Filed To Story: Wild Dark Shore Book PDF Free by Charlotte McConaghy
“Including you, Dom?”
“Oh, sure.” He looks away from me to the corner of the room. It is empty, but he stares at it. “Me most of all, I’d say.”
“Do you hear the voices?”
“I only hear one.”
I don’t need to ask, but I make myself, because I think hearing it from him will help me to banish the thoughts that have started creeping in.
“Whose?”
Dom looks at me. “My wife’s.”
“It must be nice,” I say softly, “being able to keep her close.”
“It’s nice and it’s terrible.”
I think I understand. To miss her less and more at once. To grieve
for her less and more. She is balm to his loneliness and a symptom of it. His love for her endures, gives her form. Could mine do the same for Hank?
I know the answer to this, too: I would not let it. I have made my love for him weak, designed it to be so, that it should be easier to cut myself free of.
Wind batters the cabin. I listen to it, trying to pick out sounds within it. I think of Orly’s promise to this wind.
We aren’t going that way.
What else is out here?
I return to bed and try to shake off the images in my mind, of carving knives in bellies but also of winds that carry ghosts upon them. I want to feel something else, I want to reach for a shadow of the love Dom has inside him, wish to know if I am capable of it. So I imagine Hank’s hands on my body, in his bed I try to feel close to him, but it has been so long since my husband touched me that I can hardly remember the feel of him, and anyway a part of me knows he will not conjure the feeling I want. Instead there is another set of hands, a set I spent yesterday watching as they held tools and worked metal, it’s these large, strong hands that I can feel on my skin and it’s as if where they touch they smooth away pain, they set alight a different sensation. It is easy in the dark to imagine he is not lying in his own bed, thinking of his wife. It is so easy to imagine he is thinking of me, and vividly enough to drive him from that bed and into this one. And when it’s over, when I have drifted down the other side, I am myself again, enough to lie here in shame and know how stupid it is to imagine not an ending, but a beginning.
The trip to the field hut and the seed vault has offered no clues as to why Hank left without telling me. Although that’s not exactly true, I suppose. I may not have found anything physical, but I felt it, didn’t I? The weight of his grief. The terrible haunting of this island and the
burden of his decisions. Maybe it was all too much, the choices he was having to make, and so he boarded that last ship with the rest of the researchers and he sailed home to the mainland, but instead of coming to find me, he left me instead. Maybe he has left me.
Hank and I don’t often fight, and when we do it’s only ever about one thing. Tonight we are already in bed, which means I won’t sleep for the rest of the night, whereas he will be snoring within minutes.
“The single greatest choice we can make to reduce our carbon footprint is to not have a child,” I say calmly; it is very well-trodden ground for us. We have been over the science so many times it feels embarrassing to wield it at him again, but I don’t know what else to say. “How many times have we decided together that it means something to us, to live well. Why would the choice to have a baby be based on a different set of values?”
“Because it’s different,” Hank snaps. He is the first to sit up and put his back to me, which is how I know this is about to go downhill fast.
“I don’t get it,” I say. “I thought you were as concerned about this as I am. You’ve always claimed to be.”
“Us not having a child is not going to save the planet,” Hank tells me. “What’s going to save the planet is nobody using any more fossil fuels.”
“That’s one part of it-“
“No, that’s the whole of it.”
“So you don’t think we have any personal responsibility?” I shake my head. “Bringing children into this apocalypse is selfish and unethical.”
“Fuck ethics,” he snarls. He turns on the mattress and now I have to sit up too because otherwise he is looming over me and I need the space, I need my own ropes to retreat to.
“I want a child,” he says bluntly. “There’s nothing wrong with that and I can’t stand that you try to make me feel guilty for it.”
“That’s not what I’m trying to do,” I say, even though maybe
subconsciously I have been. I suppose I want him to share my guilt; it is a heavy thing to carry alone.
“Your arguments don’t hold up,” he declares, and in all honesty he’s right, they don’t. I can feel them falling away, can see that he won’t accept the same lines anymore. It is true, what I’ve said about the cost of children to the world, but it is not the whole truth, not
my whole truth. That has more to do with the harm the world will do to my children. That is where the deepest currents of fear live, though I can’t say this aloud lest he dismiss it as carelessly as he does my other fears.
“I don’t want a child,” I say. “I have been clear about that from the day we met.”
“Bullshit, you’ve been umming and aahing about it for years, doling out little morsels of bait to keep me on the line. I don’t deserve to be treated like this, Row. It would not kill you to do something for me.”
I stare at him. In the years we have been together it has become very clear to me that he does not see me at all. I am actually not so bothered by this; what an ordeal it would be, to be known. But the “umming and aahing”? If this is how he has perceived one conversation we had years ago, then I don’t know how to make sense of a single communication we’ve ever had. It was a time during which I questioned myself and came to realize that the problem was not that I didn’t want kids, or maybe more specifically didn’t want to nurture, to love, to care for, and raise something. The problem, the true heartbreak, was wanting those things and also feeling like I couldn’t in good conscience have them. I thought he understood me. I thought he accepted the vulnerability I battled to show him, I thought we were closer for it, but instead of comprehending the complexity of how I felt-and the difficulty of contradictory feelings-he judged me, misunderstood me, and is now using it against me.
A chasm opens up beneath me and I have never felt so lost in this marriage. Never deeply passionate, never a meeting of hearts and souls-I don’t think I believe in any of that-it has nonetheless been sturdy ground to place my feet on, it has been strong, it has been joyful to share a vision, to work toward this home we are building, to love this place together. We have made a life here, have grown and raised it.
Having kids has come up before, of course it has, but in this moment I can see what it will do to us. I can see that for him they already exist and that by saying no I am killing them. One day soon he will hate me for them, for the children.
The trek home from the field hut is much harder than the hike there. The weather turns bad, the wind chill dropping the temperature to minus five, freezing rain burning our cheeks and noses. It is more a mental game than anything to keep walking, and I am in awe of Orly, who carries on without complaint. There is no other option really-we must get home to shelter and warmth before our muscles seize and we start getting hypothermia.
During the last leg of our journey, the wind dies off and we breathe sighs of deepest relief. Instead a thick fog descends over the island. We choose our steps carefully, staying close so as not to lose each other within it. I reach out and my hand almost disappears. It is eerily quiet without the wind, and even the cries of the birds have fallen away. I listen instead to the sounds of our breathing, to our boots on the grass. Dom leads, Orly between us, me last. Which is why it concerns me to hear footsteps behind me.
I stop and turn but there is no one there. Just a wall of white, so thick I can imagine choking on it.
Something touches my hand and I yelp, spinning around, but it’s only Dom, looming over me in the fog.
“Hey, it’s okay,” he says.
“Fuck,” I say, trying to slow my heart.
Orly doesn’t laugh, he watches me with concern, his pale blue eyes very bright in this light.
“Stay close,” Dom says, and I do, shaken.