Page 7

In the dark she tells me not to open my eyes. That if I try to look she will go. I already know this and am squeezing my lids shut so tight I’m getting a headache, but for her anything.

I’m here , she says, and it’s like she is, I can feel her breath on my cheek, against my lips. I am not so far gone that I don’t know it’s a lie. Even as I hear her words I hear my own telling me to stop this, for god’s sake stop it. But she is so soft and in the end I am a coward. I let my wife hold me and I keep my eyes shut in the dark.

Sunny moments here on Shearwater are brief. This morning the sky is pale gray and there is a mist of rain on my face as I head out from the field hut. I carry on around the rocks at low tide, careful to keep my footing.

Mostly this trip south was to establish the situation with the vault and to deal with the mess in the field hut, but I’ve also been looking for a boat.

There is only one place I did not pass on my way down here, a craggy bay difficult to access on foot. I round the rocks of a curved headland and start descending the steep, crumbly cliffside until the angle opens up and reveals a dark pocket of water below. The fierce current we call the Drift comes to rest here upon a bed of jagged rocks. And wedged within these teeth, its pieces smashed into new shapes, is the small craft that delivered a stranger to our shores. I know without any doubt that whoever else was on that boat is dead.

My two eldest aren’t up in the lighthouse, they’re on the beach of the pinch. I make my way toward them, skirting around lumpy elephant seal bodies. Most of them ignore me, but I get a couple of warning gurgles to watch where I walk and one of them flicks sand over my boots.

Raff is sitting on the fine, silt-like black sand, saying something to Fen, who is standing before him, idly moving through leg stretches.

They look at me as I approach. Both share their mother’s blue eyes and blond hair. All but twins, we used to say. Born ten months apart, and my god, what delirium their infancy was, a miracle our marriage survived it.

“Is she awake?” I ask.

“We haven’t been up yet,” Raff says, apologetic.

“The cows are birthing!” Fen announces.

I glance past them at the mass of fur seal bodies farther down the beach—they are certainly making more racket than they usually do.

“I don’t like Orly up there alone with her,” I say, looking at Raff.

He stands and brushes himself off. “Sorry.”

“She was barely alive,” Fen points out.

I look at my daughter. Her nose and cheeks are covered in freckles and sun marks; I worry often she’ll wind up with skin cancer. There is no shade anywhere on this island, no cover from any of the elements. For this reason I suppose we are lucky the sky is mostly gray, but the gales can be just as damaging: Fen has the wind bites to show for it. I study her, drink her in, think how beautiful she is and how much I miss her, knowing too that she is far too trusting. “I need you both to keep your guards up, alright? We don’t know her. We don’t know anything about what she’s doing here.”

Raff nods but something slides across Fen’s face, an expression of disappointment, even of pity, that this is an insane way to think of an injured woman in need of help, and maybe she’s right but what the look tells me more than anything is that my daughter no longer trusts me. If I worried she was slipping away before, now I’m sure of it. She doesn’t feel safe with me, or maybe it’s that she has no expectation of me keeping her safe, of my ability to recognize danger, which is my only job as her father. I am filled with panic: I must keep hold of her, and I don’t know how to.

“I need you up home with us,” I say. The woman, when she wakes, will need help changing, washing, toileting. Best to have another female around for that.

Fen peers at her seals and I wait to see if she will argue with me, but she simply starts off toward the hill. Raff and I follow.

As we walk I take note of the beach and how it’s changed under the rising tide—the ocean has taken great mouthfuls of the land. Many of the rocks are gone, washed away by the storm. This coastline looks nothing like it did when we arrived here eight years ago. We are all acutely aware of this fact, but we don’t much talk about what rapidly rising sea levels mean: they mean losing the rocks and the beaches, losing the research base and all its buildings, losing the boathouse and its Zodiacs, losing a way to safely board a ship out of here.

What rising sea levels mean is the loss of our home.

Raff asks, “How was the vault?”

“Power’s down.”

His footsteps falter and he stares at me. I shoot him a quick, grim look over my shoulder, but carry on.

“How long can it stay cold without power?” Fen asks.

I shake my head slowly. “Supposed to be at least several weeks.”

We don’t say it, how close that will come. The naval ship RSV Nuyina is due to collect us, and the seeds, in about seven weeks.

“I found the boat,” I tell them, to change the subject.

“It wrecked?” Raff asks.

I nod.

“Where?” Fen is quick, she adds, “Did the Drift take it?”

Another nod.

“Then we won’t get to it,” Raff says.

“Probably not.”

“But the people,” Fen says. The bodies , is what she means.

“They’ll have to wait until the ship comes.”

She looks horrified. “They’ll be…” Shakes her head. “I can make it.”

That may well be true. She is a very strong swimmer. But she still wouldn’t fare any better than the splintered boat. Besides which, I’m not about to let my seventeen-year-old daughter dive for drowned bodies.

“They should be buried, Dad,” she says. “We can’t just leave them out there.”

“We can. It’s only their bodies.”

This quiets them. I see them both turning it over in their minds, pondering its meaning, its truth. I can see it makes sense to Raff but it won’t be enough for Fen, who grows more convinced by the day of the unquiet spirits on this island.

In the end they’re still kids, though, and by the time we reach the bottom of the slope the gloomy mood has already lifted off them and they share a grin before bursting into a sprint. They rarely miss an opportunity to race each other to the top. I laugh, and Christ, their energy, their youth , I feel ancient.

But something occurs to Raff and he pauses, losing his lead. “Dad. Don’t tell Orly about the vault, okay? He won’t cope.”

I’d had the same thought, but murmur, “You ever manage to keep anything from that boy, you tell me your secret.”