Page 54

My mother and I have not spoken much in the time we’ve spent here on her couches. We haven’t spoken much in many years, really, but today I am determined to cover a little ground with her, to make sense of some things because it is clear to me that she does not have a lot of time. I don’t make the mistake of pausing the film she’s put on, I just talk over the top of it.

“Why did we live on the boat?” I ask.

She doesn’t look at me. “What?”

“Why did you want to live on a boat with four little kids?”

“What do you mean? We all loved the boat.”

“Yeah, I know, but what made you choose it in the first place?”

Maybe I am expecting some story of wanting a life of adventure, but she says, irritated, “A flood destroyed our home, and we didn’t have a cent between us or anywhere to go.”

I stare at her.

I have never in my life heard her speak of such a thing. I can’t wrap my head around it, and my first instinct is mistrust, but there is no reason for her to lie. My mind darts back, touching upon memories, trying to reshape them. What had my parents gone through and why was it a secret? Why was I responsible enough to look after my brother and sisters but not to know the reason I had to work so hard to keep them safe?

“Why didn’t you tell us that?” I ask.

“We spared you from it. You were little.”

“Okay,” I say, keeping my voice level. “Then did it not seem irresponsible to leave babies alone on a boat?”

“We didn’t leave him alone,” she says. “He was with you.”

“I was thirteen. And watching three kids.”

“That’s right.”

I stare at her. The cancer has stolen any youth from her face; it has made her ancient and barely recognizable. I can’t remember what she looked like before this. There is a hot thing growing in my abdomen, in the middle of me, it is expanding and making it hard to breathe. I think I was going to reach for forgiveness, here at the end. I won’t get it, I can see now. She hates me for losing River. Will blame me until her last breath. If I want sense from what happened I will need to make it myself.

“I’ve been so angry with you for putting me in that position,” I tell her. My voice breaks. “Why did you have kids if you weren’t going to bother keeping them safe?”

She says nothing. She’s just watching her movie.

Mum passes away not long after this. It feels protracted and agonizing but in reality it is not so long. Liv and Jay come so that I’m not alone when it happens, though they haven’t been here for the last months of deterioration. In the ten years since River, Mum has not made herself easy to love. They barely know her. I am more of a mother to them. Dad doesn’t come back to say goodbye. His means of survival was to get away, get as far away as possible and pretend none of it, and none of us, ever existed. To be honest, I understand that. He cut himself free so he would not be dragged under.

With three of Mum’s four children sitting around her bed as she takes her last breaths, I let go of blame. It was not my fault River died and it was not my mum’s. I thought she chose that boat and that life of danger, but really the flood chose it for her, it was this crumbling world. And there will be more floods. More children swept under. But they will not be my children.

I am so sure. I am thinking of words to make sense of this, to offer some comfort. I knew this ending, I have known it all along, and we should have walked away at the start.

And then. The pathways we have carved begin to work. I watch in stunned disbelief. The sea is wild and powerful and it is not done with her, it is hungry to have her back. It surges. This is what saves the whale: this impossibly high tide.

We watch as her massive body is dragged back out along with half the sand of the beach. We see her float, tilt, and then swim. She swims. Straight for her baby, who is waiting for her. Mother and calf come together, slide over and around each other, we can hear their calls, see their fins lift. It’s dark; they are gone quickly, their skin as inky as the waterworld embracing them.

But I can’t move. I can’t leave this as easily as they can. I watch where they disappeared for a long time. It doesn’t make sense that they should have lived. An impossibility, to shake some foundation of me. Something I have learned to rely on.

I see Dom holding his children. Raff and Orly first, and then his daughter moves to be tucked into his embrace, which is big enough for the three of them.

He sees me watching and moves a hand, gesturing for me to come. He seems to think his arms wide enough to hold me, too.

I don’t know if I can cross to them.

But a mother and her baby have survived tonight. On a night I thought bound for death we’ve witnessed life instead. They didn’t surrender, they held on, they fought, and my god, so did we. These kids fought, they pushed themselves past every threshold. Knowing all the while that it would probably be for nothing, they pushed on anyway.

If they can do that, then I can cross this beach to them. I can put my arms around them, I can help him to hold them. What kind of idiot would choose only a quarter of the love they are offered?

Dom delivers us home, one at a time, on the back of the quad bike. Orly first, then Raff, Fen, and me last. I try to make the walk myself, thinking to save him a trip, but my legs are gone—I take a few steps and end up on the ground. So I sit in the rain and I make silent apologies to Hank for the choice I’ve made. It is a betrayal but it’s done, I can’t turn back. Perhaps I will be as our home was for him: a simple enough task to cut himself free of. I feel delirious. I can hear the wind, as Orly does. It warns me to be careful, it doesn’t know I have had enough of careful.

Dom is white with exhaustion by the time he returns for me. I am sitting in the grass and for a disorienting moment, in the blast of the engine and the headlights, I think he will run me over. I see my body collided with, dragged along.

But he stops.

In the dark, on the ground, in the grass.

I say, “Before I came here, I didn’t care about anything. I didn’t want anything. It’s really… desolate, not wanting anything.”

Dom meets my eyes. His expression, it could kill me.

“Now,” I say, “what I want is for your beach house to have a workshop that’s big enough for both of us, and all our tools.”

I am not the only one with a choice to make, and I don’t know what his will be. But he smiles and I have never seen this smile before. “You’d hate being near the ocean,” he says. “In a place that could wash away.”

“I’ll go anywhere with you,” I tell him simply.

“And I you,” he murmurs, and we are kissing and I feel it again, that sense of time folding over on itself, of a thousand lifetimes spent together. If it is our bodies that should one day be washed up onshore then I hope they will do so together.

He helps me onto the quad behind him. I snake my arms around his middle, rest my head on his back. The blood rushes in my ears and every bump hurts my teeth. At the lighthouse we are too tired to climb any steps so we both sink onto the floor of the living room, beside the fire that has burned down to coals but is still warm. There are no pillows or blankets but our fingers are touching as we slip out of consciousness. Deranged with exhaustion.

“Goodnight, darlin’,” I hear him murmur. “Love you.”

But something about the ring of it makes me unsure if he is talking to me or his dead wife.

Wake up.

Wake up!

I drag my eyes open. The world is blurry and spinning. There is a face over mine. I adore this face. But I would very much like it to stop talking.

“Come on,” Orly is saying. “Hurry up. We have to go back for more seeds.”

“Oh my god,” I manage to utter. “Couldn’t I just… die? Instead?”

“No, get up, come on.” He turns to his dad who has flung an arm over his eyes in protest. “Dad, you promised. Get up.”

Dom groans. “What time is it?”

“It’s 7:30. I’ve let you sleep in.”

“Wow thanks,” I mutter. I get myself upright, stumble to the kitchen for coffee. Fen is already there, making a pot. She looks about as bad as I feel, pale and very slow moving.

“Raff’s had a bad night,” she tells her dad, who disappears to check on his son. Orly, Fen, and I eat toast with jam and honey because we are all desperate for the sugar hit.

When Dom gets back, he looks worried. “His arm’s swelled up. I think he’s sprained it again. He’s gonna stay here and rest.”

“Oh no,” Orly moans, more I think for being a man down on our mission than out of concern for his brother.

We get back to it. Everything is terrible but I look at Dom and feel woozy with love, I am limerent. I look at his kids and for the first time in a long while I see a future. As we carry our containers out through the chamber doors and into the long tunnel, though, I hear a faint, echoing scream in my ears and a chill moves down my spine. I look ahead to see if Orly heard, but he’s facing forward and I can’t tell. It’s as if the island is reminding me not to forget, for a single moment, that this is a place of death.

When we return for the next load, I catch sight of Orly talking to himself. He is standing oddly in a corner, and his hands are moving as though he’s explaining something, and then I hear the lifted note of his voice, a kind of plea.

It frightens me.

He sees me and his hands drop.

“Who were you talking to?” I ask him.

“No one.” He walks past me, getting back to work.

Later I catch a snippet of a whispered conversation between father and daughter.

“… it’s a violation. And we are all going down for it.”

“Don’t you worry about that. It’s for me to reckon with.” And then Dom adds, more forcefully, “This is not on you, darlin’.”

Later still I see Fen resting her forehead against a wall. I cross to her, worried.

“Are you okay?”

My voice startles her and she whirls as though caught in the act of something. “I’m fine.” She hurries back to her task, not looking at me.

Outside, I catch Dom’s arm as he is about to climb into the Frog.

“What’s up?” he asks.

“Is something going on?”

“With what?”

“I don’t know.”

He searches my face. I don’t know how to explain the unease or what to ask him. All I know is that it’s starting to feel distinctly like they are keeping something from me again.

I wake in the night with words playing over in my head and a racing heart. Dom is wrapped around me, his mouth pressed to the line of my collarbone, my hand in his hair, his words in my ear.

We tried. We gathered around, I promise we did. But there was no way to call for help and we were in over our heads and he didn’t want our help.

I stare at the ceiling.

There was no way to call for help.

I sit up.

“You okay,” he mumbles.

“Toilet,” I say, and stumble for the door.

My feet are very cold on the stone steps as I move down to the bathroom and lock the door behind me. Why didn’t I get socks. I sit on the closed lid of the toilet. I don’t look in the mirror. I close my eyes and I will my slow dumb fucking mind to do some proper work.

Dominic told me when I first got here that the communications had all been sabotaged by someone right before leaving with the other researchers on the ship.

He told me Hank left on this boat. Distressed enough to forget his passport. Okay.

He then told me a story about three scientists who did not in fact leave on that boat, but stayed behind to help sort seeds, and who then all died. Because there was no way to contact the mainland, all three have been buried on the island.

Firstly. Why would Hank not have stayed on as part of this exercise? To finish his own work?

Maybe because he was unwell. That stands to reason.

But then.

Dominic said there was no way to call for help. Which means that when Hank was here, losing his mind, the comms had already been sabotaged.

Which means, if I have this timeline smoothed out correctly in my head, Hank couldn’t have left on the ship with the majority of the researchers. It means he did stay on, with Naija, Tom, and Alex. Somebody broke the radios and then several people died, and Dom is lying to me about it.

I climb the stairs to the boys’ room and creep in quietly. I sit on the side of Raff’s bed and gently touch his shoulder. His eyes open and he looks at me, without any other movement.

“How did Alex die?” I ask him.

Disbelief clouds his face. “What?”

“I’m sorry, kid. But how did he die?”

“Have you lost it, Row?”

“ Raff .”

“He hanged himself, alright? What—”

I reach forward and hold him tightly, and he hugs me back, but I am thinking about how that blood in the cabin didn’t belong to Alex after all, it belonged to someone else.

I keep my eyes glued to them. They’re acting sketchy, something has them spooked. Orly keeps going to stand in that same corner. Fen is anxious. She argues with her dad, and they’re being careful not to let me overhear.

I notice what I should have seen weeks ago. That often, when we have carried our last containers out through the tunnel and are loading them onto the boats, Dominic goes back to do a last check of the temperature. I’ve never once questioned it, but today I think it is weird. Why not just check it all before we leave?

So I give him a few minutes to get ahead of me, I wait until the kids are occupied, and then I slip back into the tunnel to follow him. I don’t turn on any lights but walk in darkness. I try to be silent but there is a lot of water in this tunnel now.

Inside, I can’t see him.

I slip into a far aisle and make my way slowly toward the back of the vault. My heart is beating very quickly. In the corner where I keep finding Orly, there is nothing but an air vent. I’d assumed it was a cooling vent but it doesn’t look like the others, and if it’s not, where does it go?

On the back wall is a door. Dom said this was the door to the air shaft. As I get closer I can see it’s not properly closed. Which is odd, because he specifically said they don’t open it in order to keep the temperature from plummeting.

Everything in me is a frozen kind of calm as I reach for the handle and pull it open.

It is indeed an air shaft, long and narrow, with a ladder that stretches right up to the sky; there is a tiny dot of light, way up there—a glass panel in the hatch covering. I turn my neck and follow the shaft down. The ladder reaches to a floor deeper in the earth; I can barely see it in the dark but I can hear a voice floating up to me. Dominic’s voice. I don’t know what he’s saying, but he is returning to the ladder.

I recoil, darting to hide in an aisle. Between boxes on shelves, I can see Dom emerge. He closes and locks the door behind him, and I hear him splash his way out of the vault.

After a few breaths I return to the door. It locks from this side, so I am able to open it and climb into the secret shaft, and down the secret ladder, rung by rung to the bottom. The air is much warmer here; it has never been refrigerated like the vault has.

It would have been a simple storage room, once. A concrete square. Now it has rows of water bottles, boxes of the same food supplies I’ve seen in our pantry, a heater, and one of the camp beds from the research base.

Sitting on which, staring at me in complete disbelief, is Hank Jones.