Girl in Ice(86)

Nearly two months have passed since Sigrid and I flew from Thule to the town of Qaanaaq, population 627, on the northwest coast of Greenland. Old-fashioned Christmas lights festoon the simple town hall, which also serves as church, general store, and post office. We live in sixteen hours of hard dark followed by eight hours of soupy twilight; the sun won’t return until February.

But we’re finding our way. Already Sigrid has playmates, friends her age who understand her well enough to toss a ball around or sit on the swings together overlooking the iceberg-choked bay. In such a small community, it’s as if everyone in town is already a mother, father, grandparent, aunt, uncle, or sibling for Sigrid. Pitak offered us the cozy in-law apartment attached to his home; he seems glad to have us here. Sigrid is learning the alphabet, working on writing down what she calls “talk marks.” She can’t quite grasp that paper comes from trees—she’s never seen living ones!—and wonders why I won’t come clean and tell her what animal-skin paper is made from.

There’s talk of me staying and teaching the kids English, and I’m thinking about that. These days I feel less awkward around children. I think it has to do with feeling better about myself; funny how kids pick up on those things.

It’s not that I’m planning to stay, it’s just that I haven’t left yet. Dad and I talk a few times a week, and I feel the pull to go home, but every day, I wake with the same thought: How can I possibly leave her?

The official story was that Sigrid was the only person found of the families who had trekked from the remote village to the island in search of caribou; that we at the research station had found her traumatized and were trying to bring her back to health when the tragedies occurred. She had no living relatives.

Meanwhile, the eels are being harvested and studied; much has been learned already. This particular ice eel cryoprotein was unknown until now, but it’s a simple compound, one that can be made synthetically for pennies a dose. No need to eradicate the population of ice eels. Though cheap and easy to produce, it is—like any medicine—challenging to distribute, and the ice winds are hitting everywhere now. They’re unstoppable. I know the story of these eels and how they’ll change the world isn’t over; it’s just the end of my part in it, for now.



* * *



A COUPLE OF times in my life, I have felt transcendence. Once, years ago, when I was witness to a baby being born, and last night, with Sigrid. She insisted we watch the northern lights together, that we gather pillows and sleeping skins, as she calls them, and go lie on the town dock near the fishing boats.

It was past midnight when she waited at the door, dressed in her parka and boots. I’d put her off most of the evening, because, you know, the Enormity. It had been months since I’d taken a pill, much less had one to take, and alcohol was scarce here. So, there I was. Sober, but not as steady as I wanted to be.

“Bahl?” she said, clearly losing her patience.

“Stahndala,” I said. Fear. “Big sky, night, dark, cold.” I shivered melodramatically in my snow gear.

She said, with sarcasm, “Okay, come on, let’s go,” a phrase she’d heard me say countless times by this point—she knew it cracked me up coming from her—then marched over to our bureau, where she scrambled through the sock drawer. Grabbed Andy’s heart-shaped lead piece, plopped it in my hand. Reached in her pocket and extracted the tiny troll she’d found in the walrus’s belly. Waving it by its pitiful pink hair, she said, “Joy! Bahl, Sigrid, safe, night, magic, warm.”



* * *



BATHED IN MOONLIGHT, we lay under caribou skins on the rickety dock. In the bay, a lone, truck-sized berg listed, creaking as it pitched over, seawater seething across its phosphorescent underbelly. Across the entire dome of night, the northern lights rippled green and purple, yellow and orange, each display morphing in the space of a breath. I’d never seen anything more beautiful.

Sigrid held my hand tight, said, “Excitement! Lights, sky, story, father, mother, child, true, Bahl, want?”

Pretty sure she was asking me if I wanted to hear some story about the northern lights.

“Yes. Tell me. Bahl want, true, lights, sky, story.”

She said, “Childrens, dead, spirits, play, dance, sky, alive.”

So there they were: eons of children’s spirits swirling in ecstasy across the night sky. “Tahtaksah,” I said. Sad. “Children, dead.”

She got on one elbow, eyes sparking in the dark. “Come on, let’s go, Bahl, verohnsaht!” Joy. “Dance, play, childrens, baby, spirit, always, mother see, father see, safe, night, love. Always. Okay?”

I understood. The spirits of the children were dancing happily, their mothers and fathers would always be able to see them, and they were safe up there.

I smiled, said, “Bahl, love, story, dancing, children, sky, night.”

And so I dwelt in the Enormity and did not fall up into the sky, nor was I erased by my grief; I was wrapped in the arms of the world and the night and a precious girl.



* * *



JUST BEFORE BED that night, I talked to Sigrid about the ice winds around the world, and my worries that humans were destroying the earth. An adult conversation, but she could handle it. I lost my way when I tried to explain the word hope. But she told me about a word in her language for a particular kind of hope: the feeling a hunter has when he’s waited all day at a breathing hole for a seal and one comes up but he misses with his harpoon, and even though the sun is going down and he’s hungry and cold, he knows he’ll try again tomorrow, and tomorrow he’ll be successful. He has no doubt.