Girl in Ice(31)

She reached under the dash and withdrew a dog-eared photo, handed it to me. A younger, thinner version of Jeanne, fresh-faced and quite pretty, almost delicate-looking, her eyes not buried in thick flesh and sadness, pushed a young girl on a swing. A tall man in a flannel shirt stood in the background, hands stuffed casually in baggy jeans, smiling as he watched. “That’s my husband, Adam. My daughter, Frances.”

“I’m so sorry for your loss. She was beautiful, what a great smile.”

She took back the photo, passed her rough thumbs over her husband and daughter’s image. Said, “Pitak thinks God saved Sigrid because killing all her family and all the hunters who were going after those herds of caribou was too much of a punishment. It was this act of mercy, you know?”

“Could be.”

She turned to me. “I’m sorry you were punished. To lose your brother like that. Your twin, even.”

My fingers stiffened with cold; I forced myself to move them. “Tell me what it was like, Jeanne, to find my brother that day.” The gates seemed open, so I had to try. I steeled myself for her answer.

She took another sip of whiskey; her face closed down. I wondered if we’d be able to start the motor again, or if the cold would knock it out. “Wyatt found him, not me.”

“What happened the night before?”

“Come on, you… Wyatt must have told you everything by now.”

“He told me his version.”

“Well, I don’t know what you’re getting at,” she said testily. “There’s only one version.” She pushed herself up in her seat, capped the flask. “But all right, if you need to hear about it so bad. Him and Wyatt had some contest going on for months about trying to find out what made Odin thaw out alive. They messed around with everything: shellfish, moss, lichens, flowers, even pollen—every kind of combination of stuff. That night they were drinking, laughing a lot. Drunk. Or maybe they were arguing, it was none of my business. They were the best of friends, they didn’t need me around.” She flicked her half-smoked cigarette out the window; the wind sucked it away. “Well, that’s half-true. Wyatt still needed me for day-to-day stuff ’cause Andy wasn’t great at the nitty-gritty, you know, he wasn’t great at doing the kind of homework you gotta do around here to stay alive: scouting glaciers for the safest routes, keeping track of equipment. You got to be Johnny-on-the-spot with this stuff, it’s life-and-death. Don’t get me wrong, I liked him, he was a good man—”

“He was a dreamer, I know.”

“Right, scattered. Point is, he made things a little more complicated around here. In ways that weren’t always good. Times it felt like Wyatt’d forget the important stuff, like how he still needed good ole Jeanne around to get him in and out of a crevasse alive because she brings along the right harnesses and ropes, collects his weather monitors safely, keeps him on track with logistics and all. I mean, those two could yabber on about science till the cows came home, but talk won’t save you out there.” She sighed mightily, as if lifting herself out of some bottomless thought chasm. “Anyway, that night I left them to their carousing and headed off to the Shed. Had an ice drill to fix. Went to bed after that—assumed they had too. It was real late. Woke up the next morning and he’d found Andy. Wyatt was destroyed. Never seen him like that. I felt sick about it.”

I clutched the wheel, willing the image out of my brain. “Just tell me one thing, Jeanne. Were all the doors locked the morning Wyatt found him?”

“Locked?” She grimaced, leaning over me to turn the cat’s key. I nearly cried to feel the blast of heat on my face, see the friendly glare of the dashboard. “Have a look around. No locks on any of the outside doors. Locks freeze out here, they’re a pain in the ass. I got rid of them. Besides, who would we be locking out? Polar bears can’t turn doorknobs. Look, Andy went out there, God knows why, but he could have come back in if he wanted to. Whatever he did, Val, he did it on purpose.”





twelve


It was nearly midnight. We’d all stayed up drinking shitty wine, getting into heated theories about Sigrid, before Jeanne turned in and Nora and Raj trudged off to the Dome in haunted blue twilight.

“So, Wyatt,” I asked, “what’s next for you, after this place?” I sat on the rug with Sigrid, who—newly entranced with markers—scribbled on page after page of drawing paper. She’d refused to go to sleep that night, hadn’t eaten much, and had barely spoken all day.

He tossed the dregs of his wine in the sink, whipped around to face me. “Ah, come on, Val,” he said with derision. “Don’t be coy. You must have googled me by now.”

I reddened. “Guess I missed something.”

He exhaled. “I was”—finger quotes—“inappropriate with a student back home. Grad student. She came at me, she was all over me, it was… mutual. For months. Then she blew the whistle. I should have known. Anyway, the powers that be are letting me finish my time here. Then they want me gone. They probably figure, what harm can I do? No nubile nymphets running around this place, that’s for sure.” He tugged at his scraggly beard and snapped at his spearmint gum. On his PC, a time-lapse animated field of glaciers melted and reformed, over and over. “So this is my last dance. Fuck knows where I’ll end up after this.”