Son

He hates the birds. There are two, a breeding pair. Their eyes are red as devils’. On land they’re stupid, little feet pushed so far back on their bodies that they can’t escape by running. Yet they glide over the water, glossy mottled boats. Their chicks ride their backs. The adults protect them, tuck black wings up to shield them from wave and eagle. They are good parents.

Around him, the world drips: Ontario spring, slate-green and cold. In the damp notebook on his lap, he’s supposed to record behaviors. When did the chicks hatch. How long until they stand, swim, fledge. At thirteen, he’s trusted to do just this. In two years, maybe, he’ll graduate to supervising the water treatment plant fifty kilometers down the coast at the boundary of this Eco-Refuge. Never beyond. No papers, say the Mounties, and besides, isn’t it nice living in nature? City kids never get to see loons.

He hates city kids. A bus full of them visited the Refuge once on a school trip, stared at him as if he too were an endangered species. He socked one, drove his nose into the boy’s sniveling face. Boater socked another, to back him up. His heart had pinched, then flooded: Boater would fight, just for him. She’s as good as a real sister.

He thinks of her as he watches the loons. When he first pitched the plan, she wasn’t sure. She hates the Refuge, but she loves its birds. At night, after work when she’s scrubbing free of grease, he tells her what he saw, recalling details of the little family: the fluffy siblings peeping, the mother’s tremolo laugh, the father’s protective lunge at a raccoon. She’ll miss them. There aren’t many birds anymore, especially in the city, where they’ll have to hide.

He isn’t sure either. But life hands you nothing: You must take it. So they’re escaping. They’re sailing to the city. City kids are pussies—they get black lung, get cancer, get fat. But they can leave. Their fathers never look at them out of red eyes and whine that this was the best they could do. His mother was a fighter, in the war. Now his father won’t fight anything, not even him.

The loons glisten, roll slightly like loose bullets. On their backs their smoky puffs of children ride.

He watches as they paddle across the gray water and away.

Father

Nurses, they say, are always on the front lines. But he fled the front lines long before he had to. His son knows it, and he’s never forgiven him.

Somewhere along the marshy shoreline, the boy is observing loons. Pukaskwa Bird Eco-Refuge is one of the country’s last breeding-grounds for endangered waterfowl. Of the limited options in Canada’s Youth Placement Program, he’d thought this was best. He’d chosen it after the boy got in another fight. He told himself he was being considerate. “You’ll learn to care for something,” he’d told the boy.

“I care for Boater.”

“More than just Boater. People who don’t care about others, they take them away.” He’s seen it, feral kids disappeared for belligerency by the Wellness Bureau, never returned. He worries about quiet, dark-eyed Boater, who spends most of her days beside the boy, most evenings at supper in their tent. Orphans disappear faster. Canada, he remembers, was supposed to be the safe place.

“I don’t care,” said his son, and spat.

Nursing, the caring profession. Every day he professionally cares, playing camp doctor to Pukaskwa’s human refugees. These families fled later than him, after losing more: an arm, a child, whole continents. Their mourning is uncomplicated. As he wraps burst joints or dribbles water on eyes puffed with chlorine, they cry, cleanly, of the bombs that razed their villages, cholera outbreaks, famine. They’re victims of Canada’s devil’s bargain with the EU, unlimited refugee resettlement in exchange for protection from US invasion. American, their eyes say, when he asks them in English to scale their pain, one to ten.

The war was not his fault, but people are symbols. And refugees deserve someone to hate. Hate is a human right, too. His wife told him that.

The last time he saw her, at the bridge over Sault Ste. Marie when the border was still open, she hugged the boy savagely, then let him go. When he begged her to come with him, she said, “I have work to do.” The explosive vest bulked her chest like an armadillo.

Now that she’s gone, her body pinched to black mulch beneath some crater in Chicago, he wonders if she sacrificed him as well as herself. Man, she told him once, is not the laughing but the punishing animal. She died, so now he has to raise their son alone, their son who hates him. Is this his punishment? What kind of a wife is that?

He wonders how she would have felt about Boater. She never wanted another child. “Too much work,” she said, meaning too much heartache. But he bets she would have liked the girl, just like her son does—just like he does, too much sometimes, since Boater is more like him, more his child than his real one. He’s grateful his son loves her, and a little frightened. Sometimes he catches his son staring at Boater, and the look is his wife’s: an arrant, violent devotion, the wordless promise that you will die for someone, or kill. He wonders what his wife would’ve thought about that, too.

He recalls her face, creased with matchlight, holding a rag to plug a reeking bottle. He recalls how in bed, her muscles wrapped him like a python, like safety. What kind of wife: his.

Sister

“Tomorrow,” Swimmer says, when they meet before dinner to wash. He helps Boater scour the scum from her hands.

“Why tomorrow?” she asks.

Boater is an ironic nickname, since her family was probably from the desert. Probably: She never met them. They died back there, on that continent whose language she still speaks. The community that took her in here uses a different dialect, and when she was young, the kids mocked her. Running here, when Cairo didn’t even get flattened? Just two bombings, crybaby? One boy scraped up the ashes of his cookfire to hurl at her before a horrified auntie plucked him up, scolding.

Swimmer’s dad, a soft, droopy man with purple eye bags, helped the auntie wipe Boater clean. Later, he sat her down and tried to explain. “When people are desperate, they lash out. They control what they can, since everything’s been taken from them.” Of course he can say this: He ran while his life was still under his control, and he has a good job here, a tent with a real floor, extra rations because he’s a doctor. He even got Swimmer that cushy job birdwatching.

Boater scrubs filters. She started at eleven. At the far end of the Eco-Refuge, away from the gray-lapped rocks and dripping firs, the water-treatment plant chugs up Superior and spits it out through long pipes that straddle the continent. The filters are Boater’s own height, plates of green-yellow slime studded with metal or glass. Scars stitch her palms. Beneath their officer’s watchful eye, she and the other orphans dip in and out of the pipes like the little black birds dip in and out of the creeks upcoast, in the Eco-Refuge.

Dippers, loons, great black-backed gulls: Boater watches them, their wet-slate eyes and lacquered beaks. She’s not supposed to love them. She was sold here, to this wet place, as human collateral. Like everyone else, she’s supposed to want out. But she’s grateful for the birds. From them she’s learned how to float above things, to peer beyond the horizon, trust a migration path she’s never seen. To escape, you need two things: faith, and a target.

In the reeds behind Swimmer’s loons nestles the little boat they stole. Together they’ve reinforced it with shaven planks of driftwood. It’s hard but light, its oarlocks of clean iron. When Swimmer first pitched the idea, he was ten, she thirteen. “We’ll run away,” he said. “We’ll never come back.”

“You want to row? Across a Great Lake?”

“I’ll push you if I have to. You in the boat, me behind, swimming.”

“Boater and Swimmer.” She laughed. “Some relationship.”

He flexed his little bicep. “I mean it. I’ll protect you. I’ll sock anyone who tries to stop us.”

She laughed again, but her heart flooded. Sweet, silly brother, who cared enough to believe.

Now she asks again: “Why tomorrow?”

“Dad made mom’s favorite,” Swimmer says, evasively. She understands. Swimmer’s dad is a coward, a bag of excuses; but once they escape, they’ll never see each other again. Her heart pinches: one last supper together, as a family.

“Ok,” Boater says. “Tomorrow.”

Officer

She sees the kids slipping into the woods at noon and rubs her temples. Seven to one they’re trying to escape by water. She can’t blame them, but kids always try the dumbest, most dangerous ways possible. They don’t realize how cold Superior is, that thirty minutes in its chill, even in May, is fatal. If they’d had decent schooling they might not hazard it; if they’d had options; if they’d had hope.

She sniffs the air: tinny, loaded with ozone. Clouds are a gray-blue cap on the horizon. Beneath, the low pressure feels like suction. Flaps lift along the lines of sleeping tents, and the old women, who always know, are dousing their fires. Stupid kids.

The girl, Boater, is one of her best scrubbers. The officer won’t punish her; there’s no point. Living here is punishment enough, eh? The boy is trouble. Angry, desperate little thing, always looks an inch away from tears. Suicide risk for sure; maybe that’s what this is about.

She remembers he’s the doctor’s kid. Boater might as well be, too, for the amount of time she spends in his tent. The doc is American, but sensible: She’ll tell him. He’ll keep them from killing themselves, at least before this place does.

Of course she’s cynical. Who wouldn’t be? She’s not a refugee, but she’s trapped here too, on this thumb of gummy rainforest stuck into Superior. The economy’s been shit since the war. No one paying attention believes the Pukaskwa Bird Eco-Refuge is really about birds or refugees. It’s a greenwashed holding pen. Ontario gets carbon credits for it; a few laid-off miners from Thunder Bay get jobs; Calgary gets cheap filtered lake. Crops rot in the wet, so it’s small, barely a thousand people. Everyone’s always hungry, but at least there’s water. The big camps, the cattle-ranch tent cities of forty thousand in the parched flatlands outside Regina, reek of dysentery. Pukaskwa’s more photogenic, so every few years, little parades of journos or schoolkids march through the camp for photos. She has to spend a frantic week badgering dejected women to sweep the yards, put sand on the mud, smile as they clip tin bands on chickadees’ legs or check snags for merganser eggs. Lipstick on a pig, but what choice does she have? She can’t go back to the plant.

Her girlfriend, the Mountie, claims this isn’t the first camp here. Before, there were loggers; before that, natives. Her girlfriend claims she’s Ojibway—dodgy, but whatever—and says that this place sucks so much because the people who planned it forgot that place is a sort of relationship. You’re not ever just yourself: You play a role, even to the land. We’re all relations.

“Like a family?” she asked, scoffing. “Most of the people here can’t stand each other.” Then she remembers her family. Oh.

Above, the sky darkens. The suck of low pressure lifts, and leaves flash their white bellies. She breaks into a jog.

At the doctor’s tent, he’s organizing pills. His eyelids are greasy with fatigue. “By water?” he cries stupidly. “They have a boat?” She remembers his wife was a suicide bomber, took out some hotel on the Magnificent Mile instead of running with him. No wonder he always looks so broken. She wonders what their relationship was like, whether it resembles her own. She wonders if she and the doc are relations.

He’s panicking now. “Chill,” she says. “Let’s get my girlfriend.”

Mother

She floats above the medical tent, listening to her husband howl. Through her vaporous body, thickening raindrops hiss.

She’d died instantly. After, she floated up over Chicago, anticipating heaven, only to bump on the troposphere like a sparrow trapped in an attic. Heaven’s borders were closed. Stateless, pissed, she jetted north to linger over Pukaskwa. If she couldn’t ascend, at least she could see her son.

She thought someday she’d pass on. But it’s been nine years. She’s trapped here, too.

“A boat?” Her husband reels out of the flap, tailed by the camp’s bitch of a cop. “A boat?”

Yes, a boat: She watched her son refit it. She’s proud. He’s going to escape, reject this hypocritical smear of mud, and begin the real work of life.

From above, she’s seen him grow from a toddler punching mudpies to this fuming, silent teen. His rage is a flame in his throat. If she’d lived, she could have set it to a fuse, taught him how to hack, drill, smash a window, and vanish. When he swings at his father, teacher, friends, her heart, the aching fog where her heart once beat, flutters—in pride? Fear? No: hope.

That’s what her husband has never understood. When he’d first suggested fleeing, she was furious. The war was still in the south then. Chicago would stand. The front would need nurses. Their son needed to see resistance, learn that evil would not win if people, regular people, hated it enough to stand up. They fought. He was afraid for her, for their son, for himself; all he wanted was to survive. Though hadn’t she married him for that timidity? His soft stomach, furred like a nest, his terror of even his own anger? He was safe. She’d met so few men who were.

When she told him to go without her, he feared she was suicidal. But hate is the opposite of suicide. It’s transitive: It gives you a target, like love. You need a target in life.

She loves her husband still. She loves her son. She loves the girl they’ve both adopted. She died for them because she loved them—Boater too, though she hadn’t met her yet. She has spent nine years wishing she could explain.

“Where?” her husband asks the cop, who shrugs.

The wind is swelling now, beating the trees. In May, Superior is cold as death. Her son should be smarter, or Boater should be; the girl is timid, but sharp. Surely they wouldn’t throw their lives away on something so hopeless. Surely they know better. Don’t they want to live?

She remembers her son kneeling in the reeds, hands noosing and unnoosing before the loons. “I hate it here,” he whispered to himself, over and over. “I hate everything.”

A shiver like she’s never felt in life or death ripples through her.

Then she gathers her energy like the torque at the edge of a storm, and flies.

Below her, the camp’s swirls of wet gray blur into miles of green-brown, sodden clearcuts. Over the lake, the storm detonates. Rain pulverizes the waves. She can’t see where sky ends and water begins. But ghosts don’t need eyes.

She shivers again, lets herself bleed out through the air—

There. Swamped in the swells, the little boat rolls, each child clinging to an oarlock. Very far out: Of course, they left when it was still calm. Boater’s braced her oar beneath her armpits in case she’s flung overboard. Her son is white and gasping.

Back on land, her husband is hauling the cop and the Mountie into a dinghy. The rain is thick as paste. They’ll never see the kids.

Her heart floods. Nine years she’s been trapped here, she’d thought for no reason. She thought she’d already burned up everything in her there was to burn. Yet now through her translucent body, memories raze like pulses of wildfire. Their courtship, watching loons at the Chicago zoo: loons, who laugh but do not punish. The birth-bed, her son a terrifying purple larva, her husband calmly tapping the little back until the cough, gasp, wail. Scrolling the news while breastfeeding, her son’s tiny red mouth, her husband wet with fear-sweat. Their arguments; his tears. That last day, hoisting herself up the blue glass on the window-washer’s platform, the haze of fighting to the south, sweat itching her ribs beneath the vest; imagining, among the silver beetles of cars crawling north, her husband’s passing into Pukaskwa. She loves them. But she can’t be both parent and example at once. Wind bumping the platform, daggers of sun; her numb fingers typing the code. She loves them so much.

What is love? Faith, and a target. Her husband will never fight, but she can still help him aim.

She rises. A ghost is heart and air, combustibles. She remembers the feeling of keying in the code, the roar and then the silence. She touches her invisible fingers to her invisible chest. Above her, thunder rumbles toward lightning.

She loves them. Her heart grows, and grows, and explodes.

For a single brilliant instant, the whole sky clears.

Brother

He’s cold. His hands are rubber. He had been swimming; he is Swimmer only to her, but it’s still his real name, the one he likes best. A fog on his eyes: the clouds, impossibly dazzling, as if drenched with light. Beyond, their little boat crunching in the waves, empty. Boater.

He hears his body thump as rough warm hands haul him into the dinghy. His father streams with water. Some Mountie howls at some cop: “Shore, shore, the eye won’t last long.” A higher whine skims the storm’s bass roar, an outboard motor screaming.

“Boater,” he gasps. He can’t hear his own voice. But his father’s watching. He sees his fat face wince, then jiggle like putty between lie or truth—then choose. He knows what his father will say before he shouts it: “We couldn’t see her. We have to go.” Coward, coward, sham man—Boater—he hurls himself up, tries to shoulder his dad away. “Turn around!”

His father’s bear arms grip him. He wriggles up, slams his body like a snake half over the gunwale to look—gray waves, not a dot of color—she is drowning somewhere in that cold dark. They were going to escape together. He promised to protect her. Now he’s just like his dad: traitor, coward, failure. He’s trapped here for life. He deserves it for what he’s done. Uncaring, evil: inhuman. Boater. He hates himself, hates himself, hates himself—

His dad’s arms clamp tighter. “I hate you!” Swimmer screams, wriggling. “I hate you! I hate you! I hate!”

Symbol

In the eye of the storm, the loon slices the waves.

The loon is nineteen, an adult. It has lived in the Eco-Refuge its whole life. It has raised many chicks here; the current clutch, now safe in their nest, is its seventh. Its ancestors have always inhabited this cold spur of Superior. On calm summer nights, the little families raise laughing calls across the water. Is this a society? We don’t know; but it is a relation.

This loon tips over a gray wave. Ten feet off, a girl is drowning. It watches, then blinks as a yellow spotlight swings over her flapping arms. It sees the ship breach the rain. It hears a foghorn, then a gabble of human language, to which she screams back in her own, shocked to be understood. The loon watches the rescue: The girl is hoisted aboard, dripping. Then it watches the boat bump away over the wave-crests, away from the Eco-Refuge, away, forever. The girl is safe.

(This is not a symbol. A symbol is a relation between what you have and what you want, which is why loons don’t need them and humans do. But Boater is safe: literally, not symbolically. This we promise you, reader. A promise is also a relation).

Later, when the waves deepen, the loon returns to its nest. Its two chicks nestle there, peeping. Its mate has fed them small fish. They burrow warmly beneath its wings. The loons are good parents; still, each year, some chicks die anyway.

Together they huddle and ride out the storm.

In the silver morning, the loon, or perhaps its mate—they all look alike, don’t they?—paddles out to fish. The other loon remains with the chicks.

They take no note of the boy who appears at midmorning. He’s been here before, and come quite close. They aren’t frightened.

Loons are slow on land. Their feet are far back, can only push and paddle. When he lunges, hands noosing, they have no chance.

When the loon’s mate returns and finds the bodies, it wails. Did it love them? We don’t know. Does it understand who killed its family? We don’t know that, either.

But we like to imagine—because we are human, and because the loon cannot punish us—that it does not hate.

Authority

Hi doc—

This is just a note to say how sorry I am. I know that’s not a comfort. When we picked him up in the boat, I really thought he’d turn it around. I did try to talk to the Wellness Bureau people, ask them to give him another chance. Sara did too. A Mountie and a cop, you think they’d listen. But what could we say? The loons.

At the Institute he won’t hurt anyone at least. They took him there because he’s a danger to others. Also himself. You get that, right? Kids who can’t care for animals can’t be in relation with people, either. Please don’t blame yourself. This is just how some kids are. There’s nothing anyone could have done.

Mostly I don’t want you to think of this as punishment. Those Institutes, they’re not so much worse than here (ask me how I know—I wasn’t always a Mountie). Regina’s sunny, at least. He’ll meet other kids his age. Maybe make friends. Who knows what’ll happen.

Think of it this way: He’s out. He got out. How many of us can say the same?

— M