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i.
There's reindeer in Iceland.
Cal and Kira go and visit them, bundled up in layer after layer of comforting fleece jackets, long johns and stiff gore-tex. They stand, pressed close together at the crest of a herbaged cliff, marveling at the rare treasure the island has presented them with. In the valley below the steep, rocky slope on which they stand, where every color except endless variations of green, blue and gray has drowned in the fog, maybe a dozen large animals move slowly through the thick vegetation.
Cal tries to make himself as small and silent and harmless as possible, not wanting to attract their attention and scare them away, now that they've finally let themselves be found. He glances down at his daughter (his daughter), and the look on her face instantly makes the miles of rocky mountain roads behind them worth it.
They lay down on their bellies on the wet ground. Cal plows away the high grass in front of them with one of his arms, creating a tunnel of vision down into the valley. He has brought binoculars, two pairs, and he lets Kira hold one of them in her gloved hands and squint through the thick lenses. She watches in captivated silence as the reindeer lift their heads to pick up scents in the air with their soft muzzles, their large intelligent eyes so rich and black they look like cuttings of the night sky. Their horns are so big, and the movement of muscle beneath the thick brownish fur looks like rippling waves; the animals must be so strong. But they arch their necks to give way for one another as they pass, press their faces against each others' flanks in something reminiscent of affection.
It's strange, Cal thinks. How something so powerful can be so reverential.
ii.
They visit so many places; see more things that have only ever existed in fairy tales before.
In Reykjavik they wander around the brightly colored roads at the heart of the city, spotting the pale strip of ocean at every cross street. They find little cafés where they sit by the window, peel their jackets off and order hot chocolate – the kind with lots of cream and a small mountain of marshmallows on top – and Cal clatters away on his laptop while Kira reads or draws or watches people go by outside, thoughtfully sipping on the hot, sugary drink.
They browse through gift shops and old, dusty bookstores where everything is in Icelandic, and Cal buys Kira a small notebook with reindeer on the cover.
“A souvenir,” he says when he hands it to her on the street outside. Kira thanks him politely, and angles the book so that the gallant rays of sunshine that have fought their way past the clouds hit the engraved reindeer. They shine in blinding golden, casting reindeer patterns across Kira's hands and face, and they laugh, and Kira tells him it's lovely, and neither of them mention that you don't usually buy souvenirs on escape trips, because it's a truly beautiful book.
Some days they pack sandwiches, tangerines and extra pairs of socks, get in the car and drive to big, thunderous waterfalls, wide, flourishing cracks between continental plates, or out on the wild, uninviting ocean to see killer whales dance like sculptures among the waves. One day they drive for hours on desolate roads to see one of the island's smaller glaciers. A great, gray-white expanse of ice growing (or rather, shrinking) on top of ash-colored mountains.
“It looks sad,” Kira says contemplatively as they stand on one of the lookout platforms built for tourists, because that's what they're pretending to be; tourists.
The brisk wind rips at his hair while Cal frowns at the glacier. Kira is right. The shapes are unsympathetic, the colors grim, and it looks very big, very terse and very lonely. He feels a twinge of dysphoria in his heart – maybe caused by their situation at large rather than the imminent view – standing on this lookout point trying to keep up an illusion that neither of them are strong enough to sustain and both of them can see through. But Kira puts her hand in the vacancy of his palm, and the way it fits there – like a consoling truth in the midst of the pretending – makes him feel better.
They don't talk very much, but they sit close together in all those unfamiliar, cold, magnificent surroundings. Kira asks questions from time to time, questions that Cal answers to the best of his abilities. Mostly they take in all the beauty the island presents to them, breathe cold, clean-tasting air below heavy rain clouds longing to burst, and when they are filled to the brim with chilly air and beautiful scenery, they climb back into the car and drive away, raindrops smattering against the windshield, never reaching the comfortable warmth on the other side.
iii.
Kira slips on a wet cliff and splits her knee when they're going swimming in one of the island's less hot springs.
The blood wells up in time with the despair in Cal's heart, like an ominous flower unfolding into bloom. He should know the situation by heart – fathers know what to do when their children get hurt. But he doesn't; doesn't know whether to console or dismiss or hug or encourage to get up again, doesn't know the correct voice to use or the right way to touch. But there's a lot of blood, contrasting to Kira's pale skin and the colorless cliff. Kira stares at it with large blinking eyes, then looks up and focuses them on Cal with a surprised expression.
Cal almost falters, almost falls to his own damn knees with desperation. It's ridiculous, he knows, unjustifiable. But he never had anyone make split knees feel like a cinch; to him it feels like a gunshot wound, a life-threatening injury, a terrible red flood of blood across the hard stone.
He gets to Kira just as her tears do too, and with his thumb he swipes the ones tangling in her eyelashes away before they can wet her cheeks. Cal presses his towel to where red is spilling out, trying not to tremble.
Kira presses her hand to the towel, beside his own. “It doesn't hurt,” she breathes, and her unsteady voice gets trapped between the wind and Cal's ear. “It doesn't even hurt.”
He lifts her swiftly from the ground, her cold bathing suit sticking uncomfortably to his skin, and she wraps her arm around his neck without hesitation. Like an encouragement, like trying to tell him whatever you do, I trust you.
Cal carries his bleeding daughter (daughter) the distance to the car on shaking legs and with an anxious heart hammering against his ribs. Below the stream of his water bottle he washes the blood and gravel from Kira's knee while she silently looks on, supporting herself with a hand to the juncture of his neck and shoulder. In the trunk of the car he finds a first aid kit, and in it are band-aids. Kira chooses the largest one, and Cal puts it over her wound gingerly.
“You're supposed to wait until it stops bleeding,” Kira says when a dark stain blooms out below the plastic, but he wraps her up in a dry towel and hides it beneath the folds, finds her a tangerine, and closes the door around the little land they have made for themselves in the car. Kira lets him stroke her hair and kiss her knee and joke until she's laughing and smiling and filled with color again, and suddenly his timorous heart has survived a gunshot wound like it was barely anything.
iv.
Cal tries very hard to understand his daughter. (Daughter).
He assumed young girls in general were very attached to their mothers, and he knew for certain that Kira and Sarah had a very strong, if complicated, bond.
But he watched Kira kiss her mother goodbye and get on an airplane and let it transport her the length of an ocean. He thought maybe she was overwhelmed, that it would catch up to her when they arrived. But he watched her put her backpack down by the foot of her bed, brush her teeth and crawl down beneath the covers. And the next morning she woke up, brushed her hair and politely asked if maybe they could go and see reindeer.
He doesn't understand it, how obediently she turns her life upside down. She's so good at it; accepting, not questioning, quietly packing up her feelings and locking them in a box as if they were playthings, pushing it up on a high shelf and turning the other way. It makes him think she must be an expert on the matter, which makes his heart ache terribly.
On their third day on Iceland, Kira asks about Sarah for the first time. It's small, in passing, just an unfazed I wonder what mommy is doing. Cal steels himself for tears or at least melancholy, but Kira proceeds to put on the record player and drag him up from the couch onto the living room mat, spinning herself around and around beneath his hands, her airy laugh bouncing off the walls.
When they've been on Iceland exactly one week, Kira asks him out in the darkness of their shared bedroom if he knows if Sarah's okay, and it feels like firing a bullet when he answers that he doesn't; that he hasn't heard from Sarah since he told her goodbye eight days ago. The covers rustle as Kira gets out of bed and crosses the floor to him, and with a trembling rabbit heart he lets her settle against his chest, her hair tickling the exposed skin at his clavicle. Warm tears wet the washed out fabric of Cal's t-shirt, and he doesn't hurry to wipe them away this time.
“I miss her,” Kira whispers between the tears, and Cal strokes her back above the covers and tells her he knows, that he misses her too, and that they'll be okay. Eventually Kira falls asleep there in his bed, a small warm body right next to him. He can feel her slow breath in the crook of his arm, and it's both soothing him and weighing him down.
He decides it's worth the risk and calls Siobhan the next day, and after a mild scolding for indiscretion, she agrees to a Skype-call. From an untraceable IP, of course, all precautions taken. Fear keeps him from asking about Sarah, but Siobhan spares him the effort of working up the courage. She went after a man who knew the Prolethean leader five days ago. We haven't heard a word since then. I know it doesn't look good – Felix is on the verge of losing it, but I... Cal, I know she's alive. Somehow, I can feel it. Don't lose hope. But promise me not to tell Kira about it. I don't want her to worry about Sarah, god knows she does enough of that already. Cal swallows hard and promises.
Kira's worried face unravels into a blinding smile when a flimsy image of Siobhan and Felix by the kitchen table appears on the screen, and she waves enthusiastically. Cal smiles and raises a hand in greeting too, but he sees the quiver in Siobhan's smile and the dark shadows beneath Felix's eyes, and he excuses himself soon after that.
When the call has been disconnected with a promise of another one soon, Kira folds into the space beside him on the couch, once again frowning. The rain is hammering mercilessly against the roof, but Cal has come to find it a comforting sound.
“Mom wasn't there,” Kira notes quietly. “Do you think she's okay?”
Cal sighs and thinks about what Siobhan told him on the phone. “Yeah. I think she's out there right now, fighting with all she's got, so that we can all be together soon. Don't you?”
Kira gives him a half-sided smile and nods, and Cal can tell that she doesn't fully believe him, but that she isn't going to argue. Maybe because she recognizes that he is trying to spare her the pain, and although it's futile, it's a nice gesture.
Slowly, tentatively, they begin to understand each other.
v.
Kira learns words in Icelandic.
The vowels in the language are abundant and forgiving, soft on her tongue as she stumblingly spells them out. It becomes a game they play, in the long evenings when Cal has lit a fire in the stove and made them hot chocolate from scratch and they've finished both the story-books Kira brought in her backpack and flipped through the small amount of channels on the television. Kira comes up with a word and Cal types it into the translating website on his computer, and when the newly arranged letters show up Kira studies them with great assiduity, takes them carefully on her lips, and lets Cal listen. Wow, nice, that sounded very Icelandic, he'll praise with an encouraging nod. You're a real bi-linguist now. If the words are deemed pretty enough, Kira writes them down in her new notebook. The one with the engraved golden reindeer on the cover.
Whenever the website finally finishes loading and the combination of letters churned out on the other end is the same as in English, maybe just with some added apostrophes on the i's and the o's, they throw themselves back into their chairs, throw their hands up above their heads, hoot and grumble at the screen in mock disappointment. But when they're not; when they're new and different and strange and beautiful, Kira leans forward, squints at the pixelated little marks, and copies them with great care.
Reindeer, hreindýr. Angel, engill. Green, grænn. Mommy, mamma. Cone, keila. Aunt, frænka. Glasses, gleraugu. Friend, vinur, vinonka. Color, litur. Sea, haf. Shore, strönd. Monkey, api. Love, ást. Home, heimili.
Dad, pabbi.
Cal might let his eyes linger on the word for an extra moment – on the heartrending way Kira's hand moves when she writes it down; a little hesitant at first, like she's unfamiliar with the arrangement of the letters, but resolute again by the second d. The way she looks so focused and content and startlingly alike himself in the armchair beside him – and if there's a fleeting urge to say something important within him when she looks up, he swallows it with a reassuring smile.
They don't need tearful confessions or grand apologies. Kira is not resentful, he knows. Kira doesn't want his capitulation or acknowledgment of past mistakes. What she wants is someone to read her a bedtime story and kiss her goodnight, and someone to wake her up in the morning and make her toast. What she wants is someone to put band-aids on bleeding knees and kiss them better, someone's hand to hold when the ground gets uneven and glaciers are dying in front of your eyes. Someone to let her watch reindeer for two and a half hours even though the wet finds it's way into gloves and your back gets stiff from the uncomfortable posture. What she wants, it seems, is a father.
Cal has never been more unconditionally, anxiously up for anything in his life.