Girl in Ice(21)

I blinked, gutted by this new possibility of suffering. Rattling the handle, I yelled, “Let me in, let me in, let me in!”

Dizzy, I rested my forehead against the freezing metal, then went at the door again, banging and calling.

Wyatt stood away from me, hugging himself, as if ashamed.

Jeanne appeared around the side of the building clutching a length of pipe, her face as pale and gray as the barren slope behind her. “What’s going on? Is everything all right? Wyatt?”

“Yeah, Jeanne,” Wyatt said. “We’re just… it’s fine.”

She gave me a dark look, searched Wyatt’s face.

I wrenched myself around. “You wouldn’t have heard that, Wyatt?” I hissed. “You’re telling me you wouldn’t have heard my brother beating at the door to get back in? Did you hear him?” My voice cracked. I knew I was accusing him of something horrendous, but at that moment I would have done anything for a story rather than the one I still couldn’t accept.

He took me by my shoulders and shook me quiet. I felt bantam in his grip; I didn’t like it. He said, “No, Val. I heard nothing that night. I wish I had. I’d have come, kiddo.”

My breath was ragged, and I could feel the hate and blame in my face, but his expression was surprisingly calm, surprisingly kind. It disarmed and confused me. He reached out to hug me, and I let him. It felt so good to let myself sink into someone else, if only for a few brief seconds.

“Come on, Val, come on,” he said gently as we pulled away from each other, both of us looking slightly sheepish. “I know it’s hard, I do. I’m a fucking wreck about it. I just process it the way I process it. And you have to do the same, I can see that.” He took a step back. “But you don’t want to scare the girl, do you? So let’s go inside, let’s get you a drink, some food. It’s been a long day.”

We turned back to the main door. Crossed with shadows in the deepening dusk, Jeanne stood staring at us, lead pipe dangling from one hand.





eight


I got my wish: two uninterrupted days with the girl. The bitch of it was, she turned away from me each time I tried to speak to her, as if she’d given up on me, as if I had already failed her.

All day long she planted herself on Wyatt’s desk under the picture window, tracing circle after circle on the sweating pane as she chanted some lilting song. She drew three rows of eight rings: Why eight? The last circle she rubbed hard with her palm, as if trying to obliterate something. Hour after hour I pointed at the circles, counting one to twenty-four, my little recorder on to catch every sound she made, until finally she began to count in her language—at least I thought that’s what she was doing. I thrilled at the new numbers but couldn’t seem to progress from there. When I pushed her to move on to basics—my name, hers, simple nouns—she banged at the shining rings until I thought the glass would shatter, then ran to her room to bury herself under her bed in her fortress of blankets and pillows.

The hours-long twilights set me on edge: days that wouldn’t quite end; true darkness that refused to arrive. Outside, a miserly palette of grays, whites, and blues. Thunderous crashes of icebergs calving in the bay—Wyatt called it Arctic white noise—rendered me jittery and anxious. I began to tap a fifth of vodka from the fridge during the day, just to take the edge off, watering it down to cover it up, like I was a teenager. I had to parse out my pills; I had enough to last until I was home—not one day more.

I barely saw Raj or Nora except for meals; they ate quickly, as if anxious to get out of the stifling, steamy kitchen and back out to the Dome on the frozen bay. I envied their privacy, their ability to move around, the fact that they were making progress with their projects while I was nearly stalled with mine. Except mine was no project; she was a living, breathing, miraculous girl.



* * *



DAY THREE. FOUR thirty in the morning. Small, hard fists banged on my door, blasting me from sleep. I flung open the door. The girl stood in her boots, drowning in a sweater of Jeanne’s over her Christmas sweater, my hat engulfing her small skull, Wyatt’s muffler that said “Ice Rocks” wrapped around her neck. Only her burning black eyes showed. She stole my hand and yanked me down the hallway. Seized the doorknob of the front door and rattled it, shouting in her language.

“Hey, calm down,” I said in West Greenlandic, reaching for her shoulders. She pushed me away, her hysteria rising as she pummeled the door.

Ignoring our skirmish, Jeanne padded past us in her men’s wool robe and stockinged feet. She lit the range and started the coffee.

“You can’t go out. It’s not safe out there,” I said to the girl in English.

“She wants to go home,” Jeanne said over the girl’s screams, reaching into the fridge for our last pint of cream. After that was gone, it was powder only. “She wants her real family.”

The girl turned and slid down into a teary puddle, repeating one word over and over.

Tahtaksah.

What did it mean? Was this the word for mother? Or father?

“Tahtaksah,” I repeated to her. “Tahtaksah?”

Frustration filled her face. I’d gotten it wrong. Again. She wailed.

Wyatt’s door flew open. He thundered out of his room, pounding down the hallway. “What the hell’s going on out here?”