s truly the day for it. Just the two of us. A trip across the bay.”
“Across the bay?”
“My cousin Ger’s on the three o’clock. He’ll pick us up on bayside and take us into town. Or we’ll call a cab. We’ll go out for a meal, whatever you wish, Miranda.”
“What if my father finds out, if someone sees us and tells him?”
“We’ll ask them not to. Everyone already thinks it strange. That you never leave. You can’t, for any reason. Why shouldn’t you, Miranda, one afternoon, you’re eighteen, where’s the harm in it? It’ll be some fun, I promise.”
In her first years at the island school, girls, Brianna Morton, Caitlyn Harvey, others, sometimes asked her to come along when their mothers agreed to drive them in to the Gander malls, but when Miranda always said no, they stopped asking. She became known as the girl who didn’t leave. Couldn’t, wouldn’t. The only one. When people asked why, she said she and her father didn’t. Always Caleb had accepted this aspect of her life without ridicule or protest. Would she be like this forever? Maybe. The bond she shared with her father was strong, though, yes, she had sometimes asked Caleb to describe Gander to her, the airport, or St. John’s with its brightly painted houses and steep streets. Phoneless, she had sometimes looked at the world through his phone and texted her father on it or together she and Caleb had watched a movie on its tiny screen.
She had never flouted her father’s rules, understanding the reasons he gave for them. They had all they needed on the island. More people needed to live as close to home as they did.
Danger had driven them to Blaze Island. As far as Miranda could tell, from overhearing her father’s conversations, from her own brief forays online, the outer world hadn’t altered. The deniers were still there, even growing stronger, heat intensifying, storms worsening, most people going on as before while the blanket of gases accumulated above them all. To leave the island was to take a step back towards all that.
“I can’t go over there,” Miranda said. The sun had broken through its haze and warmth poured down on them. Off in the distance beyond Caleb, the silent chorus of icebergs floated over the water. Above their heads, terns squeaked and tore through the air.
“If your father finds out, tell him you wanted to go.”
“I can’t, Caleb. Please don’t make me.”
Every particle in Miranda’s body stiffened at the thought, and if it made her seem foolish, she didn’t care. Yes, her father would be angry. Yes, he had a temper. But it was more than that. She wanted to be back on the island, feet on that ground, feel every particular of that place around her, its tremulous shelter a small thing to set against the deepest fears.
There was something else, another seam in her. She didn’t want to go across the bay with Caleb. Something stopped her. They had stared at the melting icebergs — and now he wanted to go to a restaurant? If they found themselves sitting across from each other, Caleb might reach for her fingers or slide a hand under the table to touch her thigh, and she didn’t know what to do with the rabble of feelings these imaginings aroused. Yet, unless she leaped into the freezing water and swam, so cold it might kill her, she was dependent on Caleb to get back, familiar Caleb in his coveralls perched in the stern, squinting beneath his ball cap and smiling an unnerving smile, hand on the tiller, still revving the engine.
“What’s wrong with you, Miranda?” He was trying to be teasing, but she sensed his frustration.
He took off, speeding them once more away from the island and into the bay, southward, to where the still-invisible Adieu ferry dock must be. When Miranda lurched towards him, he pushed her back.
“Get off me.”
“Take me back, Caleb.”
She was shouting, but some new hardness in him wished only to have its way. Again he revved the engine, the boat smacking the water, and as the distant shore grew closer, Miranda’s panic rose. This time when she lunged, almost stumbling into Caleb, she grabbed the tiller, the boat rocking precipitously. When Caleb pushed her back, harder this time, she tumbled over the metal bench, landing on the boat bottom where the life jackets lay, biting the inside of her cheek with the shock.
“Jesus, Miranda!” Caleb, too, was shouting. “What are you trying to do, tip the boat and drown us?”
Her chest stung from the force of his push. He’d grabbed the tiller back and righted their course, slowed the engine, thankfully. Bilge water soaked her jeans and her tailbone burned. She clambered over the two benches towards the bow seat, as far as she could be from Caleb, who had at least turned their course. How could you know someone and not know them at all?
Only now was he asking her, his face full of concern and remorse, “Are you all right, Miranda?”
All the way back to Pummelly harbour, he kept calling, across the length of the boat, forehead crumpled with anxiety, more like the Caleb Miranda thought she knew, telling her how sorry he was, begging her not to tell her father, the frightened outsider, insisting he hadn’t meant to hurt her. “Are you all right?”
Huddled in the bow, she touched her tongue to the place in her mouth where the skin was broken, felt the sting of Caleb’s hand on her chest, tried to breathe through her shock.
When she got home, her father was still at the cabin with his third visitor, Arun Mudalnayake, but as soon as he returned and they headed out to take the weather measurements, he seemed to sense something was wrong. But Arun with the nervous stare was with them, and Miranda had no intention of saying anything in front of him. It was while she was feeding the hens in their run that her father cornered her and asked what the matter was. Concern emanated from him.
“Caleb tried to take me across the bay. When I refused to go, he hit me.” Miranda heaved out a breath. She didn’t know how to talk about the icebergs. The lingering pain in her chest felt like a bruise coming in.
“Caleb hit you?”
She had the full weight of her father’s attention now.
Anger and self-righteousness and the desire to cause pain were a confusing fire. “We were out in Tom Borders’s speedboat.”
“He tried to take you across the bay?”
What had she expected would happen then? When she confirmed these things with a nod. She was still her father’s daughter. She, too, had the power to break apart a life.
Two weeks after the boat trip out into the bay with Caleb, on an afternoon when she knew Caleb to be busy elsewhere, Miranda knocked on Sylvia’s door. It was a relief when Sylvia opened it.
Sylvia didn’t offer a hug, she asked if Miranda wished for tea. Her kitchen table was littered with the last of the rhubarb stalks, a bucket for the discarded leaves beneath. Sylvia took up her seat and knife again, chopping with strong, deliberate strokes, cutting up stalks for jam while Miranda took out mugs and tea bags and a jar of goat’s milk from the fridge, as she’d done so often before, finding it impossible to speak until Sylvia spoke for her. “Are you going to tell me your version of what happened out in boat, Miranda?”
Miranda’s hands shook as she held her mug. “Caleb
tried to take me to the other side, against my will.”
“Your will? I thought it was your father’s.”
Couldn’t the two be the same thing, Miranda wondered. “I tried to grab the tiller, because I didn’t want to go across the bay, and Caleb shoved me back onto the bench, hard enough to bruise my chest.”
“I’m not excusing my son’s actions, Miranda, only wondering why your father thinks Caleb hit you.”
It was hard to own up to the words. “That’s what I told him.”
“I see,” Sylvia said quietly. “Now why would you put it like that?”
“Because he hurt me,” Miranda said.
“I see,” was all Sylvia said.
There were things it felt impossible to talk about with either Sylvia or her father. Caleb’s longing. When they’d kissed, during the winter months in his shed and then, when summer came, by the rock called the Devil’s Chair, up along back shore, Miranda hadn’t said no, wanting to know what it would feel like and what would change when she opened her mouth to Caleb’s tongue. Caleb’s lips were soft, on her face and neck, hers on his, her tongue in his mouth. Yet, despite her curiosity, she’d felt like they were playing a game and part of her remained outside it.
One evening at the beginning of the summer, Caleb brought a blanket out to the parlour at Cape House and with great ceremony laid it on the planks. The sight made her skin grow cool. Sliding his hands under her shirt, he’d fondled her nipples and, hands under his shirt, she’d grazed his bare ribs, their bodies pressed tight enough for Miranda to feel the bulge in his crotch, her skin pale against his. Something in her had pulled back in dismay, because Caleb still felt like a brother and no matter how she tried to imagine otherwise, she couldn’t shake this feeling. She’d run all the way home, without him, through the twilight.
Blaze Island Page 25
