Girl in Ice(18)

I held it up and said in Danish, “Let’s play.” Rolled the ball to her. It bumped along the rug.

She watched until it came to a stop at her feet. Looked up at me. I motioned for her to roll it back. Her face said, Why are you doing this weird thing? Desperate, I took a pen and rolled it over to her. Then another. Tears welled in her eyes.

Bit by bit, so as not to startle her, I reached down toward the pile of her new clothes, holding them up one by one, but the tears kept coming, with little gasps for air now as she began to sob. I got down on the floor and upended the box, praying Wyatt had snagged some toys, too. Of course not. I tossed the deerskin boots on the floor.

She stopped crying and said something. Three words. Said them again.

“The boots?” I whispered. They were real deerskin, not the fake awful crap. “You want the kamiks?” The Inuit word for skin boots. I held them up.

She hazarded a few steps toward me, then ran and ripped them out of my hands before fleeing back to her room. But she did not slam her door shut.

Cautiously I approached her room.

She faced her window wearing the boots, shoulders shaking, hands flat against the icy pane.

“Hey,” I said. “Hey,” and sat down on her bed. “It’s all right. It’s going to be all right.”

She whipped around and spouted several long sentences, each word polysyllabic and complex. What is this language? It was so eerie and beautiful it gave me chills; it was more like Greenlandic Norse than anything, but with a modulation, like Mandarin or Japanese. She wiped her eyes and plopped down on the tattered rug as if giving up on me, on everything. Stretching the cheap sweater over her knees, she dropped her chin between them, sullenly playing with Rudolph’s red nose.

I approached her with slow, measured movements. She stiffened and glared up at me but didn’t run. With zero plan at the ready, I sat down cross-legged in front of her. She watched my every move, scooting back toward the wall behind her. I made small noises of comfort.

When she had settled, I pointed to myself and said, “Val.” Then I pointed at her with a questioning look.

She narrowed her eyes but said nothing.

“Val,” I said, somewhat more forcefully, then gestured at her again.

She screwed up her face into a look of distrust, backing away from my pointing finger. Wiped her eyes and nose on the sweater and glowered at me.

I reached out my hand, gingerly touched one of the reindeer on her sweater. In English, I said, “Reindeer.”

She repeated the word in her lilting cadence. “Rane-dar?”

I broke into a sweat, thrilling at the sound of English from her mouth. “Yes, reindeer.”

She shook her head. Stuck her finger square in the reindeer’s face. “Kannisiak.”

I did my best to repeat the word.

She actually rolled her eyes. Tenting the sweater away from her body, she stabbed her finger at each reindeer in turn. “Kannisiak.”

She seemed to silently count the rest, before announcing, “Venseeth kannisiak.”

Caribou. Eight caribou.

Of course that was why she loved that sweater.

I laughed and had to stop myself from hugging her. My whole body seemed to melt with relief. Eight numbers and a noun in just one session! What had I been so worried about? I sat back, grinning goofily at her. At that pace, I’d have the basics of her language mapped out in a week.





seven


Eyes obscured by mirrored glacier glasses, Wyatt shifted the snowcat into neutral. We faced a final white wall: the tongue of the glacier that split the mountain range.

“Have to say,” he said, chewing a thick wad of spearmint gum, the cloying smell filling the small space, “I’m still not clear on how this little trek is going to help you with the girl.”

Not waiting for an answer, he shifted gears, the engine screaming until the metal teeth of the tracks nipped into sheer blue ice and propelled us up and over the bank. Before us: a mile-long descent onto a vast ice field; beyond it, black mountains jutted up against the horizon like cresting waves frozen in place.

“I need to see where she came from,” I managed to say, though I doubt he heard me over the motor. Though cotton-headed from my drugs, anxiety had taken root; I fumbled for my sunglasses with fat-fingered gloves, trying to recall my shrink’s advice. Take in a little at a time. Look just below the horizon, or focus in one direction, or on one object at a time. But it was like staring into a fire and trying to look at just one flame. I tried fixating on the control panel, my lap, my boots, then—daringly—a narrow hallway of tumbled ice that led down to the ice lake. But a panorama aches to be seen, so now and then I would let myself look, take in the Enormity, willing myself not to throw up in the cat.

“You okay?” Wyatt asked.

“Yeah. Doing good.”

He downshifted and we rolled forward, snow and ice crunching beneath us.

“I appreciate you taking me out here,” I added, squeezing Andy’s lead heart, hot in the palm of my right glove.

“Anytime.”

We crawled across the ice for several minutes of awkward silence until he turned to me with a blazing smile, white teeth flashing in his leathery face. “So, Val, how are you with secrets?”

“Are you asking if I’m trustworthy?”

“I’m asking if you can keep a secret.” We banked down onto the windswept lake. It felt like we were flying.