Chapter Fifteen #2
But seeing the bird makes me wonder if there’s something just beyond the horizon.
An outpost, a small arctic town, a coffee shop.
It’s been decades on the mainland, and in that time, perhaps this remote part of the world is more inhabited.
Perhaps a hotel and a town wait for us over the next iceberg.
But we stay inside, shivering, using up the last of our firewood to heat the house, and eating what’s left of our preserves from the cellar.
Eventually we’ll need to start burning parts of the farmhouse—window frames and doors and furniture.
We’ll either freeze, or starve.
Clay’s strength has been returning, but now the cold seems to be making him worse. He’s reluctant to rise from bed in the morning, and when he does, he is slow, moving painfully through the house.
“After what happened,” Clay adds, “I prefer to remain away from civilization. The world isn’t what we remember of it, Ellie.”
“If we stay, we might die.”
“I think I prefer death.”
We rarely leave our room.
Our bed is warmth, it’s survival. So we remain beneath the blankets most days, only rising to eat, to pee outside in the cold. Clay’s wound is healing, the stitched hole from the bullet is no longer inflamed, his flesh woven itself back together.
And yet, he still seems weak. The lack of food, the constant cold—it weighs on him. I can survive on fewer calories, but I can tell his body is wasting away, losing muscle each day.
I lie awake at night and think about time.
An intangible resource, a thing we lose little by little.
The Greeks had two words for time: chronos and kairos.
The first represents our measurement of time, the chronological order, like a ticking clock.
Linear and predictable. But kairos is more mercurial—that indescribable moment when all things come together in perfect unison, the right place at the right time, when it feels as if the universe has orchestrated your life into absolute harmony.
But which is correct?
Which truly governs our existence?
Perhaps time is nothing more than a system of beliefs. A perception. A way to make sense of our surroundings—to measure and calculate and create order.
But out here, without a clock or calendar to mark the hours, maybe we are bound by no edicts or natural laws.
We are free.
I find a copy of The Old Man and the Sea by Hemingway on one of the dusty shelves in the living room, and I read to Clay each morning, while we lie curled in bed.
Then I wrap myself in one of the quilts, my feet in two layers of socks, and plod down to the kitchen to make tea.
I bring two steaming cups back upstairs, crawl into bed, and we sip them with blankets pulled to our chests.
He tells me old Scottish fables, stories that were read to him as a young boy.
“Maybe you’ll see it again someday,” I say. “Maybe the island will carry us back and I will finally see your home. Your Scotland.”
“Maybe,” he agrees.
Time is our perpetual partner, intimate and ceaseless. Some days it bends around us easily, hours passing without much notice. But other days, the minutes gnaw and bite at us—a reminder that we’ve been here too long.
Too many weeks have passed, and eventually time will run out.
The sun will not rise, our eyes will not open.
And we will be a memory recalled by no one.
“You should try to stand,” I urge. But he closes his eyes, looking so weak I worry he won’t open them again. “Clay, please.”
I slide my arm around his torso—still broad and muscled, even after so long without a real meal—and reluctantly, he bends forward, sliding his legs to the floor. I place the cane into his hand, and he shifts his weight heavily onto it.
With effort, he stands, and I guide him to the bedroom door.
He limps across the hall, and I push open the bathroom door. He angles himself in the doorway, seeing the bath of warm water. “Ye didn’t have to do this.”
“I thought you could use a little warmth.”
It took some time, hauling the buckets of water up from the kitchen to the bath, twice as long as it usually takes Clay to fill the tub.
But after adding a few sprigs of dried lavender, left over from the jar Alice kept in the cupboard, the entire bathroom smells so delicate and beautiful that I could cry.
I help Clay to undress, and he grips the edge of the bath, easing himself down into the water, gritting his teeth. If the tub was large enough, I’d happily sink into the water with him, but instead, I leave him alone while I plod down to the kitchen to find something for dinner.
Our choices are limited. On the counter sit five mason jars of stewed tomatoes—which we’ve eaten so much of that it makes me sick just looking at them.
A large jar of pickled cauliflower and cabbage.
And one last jar of red beans. I’d been saving them, the last of our protein—aside from the few eggs our chickens have been laying.
But they too have been affected by the constant cold, and limited food.
Soon, we’ll have to decide if they’re better off on our plates, instead of waiting for the rare egg.
Once it comes to that, I know we’ll be nearing the end. It will likely be our final meal.
Tonight, we will spare the chickens, and I decide to open the jar of beans.
After a warm bath it will feel like a delicacy.
I twist off the lid, about to pour it into the cast-iron pot, when the glass jar slips between my fingers—shattering across the floor. My lungs release a breath, gaping down at the mess of broken glass mixed with cold beans, in shock, when my mind finally catches up, realizing what’s happening.
The whole house is vibrating—windows shaking in their frames, glasses above the sink rattling, and I reach for the counter for balance.
My thoughts are slow to understand, the lack of calories has dulled my synapses, but when I look to the window, I see the ice shifting.
The vibration pauses, then starts again, the walls of the house thundering up from the foundation. I stagger to the back door, yanking it open.
I need to see.
To be sure.
The house is moving.
I race up the stairs to Clay.
Fissures begin cracking open in the landscape of endless white.
Perhaps spring has arrived, the temperatures warming just enough to set us free. Or maybe the current has shifted, the ice breaking apart only to knit itself back together again.
But we can feel the house, and the island, settling back into the water—floating. No longer locked in place.
And by the end of the next day, we’re moving steadily through the swath of fractured icebergs.
The following morning, we can see the edge. The end of the trapped ice.
And we drift out into the open black sea.
Clay leaves the cane beside the bed.
He uses it less and less, and one morning, he places it against the wall and never touches it again. The limp remains, though, and sometimes he winces when walking up the stairs, reaching for the wall for balance.
He thinks I don’t see.
It’s been three weeks since we left the ice. The days grow milder, and then the rain comes. Light and drizzly at first, a few drops against the soil, but it soon turns into a daily downpour.
“We could replant the garden, start again,” I say, bringing the spoon to my mouth to sip the seaweed stew I made for breakfast. The only edible thing we’ve had in days.
Clay shakes his head. “We planted all the seeds we had, then lost the crop in the cold, without a harvest.”
“There’s nothing left?”
He looks at me, and I can see the regret, the guilt—as if this is all somehow his fault. The men who raided our island, the winds that pushed us north into the ice. He feels responsible.
“We still have the chickens,” I remind him, tucked safely away in the warmth of the cellar. “We can move them back outside, maybe they’ll start laying eggs again.”
He nods, then stands, moving slowly to the sink with his empty bowl, his leg hitching with each step.
It hurts to see him like this.
The afternoons grow warmer, rain sheeting over the island each evening. Along the shore, grass pokes above the soil, bright and green, returning. I watch the garden, hoping a cabbage or potato sprout will push to the surface, seeking sunlight, but it remains a muddy wasteland. Where nothing grows.
Clay perches himself on a smooth rock at the shore, casting his fishing line out into the sea.
For two days he catches nothing. We return the chickens to their coop, and each morning we let them out to wander the island, pecking at the soil for insects and stray seeds. But still, they refuse to lay eggs.
Too traumatized, perhaps. Too stubborn.
“Please,” I beg them, my hand feeling along their coop boxes for a tiny precious egg, but finding them empty for the third day in a row. I can feel myself growing hollow and frail, my movements slow, my mind clouded. We can’t survive on seaweed alone.
But if we take the life of our chickens, it will be our final dinner. They are more valuable to us alive, in the long run. But if they don’t lay eggs, if Clay doesn’t haul in a fish from the shore, then we will have to decide.
We have escaped the ice. But we are slowly starving.
At night, I feel the delicate pressure of Clay’s fingers tracing the valleys of my tired body, brushing his lips along my freckled skin. Reassuring me. He whispers against my flesh that we’ll be okay. And I believe him. I need to.
But there’s something in the air.
The wind across the sea feels strained, tensed, like it’s bracing for something—a certainty I can’t pinpoint.
A scent maybe, like smoke. Faraway and diluted.
“Ye’ve been watching the sea—” Clay says to me, coming up behind me to fold his hands around my waist. I’m standing on the pebbled shore, my pants rolled up, letting the cold waves slide over my ankles.
“I don’t know what it is—” I tell him. “It’s just a feeling. The air smells odd—unnatural.”
He releases his hands from my waist. “The wind knows things before we do.”
“It feels like it’s always out there, waiting for us…”
His eyebrows pinch together. “What is?”