Inukshuk (29 page)

“What are you saying?”

She shook her head. “No. I won't do this, either. Won't do it. What happened here last night, this morning . . . It was good. And I won't
say another word to wreck it. Because the truth . . .” Again she shook her head. “You have to trust me on this one, John, but there are things I just can't share with you now—things you should be grateful to have no part of. Later . . . if we can get a little distance down the road, a little space from our respective situations. I don't know. But for now, please believe me, and try to understand.” She stood, pulled on her other boot, zipped it, and went to the sweater chest for her jacket. “And count yourself lucky.” Slid arms through and turned to face him. Held up the hat, grinning manically and waving it like a flag. “See? I didn't forget,” she said, and placed it crookedly on her head. “Now wish the liar luck.”

He stood. “Hey,” he said. Opened his arms and drew her to him one last time. “I'm glad we had this night, then. And I'm sorry if it causes . . . if it's messed things up for you.”

“Not your fault, John.”

“Let me walk you out.”

Years past, with Devon sneaking out of the house after midnight to rendezvous with friends or, in his last year of high school, slipping away in the early hours to meet up with Charmaine in some park or in her parents' basement, Franklin had learned that the whole parent-as-gatekeeper job was as impossible to enact as it was impossible to dodge or rescind. Bolt and alarm the doors. Threaten and cajole. Plead. Bargain. None of it mattered; none of it did any good. The house was a sieve. Temporarily things might be set right, compromises reached, but in the end it came to the same thing: standing outside his own bedroom door some early morning or in the middle of the night, bleary-eyed and barely awake but knowing, with a shock of adrenaline, the boy had figured out a new way to spring the trap and a new urgency for doing so. Bitten off his own leg and run. Gone. Hours already. Lights left on, a door or window open, smell of cologne in his doorway, empty, unmade bed, nothing more. And though Franklin might wish things otherwise, might hate himself for being in this role of
protector
,
controller, commander, parent
, he hated even more that he'd failed at it. Again. More even than that, he was plain furious with Devon for running.

But Thomas did not openly fight or run. Consequently, with Devon out of the house for college, Franklin had mostly (and instantly, happily) forgotten these particular alarms and responses—light careening harshly at the corners of his sleep-deprived eyes and the sudden knowledge that something had gone wrong in his off-hours and he was now about to face an outcome he was too late to do anything to fix or stop. The house was a sieve—a sinking ship, a junkyard full of stuff no one wanted anymore, graveyard from which everyone but him, it seemed, longed to escape. If he'd ever truly been the one in charge, it was long past the time he should resign and walk away.

Instinctually, he knew why she must have frozen ahead of him and was now pointing, staring toward Thomas's room.

“Is that . . .” she began.

“Yes,” he said. “That'd be Thomas.” Looking past her, he saw Thomas, apparently passed out, facedown on the floor. “He does sleepwalk sometimes. Let's just hope . . .” He crossed to Thomas's room, noting as he did the lights left on downstairs as well as upstairs. Wrong. All wrong. A lit-up sieve. He should have known.

SEPTEMBER AND ALREADY THE NIGHTS were well below freezing, gale winds bringing up black clouds on the northern horizon and bouts of stinging snow and ice. Nothing anymore, but this flat white cusp of world—no trees, no hills, barely any shape to the land. Only rock and snow. Icy, refrozen serrated edges of drifts. Bare slick patches that crunched underfoot or broke open, engulfing him to the knee, slicing at his ankles. Slushy wet snow piled on the back sides of drifts stuck and soaked through the torn bottoms of his boots. Once, breaking through, he'd found himself up to the knees in slushy half-frozen meltwater. Funny, he could still feel it enough to panic, though he wasn't sure whether or not to care. But he did. Enough to pull himself out and trudge on. And two days later, breaking camp, reoutfitting himself in his same wet boots, wet woolens and skins as the day before and the day before that, he'd
dared to look. The toes were black and red, nails gone, except the big toe on his right foot, flesh rubbed away between most of them, one little toe bent and twisted back over the others, and though he'd pried it into place again, it wouldn't stay. Dead. Broken. Everything from the ankles down swollen unfamiliarly to the size of his brother's feet, his father's. Well, if they made it through, he'd have to get the toes all cut off, to be sure. Learn to walk with canes. The older sailors said it could be done, but your days at sea were surely finished. A frozen finger or two, easy. But a man who couldn't walk, couldn't climb a ladder or rig a sail, he might as well try to marry a dog as sign on for service again. Life of begging under bridges, or maybe a desk job with the admiralty. And what would she think of him then, a man stuck behind canes, hobbling up and down stairs? A cripple.

Five days he'd been allowed off sledge-hauling duty and still he couldn't easily keep up. East. Why were they headed east now and how much farther? He tried to remember. The plan had been to walk inland, away from the worst of the coastal weather and straight south down King William's Land to Back's Fish River, where, Crozier assured them, they'd find game to shoot. Eskimo to barter away trinkets and silver, guns if necessary, for fresh seal meat, whale, and caribou. But here was the frozen sea before them, crammed with pack ice. If not for the sun, they'd have supposed it a misreading—compasses gone awry from the proximity to magnetic north again. But no . . . it was an unmapped inlet, deeper and wider than any others known on King William's Land, so they circumnavigated, three days now, maybe more, and with every weary step went sideways of their goal . . . east. Every step forward doubling the number of steps toward their destination.

Through the layers of woolen gear, he touched his few remaining possessions. The notebook from Harry Peglar taken off Gibson weeks ago when he died in his sleep. His steward's lint brush. A pen from Jenny, for which he'd long ago run out of ink to write her. And the silver plate stolen from one of the abandoned sledge-hauled longboats, rightfully his—the gift from Franklin. He couldn't say why he
kept any of these items anymore except that knowing what they were and why they were on his person reminded him he was alive and had some hope and could still place one foot before the other.

Ahead of him, the men in traces had stopped and broken out, collapsing to either side of the last longboat. Crozier stood to one side of them with another sailor, likely ice master Reid or one of the petty officers, getting another reading on their coordinates. Crozier lifted his spyglass and faced away from the men and spun again, pointing, saying something to Reid.

Hoar seated himself by Work and waited.

“What's he after?” he asked.

Work shrugged and lowered his head on his knees. Turned his face to the side and stared past Hoar. “Seen some tracks a ways back . . . dog sledge and Eskimo. Crozier's hoping they got meat to barter.” Still he stared past Hoar. “Half a mile ago now should have been the end of the inlet, by my reckoning. These officers”—he coughed and lowered his voice further—“it's like they been soaked in gin every night and got no wits about 'em anymore. Dizzy stupid they is. We're headed north again soon or my name's not Thomas Work.”

“What are you sayin'—north?”

“I'm saying we gone the wrong way.”

“Where should we go, then?”

“Straight across.”

“The inlet?”

He nodded. “It's no inlet, Edmund; that's your Northwest Passage.
Tallurutik
.”

Still Hoar didn't understand.

“It's an
island,
” Work said. “We're on a bloody
island
. King William
Island
. It don't connect with the mainland at all. This right here is the southern coast, and that”—he pointed with his chin to the inlet before them—“is the goddamn passage. Behold the great watery byway—future of English commerce we turned ourselves to walking corpses to find. Just remember you heard it from me first.”

Hoar turned. Positioned himself with the sun in his face to be sure, and looked south. Ice. Gravel- and ice-covered rock running
down to the frozen shoreline, and beyond that the white humped shapes of pack ice frozen treacherously in place. Glints of water farther on, but no real open leads. Too far to see across, but now at last he understood: not an inlet after all . . . which meant, as Work had said, it was the final missing link, the last unmapped stretch of open water connecting east and west along the top of the North American continent. The passage. Right there.

“Thomas.” He searched his inner layers for the silver plate. Handed it to him. “If you make it home, please take this to my mother. In Portsmouth. Like I told you before,” he said. “But if you need it to barter. . . .” He shrugged. “God bless you, Thomas, and keep you.”

“What are you off about, then?”

“I'm not going with ye's across. I'm done for. Right here, in sight of the passage. I don't think I've got that many hours left me anyway. I'll find my own way.” From some of the older sailors who'd gone to the brink and back again, he knew it was an easy-enough death they had to fight against themselves not to succumb to its temptation—
peaceful and restful and by the time ye're done for ye don't even feel the cold so much. You don't feel a thing. Like fallin' asleep in your mother's arms. Like fallin' asleep in your dead mother's arms.
He could just lie out in the open and let the cold take him. “Tell the others I gone to see what's over top of that rise there.”

Work stared between his feet. “I won't, either, Edmund. You go now before anyone gets an idea. We got meat for another day or two at the best and there's talk of another.... I don't want to be the one cutting you meat-from-bones, let's say, but I will if I have to.”

“Godspeed, brother.”

He pushed himself upright and walked, singing under his breath. At the top of the ridge, he turned and kept on, the open sea always in his sight. And when he'd gone far enough that the others were out of earshot and hidden behind the ridge, he sat in a crusted drift of snow, propped up and facing south, arms open—a flesh and blood
inukshuk
. He dug in his heels and tipped his head back at the sky to watch the northern stars wheel into view, and sang.

YEARS LATER, THOMAS WOULD REMEMBER it as the morning he came back to life. He'd picture his father and the woman in the white hat staring gravely at him as if from a distance, space stretched and telescoped, so they seemed below him somehow yet still looking down. Their expressions of consternation and desperate worry a cause of amusement at first, giving him more of the happy, buzzed, and sloppy-sleepy feelings that had held him down so long, face-first on the floor, dreaming in a pool of blue drool. Incongruously, his father's feet were prodding him and then his hands and the two of them, his father and the woman with the seal-looking white hat, were touching him up and down the torso, saying things to each other, and then he understood. Scurvy symptom number three: old scars reopening. Old chicken pox scars on his chest blistered and bloody, and the cut on his neck, not from Jill after all—now he remembered: It was a rope burn from an incident with Devon years earlier that he'd picked and picked at ceaselessly, never allowing it to scab, until it was an
issue
. Infected. Now reopened and hemorrhagic.
Scurvy,
he wanted to say. Brag, even.
Look at that! I did it.
But he could not be sure he'd actually said any of it, and anyway, they seemed not to understand.