Where'd You Go, Bernadette(82)

“She’s really pregnant?” I said.

“Yep.” Poor guy, he looked like he was going to barf.

“So basically,” I said, “your life is ruined.” I’m sorry, but something in me made me smile.

“I can’t say that thought hasn’t occurred to me,” he said. “But I try not to think of it that way. I’m trying to frame it as my life being different. Our lives being different. Me and you.”

“So me and Lincoln and Alexandra are going to have the same brother or sister?”

“Yep.”

“That’s so random.”

“Random!” he said. “I’ve always hated when you used that word. But it is pretty random.”

“Dad,” I said. “I called her Yoko Ono that night because she was the one who broke up the Beatles. Not because she’s Asian. I felt bad.”

“I know that,” he said.

It was good that sappy-eyed seal was there, because we could both just watch her. But then Dad started putting in eyedrops.

“Dad,” I said. “I really don’t mean to hurt your feelings, but…”

“But what?”

“You have way too many accessories. I can’t keep track of all of them.”

“It’s a good thing you don’t have to, isn’t it?”

We were quiet for a while, and then I said, “I think my favorite part of Antarctica is just looking out.”

“You know why?” Dad asked. “When your eyes are softly focused on the horizon for sustained periods, your brain releases endorphins. It’s the same as a runner’s high. These days, we all spend our lives staring at screens twelve inches in front of us. It’s a nice change.”

“I have an idea,” I said. “You should invent an app so that when you’re staring at your phone, it tricks your brain into thinking you’re staring at the horizon, so you can get a runner’s high from texting.”

“What did you just say?” Dad spun his head to look at me, his mind in high gear.

“Don’t you dare steal my idea!” I gave him a shove.

“Consider yourself warned.”

I groaned and left it at that. Then Charlie came over and said it was time to head back.

At breakfast, Nick the penguin-counter asked me again if I’d be his assistant, which did sound pretty fun. We got to leave before everyone else, in our own Zodiac. Nick let me stand next to the outboard and steer. The best way to describe Nick would be to say that he didn’t have any personality, which sounds mean, but it’s kind of true. The closest he came to personality was when he told me to scan the horizon wide, like a searchlight, back and forth, back and forth. He said after he was down here the first time driving a Zodiac that he went back home and immediately got into a car accident because he was looking left to right, left to right, and ended up rear-ending the car directly in front of him. But that’s not personality. That’s just a car accident.

He dropped me off at an Adélie penguin colony and gave me a clipboard with a satellite map marked with some boundaries. This was a follow-up to a study a month back, where another scientist had counted the eggs. It was my job to see how many had successfully hatched into chicks. Nick sized up the colony.

“This looks like a complete breeding failure.” He shrugged.

I was shocked by how casually he said this. “What do you mean, a complete failure?”

“Adélies are hardwired to lay their eggs in the exact same place each year,” he said. “We had a late winter, so their nesting grounds were still covered with snow when they made their nests. So it looks like there’s no chicks.”

“How can you even tell?” Because there was no way I could see that.

“You tell me,” he said. “Observe their behavior and tell me what you see.”

He left me with a clicker and headed off to another colony, saying he’d return in two hours. Adélies may be the cutest penguins of all. Their heads are pure black except for perfect white circles, like a reinforcement, around their tiny black eyes. I started at the top left corner and clicked each time I saw a gray fuzz-ball sticking out from between an Adélie’s feet. Click, click, click. I worked my way across the top of the mapped area, then dropped down and worked my way back. You have to make sure not to count the same nest twice, but it’s almost impossible because they’re not in a neat grid. When I was done I did it over again and got the same number.

Here’s what surprised me about penguins: their chests aren’t pure white but have patches of peach and green, which is partially digested krill and algae vomit, which splatters on them when they feed their chicks. Another thing is penguins stink! And they’re loud. They coo sometimes, which is very soothing, but mostly they screech. The penguins I watched spent most of their time waddling over and stealing rocks from one another, then having vicious fights where they’d peck each other until they bled.

I climbed high on the rocks and looked out. There was ice, in every possible form, stretching forever. Glaciers, fast ice, icebergs, chunks of ice in the still water. The air was so cold and clean that even in the way distance, the ice was as vivid and sharp as if it were right in front of me. The immensity of it all, the peacefulness, the stillness and enormous silence, well, I could have sat there forever.