My Last Continent: A Novel(18)
“I think the spark plugs got iced over when the temps dropped yesterday,” he says, straightening up. “Clean and dry now. Give it a try.”
The engine starts right up. I let it run while I pack our tent. As we head toward the base, with Keller sitting behind me, his arm around my waist, I wish we weren’t on our way back. The cold, exhaustion, and hunger don’t compare to my sudden desire to remain with Keller, away from the busyness of the station.
As we return the snowmobile to the MEC and set off for our dorms, I try not to delude myself into thinking he’s more interested in me than in the birds. In fact, when I see him later and he suggests we meet at the Southern Exposure, one of McMurdo’s bars, he asks if I can bring my notes, if I’d mind sharing them.
And so, over the next couple of weeks, we continue our routine—days counting birds together, nights in the bar after his cafeteria shift. We get to know each other slowly, drink by drink. Once we’re a few beers into the night, the conversation becomes personal. Keller doesn’t like to talk about himself, and I have to fit together his pre-Antarctic life in puzzle pieces. It’s an image that remains with me when I see him each morning—a faded cardboard picture with the seams still visible, the cracks still open.
But I want to put the puzzle together; I want to understand who he is. He’s unlike most men I’ve known, men whose experience here is more academic. Keller seems to go about discovering Antarctica like one of the early-twentieth-century explorers, part fearlessness, part eagerness, and part ambition, as if he’s got something to prove. I’m intrigued, as if I’ve unearthed a new species, one I’m eager to study, bit by bit.
One night I’m gazing at him, trying to picture it—the -buttoned-down life he said he’d once lived—this man I’ve never seen in anything but denim, flannel, and Gore-Tex, whose hands are chapped from nights working in the galley and days counting penguins.
“So you were a lawyer, married, house in the suburbs,” I say, wanting the rest of his story. “Kids?”
He says nothing, and something in his face makes me wish I could withdraw the question. I stand up and wobble my way over to the bar to get us another round of drinks. When I return to the table, he’s staring at the wall, at a photo of an emperor colony. Our beers slosh as I put them down on the table, and I tumble into my seat.
Finally he turns to me. “Remember the other day—you told me how penguins that fail to breed will sometimes choose new partners.”
For a long moment, I can’t comprehend what he’s telling me.
“It was our first child,” he says. “Only child.”
He takes a long drink, and I try to remember how many rounds we’ve had. “She died,” he says. “Car accident.”
I don’t know what to say. He is very drunk, and he’s talking far more than he ever has, yet his body remains still, lean and almost statuesque in the chair. “I thought we might try to have another baby,” he says. “But she decided to try another husband.”
“Just like that?” As I look at Keller through the bar’s haze of cigarette smoke, I’m finding it impossible to imagine anyone walking away from him so easily.
“Just like the birds,” he says with a harsh laugh. “I can’t blame her.”
I want to touch him then, but I don’t move.
He shifts in his seat and pushes his hair off his forehead in a slow, tired motion. “It was my fault,” he says. “Ally was nineteen months old. Britt, my wife—she went back to work after Ally’s first birthday, and we took turns dropping her off at day care, picking her up. I was supposed to pick her up that afternoon, but a meeting got rescheduled. I called our babysitter, Emily—a grad student who took care of Ally from time to time. Ally loved her. I even bought an extra car seat so Emily could take her places. She used to joke we were killing her love life, with a baby seat in her car. It was this crappy old subcompact. If only I’d bought her a new car instead.”
He reaches for his beer, but he doesn’t pick it up, doesn’t drink. “I had my phone off during the meeting. I went home and no one was there—no Ally, no babysitter, no Britt. Then I turned on my phone.”
His hand tightens around the glass. “I went to Children’s,” he says, “but she was gone. A driver on a cell phone had run a red light and slammed into the back, on Ally’s side. Emily survived. Britt blamed me more than anyone. I was the one who should’ve been there.”
I reach over and touch his hand, still wrapped around the glass, his skin rough and wind-chapped, and I think of how Antarctica toughens you up, how maybe this was what he wanted—maybe this is what we all want—to build calluses over old wounds.
He turns slightly in his chair, leaning almost imperceptibly closer to me. “It didn’t fall apart all at once,” he says. “It’s strange, how people disappear. No one likes to talk about it—as if it might be catching. Our friends, Britt’s and mine, didn’t know what to do—I mean, all of a sudden, we didn’t have kids who played together anymore. My sister was the only one who would listen, really listen. She’s the only one who calls me on Ally’s birthday. The only one who invited us over for dinner on the first anniversary of her death, so we wouldn’t have to be alone. She’s good that way, like my mom was. Everyone else—they seemed to want to pretend it never happened.”