My Last Continent: A Novel(9)

“In another month,” I tell him, as gently as I can manage, “the ocean will freeze solid, and so will everything else, including you.”

“What about you?”

“In a couple weeks, I’m leaving, too. Everyone leaves.”

“Even the penguins?” The question, spoken through clattering teeth, lends him an innocence that almost makes me forgive his intrusions.

“Yes,” I say. “Even they go north.”

He doesn’t respond. I stand up and head straight to the radio in our supply tent, hardly thinking about my wet clothes. Just as I’m contacting Palmer, I realize that I don’t know the man’s name. I go back and poke my head inside. “Dennis Marshall,” he says.

The dispatcher at Palmer tells me that they’ll pick Dennis up in the morning, when they bring Thom back. “Unless it’s an emergency,” he says. “Everything okay?”

I want to tell him it’s not okay, that this man could be crazy, dangerous, sick. Instead I pause, then say, “We’re fine. Tell Thom we’ll see him in the morning.”

I return to the tent. Dennis has not moved.

“What were you doing in the water?” I ask.

“Thought I’d try to catch up to the boat,” he says.

“Very funny. I’m serious.”

He doesn’t reply. A moment later, he asks, “What are you doing here?”

“Research, obviously.”

“I know,” he says. “But why come here, to the end of the earth?”

It’s always been hard to explain why a place like Antarctica is perfect for me. Before you can sign on to overwinter at McMurdo, they give you psych tests to make sure you can live for months in darkness and near isolation without going crazy—and the idea of this has always amused me. It’s not the isolation that threatens to drive me insane; it’s civilization.

“What kind of question is that?” I ask Dennis.

“You know what I mean,” he says. “You have to be a real loner to enjoy being down here.” He rubs the fingers of his left hand.

I catch his hand to examine his fingers. “Where do they hurt?”

“It’s not that,” he says.

“Then what?”

He hesitates. “I dropped my ring,” he says. “My wedding band.”

“Where? In the water?”

He nods.

“For God’s sake.” I duck out of the tent before he can stop me. I hear his voice behind me, asking me where I’m going, and I shout back, “Stay there.”

I rush toward the water’s edge, shivering in my still-damp clothes. The penguins purr as I go past, and a few of them scatter. I shine my flashlight down through the calm, clear water to the rocks at the bottom. I don’t know where he might have dropped the ring, so I wade in, and within minutes my feet feel like blocks of ice. I follow what I think was his path into the water, sweeping the flashlight back and forth in front of me.

I’m in up to my knees when I see it, a few feet down—a flash of gold against the slate-colored rocks. I reach in, the water up to my shoulder, so cold it feels as if my arm will snap off and sink.

I manage to grasp the ring with fingers that now barely move, then shuffle back to shore on leaden feet. I hobble back to my own tent, where I strip off my clothes and don as many dry things as I can. My skin is moist and wrinkled from being wet for so long. I hear a noise and look up to see Dennis, blanket still wrapped around his shoulders, crouched at the opening to my tent.

“What are you staring at?” I snap. Then I look down to what he sees—a thin, faded T-shirt, no bra, my nipples pressing against the fabric, my arm flushed red from the cold. I pull his ring off my thumb, where I’d put it so it wouldn’t fall again, and throw it at him.

He picks it up off the floor. He holds it but doesn’t put it on. “I wish you’d just left it,” he says, almost to himself.

“A penguin could have choked on it,” I say. “But no one ever thinks about that. We’re all tourists here, you know. This is their home, not ours.”

“I’m sorry,” he says. “What can I do?”

I shake my head.

He comes in and sits down, then pulls the blanket off his shoulders and places it around mine. He finds a fleece pullover in a pile of clothing and wraps it around my reddened arm.

“How cold is that water, anyway?” he asks.

“About thirty degrees, give or take.” I watch him carefully.

“How long can someone survive in there?”

“A matter of minutes, usually,” I say, remembering an expedition guide who’d drowned. He’d been trapped under his flipped Zodiac for only a few moments but had lost consciousness, with rescuers only a hundred yards away. “Most people go into shock. It’s too cold to swim, even to breathe.”

He unwraps my arm. “Does it feel better?”

“A little.” Pain prickles my skin from the inside, somewhere deep down, and I feel an ache stemming from my bones. “You still haven’t told me what you were doing out there.”

He reaches over and begins massaging my arm. I’m not sure I want him to, but I know the warmth, the circulation, is good. “Like I said, I lost my ring.”

“You were out much farther than where I found your ring.”