Waiting for Unicorns (2 page)

WHEN HE WASN'T OUT ON
expedition, Dad taught at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, which meant that sometimes he had a normal everyday job like other dads, and sometimes he didn't.

This summer the marine biology department had offered Dad a fantastic opportunity—they were sending him and a small team of researchers into the arctic waters of Hudson Bay and the Baffin Island inlets to do whale research for three months.

But it wasn't the first time Dad had been to Churchill to study the whales. He'd actually been there a bunch of times. In fact, this is where he started his whale research, way back when he was an undergraduate at the institution. So Dad knew people in Churchill. He had friends here—people he'd known for a long time. And he had a place to do his work. The Churchill Northern Studies Centre, or the CNSC, would serve as home base for Dad and his team while they did their research. But I'd never been here before and everything was strange. There were no familiar faces for me and no familiar names. Nothing but the unknown.

Even though Dad had been to Churchill on plenty of expeditions in the past, this was the first time the institution had ever offered to fund one of his expeditions. And it was the first time I'd ever come along. Sometimes, Mom and I had gone to visit Dad while he was away on trips like this one, though never to Churchill. And those trips had always been a kind of short vacation for us. We'd never stayed for an entire summer.

When Dad told me about our summer plans he said they were only temporary. And I know he was trying to make me feel better. But it didn't work, because all I could think about was how the permanent things were slipping away. Just this year, I'd said good-bye to all my friends, and my home, now our green truck, and Mom. Even though we were only leaving for three months, I couldn't help but feel like the only things left were temporary.

Churchill, Manitoba, sits all huddled up on the shores of Hudson Bay, where ice and snow try to keep it in deep freeze. But the boreal forest—old and green with lichen, black spruce, highbush cranberries, and the tundra—strewn with glacial rock as old as the earth itself, makes the place more than just a tiny arctic community on the edge of the great cold.

“It's a beautiful place, Tal,” Dad said over the whine of the airplane's engine. “People come from all over to visit because it's magic, you know.” He winked at me. I rolled my eyes and looked out the window.

I couldn't see much down there, just a shift in colors as we went farther and farther north. At first there was only green, the soft new kind—new leaves and springtime spread out below me. All the trees at home had thrown on their springtime dresses weeks ago, but these trees wore the fresh green of brand new leaves. As we kept going, the forest underneath us got darker and richer. Dad told me the names of those dark green trees as we flew over—evergreens. “They will never lose their leaves as the seasons change,” he said. “That's how they got their name. But there's also spruce, cedar, red and white pine, and redwoods down there, too.” He was so in awe of this place. I just nodded.

After that the landscape changed even more dramatically—the old green shifted to white until there was only a blanket of snow beneath us, stretching out in all directions. And that's all I'd see until we landed in Churchill. People who come here for fun must be crazy. Why would anyone want to go someplace so far away from absolutely everything? So cold, and white, and
winter
?

I knew why people came to Churchill, of course. They came for arctic adventure. They came to see the polar bears and the rare arctic birds. Mostly, they came for the whales. I knew this because that's what Churchill's official website said, under the “Things To Do” section. I never would have come for these things, but I didn't have a choice in the matter. Even if I did, Dad and I wouldn't be doing any wildlife tours together. I'd be stuck in town while he was out on the ice, because even though I was here for my dad, he was here for the whales. You could have tossed out every other interesting thing about Churchill, and he'd still come. That's how much those whales mattered to Dad. Lucky for him, Churchill is the self-proclaimed “Beluga Capital of the World.”

To the south of town, the Churchill River runs wide-mouthed into Hudson Bay. And it's there, at the mouth of the river, where thousands of little white whales come up out of the Arctic Sea. The water is warmer where it empties into the bay, and June through August, belugas come here to feed, give birth, raise their babies, and catch up with each other. By late August there can be more than three thousand belugas in the Churchill River estuary.

Dad's heart belonged to the whales. It always had. Mom told me she knew this when she married him.

“I'd rather he be out there, doing what he loves, even if it means being away from us and missing us, than if he did something he hates closer to home. Wouldn't you?”

“But it's lonely without him,” I protested, and she agreed.

“I wish he was closer, too. But we all do the best we can. And he'll always come back to us, Tal. You can count on that. He will leave those whales of his—let them go off without him, and hurry home to us because we're his family.”

Mom had been certain family meant more to Dad than anything else. I wonder what she would think if she could see us now.

Dad and I sat crammed together in our uncomfortable airplane seats trying not to crowd one another, which was pretty much impossible. There was only one armrest between us and I didn't know if it was his or mine. He didn't seem to know either, so we both just avoided it. An armrest-shaped wall between us.

“People used to believe whales were magic, too,” Dad said.

I waited for him to continue, to explain which whales, and why people thought they were magic, but he never did. Dad did that a lot—started a thought and forgot to finish it. I think he forgot I was there, listening, waiting for him.

Mom never did that. She always finished her thoughts, always finished her stories. She collected them, studying languages, people groups, and the tales that, she said, tie us all together. And when she got down to the business of telling a new story, you might as well just drop everything. She wouldn't stop till it was over, and you wouldn't be able to focus on much else until she did anyway.

She always started exactly the same way.

“I've got a new one for you, Tal,” she'd say. And she'd pause, long and hard. When I was little, I used to think she paused like this because she was making things up in her head as she went, or because she wanted to be certain I was paying attention. Now I know she paused because she was feeling the story's weight.

“A story never belongs to just one person,” she explained to me. “It belongs to every person who has ever told it, and to every person who has ever heard it. And that makes storytelling quite an important thing.”

But as I stared out the plane's window watching the topsides of clouds floating past, I shook off thoughts of Mom. Sometimes it just hurt too much to remember.

We arrived in Churchill on May fifteenth. I watched Dad mark off the day in his little green pocket calendar before tucking it back in the front pocket of his shirt and patting it reassuringly. Dad has carried a pocket calendar with him for as long as I can remember, marking off the days as we lived them.

He said it was easier to carry all of your days when you've got them with you. But I wondered if he kept his little calendar because it made him feel like he was big enough to go on without Mom. Did he mark the days since she'd been gone, like I did?

Our first night in Churchill, when the arctic wind beat against our motel, and the sound of my dad snoring came clear across the hall, I felt the weight of our days myself. My chest ached from the strain of a million held-back tears, but I fought to keep them in. And in the early spring darkness, when the purple and green aurora borealis washed against the arctic sky and the still, frozen surface of Hudson Bay, I remembered Mom's stories.

I WAS IN CHURCHILL FOR
three whole days before I saw a bear. I was kind of surprised it took so long because besides whales, Churchill is famous for polar bears, and I am terrified of them.

Despite what you might think, they're not cute, or friendly, or wary of people. They're just hungry. You might as well be wearing an “Eat Me, I'm Tasty” sign.

Manitoba Conservation even employs a bear patrol year-round to help keep the bears out of town—all twelve hundred of them. And Churchill is a pretty small town. Less than a thousand people live there. So, if you were going to be picky about the math, there were enough bears for every person to have one. And some people could have two.

The bears are always there, but they don't wander into Churchill very much until bear season begins in October, when they come in off the tundra and wait at the edge of Hudson Bay for ice to form. Then they head out on the floes to hunt seals. I knew this because that's what Churchill's official website said about the matter, and I'd read as much as I could. Just to be certain I was prepared. Being prepared is sort of important, if you think about it. The more prepared you are for things, the less chance they have of surprising you. Or scaring you. Or breaking your heart.

But no amount of preparation could have helped me feel ready for the actual sight of a real, live
nanuq.
Dad and I were on our way to the airport to pick up our boxes, snug in an old Suburban we'd found to handle the icy roads and snow, when a big white polar bear strolled lazily across the road, pausing to study us. Dad slowed down to a full stop. I tightened my fingers around the edges of my seat as my heart started jumping around in my chest.

“Tal, look at her! She's beautiful.
Beautiful!
”

Tall and almost lanky, she seemed cool and indifferent. She might as well have owned that road. Her face was long and narrow, and her eyes seemed very dark and tiny against all that white fur. She was impressive and
terrible,
that's what she was. But Dad would have been disappointed if I didn't look excited.

“Uh-huh. Beautiful,” I said, chewing on the ends of my hair.

Until then, the closest I'd ever been to a polar bear was at the zoo in Massachusetts. I'd watched an old bear named Bjorn swim around his glass-walled enclosure, and I'd pressed my hands to the glass, measuring their size against the bear's paws, surprised to find myself so small.

As I sat beside Dad, and as that big white bear examined me from the other side of the windshield, I felt that same smallness and fear creep back in. I tried to ignore what I'd learned—that a polar bear can run up to twenty-five miles per hour—fast enough to catch our Suburban before we could really pick up any speed. Not that it would actually chase us down the road or anything. Still, Dad's reassuring hand on my shoulder was nice, and the rifle stashed under the seat made me a tiny bit braver. That gun was one of the first things Dad had picked up once we arrived in Churchill, along with the Suburban. Even before we got groceries or anything. It was for emergencies. We were prepared.

Our cardboard boxes were waiting for us, neatly stacked in the airport's cargo terminal, and a bittersweet, homesick feeling rolled around in the pit of my stomach at the sight of them. Our handwriting was familiar, reminding me of their contents. But the boxes seemed out of place, as if they'd time-traveled—small, square packages full of home, way out here on the edge of the Arctic.

Dad and I were quiet as we drove away from the airport. He must have been thinking about Mom, because at one point he reached over and tugged on my ear, like she used to do. It bugged me.

“I'm all right you know,” I said, leaning my head back against the seat, out of his reach. He just nodded.

Sometimes I thought I could fool him—thought I could pretend hard enough to convince both of us. Over the last few months, we'd grown so busy trying to convince each other that we were all right—that we were doing okay without her—that now there was this space the exact size of Mom standing between us. And no amount of pretending could fill it.

There'd always been a kind of space between Dad and me, maybe because he was away so much. But now that Mom was gone, that space seemed like a dangerous thing. What if it got bigger? Losing Mom was bad enough. I didn't want to lose my dad, too. I wasn't even sure if he felt that space. Maybe it only existed from my side and he couldn't feel it. Or maybe it was all in my head, like that warning on the side-view mirrors of a car: “Objects in mirror are closer than they appear.” But that space certainly felt real, and I didn't know how to close it up. Especially now that we'd be apart for most of the summer.

We were renting two rooms in a house right on the edge of town. Dad had stayed there before. He was friends with the Inuit woman who lived there. And while it was nice of her to welcome my dad and me into her house, I wasn't exactly excited about spending my summer with a stranger while Dad was out on the ice.

“I've been friends with Sura for a long time, Tal,” Dad said. “Your mom, too. We came to Churchill together a couple of times before you were born,” he said. “She and Sura knew each other. She never told you?”

I shook my head. Mom had told me things about Churchill, but she never told me she'd been here herself. I just figured she knew things because of what Dad had told her, same as me. It was a new thought. My mom had been here, sat beside my dad as they drove along these roads. She'd seen these same trees and glacial rocks, the same sweep of the shore, ice-locked and covered in snow.

I held that thought, clung to it as we pulled up next to the house, the back of the Suburban loaded with our boxes. Instead of clapboard siding, the house was covered with blue asphalt shingles from peak to porch. The whole structure seemed to sag a bit, as if it were leaning into the wind whipping shoreward off the frozen surface of Hudson Bay.

“So what do you think?” Dad asked, reaching over and patting my knee.

“It looks good,” I said, and I scrunched up my mouth into what I hoped looked like a smile.

He studied my face for a minute and sighed. Then he nodded once like he'd made up his mind, and got out. The cold air whooshed into the warm cab as he slammed the door behind him.

The engine ticked quietly, cooling in the arctic air. My breath fogged up the windows, making everything seem calm and far away through the cloudy glass. I sat in the car, waiting for just the right moment, taking in the sight of the place that would be my home for the next few months. I wasn't ready to jump right into this new life just yet. So I took that pause. The same one Mom used to take before she began a story. Then I took a deep breath and opened the door. It screeched wide on frozen hinges.

The wind whipped around me, stinging my face and bare hands. I dug into my pockets for my mittens and tucked my chin into my coat collar. Anything to protect myself from the cold.

Dad didn't seem to mind it, though. He was waiting, one hand stuffed deep into his pocket, the other ready to land on my shoulder. I dodged his arm, and we walked to the front steps with a Mom-sized space between us.

A dark-haired woman in a yellow sweater stood on the porch. She was a splash of color in that cold, drab world, like that jar of saffron in the pantry.

“Welcome back, Thomas,” she said to my dad, taking his hand in both of hers. I stood behind him on the steps, one hand pressed against the railing to steady myself.

Her voice was surprising. Deep and rich and smooth as chocolate. She was nothing like what I'd expected. She was quite pretty. Her skin was darker than mine, and her eyes were smaller. Her hair was black and shiny and fell thick just past her shoulders. And she was younger than I thought she'd be, not much older than my mom, actually. In my head she'd been old and gray haired, her skin wrinkled like the paper we'd packed around our belongings from home. All of a sudden I had to rearrange some of the things I'd been imagining about her.

“Sura, this is my daughter, Talia Lea McQuinn,” Dad said, gesturing awkwardly as I joined them on the porch. She knew who I was, of course, just like I knew her. Dad had spent the last several weeks talking about her, where she lived, how her culture was different than ours. He was preparing me, I suppose.

I did my best to return Sura's warm smile, but the cold had seeped into me, slowing everything down, and I couldn't seem to get my lips to move much. I leaned against the house, comforted by the shingle siding, rough as sandpaper under my palm.

“Blue, like the bay in August when the ice is out,” Sura said, nodding at the siding.

She could have told me how good it was to finally meet me, how much she hoped Churchill would feel like home, or what great friends she knew we were going to be. But she didn't. Maybe Sura knew better than to pretend. She traced the edge of a blue shingle with her fingers and then glanced out over the snow and ice to where the vast expanse of Hudson Bay finally met the horizon.

I could live here, if I had to, in this house that leaned into the arctic wind. It wasn't home, but it was certainly better than the hotel where Dad and I had been staying for the last three days while we waited for our things to arrive.

“Welcome to Churchill, Talia Lea,” Sura said finally. Her words gently broke the silence that had crept into all of us, standing out there on her porch.

Her English was smooth, though I could tell she used a different language more often than the one I was familiar with.

“It's just Talia,” I said. Her gaze and unexpected warmth made my face feel hot.

She nodded and held the door wide, leading Dad and me inside.