Girl in Ice(71)

What was I supposed to say—sorry for your loss? I gathered myself to leave. In full view were contents of his small refrigerator; slides and test tubes covered every available space. For the first time I noticed the slides weren’t just labeled by content. A few had been turned over, revealing a date scrawled on a piece of masking tape attached to the other side.

The door burst open; Jeanne blustered through. “You ready to head out?”

“Give me a minute,” he said.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“Something’s wacko with the weather equipment,” Jeanne said. “We got some real weird readings, these really high temps. I mean crazy high. Then no readings at all.” She poured herself a glass of juice and knocked it back. “I think a bear took it down, but I don’t know. We’ve got to check it out.”

“Yeah, haven’t you noticed?” Wyatt said. “It must be forty degrees out there. And it’s gone up a few degrees just in the past hour. Something screwy is going on.” Quickly he assembled the slides and tubes back into the fridge and began suiting up, signing off in the log with a flourish. “We might be a while. I wouldn’t wait up.”

I nearly crawled back to my room, the lack of sleep finally taking over. Sigrid, still in her hat and parka, sat in bed surrounded by drawing pads and books on ancient Greenlandic cultures. She moved over to let me in. Took my hand—ravaged by eczema—and turned it over in hers. From the pocket of her parka, she removed a fist-sized gray cube of walrus blubber she’d secreted away and warmed it between her palms. Chanting “Bahl” in her singsongy way, she rubbed the cube into the skin of my hands, wrists, and forearms. The smell wasn’t bad, like almonds or walnuts. The heat of my skin released a thin sheen of oil from the cube.

“Sigrid, thank you.”

She kept swirling the slab of blubber over my skin, happily jabbering away.

“Verohnsaht,” I said. Happy. “But, Sigrid.” I stayed her hand, lifting up her chin to look at me, her floppy wool hat half obscuring her eyes. “Stahndala.” I’m afraid.

I took the block of cool, greasy fat from her, set it on the night table. Her face was wiped clean of the charcoal, but her eye drooped again, worse than ever. She wore a look of indelible sadness, as if she knew she was going to die, that it was simply too late. It devastated me.

“Where are the ice eels, Sigrid?” With a Sharpie I drew my best ice eel on the sketch pad. “You must know. Your family knew. That’s why you’re alive. Ice alive.”

I drew two circles. The second I crossed out with a red marker until she stilled my hand. Her movements slow and deliberate, she tore off a clean sheet of paper. The perspective flat but recognizable, she traced the particular outline of the mountain range, the pass where the tongue of the glacier poured through, and the glacial lake where she’d been found, a zigzag line for the crevasse. She looked up at me, eyes pleading, Do you understand?

“Yes, I know what you’re drawing. Keep going, Sigrid.”

She traced smaller circles—footprints?—stepping off the ice lake and marching over what looked like another mountain range. Flipped the paper over and carefully sketched more footsteps as if this was a continuation of her map. Then she began to lose me. She drew three piles of flattened circles, connecting them with lines. From the last cluster of circles, she drew her little tracks to a set of waves—a beach?—and with great concentration, a pile of ice eels.

“What are these, Sigrid?” I pointed to the piles of squashed circles.

She gazed up at me as if to say, How much more do I have to explain to you? She looked so weary. I flipped through the Greenland book to the thick section of photographs in the middle. We pored over pages and pages of them. Engraved onto whalebone: elaborate drawings of whale hunts, teams of sled dogs sledging, snow shelters, a caribou shedding the velvet from its antlers for winter.

On the last page of photographs, Sigrid slammed her hand down, yelped with excitement. She yanked the book from me, pointing to a picture of cairns. Inuksuit. Ominous-looking piles of rocks, seven, ten feet high, created as graves or to mark good hunting grounds. Sometimes vaguely in the shape of humans, often used as silent messengers. The stones might be arranged to warn of thin ice, or to frighten caribou in the direction of hunters. These were decorated with seagull wings, bone, or long strands of seaweed that blew in the wind, a kind of scarecrow. I imagined ribs and antlers clicking and clacking against one another in an otherwise soundless landscape.

I struggled to understand how Sigrid’s three cairns were related to one another, Why can’t I just go straight to the ice eels that—according to her drawing—are at a beach? And what about distances? We couldn’t seem to get anywhere with how close the cairns were to one another, much less how far away the eels were.

We both had to give up on it after a while: I was loath to end on a note of frustration after all her valiant efforts, but she could barely keep her eyes open. I folded the drawing and zipped it into the side pocket of my sweater for safekeeping. Even as I hugged her good night, she began to doze. In minutes I followed suit. It was during those odd, between-worlds minutes of drifting off, brain cycling and stuttering through the wild images of the day, when I saw the numbers flicker by.

The month, day, and year I knew so well.

I sat up as if a demon were hurtling toward me from the dark corner of the room.