Silent Girl (20 page)

From atop the hill they can see the ocean and water two metres deep that surrounds the Village like a moat, the wooden catwalks like drawbridges. They can see clear down to the harbour, too, and the fancy dome of Old Parliament sticking out of the water. Flooding will be worse come winter. Mother says it's due to atmospheric pressure and the relative positions of the earth, moon, and sun. But Akin believes the tide is freer to act than that. It has a greedy appetite, creeping in to eat away at bricks and plaster, leaving slimy green spit as it creeps out again.

“If we don't bring anything,” he says, “they'll ask what we've been doing.”

Mother doesn't appear to hear him. She's staring out at the ocean. “They never returned his body. How do I know he's dead?”

After Pilipaza died, he watched the ocean every day for months, half expecting the tide to bring her back. Hoping it would. When he had the vision about The Land, Pilipaza didn't say he imagined it. “My father's spirit journeyed where others' did not,” she said. “You have his gift.”

He would never watch for Gruzumi. What's so brave about digging a hole in your wrist? Maybe Akin will do the same one day if it impresses his mother so much. No one scans the stupid monitors anymore, anyway. The government's gone, the island handed over as a base for the naval forces of the Coalition of Pacific Republics.
CONAV
. His friend Zunar says it in a phoney deep voice, dragging out the second syllable –
CONAAAV
– and Akin pretends to tremble with fright.

Mother would say the room smells of bacteria and diet deficiency, but that afternoon it also smells of tension. Akin's family and another they took in when the first floor flooded – Zunar and his parents – sit on the common room floor, amid blankets, mattresses, and clothes. Zunar was in Akin's class before school closed for good. Mother calls him a fatuous boy. Akin doesn't know what that means, only that Zunar makes him laugh. He can't imagine Mother as a girl, having fun.

Everyone in the room but Akin fits together: white skin and hair, eyes so blue you can drown in them. If what Pilipaza told him was true, that his destiny is linked to the Snows' fate, why was he born with stained skin and eyes the colour of fog?

Aapa Adero waves them over almost absentmindedly, his face sagging with preoccupation. Akin squeezes in between Aapa and Zunar, who punches his arm and mouths,
Where were you?
Akin crosses his eyes and sticks out his tongue.

“
CONAV
was here,” Aaka Katsi says. If Akin looks at Zunar he'll snort.

“They said we should move to higher ground as soon as possible,” Aapa says. “Take any vacant houses we can find. The owners won't be coming back.”

Akin laughs and groans at once. All that sneaking around, his gut in his throat for months, mentally practicing what Mother taught him to do if they were ever arrested.

Mother lifts her eyebrows at him and says, “Plans change.”

“Some people are out already looking for places,” Aaka Katsi says.

Mother stands. “Then Akin and I better get back, before they take ours.” She tells them what she and Akin have been doing.

Zunar claps him on the back, and says, “Brilliant!” To Zunar, everything is either “brilliant” or “dismal.”

Aaka and Aapa look stricken. Ada snaps her fingernails.

“You've been stealing?” Aaka Katsi whispers.

“They've stolen our labour for years,” Mother says, “and, besides, it doesn't matter now.”

“Since when is this family a community of two?” Aapa says.

“You would have stood in my way.”

Aapa rubs his eyelids. “Sit down, Sela. Please. When you came in we were discussing what to do. Asalie and Narberi want to walk to the university and apply for evacuation.”

“Me, too,” Tandrea says through her nose.

Akin's aunt Asalie, her mate, Narberi, and their wispy-haired ten-year-old daughter Tandrea live with them. Asalie keeps the child inside, frequently checking her for fever and rash, although Akin can't remember her ever being sick. The incessant step-slap of Tandrea's skipping rope in the common room keeps Akin outdoors as much as possible.

Mother drops back down to her cushion, in her eyes the scoffing look that makes Akin's shoulders tight. “Have the rules changed? We no longer need sponsors on the mainland or immigration approval from another republic?”

“Narberi thinks they'll take pity on a young family,” Asalie says. Her clipped and feathery hair reminds Akin of an owl in one of Mother's books.

Akin and Zunar hiked to the university after
CONAV
took it over to see the new fences all around and the guards at the gate. “An island of indifference,” Mother calls it. The only people allowed in are those who qualify for evacuation.

“We'll tell them we're willing to do any job,” Narberi says.

“Why would you want to be slaves again?” Mother says.

“We might go, too,” Zunar's father, Einar, says. “We need more to eat.” His small, pleading eyes look at everyone and no one at once. “You can't count on the right amount of sun and rain. The crops might fail one year, and then what?” Einar is boyish looking from a distance, but close up the strain in his eyes gives his age away. His wife, Tabia, lost so much weight after the government food stores closed, her face is almost cadaverous.

“What if the island sinks completely?” Tandrea says.

Mother turns to her and says with forced patience, “If we don't take a chance on ourselves, others will keep deciding what we're worthy of.”

“Sela,” Ada says, “would it hurt to at least try? If we can't leave the island, maybe they'll let us live in the dormitories.”

“The university gardens are huge,” Narberi says, “and
CONAV
has generators. We'd have food, water, power.” He always speaks with authority. Akin envies that, but Mother says not to believe half of what Narberi says. She worked with him at the cannery until it closed.

“The only hospital is there,” Asalie says. “What if Tandrea gets sick?”

“We've lost the skills to survive on our own,” Katsi says.

“I haven't,” Mother says.

“You're free to stay here, Sela,” Aapa says, “but Zumi's boy should go with us.”

“Akin is free to choose, too,” Mother says, but he knows he's not.

His stomach is so tight he can hardly breathe. He can't imagine a life without them all. Before he can say what he wants, which is for everyone to go or everyone to remain, Ada says, “If Sela's staying, so am I.” After that, it can only seem he's chosen her over the others.

Mother stands again. “Akin, Ada, and I will secure a house tonight. We'll do our best to hold onto a few others in case you come back.” Her mouth hints at a smile as she says, “No applications to file, no criteria to meet for
my
nation.”

“Snow Nation,” Zunar says, pumping his fist into the air. “It'll be brilliant! I want to go with Akin.”

Einar and Tabia look at each other for a long moment, speaking a silent language. “Right, okay,” Einar says. “Better to get a house while we can. We can always go to the university tomorrow or the next day.”

The others reluctantly agree. Mother has pulled it off.

Later, Asalie complains about not getting the only furnished home. “Take whatever you want from it,” Mother says.

Not the chair, not the chair, Akin silently transmits.

That night, as Ada organizes the kitchen – “so good to be out of close quarters, away from all that squabbling,” she says – and Mother looks through book after book in the old lady's house, Akin sleeps on the blue recliner by the fireplace. He dreams of The Land. It looks different than it did in the vision. Greener, with lofty trees and cloud-fringed mountains. There are boats, too, coming toward him. Canoes. Where is he, then, that he can greet them?

Only Asalie, Narberi, and Tandrea trek off to the university. They're turned away after waiting with Rainbows from coastal towns up island. The line snaked for half a kilometre, they say. That there were Rainbows without connections gave them comfort, at first: the Snows wouldn't be the only ones left behind. But
CONAV
has decided to evacuate anyone with a passport and the Rainbows have passports. For days, whenever Akin sees Asalie, her eyes are bright with tears. Why, when the Snows were never encouraged to think they might be able to leave? Why didn't everyone know what Mother did all along?

By September, when three blasts of a haunting horn signal the last ship off the island, most Snows have vacated the Village, caravanning down the catwalks and through the deserted streets with mattresses balanced on their heads and clothing tied around their waists. Mother assumes control of the street she and Akin claimed and someone dubs it Selaville. She won't let more than four or five people move into a house. That's all each garden can support, she says, and, then, only if they strictly ration food and continue to work communal plots.

Aapa and Aaka Katsi have to be satisfied with living next door to Akin in the same house as Asalie's family. On their second night, Aapa and Akin try out the wooden deck behind Aapa's house and the Rainbow custom of sitting in back gardens, hiding from neighbours. They listen to new sounds, to the absence of the slap and drag of the surf. Whenever he hears Aapa's stories about growing up, Akin feels he lived them, too: how puzzling the northern lights seemed when Aapa was a boy in that frozen land; how baffled he was at the wolf's wail and the wind's scream before he knew what they were. For Aapa, as for Akin, mystery and fear sleep in the same bed.

They sit on the wooden slats, hugging their knees, and gaze up at the sky, smeary with stars, more than Akin can ever recall.

“See the Big Dipper?” Akin says.

Aapa follows Akin's finger. “Who told you it was called that?”

“Everybody. At school, everywhere. That's what it is.”

“Then everybody is wrong. It's a skin boat, a whaling ship. Those three stars are the boat's deck and the four stars climbing out of it the post you wrap your rope around, the rope attached to your harpoon.”

“You ever harpoon a whale?”

“Wasn't old enough, never got a chance before the Great Migration. But, from the time I was ten, I practised shooting harpoons at traps. Each spring I watched the men get ready for the hunt and imagined myself one of them — going off on my own to a private place to sing and pray. They did that, you know, for as long as it took for the ocean to turn whale-calm.”

“What did they sing?”

“No one knew. The songs and prayers were secret. Each man made up his own. I got to see them bathe, though. They made themselves so clean they could walk through the village without a dog catching their scent. Every day they'd stand naked in the icy water and scrub their skin with mussels and barnacles. Rubbing off the old to get ready for the new. Some men rubbed their skin raw.”

“Weren't they embarrassed, all naked?”

“Nah, only men and boys saw them. And they were showing kinship with the whale. Whales don't wear clothes, you know.”

Akin's laugh echoes in the quiet black air.

“We believed the whale would present itself to us so we might continue to live, but only if we showed respect for it and its home. We believed many things once that we seem to have forgotten.”

“There's a reason we don't believe everything they did then,” Mother says the next day as Akin turns the soil for her medicinal herb garden. “Know what a woman did when her man was on the whale hunt? Stayed in one room like a hostage, forbidden to go out until it was time to cut up the whale meat. Wasn't bad luck for her to do
that,
of course.”

Some Snows are at a loss to manage. They were more interested in getting into the once-rich parts of the city – into houses with bidets and long silenced fountains – than in choosing neighbours with survival skills. Aapa visits as many as he can to show them how to care for their rain-water tanks and warn them they should filter and boil the water before drinking. Despite his guidance, nine people on one street take ill with vomiting and diarrhea. Those who care for them get sick, too. Within days, fourteen are dead. It isn't Snow custom to bury their dead in the ground, but no one dares prepare the bodies for ocean committal, so the dead people's neighbours decide to burn them.

On a windy, November afternoon, a few men dig a pit, pile up tires from abandoned cars and lumber stripped from vacant houses. They shovel the bodies and bedding into the pit. Akin and Zunar stand with slack faces as Mother lights a branch and circles the pit with it before touching it to the kindling. “We are the first Snows in a new land,” she says. “Death will be our guide.”

“Now there's a motto,” Zunar whispers to Akin.

Others tend the fire, turning the bodies with shovels and poking them with a pole to make the burning easier. Before long, the skulls explode with a loud noise. That and the smell of burning rubber and flesh make Akin vomit. He isn't the only one. It takes hours for the bodies to turn to ash, leaving only a few pieces of white skull.