Blaze Island

by Catherine Bush

  Yet, sitting at the table in Sylvia’s kitchen, she felt the wide breadth of Caleb’s absence in her life and the growing fear that she had wronged him.­

  Miranda clambered up the slope to the garden, leaving Frank and her father in the house.

  Always when she’d allowed herself to think about the ­future it had been shaped by the contours of the past: how else did you envision what was to come other than by reconfiguring what you knew? There were days when, swayed by Caleb’s suggestions, she had imagined living with him on the far side of the cove even as another part of her retracted from the dream. She had assumed that somehow Caleb and Sylvia would be in her life forever. What she loved would always continue, how could it not? More often she’d seen herself living in the little white house in Green Cove with her father and Ella, taking care of her father, because he needed her to do this. She’d ruffle Ella’s fur, meet her brown-eyed stare. There’d be more animals, because she wanted more, she would tend the land, build a bigger greenhouse, listen and note each time the wind shifted, there would be order and safety in such a life, in its deep choreographies and self-sufficiencies, in being responsive to sea and sky and the wild and ragged weather growing wilder all around them. There had been ruptures and alterations, but nothing had shaken her fundamental belief in the continuity of this life, given to her after the biggest rupture of all, the catastrophes that had sent the two of them fleeing to the island: everything here was proof that, despite grief, a new life could be made. Even the rupture of losing Caleb, painful as it was, had somehow been bearable. She’d gone on. They all had. Now, though, the world looked so different she wasn’t sure she could step back into the body she’d inhabited only a day ago.

  She was searching for salvageable leaves among the storm-pummelled lettuces and arugula when a shift in the air made Miranda scramble to her feet. Someone was on the other side of the garden fence, town-side. Sylvia was standing there, tall, her red and grey-streaked hair blazing, a groove notched between her eyebrows where the light hit, Sylvia who hadn’t come near their house for over four years, since her break with Miranda’s father.

  Her father was the one who’d cut off contact first; then Sylvia, in retaliation, had done the same. Despite this, Sylvia had not cropped Miranda from her life, and this had felt like grace, that Sylvia still welcomed Miranda into her home, took her foraging, offered solace. Then, when her father declared that she was no longer to speak to Caleb nor Caleb to her, Miranda was convinced Sylvia would turn her back as well. Even after their awkward conversation in Sylvia’s kitchen, she and Sylvia had gone berry picking together, cared for the year’s new kids in the goat barn, carded the wool from Pat Green’s sheep. Not as often to be sure, there was a new distance and wariness, since the invisible presences of both Miranda’s father and Caleb now lay between them, but Sylvia’s warmth didn’t altogether vanish. This had calmed Miranda. She hadn’t entirely destroyed what had been, although she sensed a turn in Sylvia’s feelings for her, a new note that felt like pity.

  Over the fence, Sylvia wished Miranda a good evening and Miranda, wiping her hands on her jeans, wished Sylvia the same. Everything was civil, yet there had to be something pressing to compel Sylvia to come out this way. Sylvia was staring at the ripped plastic flapping from the greenhouse. Was it storm damage? Miranda said it was. Yet this could not be why Sylvia had come.

  “Miranda, I wouldn’t be asking you this if I didn’t have concern, but do you have any idea what my son might be doing for your father today?”

  The question filled Miranda with confusion; Sylvia had never before asked her about Caleb’s work. All she could utter was that earlier Caleb had been at Cape House. Sylvia’s next question was even more alarming.

  “Do you know who flew into the airstrip yesterday? Are they friends of your father’s, by some chance?”

  Miranda’s tongue clung to the roof of her mouth. Why should Sylvia want to know this so badly that she’d walked all this way? Would she have come to the house if she hadn’t found Miranda in the garden? “I don’t know.” Which was a sort-of truth.

  “I’ve a request to make of you.” It was as if Sylvia had only now reached the real reason for her arrival. There was something severe about her manner, even regal. “I’ve come to ask you to have nothing more to do with my son.”

  Did Sylvia know about their botched encounter that afternoon at Cape House? If so, why would Sylvia be asking questions about Caleb’s work or the visitors that she might have asked of Caleb, unless he’d refused to answer. Something had raised Sylvia’s suspicions higher than ever. “But I don’t —”

  “Nevertheless, I’m asking you,” Sylvia said with the same stern air.

  There was something confounding about Sylvia’s in­sis-tence. Here was someone else demanding Miranda acquiesce, like a child. Yet Sylvia’s demand had affliction in it, as well as protectiveness, and in making it, Sylvia was asking Miranda to look clearly into herself, at all that she’d done, what she was doing.

  “Why should I promise?”

  “Because you’ll hurt him whatever you do. Miranda, can you not see that?”

  No matter how much she yearned to throw herself into Sylvia’s arms, press her cheek against Sylvia’s sweater, wait for the old kindness to arise, it was not possible. Sylvia had a great, invisible knife. With it she was cleaving the air between them, cutting it as sharply as cloth, slicing the past from the present and the present from the past, severing an imagined future. When Sylvia turned, it was as if she were pulling herself away for good.

  Frank and Alan were in the yard, staring up at the flapping wind flag, the green rectangle of cloth tugged by the southwesterly, Alan teaching Frank an old wind rhyme.

  “Wind in the north, no sailor should go forth.”

  Frank repeated the words.

  “Wind in the east, not fit for man or beast.”

  They waved at Miranda as she approached, garden basket over her arm, the disturbance of Sylvia’s words swimming in her, loss streaming past on all sides.

  “Wind in the south brings bait into the fish’s mouth,” said Alan. “Miranda, tell us the last one.”

  “Wind in the west, that one is the best.” But she didn’t stop in her passage towards the bridge and through the back door.

  “Wind decides everything,” she heard her father say to Frank. There was no sign that in her absence Frank had asked her father probing questions about scientific research stations or an artificial haze in the sky or his own father. This was one more thing that threw Miranda off-kilter. Having set the basket full of greens on the counter, she found she couldn’t stay in the house after all: she needed to know what her father and Frank were up to.

  They had moved to the shed, where, door open, the muscular older man was explaining to the lanky young one how their power set-up worked: the solar panels attached to the western roof, the one bolted to the rocks by his study, the wind turbine, how they all connected to this storehouse of batteries.

  Across the yard, Miranda scrabbled in the laying box for eggs for their supper, and Ella pressed close, as if she at least sensed Miranda’s turmoil. Frank and her father were chatting about harnessing tidal power and small-scale wind farms and community energy grids and how that could work out here, and Frank was gesticulating excitedly. Why was her father showing Frank the mechanics of their survival and why was Frank, who organized protests and lived in a co-op in Boston and was surely going to vanish as soon as he could, acting so interested?

  When her father shouted to her that it was time to take the weather measurements, Miranda went with them. She listened as her father explained to Frank what a Stevenson screen and an anemometer were, the wind sock dancing complicated patterns that the border between sea and land made of the air, and Miranda felt like a wind sock rippling.

  Supper was the omelette her father cooked, the kale Miranda stir-fried, a sliced tomato she’d grown, and when her father pulled out a bottle of Norwegian vodka brought by Anna Turi on her l
ast visit and asked Miranda if she wanted some, she said yes. Frank ate hungrily, eyes on Alan as he told the story of crawling through the yard at night through Hurricane Jose. With a certain self-consciousness, Frank described huddling in a bunker on an unnamed Caribbean island while the house, well, mansion, really, above his head was torn to pieces, and Miranda spoke of the thunderstorm that had come to the island the previous July, the first in years, its huge clouds and violent stabs of lightning slowly moving across the land, how strange it had been to hear the rumble of thunder after so long. “When did you last hear thunder — before you came to the island?” Frank downed a mouthful of vodka with a sliver of iceberg in it.

  Springing to his feet, Alan said, “Let’s go outside and watch the sun set, shall we?” Pink light was already staining the white walls, moving across the planks and fading instant by instant.

  They walked out into the grass and there, facing the cove and the western hills, her father threw an arm around each of them.

  “Look, smoke.” Miranda pointed to the faint plume on the far side of the cove. Was Caleb burning things in the firepit? It seemed an odd time to be doing so. But she was distracted, by the squeeze of her father’s hand, by Frank’s reckless exclamations about the beauty of the sky, by all that could be lost or was being lost, by Frank, tucked against her father’s shoulder, saying, “You know what, I think I really could live out here,” though likely he was drunk on vodka, the whirlwinds of the day, her father’s conviviality. The words meant nothing. Nevertheless, her father smiled as if with secret satisfaction.

  Miranda woke in darkness. She was riding a fierce wind. The changes were not going to stop. Someone was moving about below her, and the small sounds would have been reassuring, except that it was only a little after five a.m. Whoever was below had lit a fire. Heat ticked in the metal chimney on the far side of the room, the ticks speeding up. Miranda whispered to Ella not to stir.

  Through the half-open door of her father’s bedroom, she took in the tussle of his empty bedclothes, reading glasses tossed atop his dresser. Always there had been secrets in this house, and she had surrendered to her father’s desire for them, the things they’d kept hidden about their past, other things he’d attempted to hide from her and she’d allowed herself to ignore, but a new impatience surged as if she were struggling to climb over the fence that encircled her.

  Downstairs, in his coveralls, eating a slice of toast at the counter, her father turned sharply at the sound of her footsteps. “Miranda, what are you doing up?”

  “Couldn’t sleep.” She kept her voice as low as his. He’d made only the one mug, not a pot, and everything in his posture made her presence an intrusion. He wasn’t welcoming her, she was merely slowing his escape.

  “Why don’t you go back to bed? There’s no need for you to be up so early.”

  But she was wide awake. “Where are you off to?”

  His face relaxed into a smile. “To see if by some miracle I can access the internet at the cabin.”

  “Can I come with you?”

  It was an impulsive thought, and he said no before adding, “There’s no need for that.”

  “Why not if I want to? Are you meeting someone?”

  He shook his head. “Best to have one of us stay with our guest.” Our guest, she thought, and then, more possessively, my guest. Something else gnawed: Would her father lie to her? Had he before, would he again? Did her own safety make the lies justifiable?

  “Dad — the plane that landed at the airstrip the day before yesterday, who was on it and what are they doing here?”

  Her father gulped down the dregs of his tea and set his mug in the sink.

  “Miranda, I need you to sit tight for a bit. Can you do that for me?”

  He was ruffling her hair, asking her to do something for him once again. She shook herself free, some essential part of her refusing to be deterred, a new resolve forming in her throat.

  “Why won’t you answer me? I’m supposed to do what you want but you’re always hiding things from me — saying we should never leave then inviting people here and going off with them. What are you actually doing? Whatever you’re up to, it isn’t just weather monitoring, is it?”

  “Miranda.” He stepped into the middle of the room. “If I’ve kept secrets, it’s only been for your own good. Things are in such a precarious state. I’m trying, from this out-of-the-way corner of the world, to do everything I can —”

  “What if I don’t want to be protected like that?”

  He didn’t have an answer, other than to show her that she’d jarred him. When he hugged her, the strength of his embrace stopped her mouth even as she struggled to say more. The next moment, with a rustle of jacket and shudder of boot, her father was gone, leaving her alone once more, if not entirely alone, given Frank asleep upstairs.

  Outside, Miranda called sharply to Ella as the wind bit her cheeks and raced through her long underwear, tangling at the place where her calves met her boots. Her father hadn’t taken the quad. Even so, he’d vanished.

  When she threw open the henhouse door and, with a whiff of ammonia, the girls burst into the run, flexing their speckled feathers, the sight of their ordinary hunger made tears spring into her eyes. Rosie, Mottle, June. A band of lemon light gathered along the eastern hills. What was going to happen? What should she do? The island was her home, the only home she had. Yet it no longer felt like the home she knew. Someone laid a hand on her forearm, and all the breath swept out of her.

  “Miranda, it’s all right now, it’s all right,” Caleb said.

  She’d missed his approach, the wind rushing at her ears. Off about her own business, Ella only now galloped close, tail wagging, because Caleb, to her, was no intruder. Nostrils working, could Ella smell the wildness in him? He looked as dishevelled as Miranda had ever seen him, hair askew, mud on his coveralls, sweat in his clothes, possibly sleepless, a white moon, just past full, hanging in the sky behind him. Had he by chance spent the night at Cape House and had some new calamity befallen him there? He’d shouted at her the previous afternoon and now his touch on her arm set off a flapping through her, despite the gentleness of his voice. She was in nothing but sweater and boots and long underwear and needed to pee.

  “Not meaning to frighten you, Miranda.” There was the unpredictable in Caleb. Strong passions blew out of him. He was scanning about as if expecting her father to charge out of the house, still playing by those rules. It was only then that Miranda remembered Sylvia’s words and the promise that Sylvia had attempted to extract from her the evening before, of which Caleb seemed oblivious.

  “My father’s not here,” she said, and this seemed to relieve him.

  “Where’s he to?”

  “He went out. I don’t know when he’ll be back.”

  “For a walk at this hour?”

  “To the cabin, he said, but I’m not sure.” Maybe she shouldn’t be telling Caleb these things. Then again, he worked for her father. She had the strongest longing for their old unrecoverable companionship. She still trusted Caleb, loved him. Her almost-brother. Could she try again to ask him what he knew, ask for his confidence, tell him her concerns?

  “Miranda, I’ve come to warn you, your father’s up to dangerous things.”

  Once more the earth beneath her feet heaved, and her skin retracted at his words. “What do you mean?”

  “Those men he’s brought here —”

  “Brought them?”

  “Yes, Miranda, they’re here to make a deal about some way to alter the weather all over the world and make it just the way they want it, I swear. They’re meeting with your father this morning. They’re ruthless and they want to make money off it. Has your father ever, ever talked to you about this?”

  Once more the top of her head was turning. Here was Caleb repeating Frank’s crazy words, only Caleb was going further. “How do you know my father’s —”

  “I took two of them out yesterday evening, Miranda, and they got to talking
. They were telling me things. They threatened me. I realized, I’ve helped him —”

  “Helped how?”

  “Experiments. I didn’t know. Miranda, you have to come away with me.”

  He was close beside her, as close as they’d been in over a year, close enough that she smelled the sourness on him, took in the little pockmarks on his skin. But the undoable moments on the boat were also inside them. And the afternoon before, the sight of her with Frank had made him so angry.

  “You can do whatever you want, Miranda, not what your father wants. We can make a good life across the cove, a life of our own, you know that. She’s a good house. There’s space to grow things. And beauty. We’ll have all we need. For years. Free yourself, Miranda. You know how much you want this.”

  Her body trembled. As the light grew, robins flew overhead, not just one or two but a great flock. “Caleb, I’m sorry for what I did, and what I said, and then for all the silence.” Once they’d sat together at a Formica table in a tiny shack out on one of the Little Fish Islands, and she’d dreamed of a life just like the one he described, when it was still possible to imagine a future that resembled the past, when they were two outsiders claiming a world for themselves. “But I can’t come with you.”

  “What do you mean?” He stood bereft, while she tried to determine what new courage was required of her.

  “I can’t be who you want.”

  “You have to get used to the new way, Miranda. Things will change.”

  He slid his fingers into hers, skin cold and damp, and squeezed, and she squeezed back, before extracting her fingers from his. When he placed a hand on her arm, her pulse hammered. Holding tight, he tugged, as if he would drag her somewhere.

  She backed away from him, which felt like running. She held onto the doorknob from inside the house because there was no lock, but there was no sound of Caleb following her up onto the bridge. No stirring from Frank either. Only Ella, loudly lapping from her water bowl, Ella whose barks had made Caleb turn, distracting him long enough for Miranda to wrench herself free. Upstairs, she didn’t bother to knock before bursting into the spare room.