I hear him breathe. I feel the tears pushing against my eyes.
He touches my cheek, slides his fingers through my hair, and I sit up, leaning forward to sink my lips against his.
“I love ye,” he whispers.
But I don’t have any words. All I have left are tears.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
My mind feels like the wreckage after a highway pileup, all that twisted metal and those tiny shards of glass, left for someone else to sweep up.
Clay stays in bed for three weeks, unable to move more than a few steps at a time. I bring him soup and ginger broth. I tend the garden, gather eggs from the henhouse.
But the weather worsens. Snow falls from the sky, and the garden freezes in place. Even the greenhouse becomes too cold to keep any of the crops alive.
“It’s getting dangerous,” I tell him in the evening, lying beside him, my skin pressed to his to keep warm. In the first couple weeks, he was feverish each night, sweating through the sheets. I welcomed his warmth.
For days I thought he would die, the fever a sign of infection, but I made him drink water, wiped the sweat from his forehead and chest, and after the twelfth day, the fever broke, and he slept all night without waking.
He’s growing stronger now, the wound healing, but he still struggles to stand, and he sleeps more than he’s awake.
“It’s too cold outside,” I continue. “I worry about the chickens, if they can survive this.”
Clay strokes my hair, a habit each night that I’ve grown used to as I drift into sleep. “We should bring them inside, the cellar maybe.” His hand slows at my nape, and I move closer to him, my arm folded over his chest, careful to avoid all the places where I know he’s sore.
“It’s just as dangerous for ye, going out in that wind. It’s well below freezing.”
“Maybe the tide will change and the wind will blow us south.”
“Aye, maybe.”
I fall asleep with my head against his chest, listening to the sound of his lungs—a sound that feels like alchemy to me now, like hope. Because for too many days I listened and worried it might stop. Worried I’d hear the last exhale leave his lips.
Icebergs.
I’ve seen them in photographs, in documentaries of polar bears carving out a stark existence on their surface. I never gave them much thought; a landscape I’d surely never see in person.
When the first one comes into view through the kitchen window, I feel an odd sense of calm. I push out through the back door, hands in the pockets of my wool pants, the cold gusting straight through my sweater.
The iceberg is small—the size of an SUV. It bobs past us, missing our rocky shoreline, then slowly drifts toward the horizon. I watch it, my breathing shallow in the cold, wondering what waits for us at the end of this current, when the wind finally stops pushing us north.
We haven’t seen another ship since the USSKingston.
No hint of land.
This iceberg is the first.
I turn back for the house and catch movement above.
At a second-story window, Clay is leaning against the window frame,watching the iceberg sail away. He can stand on his own now, with the use of a cane, which is just a piece of driftwood that was once a tree branch, washed ashore after the hurricane.
He notices me. Smiles softly. His beard growing out.
A feeling spills through me—fear, maybe. Uncertainty. Almost like a premonition but without any clarity. I touch the two shells around my neck. The past is an uncertain number of years behind us. The future unknowable. We defy time by living out here. We scorn the gods, but someday, maybe, they will come for us.
“It’s too cold,” he argues.
“You’re complaining more than you did after you were shot.”
