Wild Dark Shore

by Charlotte McConaghy

There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning. —THORNTON WILDER, THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY

You are not meant to have favorites, but my youngest is that. If

The idea is a big one: to save humankind. But in all honesty that’s not why we came here. I needed a job, and I needed it to be far away. The purpose of it came later; in truth it came when my youngest recognized its magnitude.

as Orly got older, he would explore as we walked, touching and smelling and picking, and as he learned to talk he spoke the names of the plants we saw, and then the seeds we were there to visit, and I began to see, through his eyes, that in fact this job was important. I started imagining the use of these seeds, I imagined the world that would require them. I felt better about being here, on the island that was protecting this last floundering hope, rather than back on a mainland that would need rescuing. And with every danger that came upon Shearwater, every struggle, I would think, at least we’re not back there, dealing with fires and floods and food scarcity and all the rest of it.

And now it’s over. The seed vault is closing. It was meant to last forever, and now we are sorting and packing the seeds for transport, and in just under two months we, too, will be leaving, with all the lucky little specks important enough to be chosen for relocation.

It has been made very clear to us that keeping the seeds safe is more important than keeping ourselves safe. Quietly, down in the corners of me, I consider whether I could let thousands of species go extinct in order to save the lives of my three children.

If I were to reroute the energy we use for heating the lighthouse I might buy the seeds a little extra time. But the answer is easy, and I don’t think they should have sent a man out here who has kids. That man would never make the choice they want him to.

Despite it all, despite the importance of this place and these specks, I don’t enjoy being down here. I’m not sure why, really, it’s a mystery even to myself. Something, maybe, about the pre-life-ness of it, which in a way is death, though Orly would tell me I’m mad, that this place is the opposite of death. Maybe it’s the stasis of it then, the way that life is being kept dormant. Maybe it has nothing to do with the seeds at all, and is simply the underground of it, or the deep, deep cold. Whatever the reason, the place unnerves me, so

The unconscious woman isn’t going anywhere fast, but if she wakes she could eventually find her way down here, which means I can’t put this off any longer. I push inside. It takes my eyes a moment to adjust to the dark. The smell is a shuddering kind of bad. There are two single bedrooms, and I move past them to the kitchen. It’s not as grim as I remember it, but it is pretty grim. In the backpack I’ve brought a scrubbing brush, cloths and towels, and bleach. I get to my hands and knees and start cleaning up the blood.

Fen loves her dad. And she loves Shearwater, maybe more than any of them do, but she can see that, little by little, the island is killing them.

It is Fen’s favorite time of year. It’s what she will miss most when they leave. She has always come down to the beach for pup season. Even before this inhospitable stretch of coast became her home. Her escape. Even before she learned that there is a different kind of fear from the one you feel when you hold your breath.

She wonders if this means she is marked for a different kind of life, if it is yet another oddity that will ensure she doesn’t fit in back on the mainland. But she isn’t frightened of the dead. It is only the living who have the power to harm.

But the dandelion—this single flower that has given nourishment to countless other living creatures—is considered a weed.

There are sounds in the room and I realize they are from me, I am weeping in pain. Something touches me. I’m not sure where. I drag my eyelids open and am shocked at the brightness. I blink and blink until I can see: a small hand has taken mine, is holding mine, and perhaps I have died after all. The voice, that sweet little voice is saying I’m here, I won’t leave you, and I start crying for a different reason.

The kid returns with vodka and I get drunk. It helps with the pain, not with the memories. He’s also brought me a Vegemite-and-cheese sandwich on bread that isn’t entirely defrosted and a cup of tea with long-life milk and about sixteen sugars, by the taste of it. It’s all very unpleasant.

think getting drunk was a bad idea because it feels like the rocking sea and the boat, it feels like his voice calling out to me only I can’t find him and I know he’s gone now, the Drift must have got him, and it was my desire, my arrogance, the stupidity of this quest that drowned him.

He doesn’t talk to me much on the four-day journey, but I will remember his voice. I will remember the sound of it calling my name and the way that name was swallowed by wind and waves.

something slides across Fen’s face, an expression of disappointment, even of pity, that this is an insane way to think of an injured woman in need of help, and maybe she’s right but what the look tells me more than anything is that my daughter no longer trusts me. If I worried she was slipping away before, now I’m sure of it. She doesn’t feel safe with me, or maybe it’s that she has no expectation of me keeping her safe, of my ability to recognize danger, which is my only job as her father. I am filled with panic: I must keep hold of her, and I don’t know how to.

This man, whoever he is, is looking at me, at my body in pieces. He has seen me come apart, tried to put me back together again.

“Rowan.” I watch for any sign the name rings a bell. “Where’d you come from?” Where did you come from. Meaning, what are you doing here. I tell him I don’t know.

Maybe I haven’t looked closely enough, but from where I’m sitting now, the lighthouse could belong to another time. Another world entirely. I think of the fathomless sky above and the gaping black space around this little building, I think of the days it took me to get here, on an immense and lonely ocean. I think of eight years. Not unreasonable for an adult wanting solitude, wanting wildness. But for teenagers? I can’t wrap my head around what the isolation might do to them.

“We’re just the caretakers, we’re finishing up. We leave at the end of this season.” “Which is when?” “About six weeks.” No way. If there really is no one else on this island, then I will not be staying for six more weeks. “Can you show me to your communications? I need to radio for an evacuation.”

A sense of danger prickles my skin. All my life I have had more than a healthy dose of fear working at my edges, but I am also good at reading people, and there are things this father and son are not saying, something they are bristling with, a tension I have not imagined.

I have been dismissed, and with that I am in no doubt that he doesn’t plan to radio anyone.

“An abandoned island is less hospitable than a populated one,” I suggest. “Yeah,” Raff says. “But it seemed different from that. Like it wasn’t what she was expecting.”

“What if she’s come because she knows something?” I ask aloud. What could she know? I shake my head. “I don’t know. The timing feels weird.”

And so I stop thinking and give myself over to her, to the memory of her and yet it’s more than that, isn’t it? It feels like so much more than that, a possession, almost, her body upon mine, moving gently, overcoming me. My last thought, though, before I fall asleep, is not of the woman beside me but of the other. Why is she here?

fight that same panic now, in this lighthouse, among strangers. It is hard not to feel trapped. Hard not to let my mind flap at the edges of my body, trying to escape the sinking feeling that something isn’t right. I do not know why he hasn’t contacted anyone for help. And I’m not sure I believe there is no one else on this island and no way off it; I will have to discover the truth of this for myself.

Tall green mountains, their tops shrouded in gray mist. Rocky cliffs. There is a prehistoric feel to it. An overwhelming sense of the ancient, of time, and of something chilling. It is the bones, I think, and the bloodiness of the kelp, the black sand, it’s the colors and the isolation and the outlandishness of the animals, the mist, I feel overwhelmed by the place, and despite its beauty I am frightened.

“Every instrument we use on this island to contact the mainland is dead. The radio system. The satellite internet. It’s all broken.” I stare at him. There is a prickling sensation on the back of my neck. “What the fuck are you talking about? How is that possible?” He spells it out. “They’ve been broken.” “By who?” “I don’t know.” The strangest sensation touches the back of my neck and I look behind me in the small space, almost, for a second, expecting someone else to be in here with us. But we are alone, and all the hairs on my arms are standing on end.

“I only noticed it after the last ship left,” Dom says, and I turn back to him, trying to slow my racing thoughts. “Meaning it could have been anyone who left the island?” He nods. “What—they busted up all the equipment and then bailed? To do what—strand you here? Why?” “I don’t know.” “That doesn’t make sense.” “I know it doesn’t.” “You must have some idea of why someone would do that to you.” “No.”

The thing that isn’t making sense to me is that he should treat me with so much suspicion. As though he needs to be wary of me. But what exactly is it that he thinks I’m a threat to? What is he trying to protect? It seems clear that shit has gone down here. If somebody’s busted up the comms, there’s been trouble. And he is hiding it from me.

for the man in this photo, who is the team leader of Shearwater’s research base, is also my husband.

I can feel something unraveling inside me. No radio to call for help. No boat on which to leave. No husband here, as he said he was, when he pleaded for me to come. No home to return to, only ash. And I have killed a man and left his body in the sun to be picked at. I have shown him to children, and altered the way they see the world. I am a tunnel, wind screaming through me. And into this empty space comes a mad thought, unbidden. They have killed him. My husband.

that disregard, but she knows now that she was wrong. Thinking of Yen’s body leads her to think of her mother and to wonder if Claire was left in such a state. Was she peeled open and spilling before she was incinerated? Were her eyes open or closed? Did she look peaceful or monstrous? Were they careful with her, or rough? She is crying silently as she walks. Fen feels too much, always bursting out of her body.

She only ever takes one item at a time, so he won’t notice. One day, when they’re all gone, he will know, but by then it will be too late.

She won’t be able to sleep on this couch, in this room. Not next to this window. Because she is quite sure she’s just seen someone walk past it. The terror this figure fills her with is profound. It drives her up and out into the night. Her windbreaker will have to be protection enough against the weather, until she can make it to the boathouse. It’s very cold as she descends the hill, though her stolen treasure sits warm against her spine and the little green lights dance ahead to show her the way.

After these lucky moments—and there have been only a few—he inevitably finds his way to the boxing bag, where he punches his body empty of the white-hot rage he feels at the thought of his mother not being here to experience the sound with him. What he is left with when that is punched out is loneliness.

On the day they first kiss, Raff’s heart does not speed up; instead it seems to slow right down, it beats so hard and so slow that he thinks of the whale heart. Of the humpback, and the enormity of that heart, of its chambers a person can walk through.

body. And so there came, for Raff, a dawning awareness of a kind of peril within him, one his father had recognized far earlier and sought to subdue.

“You’re on holidays! Take a break, kid. If your dad asks you can blame me.” Dom already hates me. “It’s pretty self-serving of you to distract me from my education purely because you’re bored, Rowan,” Orly says. “Oh.” I am crestfallen. He laughs. “Just kidding. Let’s go.”

find myself wanting to warn her of what I wish I’d known. “It’s not a good idea to fall in love, okay?” I say softly. “Not with people, and not with places.”

“What that instability does to relationships—what constant danger does to them—is devastating. It’s unraveling.”

Loving a place is the same as having a child. They are both too much an act of hope, of defiance. And those are a fool’s weapons.

tried to get in touch with his colleagues to check if he was alright, but no one would get back to me. And now. Finally, today, he has sent me three emails. The first is this. I need help. It’s not safe here for me anymore. And then this. They don’t understand what I’m trying to do. They fear what I have realized and they fear me for knowing it. And then this. I am in danger. Send help.

“What if—” “All we need to do,” he says, “is keep our mouths shut.” Raff marvels at his dad’s even keel. He is always even, always calm. Raff knows, in this moment, the way he sometimes knows what his sister is thinking, that Fen is imagining the same thing he is: that sudden, calm violence Dominic Salt is capable of, and the damage it can do.

I think don’t do this, don’t start thinking this way, she’s dangerous, and also she’s married, for god’s sake, and then I think I’m married, except I’m not, am I?

He is too sad, and I don’t know how to help that. I’m good at dealing with his anger, but this sorrow frightens me. “Dad, I miss him,” he says, forehead resting on the bag. Panic flails again. If I open my mouth I will make it worse. I need his mother here, she would know how to ease this, but I look and look and can’t find any version of her, and I am useless. “Keep punching,” I say, and turn for the stairs. “Dad,” he begs, his voice breaking, but I don’t know what else to do.

You think there will be time, but there isn’t. You get the sprinkler systems going to drench the ground between the forest and the house, the firebreak or so it’s called. You get the hoses ready to fight the flames by hand if you have to. You check that the gutters are clean, you soak them yet again. You pack bags. You pack everything that means anything to you. You think there will be time to pack more but it’s already arrived, tearing through the hills. You think you will fight it but you can’t, you can see that now. There is no stopping this blaze.

I’d set up the property well. My firebreak was wide enough that it should have saved the house. The materials I’d chosen to build with were about as fire resistant as you can get. I had several huge rainwater tanks hooked up to the sprinklers. But there were eucalypts, three of them. My favorite trees on the land. They were a fraction too close to the house, but I couldn’t cut them down for that. I loved them too much. In the end everything burned for those eucalypts. Because the flames, they leaped. They flew farther than I’d ever imagined they could.