Filed To Story: Wild Dark Shore Book PDF Free by Charlotte McConaghy
I realize I never told Orly what I wanted to say to you.
I am underwater now. There are little lights flashing, they look like sparks from the cut glass of your Fresnel lens.
I think of the whale, and her calf, and the sea embracing them.
I think I finally understand your words.
It’s just a body. They hold on or they don’t. You’re right, it’s nothing to be frightened of. Mine will become the salt of this water. And every time you swim it will be me upon your skin.
Orly slips. He comes under. His body slides into mine and I catch him in the dark and his long pale hair is all around me. My survival instinct
tells me to surge for the surface, to press my mouth to that small opening and draw breath-to do
anything to end the agony in my chest-but I can feel Orly panicking, his eyes are wide, he is going to suck the water into his lungs and then he will be gone, and so instead of going for air, I cover his mouth with mine and I press into him the last of what I have in my lungs, in my body. Enough, maybe, for another second or two, and I feel him calm a little, and then I think I feel him pulled from my arms
and I am falling.
But there is someone here.
A woman.
Down here in the dark with me.
She catches me and holds me so tenderly, and I know her. She is his mother, and she died so he could live. I understand it so simply now, it is a love that lives in the body but unlike the body it never dissolves. It lasts forever.
Dominic
I drag him, coughing and spluttering, up onto the wet grass. I order him to breathe, and the second I can see that he’s obeying, I dive.
She is sinking.
I catch her limp body and I pull it against mine, kicking for the surface. I use the ladder to carry her up and out of the hatch I took too long to open, unforgivably long, and I place her beside Orly.
But Orly is awake and breathing and Rowan is not.
I pump her chest and breathe into her mouth. I work on her body for a long time, I think I could keep going always, but Orly is crying and I can feel that she’s gone. I can feel that she’s gone.
I take my son in my arms and hold him. After a little while he moves us, or maybe I move us, so that we are lying with her, and we stay like this in the rain, while the earth crumbles away beneath us.
Raff
It is Raff who explains it all. The naval officers of the icebreaker RSV
Nuyina are here to collect eight people and many tons of storage containers. Instead they find four people, far less cargo than they’d been told to expect, a boat wrecked among rocks, two missing people, and four dead bodies.
The last months, now that Raff can reflect on them, have been carnage.
He takes them south on their cargo barges. Shows them, from the sea, the caved-in seed vault. The crumbled cliff face. The absent beaches. Then he takes them to the graves on the hill, and while his arm means he can’t help exhume them, he can witness it. Somebody needs to have seen it all, from start to finish, because there are going to be a lot of questions. Raff will try to spare his family as much of this as he can.
Back at the base, the materials and supplies are being dismantled and loaded. The island is being pillaged and it is happening quickly. Dozens of people have come off this icebreaker, and as Raff watches them work he is devastated that they did not come sooner. To help with the shattering burden of trying to save the world’s seeds from a flooding underground cave. To help deal with a man who’d lost his mind, to refloat two humpback whales. The difference these sets of hands could have made to the last weeks of their lives?…
The difference they might have made to a woman, who need not have drowned to save a boy.
But that kind of thinking will ruin you. And the reality is that they’re immensely privileged to have anyone here at all, when there are islands all over the world sinking into the sea, and the people who live on those islands do not have naval ships arriving to rescue them.
He thinks about their future. Of where they will go. Orly is determined to take them to Rowan’s land, and maybe there are crazier things to hope for, maybe the planets will align for them somehow and they will be able to stay there. It is possible he will never play the violin again, but if there is any choice in the matter, he won’t rest until he does. He is a boy-a man now-who knows well what it means to lose the things he loves. There is such peril in loving things at all, and he feels sort of proud, in fact, that he just keeps on doing it. He’s not going to take the punching bag with him when they leave.
His dad will struggle to survive a second time. It isn’t fair. It is so terribly unfair. But Raff will carry him on his back for as many days or years as it takes. He will carry his whole family, if they need him to. It is a good thing his father has taught him to be strong.
Fen
It takes more than a week to get the ship packed. They watch from their lighthouse as helicopters lifting pallets of cargo fly back and forth. The long black hose of a pump sits on the surface of the water and reaches all the way from the ship to the fuel tanks, siphoning what remains of their precious diesel. The island is ransacked.
Fen stands with her dad. Mostly the four of them are together, but for a few moments this afternoon it is just Fen and Dom in the kitchen of their home. He leans on the table Rowan restored for them, the only thing they have claimed from the island for themselves, the only thing he has decided to take with them wherever they go. Fen has noticed Dom likes to have a hand touching it whenever he is near.
She takes her father’s free hand. Feels him hold on tightly.
“We’ll find another place,” she tells him. “And we’ll love it just as much.”
He looks down at her, and she up at him. Grief has aged him a thousand years. But he says, “Tell me, darlin’.”
“Tell you what?” she asks.
“Anything. Everything.”
She leans into him.
Dom, Raff, Fen, and Orly walk together to the mountain behind their lighthouse. Fen is frightened of what they will find but they need to do this, they need to see, and so as they crawl up over the mound of earth and look, they are rewarded with the sight of a baby albatross in its nest, and both its parents picking tenderly at its fluffy feathers. The chick, against all odds, has hatched and survived the storm.
They sit and watch for hours.
“Rowan really wanted to see this,” Orly says. It’s the only thing any of them says.
When they go, when they sail away, the Salt family stand at the aft of the ship and watch Shearwater disappear into the horizon. The last thing they see is the tip of their lighthouse, rising into the sky. Fen feels a moment of panic, she runs to the railing and could almost fling herself over, she doesn’t want to go, she hasn’t said goodbye, not properly.
But they are here in the water, following the ship. Her seals, diving in and out of the waves, their fins lifted in farewell.
Dominic
The ship is being prepared, but instead of helping I take a few hours. I take these hours to walk back to the crystal lake I know you loved. I shed my clothes and I wade in. The albatross are still asleep: it’s morning, they will come later. I sink beneath the cold surface. Somehow I can feel you here. I knew I would. Not a haunting, but something gentler.
I think of how you returned my children to me, each one of them.
I will go back to your body now. This beautiful body. This strong body that endured all it could. I will stay with it, I will wash it and wrap it and hold it as we leave this place. I will carry it across the sea, and I will return it to your land, to live among the snow gums. It is just a body but it was yours, and beloved.
Orly
You were frightened of the ocean but only because you thought it had taken something from you. It didn’t. I wanted to tell you it didn’t.
Should I tell you, too, that I think you gave something back to this place, a thing it had been longing for?
Shearwater has no trees, that’s what you said, because you told me you missed them. But it’s not exactly true. All around its shores are underwater forests. Like forests on land, these are ecosystems with canopies, understories, and forest floors. But the forests are not made of trees, they’re made of kelp. You should know this-you washed up on our beach in a curtain of it. They’re abundant, these forests! They can be home to thousands of species! Hundreds of types of fish make nurseries within them, and many feed on the kelp. There are worms, prawns, snails, crabs. Sharks are known to hunt within their corridors, while marine mammals like otters and sea lions-even sea birds, even whales!-use them for shelter. This is how Fen’s seals survived, in the end. They swam, even the little ones, and they found refuge from the storm among the kelp forests. These wild and rich saltwater worlds.
I wondered if you might be a part of that now. If that’s where you’ve gone. I hope so.
—-The End