Page 18

I don’t like being in the house alone with Dominic. He is so quiet. The man I lived with for a decade never stopped talking; I grew used to the constant sound of Hank’s voice as a steady hum in the background of whatever I was doing, without much need for me to reply. This silence, with only the wind to pierce it, makes me almost long for the loathsome noise of a TV. I ask Dom what I can do to help out, but he tells me to rest and then doesn’t speak to me again. I find some cleaning supplies in a cupboard and clean the bathroom, which takes all of half an hour, and then I am stumped. I am directionless. Pulled to a painful halt, the momentum I had in getting to Shearwater stalled. With no hope of rescue or escape, I don’t know what to do.

The dining table needs some attention. At least that is something I am capable of. Under the chipped white paint on its surface I can see that it’s actually a rather lovely piece of old Tasmanian oak—whoever painted it should be sent to prison. I raid Dom’s tool trolley for a few different grades of sandpaper, some turpentine, and some tung oil. I can’t find any paint stripper, so I start with a coarse 80-grit sandpaper, knowing this will not be an easy task without a power sander but happy to have something to concentrate on for the next few hours. The paint is so old it chips away easily in most places, especially when I use a metal scraper, but it’s harder to work free in others. I am careful not to apply so much pressure that I damage the wood beneath. The movements of my arm are so familiar to me, the scent of the fine wood dust so visceral that I feel, for these moments in time, unburdened. By memory. By responsibility. By loss. The way it’s always been. A homeplace, working with wood like this.

When the paint is gone, my shoulder and arm are aching but even this is comforting. I clean the table, then take a medium-grit sandpaper to it, working carefully and consistently. It’s a simple piece of furniture, there aren’t any curves or grooves for me to worry about, no delicate detailing or carving, so it doesn’t take too long before I can move onto the finer sandpaper. The smell again, god, the calm it brings me. But I come all too soon to the end of what I can do today. Once I have wiped the table down thoroughly and applied a coat of the tung oil, I have to leave it to dry overnight before I can do any further sanding and coating. I stand back and look at the table. The pale timber is gorgeous, with its intricate white grain. I force myself to leave it, and then I am back where I started, with too many hours left to fill.

It strikes me that I haven’t seen the kid all day, and—despite having wished he’d leave me the hell alone—I miss him. I also want to check that he’s okay after yesterday. I find him in a fourth bedroom I haven’t yet explored, a study. There are three small desks crammed awkwardly against the curved walls, and here is the tech I wondered about—each desk has a computer connected to speakers, and there is also a phone sitting on a tripod, its camera aimed at a desk. Orly isn’t using any of it, he has a pencil and workbook. Spread before him are dried plants, flowers and grasses he’s pressed between the pages of a book and is now drawing.

“I thought you were on holidays,” I say as I enter the room.

“Summer homework,” he says.

“What’s this for?” I touch the phone on the tripod.

“Our distance ed classes. During term we had to video call in once a week, and there were a bunch of presentations we had to film and send. They’re all dead now, batteries are done.”

I nod, wandering the room idly. Orly watches me. In glances I try to ascertain if he seems bothered at all by having seen a dead body. “Wanna do something?” I ask.

“Like what?”

“Anything. Show me something I won’t see anywhere else in the world.”

“I’m meant to be doing my work.”

“You’re on holidays! Take a break, kid. If your dad asks you can blame me.” Dom already hates me.

“It’s pretty self-serving of you to distract me from my education purely because you’re bored, ,” Orly says.

“Oh.” I am crestfallen.

He laughs. “Just kidding. Let’s go.”

“So what’s going on with your dad and your sister?” I ask as we walk.

We are headed, not down the hill to the pinch and the beach, but inland, into the mountainous center of the southern island. I told Orly I couldn’t manage any extreme hiking or climbing, which means this relatively easy walk is our only option.

He doesn’t seem eager to answer my question. “I don’t know,” he says. Eventually he adds, “They disagree on a lot of things.”

I am starting to worry about Fen. I don’t think Dom should just be letting her live in the boathouse on her own. Something’s happened but it’s clear they don’t want me to know about it, and it’s far from my place to get involved.

Orly leads me up a small incline and tells me to lie down on my tummy and crawl to the edge. Grasses tickle my face as I awkwardly commando forward. After a few centimeters of this it’s too painful and I have to sit up and edge forward on my bum. The ground drops away before us, a series of sweeping hills and valleys. Orly points to the hill directly to our right, its slope intersecting with ours to give us a perfect view of what sits among its silvery grasses.

It’s an albatross. Close enough that I can see the soft, snowy plumage of its neck and face and head, the speckled gray on its wings, its pink hooked bill and dark eyes. It is sitting on a nest, I think, and it’s huge. I have seen David Attenborough. I know what they look like. But I could never imagine the majesty of them so close; the true size of this bird is dazzling.

“Is this the one you told me about?” I ask softly. “With the seed?”

Orly smiles. “Maybe. That’s Ari. She’s got an egg under there. Nikau is at sea. He’ll be back sometime soon to take over on the nest.”

The moment is so peaceful that I could lie down and stay here with her forever. I feel all the restless, panicked threads of me calm.

“Did you know they spend most of their lives in the air?” Orly says. “They can glide without flapping for hours at a time.”

I imagine this easy, lazy flight. I saw it, on that first walk down to the beach, I sat in the tussock and watched Ari—or maybe it was Nikau—soaring almost motionless through the air, so different from the other birds that it’s impossible not to recognize.

The wind picks up a little and I lift the hood on my windbreaker (Dom’s windbreaker). Orly doesn’t have a hood today, and his long pale hair is whipping around, getting in his face. I gently comb the threads with my fingers and start braiding it tightly. I haven’t done this since my sisters were little but my hands remember it well. While I braid, Orly tells me more about the wandering albatross. He explains how they only lay an egg every two years and how the last time Ari and Nikau did this, for her senior biology project Fen tracked and studied the process, from laying the egg and then incubating it for eleven weeks, to the egg hatching and then the growth of the chick. She set up a camera that recorded the chick, named Tui, for the months he sat in that nest, waiting for his parents to return and feed him. They watched as he practiced building his own nest by collecting mud and vegetation into a mound, and they were here when Tui finally took to the sky. Orly says his sister sobbed, knowing she would probably never see the bird again but also knowing this was a triumph, that he’d made it to maturity when not all chicks did. They are old, Ari and Nikau, nearly fifty years old, and they don’t have many more breeding years in them.

“We might see this egg hatch,” Orly says. “Before we leave.”

“I hope so.”

I finish Orly’s hair but neither of us moves; instead he leans back into me and together we watch Ari tilt her head and lift her beak into the sky, we watch her spread her extraordinary wings as though to show us her beauty.

“This your doing?” Dom greets me. He’s standing by the sink, gesturing to the dining table.

There is a brilliant pink and mauve sunset tonight as Orly and I get ready to brave the walk down the hill. We plan to join his brother and sister on the inky sand of the beach.

I nod.

“Why?”

I don’t know if Dom’s pissed off, but he is studying me closely, trying to work me out. He certainly doesn’t seem pleased .

“It was a travesty,” I say. “And it’ll need a few more days of work before you can use it.”

“So where are we meant to eat?”

“On the couch, like normal people.”

This irritates him, and I try not to smile.

“Come down to the beach with us,” Orly begs his dad.

Dom drags his eyes from me long enough to tell his son, “Can’t, mate, I got things to get done around here.”

I see Orly’s shoulders slump and I wish his dad could see it too.

By the time we reach the pinch, Raff and Fen have already made a fire of driftwood. The world outside these flames disappears into shadow, but I can hear the constant snorts and scuffles of the seals, hundreds of them all around us.

Fen uses a blade to cut open the rubbery orange kelp, the texture and look of which makes my skin crawl, it is so alien, and then she places a fish inside it and puts the package on the fire to cook.

“You feeling okay today?” I ask Fen while the boys practice boxing moves by the water.

She nods.

Raff is about four times the size of his little brother, and he is laughing as Orly feints and weaves around him, his feet moving in swift dance steps, a twirl here, a pirouette there.

“I’m picturing it a lot,” she admits.

“Me too. You’re seventeen, right?”

“Yeah.”

“And you’ve been here since you were nine?”

She nods. “We’ve been back to the mainland a couple of times to go to the doctor or the dentist, but that’s it.”

“That’s…” I shake my head. “Crazy.”

She shrugs. “I guess.”

“Do you like it here or would you prefer to be in the real world?”

“This is real,” she says, and leaves it at that. A while later she asks, “Do you have kids?”

I shake my head.

“How old are you?”

“Forty.”

“Then how come you don’t have any?”

“I don’t want any.”

“Why not?”

“Fen.” I laugh.

“Sorry,” she says quickly. “Was that impolite? I have nightmares about getting back to the mainland and offending everyone because I don’t know how to talk to people.”

I shake my head. “You’re fine. You’ll be fine.” We are quiet a moment, and I think about her question. “The world’s not a good place for a child.”

She frowns. “That’s not true. Look around.”

I do. And wonder what she can see that I can’t. What I can see is an ocean rising so swiftly that this extraordinary island, this home, will be gone in the blink of an eye. A place so unsafe that most of its occupants have already fled.

I meet Fen’s gaze. She is all the hope and wonder and optimism of youth, and that’s good, I guess, maybe she should try to hold on to that for as long as possible, until the world and other people take it from her. But I find myself wanting to warn her of what I wish I’d known. “It’s not a good idea to fall in love, okay?” I say softly. “Not with people, and not with places.”

Fen looks surprised by this.

“I loved a landscape and watched it burn,” I say. “This island, you can see what it will look like, there’s a film over everything. You can see it disappearing. There’s no stable ground. Not here. Not anywhere else.”

“And you’d want to try and survive all of that on your own?” she asks.

“What that instability does to relationships—what constant danger does to them—is devastating. It’s unraveling.”

I can see she doesn’t believe me but I don’t push the point. She will see, one day. Loving a place is the same as having a child. They are both too much an act of hope, of defiance. And those are a fool’s weapons.

“Your dad,” I say. “He’s pretty tough, huh?”

Fen nods.

“What’s his deal?”

“Like why’s he so strict?”

I mean I guess he is and he isn’t. He has strict routines for his kids, he works them hard, but he also lets them roam, he lets Fen live down here. It’s a contradiction, but rather than trying to articulate this I just say, “Yeah.”

“He just… It’s not easy to raise three kids alone on an island,” Fen says.

“So why is he doing it?”

“He was pretty messed up when Mum died. I think he wanted to be somewhere he felt he could contain things.”

“He made it so hard for himself.”

“Well, he had me and Raff. We helped with Orly a lot. And we had systems, you know. You all just have to stick to the systems and things hang together.”

“Sounds boring.”

She smiles. “It is.”

“Is that why you’re down here now? Is this your youthful rebellion? Running away from home?”

“It’s not much of a rebellion, right?”

“It’s pretty good, given the circumstances.”

“What was yours?”

“God it feels like a long time ago. I didn’t really have one, I don’t think. I couldn’t; I was too busy looking after my sisters.”

“Oh.”

“Any rebellion I had was just this… quiet anger. Always swallowed down.”

“Who were you angry with?”

I recall those painful years. Feeling either invisible to her or hated by her. “My mum,” I say.

Fen’s head tilts to the side. “I don’t know much about that.”

“But this stuff going on with your dad. It’s all the same. Parents. Trying to impress them or enrage them.”

She is quiet for a moment, and then she says, “I know Dad loves me. I just don’t know if he can see me.”

Raff and Orly tumble down beside us and we eat the fish with our fingers; it falls apart, moist and rich and full of flavor, and the sky is enormous and pricked with stars, and I think it is an astounding life he has brought them here to live, and a lonely one.

I walk the boys back up to the lighthouse and it seems wrong to be leaving Fen on her own. I can see that it pains Raff, too, but he doesn’t say anything and so neither do I. When it’s just the three of us, struggling our way up the hill in the dark, he says, “She’ll go to the boathouse. She’s not allowed to sleep outside.” Which makes me feel a little better.

It’s the first time I make the walk up the hill. So far I’ve had the quad bike to carry me but tonight Raff doesn’t offer it and I don’t ask. I just take one plodding step after another. And with each of these steps I feel a sense of achievement. It hurts, and I can barely breathe, but I’m going to make it. It’s not going to kill me.

Because it’s late and Orly is tired, Raff carries him the last part of the journey, and then up the lighthouse steps, and I watch from their bedroom doorway as he settles his little brother into his own bed. “He sleeps better when he has company,” Raff explains, though I didn’t ask. I am well acquainted with Orly needing a bed buddy.

“Night,” Raff adds, dismissing me, and I make my way carefully up a few more stairs to Fen’s room. It’s dark, and I don’t bother turning on a light, I just unbutton my jeans, intending to fall into bed.

A voice clears its throat and says, “Sorry.”

I jump halfway out of my skin.

“Sorry,” Dom says again, but he doesn’t sound it.

It annoys me—I don’t like feeling as though he could enter my space whenever he wants. “You don’t need to sit by my bed anymore, okay?” I say. “I’m alive. You want to talk to me, you knock.”

He nods, an acknowledgment.

As my heart slows, I sink onto the end of the bed. He is mostly in shadow. There is something coming, he is building to it. An admonishment for distracting Orly from his schoolwork today, maybe? Something about the dining table?

He says, “We had Raff and Fen quite young.”

I wait, unsure if he expects me to answer.

“We didn’t want to waste time. Life seemed so short.”

“It is, I guess,” I murmur.

“It doesn’t feel that way anymore,” Dom says. “It feels very long.”

“You lost a partner.”

He looks at me and I am surprised to see something gentle come into his face. “I learned how to be a parent from her. I watched her with Raff and Fen. So I knew what I had to do when Orly came. I don’t mean to say I did well, or that I was good at it, but she’d shown me the way and there isn’t a minute I’m not grateful for that.”

“Okay.” I am nervous about what he’s trying to say.

“I know what a spouse becomes. A whole world. So much a part of your life you couldn’t untangle yourself from them even if you wanted to. I would have done anything for her.” He gets something out of his pocket. Unfolds it. I know what it is without looking.

“You didn’t have to lie,” Dominic says, handing me the photo of Hank. “I understand. You’re the wife, you came here to find him.”

My eyes move from the picture to his face in shadow. I try to think through what this means. There are some things I still need to hold close to my chest. There are others to which I intend on getting answers.

“So where is he, Dom?”

“I told you, . He left. They all did.”

“He was asked to sort those seeds and you’re telling me he left without finishing the job?”

“He did finish it. He left us instructions. We’re just moving boxes.”

I study his face, searching for truth or lie, but I can’t read him. The words have a ring of believability. Except, “Why didn’t he tell me? Why not let me know he was on his way home?”

“I don’t know. You’ll have to ask him when you see him.”

There is silence as I process that. The thought that his absence and my presence could be just one big, ridiculous miscommunication is painful. The thought that this miscommunication has resulted in a man’s death is worse. I don’t know why Hank would get on that boat without sending me an email to tell me he was coming home. To tell me to disregard his last messages.

Unless he wasn’t coming home but going elsewhere. Leaving me for good.

“He didn’t seem well,” Dom adds more carefully. “In the end. He seemed burdened.”

“In what way?”

“I don’t know. He was doing a difficult thing.”

Burdened.

Hank is the most self-confident person I have ever known. He is arrogant. Single-minded, certainly. Could that have turned to something else? Obsession?

“This place,” Dom says, as though reading my mind. “It’s extreme isolation, . You don’t understand it yet, but it takes a very real toll.”

Then he says, “What I don’t get is why you felt you had to come all this way to see him.”

It’s the heat of the water, and the steam within the shower. I am sitting beneath the downpour, feeling the burn on my cheeks, and then I am returned, speeding along the bubbling bitumen of the road, trying to outrun roaring flames beneath a sky so red. Beside us I watch the running shapes of three horses, swallowed by a cloud of smoke.

“ .”

My sister. She is turning off the shower and helping me upright, wrapping me in a towel. “Jesus, you’ve cooked yourself,” she mutters, of my bright pink skin.

“Sorry,” I say. There is still so much steam. “I’m fine.”

“, you can’t—”

“I’m fine,” I repeat, meeting her eyes. She is scared. I see this fear in her face whenever she looks at me: she has never known me like this. To Liv I have always been rock solid, the most reliable thing she has ever known. I made myself this way, for her and for our sister Jay. I had to carry them. And now I am unraveled and she’s frightened and I don’t know how to tie my pieces back together. I have lost too much and am too much lost.

When I can convince Liv I’m not a threat to myself and shuffle her out of the bathroom, I get dressed and return to my bed. After the fire (nearly a whole year ago now), Hank went to Shearwater and I, with nowhere else to go, came here to Liv’s spare bedroom, which, in a month, will be a baby’s room. I open my sister’s old laptop, and the emails are waiting for me at the top of my inbox, three of them.

When Hank first got to Shearwater, he would tell me at length about his colleagues on the island and what they studied and how the base worked. Though he was there to study the ecology of the island, he also liked to go south and visit the vault and learn about the seeds stored there. He would talk about the specimens, about the nature of the vault itself and how extraordinary it was that it boasted such diversity. He told me of the weather on the island, the storms, the rain, and the wind. He said the wind was alive in a way it isn’t elsewhere; he said he’d met a boy who spoke to it.

Hank’s life was full, it was rich; in the wake of our loss he had found purpose, he was thriving . My life was the opposite. I was— am —dispassionate about everything. Barely able to find a reason to get up in the morning. Alive with envy for Hank’s purpose and his passion, which now evade me completely.

Then things with Hank changed.

He told me the seed vault was being shut down. He said the island was too hazardous—weather events getting worse, sea levels rising with alarming speed—so the seeds were being moved off island to a much smaller vault. The UN was streamlining funds into identifying and storing only the seeds needed to feed humanity. There were fires and floods, there were wars, diseases, food shortages—they were going to need to feed people.

As the only botanist already working on Shearwater, Hank was asked to make these decisions. To do the sorting. To choose what would have a place in this new vault and what would be left on the island to gradually be surrendered to the sea. He told me it was utter stupidity. Shortsighted, linear thinking. The world, he tried to explain—to his bosses and also to me, on the other end of the video call—needed biodiversity more than it needed any other thing, and he said this as though we didn’t already know it, except that we all did. And still, he had to decide on half. Which means that when the fires rage and the seas swallow and the bombs destroy, there will be no backups for the thousands and thousands of lost species. No way to replant. They will simply be gone forever.

At this point Hank stopped video calling me and switched to email, and these emails read differently. They were short, erratic, full of errors. They changed subject midsentence. I could see him spiraling on the page but I couldn’t get through to him. I tried to get in touch with his colleagues to check if he was alright, but no one would get back to me.

And now. Finally, today, he has sent me three emails.

The first is this.

I need help. It’s not safe here for me anymore.

And then this.

They don’t understand what I’m trying to do. They fear what I have realized and they fear me for knowing it.

And then this.

I am in danger. Send help.

I don’t sleep. I let the words turn over in my mind. I let them stir some dormant part of me. A little after dawn I stumble into the kitchen, startling Liv, who is not used to seeing me at this hour. She’s drinking coffee in her dressing gown, which is barely closed over her enormous eight-month-pregnant belly.

“God, you look…”

I am aware that I must look deranged. I put the laptop in front of her, open to the first email.

“What is this?”

“It’s from Hank. These three. Read them.”

She frowns as she does so. Then looks up at me. “This is… Jesus. He doesn’t sound… well.”

“No.”

“Should you call the police?”

“The police? What the hell are they gonna do? He’s thousands of kilometers across an ocean.”

“Well, what about his colleagues out there?”

“Nobody’s getting back to me.”

“So we just… stay calm, okay.” She reads the emails again.

I start making myself a coffee with trembling hands.

“We’ll go through the right channels,” Liv is saying but I’m barely listening. I am vibrating. My mind is working with a clarity it hasn’t known in a year, making swift plans. I feel woken from a dream.

“.”

I look at my sister.

“Don’t do anything stupid, okay?” she says.

But the answer is simple. “He’s my husband,” I say, “and he needs my help.”

And so. I should have waited. Pursued other avenues first. But the messages did something to me. They brought me back to life.