“You know the log booms?”
“Oh. Huh.”
“Big break. Whole boom got loose, apparently. That could be like three or four thousand deadheads. Good as a floating minefield.”
“Huh.”
“What am I gonna do with you, Goose?”
“Come too.”
He twisted around.
“Please,” she said. Her lungs were calming.
His unflappable look settled back on the road. “Sea air ought to make you sleepy, I guess,” he said. “Anyway. Okay. You can’t be trusted on your own.”
• • •
She’d have died of exposure if she’d gone out on the water in nothing but her sweaty vest and shorts, but Jonas had outdoor clothes and waterproofs in his trunk. They sagged around her like a spacesuit. She didn’t mind. She was on the edge of something; she didn’t know what, but it felt perilous, and Jonas’s company was keeping her from tipping over.
Besides, she had an idea. It felt like it might help.
“Jonas?”
He sized her up as she zipped the waterproofs closed, chuckling. “I gotta hand it to you, Goose. Not a lot of chicks I know have the guts to go outside wearing that.”
“Don’t call me a chick.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
“So you already know about that whale?”
“The one that stranded?”
“Yeah.” He walked, she shuffled along the gravel of the wharf toward the dock. There were a couple of kids pushing strollers. Both of them looked far too young to have kids of their own. “You ran into those guys who told me about it?”
“Uh-huh. Fishing buddies.” She waited for his They’re good people, but it didn’t come; something must have given him pause.
“You think they were having me on? I kind of had the feeling they were messing with me.”
“The thing is,” he said, as if he’d been mulling it over for hours, “they wouldn’t feed me the same story. If it was just you, yeah, I’d say maybe. Don’s good people” (aha! ) “but he gets a kick out of stuff like that.”
“But they told you the same thing? A killer whale stranded on, what was it? Something island?”
“Masterman. Yep. Weird place for it. And wrong time of year. Even the transients are usually still down south now. Plus I only ever heard of them stranding in bunches.”
She descended carefully onto the floating pontoon. They were the only people on the dock. “Can we go check?”
“Huh?”
“That island group’s just out of the bay, right?” She’d looked them up in her atlas. That was at around three in the morning. Three in the morning, the apartment smelling of packing tape and unwashed wetsuit (she’d left it in a heap in the bathtub), and poor sleepless Séverine awake still, wondering what was happening, where the silent girl had been going, still in the grip of the nighttime delusion that she could work it all out.
“Oh. You mean take a little detour? I guess.”
“You’re supposed to report strandings, aren’t you?”
He knelt and began untying his boat. “Right now,” he said, “I think people got other things to worry about.”
“It can’t be that much of a detour. Humor me.”
“You know there’s nothing we’re gonna be able to do? Those things weigh twice as much as a car.”
“Yeah, I know.”
He climbed aboard, lifted up a plastic tub, and took a bunch of keys out from underneath it. “Gonna look pretty miserable up on the beach. If it’s there at all. Just a big hunk of dead fish.”
“That’s where you keep the keys? Seriously? Not even in a locker?”
“Hey.” He clicked the bilge pump on and started the motor. The few kids pushing strollers through the park below the town all turned to see what the noise was: something happening! There were people in Hardy who walked down from their houses a couple of afternoons a week just to watch the ferry arrive. “We do things different up here.”
She climbed in after him, huddling in the limited shelter of the cockpit. “So can we check? I’d like to see.”
Jonas gave her a long look as he steered out. It almost qualified as curious.
“What’s up with you, Goose?”
“I wish I knew.”
• • •
North of the island’s tip, the ocean air banked thick and damp against the ramparts of the coastal range, tripling the late winter mist into a fog. The continent’s edge was outlined in soft white, a hazy barrier, like an atmosphere. A white boat drifted there, invisible. It made no sound. There was nothing to propel it: no sail, no engine. Its single passenger sat in it, sightless head bowed, unmoving. The head was black as well as white, and there were black characters on the bow, as useless in that solitude as patterns made by a tangle of weed: LV6 IRKUTSK STAR. The open boat, no more than twice as long as Marie-Archange Séverine Gaucelin-Maculloch’s kayak, rocked and swiveled, rudderless in the long swell. Birds avoided it.
• • •
The shore was a series of protrusions and indentations, a wavering negotiation between rock and water. Tree roots fingered into every crevice above the line of high tide. The forest pressed as close to the ocean as it could, the two vast uniformities almost touching, the dull dark evergreens and the dull grey water. Goose couldn’t find anything to look at.
“You doze off if you want,” Jonas said, over the motor’s whine. “Looking kinda dopey.”
“I’d love to.” The sea was calm, barely more ruffled than bedsheets. They skimmed along without jolting.
“Logs’ll just ride up and down on the tide until the wind gets up. I don’t think there’s gonna be a problem with them getting into the bay.”
“Did Cope say why the boom broke?”
“Dunno. No, he didn’t say. They lost contact with the tug. This problem with the satellites, I guess.”
“Those booms can break up in bad weather, eh? But it’s flat as a pancake out here.”
“Yup. Looks like there’s a fog up the Passage.” He shaded his eyes to look north and west as they powered out of the bay. Though there was no glare, the sheer expanse of grey had a kind of glistering weight that hurt the eye.
“Oh, great.”
“Nah. Not gonna bother us today. Way off. See over there? Those are the Mastermans.” Jonas indicated a snaggle of forested rock chipped off from the main body of the island, debris fallen a few hundred meters offshore. “How about we swing by now? I’m not seeing deadheads anywhere.”
There were a couple of outlying lozenges of rock. An eagle stood near the top of a bare tree and watched them as they slowed to pass between.
“That’s the big island on the left there. Don said it’s right up on the beach.” He pulled the throttle back and curved their course away, to get a better view. “Right over there.”
Goose stood up. She could see the break in the trees, a pebbly notch scalloped out of the island. “There?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I guess your buddy likes winding you up too.”
Jonas looked slightly pained. “I guess. Never thought he could keep his face that straight.”
“Unless it unstranded itself.”
“Could be.” His normal lack of curiosity was reasserting itself quickly. He leaned on the wheel, turning them about. “Okay. Nothing to see here.”
“Wait.” Now Goose shaded her eyes, squinting. Jonas followed her look back toward the tiny beach.
“Hey,” he said.
Looking for a four-ton orca, neither of them had at first seen the smaller shape slumped on the pebbles, too big for a bird, too small for a twisted fragment of felled tree.
“Looks like a body,” Jonas said. He let the boat complete its curve until it was facing the island again.
Goose was feeling something she recognized from the
middle of the night: a strange and bleary quickening, like the first glimpse of a prospect equally hoped for and dreaded.
Jennifer, she thought. Jennifer.
There was definitely someone lying half curled up on the pebbles, partially draped by some dark covering.
“That’s a kid,” Jonas said beside her. “Oh, m—”
The depth beneath them was reducing rapidly. He slowed to a crawl and steered around a treeless reef. The scattered land pushed closer around them, the water now shallow and perfectly calm. Dead ahead, a dark-haired child sprawled unmoving as beached driftwood. She lay in the center of a strangely smooth depression printed in the speckled sand and stones, as if, Goose thought, as if, as if something really really heavy and kind of rounded had been lying right there making that shape.
“Hey!” Jonas shouted. The wall of straight-trunked evergreens swallowed his voice. Another eagle flapped silently away, disturbed. “Hey!” The child lay unresponsive, the back of her head to them. Something about her didn’t look like Jennifer. “Take the wheel,” Jonas said, “I’m gonna jump.” But Goose, ignoring him, had already scrambled to the bow and over the forward railing. Too small, she thought. Short hair. Just before the bow scraped, she sprang onto the pebbles. The kid was lying with a dark puffy coat draped over her, head sticking out one end, feet out the other. Goose slowed as she came close, crouched down, put her hand out to the neck.
“Dead?” Jonas called from the boat.
It wasn’t Jennifer. It wasn’t a girl. It was a boy, a small boy, not much older than Cody, a native kid, pale as death. His mouth was open.
His eyes were open too. They twitched toward her.
“Mon dieu. Okay. Oh my God. Okay.” She bent over him and touched his cheek. He was as cold as the sea. “Okay, you’re going to be okay. Can you hear me? Hello?”
The boy’s feet scraped against the pebbles. She heard Jonas swear.
“Get on the radio!” she shouted over her shoulder. The boy quivered at the sudden noise. His head lifted a little. One hand came up from beneath the coat and clutched at his chest, a feeble and clumsy infant gesture. “We’re going to need an ambulance at the dock!”
“Is he hurt?”
“I can’t tell!” She tried to catch the boy’s wandering eyes. “Hey. Can you hear me? Are you okay? Can you get up?” She squatted on her heels and lifted the coat away.
She fell back on her heels, heart juddering, swearing without thinking. “Tabarnac.”
A brutal gaze fixed on her, its eye a single huge dark lozenge.
The boy had curled himself around a native mask. It stared at her like the head of a beast buried in the shingle. “Tabarnac. What the hell.” It dared her to touch it. It was all flowing lines and carved protrusions, as fierce and solid and substantial as the boy was frail and limp.
“Goose! You need help?”
The boy closed his mouth and made a strange kind of moan.
“What the hell have you got here? Okay. Doucement. Take it easy.” He spasmed and shivered, pushing himself up, staring at her properly for perhaps two seconds, his look as intensely empty as the terrible stare of the girl in the cell. His eyes closed and he slumped back to the stones.
“Goose!”
“All right. All right. Give me a sec here.” The mask wouldn’t release her. Nothing could close that eye. She tore her own look away from it, trying to concentrate. Protocol. Recovery position. (The kid was already in it.) Heartbeat. (Faint, terribly faint, but she could feel it in his neck, though the skin under her fingers seemed too cold for life.) Signs of injury. She scanned the body. The boy was dressed in dark slacks, black shoes, a dark sweater, some kind of dark jacket with yellowy piping and a badge at the pocket, weirdly formal. The clothes were crumpled and faded and scuffed but not wet, or no wetter than everything else touched by the sea air. “Hey. Hang on now.” He seemed to have passed out. She felt carefully along his clothes. There was nothing obviously wrong, nothing broken, no wound she could see.
“Get the ambulance!”
“I’m trying! Damn radio . . .”
She reached underneath him very slowly. He groaned slightly. She could almost cradle his head in one hand. It felt horribly light and fragile, like a bird’s skull.
“Okay. I’m going to try and lift you up. We’ve got to get you out of here, eh? You shout if it hurts. Can you hear me?” There wasn’t any time to waste. The kid was terrifyingly pallid and chill. She got one arm under his back and the other beneath his thighs and braced herself.
It was like lifting a baby. Half the weight must have been in the clothes. She carried him back to the boat, where Jonas, dumbstruck, leaned over and let her pass the kid to him.
He nodded toward the shape on the pebbles. “What’s that thing?”
“You’re not going to believe it.” She ran back to the mask. She’d seen things like it in the museum in Victoria, safely hidden behind glass. It didn’t look so safe here. She used the coat to wrap it. As she picked up the bundle she noticed, casually, incidentally, that the coat was much too big for the boy, and had sparkly threads stitched between its quilted puffs: a girl’s coat.
“He’s like ice.” Jonas had cleared away his boxes of fishing crap to expose a padded bench where he’d laid the kid. He’d already taken off his own jacket and spread it over him.
“Do you recognize him?”
“Huh?”
“Not a local kid?”
“Not that I know of. You sit here, okay? We better hurry. Here.” He handed her the radio. “Keep trying.”
“Wait.”
“What?” He’d already lifted a boat hook from somewhere and was about to push them back from the shore.
“Look at this.” She opened the bundle.
Though they’d only been partners for twelve days, she felt she knew Jonas Paul reasonably well, perhaps because she’d spent a hefty proportion of that time in his company. She’d never have guessed his equanimity could disappear completely.
“Holy fucking shit,” he said.
“My thoughts exactly.”
“Excuse my French.”
“Let’s get going.”
“Try the radio again. It started acting up yesterday. I got it to work sometimes, though.” Swift and efficient—she’d always suspected he could do it if he had to—he gunned the motor, spun the boat, and eased them away from the island, accelerating steadily. “He gonna be okay like this?” With the outboard roaring he had to shout to be heard in the bow. She couldn’t see that the small bumps and judders were doing the kid any harm. She gave Jonas a thumbs-up. He nudged the throttle forward a bit, pointing at the radio.
She buzzed the call button and shouted over the noise. “Maculloch. Needing assistance. Hello? Anyone hearing me?”
She thought she heard static, though it was hard to hear anything even when she squeezed the radio against her ear. She buzzed again. “Emergency. Ambulance required. Got a minor in trouble here. Hello?”
“Hello?”
She almost let go of the radio. The voice popped out as if the man had materialized at her ear: breathy, hoarse, too close.
“Who’s that? Maculloch here. I need an ambulance.”
Nothing.
“Ambulance. Emergency.”
“There was a wave.” The voice was hesitant. It had a strange accent, like Newfie but more so.
“Identify yourself, please.” Goose turned her back to Jonas and faced the spray.
“Too late,” the radio told her. “All hands lost. None of us . . .”
“Who the fuck is this?”
“Barely a minute, it was.” The voice in her ear sounded distraught. “I only thought to rest my eyes.”
“I need . . .” Her throat caught. To her astonishment she realized she’d choked up with fear. She hunched over the radio so no one could see her face. “
I need an ambulance.”
Grief-struck, the voice roared, “She broke in two!” The radio tumbled out of Goose fingers. She clutched after it, knocking it forward onto the gunwale, where it bounced and fell in the ocean. “Tabarnac! ”
“Dammit, Goose!”
“It wasn’t working anyway,” she yelled. Her hands were shaking. She had a sudden strong feeling that she was going mad, that she could suddenly see what madness felt like and had accidentally found herself standing one step away from it. Vous êtes ici. She stared at the shore ahead, the spilled white specks of the town, wishing the boat could go faster.
• • •
They heard a siren rushing out of town as they reached the dock. Seeing that Goose and Jonas were unloading a body, some of the aimless kids came ambling around the empty waterfront condo buildings (and their cracked and weed-infested parking lots) to see what was going on. Jonas shooed them away surprisingly forcefully. Goose got in the backseat with the kid, laying him down so his head was on her lap; Jonas drove up to the hospital. There was a patrol car there too, pulled up outside with its lights flashing. Goose was so tired, she could barely move. She sat with the boy while Jonas went inside.
“What’s going on?” she asked him, quietly. “Where the hell did you come from?”
The mask was in the front passenger seat, wrapped up again. Jonas had wondered whether the kid might have stolen it. She’d thought the boy was First Nations but Jonas said not. Now that she was sitting quietly, looking down at the kid’s bleached-wood face, she could tell he was right. His ancestry was on the other side of the Pacific, in Korea or China or Japan.
She imagined him floating all the way across the ocean, washed up here for her to find.
The clothes were like a uniform, it occurred to her. Like he was a miniature security guard, with that faded yellow shield pattern on the breast pocket of his jacket. They had schools like that in Japan, didn’t they, where they dressed the poor kids up funny. School uniform.
She was so tired now that her brain was working in slow motion and at minimum capacity. Just one train of thought came along at a time, rumbling sluggishly from idea to idea, like those monster trains she used to see crawling along next to the highway back home. School uniform. Name tags. Name. ID.
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