Girl in Ice(30)
“That day, that was something,” she said almost wistfully. She freed a beat-up pack of Marlboros from the pocket of her parka, lit one. I drove slowly so as not to distract her, give her as much time as possible to tell the story. “First of all, day we found her, there was no doubt we were gonna cut her out, bring her back. Wyatt’d already froze and thawed out Odin a couple times, and he had some confidence in that regard. Anyway, the first couple days we kept her in the Shed. The ice around her was more’n a couple feet thick in places. But when it got close, maybe a couple inches or so, we brought her into the Shack. Laid her out on a tarp on the kitchen table and just blasted the heat and never left her. Put towels around her to soak up the melt. It started to smell weird in there, like sulfur, but also like flesh, or rotted leather, or mud. I thought of my daughter in the morgue, you know, and I almost couldn’t take it, another dead girl in front of me. I even said to Wyatt ‘Why are we doing this? I can’t go through with this,’ especially after everything that happened with Andy. I mean, a mouse is one thing, but a girl…”
I felt her watching me but kept my eyes on the yellow Dome, stalwart and solitary in the dead white vista. We crept along in the lowest gear, the steering wheel rattling in my grip, the smell of diesel leaking into the cabin.
“But Wyatt, he always has things under control. He’s got his reasons for things, for what he does. Like I said, he’s been a good boss, and I felt like I owed him a little faith, you know? So we watched her till most of the ice was gone. And she became—she was just a little girl lying on the table in a rotted caribou anorak and polar bear pants and one boot, eyes open, and she looked so scared. Then we cut off her clothes real slow, real careful. You think she’s dirty now, but so much of that is stain from those wet skins. We covered her with a couple of blankets, like she was sleeping. It was crazy, what we were doing. Fucked-up for sure. I even said to Wyatt, when we found her, ‘Why not leave her? Why make a mess of things?’ But he wouldn’t have it. She was coming out of that ice. So, there she was. A human being cut out of a glacier lying on the kitchen table. I touched her hand. Her skin was so cold, but not hard anymore. It was softening by the minute, but we had to give her time, because you know things thaw from the outside in, so we were patient. But soon we checked for breathing or a pulse and of course there was nothing, so I was getting nervous. I couldn’t believe we were disrespecting a body like this, a body that had been at peace in the ice. What were we going to do now? If she was dead, and it sure looked like it, how would we bury her in the frozen ground?”
She blew a lungful of smoke out a crack in the window. We sat just beyond the Dome in a world of white, the low sun spearing us with icy late-afternoon beams. “Why don’t you cut the motor? You need to practice starting her up a few times anyways.”
Nodding, I turned off the ignition, cutting the heat, the glow of the dials; stilling the shaking joystick. Immediately I missed the reassuring hum of the motor. In seconds, the temperature plummeted in the cab, the vicious cold slipping through every crack in metal or glass. My blood grew gelid in my veins as I clutched the wheel.
“Then her left hand twitched under the blanket. We both yelped and jumped back. After a while, I thought we both imagined it. But then her jaw dropped, and her mouth opened and closed, so we checked for a heartbeat—nothing. So: boom—right away, Wyatt was on her with the defibrillator. Just about bounced her off the table she’s so small, but he did it again and nothing. She wasn’t breathing. Eyes still glazed over, both hands still—like what we’d seen was just some side effect of a body thawing—and I begged him to stop, but he wouldn’t. I begged him in Frances’s honor—Frances was my daughter—to stop. I said, ‘Wyatt, maybe this is some rigor mortis thing setting in, just leave her be.’?”
Her voice had broken a little. I didn’t dare start the machine and break the spell. A searing breath of icy air whooshed up my spine, encircled my legs and feet in a frigid vise. Hatless, gloveless, Jeanne seemed oblivious to the cold; it seemed to enliven her.
“I smelled flesh burning, but he kept at it long after I would have, you know, given up. But that’s not Wyatt. That’s just not him. He willed that girl alive. I was in the corner in a pile sobbing, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry, forgive us this unholy thing,’ to whatever gods this girl prayed to. I was begging him, begging him to stop, Val, you understand?”
I nodded, teeth chattering, but she wasn’t looking at me; she was gazing out at all the white, deep in thrall of the Enormity, which seemed to be drawing the tale out of her. “Must have been the tenth try, something changed. You could feel it in the room; this crackling energy filled it up. He was looking down at her, smiling. From where I sat, I saw her hand shoot up and sort of smack his arm, and I screamed and jumped up and ran over. The girl was coughing and gagging, threw up all over the floor but she was breathing! She was breathing. Wyatt, I mean, he was spattered with puke but he had this look of rapture, like he was in his own sorta church. Standing next to him like that, watching her try to catch her breath, this little filthy, naked child, hair in knots, I was trying to understand where on God’s earth she had come from and what had happened to her. And I felt like, in a weird way, we were her parents, or her second set of parents, you know what I’m saying? I mean, he started her little heart, but we worked together to bring her out of the ice, to bring her alive. Think about that.”