“But he left you a voice mail that kind of propped the door open, right?” she asks, brushing through my hair with her fingers.
“Wow. Kimba is more thorough than I thought. Yeah. He said when he gets back, he’d like to talk and see where things could go. I’m not getting my hopes up.”
“We need to talk about you and hope, young lady.”
“Hope is hard.” I close my eyes to block out her persistent concern. “Hope hurts when it doesn’t deliver.”
“I know you’re thinking about your mother, but—”
“Don’t.” I sit up and push my hair back. “I don’t want to hear about how I’m still holding onto that. How I can’t open myself up to anyone because I’m afraid to fully feel.”
I just fully felt with Maxim, and look where that got me. Probably nowhere but “deflowered” and with my heart cracked.
“Sounds like I don’t have to tell you,” she says softly, “because you already know. You should see a counselor, honey. I told Rand when it happened years ago.”
“I talked to someone . . .once.” I twist the hem of my shirt between my fingers and eye the door. As much as I love Mena, I want out of this conversation.
“You were so young, and a situation like that—”
“Auntie, please,” I groan. “Can we drop it?”
She sighs, resignation on her pretty face, and nods. Jim comes back into the office, and his face is ashen, his mouth grim. As soon as he’s close enough, he reaches for Mena’s hand. She stands and presses into him, her anxious eyes fixed on his face. There is obviously more than just a “few dates” between them.
“What’s wrong?” she asks.
“The sheriff,” Jim says, shaking his head and closing his eyes briefly before opening them, meeting mine. “He had bad news.”
“What kind of bad news?” I ask, but somehow I already know. Before he even says it, I know that hope has let me down again.
“It’s Tammara,” he says hoarsely, sorrow etched into the lines of his distinguished features. “They found her.”
27
Maxim
I’ll never take the sun for granted again. We spent four months cloaked in darkness. Every day without the sun, it’s harder to lift your spirits. Depression, seasonal affective disorder, Vitamin C deficiency—whatever you want to blame or call it, it’s real. We ate the dark like nightshade, and it was poisonous. Melancholy with every meal. The weight of the endless night can suffocate you if you’re not careful. I know now why men have gone mad in the Antarctic. I understand the rigorous psychological testing for those who winter over. We aren’t built to live this way.
Just as I’m sure I’ll lose my mind, one day, the faintest glow illuminates the horizon and we at least don’t need head torches to see and move around.
“I’m counting the days to the peninsula,” Grim says over a hand of poker one night in September. “After all this snow, I’ll take the water for a few months.”
“Not sure how open the waters will be,” Peggy says, chewing on a cigar she never actually smokes. “We’ll be contending with ice floes and another set of challenges.”
“I need another set of challenges.” I fold my hand. “I’m kind of ready to go home.”
“Tulip girl’s waiting for you?” Grim asks, his eyes briefly flashing the humor his mouth doesn’t allow.
“Shut up, man.” I shake my head and slide my seat back, not in the mood to be teased about Lennix.
“I’ve seen you looking at the pictures of her in the tulip garden,” he says, his voice serious. “She’s pretty.”
“Pretty is the least of what she is, but she is that, too.”
I miss my parents, my brother, and my family. But what I’m missing with Nix is more somehow. Even after only having a week with her, it’s more. For every time Grim has caught me looking at that photo on my phone, there’s a dozen times I’ve pulled it out he hasn’t seen.
I’ll never regret this trip. It’s been good experience and our research is valuable, but even with the part I’m most excited about still ahead, getting outside this summer and exploring the peninsula, I’m ready to go home. The quiet, the scope of this place changes your perspective on life. And if there’s one thing I know about my life after this trip, it’s that I want Lennix Moon Hunter, however I can get her, in it.
*
Being on the water breathes new life into my passion for this Antarctic voyage. Living confined and in the dark with limited human contact for so long felt like my hope was packed under ice as tightly and surely as the pre-historic snow we collect.
We worked ashore the last few days, which took an enormous amount of preparation. Bureaucratically, because the area is so closely guarded and managed that it takes a machete to cut through all the red tape. We received our approval to gather data mere days before reaching shore. Now that we’re off the peninsula, and our ship The Chrysalis is floating alongside an armada of glaciers, I feel as buoyant as the ice floes bobbing around us.
“The landscape looks different every day,” David says from beside me, his forearms leaned on the ship’s railing.
“That’s part of what makes it so unpredictable,” Grim adds. “Glad we got some good work in before conditions changed.”
“The birds were my favorite part,” Peggy inserts with a laugh, chewing on her ever-present unlit cigar.
She worked with our seabird specialist to get population counts for various species, which will be compared with previous data, helping to identify any potentially endangered populations. They’ve been able to perform a thorough penguin census and collect blubber from the seals in the area. We also gathered several mud samples that will be analyzed and hopefully give us information on how carbon may be trapped under ice.
“I think Larnyard may wish he’d listened to you,” Grim says, hitching his chin toward the sky. “Look at those clouds.”
I recommended we make camp on shore for a few days and spend some extra time collecting much-needed data since it had taken so much time and effort to even access the area. Dr. Larnyard had disagreed and wanted to get back on the water for the next leg of our expedition.
Sailing through ice is a treacherous, exhilarating prospect. The Chrysalis is ice-capable, but no vessel guarantees safety if you clip a ’berg the wrong way or get trapped out on the water in one of the Antarctic’s volatile storms. The clouds looming over our ship promise storms. We’re hundreds of miles from shore, thousands of miles from civilization, and a hairsbreadth from catastrophe.
“I don’t like what the sky’s telling us,” David says, his brows rouching over concerned eyes. “Iceblink.”
There are only a few places in the world where the phenomenon of iceblink, glaring white near the horizon reflecting light from ice, is even possible. Antarctica is one of them. Polar explorers and sailors have been using iceblink to navigate arctic seas for centuries. In contrast, water sky projects open lanes of water onto the clouds, showing how to avoid hazardous ice floes that could lock up a ship for days or even weeks. Hell, for months.