Chapter Fifteen
My mind feels like the wreckage after a highway pileup, all that twisted metal and those tiny shards of glass, left for someone else to sweep up.
Clay stays in bed for three weeks, unable to move more than a few steps at a time. I bring him soup and ginger broth. I tend the garden, gather eggs from the henhouse.
But the weather worsens. Snow falls from the sky, and the garden freezes in place. Even the greenhouse becomes too cold to keep any of the crops alive.
“It’s getting dangerous,” I tell him in the evening, lying beside him, my skin pressed to his to keep warm. In the first couple weeks, he was feverish each night, sweating through the sheets. I welcomed his warmth.
For days I thought he would die, the fever a sign of infection, but I made him drink water, wiped the sweat from his forehead and chest, and after the twelfth day, the fever broke, and he slept all night without waking.
He’s growing stronger now, the wound healing, but he still struggles to stand, and he sleeps more than he’s awake.
“It’s too cold outside,” I continue. “I worry about the chickens, if they can survive this.”
Clay strokes my hair, a habit each night that I’ve grown used to as I drift into sleep. “We should bring them inside, the cellar maybe.” His hand slows at my nape, and I move closer to him, my arm folded over his chest, careful to avoid all the places where I know he’s sore.
“It’s just as dangerous for ye, going out in that wind. It’s well below freezing.”
“Maybe the tide will change and the wind will blow us south.”
“Aye, maybe.”
I fall asleep with my head against his chest, listening to the sound of his lungs—a sound that feels like alchemy to me now, like hope. Because for too many days I listened and worried it might stop. Worried I’d hear the last exhale leave his lips.
Icebergs.
I’ve seen them in photographs, in documentaries of polar bears carving out a stark existence on their surface. I never gave them much thought; a landscape I’d surely never see in person.
When the first one comes into view through the kitchen window, I feel an odd sense of calm. I push out through the back door, hands in the pockets of my wool pants, the cold gusting straight through my sweater.
The iceberg is small—the size of an SUV. It bobs past us, missing our rocky shoreline, then slowly drifts toward the horizon. I watch it, my breathing shallow in the cold, wondering what waits for us at the end of this current, when the wind finally stops pushing us north.
We haven’t seen another ship since the USS Kingston.
No hint of land.
This iceberg is the first.
I turn back for the house and catch movement above.
At a second-story window, Clay is leaning against the window frame, watching the iceberg sail away. He can stand on his own now, with the use of a cane, which is just a piece of driftwood that was once a tree branch, washed ashore after the hurricane.
He notices me. Smiles softly. His beard growing out.
A feeling spills through me—fear, maybe.
Uncertainty. Almost like a premonition but without any clarity.
I touch the two shells around my neck. The past is an uncertain number of years behind us.
The future unknowable. We defy time by living out here.
We scorn the gods, but someday, maybe, they will come for us.
“It’s too cold,” he argues.
“You’re complaining more than you did after you were shot.”
He makes a sound of protest, looks at me, eyebrows raised.
“I refuse to kiss that face unless you shave.”
His expression changes, lightens, and I love when his eyes shiver slightly, like there is a light source inside him.
A flicker of shyness, of thoughts he would never say aloud.
But it’s enough to convince him, and he limps through the front door, leaning heavily on the cane, then slumps into the chair I’ve placed on the front porch.
I fold a towel gently around his neck, a pot of warm water waiting on the other chair.
I’ve missed the tenderness of these moments—a feeling that’s difficult to describe. I slide the razor down his jawline, following the known landscape of his face.
“Remember the first time ye shaved my beard?” he asks.
I smile, angling the razor over his chin. “I thought I might cut you.”
“I thought I might kiss ye.”
“I wish you had.”
I rinse the razor, shifting to the other side of his face.
He tilts his chin up to me, and his blue eyes are so beautiful they’re painful.
I would do anything for him. I would let the world burn around us.
His hand finds my leg, as if he’s holding me steady, and my fingers slide from his temple to his throat, tiny hairs splintering off, dusting the porch.
I only want this. An endless dusk, the sun waiting against the sea, but never quite touching it.
Night never folding itself over us. For the rest of time.
“I love you, you know,” he says, the words not hidden by even a hint of Scottish lilt. “You remind me of the sea, you smell like the softest wind. Like this island. Like you were always meant for this place.”
I bend down, running my fingers across the smooth surface of his face, letting my thumb brush his lips. My husband. The only man I’ve ever truly loved. His hand scrapes around the back of my neck, easing me to him, where he kisses me so delicately I want to dissolve in his hands.
His other hand presses against my hip, easing under my sweater.
We haven’t touched like this since those men came ashore. Almost a month.
I pause against his lips. “You’re still healing,” I whisper.
“Aye, and I need ye to put me back together.”
My mouth hitches into a smile, and I kiss him again.
I leave the razor and the bowl of water on the front porch—where they will be forgotten, where the water will freeze solid overnight. And I follow Clay into the house, his pace slow with the cane, limping each step. He eases down onto the couch, letting the cane fall to the floor.
I peel away his clothes, careful and slow.
Then I shrug out of mine. For a moment, we look at each other, our bodies bare, the wind whistling against the house, the light darkening from the sky.
Two people lost at sea. But found again.
He pulls me to him. I ease myself over him, careful of the wound at his lowest rib—mostly healed—but the scar is still pink and waxy. A bullet somewhere inside.
“Tell me if it hurts,” I say.
“It won’t.”
I lift an eyebrow, but he presses his mouth to my throat—the place where that man, Langston, ran his own lips up to my ear.
But I push the memory away, because Clay is making new patterns of my flesh, erasing old scars with every exhale, with the feeling of him inside me.
My palms against his chest, I let myself cry.
He wipes the tears from my cheek, he kisses them away, and we find a rhythm that not even time can touch.
“Ellie—” he whispers at the end, the texture of his voice honeyed, rich and thick against my ear, as his body, his torso, tenses against mine.
And when I let out my last breath, sweat pricking my temple, I sink into his arms, our flesh pressed to each other, and we sleep like this, in the living room, with the cold always looking for a way in.
The sound cracks through the walls of the house, a long chattering moan like bending metal.
I lift my head from Clay’s chest, looking to the front door.
The sound comes again, grinding, crunching, then falls quiet.
“Wait here,” he says, reaching for the cane, and pushing himself up from the couch—still naked.
The memory of those men is still too recent, the fear we both share, and he grabs the rifle—waiting beside the front door—as he steps out into the morning light.
But I don’t do as he says. I walk to the doorway, the quilt folded over my shoulders, looking past him.
Out beyond the edges of the island, the sea is gone.
The blackish-blue horizon, the churning waves that have been our constant view for months, has been replaced by something else.
White.
The ocean has been iced over, solid and endless.
Clay scans the horizon, the rifle at his side. “This is the farthest north I’ve ever been.”
The wind has stopped blowing, and I lift a hand over my eyes, finding it hard to focus.
The endless landscape of snow and ice is blinding.
Clay leaves the rifle on the porch, and we descend the steps, circling the house.
It’s the same in every direction. Past the henhouse, we can just make out a sliver of black in the distance, several miles behind us, where the sea is still liquid.
But the wind or the tide has blown us into a field of frozen water, icebergs rising up in every direction.
We’re stuck.
A bird wings through the sky.
It looks like a blackbird, but larger. A raven perhaps. “What the hell is that doing way out here?”
“Trying to survive,” Clay answers, and I can’t tell if he’s making a joke.
It’s been a week since the island became lodged against an arctic sheet of ice. The garden is frozen, the chickens are happily housed in the cellar, and we spend our days inside—hoping for wind. For a change in the weather. For the ice to let us go.
“Maybe there’s land somewhere out there,” I suggest, watching the bird rise higher, before wheeling out past the house and across the ice.
“Could be.”
“Maybe—” I begin.
But Clay shoots me a look. He knows what I’m thinking.
We’ve already discussed it and decided the risk of leaving the island is too great.
We don’t know how safe, how solid, the ice would be.
We don’t know how far we might need to walk before we find something.
And once we lose sight of the island, the farmhouse, it might be impossible to find it again in a landscape this featureless.