Waiting for Unicorns (4 page)

DAD AND HIS TEAM SPENT
the next week and a half getting ready for their first short-term expedition, and I pretended like I wasn't counting every hour, every minute until he left me. I finished all of my end-of-the-year school assignments, reread two of the books I'd brought from home, and spent a lot of time just standing at my bedroom window, staring out over the frozen landscape. It was the third week in May, but there was still snow on the ground, and it was below freezing. Spring didn't seem like much of a possibility way out here.

I knew what snow looked like, obviously, but I wasn't used to the colorful whiteness of everything—the different shades and textures. Like the clouds that scuttled across the sky, trying to outrun the north wind, the snow was full of colors. If I were a painter I'd have to use grays and browns, blues, pinks, and yellows in addition to whites to get it right. And that was on a cloudy day. But when the sun broke, there was no hope of ever getting that snow right, no matter how many colors you might have in your palette.

I've heard people say freshly fallen snow is blinding. But I never really understood what that meant until now. When the sun hit the frozen bay, the new snow looked like it was lit from underneath. It was almost as if the sun had somehow broken itself apart and burrowed under the arctic landscape until all of its warmth seeped out, leaving behind only its cold brilliant light.

I also watched people come and go. Since Sura's house was on the edge of town, it was pretty much just hunters and trappers venturing out past the house into the tundra. With their snowmobiles whining and spewing exhaust into the cold air, they would drag their gear behind them in sleds, cutting a wide swath through the snow. It was a strange sight, watching them disappear into the frozen landscape, a rifle strapped to their backs. Sura said they were hunting tuktu—caribou, mostly. Sometimes moose.

“Most of what we eat comes from the land,” she said. “Or off the ice.”

“Aren't there laws against hunting in the springtime?” I asked.

Sura smiled. “There are. Though I'm surprised you know about that.”

“Why are you surprised?” I glanced up at her and crossed my arms. My dad had been a whale researcher my whole life. Was it really so shocking that I would know some stuff about animal rights?

“I just didn't realize you thought about hunting regulations,” Sura said carefully, “especially in regards to your dinner.”

I didn't really know how to respond to that. I hadn't talked to Sura much since we'd arrived, so this—being around her—was all still pretty new. Instead I just asked again, “So is he hunting illegally?”

“No. Standard hunting regulations do not apply to the Inuit because we depend on the animals in ways other people do not. We do not take them for sport, but for survival. There is a difference.”

I nodded. “Tuktu
.
” I said the word for caribou in Sura's native language clumsily, feeling its heaviness against my tongue.

“Yes. The life of a caribou for the life of the Inuit. And you.”

I wanted to tell Sura I hoped they weren't out there killing caribou for my sake, but I didn't say anything.

By May twenty-fourth, Dad was ready to leave for his first expedition. The morning of his departure, I stuck pretty close to him, partly because I didn't want to lose sight of him before I had to, and partly because I didn't want to keep running into Sura. The house was pretty small, and it seemed that no matter where I went she was lurking just around the corner, waiting to see if we needed anything. I couldn't exactly tell her that what I needed was to be at home—to have my mom back—to be anywhere but here in the middle of Churchill, Manitoba, because if I was here, that meant my dad was still leaving and my mom was still gone. And there wasn't much Sura could do to change that.

While Dad packed, I sat cross-legged on his bed, running my palms over the patchwork quilt that covered it. I watched as he filled his duffel bag—wool socks, sweaters, long underwear, sun goggles, sunscreen. I tried to pretend he was just leaving for the weekend.

“Maybe you'll get a nice tan,” I said jokingly. But I knew better, and so did Dad. In fact, the sun was so strong out on the ice that in addition to needing sunscreen to protect his skin, Dad needed to protect his eyes, too. Like sunburn on your eyes, the glare off the brilliant snow stretching out for endless miles in all directions could shut you up in darkness if you weren't careful. Snow blindness was a real thing—temporary, but painful. The Inuit had known all about this for ages, and long before we came along, they were wearing snow goggles carved from whale bone with slits to see through.

But snow blindness was the least of Dad's concerns.

Ever since we'd come to town, we'd been hearing reports from hunters and trappers as they came in off the ice. Dad said it was the strangest thing he'd ever heard, and I could tell he didn't quite believe it.

There were no whales.
That's what they were saying.

“What if you can't find them?” I asked.

Dad shrugged and grinned. “It's early. Sometimes currents and water temperatures shift just enough to alter migration patterns a little. Nothing to worry about. I'll only be gone for a few days,” he promised. “I'll just take some measurements and water samples, and then I'll be back.”

And with that, he left me at the blue house with Sura.

When Dad radioed just two days later to tell us he was coming in off the ice, I could tell by the sound of his voice that something was wrong.

The night Dad came home, Sura cooked a huge dinner to celebrate his return. She went all out. Maybe she hoped that surprising him with his favorite meal would cheer him up. But Sura's efforts fell flat because Dad was so wrapped up in his whales—or rather, the
lack
of them.

He and his team had run a variety of tests sampling ice and water, testing salinity and current shifts. They'd done sonar scans, and dropped giant booms through the ice into the depths of Hudson Bay, listening for whale song. But the sea was quiet.

I couldn't help but think maybe something terrible had happened to them. Dad had told me that beluga whales stay near the edge of the ice pack where holes in the ice allow them to surface and breathe. But if it suddenly gets very cold and those holes freeze over, or if the ice shifts, cutting off their route to open water, the pod can become trapped. If the whales can't break through the newly formed ice, or if open water is beyond the distance they can swim without surfacing, they can drown. Whales are mammals, and they have to breathe air, just like people. They can hold their breath for a long time, longer than humans, but even the best breath-holders in the world have to come up for air eventually.

“It doesn't make sense, Tal,” Dad said to me, stabbing his fork through noodles, sauce, and ricotta cheese. “They've never been this late to Churchill.”

“You think something happened to them?” I picked at the crunchy edges of my bread.

“I don't know. Even below-average temperatures wouldn't strand an entire migratory population,” Dad said, his voice sharp with frustration. “Something is holding them up. I can't figure it out.”

He got up from the table and dropped his plate in the sink. It only took him a few minutes to throw on a coat and boots before he clomped back out the door into the arctic night air, the door slamming behind him. I heard the Suburban sputter to life, protesting the cold, and then he was gone again—back to the CNSC to try and make sense of it all.

I spun my spoon around and around on the smooth surface of the table, watching it catch the light from the low-hanging lamp over my head.

Dad needed those whales—he needed them like I needed Mom's stories, because sometimes you just need something bigger than yourself to feel whole. To keep all the pieces of yourself from falling apart. Those whales were big enough to keep Dad together, but not if he couldn't find them.

And then what?

We were already pretty broken, Dad and I. We couldn't handle too many more missing pieces.

WITH DAD'S RECEDING footsteps and
the slam of the front door still resounding in my head, I stretched out on my bedroom floor, my knees and elbows digging into the wide-plank floorboards. My fingers met the cool solidness of my jar of wishes beneath the bed, and I pulled it from the dark into the light of my room. My wishes had settled nicely.

I don't think Dad knew about my wishes, or if he did, he never said. Probably because he wouldn't have known what to do with them.

The first wish I'd ever written was easy to pick out, even though the jar was full of little paper slips. It was more crumpled than the others and the ink was smeared a bit where I'd cried on it. Even the paper looked different. Less white. Older. I'd almost thrown that wish away, because it was so obviously not coming true. But I kept it, in the end.

Mom had fingered it like the petals of a flower when I showed it to her.

I wish there was no more cancer.

Then she'd kissed it and dropped it into my jar herself. I couldn't throw it away after that because it wasn't just my wish. Mom and I had both wished for her cancer to go away.

Over the next few months, she added two more wishes to my jar:

I wish I knew how to make crème brûlée.

I wish I could grow roses.

At the time, I asked her why she was wishing for such silly things. She just poked me in the ribs and told me she already had everything she really wanted.

I'd always loved making wishes—blowing dandelion seed heads into the wind, wishing on birthday candles. I started writing some of them down because I couldn't always remember what I'd wished for and I wanted to see if any of them had actually come true. Sometimes they did. Always small wishes, though. That Mom and Dad would let me have a sleepover with a friend from school. That I'd get what I wanted for Christmas. That I wouldn't have a test or a pop quiz in history. Those kinds of things. But I could never tell if those things happened because I
wished
for them, or if it was just a coincidence.

The jar itself was an answer to one of my wishes. Sort of.

Mom and I sometimes went to garage sales on Saturday mornings, and one morning two years ago, Mom turned as we backed out of the driveway, and met my gaze across the front seat.

“If you could find one thing today—one treasure—what would it be?”

“I wish I could find something to keep my collections in,” I said.

“Good plan!” She laughed, and we pulled out of the driveway.

I really had no idea what I was looking for. An old trunk, or a small wooden container—a cigar box maybe. But when I saw a big, old mason jar, the kind that held those giant pickles at the fair, I knew it was supposed to be mine. It didn't sparkle in the sunlight or anything. It didn't call my name, and it didn't draw me irresistibly the way these kinds of things do in movies. It just sat there. But I knew it was for my wishes. I bought it for twenty-five cents and took it home, where it sat on my nightstand for three weeks, empty, while I tried to come up with a wish important enough to drop inside.

Then we found out about Mom's cancer. And I made my first wish.

As I sat in my room on the second floor of the blue house, I pulled out that no-cancer wish first, just like I always did. I kissed it, smoothed it out, and laid it on the floor. Then I plucked the rest of the wishes from my jar one by one, the way you pull petals from a daisy.

I wish Garrett Wilson liked me.

I wish I was taller.

I wish I could play a musical instrument—something besides the recorder.

Soon, wishes lay all around me on the floor, carefully smoothed and arranged all nice and neat so I could read them. There were ones about snow days and new shoes. There were ones that made me a little embarrassed—about boys and being kissed. Wishes about things I hoped would happen. Wishes about things I hoped would
not
happen. And even wishes about wishes.

At first I'd been really particular about which wishes I put in my jar. Only the big, important ones went inside. But then I realized that every wish was important in some way. So as long as I was throwing my heart into an old glass mason jar, I might as well have some rules, because there's a difference between just hoping something will happen and intentionally wishing for it.

Rule number one: No getting rid of wishes once I had put them in the jar. This meant I had to want whatever I was wishing for badly enough to make it permanent. Of course, this made all the silly things I'd already wished for even sillier. But that didn't mean I didn't still want them to come true.

Rule number two: Only my wishes could go into the jar. I couldn't go dropping them in on behalf of someone else. (Mom's two wishes were okay because they were already in there, and taking them out would break rule number one.)

That first wish was okay, too—that no-cancer wish—because it belonged to both Mom and me. But I couldn't say something like
I wish my dad would find the whales.
I could only say
I wish for the belugas to arrive.

Rule number three: No hurtful wishes. I couldn't wish anyone dead or injured or anything like that, because what if it actually came true after I stopped being mad or upset with that person?

And, rule number four: All wishes had to be kept secret. I couldn't go around putting my jar on display or sharing my wishes with anyone.

When Mom died, I quit making wishes for a while. It wasn't fun anymore, not after that. Before, it had been exciting to think of things, even impossible things, to write on slips of paper and drop into my jar. Kind of like throwing a penny into a fountain and imagining your life different because of it. Because then, at least for the most part, I could pretend that my wishes didn't matter as much as everything else I already had. But after Mom was gone that changed. And now no matter what happened, everything I had left didn't feel like enough anymore.