My Last Continent: A Novel(26)

I hear the creak of a hatch opening, then the sound of footsteps on the deck. It’s Keller approaching, smiling just as I remember—a quick, easy smile with a hint of sadness underneath. He carries a worn paperback in his gloved hands. Seeing him, I feel a familiar cool hollowness, like an ice fog settling into a valley—the way I’d felt long after leaving him at McMurdo.

I’d kept busy the spring after I left, working on my data and writing a paper on my findings at the Garrard colony; when the days in Oregon grew long and bright, I taught a summer school class and then got a last-minute gig in the Galápagos on another ship from the Cormorant’s tour company. I’d returned to Antarctica as usual last season, and being on the peninsula felt far enough from Ross Island that I managed not to think too much about Keller. By then, I didn’t know where he was; I’d let our correspondence go months earlier.

Now, as I look at him on the deck, with the breeze in his hair and his eyes fixed on mine, it seems as if time has frozen, as if I’m back in the same moment at the Movement Control Center at McMurdo, when he told me he was staying behind.

He holds up his book, its pages fluttering in the night’s breeze. Alone by Richard Byrd. I’d read the book years ago, a memoir by the first person who’d wintered by himself on the continent.

“The first time I read this,” Keller says, “it was about two years after Ally died, after Britt and I split up. I came across Byrd’s home address—it’s right there in the book—and I knew exactly where it was. He lived on Brimmer Street, in Beacon Hill, not even a mile away from me.”

He palms the book between his hands. “I was still at my old job, so the next morning, I worked a half day from home, then headed over to Beacon Hill on my way to the office. It wasn’t hard to find the address, but I began to doubt it was Byrd’s real house because there wasn’t a plaque or anything setting it apart—and this was the home of a man who had three ticker-tape parades in his honor during his lifetime, and a state funeral after he died, a man who’s buried in Arlington National Cemetery. So I was about to keep walking when a woman emerged from the house with a bag of garbage. I said hello and blurted out that I was admiring her house. Without missing a beat, she said, ‘So you’ve read the book.’ I said yes, and then she invited me in for a tour.”

Keller’s lips turn up in a half smile. “She showed me the paneled library on the first floor with a carved oak fireplace mantel, where Byrd planned his journeys. She showed me the little backyard where Byrd tried to keep penguins after one of his trips. It was unbelievable that she did that—she didn’t know me; I could’ve been any kind of lunatic. But I knew why when I told her she should put a plaque up on the building. She shrugged and said, ‘Nobody remembers Byrd anyway.’ ” Keller looks up, his eyes meeting mine. “That was the day I quit my job. I wanted to do something worth remembering.”

“And so you became a dishwasher at McMurdo.”

He smiles. “I thought of it as a temporary distraction—the part where I got away from it all and discovered what I wanted to do. I had no idea this would be what I really wanted. Which meant I had to start over, catch up to you.”

“You thought leaving me was the best way?”

“For the record, I never planned to stay on,” he says. “I never wanted to separate, but that was my chance—to learn as much as I could, to become something new. I tried to explain it. If only you’d picked up the phone.”

He steps closer, leaning his body next to mine against the railing. “I wasn’t ready to go home. Not then.”

“But you weren’t planning to go home,” I say. The cry of a petrel in the distance adds a background whining note to my voice. “You were planning to come to Oregon with me.”

“And wash dishes in Eugene?”

“There were other options. Other ways to come back down here.”

“Like what? By staying, I could put the hours in, learn how things worked. Whenever I wasn’t working, I was out helping anyone who needed it.”

“So why’d you leave McMurdo at all?”

“Because that was only the beginning of the journey.” He takes my cold hands, and I don’t resist. “You were the destination.”

I shake my head, my mind trying to return to the way it was between us, wanting to get it all back.

“What is it?” Keller asks.

“Just trying to remember the last time you kissed me.”

Keller puts a hand on one side of my face, and as he slips his hand to the back of my neck, he pulls me forward and kisses me, a long slow deep kiss that in an instant melts away the icy edges that had frozen since I left McMurdo.

Finally he steps back and looks at me. “So,” he says, with that grin of his. “Does that jog your memory?”

I try to look nonchalant, though my hands are shaking. “Vaguely.”

He kisses me again, and we stay out on the deck for a long time, huddled together, trying to fit the past two years into the next two hours as night settles over Ushuaia.

It doesn’t take us long to pick up where we’d left off—and, as at McMurdo, our time together is so unpredictable, so divided among shipboard duties, that every moment feels tenuous, as if we might easily lose each other again.

Over late nights on the crew deck, Keller fills me in on what he’s been up to the past two years: He’d done legal consulting as he went back to school full-time, earning a master’s in ecology, behavior, and evolution in only two semesters. He wrote his thesis on the impact of rising global temperatures on Adélies, and he impressed the APP enough for them to recommend him to Glenn as a naturalist this season so that he could gather data on Petermann Island.