Read Online The Year of Broken Glass by Joe Denham - Free Book Online

down low as I climbed up and in beside him. He’d waited for me to the last moment, just as he’d promised he would if, in the event of an earthquake or some other emergency, we were forced to evacuate.
    He lifted the helicopter off the ground perhaps a minute before the tsunami broke shore and we’ve hovered over our homes ever since watching the water stampede toward them. Now the sea is washing over the land like it normally does the intertidal zone, runnelling through the age-old forest as though it were just a rock-clinging bed of kelp.
    Jim turns us to the east, and we fly. Up the Tofino Creek Valley, over Great Central Lake and across the shoulder of Mount Arrowsmith. As we crest the mountain, massive clouds of dark grey ash suspended over the Cascades come into view, and I know that one of the many long-dormant volcanoes north of the city has erupted in the earth’s convulsions. The helicopter shudders in the wind funnelling down through the valley off Qualicum Lake, Jim steering it adeptly over the ruins of the town, the magnitude of the quake made apparent by the heaps of brick and wood that were once Qualicum Beach’s older buildings. We travel down the island’s eastern coastline to Schooner Cove and Jim spins us low over the rows of yachts tied snug in their slips.
    One of my late husband Horace’s great ambitions was to sail the world. It was never going to happen, him lacking the necessary bravado for such an undertaking, but there was nothing stopping him from buying an open water-ready sixty-five-foot ketch and keeping it spit-polished at this exclusive marina. We made a few weekend forays on the Princess Belle to the sandy beach of Tribune Bay on Hornby Island and the blue shallows of Home Bay on Jedediah. We even stopped in False Bay and hiked up Mount Tremeton to visit Fairwin’ Verge at his tree fort.
    Then Horace, gaining confidence, decided we should venture further afield, so we took the Belle up to Princess Louisa Inlet to view its glacial till, aquamarine waters and the majestic Chatterbox Falls. On the way back we nearly lost the boat (or so Horace’s story went—to my mind it wasn’t as close a call as he imagined) when he misjudged the residual whirlpools passing through Malibu Rapids at high water slack and the hull sucked over, leaning so far to port the jack-line saw green. After that Horace—the wind gone out of his proverbial sails—gave up his seafaring dreams.
    There she is, Princess Belle , long and dark and regal in her slip. Jim sees her, too, and pulls the helicopter up high over the trees, then spins down into the ballpark just a few blocks from the marina. I unbuckle myself and so does Jim and we hug each other in the roaring cockpit, the blades still slicing the air above us. “I’ll be there,” Jim calls to me over the deafening noise of his machine.
    â€œYou take care,” I holler back, and jump to the soggy grass, my legs a little weak beneath me. Running from under the blades I turn and stand in the helicopter’s heavy thrashing of the air as Jim lifts off and circles northward over the trees and out of sight. I have this foreboding feeling that it will be the last time I see him, but it’s to be expected, I suppose, under the circumstances. So I swallow it and start walking.
    So far, things have gone as we’d planned. Jim is en route to his home away from home, a modest, self-sufficient house on the south end of Reid Island where he can wait out the storm with his radio and his books and his six-month stores of non-perishables; I’m on the way to my boat, fully fuelled, stocked with food, and with seaworthiness and sails to hoist and power me wherever I need or desire to go. This may be straight up to Jim’s to wait out the aftermath with him; to marry the Belle’ s resources to his so we can both live with more, and in good company, while we wait for the world to recalibrate.
    Walking