Filed To Story: Wild Dark Shore Book PDF Free by Charlotte McConaghy
I wait, unsure if he expects me to answer.
“We didn’t want to waste time. Life seemed so short.”
“It is, I guess,” I murmur.
“It doesn’t feel that way anymore,” Dom says. “It feels very long.”
“You lost a partner.”
He looks at me and I am surprised to see something gentle come into his face. “I learned how to be a parent from her. I watched her with Raff and Fen. So I knew what I had to do when Orly came. I don’t mean to say I did well, or that I was good at it, but she’d shown me the way and there isn’t a minute I’m not grateful for that.”
“Okay.” I am nervous about what he’s trying to say.
“I know what a spouse becomes. A whole world. So much a part of your life you couldn’t untangle yourself from them even if you wanted to. I would have done anything for her.” He gets something out of his pocket. Unfolds it. I know what it is without looking.
“You didn’t have to lie,” Dominic says, handing me the photo of Hank. “I understand. You’re the wife, you came here to find him.”
My eyes move from the picture to his face in shadow. I try to think through what this means. There are some things I still need to hold close to my chest. There are others to which I intend on getting answers.
“So where is he, Dom?”
“I told you, Rowan. He left. They all did.”
“He was asked to sort those seeds and you’re telling me he left without finishing the job?”
“He did finish it. He left us instructions. We’re just moving boxes.”
I study his face, searching for truth or lie, but I can’t read him. The words have a ring of believability. Except, “Why didn’t he tell me? Why not let me know he was on his way home?”
“I don’t know. You’ll have to ask him when you see him.”
There is silence as I process that. The thought that his absence and my presence could be just one big, ridiculous miscommunication is painful. The thought that this miscommunication has resulted in a man’s death is worse. I don’t know why Hank would get on that boat without sending me an email to tell me he was coming home. To tell me to disregard his last messages.
Unless he wasn’t coming home but going elsewhere. Leaving me for good.
“He didn’t seem well,” Dom adds more carefully. “In the end. He seemed burdened.”
“In what way?”
“I don’t know. He was doing a difficult thing.”
Burdened.
Hank is the most self-confident person I have ever known. He is arrogant. Single-minded, certainly. Could that have turned to something else? Obsession?
“This place,” Dom says, as though reading my mind. “It’s extreme isolation, Rowan. You don’t understand it yet, but it takes a very real toll.”
Then he says, “What I don’t get is why you felt you had to come all this way to see him.”
It’s the heat of the water, and the steam within the shower. I am sitting beneath the downpour, feeling the burn on my cheeks, and then I am returned, speeding along the bubbling bitumen of the road, trying to outrun roaring flames beneath a sky so red. Beside us I watch the running shapes of three horses, swallowed by a cloud of smoke.
“Rowan.”
My sister. She is turning off the shower and helping me upright, wrapping me in a towel. “Jesus, you’ve cooked yourself,” she mutters, of my bright pink skin.
“Sorry,” I say. There is still so much steam. “I’m fine.”
“Rowan, you can’t-“
“I’m fine,” I repeat, meeting her eyes. She is scared. I see this fear in her face whenever she looks at me: she has never known me like this. To Liv I have always been rock solid, the most reliable thing she has ever known. I made myself this way, for her and for our sister Jay. I had to carry them. And now I am unraveled and she’s frightened and I don’t know how to tie my pieces back together. I have lost too much and am too much lost.
When I can convince Liv I’m not a threat to myself and shuffle her out of the bathroom, I get dressed and return to my bed. After the fire (nearly a whole year ago now), Hank went to Shearwater and I, with nowhere else to go, came here to Liv’s spare bedroom, which, in a month, will be a baby’s room. I open my sister’s old laptop, and the emails are waiting for me at the top of my inbox, three of them.
When Hank first got to Shearwater, he would tell me at length about his colleagues on the island and what they studied and how the base worked. Though he was there to study the ecology of the island, he also liked to go south and visit the vault and learn about the seeds stored there. He would talk about the specimens, about the nature of the vault itself and how extraordinary it was that it boasted such diversity. He told me of the weather on the island, the storms, the rain, and the wind. He said the wind was alive in a way it isn’t elsewhere; he said he’d met a boy who spoke to it.
Hank’s life was full, it was rich; in the wake of our loss he had found purpose, he was
thriving. My life was the opposite. I was-
am
-dispassionate about everything. Barely able to find a reason to get up in the morning. Alive with envy for Hank’s purpose and his passion, which now evade me completely.
Then things with Hank changed.
He told me the seed vault was being shut down. He said the island was too hazardous-weather events getting worse, sea levels rising with alarming speed-so the seeds were being moved off island to a much smaller vault. The UN was streamlining funds into identifying and storing only the seeds needed to feed humanity. There were fires and floods, there were wars, diseases, food shortages-they were going to need to feed people.
As the only botanist already working on Shearwater, Hank was asked to make these decisions. To do the sorting. To choose what would have a place in this new vault and what would be left on the island to gradually be surrendered to the sea. He told me it was utter stupidity. Shortsighted, linear thinking. The world, he tried to explain-to his bosses and also to me, on the other end of the video call-needed biodiversity more than it needed any other thing, and he said this as though we didn’t already know it, except that we all did. And still, he had to decide on half. Which means that when the fires rage and the seas swallow and the bombs destroy, there will be no backups for the thousands and thousands of lost species. No way to replant. They will simply be gone forever.
At this point Hank stopped video calling me and switched to email, and these emails read differently. They were short, erratic, full of errors. They changed subject midsentence. I could see him spiraling on the page but I couldn’t get through to him. I tried to get in touch with his colleagues to check if he was alright, but no one would get back to me.
And now. Finally, today, he has sent me three emails.
The first is this.
I need help. It’s not safe here for me anymore.
And then this.