The Ice Child (48 page)

And then, she saw him.

Doug was just to the left of Catherine. Jo saw him in profile, his gray bag slung over one shoulder. He was gazing around the crowds, looking for someone.

“Doug,” she whispered.

He turned. First to Catherine. Then, he looked toward her.

She met his eyes, saw the message in them.

I’m going with her
.

I’ll be there
.

She blinked; he vanished. Catherine looked back, once, and raised her hand as she walked on. Then, she was lost in the crowd.

Jo stared after her. She stared at the place where Doug had been.

“Dear God,” she prayed, letting go of all her previous bitterness, “dear God, please. Please help us.”

An overwhelming feeling suddenly swept through her. A warm sensation, a flood of light, just like that she had felt two years ago in the garden, when she took Sam there, a few days after he was born. That same strange, unmistakable note of connection. She felt Doug so close to her that she had the touch of him, his lips on her face.

Far off in the distance she thought that she heard the reporter’s voice, and others, at her side. But their tone of concern hardly registered with her. Colors flew and mixed; the ground flipped under her feet.

Rolling, it took her down into the dark.

Forty

Starvation Cove. Maconochie Island.

He had seen it before in his dreams.

Although his dreams had always been high with color. Stark blues and orange, backlit ice that glowed in low light; green-blue ocean, Arctic poppies, saxifrage.

In the last two days John had realized that all his dreams had been the same, even those of the
Jeanette
. There had always been such shade and detail. Disko Fjord under McClintock’s feet in August 1857, with blue campanula blazing among the wildflowers. The haloes around the sun. McClintock’s Christmas aboard the
Fox
in 1858, with the luxury of candles at the table, and their light falling on the scrubbed white pine table, while outside the snow drifted and the temperature fell to eighty degrees below.

But, after all his dreams, there was no color here.

John stood on the highest piece of land he could find. It was probably raised no more than thirty feet above sea level. It was midday. There was nothing at his back but the moonscape of the peninsula, flat and smooth except where it was broken by the occasional small ridge of larger stones. Water was everywhere. Runoff from the ice had left hundreds of pools among the rock. Under the cloudy sky they showed as flat gray circles.

Monochrome, not color.

He looked east. The land was perfectly flat for as far as the eye could see. There was no movement at all on it: no animal, no vegetation. As he turned his body, every muscle in it protested. He had walked thirty-five miles in three days, and his legs and back burned. He had pitched his tent, but he could see now, looking back at it, that he had made a poor job of it. The tent door flapped. He felt an overwhelming urge to pull it down. He wanted to leave everything behind. Everything. He wondered if he would bury the tent, along with the rest of his belongings.

Out there, to the east, the inlet broadened. Maconochie Island was probably a half mile away. He narrowed his eyes, trying to make out any sort of alteration to the monotonous landscape ahead of him. On the map that had been pinned to his wall in Cambridge, the island was a small white oval, fringed on its western side with sand and gravel dunes. White oval on a colorless chart.

And it was the same today. Exactly the same as the map he could have drawn from memory. A bleached horizon, with fog rolling. White on gray, gray on white.

John sat down on the shore. The rock under him made a grating sound, like broken china, a sound to set the teeth on edge. He curled up on the ground, the last of his energy gone, oblivious to the temperature and the ever-present thick cloud of mosquitoes. On the first day of his walk he had tried to pull his hood down over his face, and keep his gloves on, because the insects settled on him as soon as he stopped. They coated the leeward side of the tent, thriving in the relative heat of seven degrees. But he hadn’t tried to stop them lately. His face was swollen with bites.

It didn’t matter. The pain was no longer anything real. Like his thirst, like the pain in his joints and muscles, it had become background buzz. Static on a radio, the blur of white noise with a missed transmission. The unobtainable signal on a phone. Just background buzz. The indistinguishable, useless buzz of the world.

He rolled onto his stomach, closed his eyes.

He plunged his hands now into the stones underneath him. Ran his fingers over the rough edges, some as sharp as knife blades. A cool salt breeze blew over him.

Schwatka had called this Starvation Cove when he came looking for Franklin in 1879. He thought he had found survivors then. He listened to the Esquimaux and heard them tell him about finding bodies, and watches, and guns, and gunpowder. The Esquimaux children hadn’t known what the gunpowder was. They had thought it was black sand. They’d taken it into a tent, and it had ignited, singeing their eyebrows and hair and frightening the hell out of them.

Some said Crozier had got as far as Montreal Island, at the very mouth of the river, but John had always doubted it. It was another thirty miles, and he couldn’t see Crozier getting thirty more miles after begging for the seal meat. No … it was here. He had died here.

Right here.

John turned on his side and opened his eyes.

He supposed he had been waiting all along. After leaving the boat from Gjoa on the coast, the walk had been pure, cleansing. He was grateful for the hardness of it, because it filled his head. It had rained the second night. Water got into the tent somehow; and he had found that he was wet through when he woke up, the clothes sticking to his skin. He had got up and moved on, aware of the labored sound of his breathing. He had plowed on, seeing ice far out in the channel, noticing crystals of it lodged in the pools on the shore. Another month, and the weather would start to close in again.

He pushed himself to a sitting position now, and waited.

He had thought he would see him. Or something of him.

But there was nothing to see here.

Nothing at all.

Suddenly his father sprang into his mind. His father in that room, the big bay-windowed room of his flat. Piled on the couch with his leg in plaster. Talking about this woman from the paper. Only two visits, and that had been the sole topic of conversation, Jo Harper. Not him. Not John. He remembered the day; rain drying on the window. Sun breaking through. Doug’s weather-lined face going into a smile. Light in the eyes.

John had wanted to tell him about Catherine. Never could. Never could put it into words. That was his problem. Words closed in his throat. Couldn’t get them out, couldn’t reveal himself. Only Catherine had seen the face he hid. Knew his desperation, wanted his love. Love from the real person. Took the obsessions, accepted him. Not like Amy, forever asking him to drop the idea. Catherine worked with him, going along. Hand in his hand. Eyes always searching his face.

He couldn’t look into hers after Doug had died. He couldn’t bear the patient forgiveness and understanding. He didn’t understand himself. He didn’t forgive himself. Why should she? He had nothing to give anyone. Nothing to give his mother. Nothing to give Catherine.

And yet she would have walked with him this far.

He put his hand up to his face, and wondered where the water had come from, and realized that it was tears.

The day rolled down toward evening.

The ocean at last gave up a color: a deep, deep indigo. It was so beautiful that he laughed at the magic of the trick, the water turning color in the reducing light. The cobalt and indigo of a paintbox. Add water to the dry paste. Watch it bloom. Indigo on a paintbrush, sinking into cartridge paper. Colors of childhood, names on a paintbox. What were they called? Burnt sienna. Violet. Titanium white. And this—this beautiful blue racing past his feet.

The light of the perpetual day barely faded at first, and then the rain came suddenly, thicker than the mosquito, thicker than darkness. From light to dark in a matter of minutes, the wind picked up and drove the needles of cold into his face. He could no longer see the ice on the ocean. He could no longer see the pitted terrain at his back.

Finally, disorientation took hold of him.

He had found himself on his hands and knees, and he couldn’t remember what he was looking for until he closed his eyes and conjured the shape again. He had somehow cut himself on the palm of one hand. Looking for something. The rounded, cylindrical shape he thought he’d felt. Irregularity in the rock. Smoothness. Thought he felt it, then lost it. Hands and knees, hands and knees, air scouring at the top of his lungs.

He lay in the door of the tent now, motionless, gazing back the way he had come.

Somewhere out there in the sea was
Erebus
. She would have drifted. Perhaps she brought the
Terror
with her. The Inuit said that one of the ships had been broken up on the shore of King William, pushed there by ice. They had found the other almost intact, farther south, and they had boarded her, and found a man’s body, and a ladder stretching down to the ice, and the footprints of two other men. Afraid at first, and building courage little by little, they had gained access by tearing away part of the hull. They carried off what metal they could, and then found that the ship was sinking, because they had weakened the hull around the waterline.

She went down fast, within the day. For months afterward, only part of her could be seen, then even that disappeared. Somewhere at the bottom of the sea that John was staring at were the remains. Somewhere on the bottom were two steam locomotives. They would remain when everything else was rotted. Somewhere down there. Somewhere
out
there.

His father had always said what a coup that would be. What a dive. The dive of his life. To go down to the wreck of
Erebus
or
Terror
. Worth all the other dives of his life rolled together.

And John thought of the silence when he had dived in Turkey. The rattle of air, the fragile fix of oxygen. A repeated drumming, like the drumming he thought he heard now above him. A drumming like a boat’s engine, the noise you could hear when you were below the water, waiting to come up. Waiting, hearing both that and the perfect, suspended silence when you stopped breathing. He thought of
Erebus
suspended, not dead, not alive, on the bottom of Victoria Strait.

Not dead.

Not alive.

He got to his feet and stared out at the ocean. He looked at the blue-on-gray, and the light sky devoid of stars.

The sea writhed at his feet.

Remorseless current.

Empty day.

“Dad,” he said, the word drowned by the sound of the water. He sank to his knees in the broken, grainy shale of the beach.

“I can’t find you,” he whispered. “Dad, help me. I can’t find you.”

The sound of the boat came late, very late at night.

They had come too far down the coast, and the rain was driving them in to the shore.

It was only the persistence of one person that had brought them this far. The boat ground up on the shingle. Three people got out, two immediately hauling the canoe up onto land, the outboard slumping the hull to one side. They turned their faces from the onslaught of the wind, shoulders hunched. He heard their voices—surely ghost voices—torn and scattered by the gale. The third figure looked up the slope, and began to walk, then run, toward him.

He strained through a fevered sleep to see her, a fragment of his hopes, coming through the torrent toward him.

She was not there, of course.

She was only what he longed to see.

As she knelt beside him, she pushed back the hood from her face, and he saw the water, the driving rainfall of the storm, streaming through her hair.

That hair. That hair, black in his hand, that rope of hair.

“John,” she called “John …”

He closed his eyes, grateful that she had come to him in this most terrible of dreams.

She put her arms around him. She lifted his head.

“It’s too far,” he said. “Too far to go back.”

“It doesn’t matter how far it is,” she told him. “We’ll go there together.”

Forty-one

It was silent in Great Ormond Street Hospital.

Six o’clock in the evening, and silent.

Catherine had been gone five days.

Gina was standing in the corridor by the window, in the same place that the three of them had been only a week before, and the surprise of the sudden stillness made her catch her breath. She glanced at her watch, and then up and down the corridor, puzzled. A hospital was never really silent; there was too much going on. The changing of equipment, the ringing of phones, the hushed but persistent opening and closing of fireproofed doors. Voices in corridors. The hum of the lifts. The monitors by the beds.

And yet, in that moment, it
was
silent.

Even the traffic noise outside seemed to have been smothered.

Gina turned around. A nurse was coming along the corridor.

“Did something stop?” Gina asked.

“Excuse me?” the nurse asked.

“Did something stop?” she repeated. “Did the air conditioning go off or something? The heating?”

The nurse stopped to listen. “No. I don’t think so. Sounds the same.” She gave Gina a quizzical look.

Then, a terrible conviction hit her. Quite suddenly Gina felt that she knew exactly what the silence meant. She promptly pushed past the bemused nurse and ran to the doors to the ward.

They had put Sam in a screened-off bed; Jo was next to him, propped up in the big green armchair. She was asleep, her head on one side, and Sam’s teddy bear was in her hand. The trolley that had held Sam’s supper had been pushed away, the plate barely touched.

The way that Jo had positioned the chair, parallel to the bed, had effectively obscured Sam from anyone standing at the door. A terrible bolt of sick apprehension slammed into Gina, a sense of the world having entirely halted. It was like the moment in an accident when realization slurs forward on slow motion, and minor details become unnaturally clear.