Where'd You Go, Bernadette(84)

“What’s going on?” I said. It was two in the morning.

“Oh, we must be at Palmer,” Vivian said with a hand flutter. It was her turn, and she actually thought she was about to seize Europe.

More people appeared on the deck, but I couldn’t see over their heads. Finally, I stood on my chair. “Oh my God!”

There was a little city, if you’d call a bunch of shipping containers and a couple corrugated metal buildings a city. “What is that place?”

“That’s Palmer,” Iris said.

Palmer was short for Palmer Station. When Nick said he was packing, and when Iris said we were dropping Nick off at Palmer, I figured it was to count penguins on some island.

“That’s where Nick is stationed for the next month,” Vivian said.

I knew all about the three places in Antarctica where Americans can live. They are McMurdo Station, which looks like an awful dump with about a thousand people. There’s, of course, the South Pole, which is way far inland and impossible to get to, with twenty people. And Palmer Station, with about forty-five people. All three are populated by scientists and support staff. But I had checked the chart room and asked the captain: the Allegra never stopped at Palmer Station.

Still, here we were.

“Are we getting off?” I asked the girls.

“Oh, no,” Iris said.

“Scientists only,” Vivian added. “They run a very tight operation.”

I dashed out onto the deck. A few Zodiacs streamed back and forth the two hundred yards between our ship and Palmer Station. Nick was heading away from us on a Zodiac stacked with coolers and food crates.

“Who are those people coming aboard?” I wondered aloud.

“It’s a tradition.” Charlie the naturalist was standing next to me. “We let the scientists at Palmer come aboard for a drink. “

I must have had quite a look on my face, because Charlie quickly added, “Nope. People apply five years out to get to Palmer. Beds and supplies are extremely limited. Moms from Seattle don’t end up there on a whim. I’m sorry to be like that. But, you know.”

“Bee!” whispered a wild voice. It was Dad. I figured he was asleep because it was two in the morning. Before I could speak, he was shepherding me down the stairs. “I started thinking when your ID didn’t scan,” he said, his voice all trembly. “What if Bernadette got off the ship but she didn’t scan out? Her ID card would show she was still onboard, so everyone would naturally conclude that she had disappeared from the ship itself. But if she got off the ship somewhere and didn’t scan out, she might still be there.” He pulled open the door to the lounge, which was filling up with some pretty ratty-looking people, scientists from Palmer Station.

“Neko Harbor was the last place Mom got off,” I said, trying to put it together. “And then she got back on.”

“According to the scan of her ID card,” Dad explained again. “But what if she slipped off the ship later? Without scanning out? I was at the bar just now, and some lady went up and ordered a pink penguin.”

“A pink penguin?” My heart started quaking. That was the drink from the captain’s report.

“It turns out the lady is a scientist at Palmer Station,” Dad said. “And the pink penguin is their official drink.”

I searched the faces of the new arrivals. They were young and scruffy, like they could all have worked at REI, and full of laughter. Mom’s face wasn’t among them.

“Look at that place,” Dad said. “I didn’t know it existed.”

I kneeled on a window seat and peered out. A series of red walkways connected the blue metal buildings. There were a dozen electricity poles sticking up, and a water tank with a killer whale painted on it. A gigantic orange ship was docked nearby, nothing like a cruise ship, but more like one of those industrial types that are always in Elliott Bay.

“According to the woman, Palmer Station is the plum assignment in all of Antarctica,” Dad said. “They have a chef who was trained at the Cordon Bleu, for God’s sake.”

Below, Zodiacs were coming and going between our ship and the rocky shore. There was an Elvis mannequin in one of the Zodiacs, which the naturalists were videotaping to much hooting and hollering. Who knew. It must have been some inside joke.

“So the pink penguins on the captain’s report…,” I said, still trying to compute.

“They weren’t for Bernadette,” Dad said. “They must have been for a scientist, like Nick, who was being dropped off at Palmer Station, and who Bernadette befriended.”

I was still stuck on something. “But Mom’s ship didn’t come anywhere near Palmer Station—” Then I realized. “I know how we can check!”

I ran out of the lounge and down the stairs to the chart room, Dad on my heels. On the shiny wooden block was the map of the Antarctic Peninsula, with the little red dotted line showing our journey. I opened the drawer and leafed through the maps until I found the one dated December 26.

“This is the trip Mom took.” I laid it out and placed brass weights on the corners.

I traced the red dotted path of Mom’s trip. From Tierra del Fuego, the Allegra stopped at Deception Island like we did. Then it looped up and around the Antarctic Peninsula and went deep into the Weddell Sea, and back around, to Neko Harbor and Adelaide Island, but after that it turned around and went back through the Bransfield Strait to King George Island and down to Ushuaia. “Her boat didn’t come near Palmer Station.” There was no way around it.