Waiting for Unicorns (9 page)

Simon shot me a frantic are-you-ready-to-land-this-thing? look, and then abruptly dropped the charade. My face must have given me away again.

“
Jeez,
Talia, I'm just messing around!” Jumping up, he stood there, awkward and apologetic. The imaginary airplane faded around him, turning back into the empty wreck. But it had been too real. I felt sick, like I needed to throw up. I took a few deep breaths, frustrated with myself.

“Sorry—I just, I don't know. It's just sad and terrible. Or something.”

Sitting down on the edge of the plane's open cockpit, I let my feet dangle and breathed in the cold arctic air. Since Mom's funeral, I couldn't bear to think about death. Pretending it was a game was even worse. If you've never seen the face of someone you love, all cold and quiet, and
gone,
then it's a little hard to explain.

“No one died, you know—in the crash,” the Guitar Boy said as he sat down beside me. “There were only three crew members, the pilot and two others. Two of the men were hurt, but they recovered just fine.”

I just nodded and looked out over the landscape. Rolling tundra scattered with glacial rock and scrub pine stretched into the distance before sinking toward the white frozen surface of Hudson Bay.

“Sorry—” I began, but he cut me off.

“Nah, it's all right.” The Guitar Boy grinned, and then because he seemed more comfortable using other people's words to say what he meant, he pulled his guitar around and broke into song.

Up till now, Simon had only sung one song I knew. I'd only just met him and I'd already lost track of the number of songs he'd played today, spontaneously pulling his guitar around from where it hung across his back and bursting into song. But now as he began strumming, I recognized the melody as something Mom used to sing along to on the radio, and the force of it was so heavy and sudden I almost clapped my hands over my ears. If this song had come waltzing out of the speakers, I would have turned the radio off. Instead I took a deep breath and clenched my hands together in my lap. Though I didn't really want to, I forced myself to listen as that song floated out into the crisp morning air.

Surprisingly, it didn't make my chest ache like I thought it would. This boy and his guitar were different. I might have even gone on listening and actually liking it, but he didn't get very far into the song before a sudden
twang
interrupted him.

“Oh
man.
” He fingered the long string that dangled, broken, from the neck of his guitar. “I hate it when perfectly good things break, ya know?”

“Yeah.” I
did
know.

“Oh well.” He shrugged. “Sometimes broken things are better for other stuff.”

Loosening the key, he unwound the broken string, took my hand, and wrapped it around my wrist, twisting and securing it into a bracelet. I stared at it for a minute before glancing up at him.

“Thanks, Simon.” I tried out his name, feeling self-conscious as I fingered the broken guitar string.

He smiled and slung his guitar over his shoulder again, twisting it around till it hung across his back. Then Simon jumped down onto the wing of the plane, and waited, humming, while I scrambled down after him.

THAT FIRST WEEK without Dad
dragged on, though the Guitar Boy and the Birdman made things seem a little less bleak. Long days never seem quite so long when there are interesting people in them, and my new friends were definitely interesting. Still, I needed to keep track of my days.

Dad had taken his pocket calendar with him and I didn't have one of my own. So instead, I made a paper chain, one loop of paper linked through another, and I strung it around the corners of my window alcove. I'd tear one loop off every day until he came back. That way I'd be able to count down the days until Dad returned, and I could forget how many he had been gone. I didn't know the exact day Dad would be back, but he expected the ice to go out the first week in July. So I gave him till July seventh. That morning, June fifth, I tore the eighth loop from my chain, leaving, hopefully, only thirty-two loops until Dad came back.

I should have been used to Dad being gone. He'd been away for a lot of my life. But I missed him. I missed the idea of him and all that that meant. Home. Mom. So when Sura invited Simon and his grandfather for dinner that eighth-loop night, at first I thought she was just trying to make me feel better. But as I watched the three of them around the table—Sura, Simon, and the Birdman—I realized they would have been here whether I was part of the mix or not.

The Birdman had been coming to Churchill for years. Fifteen to be exact, and he and Sura had been friends for most of that time. Simon had started coming with his grandfather a couple years ago.

“Mom is big on real-life education,” Simon told me over a game of rummy later that evening. “I'm homeschooled, you know.”

I looked up. “You're homeschooled?”

He nodded.

This surprised me. The homeschooled kids I knew were super smart, but kinda quiet. Simon was smart, but he was the furthest thing from quiet I'd ever met.

“Yep, I've been at home since second grade. Anyway, Mom and Dad are always trying to make sure I get a lot of real-life learning. And real-life environmental and cultural science experiences are sorta hard to come by when you're moving around a lot. My dad's in the military.”

Simon laid down a red six, playing off the run I'd laid down on my last turn.

“I'm not about to argue spending the summers with my granddad in Churchill. Pretty sure it's the best real-life education I'll ever get.” He grinned, and I glanced over at the Birdman, deep in conversation with Sura.

What would it be like to have someone like him for a grandfather? I didn't have any grandparents left, and what little I remembered of them had more to do with nursing homes than bird-watching and arctic adventure.

“Your turn,” Simon said.

Smiling, I carefully laid down a run of spades and two kings, emptying my hand.

“I win.” I leaned back in my chair and folded my arms across my chest.

Simon ran his hands through his hair until it stuck up on just one side.

“You're either really good at cards or really lucky,” he said. This was the third time in a row he'd lost.

“My mom and I used to play a lot.” I bit my lip. I hadn't meant to say anything about her. “And I—I guess I'm lucky.” I fumbled over the words. I didn't want to leave anything about Mom hanging out there in space like an unanswered question. Simon would ask me about her, I knew he would, so I waited. But he never did. He just shrugged and gathered up the cards.

“Well, I think I'd better steer clear of you when it comes to card games,” he said. “Not sure I can take losing like this every time.”

“I guess I could let you win sometimes,” I shrugged, relieved. “Maybe.”

He laughed. “Wow. Maybe? That's super generous.”

And it was my turn to laugh.

“Well, I have to be good at something!” I nodded at his guitar. “You've already got the music scene covered.”

“Fair enough,” he said, grinning. Then he pulled his guitar from where it hung on the back of his chair and broke into song. He made it look as easy as breathing.

We sang and played card games late into the night. And from that evening on, Simon and I spent almost every waking minute together. We did a lot of exploring and some bird-watching with Simon's grandfather, too. Even Sura came along a couple times, which was actually kind of nice.

Sura and I hadn't really talked about things since Dad left—about Mom, or even about how Dad was this sort of present-yet-absent force in my life. We didn't need to. Sura just seemed good at understanding. Or maybe she and Dad had talked before we came, so she knew about some of our brokenness. But if Dad had said anything to Sura, she never mentioned it. And I never asked.

Before Dad left, I'd been worried that Sura was all determined to be some kind of fill-in mom. But the better I got to know her, the more I realized that Sura wasn't actually treating me any different than she treated everyone else. She took care of people, loving them with the food she made and other things she did for them. Like when Dad came back from his first scouting trip on the ice. The special dinner Sura had made for us that night gave me a pretty good idea about what she thought of us. And on top of that she just sort of mothered everyone. Sura was one of those people who seemed to know what others need and wanted to do something about it. Once I figured this out, it didn't bother me quite so much. I wouldn't say we were best friends or anything, but I felt like we were starting to understand each other.

It was surprising. I didn't expect to like Sura very much—to like being around her. I'd been so sure that spending my summer with a stranger would be one of the worst parts of this whole thing. Maybe I'd been wrong about that.

When I wasn't with Sura or out exploring with Simon and the Birdman, I studied my wishes and waited anxiously by the radio receiver. Dad was good about calling in on the days we'd agreed upon. And every time the receiver crackled to life, my heart jumped into my throat, and relief would race clear to the ends of my fingers. Our conversations were always the same.

“VE4 portable W1APL, this is Dad. Over.”

“Go ahead, W1APL.” I'd say this into the radio. Then Dad would give me his location and I'd pull out the coordinate ruler. Lining it up with the grid marks on the map that hung over my desk, I'd make a mark where the latitude and longitude coordinates intersected, just like he'd shown me. With each new mark I made, I drew a line from the last location Dad had given me, charting his course across the wall. It was like playing connect-the-dots, only I couldn't tell what sort of picture would emerge from all of those connected lines. Maybe it would be a picture of the one thing we were both looking for and couldn't seem to find.

“How's the weather down south?” Dad would ask, his voice crackling over the radio static. I'd laugh and tell him I was wearing my sundress and flip-flops, which of course I wasn't. I couldn't even imagine myself in a sundress. I couldn't make that picture fit in this place of snow and ice, no matter what the sun might eventually do to warm things up.

“All is well on the ice,” Dad would say. “No fish, but I'm not starving yet,” which meant that he still hadn't seen any whales, but that he wasn't giving up.

“All is well on land, too,” I'd tell him. “No bears and the natives are friendly,” which meant that I was safe and that Sura and I were doing okay.

“See you soon,” Dad would finish, and we would say good-bye until our next scheduled call-in.

“Copy,” I'd reply. “Over and out.”

“Over and out,” he'd respond.

And then the radio would go silent again.

ONE AFTERNOON WHEN THE SUN
felt a little warmer than we were used to, the Birdman, Simon, and I packed a lunch and went looking for birds. It was weird, going to look for them when they were all around us. But apparently, big things would start happening in the bird world as the weather shifted toward spring.

“We are not looking for everyday, ordinary birds,” the Birdman said. “We are looking for something else.” The Birdman was pretty energetic for an old man, and sometimes his birding treks across Churchill got kind of intense. “We are looking for something that must be
sought.
” And he swept his arms up and around, taking in all of Churchill and Hudson Bay.

“Sought?” I asked, wondering what, exactly, would be required.

“Sought,” he repeated. “Do you think wonderful things will simply fall into your lap without the slightest effort on your part?”

I blinked at him. I'd never really thought about that before.

The Birdman wagged a teasing finger at me. “You of all people should know better, Talia Lea McQuinn,” he said.

“I should?”

“You should,” he insisted. “All good things always require a little effort.”

I was beginning to turn this thought over in my mind when the Birdman turned to Simon. “We will have to keep our eyes open and our lips still.”

Simon's lips were never still, and I laughed as he broke into spontaneous song—a made-up tune about people who talk too much and people who don't talk enough.

For the most part, though, we kept our mouths quiet and saw a number of birds that afternoon. None of them were all that unusual to the Birdman—he had a pretty exhaustive list. But for me, they were all rare and wonderful.

I wanted to learn to identify them, so the Birdman had given me his little pocket field guide to Canadian birds, and I pored over it, trying to memorize the names of the birds I'd never seen. Verdins and nuthatches, plovers and turnstones, gulls, ravens, and all kinds of birds of prey. There were photos and descriptions of songbirds, too—warblers, swifts, sparrows, larks—and other insect-eating birds. But none of those had arrived in Churchill yet. Things hadn't thawed out enough to hatch their breakfast, lunch, and dinner—mosquitoes, blackflies, and other pesky bugs. But they'd be on their way before long. Or so the Birdman said. Even though it had warmed up a bit, I had a hard time believing spring was only a few weeks away, considering how wintery everything still looked.

“Just wait,” the Birdman said. “One morning you'll wake up and realize exactly how quiet it's been. There'll be songbirds everywhere, and you'll suddenly discover you've missed their song.”

I figured he was right. He'd been coming to Churchill long enough, so I started listening for them—for those birds whose names I was just learning. And even though it was the first time I'd ever missed them, their absence suddenly felt loud.

Just before we stopped for lunch that afternoon, the Birdman led us out toward the end of a rocky peninsula jutting into the bay. The ice was beginning to recede from its edges, and I followed the Birdman's finger as he pointed out the shape of a massive bird in flight. Settled on a driftwood log bleached white by the sun and smooth as bone was an eagle majestically folding up his impressive wingspan. He studied us imperviously from where he rested on the tip of the peninsula.

The bald eagle was one of the few birds I could identify without Simon or the Birdman's help. I'd seen them a few times before, and they never failed to make me catch my breath. They seemed to carry themselves differently than other birds, like royalty, even though they were scavengers.

“All right, you two,” the Birdman said to Simon and me. “Tell me what you know about your national bird.”

I laughed, because though we were in Canada, there was still a bit of national pride invoked by the Birdman's request, and Simon and I were happy to prove our allegiance.

“Well, it's a bird of prey, but it rarely kills its own food like hawks or owls do,” Simon began. “Except for fish—it kills a lot of those. Mostly, it just eats whatever it can find.”

“And it typically lives near large bodies of water and forests of old growth, because it likes to nest in tall trees,” I said, scanning the snowy shoreline behind me. This far north the trees didn't get very big because of the poor climate conditions.

The Birdman nodded and followed my gaze.

“You're right,” he said. “But if large old trees are unavailable, the eagle will nest on the ground. They're resourceful birds,” he said.

“Oh, and they usually return to the same nest every year,” I added, proud of what information I remembered from school.

“In 1782, the United States Seal was designed with the bald eagle on it,” Simon said. “It has thirteen arrows in one talon and a thirteen-leafed olive branch in the other—for times of peace and times of war. Thirteen on account of the thirteen original colonies,” he finished.

“How do you know that?” I asked.

Simon grinned and shrugged. “I like history.”

“You
like
history?” I asked. “No one likes history.”

Simon just laughed.

The Birdman handed me his binoculars and I peered through them, loving their magic. As I looked at the world through them, space opened up on itself, compressing everything around me. Where only a blur of feathers or a flash of color was visible before, the flicker of the eagle's opaque eyelid and the individual shafts of his wingtip feathers came into view—close and immediate. How nice it would be to see like that all the time—never missing the most important things, however tiny or far away. I shifted the binoculars away from the eagle and worked my way down the shoreline. But everything was empty and still. As far as I could tell, the eagle was alone.

“Oh, I almost forgot,” I said suddenly, lowering the binoculars and returning them to the Birdman. “They mate for life.”

The magnificent bird stretched his wings and stood on tiptoe for a minute, like he was assessing the wind, and then he lurched into the air. Simon and the Birdman watched him leave, but I scanned the sky and the shoreline for something else, wondering if his mate was out there somewhere. Wondering if he was going to her.

After we had done enough seeking to satisfy the Birdman, we ate the lunch Sura had packed for us: caribou jerky, fried touton, and a couple of apples with cheese. Then we washed it all down with water from our canteens.

I had watched Sura make touton one afternoon, perched on the counter as she deftly blended flour, baking powder, salt, bear fat, and water, using her hands to shape and knead the mixture into a smooth dough. The bear fat part made me nervous, but really, it was pretty much just like the fat my mom drained off bacon from those Saturday morning breakfasts we used to have together. Smelled the same, too. And with some sugar sprinkled on top, I might as well have been eating a doughnut from the corner bakery back in Woods Hole. I was getting brave about trying new things. Well, at least a little bit. It helped that Sura was sort of easing me into it.

After lunch, the three of us continued on, taking the back roads on the edge of town, wandering into the scrub now and then, though never very far because of the possibility of bears, and the Birdman refused to carry a gun.

Before long my boots were caked in icy mud from the road and peat moss from the scrub, and Simon was pulling lichen and twigs from my hair. I felt like a walking collection of arctic habitat.

“You look like you grew here,” Simon said. “Like you belong here.” He carefully untangled a bit of black spruce from my hair. His words hung in the air for a minute like a bird in flight. And then I let them land on me and sink in.

“Thanks,” I said. And I ducked my head, hurrying after the Birdman before Simon had a chance to say any other nice things to me.

We made our way back toward the bay, which was still frozen over, but the sun had started warming the shallow waters, especially where the Churchill River emptied into the bay. Ice was gradually receding from shore and there was a good twenty yards of open water around the edge now. Even though it was early, we searched for shorebirds and waders with their long beaks and stilt-like legs. But our efforts went unrewarded; it was still too cold. Instead I listened as the Birdman described them, imitating their calls as he showed me their pictures in the field guide.

“In a few weeks' time sandpipers, plovers, and stints will scour this shoreline for food,” he said. And my imagination was filled with flurries of wings and peeping cries that would ring out among the rocks and ripples.

We headed home after that, but before we got very far the Birdman suddenly stopped and pointed to the sky where a small white bird hovered, beating the air with his wings the way a hummingbird does. It looked almost as if there were an invisible string suspending him over the ring of open water around the shore.

“What is it?” I asked.

“It's an arctic tern,” said the Birdman. “And he's early. That, my dear, is the bravest, most determined little bird to rise over icy waters.”

“Why?” I asked. “Because he's so early?”

The Birdman nodded. “He's unusually early.”

The bird hung against the blue spring sky, so white he looked more like the absence of blue in the shape of a bird. Only a small cap of dark plumage gave him away, low over his face, making him look like a tiny aviation pilot, his hat resting low on the bridge of his nose.

“He's brave because of the distance he covers,” the Birdman continued. “The arctic tern makes a round-trip flight of about forty-four thousand miles every year. He flies from the Arctic pole to the Antarctic pole, and then back again, every year. It's the longest migratory distance of any bird on the planet. In his lifetime that little bird will make the equivalent of three round-trips to the moon!”

“Really? That's crazy!” Simon glanced up at the sky like he could somehow eyeball the distance across the blue cloudless span. It was hard to imagine one little bird covering that much ground. It made the distance I'd traveled from Woods Hole to Churchill seem like hardly anything at all.