Waiting for Unicorns (14 page)

TWELVE DAYS LATER, ON JULY
second, the ice on Hudson Bay finally gave way, piling on shore as the wind drove it out of the water or pushed it out to sea.

There were just four loops left on my paper chain. Dad had been gone for six weeks.

The day after my birthday, Sura had called the CNSC and talked to one of the guys my dad worked with on occasion. We thought maybe he would have some news of ice conditions or updates and reports from Dad's team. But he hadn't heard a word.

“Nothing? Really?” I said when Sura got off the phone. Disappointment and now fear felt like an actual thing lodged in the back of my throat.

“Your dad took a full team with him, Talia,” Sura said, her voice calm and steady. “He would really have no reason to call the CNSC or report any of his findings until he came back and had a chance to sort through all of the data they collected. And I'm sure there's a perfectly logical explanation he hasn't been able to call us, either. Perhaps the radio failed.”

That made sense. After all, the Birdman had said that Dad wouldn't take any more risks than he needed to. And Dad knew I was here, waiting. But things that seemed so reasonable in my head didn't necessarily agree with the things in my heart. I wanted something real, something I could hold on to.

I lay in the darkness that night and listened to the ice grinding and groaning out on the bay as it fractured and ran aground—ice against rock and rock against ice. It must have sounded like this, ages and ages ago, when glaciers of ice carved away the ground, moving earth and stone, pushing up mountains and hollowing out canyons.

Despite the thrill of the wind, the arrival of spring, and the ice going out, I felt hope slowly seep out of me, leaving me cold and empty. I listened as the ice heaved toward shore, little glacier upon little glacier. It would have been one of the best sounds imaginable, the sound of winter
finally
ending, had Dad been safely asleep in the room across the hall. Instead, he was out there somewhere in all that grinding, shifting ice.

I padded barefoot to the window and leaned against the sill, holding my breath so that I didn't fog the glass. In the gray, dusky light of the midnight sun, Hudson Bay had emerged, and the water now moved and heaved under the fractured ice, throwing it off like a winter coat.

Dad and his team had planned for this. They traveled by airboats specifically for the break up. And even though I knew this, I couldn't forget that Dad hadn't called. Each small island of ice making its way either shoreward or ocean-ward sank my own personal airboat of hope just a little more, taking my dad down with it.

I'd been having trouble falling asleep since Dad left, though I'd never said anything to Sura. Even if she asked, I would've blamed the old hot water radiator in my room. I didn't want to worry. I wanted to feel okay. I wanted my dad here and everything to be normal. I wanted him to sit out on the porch with me and listen to Simon sing and tell stories. I wanted him to be there when the Birdman took us out on bird-watching expeditions. I wanted him beside me at dinner, leaning back and stretching his long legs under the table. I wanted him now like I had wanted Mom. And didn't have either one of them.

I stood at the window, panic churning in the pit of my stomach.

Dad had been out there for a long time, suspended on ice between the arctic sky and the Arctic Sea. And there's a lot that can happen, even before the floes break up. Which is why Dad's call-ins had been so important. The last time he called, his voice scratchy and tied up in radio airwaves, he told me again that he'd be back before the ice went out.

But he wasn't back. And no one had heard from him.

Crawling into bed, I stared up at the ceiling. I tried not to let my imagination run wild. I refused to think about ice chasms and bitter storms that would make the already-chill temperatures drop even further. I refused to think about failing equipment, low supplies, or frostbite and hypothermia. But those things crept inside me anyway and pressed cold fingers against my heart till I could hardly breathe.

He isn't alone,
I told myself.
His team is with him. They'll take care of each other. They'd let me know if something happened.

But my fear hissed back, twisted and mean in the darkness.

Unless the equipment failed. Unless they're all dead.

Fear always says the worst things in the dark. And though I never meant to, I'd invited fear in, and now I couldn't make it leave.

FOUR DAYS LATER, THERE WERE
no more loops left on my chain. I sat at the edge of Hudson Bay, facing north, knees pulled tight to my chest, my arms wrapped around them. I settled into the rocky shoreline. I would wait all day if necessary.

The warm wind pressed against my back as I searched out over the ice dams and across the open water for the tiny specks that I hoped would appear on the horizon—airboats bringing my dad home.

It was a strange sight, all that water dotted with ice. I'd never seen it before. Hudson Bay was
vast.
Not that the ice had made it smaller, just more crossable. Funny how just because I could walk on ice, it seemed less wild. Less dangerous. Like it was something I could handle. Something my dad could handle. But neither of us could walk on water.

The panic from last night had been replaced by the weight of emptiness in the pit of my stomach. It was the same feeling I'd had when Mom died, and I hated that it was there. It's a terrible thing, really, being the one left behind.

Now it was Sunday, the day of our weekly call-ins. Dad made me promise only to call him in case of emergency, and Sura told me to give him the benefit of the doubt. I had listened to them both. But I couldn't anymore. The first week of July was over, and still Dad wasn't back. So if I didn't hear from him at the usual time tonight, I'd radio in myself.

After a while, Sura came and sat with me. She brought my lunch out to the shore when I refused to come back to the blue house. Some kind of meat stew in an oversized tin cup. I had no idea what kind of meat it was. Caribou? Rabbit? Seal? And suddenly I hated it. I hated everything about it. It was bits and pieces of this rock-strewn, frozen, ice-bound Arctic. And I was supposed to swallow it down and like it. The stew. This place. This place that had stolen my dad and might not give him back. I couldn't do it.

Before I could think of a reason not to, I threw the cup and all of its contents down the shore as far as I could. I didn't even care that Sura was right there beside me. I thought she would be mad, but she wasn't. She just sat with me and didn't say a word. She didn't even ask me to bring back the cup. So I didn't. I left it there on the shore until the tide eventually came in and carried it away.

Just before she left, Sura pulled something from her pocket and handed it to me. A small feather, no larger than my thumb, and white as the moon over Hudson Bay. Pinching my fingers, I zipped the feather through them, straightening all of the tiny shafts until not a single one was out of place.

“It's the flight feather of an arctic tern,” she told me. “He dropped it and I thought you might want it. To help you practice your flying.”

I didn't understand.

“We forget,” she said. “How to fly. It's a fragile thing, and the weight of things—things that hurt—can make us forget how it's done. We dream about it. We remember how it feels to be weightless. But once we forget, we have to spend the rest of our lives relearning how to take that leap and believe we can do it.”

Sura had been staring out at the water, but she turned to me now. “If you can practice along the way,” she said, “that first leap—the letting go—will be a little easier.”

I was still confused—let go of what? Fear? Hope? Dad?—but I brushed the feather across my cheek, taking comfort in the softness against my skin.

Later, a few hours after Sura left, and after Simon, too, had come and gone, the Birdman showed up. Together we sat watching the tide creep up the shore, and every once in a while we would throw a few smooth stones as hard as we could out over the ice dams and into the open water. Sometimes they made it. Sometimes they didn't, landing among the embankments and steeples of ice with a hollow ricocheting sound.

Neither one of us said a word the whole time. We didn't need to.

Finally, the Birdman sighed, and handed me the binoculars that had been hanging around his neck. Then he got up, his bones creaking as they adjusted to standing, and left me on the bank alone.

I used the Birdman's binoculars to stare out over the water until there was no longer enough light to even imagine I was seeing something.

I stretched, stiff from sitting there all day, and lay down, folding my arms behind my head. There were no stars out yet. It wouldn't be dark enough to see them for a while, but I looked for them anyway. I knew they were there, behind the lingering arctic daylight.

I never wished on stars, they always seemed too far away. And most of them had already died long ago, so distant that all that remained was their light, still shooting through space and time to reach us. It made me wonder: What kind of light might I leave trailing out behind me, after I was gone?

When I couldn't stand the silence or the sight of all that empty water a minute longer, I stood up, tired and cold, and walked back to the blue house.

Sura was sitting in the front room waiting up for me, but I stood in the entry, unlacing my boots and hanging up my coat very slowly. Taking years of time to do what should have taken just a few minutes.

I was afraid to look at her. She was sitting there so quietly, waiting for me, and it made the fear that had churned in my stomach all day long threaten to rise up and suffocate me. I brushed the feather she'd given me nervously across my cheek.

“It's almost eight,” I said, and Sura nodded. Wordlessly we walked into the front room where Dad had set up the radio, and I stared at the map on the wall, trying not to look at the clock. Trying not to count the minutes, the seconds until the big hand reached the twelve. But it did. And then I stared at the radio, every part of me waiting.

Sura was absolutely silent beside me and we both held our breath. The only noise in the room was the clock's ticking second hand. I refused to look at the time again. I didn't want to know how many minutes past eight it was.

I stood there for what felt like forever, until Sura finally sighed, and I jumped and glanced at the clock: 8:42
P.M.
I grabbed the radio receiver. Missing this many calls felt like an emergency.

My hands were shaking as I cleared my throat and held down the receiver button, filling the silence of the front room with the sound of my voice, tense and nervous.

“VE4 portable W1APL, come in. Over.”

I let up on the receiver button and waited several long seconds before trying again. “VE4 portable W1APL, come in. Over.”

Nothing.

“VE4 portable W1APL, this is Tal. Come in. Over.” Radio static filled the front room in the blue house.

“Dad. This is Tal. Come in. Over.” I could barely get the words around the lump in my throat.

Sura rested a hand on my shoulder and my stomach lurched, then sank too fast. I was on some kind of terrible roller coaster in the middle of the Arctic. My head ached. But I wouldn't cry. I
wouldn't.

I looked at up at Sura. So steady. Same as those glacial rocks that dotted the tundra. But even those rocks had been moved, I guess. Set down and abandoned by the passage of massive icebergs, twisting and tearing their way through the landscape. Those rocks were moraine. And Sura was, too. She, too, had been left behind. Like me. Maybe we were all moraine—just pieces left over after everything else was gone. And with that thought I was suddenly very, very tired. I hung up the receiver, cutting off the sound of static, and then stood up carefully. I felt like if I moved too fast I might break into pieces. Sura reached for me, but then let her hands fall to her sides.

“I'm going to bed,” I whispered, leaving a piece of myself on the stairs as I went.