My Last Continent: A Novel(62)
“I’m in Rocheport,” I say, “but I’ll be on my way soon.”
“Rocheport?” she repeats, and I can picture her expression as she figures it out—her research assistant, the one who insisted she didn’t have a boyfriend, missing work because she’s at the region’s most popular couples’ retreat.
“I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
“Forget about it,” she says. “You’re there. Enjoy it.”
“I didn’t expect to—”
“Take a day off, Deb,” she says. “I’ll see you tomorrow.” And then she hangs up.
I stare at the receiver in my hand for a long moment before putting it down.
Chad has barely stirred. I put on yesterday’s clothes and go to the inn’s reception desk, thinking I’ll take a taxi back to Columbia. But once I’m there, I realize I don’t have money for a fifteen-mile cab ride, and even once I get back, I’ll have no way to get out to the Ozarks if Pam’s already left.
It’s barely light outside, and I sit in the empty breakfast room with a cup of coffee. I cling to the mug, letting it warm my hands, staring into my wavy, dark reflection, trying to decipher what Pam said. Her tone was the same as always—brisk, no-nonsense—but somehow I get the feeling I’ve disappointed her. Pam herself never takes a day off, at least as far as I can tell, and I worry she’s thinking what I’m thinking—that I should be out in the field instead of lounging around in a bed-and-breakfast with a man who still hasn’t earned the label of boyfriend.
I’m not sure how long I sit there before someone pulls out the chair next to mine. “I was wondering where you’d gone,” Chad says.
He still looks half-asleep, with his mussed hair and weighted eyelids. When a waitress walks by, he asks for coffee. I hadn’t noticed, but now there’s another couple sitting across the room, and yellow light is sluicing through the windows.
“I’ve missed work,” I tell him. “I think my boss is pissed.”
“Why didn’t you just call in sick?”
I hadn’t even thought of that. “I shouldn’t have come here. This was a bad idea.”
His coffee arrives, and he fills the mug with cream. Watching him, I try to make myself savor this moment, our first morning together, but I can’t.
“What’s on your mind?” he asks.
I push my mug away and straighten my back. “This has been fun,” I say.
“Has been?” he asks, smiling. “Am I past tense now?”
Despite myself, I smile back. “You call yourself a journalist? That’s not past tense. It’s present perfect.”
“Thank God for editors,” he says with a laugh. “Okay, remind me—what does present perfect mean?”
“It means a past action that remains an ongoing present action.”
“You’re saying you’d like us to be ongoing?” he asks.
I’m surprised; I’d been thinking only of preempting the inevitable. “Would you?”
He’s still smiling, and as I look at his face, I remember the night he took me to see the Parsons Dance company, a modern dance troupe with a wildly creative use of light. The dancers had spiraled into darkness, then leapt into a beam of light, fluidly, as if made of water. And then, moments later, the effects of a strobe light held them in place, highlighting them in split-second poses—and as I think of how they moved across the stage, their bodies frozen in midair, it occurs to me that this is Chad and me, inching forward and yet motionless at the same time.
He gets to his feet and says, “Sit tight. I’m going to check us out and then call a cab. Maybe you can salvage at least part of the day.”
“Really?”
Now standing behind me, he leans down. “Sure thing,” he says in my ear. With his lips, he traces my jawline to my mouth, giving me a kiss that asks for forgiveness, a kiss I return.
As I wait for him, I sip my cold coffee and hear Pam’s voice in my head, and I wonder whether love and science are incompatible after all. I’d embraced her philosophy because I’ve mostly had only work. Now, through Pam, I can see who I might one day become, and I want to prove her wrong, to find a way to have both.
The Gullet
(67°10'S, 67°38'W)
Freshwater freezes at thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit, but seawater has to be colder. Depending on the salinity, it freezes between twenty-four and twenty-eight degrees. At these temperatures, of course, the odds of survival for humans come down to a matter of minutes.
Right now, I wish I didn’t know what it feels like to be in that water; I wish I couldn’t even imagine it. In all my years in Antarctica, I’ve fallen through the ice exactly once. It happened seven years ago in the Ross Sea; I’d been with a group of geologists from the U.K. who were planning to drill a hole in the ice for their research on fossils. We traveled in a caravan of snowmobiles but also had to do a lot of hiking on foot, across pressure ridges formed by overlapping pack.
I don’t remember falling in—it was so sudden, so unbelievably quick—I recall only the sound of the ice breaking, the heart-stopping rumble and crack, and then I was submerged. The water was violently cold, sucking every bit of heat from my body. When I opened my eyes, gasping for breath, I realized that I was being pulled underneath the ice by the current. I reached up through the opening my body had left and grabbed on to the shelf of ice. Turning my head, I saw one of the geologists holding out a pole for me, standing well back from the edge, lowering his body to the ice so he could crawl toward me. It was dangerous for him to be so close, but he had no other choice. I caught hold, kicking my legs, trying to help him in his efforts as he reached down to haul me out. As he towed me up onto the ice, I saw that behind him another geologist was holding his legs, and yet another was holding hers—a chain of humans flattened out on the ice, desperately moving backward, away from the thin part that had given way.