Filed To Story: Wild Dark Shore Book PDF Free by Charlotte McConaghy
I meet her eyes and say, “I think we should take our dinner down to the beach this evening and eat with Fen.”
The boys make sounds of excitement and a smile splits Rowan’s face. “That’s the best idea you’ve ever had.”
Raff
The fire is too big. That’s the thought he has as they approach. He knows before anyone else does. He’s always been able to read his sister’s mind, just a little. He knows, too, why she would do such a thing, but he doesn’t have the same hope she does. Just a sick question: Is this what will break them?
He moves into the front of the group carrying their foil-wrapped food. He isn’t sure what to do but he thinks he should get ahead of it somehow.
“Dad,” he says, as they reach the sand.
“Yeah?” Dom seems lighter, and it leaves an even deeper pit in Raff’s stomach.
“It’s not to hurt you,” he says.
Dom frowns, confused, and then a wariness fills his eyes, and then, as they reach the bonfire and he sees what Fen is putting onto it, something like disbelief.
“Dad,” Fen says. Pleading. Apologetic. But she carries on, she throws a book onto the flames and a strangled sound comes from Dom. He lurches forward to rescue it, and his sleeve is alight, and before Raff can even think what to do, as he watches on in shock, Rowan is removing her own jacket and using it to smother the flames on Dom’s arm.
Belatedly Raff grabs his little brother and lifts him into his arms. He can feel Orly’s heart racing against his chest.
Dom is staring at the burned edges of the book, and at the fire, at all the things he can make out among the flames. Nothing remains unburned.
“Why?” he asks Fen.
“To free you,” she answers.
Raff isn’t sure his dad will reply. He doesn’t for a long time. Then Dom says, “I had no idea you had such cruelty in you.”
Fen’s face falls, tears flooding.
Dom sinks to the ground and rests his head between his raised knees, and he weeps. He didn’t do this when Claire died. Not that Raff ever saw. He never broke, not once. Now he is asunder and Raff doesn’t know what to do.
“Go back to the boathouse,” Rowan tells Fen. “All three of you. Stay there until I come find you.”
Then she goes to Dom and she crouches behind him and puts her arms around his shoulders, and she holds him with her lips pressed to his neck, his cheek, and what’s more, Dom lets her. The sight is so shocking to Raff-and, he thinks, to his brother and sister too-that they are wordless as they walk to the boathouse. He carries Orly, and Fen cries silently beside them.
Within the little shack, Raff settles his brother and sister on the mattress under the blankets and sets their plates of dinner beside them. Fen has composed herself for the sake of her brother and reads to Orly from whatever she’s partway through. Raff waits to make sure they’re okay before he succumbs to the thing building within. “I’ll be back,” he says, can barely say, and then he walks from the boathouse and back up the hill, not looking at his dad on the sand or the flames beside him, not looking back at the fuel tanks to where the swinging body will be waiting for him. He walks all the way up past the lighthouse, and he keeps on. Up a different peak. To the communications building at the very top. It is astounding, actually, that the rage survives this long, with this much exertion to wear it out. He is expecting it to be gone by the time he gets here but it isn’t, it is as vivid as ever. Because he can’t stop thinking how utterly wrong this is. This wasn’t supposed to be their life. He doesn’t know how to save them from it, how to hold them together, and he’s furious with Fen for doing this, and with his dad for letting it get so bad that she felt she had to. Dom is just letting her drift away, drift right out to sea, and he isn’t doing a thing to stop it. And Raff is livid with himself, too, for never being able to save anyone.
He takes his hydrophone, this precious thing his dad saved up and
gifted him, this thing that brought him so much joy, that he shared with Alex, and he smashes it to pieces.
It is only later, when he has emerged, that he thanks fate or the universe or luck that his violin was not here too.
Rowan is right. He can’t go on like this. He needs to find something else.
Rowan
This family is falling apart.
I sit with Dom on the sand for a long time, until the fire has burned itself out. There’s no way to douse it-it’s quite the blaze. So we watch. He’s still holding the partially burned book. I can see enough of the cover to know that it’s
Jane Eyre. I take it from him gently and brush the burned edges away, open the pages to see they’re mostly intact. Claire’s writing fills the margins. “I think this was the best one,” I murmur. “She put herself into this one. It’ll be enough.”
“There was so much that she loved in there,” he says, of the bonfire.
“I know about things burning,” I tell him, and he looks at me for the first time. “I know about sifting through ash to try and find anything that survived. They’re just things, and you don’t need them, but it’s okay to grieve for them.”
I hand him the book and he gazes at it.
“I’ll go check on your kids, and then we’ll walk up home, get some sleep. In the morning we’ll start work on the vault.” I know him well enough to know he’s going to need something to work on, something important.
There is no rust converter, so we will have to manually scrape the rust from the steel. We set up two ladders with a scaffolding tray between them so Dom and I can both climb up and halve the time of the job. First he uses a rotary drill with a chisel attachment to chip away all the flaking concrete-it turns out to be a huge area, much larger than it first looked, and we don’t say aloud that we don’t think we can patch up
this problem; instead we silently go about trying. Once the steel rods are exposed, we start scraping off the rust. It takes a few days of neck-craning, arm-straining work. It’s not difficult, just tiring, especially dressed in the bulky cold suits. We don’t talk much while we work, but the silence feels prickly and full of noise. The monotony makes way for thought and my thoughts are out of control. Once a minute I think of his question, his offering, and I think of my response and how blunt it was, blunt like a sledgehammer. I think of his kids and how much I want to be around them. I think of the way he broke when his wife’s belongings were gone from him. I don’t know how he feels about that fire now, or about me. I don’t know if he is freed, as Fen intended, or more tightly bound than ever. But I know there is something different in the space between our bodies, there is heat now, and
knowledge. An intimacy so blazing it is very difficult to ignore, to undo. That is what we’re attempting: to pretend it never existed. Even as I imagine his hands on me and then his mouth, the weight of his body on mine.
We take breaks from the vault often, though they slow us down. There is no other option-we can’t let ourselves get too cold, must always be climbing out of this freezer and warming thoroughly under blankets by a fire before we head back down.
Once the rods are clean, we refill the open area with mortar and leave it to dry. While up on the ladders we’ve spotted more patches of concrete cancer, so we work on these next. There is simply too much moisture in these walls, trickling down from above. The permafrost is melting fast, and permafrost is not meant to melt. This place was never prepared for it, for a thing that couldn’t be conceived of. The storms grow more violent. The pump works hard to siphon out the water, but I feel like every time my feet touch the ground they are a little more submerged. We carry buckets of water each time we go. And the kids are on round-the-clock seed-sorting duty. They do this with gusto, for there are just so damn many-thousands and thousands of containers that need finding and moving. It is an incredible feat, the list Hank has made. No wonder he became consumed by it.
“I think we need to get them out of here,” I say after a week has passed. “All the seeds that need saving.”
The kids have finished sorting the containers, but Dom’s and my efforts to repair the vault have amounted to very little. The wall should hold out for a while longer-if we are lucky, until the ship comes in three weeks-but new cracks appear by the day and water trickles in from every angle and the temperature has reached minus eight and continues to rise.
“They all do,” Orly says, and there is an uncomfortable pause.
I look at Dom. “Is there anywhere dry we could put them?”
“Gotta be dry and very cold,” he says.
“Has the freezer on the base started flooding yet?” Raff asks.
Fen nods. I haven’t heard her speak aloud since the bonfire. She has gone painfully silent. Dom is the same toward her; he doesn’t look at her, doesn’t address her. The tension between them is unbearable. And I don’t think it’s anger, exactly. Neither of them seems to have any kind of temper. It’s just?… distance. I can see how this divide could grow until it swallows even the memories of their closeness. I can see how distressed it’s making Raff, who looks between them constantly, too silent himself to come out and say anything that could bridge the gap.
“Could we move it?” I ask.