I stood up and leaned right out over the stone balustrade, and when I squinted I could see that it was plastic barrels, tied together—some of the empty barrels of fuel that Pops had brought with us to power up the generator, which we hadn’t been able to use for ages. On days when it was super hot, we’d take the empty ones up the mountain, launch them on the river, curl our tummies over the warm, yellow plastic that smelled like a baby doll we’d once had. We’d ride them back down, our arms outstretched so that we could hold pinkie fingers as we floated.
But now, as she tried again and again, unsuccessfully, to jump up onto her raft, Winter clearly wasn’t waiting for me to join her on a nautical adventure. The big backpack was dragging her down pretty hard. It must have been heavy and that’s when I realised: Winter wasn’t just planning a short picnic with the dolphins.
You know that feeling when your head goes hot hot hot at the same time as your insides turn to ice, and you sweat right at your hairline while your stomach clenches up, like it wants to turn inside out? That—that’s the feeling I got when it dawned on me that Winter was running away, or trying to. That however you tried to look at it, she was running away from me.
Just when I could hardly see her through the gloom, Winter gave up. She pulled the raft onto the sand and looked around to make sure nobody was watching, nobody as in me, and I bet you’re thinking that this is the moment when I stormed down the 362 steps of the bell tower and out onto the beach to confront her, waving my arms, all bold and loud and mad.
But I didn’t.
My legs were shaking too much to move anywhere, and as she dragged the raft across the lawn and scampered off to stash her supplies, I sank to my knees, closed my eyes. And when I came down and Winter was serving up a dish of steaming dehydrated French beef stew for me to eat by starlight, I didn’t say anything at all. I didn’t ask where she thought she was going, or why. Was I frightened of the answers, or did I know them already? I just said, ‘The way you make this—it’s so good,’ and tried not to throw up as she beamed at me proudly.
I’m not sure why I was so shaken, so surprised, because after Pops left us, I was the one who wanted to hang around when Winter had begged, over and over, to do the one thing we could that would allow us to leave. ‘There’s nobody here to take care of us,’ she wept. ‘Nobody knows that we’ve even survived. Please, Summer? Please can we just go?’
‘I’m still here,’ I’d say sourly. ‘I can take care of us. And it’s not so bad, just you and me. Besides, Pops wanted us to stay. We’re doing this for him.’ I would turn my face away from her fear and her red-rimmed eyes.
So after Edward arrived and I saw how much Winter loved him, how much he adored her—that’s when I could finally relax a little, because now she had something to stay around for. Like a mound for her to stick a flagpole in and claim her place in the world. Eventually I stopped getting edgy every time she left the room, and when he would pad after her, I’d try not to mind that he’d left me behind. When he was around, she seemed to forget that there was even a way we could escape from here at all. And after a while Winter overcame her squeamishness and took the bear to the forest so he could put his paws in piles of leaf litter and commune with the spirits of his forebears, or whatever she thought he was doing in the forest. If only I had gone along with them—well, you’ll see.
Winter
‘What’s with all the reading, anyway?’ Edward asked one night. He was lighting the fire.
We were reading in the pews, Summer and I, our feet sole to sole. Summer liked them that way, all lined up. We had two copies of Gone with the Wind. I read faster, but I waited at the end of each page. I knew she liked us to turn them together. It gave me a chance to watch how he moved. Smooth somehow.
‘It’s kind of, you know…passive,’ he said. ‘Wouldn’t you rather be up and doing something than sitting round like this, flicking pages with your thumb?’
‘Passive?’ bristled Summer. ‘Flicking? You think ingesting deep truths about the human condition to better understand humanity is passive? That’s the most meat-heady thing you’ve said yet, and that includes your views on soft-plastic recycling. Did you miss the memo? Reading is the new social media—people are crazy for it. Have you ever even finished a book?’
He sat back on his knees. He ran his hands through his hair. His jawbone popped out as he clenched his teeth.
‘You can’t read,’ I realised, and wished I hadn’t. When I looked up, I could see the part of him that could fight off a wolf. Something hard passed over his face.
‘Winter can teach you,’ Summer said breezily. ‘No probs at all. We were at a camp in South Sudan once and, I kid you not, she taught a bunch of kids their ABCs, and they couldn’t even speak English to start off with. We ended up taking turns to read them Anne of Green Gables out loud, and they lapped it up like a bowl of melted ice cream. Boy, those kids were tall. Taller than you, even. Maybe.’
How I loved Summer then, her straightness. It wasn’t always easy to love her that true.
‘I can teach you,’ I said. ‘If you want to learn. I can help.’
‘Can’t,’ he said, and his voice was husky. ‘I’ve tried before.’
‘But you can speak,’ I said. ‘You can see. That’s all it is: words and looking.’
Edward looked up at me and winked.
‘And Winter is patient,’ said Summer. ‘Heaps more than me. Even if you’re a total cheese brain, she’ll get you there in the end. She could teach an Eskimo to rollerblade.’
‘I don’t think you’re allowed to say Eskimo anymore.’ I felt shy. ‘I think it’s Inuit.’ I turned to Edward. ‘You’re teaching me to run, remember?’
‘Vaguely,’ he said.
‘WHAT? Winter can’t run.’ Summer frowned at me. ‘Why would you even want to? And where?’
‘In the forest,’ I whispered.
‘Well, that’s the most idiotic thing I ever—’
Pete woofed, and raised his eyebrows.
Summer clicked her tongue and turned back to Edward. ‘Just say yes already. I know a book you’d go totally nuts for.’
Edward smiled. ‘I guess it’s time I understood humanity a little better.’
Summer
Us and Edward and the beach at sunset, right where it rubbed shoulders with the meadow, and that feeling like the one you get from a movie where there’s a bunch of kids in a performing arts school and they all understand The Pressure of Being an Artist, and they walk along in a row with their arms around each other’s shoulders, boys and girls, like it isn’t awkward—like it’s actual, deep, respectful, abiding love that will last way after the applause at the end of the end-of-year show, where they are hoping to attract talent agents, even though you and I both know that eventually they’ll be going up against each other in auditions.
There was Winter, turning cartwheels on the sand with her toes pointed, and me talking about rodeos, and the bear trying to nibble the waves, not understanding the fundamentals of solids and liquids and gas, and us laughing at his sweet pudgy face, biting down on our teeth because we could have squeezed his skull till his eyeballs popped out, that’s how much we loved him.