Girl in Ice(32)
“I have a feeling you’ll land on your feet.”
He strolled over to me, reached down, and traced his rough finger along the side of my face, gently lifting my chin to look him in the eye. I was stunned, but didn’t stop him. When was the last time a man had touched me like this? Even I didn’t know. His gesture felt intimate, sexual, but also spontaneous. Still, the flip from aggression to seduction unnerved me, and I felt my expression tightening. Sigrid had stopped drawing and watched his every move.
“You think less of me now, don’t you?” he said, stroking my hair.
Shivering, I drew back, and he pulled away. I felt relieved but also mourned the loss of his touch, of any touch. “Look, Wyatt, it’s none of my business how you deal with—”
“Val, I mean well. That’s what people don’t understand. Yeah, I’ve made bad decisions. Done things out of passion that just aren’t right. Things I’ll never forgive myself for.” He gave me a searching look—seemed vulnerable for the first time in memory—and might have kissed me. I would have let him, even in front of Sigrid. But he didn’t, and the moment passed. “Here’s the thing. I’m not the worst guy. I call my mom—she’s ninety—every Wednesday morning, nine o’clock sharp. Right here, on the sat phone. And hey, I’ve got some arthritis, some other old age bullshit, but I’m not completely washed-up. I’m sixty-one, which is a crime in America, to be over thirty—”
I laughed and nodded, and he finally smiled. I thought about the exquisite Japanese word, shibui, the beauty of aging, a concept that doesn’t exist in American culture in any real way.
Wyatt got comfortable at his desk; Sigrid returned to her scribbling. “I’ve never been more passionate about what I’m doing.” He leaned forward, his face half in shadow. “I’m not just curious about stuff. I have to know. Those odd striations a mile down in the ice, what’s the explanation? How does the world work? It’s almost like sexual frustration, which is pretty much my constant state anyway.” He laughed ruefully. “It’s like I’m a little pissed off all the time that I don’t have the answers to my questions right away. But if I had them, what would be left for me to care about?”
He lowered his voice. “And, Val, listen. I loved Andy—you know that—but I care about all my students. So many of them are going to go on to change the world. They’re doing it now. I’m very proud…” He rubbed his forehead, exhaustion plain in the deep creases of his face. “So what’s left? I’ve got these cores, this fifteen-year body of work, which I’m damned proud of. But now, now? It’s the girl. The girl is everything. The reality of her, the science of her, the why of her. Let me show you something.”
He lifted the top off a long, low freezer in the kitchen. A fog of dry ice billowed into the stale air of the room. Slipping on canvas gloves, he reached in and gingerly lifted out a tube of ice four inches in diameter and a yard long: an ice core.
“See this? Pulled it out of Glacier 27G this morning. I’ve got dozens of these. This is going in the walk-in freezer in the Shed tonight—they degrade if they’re not kept in super-cold conditions. It’s fifty-three below in there. Anyway, I’ve sent hundreds of these back to the states, which is, in total, hundreds of thousands of years of data.” He held up the steaming rod. It glistened in the light that flowed like violet-colored syrup from the window. “You’re looking at a couple decades of climate information—hydrogen and oxygen isotopes, levels of CO2—all compressed into a few centimeters a year. I could spend years reading all of these, trying to understand what was happening during different time periods. It’s like a book written on fine paper. A really, really long book. A puzzle with a million pieces. The difficulty is seeing the whole thing, the patterns among all the clues about temperature, precipitation, volcanic activity—even wind speed and direction—but it all drives me crazy some days, you know? The most sophisticated computers in the world work on this data, and still we have more questions than answers.” He slipped on a pair of magnifying-lens glasses and peered at the core. “Is that what it’s like with Sigrid, Val? Too many puzzle pieces?”
Hearing her name, Sigrid lifted her head and watched us, wary.
I sipped at the dregs of my red wine, dreading my answer. “Her language isn’t rooted in any known language. Certain words are similar enough to West Greenlandic to be loanwords—”
“It’s been more than two weeks.” His tone shifted, chilled. “Closer to three.”
“Look, I’m making progress.” My hand trembled; the skin painfully cracked and raw. Wine shuddered in my cup. “She’s coming along in her own way.”
But I was lying. Again. Sigrid was clamming up, wanting only to wander around outside, watch Nora and Raj do their dives, sit on the counter as Jeanne cooked or hang out with her in the Shed. She was fretful, fidgety, and distracted. Something felt off.
Wyatt nestled the ice core in its wooden sleeve and tucked it back into the freezer. “Fine. I’ve got some homework for her, right here.” He plunged his hands deep into the icy fog and lifted out a shoebox-sized terrarium, its base scattered with what looked like thumb-length orange and black furry turds. Sigrid squinted at the glass box.
“See these little guys?”