My Diary from the Edge of the World (30 page)

“As the cold grows, new ice gets born,” Dad says.

From time to time our trek has taken us along the coast. We must be slowly climbing, because we keep getting higher above the ocean, and yesterday, peering down from a sheer rise, I could see the vaguest hints of rooftops just under the surface of the ice-frosted sea. There were curling spires that looked to be made of
shells and stones, and domes white as marble shimmering just under the frozen film.

“The old mermaid cities,” Dad said, noticing my gaze. “They're abandoned now.”

Studying the view, I imagined empty mermaid streets and abandoned mermaid theaters. I can't explain why it made me sad. Dad kept walking, but I lingered, and a moment later I felt Millie beside me.

The others had moved on, though Mom kept glancing back to make sure we'd follow, her pigtails hanging out of her bright red hat. Oliver, beside her, kept glancing back too.

“Do you think we're actually headed somewhere, Gracie?” Millie asked, nodding toward the mountain range where Dad's taking us. “Do you think anything's waiting for us on the other side?”

I looked at her. “I don't know.”

Millie nodded, looking out at the ocean and the ice-shrouded rooftops. She took in a deep lungful of breath and let it out. “You know what?” she said. “Even if there isn't, I won't regret coming.”

I followed her gaze down to the ice.

“I guess I won't regret it either,” I said.

We smiled at each other, a bit goofily, like two
strangers just meeting. Then Millie reached for my hand and tugged me along, and we walked to catch up with the others.

*  *  *

Tonight before we crawled in here to sleep, we all sat by the camp stove for a while (Mom was boiling water for tea), bundled in our supposedly “best money can buy” sleeping bags that Prospero said would keep us warm, but that actually just manage to keep us from being really, really cold. Sam was sitting on my lap again, and while everyone else was lost in their own thoughts and just looking at the flame of the stove, he asked me to tell him the old story about the night he was born.

“I'm not really in the mood, Mouse,” I said.

“Tell me,” he said plaintively.

I sighed.

“On the night you were born,” I began, “Dad called from the hospital to say you were a boy, and I cried my eyes out.”

Sam settled against my belly, warming me up, pushing his little bundled face to my chest so that I wondered if he was going to fall asleep.

“I'd always wanted a sister.” I took a breath, then went on, feeling his little heart beating against me.

“I didn't want to hold you, but Dad tricked me.”

“He said can you hold these potato chips,” Sam murmured into my coat.

I nodded. “Then he put you in my arms. And when I looked at you . . . and you looked at me . . . I felt . . .”

I paused, trying to remember back to that day. Maybe for once, after all my practice writing in here, I could actually put it into the right words.

“I felt a mystery all around me,” I said. “That's all.”

I thought about the last time I'd told Sam the story, in the Winnebago what seems like a thousand years ago. Being here at the Southern Edge of the earth, all together and alone, almost feels like the only real life there ever was.

“Is the Cloud up there right now?” he asked, not willing to look.

I gazed up at the sky—full of stars, too big for us. And the Cloud, drifting just off a ways, along the shore.

I shook my head. “It's not there tonight,” I said. “Maybe it forgot about us.”

“Maybe it won't take me after all,” Mouse whispered. He hugged me tighter and drifted off to sleep before it sank in, what he'd said.

My tears froze on my cheeks. I waited to pluck them
off, because I didn't want to wake him up. How long had he known?

My family is like a mermaid city.

If nothing's waiting for us on the other side of the mountains, we'll go extinct.

We've finally come to the
valley at the foot of the ridge. Beyond our camp, the mountains rise up in huge spikes and crooked blue-white points. Millie says they look like rows of shark's teeth.

Usually we hike until just before dusk, but today we've stopped early to rest. Tomorrow we'll climb, and we'll have to start early.

Mom is boiling water again, and Dad is staring up at the mountains with his binoculars. “I think we can make it over in a day, maybe two,” he said a moment ago. Oliver and Sam are snug in our tent, playing cards; Millie is taking a nap in Mom and Dad's.

I keep finding myself staring up at the mountains too. Just looking at them sends shivers through me,
and I keep inching closer to the fire, though it hardly gives off heat at all. If we're lucky, and nothing terrible happens to us on the way, in a day or two we'll get to see what's on the other side.

Today I, Gracie Lockwood, sit
at the edge of the earth, and I'm going to try to record what I see. I'm writing this down for whoever may read it one day. I hope it doesn't show up buried in the ice.

Four days ago, when we left camp, Dad made us leave everything we didn't absolutely need in a pile, saying we could come back to it if things didn't go the way we hoped. And then he and Mom dug in their packs and attached special metal spikes to all our shoes, and put us all in special belts with metal loops. They examined a bag full of ropes and ran along each rope carefully with their hands, checking the little pulleys and levers and clips attached to the ends. All this preparation got our hearts racing, and Millie and Oliver and I kept
looking at each other with a combination of fear and excitement (whatever amount of fear and excitement you can communicate through goggles).

Mom went through our packs one by one to make sure we weren't carrying any extra weight (“You'll regret anything even slightly heavy when we're halfway up the mountain,” she said), and when she came across my diaries, she looked at me uncertainly.

I didn't know how to explain that if she made me leave them, it would be like asking me to leave an arm behind. But maybe Mom understood without my saying it, because she nodded at me slightly, then closed my pack as if she hadn't seen anything.

Finally, it was time to go. We all wrapped our scarves tighter around our hoods, readjusted our goggles and our mittens, and began the slow trek upward.

The snow began to blow against us within an hour of our climb. We went up the first mountain tied in a long single-file line, Dad at the front with Sam on his back, and Mom behind the rest of us. Our progress was shockingly slow. “At this rate, we'll be over the mountains by next year,” Millie said during a quick rest. My legs burned, and I know it must have been hardest of all on my Dad, carrying Sam, but we all pressed on.

Reaching the pass between two ridges before nightfall, we felt like we'd accomplished something special—until we saw all the mountaintops ahead.

“Shark's teeth,” Millie repeated, holding her hands on her knees to catch her breath.

Still, that first night, as exhausted as we were, we were proud that we'd come so far, and a little more animated than we had been the night before as we settled into our tents to eat our cold dinners (beef jerky and freeze-dried peas). Millie even dabbed a tiny patch of freeze-dried peas under her nose to look like boogers, which made Sam laugh so hard we thought he might pass out.

The second day was harder. There was less snow and more ice. We had to navigate through crevices—ice tunnels as big as cathedrals, slick and glossy on all sides—Dad going first to see if he could find a way through. The tunnels made me feel like I was in the belly of the earth, like the earth was a big animal swallowing me up. We turned back several times from dead ends, and at one point Oliver lost his footing and slid down the slope behind us for about a hundred feet. But with all of us tied together, he merely came to a stop like a puppet on a string, then started to climb back up.

By halfway through the day, my muscles felt like jelly. When the sun started going down, we camped in one of the tunnels, again without even lighting the stove. We were all very quiet. I think we must have all been thinking the same thing. What if it wasn't there, waiting for us? What would we do? As much as I wanted to reach the end of this slog through the mountains, I feared it too.

Yesterday morning the snow blew on us so hard we could barely see in front of us. I got so tired, just before we stopped for lunch, that I cried into my goggles a little bit and my tears froze to my face. In front of me Millie trudged ahead, and I think the only thing that kept me going was thinking that if she could do it, I could too.

Just as it seemed we'd never reach the end of the up-and-down climb, the land began to slope and taper downward, toward the flatlands. We couldn't see very far because of the snow, but we knew without a doubt we'd finally reached the end of the range.

I could have cried again, in relief. The snow began to let up, and within a couple of hours we reached a wide flat valley and came to a stop, untying ourselves, but not saying anything. Looking ahead, it was hard to tell where the ground ended and the gray sky began. The
dim, shrouded sun was low but not yet setting. It had taken us three days to cross the mountains, but we'd done it.

“Let's set up camp here,” Millie said. “I can't move another foot.” She began to slip out of her backpack. I did the same. Looking up, I couldn't see the Cloud, and wondered if it was hanging back on the other side of the ridge.

“It can't be much longer,” Dad said, his hands on his hips. Sam had slid off his back and now moved to hold Mom's hand. “I think we can reach it before dark,” he went on, gesturing forward, his eyes bright behind his goggles.

We all looked at each other, unsure we had it in us. And then Mom nodded. “Let's try it. Another hour.”

I don't know how we found the strength to start again. I think it was that the thought of being so close to the end spread among us all like wildfire. We gathered our packs, caught our breath, and spurred ourselves forward. The snow continued to let up, and soon stopped altogether.

*  *  *

I'm not sure how long we were walking—the light stayed the same dim gray, and our steps were so rhythmic it
was hypnotizing. Up ahead, a solitary mountain tumbled down onto the horizon, where it met what looked like the southernmost corner of the frozen Southern Sea.

Dad stopped for a moment, staring.

“That's it,” he breathed. “That's the edge, right where that mountain meets the water.” I don't know how he knew. He started jogging, unable to hold himself back. We all followed.

At the foot of the mountain, coming around the bend that blocked the view beyond it, he came to a sudden stop, his arms shooting out to the sides just as we caught up with him to stop us from running past him.

He gestured for us to stay still. We stared ahead of us, gaping.

We were perched just on the edge of a thin sliver of frozen ocean. And beyond it . . .

Nothing.

Well, not nothing.

There was space. Endless, open space. A black sky full of stars as deep as forever, clusters of galaxies, exploding stars far in the distance.

From where we stood, we could see that our frozen ocean was pouring right off the earth—hanging from the edge of the planet like an enormous icicle. There was
no telling how far down the frozen waterfall went.

Beyond it the stars stretched on endlessly. I clutched Mouse's hand, stricken silent with shock and wonder. Because amid all the emptiness and vastness, there was one thing that commanded all our attention. And we all knew what it was without having to ask or wonder.

There were two things I knew about it right away, just by sight.

The Extraordinary World existed.

And we were not going to reach it.

I had to take a
break from writing for the night, because I didn't know quite what to write or how. I'll try to pick up where I left off, now that I've gathered my thoughts.

*  *  *

We could see it was an enormous planet—blue and lush and surrounded by white clouds just like ours, but round instead of flat—floating out in space and revolving around its own fiery sun that was also just like ours.

It wasn't just a different planet. I could see it was
our
planet, but a different version of it. The shapes of its continents were identical to ours. Its sky was the same shade of blue. It seemed so close that I felt as if I could reach out and touch it—I even stretched my arm toward it. But it was, in reality, far far away.

Again, tears were freezing to my face beneath my goggles. I saw the others were crying too. But I don't think it was just because of sadness. I think in that moment, we were heartbroken and overjoyed at the same time.

“We can't get there,” Millie said, as if she was accepting something she'd suspected all along. But she blinked in amazement at the sight. We all did.

After all the endless lectures and mutterings, we knew what it meant. It meant that Dad had been right, and that we were looking at one version of our world and that there might be a million or a billion more. Just like he had said all along. It meant everything was different than what we'd thought. It meant quantum jitters and alternative universes and endless possible Millies and Gracies and Sams. It meant endless possibilities.

We stared at the round planet, so seemingly peaceful and safe, so far away. I wrapped my arms around Mouse and held him close to me. And we all gathered together in a knot, wrapping our arms around each other.

Do the people who live in the Extraordinary World realize how lucky they are? Do they feel constantly surprised by the wonders that surround them? Do they ever get used to it?

*  *  *