St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves (20 page)

“Hold on, Brauser,” I say without conviction. “Help is on the way.”

I wonder, briefly, if I could eat Brauser if it came to that. At this point, we have been alone on the glacier for fourteen minutes.

Brauser’s face is a raw, freckly pink. I fix his hat. The shadow of my hand moves back and forth over Brauser’s open eyes. Pupils expanding, pupils contracting. A dark blue ring around the world. In between breaths, I realize that something incredible is happening at this new elevation. Up here you can hear everything—the orange
ping
of light on metal, the purr of water melting. These blue ocean contractions in Brauser’s eyes. His pupils make a faint tidal
whoosh-
ing. Shadows sound like feed pouring out of a cloth sack. When I move my hand, millions of shadow grains bounce along the hard snow. That’s my sound, I think, birdseed raining out of a sack. It shakes out across the empty snowfields. I look up at the sky, nervous. What sort of bird, I wonder, is my shadow designed to be food for?

Above us, the sun bounces orange and yellow. The silence changes. We bump noses, but I can’t hear Brauser’s eyes anymore, or his shadow. I tug his hat down harder.

Rangi’s air pulses red like a swallow’s breast. Brauser’s quiet is coma white. My own silence hums with these black-and-yellow bee stripes of fear:

YOU ARE

GOING

TO DIE UP

HERE

NOBODY KNOWS

WHERE

YOU ARE

THERE IS

NO MORE DOWN

THERE

I snap out of it when I realize that Rangi has started walking away from us. He pushes through the shallow crater left by the ice plane, stabbing his crampons into the jellied snow. Then he climbs over a ridge of wind-scoured shale and disappears.

“Rangi! Wait up!”

It takes me a full five minutes to cover the short distance between us and clamber over the wedge of shale. Rangi is waiting for me on the other side. “Why did you—” The question dies on my lips. No explanation is forthcoming from Rangi. We lie flat on our bellies, taking labored breaths and watching the sky, two soldiers in the trenches. Then Rangi starts making a sound. Nothing quite so deliberate as speech, but a dense fizz of noise, like bubbles zipping up to the surface of a tall glass.

“— — —…— — —,” he says, pointing into the clouds.

We both look up. A helicopter is coming for us, the sun pinging off its blades.

“We’re saved!”

Rangi and I peer over the ridge and watch as the helicopter touches down on the glacier. Two men leap like flames out of the cockpit. Their vests glow red against the pure white backdrop. The glare off the snow makes their faces look like taupe holes.

The men unload three stretchers from the helicopter and lay them flat across the powder. They heave Brauser onto the first stretcher. One of the rescuers is whistling a cheery tune. It’s a scary, incongruous sound in this landscape. Each whistled syllable hacks flat into the wind like a cleaver. I can see the dark fissures between his teeth.

“Help!” I jump up and pull Rangi out of the powder, puppet-jerk him to life. “Here!” I start to wave and shout. “Here! We’re over he-e-ere!”

The ice pilot is still whistling, oblivious of us. I think I can just make out a softer, inner whistle, under the word:
Run.

“Run,” Rangi says.

Then I am facedown in the snow. Rangi’s kneeling on my back, digging his whole weight into the base of my spine. Something thunks against the back of my head, and for a moment red stars cluster in front of my vision. Rangi grabs me by the legs and starts dragging me across the ice gully. I’m stunned but still conscious, too shocked to struggle. Then he yanks me over a snowbank and out of sight. The world goes blue-white-blue for a series of hills. I yelp and try to kick away, but Rangi’s got me. He presses me to his chest in a murderous bear hug as we roll. We slide down the slope together and bang our way into an ice cave. In the lunar shadows, it looks as if our cheeks are sweating blue light. The altitude here manifests itself as a pernicious thirst, and my throat burns in the desiccated air of the cave. Inside, a twinkling, chandelier light fills every ablation. Even seated, I can touch the cold ceiling. I touch my tongue to the cold roof of my mouth.

The helicopter is taking off without us. It makes three buzzard circles above us, and I’m surprised to find myself cowering with Rangi in the cave. I should be jumping up and down, screaming at its metal belly. I think about Franz Josef’s hand pressing hard on my diaphragm. Up here I can’t untangle it, the word-strangle of it, the twisted umbilical that binds deep panic to sound. I open my mouth and release dead air. Snip, snip! go the scissors of the wind.

Rangi holds his hands over his ears and buries his face in my side. He doesn’t speak again. The helicopter shrinks into a dense red pinprick of noise above us, lost in the sun. Then it’s gone. After a few moments, the silence reconstitutes itself. I can hear our shadows again, spilling up the walls. It’s a scary freedom.

When I look down and see Rangi staring up at me, I feel my stomach heave again.

“W-what-what the hell were you thinking?” My teeth are chattering uncontrollably. “Do you enjoy being stuck up here? Those men were here to
rescue
us, Rangi!”

Rangi closes his eyes and he
smiles.
He beams at me with ghastly relief. I move away from him, horrified.

“Who knows how long it will take before they send another helicopter? It could be
hours
!”

Anger flames through me and my muscles tense to hit him, a violence that clenches once and then vanishes. My fists uncurl without my conscious intervention. I stare down at my open palms with real surprise, feeling shaky and defeated. It’s as if my body knows before I do that it’s too dangerous to feel this way towards Rangi. Right now, he’s the only other human around for thousands of vertical miles.

“Rangi? What are you doing?”

Rangi is on his hands and knees, crawling towards me, his face flickering in the cavelight. His black eyes sparkle with intent.

“Ran-gi?”

My voice has a wobble in the middle—like a tightrope strung between two fears. It sounds as if a sly little demon is bouncing across it.

“Come on, Rangi!” I say nervously. “Let’s go back to the snowfield. Don’t you want to get down from here? Don’t you want to get home?”

Rangi holds a finger to his lips. His breathing comes quick and adenoidal when he reaches over and turns off my transponder. Before I can even process what’s happening, Rangi rips it off my neck and lobs it, with a casual madness, into the blue maw of the crevasse.

Then Rangi flicks off his own transponder. He slips it over his neck.

“No!”

He sails it into a narrow opening in the ice.

“Oh no—oh no—oh
God
—oh no
why
did you do that? Now you’ve done it, Ritardando, now you’ve really done it….”

I belly-squirm out of the cave and peer over the lip of the crevasse. The chasm glows with the loveliest, least hospitable colors: cold white stars, the green of interstellar vapors. It reminds me of the old stories, kids’ stuff, about sirens who swam in the deep pools and thrashed up snowstorms with their merscales. Pirate lore. X-marks-the-spot stuff. I’m in no position to appreciate the fantasy shades of white and green inside the chasm. The only color that I want to see is the plastic yellow of my transponder.

This is when I plunge my hand into the ice hole, up to my elbow, fishing around a ledge for the transponder, and come up with a fistful of treasure.

It’s really true, then, the part about the treasure. I can’t wait to tell Mr. Oamaru that I was wrong, that “The Pirates’ Conquest” isn’t all lies and stupid rhymes; there are at least a few bars of truth in our song. Verse 4.

It’s the stolen Moa patrimony: greenstone, river pearls, whale-tooth combs. The crevasse has swallowed our transponders, but the ice ledges inside are heaped with old plunder. Soon I’ve amassed a tall stack of greenstone. I wonder if I’m looking at the Moa’s holy relics, melted down by our great-great-grandfathers into these anonymous nephrite bricks. I pull out coins, too, orange and red metal. They must have been here for a century or more. The coins are frozen. Each is chiseled with a historic profile, a numismatic portrait of the old Moa leaders. Nobody we sing about in “The Pirates’ Conquest.” You can’t even make out their gender anymore, just high collars, proud noses, stout asparagus braids in the green copper. Men and women from some past that never made it into our music. I would have preferred a miracle that benefited us more directly.

“Here you go, Rangi!” And suddenly I’m laughing, I’m shaking all over now, in total hysterics. My body feels like a great chattering tooth. “We’ll split it! Fifty/fifty…”

Rangi refuses to touch the treasure. I grab him by the elbows and twist open his palms. I place a brick of the luminious nephrite in each of his hands. It’s enough that, if Rangi ever gets back to town, he could become the cemetery’s sole proprietor. He could employ Digger Gibson.

“Take it!” I scream. “It’s yours, it’s yours, take it!”

What a small, cold fortune. Rangi lets it sink into the snow. He just wants a fistful of bear fur. I want my father.

I try to remember the chorus of “The Pirates’ Conquest,” and I’m frightened to discover that I’ve forgotten how it goes. No words, no melody, just a white, blank space. Sun sparkles above us. The walls of the ice caves are melting together—too softly, this time, for me to hear. I touch a drop of the wall to my tongue. A clear braid of liquid trickles across the caves, snow that fell in 1947, 1812, earlier still, released all at once like tears from a body. Rangi crawls over and crouches in front of me. The solar glare is sculpting the ice into glass fangs and tall blue scythes.

“Well, I hope you’re happy,” I hiss. “No one’s going to save us now.”

Rangi doesn’t look happy; his face is still a mask of old fury. I wonder what it feels like to be angry at everyone except for a dead bear. It scares me to think about it. I picture the dead bear loping and slathering forever inside of Rangi, a long-toothed loyal animal, his one memory of love. Digger Gibson should never have adopted him. Who wants salvation when it just orphans you further?

I lean my cheek against the translucent outer wall of one of the caves. Water whispers inside:
You are going to die up here—nobody knows where you are….
Any place, then, can become a cemetery. All it takes is your body. It’s not fair, I think, and I get this petulant wish for ugly flowers and mourners, my mother’s old familiar grief. Somebody I love to tend my future grave. Probably this is the wrong thing to be wishing for.

I jerk away from the trickly whisper of the snowmelt. This is the wrong thing to be wishing for. I don’t want to die on this glacier. This accident is nothing I volunteered for. Below us, the ground rolls with sluiced water. In the Valley, it’s easy to forget that the ground is moving, that we’re traveling on a frozen river. But up here I can hear it happening. Centuries of water are melting in the heart of the glacier, a constant interior roar that calves icebergs into the black sea. Even now, we’re moving away from Waitiki Valley. And suddenly I’d give anything to be back in my kitchen with Mr. Oamaru, swapping lies about my father. I’d pay any price to open my eyes and find myself in the Ice Amphitheater with the boys choir, all of us holding that single note.

And then I get a hero idea. This is my solo. If I can sing down an Avalanche on my own, the families at the base of the glacier will see it and send help. Mr. Oamaru’s weathered face floats in front of my vision, and I make it a target for my anger. I pitch my voice so high that my forehead starts throbbing. Higher, and higher still. Breath floods out of my lungs. The note beckons and retreats above me, a round luminous note, like the sun viewed from the bottom of the Waitiki River. My voice rises like a hand struggling to break the surface of that water. I wonder if it’s like this for Rangi, too; if Rangi’s mutism just means that he has sunk several fathoms farther down than the rest of us, and given up on swimming.

If this were a local interest story, some square of uplift in the
Gazette,
I’d send down a tremendous Avalanche, an S.O.S. I’d hit that high C, or, in a fluted miracle, the C above it. Somebody below us would see it and send help. But that’s not what’s happening. My voice is cracking. It suffers up and fails and surges again. It breaks eons before the ice ever will. Now I’m breathless and covered in freezing spittle. Rangi watches and never even opens his mouth.

I hear myself echoing Franz Josef: “Sing it with me, Rangi! Forget Franz. Forget Digger. It’s okay to sing now, Rangi. Or scream if you have to, anything….” Our voices are the only hatchet that we have up here. But Rangi, if you can believe this, has fallen backwards into the snow. He’s settled into his own snow angel. When I kneel and shake him, Rangi looks up at me with a mild surprise, as if he’s forgotten that I am still here. Then his gaze shifts inward. A new shape is running in Rangi’s eyes now. A brown-gold speck, at such a distance. Its black snout opens in a soundless, joyful roar.

Somewhere, an Avalanche is about to happen without us. Rangi must know this before I do, and the dead bear in his eyes comes racing towards us across old snow. At the base of Aokeora, Mr. Oamaru is fiddling with the flashbulb, the black drape of the box camera billowing around him. He is snapping picture after picture of white sludge rolling down an ice shelf. My mother is pointing to the ridge where I’m supposed to be and making good-natured jokes about my weight gain. Ruth, Rachel, Rebecca are sending up a prayer for my success. They’ll eat stale lemon moonpies and listen for a happy hallucination of my voice. In a few minutes, the town will stand up and applaud. I feel as if I’m looking down at my own funeral, only nobody knows that I’m dead. It’s a frightening, lonely feeling.

Even so, I can’t silence a small chirp of hope. Who knows? Maybe my transponder hit a ledge that jarred the switch back to
ON
. Maybe it’s still emitting a signal. A part of me feels certain that my family will hear my absence at the bottom of Aokeora, thousands of feet below us, and know that I am lost.