The Winter Over(76)
But now Carla was barely hanging on to her own sanity because Anne—in emotional turmoil, but still possessed of a scientist’s mindset—had insisted on helping Carla with biology experiments she was unqualified to perform. The stress of the situation on base plus Anne’s insistent presence had brought Carla’s concussion-induced headaches back full-time, making her snap at the slightest provocation. Now the two of them were both on edge, no work was getting done, and Carla was close to kicking her friend out into the hall.
Instead, she gritted her teeth for three seconds, relaxed her jaw, and turned around with as genuine a smile as she could muster. “This sequence really is a one-person job. If I could clone myself, I still wouldn’t be able to help. But what I could use is a good jolt of coffee. If you wouldn’t mind playing intern for a minute, could you run down to the galley and grab me a cup?”
“You’re serious? You want me to fetch coffee?”
“Don’t think of it as fetching,” Carla said brightly. “Think of it as providing field support. If I’m going to get the most out of this latest round of tests, I’ve got to stay awake and alert for the next twelve hours. Only coffee and good conversation is going to make that happen.”
Anne looked wounded, but nodded and said, “Black, right?”
“Just like my test results,” Carla quipped. She got a slight lift of the lips in return, then Anne headed outside and down the hall to the galley.
Carla stifled a sigh. Anne was going to have to either lighten up or get back to work, or there’d be more than a couple casualties before the winter was over. She winced. She could be an insensitive bitch at times. She didn’t know where it came from. Jun had been a nice man, after all, and Sheryl had always been polite and cheerful. Carla frowned. Assuming Sheryl was actually dead, of course; Cass’s accusations had gotten everyone talking, but Carla preferred to deal with the facts that she could see in front of her. Until she saw the proof that Sheryl’s death had been faked, the woman remained dead to her.
She sighed, getting back to the problem at hand: Anne. She’d racked her brain trying to come up with things for her friend to do around the lab, but the work wasn’t just specialized for someone with a PhD in biology; most of the tests and experiments had been specifically devised by Carla for herself to perform. Space for busy work—mentally, physically, and professionally—just didn’t exist. In truth, Anne’s running out to get coffee was probably the most useful thing she could’ve done. Carla let her eyes meander around the lab, trying to dream up fake tests and bogus tasks she could give Anne when she got back, a kind of work placebo, but nothing came to mind.
Stop wasting time , she chided herself. The only thing that could make the situation worse would be if Carla squandered the time she’d been given after successfully getting Anne out of the lab. She’d just toss her another bone when the time came. Carla cleared her mind and bent over the slides she’d been working on.
Anne stalked down the hall toward the galley, seething. Rationally, she could understand Carla’s need to get rid of her—if the situation had been reversed and Carla had insisted on pestering her in the middle of an analysis of COBRA data, she would’ve hit her with a laptop—but she had trouble, had always had trouble, when her friends had appeared to abandon or dismiss her. It fostered in her a profound sadness that twisted and transformed into a deep-seated anger she had difficulty defusing.
Worse, with an analytical mind like hers, she knew exactly where the anger came from. But no amount of left-brain analysis had ever overcome her right-brain emotion. Simply put, if she could, she would go back in time and kill her father.
She’d come to the conclusion long ago that the burden of guilt she would bear from killing a parent couldn’t compare to the cross she’d been forced to bear when, as a seven-year-old in a daisy-patterned dress, she’d discovered her father hanging from the second-floor banister of their Providence brownstone. Anything would be preferable to that.
Two of her friends had come over to play, and when she’d turned to them, hysterical, for help and advice, they’d laughed at her and accused her of making up stories. Since then, any time thoughts of her father and an image of his slack body resting still and motionless in the stairwell invaded her head—when she’d looked up at the dish antenna and was sure she’d seen him hanging from the steel catwalk, but shod in Jun’s threadbare sneakers—they were accompanied by the light, scornful laughter of little girls.
Anne pressed her hands to her face, willing the image and the sound away, desperately trying to put the look of pity and impatience on Carla’s face into perspective, trying to rationalize to herself why her friend’s charity and tolerance might be wearing thin enough to send her on a bullshit mission in search of coffee.
“Get ahold of yourself, Klimt,” she said out loud, startling herself, but the sound died in the dead walls of the station. No one was around to hear her, which, not long ago, would have struck her as strange. Even on a winter-over, she should have run into a familiar face or two on the way to the galley, but since Cass’s announcement at the midwinter party, people had chosen to hunker down in their berth or bury themselves in their work. Like some people she knew.
If she had any doubts that life at Shackleton wasn’t proceeding normally, entering the galley put them to rest. The dining room was as empty as the halls and that was definitely not right. People on base ate and drank constantly for comfort and camaraderie. Not long ago, half the station would’ve congregated in the galley simply to be close to one another. Now, the room stood empty, and she could imagine herself as the only one alive on base. Alone, wandering the halls, looking for someone, anyone to talk to . . .