Girl in Ice(16)
Wyatt got to his feet, slammed his chair into the table. Outside, the wind voiced its rage, the building rattling like a toy.
I felt a presence in the doorway and turned to look. A pitifully small Inuit girl hovered in the shadows. High, wide cheekbones under bottomless black eyes, ruddy skin that glowed with the heat of the room. Above her quivering upper lip, a drop of clear snot trembled from her nose. Her ink-black hair looked as if a mad person had cut it. Her body was lost in an enormous Christmas sweater featuring Santa’s sleigh and eight reindeer flying up over one shoulder. Its hem swept the floor—it had to be Jeanne’s or Wyatt’s. As she scanned the room, taking in the three newcomers, her eyebrows met in an upside-down V of concern. Slowly, evenly, I got to my feet and said, “Hello, I’m Val,” in West Greenlandic.
The girl let out a scream, pivoted, and bulleted down the dark hallway.
six
A cold, sharp light filtered through my frost-rimed window at just past six, bringing the weird palm trees and grinning coconuts into focus. Already I missed my cramped, lonely apartment. I missed warmth and plants and trees and couldn’t imagine Andy or anyone else loving this brutal, desolate place, but he had.
The smell of coffee drew me from my room. Jeanne’s door stood ajar, bed made tight, creepy dolls neatly arranged sitting against the pillows and staring straight ahead. Raj and Nora were nowhere to be seen.
Bearded like a pirate, salt-and-pepper hair escaping his cap, Wyatt hunched over his computer, mousing over a map on the screen.
“Right there,” he said as I approached with my coffee, pointing to a tiny black dot on a vast glacier. “That’s where we found her.”
It looked impossible. A little girl alone, frozen in place ten feet down the wall of a crevasse. To truly understand her—the realization hit me viscerally—I had to go to this place, no matter how doped up I needed to be.
“I’d like you to take me there. Can you?” My hands rang with pain at the thought of venturing into this white void.
“Your job is to be here, with the girl. It’s not like we have time to waste—”
“My job is to figure out her language, but part of that is knowing as much as possible what happened to her. At least see where she came from.”
He took a bite of a waffle smeared with Nutella and tossed it back down on his plate. “I’ll think about it.”
“Do you buy the story about those caribou hunters who disappeared?”
He looked relieved by the change of topic. I tried to focus on the screen, not on his stockinged feet, especially the empty pouches where his toes were supposed to be. Without boots for support, his walk was shuffling, awkward, though he didn’t seem the least bit self-conscious about it.
“It’s just… where did everyone else go? Why was she alone?” He shook his head. “I am honestly fucking mystified. I’m not sure I believe the story. News gets pretty diluted around here. People don’t keep track of things very well. And it’s a good twenty miles to the mainland. Would they really come here for some caribou, the numbers of which could have been exaggerated? And why would they bring their families? Why wouldn’t just the men go?” He dosed his coffee with a splash of fresh cream Jeanne had swooned over when she unpacked it the evening before. “But, you know, crazier things have happened here, that’s for sure. Those people had nothing, they were desperate. And I know the route the hunters would have taken—but with everything going on, I haven’t had the chance to go out there and really search.”
He zoomed in to the featureless expanse, as if by staring long enough, the mystery of the girl in the glacier would reveal itself. The screen turned pure white, the dot a faint smudge.
“When did she eat last?”
“Yesterday morning, and it wasn’t much. Maybe she’s on a food strike to get what she wants, whatever that is. She likes fish and beef, especially raw hamburger.” He went to a low refrigerator along one wall of the kitchen, opened it. “Pitak got us a whole shipment for her. Plus some seal.” He unwrapped a package of ground meat, spooned some into a cereal bowl, and gave it to me. “She uses her hands.”
I took the bowl and a glass of water to her door, knocked softly. “Hello,” I said in Danish. “Hello, girl, I’m not here to hurt you. I’m here to help you.”
The creak of a mattress, the thud of a bed shoved against the door.
“I have food,” I said in West Greenlandic, a language I didn’t know as well by a long shot. The word for meat escaped me. “Some beef. Not cooked. You are hungry?” I grabbed the doorknob and turned. The thump of her small body against the hollow door. “Be calm, young girl. Here is beef, and a glass of water, right here, here for you.” I rolled my eyes at my pitiful command of the language as I set down the food and water.
Silence.
Wyatt lingered at the other end of the hall, a heavy, watchful presence. “Is that her language?”
“No idea. Does she use the toilet?”
“She’s terrified of it. She shits in a coffee can I gave her. Makes sure to leave that out for me every morning.”
“What about her clothes? What was she wearing when you found her?”
“Caribou skin coat, polar bear pants, and one sealskin boot. The usual outfit for indigenous folks around here in super-remote settlements, as far as I know. Don’t know why only the one boot.”