Blaze Island Read online

  Leo Borders swung his truck into the lane, trucker’s cap pulled over his brow. At his side, his brother Tom, oldest of the Borders brothers, gave a nod. From behind Leo, Frank extracted himself from the jump seat, long legs in flight as he leaped from the cab.

  “We’ll come by later when tide and brook’s lower and pull her out then,” Leo said, peering down at Miranda through the cab window. “Now tell your father, Miranda, the road’s going to take some repair. I’ll get a call into the town as soon as the phones are working, but we’ll likely be enjoying our own company for a few more days.”

  Their own company plus a stranger’s: Frank had come to stand, tall and unusual, beside Miranda. A new day and he was still here, emphatic by daylight and filling her with an awe that made her both want to observe him and run in the other direction. As the men pulled away, Frank told her the car was totalled, obviously.

  “You can borrow anything you need from us.”

  The storm had left him with even less than she’d had upon arriving on Blaze Island. Under his lime-green jacket, he wore the sweater she’d loaned him the night before. The rubber boots, a pair of her father’s, must fit him well enough. He’d retrieved his skinny, ripped jeans and by daylight looked a little more at home in his borrowed clothes. Miranda wondered what it would feel like to draw him. The cheekbones, the black hair, the lips. Her skin prickled. He didn’t seem distressed as much as floating on a cloud of shocked equanimity.

  “Your father asked me to bring down some more wood so I was doing that when Leo and Tom showed up.” It felt strange to hear the men’s names in Frank’s mouth. Together he and Miranda tossed a few more logs into the barrow, then set off, Frank manoeuvring the wheelbarrow joltingly over the lane’s puddled ruts. When a pair of sanderlings flew past, he glanced at them.

  “A bit freaky seeing everything by daylight.” Frank raised his sunglassed face to the wide, bright arc of blue. “What I drove into. What might have happened, the horror of the hypothetical. Then there’s everything else, which is spectacular and awesome. This sky, for instance.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “I have some beautiful bruises coming in but otherwise I’m fine.” He seemed distracted, now, by the wind turbine. No accidentals yet, he told her.

  When Miranda asked Frank if her father had returned, Frank said no. She was about to ask if anyone else had passed by on a quad, thinking of Caleb, only Frank was already inquiring about the village. Miranda told him: missing shingles, a missing boat, and one woman’s roof had blown off.

  “Do you often get hurricanes out here?”

  “It was really only the edge of one,” Miranda said.

  “But, like, is that becoming more common? Hurricanes coming farther north?”

  “I guess so.” She wasn’t sure why she didn’t want to admit this.

  In the yard, within their run, Rosie, the most assertive of the hens, hurried in their direction, Mimi murmuring behind her, the hens’ stippled, brown-gold plumage winking in the sunlight. Sylvia had given Miranda the eggs, and she’d hatched all eight of them under a grow light in the bathroom. There were three eggs in the laying box, one warm, all of them blue. Frank peered at the eggs in Miranda’s hands and said he’d never seen a blue egg in his life. “I’ve heard of green eggs — and ham. But not — what would you call this colour? Pale sky?”

  “They’re Ameraucanas, and they only lay blue eggs.”

  “Do blue eggs taste different than brown or white ones?”

  “Our eggs taste — a bit like the sea, a bit like the grass, intense. You have to try one.”

  Frank turned to her with what felt like sharp scrutiny. “Apologies if this is kind of forward, but you and your father — your accents don’t sound like you’re from around here.”

  “We’ve lived out here a long time.” Miranda had a violent wish for her father to reappear. Frank was a visitor. Naturally he was curious. About them. Was it wrong to tell him things? Her body stiffened. She asked if he’d grown up in Boston.

  “No, no, all over. Like, Florida, Virginia, New England. My parents are very, hmm, peripatetic?” — Frank gestured to the solar panel fixed to the rocks beyond her father’s office shed — “And everything’s off-grid?”

  Miranda nodded, tucking the eggs into her wool cap.

  “Is your father some kind of survivalist? I did happen to notice the rifle hanging on the rack over the kitchen door.”

  Again, her muscles contracted. Was there a name for what they were? “He hunts. Everyone around here hunts. We live close to the land. And try not to use too much power.”

  She had no experience describing her life to a stranger. On the island, her life had its peculiarities, but this was different. She’d expected her father back by now. He’d implied that he was only making a quick trip in to the cabin, but perhaps he’d stopped by the village on his return.

  On the other side of the door, Ella gave eager yips. She leaped into the air when the door opened — “Ella, watch the eggs!”

  There was a thud behind Miranda. Frank swore. Crumpled against the bridge, he lay clutching his forehead, Ella all over him. “You need signs on your house telling tall people to duck.”

  Miranda had to put the eggs down and call off Ella, haul her away from Frank by the collar. He’d survived a car crash, crawled through dark fields in a hurricane, been dragged through their door, only to smash into her door frame the next morning, a red welt forming on his forehead. Now he struggled to his feet and hunched through the doorway as if afraid the door itself might hit him. A moment before he’d had almost a detective’s curiosity.

  After soaking a tea towel in cold water, Miranda told him to lie on the fisherman’s daybed, which Frank did, cloth over his forehead, long legs dangling off the end but no, he said, no concussion. At least he stopped asking her questions, although there was something about him that kept tugging her troublesome past out of the deep.

  . . .

  During the weeks after her mother’s death, Miranda woke in the dark of the Princeton house to the sound of her father sobbing. Her own tears were long silent streams, while her trembling body hovered somewhere up above the Earth.

  One afternoon, she came upon her father at the kitchen table, head buried in his arms. He started up, pale cheekbones like fists, and told her that something else had happened. The major funding that supported his research hadn’t been renewed, because of the allegations against him. They weren’t true, but he hadn’t yet officially been cleared. Without funding, he had to let his research team go, all his post-docs, his graduate students. The university couldn’t fire him because he had tenure, but the administration had decided to dissolve the centre, which effectively meant he had no job.

  “They’re saying they’re concerned about an unsafe environment for students,” he said. “Unsafe environment! Because of the threats and the protests and the sniper but oh, oh, the irony!” He gave a raw and reckless laugh, almost a scream, which he then tried to stifle.

  “Listen, Miranda,” he said quietly, “the thing is, our house belongs to the university, and the university wants it back, so we’re going to have to move.”

  “Where will we go?” Miranda asked in a whisper, nearly mute.

  “Dearest one, I’m not sure yet, but I’ll figure out something. I love you more than anyone and I’ll find a good, safe place for us, I promise from the depths of my soul.” Gathering her into his arms, her father held her and rocked her and for just a moment it was possible to feel safe.

  “Where are we going?” Miranda asked him on that July morning as, with all their remaining belongings stuffed in the car, they sped up the interstate. Raindrops quivered at the edges of the wipers and smeared across the windshield. They were in Massachusetts now.

  “North,” her father said from behind his sunglasses.

  Would they drive as far north as the Arctic, was it even possible to drive to the Arctic?

  “You said we were in trouble,” Miranda said, pushing
the words out of her mouth. “Does that mean we’re going to die?”

  “No,” her father said sharply. “Everyone dies but we’re not going to die now. We’re going to be fine.”

  Somewhere in New Hampshire, he said, “We’re not at war but sometimes things feel like a war, there’s so much money and power arrayed against people like us, and those people are swaying other people not to believe that humans have anything to do with the warming weather. It’s no use my speaking out any more because I’ve been compromised. So we’re going to retreat. We’ll leave others to take up the cause. Things will change, sweetheart. It’ll just take some effort and time.”

  As he spoke Miranda felt like she’d been in unknown places with him. He was speaking to her, not as if she were a child but someone else.

  That night, in a lonely motel room in Maine, they watched reports about the unusually heavy downpours. Stretches of the I-95 behind them had flooded so high they had to be closed, said a male news anchor. A story came on about a woman who lived outside Bar Harbor, trapped in high water on a country road near her house. She reversed her van only to have the current catch it, forcing her to struggle out the van door, clutching her three-year-old son. She tried to hold onto her child, but the water grabbed him, swept the boy away. The next time Miranda looked at the TV, a moose was being borne downstream by racing flood waters. Miranda’s father, lying on the other twin bed, switched off the television, removed his sunglasses, and turned away from her, curled in on himself. He gave a sob, which he seemed to be trying to strangle. She wanted to touch him but didn’t know how, and so, on her own twin bed, in the wan light of the single bedside lamp, Miranda lay absolutely still. If she lay still enough, for long enough, maybe the police and the searchers would find the boy alive and the moose wouldn’t drown and the rain would stop falling. When her father turned at last in her direction, he stared at Miranda as if he were shocked at the sight of her and had no idea who she was. Heart speeding, she closed her eyes.

  The next day they crossed the border into Canada. At Saint Andrews, New Brunswick, the clean-shaven border guard took their Canadian passports, asked Miranda’s father to remove his sunglasses and state the reason for his return.

  Her father handed his sunglasses to Miranda. Clearing his throat, he said, “I miss the pristine landscapes of my home and native land.”

  “Do you have permission from the child’s other legal guardian to be travelling with the child?”

  “My wife just died.” His tone made the border officer clear his own throat while Miranda’s father asked her to pass him the bag at her feet. After rustling in it for a moment, he handed the guard some paperwork.

  Evergreens blurred past outside the car windows. The air still streamed with rain. Then they were on a ferry that would carry them through the night to another province that was an island out at sea. In the night, Miranda woke to find her father, on the bottom bunk, still in his sunglasses, staring at maps on his laptop, edges of land and water, water as far as her eye could make out.

  When she woke again, she was still in the ferry cabin but her mother was in the room, poised on the single chair, on top of their discarded clothes, watching Miranda. Her wild dark hair tumbled in waves down her back. She had on the flowered raincoat and red boots she’d been wearing the last time she’d left the house. Everything in Miranda’s body surged towards her. A smile swept over her mother’s perfect lips. She raised a finger to them.

  Under Miranda’s pillow was the black sweater belonging to her mother that she’d stuffed in her suitcase in the rush of leaving. Every night before sleep she buried her face in it and, breathing in her mother’s scent, felt her ribs close around her grieving heart. Every night she was overcome with the longing to steal her father’s phone, call her mother’s number, tell her where they were. In her knapsack she kept one of her mother’s business cards. Jenny Erens, artist. Before leaving the Princeton house, she’d looked one last time at her mother’s website, all the paintings now sold or placed in storage. In a box Miranda had packed one of her mother’s smallest canvases, thin figures in a forest overlaid with a shining layer of ghostly buildings; her paintings were like time, a map of time. Miranda wanted her mother to know she’d brought the painting, and that her father had a bigger one, wrapped in brown paper. Every speck of Miranda’s body closed around the possibility of if: if she had not called out to her mother on the last afternoon wanting her to take one last look, if she had not been wearing her pink running shoes, her mother would have lived.

  Every day that spring, her mother had raced off to her studio in an old building halfway between their house and the university to work on new, large paintings for her second solo show, but that particular afternoon, mid-May, after school, she was rushing off somewhere else. Miranda’s father was also elsewhere. At his office, Miranda’s mother said. The babysitter hadn’t yet arrived. Some people had gathered outside his building, Jenny said. She was going to join Miranda’s father and offer her support. All this sounded vague, as if there were other things Miranda’s mother wasn’t saying, but her impetuous energy was the same as ever, bold and vivacious and urgent. As soon as she left a room you leaned into her absence.

  In the front hall, smoothing red lipstick over her lips, Jenny said to Miranda, “Danielle just texted me. She’ll be here any moment.”

  Even then, Miranda had tried to slow her mother, holding up her phone because she wanted her mother to look at the film she was making with Uma, about pandas, using two stuffed toys, a real piece of bamboo, and a painted scroll with stars on it that read, Let Us Live. And, hurrying as she was, Jenny had stopped long enough to look at the pandas, the stars, the words, as if sensing Miranda’s need and pleasure, to marvel at the little film and praise her. If only the film had been longer or there’d been no film at all. If only her mother had stayed. Instead she’d stood there wavering, glanced at her phone. She kissed Miranda on the forehead, rustled her hair, told her she loved her, the movie was beautiful.

  “I’ll be back soon,” she said. With one last hug and the snap of her bike helmet’s chin strap, she was gone.

  Five o’clock then six o’clock passed. Danielle, the babysitter, who’d arrived as Jenny departed, left for a swim class. When the land line rang, Miranda decided not to answer it. She was in the kitchen texting Uma when her father burst in the front door. His face. It was like someone had struck him with an axe. He said there’d been an accident.

  If only she had clung to her mother’s coat and screamed and refused to let her go, if only she’d fallen sick, if only her mother had taken Prospect not Ivy on the way to the protest organized by climate-change deniers outside the building that housed her father’s centre then she would not have been hit by a car as she biked the last stretch, a car driven by a known climate-change denier, a man with an assault rifle in the back seat, though whether he’d had the heart attack before or after he swerved into Miranda’s mother and crashed into a tree, instantly killing himself, no coroner could determine.

  Now her mother was in the news, not because of her painting, though she was described as a painter and wife of —. Because while the accident couldn’t be directly attributed to the protest it was nevertheless tangled up in it. In the hospital room, Miranda reached out a trembling finger to touch her unconscious mother’s swollen and nearly unrecognizable face, her head shaved, tubes running all over her, as her father, in his heart-wrecked voice said to the doctor, “Yes, you can withdraw life support.”

  In their cabin on the ferry as it travelled across the Gulf of St. Lawrence through the night, her beautiful mother held up cards, no, tiny paintings that moved, only it was impossible to see what the figures in them were doing. The boat beneath them swayed. As Miranda reached out, tears forming, her mother’s faraway face reassured her softly, Your father will find you a new home.

  When Miranda woke next, her father, dressed, was packing their bags. He looked at her as if he actually saw her and gathered her to him.

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nbsp; The next day the rain let up a little. That night, in a motel in Badger, Newfoundland, her bearded father announced, “We’re almost there.”

  “Where?” Miranda asked. Anticipation had left her. It felt as if they’d been travelling forever and were never going to stop.

  “You’ll see,” her father said. Now, despite the blankness of his sunglasses, a tendril of new warmth lived in his voice. “Soon. I promise, sweetheart. We’re not going to drive forever.”

  They came at last to a place that was barely a place at all called Adieu, pronounced A-dew, as they discovered in the store where Miranda’s father stopped to buy gas. It was dusk. Every night Miranda had lain as still as possible in her bed. The rain had finally halted and her father’s sobs had quieted, too. Although it seemed impossible to go any farther, they followed a long and lonely road that led them at last to a wooden booth on a perch of land facing the wide and empty ocean.

  “Yes, boy, you’ve found us,” said the man in the white booth, drawing out his yes like a net you’d catch things in. Ahead lay only a boarded-up trailer with a For Sale sign nailed over another sign that said Chip Truck, and closer to the water, one low wooden building, a dock, and some white lines painted on the pavement. “Are you sure we’re in the right place?” Miranda asked nervously. Everything seemed so desolate. Her father said they were and they were waiting for another ferry.

  Soon other cars and trucks began to form a line behind them, which made the place feel somewhat less forlorn. A woman walked about with a small white dog. Yet where could the ferry possibly be taking them, how far out to sea? Miranda’s father stepped out of the car. He took off his sunglasses and eyed the world around him with more interest than Miranda had seen him take in anything in months. Gulls shrieked from the rooftop of the low wooden building. There was no more rain but the clouds hung low and grey.