Waiting for Unicorns (20 page)

THE PACKING HAD BEGUN. We
were getting ready to leave Churchill.

It was weird. I never imagined I'd dread leaving. But that's exactly how I felt. Every time I thought about packing up my things and shipping them back to Massachusetts, a knot twisted my insides and gave me that empty, homesick feeling. Everything I'd felt leaving Woods Hole and coming to Churchill had been flipped over the course of the summer. Home is only home when the people you love live there, and now I had more people to care about here in Churchill than I did back in Woods Hole.

It was surprising really, and I wasn't quite sure what to do about it. I had to go back—to school, to the apartment. And Dad had to teach at the institution. But I knew that a part of me would stay here in Churchill with Sura, and with Simon and the Birdman, too, though they were also leaving soon.

In addition to our personal items, there were several boxes worth of notes and materials that would have to be filed and shipped back to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution when we left next week. Dad had asked me to come to the CNSC one afternoon to help him organize some of the data and prepare it for the trip home.

I told myself that today would just be about helping. I wouldn't try and talk about things, or hope that Dad would try to close up some of the space that was lingering between us. Besides, it took a lot of concentration just to sort through his papers.

The back room was piled high with Dad's notes, recordings of whale sightings and the lack of them, audio files Dad had kept while out on the ice, and an assortment of other materials about whales and Inuit culture.

I knelt on the floor, flipping through stacks of notebooks, trying to find some kind of reason or rhyme to Dad's organizational system. I was just about to add a notebook to the box of materials I'd already sorted when Dad's little green pocket calendar slipped from between the pages and landed face down on the floor.

Dad had misplaced it a few days ago, and though we'd searched everywhere, we had come up empty-handed. Now here it was, lost in his organized chaos. I picked it up, flipping it over and flattening out the wrinkled pages. But I stopped when I saw my name written in one of the squares, sitting there alongside a bunch of margin notes. I flipped another page and there was my name again. And again. And again. In every square. I stared at the page. May twenty-seventh. My name was written there for the first time and next to my name, a tiny number forty. That was the day Dad had left to go out on the ice.

May 28th. My name, and a tiny thirty-nine.

May 29th. My name, and a tiny thirty-eight.

And it continued. My name and a number in every square. He was counting down.

I thought about the loops on my paper chain strung across my window alcove. One loop for every day. I'd been counting the days until Dad came back. And so had he.

Dad was across the hall buried in stacks of papers, a determined look on his face as he sorted through his work. I cleared my throat, not wanting to startle him, and when he looked at me his face grew quiet and serious.

“What's up?” he asked, brushing his hands off and shifting stacks of papers as he got to his feet.

“I found your calendar,” I said, handing it to him.

“Oh, that's great! Good work, Tal!” His face lit up. “I was pretty sure this thing was long gone.” He flipped through the pages, reviewing notes he'd made in various squares.

The room went very quiet and I stared at him, confused. I knew he'd missed me. He'd told me that when we were out on the boat—more or less. But he'd still left. He still wanted to be out there looking for his whales more than he wanted to be with me. If he really missed me all that much, why go in the first place? I had to know.

“Why did you leave?” I asked. My voice sounded hard. “I counted the days, too, Dad. I wanted you here. If you really missed me, why didn't you come back sooner? Or, why did you go at all?”

Dad stared down at the little green book in his hands.

“If I've ever regretted anything, Tal, it's that I was away from you and Mom so much.” He scrubbed one hand over his face. “If I could go back and change anything, that's what I'd change. I know I missed things. Entire parts of your life, without ever meaning to. And I could find a whole world full of justifiable reasons for being gone. But the point is, I was still gone.”

He paused and took a deep breath. “I didn't want to come, Tal,” he said. “I didn't want to come back to Churchill. I didn't want to go on this trip.”

I folded my arms across my chest.

“Then what are we doing here? Why are we here?”

“Because, Talia. Your Mom insisted I—we—go. Even after we knew she was sick.”

“What does that even mean?” I practically shouted.

There was a lump growing in my throat.

“She insisted I go,” he continued, “and she was even more insistent that you come, too, that you stay with Sura while I was out on the ice.”

“No! Mom never would have made me go with you just so I could stay behind with some stranger and watch you leave me!”

The lump in my chest was rising. Growing. Making it harder to talk. Harder to think.

“I needed you! I've needed you all along! And Mom knew that!”

Dad didn't look at me for a minute, and then when he did, his eyes were all wet.

“You're right,” he said, his voice low. “Mom knew you needed me, and on some level, I knew you needed me. But I didn't realize just exactly how much I needed
you,
Talia, until I was out on the ice.” Dad's voice broke and he took a deep breath.

I was having trouble breathing around the lump in my throat. I felt my anger leave, getting swallowed up by all my sadness, and I was doing everything I could to hold it back. But Dad was crying and his words were breaking me up from the inside.

“She made me promise, Talia. She made me promise to go on with my work. She made me promise to bring you out here so that you could see for yourself why this place is so magical. And I couldn't break a promise like that, no matter how much I wanted to. So I went. But I swear, Tal, there wasn't a day out there on the ice I wasn't thinking about you. Worrying about you. Afraid I'd come back and find you'd left me, too. In here.” He placed his hand over his heart. “And, I don't know.” Dad shrugged helplessly. “Maybe I never should have made a promise like that, but I did. And now maybe I'm too late. Maybe I'm thirteen years too late.”

I couldn't breathe. Couldn't move. If I did, it was all going to break apart. It was all going to come crashing in, and I was afraid.

Dad set down his pocket calendar and knelt down, wrapping his big hands around my shoulders.

“I can't fix this, Talia. I can't bring her back. I can't go back and say good-bye the way I would have liked, or give you the chance to do so. Life doesn't give you do-overs. It just gives you new chances. And I think this is mine. I want to take it before it's too late.
I love you,
Talia. Do you understand me? I love you more than I love anyone or anything else on earth, and I will be here for you as many days as I get. I promise you, from now on, your name will be on every square.”

The tears I'd been holding back broke and started streaming down my face. Tears of disappointment and loneliness, anger, frustration, grief, loss, and even tears of joy spilled out of me. Hot and fast, they fell. They made my shoulders shake and I didn't try to stop them. I didn't bother to wipe them away. I just let them come. Maybe they wouldn't stop or maybe they would. Maybe I'd always be a little sad, somewhere inside me. But my dad loved me. More than whales, more than anything.

He loved me.

And he said so. Out loud.

Because of that, I knew things would be okay. I knew that I could choose to be brave, because that's what love does. It puts courage in all your empty places and lets you believe that good things, impossible things, can still happen.

Dad scooped me up and we settled down on the floor together. He cradled me against his chest and we stayed like that, crying together. When our tears finally stopped, we just sat there, not saying anything for a while.

Then suddenly, I knew what I wanted to tell him.

“Hey, Dad?” I asked.

“Hmmm?” His voice was a low rumble somewhere deep in his chest.

“Do you believe in making wishes?”

He was quiet for a minute and then kissed the top of my hair and nodded, and I felt tears slide down my cheeks again, despite being certain I'd cried myself dry.

“Is this about your jar?” he asked.

I looked up at him, surprised.

“Mom told me about your jar, but I've never seen it,” he said. “I figured when you wanted me to know about it, you'd tell me.” He paused for a minute like he was searching for the right words. “Wishing can be very good,” he said, his voice cracking. “But I think we both know, unicorn whale or not, all the wishes in the world won't bring her back.”

I said nothing. I didn't have to, because deep down, I knew it was true. I'd known it for a long time. And I'd been so busy waiting, wishing for something I might never find, that I almost missed everything I had found already.

This place had changed me, because Churchill
is
magic. Here in this place I saw for myself that even the most frozen, bitter, iced-over, and broken places on earth can thaw. Even the ones inside me.

Later that night, after Dad and Sura had gone to bed, and after I'd had time to think, I examined my jar of wishes.

As Churchill summer faded toward winter, the sun and moon had started returning to their proper places in the night sky. It was late now, and the moon shone bright outside my window, casting a patch of silver light across my bedroom floor. I sat down in it, and held my jar up to the moon, shaking it gently so the light could get inside.

Then, unscrewing the lid, I opened it, reached inside, and riffled through my wishes until I found the first one, almost yellow, wrinkled, and stained with my tears. I pulled out that no-cancer wish first, just like always, kissed it, and laid it on the floor in the moonlight. Then I plucked the others from my jar one by one, reading them all until my jar was empty and my wishes were spread around me.

I was surprised to find how many of them had already been granted. It was like the Birdman had said—I was so busy wishing for big things that I had missed all the smaller but still important things coming true right under my nose.

I'd wished for a friend. And I had found Simon.

I'd wished for a place that felt like home. And I had the blue house on the edge of Hudson Bay.

When the belugas went missing, I'd wished for whales. And Dad found unicorns.

I'd wished to have a family again. And I had Sura, and Simon, and the Birdman. And for the first time in a long time, I felt like I had my dad, too.

After I read them all, I carefully gathered them up and slipped my wishes back into my jar. All of them except for two.

I wish I knew how to make crème brûlée.

I wish I could grow roses.

Mom's wishes.

These, I smoothed out and pinned to my corkboard beside the arctic tern's white feather.

“Plunge and rise again,” I whispered.

Then I took my jar, tucked it under my arm, and crept down the stairs and outside into the night.

I paused, listening. Everything was quiet. Standing there in the moonlight for a minute, I imagined the blue house smiling down on me as it leaned into the wind—leaned toward the bay, like it had been showing me the way all along.

I carried my jar to the edge of Hudson Bay, and on my knees, I emptied the tiny slips of paper out into the water. I let go of my wishes, set them free. Then I stood there a while and watched as my wishes drifted, like dozens and dozens of tiny white whales, out into the Arctic Sea.

ON AUGUST TWENTY-SEVENTH, Dad and
I boarded a small plane, taxied down the runway, and bounced into Canadian skies, bound for Massachusetts.

We'd said good-bye to Simon and the Birdman the week before, waving as their own plane carried them home.

The Birdman had made me promise to keep looking for birds, and Simon had played a song for Dad and me before closing with his customary bow.

“Don't forget me, Talia,” Simon had said as he hugged me good-bye.

“Forget you? How could I possibly forget you?” I fingered the broken-guitar-string bracelet he'd made me. “I'll be too busy missing you to have any time left for forgetting,” I said, suddenly trying not to cry.

“Good,” Simon said with a crooked smile, and he hugged me again.

They'd be back the following summer, as they had summers before, and as I waved good-bye, I was already counting the days.

School would start for me the first week in September, and Dad had to be back at the institution to teach and report on his research. But we told Sura we'd be back for Christmas, because that's what families do.

Sura was going to teach me to make crème brûlée, along with her famous touton and a whole bunch of other things. I wanted to be a part of the magic she made in her kitchen. I wanted to learn to tell people how much I loved them by the things I cooked for them, like she did.

No one knows what happened to the beluga whales that summer, my first summer in Churchill. Various research teams scoured the coast, looking for mass beachings along the shores of Greenland and Canada—places where the whales are known to run themselves aground. But no trace of them was ever found.

Sura once told me that the Inuit have a story about a young woman—Sedna—goddess of the sea. It's said that when the people no longer listen to greater truths, and grow self-seeking, she weeps and mourns, and all the creatures of the sea leave their dwelling places to go and comfort her. And when the people change, realizing the seas are empty because they have chosen small things over great, then Sedna is comforted. And all the creatures of the sea return.

Sure enough, the belugas returned like clockwork the first week in June the following year, and Dad and I were there to welcome them back. I stood on the deck of Dad's boat, a pair of headphones clapped on my ears, and I listened to them sing.

Dad had a few theories about their mysterious absence, several of which ended up in papers published by the institution. I saved them all and pinned them to my corkboard.

But if you were to ask me, I'd tell you that there are two kinds of stories—the kind people make up to help them explain something they can't believe, and the kind people make up to help them believe something they can't explain.

 

And this, well, this is a believing story.