Girl in Ice(10)

Of course Dad approved of the trip. Some groundbreaking scientific discovery might make the Chesterfield name go down in history after all. Old, babyish sibling rivalry leered at me from the usual painful places. “I gotta go home,” I said, getting to my feet again.

He looked up at me hopefully, almost puppyish, like I’d changed my mind about him crashing on my couch.

“Go home,” I said. “Apologize to Sasha. Get a grip.”

He pushed himself from the chair, his face blank. “Cool. I get it. I’ll figure something out.”

Before I could stop him, he was out the door and down the stairs, banging through the swinging doors of the lobby to the quad. I watched him from my window, his hair scorched-looking under the sodium lights, ripped sleeve flapping. He crossed the soccer field at a clip, almost running, as if attempting to escape some inner beast while trying to stay calm at the same time. I stepped outside my office into the hallway; the place was deserted.

In my current fantasy, the one where I let him stay with me—just a small, sisterly act of kindness—everything would have turned out differently, but that night a horrible emptiness echoed in the shadowy corridors and cold marble floors. My heart was lodged in my throat with dread, and it was all I could do to take a full breath.





four


Nine long, sleepless hours later, Nora, Raj, and I stood among dozens of others dressed to our teeth facing the cargo door, packs at our sides. People looked tired, even bored. How could they be? Some switch flipped, setting the hatch to clanking and groaning as it unmeshed from the cabin floor and hauled itself upward.

A gray dome of sky met a flat expanse of snow and ice an incalculable distance away. To the west, a pure white, flat-topped mountain rose starkly out of a navy blue sea, distant waves disintegrating into foggy smoke. Just in front of us, a dozen or so squat, modern-looking buildings sat arranged in intersecting rows like words on a Scrabble board. The Thule base. Nothing else man-made in sight.

We stepped out into a world of white. Drugs long worn off, I narrowed my eyes against rising nausea. Focused on my giant orange boots. You are still on the earth, I told myself, just a different part of it. I turned, squinting into the gust. Shrank back into my parka to minimize every inch of exposed skin as fine snow in a bitter wind stabbed at my face.

Diesel hit my nostrils. Exhaust pluming white from the rear, a boxy military bus rolled up to the plane—chained tires as tall as we were—our ride to one of the buildings, where we were directed to make sure we were carrying no more than forty-three pounds of personal belongings. An unsmiling marine manned a set of scales next to the door that led to the runway for our second flight, our final leg to Tarrarmiut, another three hundred miles north. Our four-seater ski plane idled, its propellers turning slowly in the frigid air. In the cockpit sat Pitak, the local pilot from Qaanaaq who I recognized right away from Wyatt’s description. We were handed a hot wrap—our lunch, fried eggs rolled in pancake-thin bread—and instructed to pare down.

Altogether my bags weighed fifty-one pounds; I reddened as I dragged them off the scale and to one corner of the cement floor to do my culling.

Nora, whose bag clocked in at a sleek thirty-nine pounds, approached my mess. “Need some help?” Nodding, I scrambled to contain a sheaf of drawings that had spilled from my bag. Nora picked them up. “Wow, did you make these?”

I reached to take them back, but she was already leafing through them. Watching her touch them was physically painful. “No, my brother Andy drew those.”

Small, gorgeous watercolors of nature: landscapes, animals, and plants alternated with unnervingly accurate pencil portraits of our parents and other relatives. He even drew himself in caricature: the big features, wide mouth, auburn mop of hair. Above his face, elaborate thought balloons filled with his tiny script floated by. These drawings were meant to make me laugh—and they had—but also to catch me up on his day or week. I had boxes of them at home but wanted to bring some with me, for luck, to keep him nearby. He had loved yakking on the phone, too, though his favorite way to drive me nuts was showing up unannounced. God, I missed that.

Nora held up one of the drawings. “What an amazing artist he is! This one should be in a gallery or something.”

My heart ached when I saw which one she was admiring. Once, when Andy’d been hospitalized, he’d assured me he would never do such a stupid thing as take his own life. Told me he was more worried about what I’d do on one of my bad days. So we made a pact: we would never hurt ourselves. A few days after I spoke to him, I received the drawing Nora held now.

In colored pencil: Andy, sporting a silly grin, held a gun to his temple. Apparently he’d fired, because out the other side of his head flowered a lush cornucopia of beautiful things: a strutting peacock, an elegantly wrought elephant, fistfuls of ripely blooming peonies, a naked siren of a woman reclining in a bed of her own raven tresses; she looked a lot like Sasha. I snatched the paper from Nora just as she was turning it over to the other side, where the billowing contents of his head continued but darker: gargoyles, a crowd of naked, emaciated people clawing at each other for a crust of bread, a blackened forest, the earth in flames…

“He’s not around anymore, I’m afraid, my brother,” I said, tucking the drawing under the others. “We were twins.”

“Oh dear, Val. I’m so sorry to hear that. Raj has a twin, Sanjit. They’re inseparable.”