Chapter Six
For the next two years, Amir and I attended Little Earth and helped my father with the many chores assigned to us at Horseshoe Cliff. We spent our free time roaming the land by foot and horseback. We were late for school every morning because we lost the hours after dawn to building forts in the grove, or swimming out toward passing whales, or racing the horses along the bluff. We were inseparable. But while I read more books in a week than all of our classmates combined, at ten years old, Amir continued to struggle to make sense of the words on the page. I helped as best I could, but sometimes I wondered how much it mattered that Amir did not love school as I did—his talents were in the wood sculptures he created, his passion lay with our land.
We managed to avoid crossing paths with Bear for long stretches of time by exploring the areas of Horseshoe Cliff where we knew he was unlikely to wander. It seemed to us that our home protected us, and why wouldn’t it? We were sure it felt our love for it and returned the feeling.
There was the one Sunday when we wandered through the orchard, collecting apples that a windstorm the night before had knocked from the trees. Slight wisps of fog came and went. Stopping in a patch of sun, we unwrapped a pair of Rei’s gingersnap cookies. I heard Bear’s voice before I saw him. Amir and I froze, and as we did, the patch of sun in which we stood flooded with fog. We grabbed our bags of apples and darted silently away. The fog was so thick that we could not see even as far as the trees that stood within five feet of us. Amir reached for my hand. In all my life, I had never seen the weather change so suddenly. Why had the fog rushed through the orchard, if not to protect us? I slowed, pulling on Amir’s hand so that he slowed, too. We stopped. Though we could not see him, we heard Bear’s heavy footfalls nearby. He stumbled and released a gruff stream of curses that made my heartbeat thunder in my ears. He was so close that I was sure if I reached out, I would touch his shoulder. Silently, Amir and I stood together within that extraordinary, breathing mantle of fog. After a few moments, silence fell. Bear was gone.
And then there was the time when an ocean current held Amir and would not let him go. Something stopped me from swimming back toward him. I scanned the beach and my eyes landed on a snakelike coil of bullwhip kelp. I grabbed it and stepped into the water only to my ankles, throwing one end to him. I sat down hard, digging my heels into the sand. Hand over hand, Amir pulled himself along the length of that rope of kelp toward me. I willed the kelp not to break. It should not have held his weight. But it did. At last, Amir sat beside me onthe wet sand, his dark eyes round with the strangeness of the sea’s hold, the kelp’s strength. We leaned against each other. As our bodies connected, we lost ourselves to long, ragged gusts of laughter.
There was the night that we sat on the back porch as Rei read to us. She and my father often exchanged books, but on this night, he asked her to stay and read out loud. They sat in the two chairs and Amir and I sat on the steps. My father and Amir worked their knives; I could not yet tell what either was making. Rei had brought a book of stories about mythical islands because she knew how my father loved folklore of the sea. I rested my head against a stair rail and closed my eyes while I listened to her calm, crisp voice pick a careful path through the legends. She read to us of King Arthur’s elusive Isle of Avalon, where apple trees grew heavy with fruit and the shape-shifter Morgan changed from human to bird as she pleased. She read to us of Buyan, the magical center of the universe in Russian mythology, home to the sun and the winds, an oak tree that connected heaven to earth, and a white stone that granted healing and eternal happiness. It was when she was reading to us of Hy-Brasil, a bountiful island hidden within a shroud of mist off the western cliffs of Ireland, that I opened my eyes and looked out toward the horizon. Fog moved along the coast, suddenly parting.
“Look!”
The others followed my gaze. On the horizon, an island rose from the sea.
“It’s a cloud,” said Rei.
“It’s very still for a cloud,” said my father. I looked at him,unsure if he was teasing me. Though he kept his gaze on the horizon, I saw the smile hidden within his beard.
“It’s an island,” I said. I looked to Amir, expecting him to agree.
But after a thoughtful moment Amir said, “What ifHorseshoe Cliffis the island hidden within the fog? And what we see out there is the rest of the world catching its first glimpse of us?”
I could tell by my father’s expression that he was as delighted by this idea as I was.
“If we’re the hidden island, let’s find the magical stone that grants healing!” I said. “We’ll use it to get rid of Dad’s cough.”
My father laughed. “Who needs to heal? On this island, we’re immortal!”
I scanned the sky for a red bird, hoping one would appear, but none did. I lowered my eyes to the horizon.
“It’s a cloud,” Rei said. She was looking out toward the sea, too, and sounded very sad. “It will be gone by morning.”
As it turned out, itwasgone in the morning. But who could say if what we had seen was cloud or island? Or if Amir had been right and we were the ones who were, in fact, on an island? Wasn’t that the beauty of magic? Before you could be certain it existed, it slipped away, leaving you full of wonder.
THAT SPRING WEall became sick. The illness started with me and spread to Amir, then my father, and finally Bear. For a week we coughed and shivered and sweated and drank the spicy seaweed and noodle soups that Rei brought us. My father’s coughing fits had punctuated my childhood, but these seemed worse than everbefore. I remembered the stories of his youth; how he’d spent so much time in bed because of illness. I waited for the sea air to cure him the way he’d told me it once had. I wished for a magical stone of healing.
My father’s skin grew pale, and the arms of his shirt grew big. Still, every morning he shuffled out of the cottage with Bear trudging along behind him. Amir and I wanted to help, but my father wouldn’t allow it during the week. Our responsibilities were school, the chickens, and the horses. The garden withered; it was as though the land, too, had fallen sick. When Bear drove to Osha to exchange our fruits and vegetables for meat and dried goods at the co-op, the box he came home with was less full each time. Amir and I were quiet around the dinner table at night, our sparse conversation marked by my father’s coughs and the sounds of Bear slurping his soup out on the porch. He had not eaten a meal with us in years. He gave no excuse to our father, but he’d grumbled to me that he could not stomach watching Amir eat food that did not belong to him, food that should have been ours.
Even when the rattling sound in my father’s chest grew worse, the idea that he might not recover from his illness never occurred to me. Through all the death that had moved through Horseshoe Cliff, my father had been untouched. Mothers died, animals died... But fathers? I believed that fathers remained.
One morning we arrived back at the cottage after feeding the horses to find that the truck was gone. My father was not in his usual chair on the porch waiting to take us to school. The sight of that empty chair made my stomach clench.
I remembered now that my father’s cough had seemed particularly relentless the night before. Why hadn’t I checked on him before I ran out to feed the animals? Inside the cottage, the noises of the land and the ocean fell away, revealing an unsettling quiet. All the windows were shut, the air thick with the smell of dust.
We hurried to my father’s room. He lay in his bed and opened his eyes at the sound of our approach. I chewed my lip. His skin was sticky looking. Sweat beaded on his brow, but his bed was piled high with all the blankets in the house, including the ones from my bed and also Amir’s. Bear must have walked around and collected them. This possibility surprised me.
“What’s wrong?” I asked my father. I put my hand on his shoulder. “Is your fever back?”
One corner of his mouth attempted to move toward a smile. “Nothing that Doctor Clark can’t fix. Bear went to get him.”
It was difficult to imagine that little gray-haired Doctor Clark from town with his table full of coloring books and wooden puzzles could fix a man as big and strong as my father. I thought the doctor only saw children whose fevers wouldn’t go away or children who felt like rocks were lodged in their throats or children who had cuts so deep they needed sewing. My hand, still resting on my father’s shoulder, began to tremble.
Amir stepped up to the other side of my father’s bed. “Would you like some water?” he asked. When my father nodded, he ran to the kitchen.
I held my father’s hand and decided I would not let go until he was well again. I lifted his hand to my lips and kissed it.
“Sugar-and-Spice,” he said. It was his nickname for me. His eyes were locked on mine, but his voice was nearly swallowed by the wind that suddenly rubbed the sides of the house. His breath was loud and ragged.
