Girl in Ice(35)

The mystery haunted me: What in the world are there seven of that she needs to refer to each time she speaks? Days of the week, the seven deadly sins, the seven seas, wonders of the world—none made any sense at all.



* * *



I WOKE TO a rustling sound; I’d been kicking something. Dozens of white packets. Like palm-sized sailboats, meticulously folded pieces of paper dotted the blue wool blanket at the foot of my bed. I opened them. They were all the same: laboriously rendered drawings of the same snake and bird. I pictured her up at dawn, churning out more of these. Why? It reminded me of something I’d read once: Repetition is the mute language of the abused child. I wasn’t speculating abuse, but I had to acknowledge repetition as a desperate attempt to communicate.

As I gathered the drawings, I felt—in my body, like a little flame—her budding faith in me, and my growing determination to help her. Nothing else seemed to matter. I tucked the scraps of paper in an envelope and slipped it inside one of my books—there seemed no better place to hide them.





thirteen


The second week of October, a blizzard swept down off the mountains so fast and so fierce, no one was prepared for it. Fifty-mile-per-hour winds boomed down from the glacial pass as snow pelted the Shack, swiftly building into man-high drifts. Blinded by the whiteout, Nora and Raj had to use the rope—hand over hand—to battle their way from the Dome to the Shack. Wyatt raced back from the glacier, his eyelashes and beard caked with snow, shaken that his GPS had quit so all he’d had to guide him were glimpses of the yellow flags flying over our three buildings. Only Sigrid, Jeanne, and I had been safely in the Shack when the storm hit.

Two days later, the blizzard showed no signs of letting up. It became hard to imagine any reality other than howling, snow-filled darkness. We’d gone through most of the card and board games, and a good deal of alcohol. We were running low on conversation. I felt walled in, jumpy, trapped.

With the exception of Jeanne constantly rummaging in the kitchen, we all hibernated in the living room on the broken-down couches and chairs, Raj and Nora sprawled on the rug under a sleeping bag, her head on his lap. We watched old black-and-white science fiction movies on DVD, like The Thing, Godzilla, and The War of the Worlds. Sigrid, agitated, sat on Wyatt’s desk with her sweater stretched over her knees, rocking as she stared out the picture window, the view a smear of bruised silver and white, like living inside a thunderhead.

The air inside was heavy with the smell of human bodies; until we could get outside again, all water was for drinking and cooking. I could have closed my eyes and identified each of us by our particular bouquets. Wyatt was all acrid tang, spearmint, and tobacco; Raj smelled like rubber and neoprene; Jeanne: wood shavings, metal, biscuit; Nora like citrus perfume barely masking a musky bite. Neither I nor Sigrid helped the situation, of course. Worst of all, Jeanne had disconnected the toilet so the pipes wouldn’t freeze. Everyone got their own bucket.

Lounging on the couch in his pit-stained long johns and down boot liners, Wyatt gestured at the TV with a can of beer. Some sort of worm was crawling out of a man’s eye. “Check out that monster parasite.”

“Reminds me of what I see under the microscope every day,” Raj said, tucking his sleeping bag closer around him. “You want to know horror, just look at what hangs around on kelp. There’s this parasitic worm that lives in the anus of a certain species of krill. Worse thing I’ve ever seen.”

“Thanks for the nightmares, darling,” Nora said sleepily.

The credits rolled, and Raj wrangled himself to his stockinged feet. Bored to distraction, he wandered to Wyatt’s desk, tossing stale peanuts one by one into his mouth from a much-recycled ziplock bag. Odin rustled in his wood shavings, his pink nose pushing through the mesh of the cage. “How’s the research? Heard it didn’t go too well with the bugs.”

Wyatt shifted in his seat. “I’ll get there. It’s just a matter of time.”

“What have you tried?”

“Why do you ask?”

Raj peered out at the never-ending storm, the snow so heavy it was like the sky falling to the earth. “So I can steal your fucking ideas.”

Wyatt let the comment slide, as if it were beneath him to react. “I’ve worked with Arctic char, cod, flounder—they can all survive temps below freezing—all kinds of Arctic shellfish, some amphibians, lichens, moss. You know there are lichens that stay frozen for years and thaw out just fine?” Wyatt jumped to his feet and withdrew a glass tray from under a heat lamp. Tiny green shoots poked from what looked like a thin mat of black dirt. “This stuff’s been locked in the ice for hundreds of years. Put it under a heat lamp and bam, it sprouts.”

“Fine, but what’s your process? How do you study the why and how of all this?”

Wyatt considered Raj, said, “I test for cryoproteins, or other cryoprotectants, isolate them, then try them on their own, or combine them in every possible way.”

Raj listlessly tossed the bag of peanuts on Wyatt’s desk. Plopped down on the couch and folded his arms behind his head, glasses flashing in the dim light. “What do you mean, try them?”

“Raj,” Nora said from her sprawled-out position on the rug. “Can you get me some tea?”

“In a minute.”

Wyatt said, “I worked with lemmings at first. Put them on special diets, injected them, froze them, but so far…”