Waiting for Unicorns (15 page)

I STOOD IN THE MIDDLE
of my room for a few minutes, listening to the clunking of the radiator, the sound of my shaky breathing, and my crazy-beating heart, waiting for something steady. But even my own heartbeat was wrong, pounding too fast.

Why?
Why?
Why hadn't he answered? Why hadn't he come back? Why wasn't he already here? I twisted myself around the question, trying to make it work out right. I wanted an answer. To know what happened. I wanted to make my heart quit hurting, and maybe if I just knew
something,
it would help.

Out of habit, I glanced at the corner of my window alcove where my paper chain had hung. It looked empty there, now that the loops had run out. Not that it mattered. Not anymore. I never knew how many days he'd be gone anyway! So really, it was stupid. The whole thing. I'd just made it all up to make myself feel better. And look where that got me.

My young mom watched me from her frame on the top of my bookshelf. Her short hair hung at her chin like some kind of prophecy, taunting me with the notion that I was the one who would cut it all off. She smiled. Smiled and smiled, and never cared. Never cared that she left. Never cared that I didn't get to say good-bye.

I could feel my heart racing. Faster and faster. It wouldn't slow down. My ears rang with the sound of my own heartbeat. Loud. Too loud. It was drowning everything else out.
Lub-dub. Lub-dub. Lub-dub.
It was filling me up. Filling my room.
Lub-dub. Lub-dub.
I couldn't stop. Not this, not any of it.
Lub-dub.
Couldn't catch my. Breath. Had to.
Stop.

I grabbed a pair of scissors from my desk.

Without even pausing, I took a handful of my hair and sheared it off.

The room went quiet, and my hair fell, long strands splaying across the wide-plank floorboards. And then I dropped the scissors, filling my room with the sound of their clatter.

I glanced at my mom's picture on the shelf.

Everyone is afraid of what they're unable to control.

I jumped when Sura knocked on the door.

“Talia, are you okay? I heard—” Her words cut short, blunt at the ends as she took one look at me and then at the hair on the floor.

“It's okay!” My voice sounded funny and I leaned against my desk so she wouldn't see my hands shaking. “I wanted it short—off—it was too long, you know?—Too long. Too much. In my face and—and I needed it gone so—”

My words were getting all mixed up. Sura's arms caught me, held me tight before I could say anything else.

I stood there for a minute, stiff. Wanting her to believe I was fine.
I knew what I was doing. I'd meant it. I'd meant those scissors.
But being brave is harder than you ever think it's going to be, and despite what Sura thought, I couldn't fly. I was no tern. I was moraine. Only bits of me left behind. I couldn't do this. I couldn't lose them both.

I pressed my cheek against Sura's shoulder, feeling everything begin to crumble inside of me. My resolve, my determination, my hope. Wrapping my arms around her, I quit fighting the lump in my throat. It was just too hard.

Finally, after all this time, I let myself cry.

I cried for Mom because she was never coming back. I cried for Dad because he had lost so much, and I cried for me because I couldn't do this alone.

The weight of all my waiting and wishing washed over me like a giant wave off Hudson Bay, determined to pull me under. It was too much, and no matter how many times I told myself that nothing could ever be as bad as losing Mom, I didn't believe it anymore. Losing my dad would be just as awful.

After we stood there like that awhile, and after I calmed down some, Sura pulled away and held me at arm's length, her head tilted to one side as she considered my hair.

“I think you've started a good thing here, Talia. What do you say we finish it?”

I fingered the ends of my hair. I'd cut more than I meant to. A lot more. But I nodded, and Sura pulled my desk chair into the bathroom.

Sitting there in the tiny bathroom on the second floor of the blue house, I watched Sura's reflection in the bathroom mirror. I watched her face as she pulled my hair off my neck and over the back of the chair, hanging long to the middle of my back. She combed her fingers through it, the ends stringy and broken from where I had chewed. It hadn't been trimmed since Mom died. Last March. She'd been the last person to cut it.

I closed my eyes as Sura laid the scissors against my hair. The same scissors I used to make my paper chain calendar. The same scissors I'd used to cut tiny paper slips for my jar of wishes.

Snip. Snip. Snip-snip. Snip.

Sura began where I'd started with that first desperate chop, working around my head until it was even, falling just past my ears. And when she was finished, she rested her hands on my shoulders.

“Okay,” Sura said gently. “You can open your eyes.”

I met my gaze in the mirror.

“You still look like her,” she said after a minute, her voice low and smooth as chocolate. “But you look more like you now. More yourself.”

I studied my face, trying to see what Sura did. But I couldn't shake off thoughts of Dad.

“What am I going to do if he doesn't come back? If he's really gone—?” My voice quit working and I stared down at the strands of hair on the floor.

“Let's give him the benefit of the doubt, Talia,” Sura said. She was firm. “It's possible that something unexpected is keeping him, so let's trust, for now at least, that he is on his way. Let's trust he knows how to do this thing on both ice and waves. And until we have concrete proof of something else, we are going to wait for him to come back. Okay?”

I held her gaze in the mirror, wanting what she had. Wanting her faith.

But I didn't have that, so I just said, “Okay.”

Sura left me in my room sometime later, a cup of chaithluk tea by my bed. I couldn't sleep, so I stood at the window for a long time, staring out into the lingering arctic summer light, wishing and waiting.

THAT NIGHT I DREAMED ABOUT
the auroras—the northern lights.

I'd first seen them on my birthday. But the night after the ice went out on Hudson Bay, the night that Sura cut my hair, I dreamed about a very different type of aurora and about Sura's story. Instead of spirit guides with upheld torches, thousands of beluga whales swam through dark skies. They sent ripples across the starscape as they broke the surface to breathe. The whoosh of their held breath escaping into the blackness was comforting, a living sound, warm and heavy. Light from the stars reflected against their white bodies, and in my dream, they led my mom across the abyss into that place where pain and disease no longer exist.

I woke sometime close to dawn with the dream of white whales fresh in my mind. I could still see Mom, her long hair splayed out around her as she swam through a black sky, buoyed up and carried across by whales.

I heard the muffled murmur of quiet voices from downstairs, which was strange and alarming considering how early it was.

I sat up in bed, listening. A chill that had nothing to do with the cold slid down my body. I took deep breaths. A dark and familiar dread tugged at me. Someone was here. Word had come—news of Dad. There was no other reason Sura would be up so early. Or maybe she'd never gone to bed at all.

Whenever the news is bad, adults talk in low, solemn voices, even when they're in the same room with you. It's like they think that by changing their tone, they can soften the weight of their words.

I listened for that lowness. Solemn notes that would tell me what I was so afraid of. But Sura's voice was warm. She
laughed.
And then a deeper voice chimed in.

Dad.

I was out of bed and halfway down the stairs before I even realized I'd moved.

He sat in a chair beside the wood stove, his feet stretched toward the warmth. His wool sweater and gray wool trousers were both familiar and strange at the same time. His face was red from sun- and windburn, and his lips were cracked from the cold. His beard was thicker and longer than it had been when he left, but his eyes were the same bright blue, and they lit up when he saw me on the stairs.

Before he could say my name, I was in his arms, and I wrapped myself around him and held on, tight. It was hard to breathe, like I'd been running for a long time. My heart pounded against my ribs and my ears roared as I struggled to catch my breath.

He held me close and we stood there in the middle of the room for a long time. He kept saying
shhh
over and over again, even though I wasn't crying. I felt like a snow globe. Someone had shaken me up and sent everything inside of me swirling around, and now, here in my dad's arms, was the stillness.

Finally, Dad settled back into his chair by the fire. But even then I couldn't let go of him. My fingers turned white as I gripped his shirt.

“The ice broke up faster than we'd anticipated,” Dad said quietly. “I didn't want to risk getting caught and crushed in the floes, so we waited it out on one of the tiny islands offshore of Baffin. Once the ice broke up, I had no way of getting word to you. I'm so sorry, Tal. I'm so sorry I worried you.”

Dad always carried the radio phone with him, charging it with the gas-powered generator when the team set up camp. But when they tore everything down and moved locations, it lost battery power very quickly on account of the cold. And they couldn't use the generator in the boat, so when they headed for home, the radio was useless long before they made it back to Churchill.

“It took much longer than I expected,” Dad said. “I'm so sorry, Talia. I never meant to put you through that.” He squeezed me tight against his chest.

I bit my lip and nodded. His words ricocheted around inside my head, bouncing off and echoing one another, like an Inuit throat song inside me. He'd waited. To be safe. And he was. But I still didn't let go of him.

I slowly relaxed my grip and just rested there in his lap, watching the fire flicker in the grate, feeling the rise and fall of his chest against my cheek. He smelled of ocean and sweat and that particular smell that was all his own, and I took it in.

I could breathe again. Until then I hadn't even realized I'd been holding my breath. Now, with Dad back safe and sound, my heart didn't feel like it was jumping around quite so much.

We sat in silence for a while, Dad and me by the fire, while Sura sat across the room on the couch, her eyes large and dark as she watched us.

“For nearly two weeks we searched for belugas, Tal.” His voice was filled with a mixture of frustration and confusion and he ran a hand through his hair, long and in need of a cut. “We found nothing,” he said. “
Nothing.
There were no whales where there should have been whales all along.”

I frowned and thought of my dream, wondering if it was worth mentioning, but Dad's voice took on a new note and he rested his chin against the top of my head.

“And then, on June thirteenth, on your birthday, Tal, we picked up whale song.”

Across the room, the light of the fire caught the gleam of Sura's eyes. She looked as enthralled by Dad's story as I did.

“We watched the edge of the floes all morning, knowing they would surface there, sooner or later. And they did,” Dad continued. “Right around sunrise, Tal, a single white horn, six feet long, rose up out of the water, and then another.”

I gasped and pushed off his chest so I could see his face.

“Narwhals! No belugas from here to Greenland, but we found unicorns!” Dad laughed, exultant.

For two and a half weeks, Dad and his team followed a pod of fourteen whales—nine cows, two bulls, and three juveniles. But when the ice started breaking up, the team was forced back to shore.

“I'm hoping to go back out and see if we can't find them again,” Dad said. “Soon. I was thinking maybe you'd like to come along?”

I stared into his face, trying to decide if he was serious.

Just then the wishes in my jar, still hidden beneath my bed upstairs, started rustling so loudly I was surprised no one else heard them.

Before I could even respond that yes,
yes,
I wanted to come, Dad said suddenly, “You cut your hair.” More a question than a statement.

I just nodded. “Sura helped me get it straight. Do you like it?”

“I like it,” Dad said. He didn't say I looked like Mom, but that was okay.

By the time I'd calmed down and heard enough of Dad's expedition to make me drowsy, morning had officially arrived, though the sun had been up since three o'clock.

Sura made hot chocolate with extra marshmallows, and my mug—the blue one with the spiraling white handle—was nearly empty. Only a bit of thick dark chocolate remained swirling at the bottom.

None of us felt like starting our day after being awake for so many hours, so we decided to pretend the sun wasn't actually up. Sura drew the shades in the front room and Dad scooped me up and carried me upstairs to bed.

Who would have guessed that after such a terrible, horrible, lonely day, the next would begin with so much hope? Dad had come back to me. There were unicorns almost close enough to touch. And my wish—my biggest wish ever—was about to come true.

I rested my head against his shoulder, enjoying the feel of his whiskery face against mine. And as he tucked me into bed and closed my curtains against the morning sun, I told him about the dream I'd had about Mom.

He said nothing, just listening while a kind of half-sad smile played around his eyes.

When I finished, he said, “Tal, I can think of no better place for our missing white whales.”

Then he tucked the covers around me, but paused for a second when he noticed I was wearing the necklace.

“Do you like your birthday present?”

“I love it!” I said. “How did you know?”

“How did I know what?”

“About me and unicorns?”

He shrugged. “I know you love that story Mom used to read to you. And I know it's important to believe good things can happen, even when life doesn't feel good.”

I nodded slowly. “But how do you do that? I mean, really?” I fingered the ends of my hair. “I didn't think you were coming back, Dad—” I swallowed hard, wanting to hang on to him again. “And no matter how hard I stared out at the water or how many times I told myself you'd be back, I was still afraid.”

“I'm sorry.” His voice was sort of choky. “I was afraid, too.”

“You were afraid?”

“Of course. What, I'm not allowed to be scared sometimes?”

“I guess you can be scared.” I smiled, smoothing out the edge of my quilt.

For some reason it seemed strange that my dad would be scared of anything—like,
actually
scared. He'd been going to faraway places and making his own adventures for as long as I could remember.

“What were you scared of?” I asked.

“I was afraid of losing you,” he said. “I still am.”

“But I'm right here! I never went anywhere!” I stared at him, trying to read behind his eyes. I'd always been right here. He was the one who'd left.

He nodded like he was trying to reassure me, and then stared out my bedroom window for a minute.

“Tal, just because you're afraid of something doesn't mean you aren't brave,” he said. “It just means you've learned to recognize the things that can hurt you. Bravery is choosing to believe in the possibility of good things—beautiful things—even when you feel afraid.” He paused. “Your mom taught me that.”

Then he leaned down and kissed my forehead, and pulled a small handheld tape recorder from his pocket—the kind journalists use when doing interviews.

“I have something for you,” he said, holding it up. “Listen.” And he pushed Play.

There was nothing at first, and then a quiet whooshing—the sound of water from beneath the surface, and then without warning, a kind of high-pitched wail, like a woman humming off-key.

Whale song.

Dad had taped the narwhals' song for me, and I sat up in bed, listening as it poured from the recorder into my room. Harmonies belonging only to the sea filled the upstairs room in the blue house, and my heart was swept away. Unfamiliar sounds rose and fell, some deep and resounding, while others climbed, rich and high and sweet.

We listened to them, Dad and I, as the sun shone bright over Hudson Bay. And I made him play the recording twice more before I finally fell asleep to the sounds of unicorns singing.