Girl in Ice(14)

He handed each of us one of the blocky, old-fashioned things. It was heavier than I thought it was going to be, but also cheap, like a toy. I thought, So this is going to save me?

“Everybody, turn yours on.”

We all did so.

“Super simple to use. It’s your responsibility to make sure the batteries are working. I’ve just put fresh ones in. Jeanne can give you more, ask her where they are when you need them.

“I’ve rated the storms one, two, and three. Level one: up to 25 mph winds, windchill to twenty below. You go outside with my permission only. Level two: 25 to 35 mph winds, windchills to minus thirty. Raj, Nora: the Dome can’t handle that in terms of heat, so we all work and sleep here. Permission to leave granted from me on an emergency basis only, and no one goes out alone, understood? Level three storm: 35-plus mph winds, windchills minus thirty or below, no one leaves under any circumstances. You’ll find that there are ropes connecting all the buildings. Crucial for getting from place to place if you’re caught in a whiteout. Look, I know all this sounds like common sense, who would go out in a blizzard with thirty-below winds? But these are close quarters. Storms can last for days. It gets boring when we can’t do our work—for me, too, okay? So, the temptation is to push the limits and say fuck it and go out anyway, but that won’t work here.

“All right, then,” he said, glancing at each of us as though we were a set of problems it was his job to solve, and he wasn’t looking forward to it. “Let’s eat.”



* * *



FIFTEEN FEET LONG from tail to tooth-filled snarl, a massive polar bear pelt covered one wall of the kitchen. I ran my hand over it; even in death, each hair of its fur felt thick and strong, glinting with a yellowish tinge, like straw. I remembered reading that a polar bear’s fur wasn’t really white; it was actually clear and only reflected the light around it. It felt surreal to be touching the body of this beast, once so ferociously alive and so at home in all the vast reaches of the Enormity.

“Did you kill this?” I asked Wyatt.

He smirked. “I’m no hunter. That’s from the mainland. Pitak and a couple other hunters took it down last year just north of Qaanaaq. Here,” he said, gesturing at a chair. “Have a seat.”

In the center of the table sat a bowl of peaches, apples, oranges, and grapes, all fresh from the plane. Wyatt snatched up an orange and held it to his nose, smiling and inhaling deeply before peeling it. The avocados were nowhere in sight.

Cornstarch-thick beef stew and white bread—a dense block of it cut thickly and spread with margarine that tasted a little off. Jelly-jar glasses of boxed wine that I deeply appreciated. Everyone chatted about their work, the strange weather, the trip, as if there weren’t a young girl in the other room who had thawed from the ice alive, or as if we were all sitting around buying this fantastical story. The lunacy of what I’d done—traveled a thousand miles from my safe apartment to a frozen wasteland with a bunch of near strangers—hit me just as I felt my meds slack off. My hands shook as I buttered a slice of bread; Wyatt noticed, and I flushed. He had a certain appeal, even at twenty years my senior, but more than that—at the time—I wanted him to like me, admire me, as much as he’d liked Andy, if I was going to be honest about it.

Jeanne, who hadn’t taken her eyes off Nora since she sat down, said, “So, how will you two be keeping busy out in the Dome?”

“I’ll be diving quite a lot,” Nora said, digging cheerfully into her bowl of stew. “On the lookout for fin whale and humpback, narwhal, beluga. Tracking how the changing sea ice here has affected their range and communication, see if or how their vocalizations have changed since the last study was done here. Darling?” She took a healthy swig of wine, draping an affectionate arm across Raj’s back.

“I’ll be sampling various kelps for changes since the last survey was done a couple of years ago: health, type, range. Even doing some studies on it as a potential packaging material. But who cares about that?” He turned to Wyatt. “What I want to know is where you found this girl. I mean—where you really found her.” He eyed Nora and me in turn, as if seeking backup. “Sure you didn’t just fly her over from the mainland as some sort of stunt?” he said, cutting himself a thick wedge of bread.

Wyatt paused, stew-laden spoon in the air, to consider Raj. “Maybe you should stick with seaweed.”

Raj made a small noise of exasperation, picked up his plate, and headed to the sink. Nora followed suit, Wyatt side-eyeing her ass as she went.

She rinsed her dishes, folded her arms, and leaned against the kitchen counter. “Okay, so tell us. The day you found her, what was that like?”

Wyatt kept at his stew, heavy forearms guarding his plate, eyes on his food. “Not sure this is the right time—”

“It was just a regular day,” Jeanne said, her voice dreamy thick. Head tilted, a rusty barrette barely holding back her shaggy shoulder-length hair, she seemed to address the center of the table. “We were headed out to Glacier 35B to get the rest of the samples. Remember, Wyatt?”

“Two weeks ago,” Wyatt added quietly.

Jeanne said, “Five months after Andy passed, to the day.”

I stiffened. We all did. Raj and Nora stood silently by the sink, listening.

Wyatt pushed his food away, face weary. “We’d finished drilling cores in the northeast quadrant, and we were heading back across the ice lake—what we call the section of the glacier near the Osvald Fjord. Overnight a fissure had opened halfway across, maybe thirty yards long, split sheer down a thousand feet, God knows how far, really. We saw it from the cat, and we started going real slow parallel to it, a couple yards from it, because now of course we didn’t dare cross the lake and take the route we’d planned, and we were shitting ourselves wondering what was going to open up next. That’s when something caught my eye a couple of yards down the far wall of the crevasse. This crescent-shaped flesh-colored thing, a color you never see out here, not like that. It was a child’s foot, from the side, from the heel down to the little toe. It was like, I don’t know, seeing a tarantula in my cereal bowl. Totally crazy. It was only by chance I was even looking in the right direction. We got out to look, but it was getting late, so we had to come back the next day with some equipment. Jeanne did this ingenious setup with a pulley and a ladder and a swing, got me down there just fine to have a look.” Jeanne cast her eyes at the greasy tablecloth, stirring her stew. Was she blushing? “So I’m dangling there, just my ass in this sling over this bottomless pit, trying to make out where the rest of her might be. It took a while to figure out if she was standing, or lying down, or what. And even then, it was a guess.”