My Diary from the Edge of the World (29 page)

Three

I've had to start a
new diary in the back of my mom's lesson plan book, because my other one had a small disaster that involved Sam, a sumo wrestling match, and an open barrel of water. It's still legible, thank goodness, but the pages have gone so wrinkly that they're hard to write on, so Mom took pity on my and gave me this book instead.

It's morning, our first morning on the Southern Edge. I'm sitting by our camp-stove fire, wrapped in a blanket. The cold is hard to escape, even this bundled up and close to the flames. Everyone is asleep, but there's so much to do that I know as soon as they wake we'll have to start packing up, so these may be my last quiet moments for a while.

*  *  *

Yesterday around midday I was lying in my berth counting the cracks in the ceiling, when there was a thud so jarring that I fell out of bed. I rushed out on deck along with everyone else, thinking we'd hit an iceberg.

The clouds had given way to a bright day—I shielded my eyes and looked out, trying to adjust to the glare, and saw only ice before us.

“How are we going to get through the ice?” I asked Dad, who happened to be standing right next to me.

“It's not ice,” he said, smiling, and reached out to pull me close to him. “It's
land
. We're here, Gracie. We're really here.”

I could hardly believe it. Sunlight reflected off the snow-covered shore so intensely it was blinding. We were surrounded by white as far as the eye could see, and Virgil was executing triumphant circles in the air. My breath puffed around me, and Millie and Oliver were trembling with cold. (Mom had Sam bundled in her arms in a microfiber hat and under a fur blanket with his socks-and-buttons bear peeping out the top, so they looked toasty.)

It took me a moment to notice the flurry of activity up at the front of the poop deck. Captain Bill was
hard at work, heaving from here to there at a breakneck pace, throwing things over the side of the boat. It took another moment for me to realize
what
he was throwing: our belongings. Peering over the rail, I could see our backpacks, piles of our clothes, Prospero's instruments (including the anemometer, with one of the cups broken off and lying beside it like a severed hand), strewn across the ice. The captain's face was bright red with exertion; he was swearing under his breath with each toss. Finally he walked over to us briskly.

“I know you'll all be prompt about disembarking. I'm on a schedule,” he said.

Mom and Dad looked at each other in alarm. Dad approached him. “What do you mean a schedule? You're supposed to stay here and wait, in case we don't find anything!”

“I'm due back in LA,” Captain Bill said coldly. “The trip took longer than I expected, and I need to get back. This is where I leave you and wish you good luck.”

We all stood, flabbergasted. Sam was clutching his bear as if he were frightened it would be the next thing to be thrown over the rails. Meanwhile I stared out into the emptiness of the world around us, trying to imagine being left here alone, with no way to get back if we needed to.

“But, you said you'd wait.” Dad swallowed. “You promised us.” Next to Captain Bill's hulking frame, Dad looked small and fragile, but he was getting angry, his body coiled up as if he might be about to throw a punch.

“You must have misunderstood me,” the captain said, picking up Mom's violin case and dropping it over the side. We heard it land in B-flat, and Mom held Sam closer, wincing. “Anyway, aren't you a genius? Aren't you sure your calculations are correct?”

“Now, look . . . ,” my father said, his face red with rage.

I was hoping maybe he
would
punch the captain, so that I could jump into the fray, and Dad was leaning in and looking like he might do just that, when Mom shifted Sam into her left arm and took Dad's hand into hers.

“Let's get the rest of our things,” she said, looking only at him and ignoring the captain completely. “You said we'll find the Extraordinary World, and we will. We won't need a rescue.”

I would have begged to differ, but the look she turned on all of us made me keep my mouth shut.

The captain stared down at the planks beneath his feet, and I thought for a moment—hopefully!—that he
might be on the verge of changing his mind, when he picked up another backpack and threw it over the edge.

*  *  *

Less than an hour later we were standing on the snow, fully bundled in our coats and fleece leggings and fur hoods and seal mittens and scarves, and trying to get our land legs back, watching the last of our food supplies being carried down the planks by the shipmates. They looked apologetic, but they also wouldn't look any of us in the eye.

Once they were all back on board and the planks had been lifted, the anchor began to wind upward. It was a sickening sight. We stood paralyzed beside our belongings, watching helplessly as the
Weeping Alexa
prepared to leave us behind. Sam the Mouse nestled against my legs, and Virgil circled up and down, throwing snowballs at Captain Bill, but missing.

*  *  *

I've decided that the sound of an anchor being lifted is one of the loneliest sounds on earth. I wanted to turn away, I think we all did—to show the captain we didn't care—but I couldn't help it, I was transfixed—watching the last link we had with the rest of the world drift back and away from us, turn slowly in the icy water, and set a
course north. Only Troy stood at the keel, looking back at us sorrowfully. He held up a hand in the air, staring directly at me. I held up a hand in reply.

“Jersey forever!” he yelled.

None of us spoke after that as we watched the
Alexa
get farther and farther away. It shrank toward the horizon, and still we kept watching it. We stood there for what must have been an hour—until it was a tiny speck in the distance, and then gone completely.

It left a wide expanse of cold, bright, clear sky behind it. And there, about half a mile away and no surprise to any of us, was our Cloud. Our Cloud, unfortunately, hadn't abandoned us.

Dad began rummaging through our things for supplies to set up camp. He circled his arms a few times, warming them up, and pulled some goggles down around his eyes. Mom dug the rest of the goggles out of the piles on the ice and told us to do the same. Then they slowly started assembling one of our two tents. Millie and Oliver found another bundle and began to unroll it, and I set to helping Dad.

“Your instruments,” she said, staring down at the broken anemometer. Dad looked at it and shrugged. “It's not important.”

“This one's still working.” She crouched and dug the manometer out of the snow, clasping it in the palm of her mitten and holding it out toward him.

Dad looked at it. He reached for her hand, pulled the manometer out of her grasp and dropped it on the ground, then reached back for her fingers and held them to his cheek. Millie and I looked at each other, uncomfortable and pleased at the same time.

“Am I big enough to help?” Sam asked me.

I turned to him. “Of course you are, Mouse.” I handed him a corner to hold that would prop up to be the zippered front door.

And together, we set about making our shelter for the night.

*  *  *

I'm back. I've just managed to shiver from my long johns into my full gear. Mouse has woken up, and now he's looking around wide-eyed at the white and wide-open world. He's in my lap, so I'm trying to write around him.

We slept piled together like puppies, our arms wrapped around each other for warmth—Oliver, then Sam, then Millie, then me. Mom and Dad have their own tent, and the rest of us are sharing one. (None of us minds being cramped together though, because it creates more heat.)
I thought we might have to keep watch for polar bears or abominable snowmen (even bigger versions of yetis). But our surroundings appear to be deserted, at least so far, and Dad says we probably won't have to worry about running into any beasts or creatures of any sort, because they've all moved north to warmer regions.

It makes me want to cry as I write this: Virgil left us last night, after we'd finished setting up camp. He said that he couldn't stretch the rules any further and he had to get home.

We all said our good-byes and gave him our thanks. It was hard not to hug him after all he'd done for us, but it was also hard to hug someone so wispy. We all did our best.

After we'd said good-bye, Millie walked him off somewhere we couldn't see. She came back a while later pretending like she hadn't been crying, but her eyes were all red behind her goggles, and she kept wiping her nose with her scarf.

*  *  *

“Is the smiling man still following us?” Mouse asked just a moment ago. He's decided he doesn't like looking at the sky and has started asking us to look
for
him instead.

“Yes,” I said.

“Do you think we can go to Santa's house on the way home?”

“We can try,” I said. He stood and scrambled off my lap, hearing Mom stirring in her tent.

This is how I'm spending my first morning on the continent. Lying to Mouse about the future.

I'll have to finish this entry later—it's time to start taking down camp.

We've been hiking for five
days, always setting up camp before dusk, which comes early here.

I'm writing this from our tent, by the light of my headlamp, which I'm not supposed to use except “when completely necessary.” I have to keep shaking the pen and warming it in my mittens, because the ink keeps freezing. Millie is beside me up to her chin in her sleeping bag, just staring at me while I write; she looks like a gopher peeping out of its hole. She just asked me, if we were attacked by an abominable snowman, if I would sit here writing it down until I got eaten, and I said probably. But she didn't say anything rude back. . . . It's like she ran out of rude things to say weeks ago. Actually, she even gave me a
compliment, in a way. She said she wishes she had a hobby she liked as much as I like writing. I think she was trying to sound like Mom, but still, it makes me feel good.

We've also been discussing how the land here isn't flat like we expected, but rolling—all the way up to a mountain range in the distance Dad said we'll have to cross. He says it's there because the earth is pushing against its edges and wrinkling.

For the rest of the day he went on directing us with the compass Prospero gave us, stopping occasionally to check it as we trudged in the direction of the mountains (or the wrinkles, if you want to be accurate), and then taking Mom's hand and walking on. He says the edge of the earth will lie on the other side of it. He says that much he knows for sure.

The cold is biting, even though we're all bundled so thickly that we're shaped more like balloons than people. We wear our goggles most of the time, but I swear sometimes my eyelashes have frozen to each other, and yesterday my eyebrows got so frigid that I thought they might fall off my face. The temperature is beyond breathtaking—it's one of those many things I can't capture in words. We're carrying only blankets,
clothing, our camp stove, and we've divided food into our packs depending on our size and strength.

To our surprise it's Sam who suffers the least. He's like a miniature furnace, and even though it's hard to piggyback him, I always look forward to when it's my turn, because it's like being strapped to a heater. (We're taking shifts; Oliver's and mine are the shortest. I can't carry the load for more than half an hour without feeling like I'm going to keel over.)

This is an utterly quiet world. No rocking of the sea, no cry of seagulls, no sound of a breeze. The air is muffled and blank. But as dead and empty as it may seem, there's actually a lot to see. I never get tired of looking at the glaciers in the distance. We can actually see them growing in place, rising out of the rolling snowy earth, and if the wind is right we can even hear them creaking.