Wyatt engulfed me in a quick hug; even that brief intimacy startled and disturbed me, perhaps because he was probably the last person to see Andy alive. I exhaled, tried to smile.
“You look good, Val, you look good. You okay? Trip okay?”
“It was long. We’re pretty wiped out—”
“Nora? Rajeev?” He shook their mittened hands, lingering a bit on Nora, as if he wasn’t expecting such a beautiful woman.
“Call me Raj,” he said, one arm slipping around Nora: a statement, for sure. We all introduced ourselves to Jeanne, a heavyset woman hard in her forties, ruddy-cheeked and moonfaced, brown silver-streaked hair escaping her hood and whipping in the breeze. She mumbled her hellos, staring at each of us in turn as if her eyes were ravenous for new faces.
“You guys hungry?” Wyatt gestured at the ugly yellow building. “Jeanne’s been working her magic all afternoon.”
“I think we could all use some food, right?” Raj said, heaving a box of supplies onto the sled. “That egg thing back in Thule was a joke.”
Jeanne’s forehead furrowed a bit; she said, “You’re not a vegetarian, are you?” as if somehow a rumor to that effect had been going around.
“Why, do I look like one?” he said with a smile.
“You’d starve to death around here if you were,” she said without a shred of humor. With a huff, she bent down to help Pitak unload a case of canned goods from the belly of the plane. Scrappy, lithe, with a windburned face, handsome despite missing a few teeth, he moved at twice her pace, all the while trying to jolly her up, smiling and joking with her. Any returned smiles were rare and unenthused.
“So, this weather! Crazy, right?” Pitak called to Wyatt. “Summer forgot Greenland this year.”
“It was bizarre!” Wyatt said. “Two weeks in the fifties, a little melt, then boom, back to this.”
“When this happens,” Pitak said, “when there is no summer, we say the winters are like two dogs fucking.”
Wyatt smiled as he balanced a crate of eggs on a wooden box of fresh fruit. “Thanks for that, Pitak.”
He raised his gloved hands as if trying to erase his words. “Sorry, ladies.”
Nora laughed. “We’ve heard the word before.”
Pitak turned back to Wyatt, his face serious. “The girl is okay?”
Wyatt nodded. “My friend Val here’s going to help us out with her.”
“She a doctor? From America?”
“Sort of,” Wyatt said, clearly interested in changing the subject. He sidled up to Pitak. “So, did you get them?”
“Oh, man, I almost forgot.” Pitak hopped back up into the cabin of the plane. Grinning, he tossed Wyatt a plastic bag tied at the top. Wyatt caught it and tore at the sack, cursing the knot. Three avocados, perhaps the only green objects in hundreds of miles, fell onto his orange boots, rolling a yard or so across the ice.
Wyatt dove down, stuffing them in his pockets as if they were bricks of heroin and we were the DEA. “Damn it, Pitak,” he said, laughing, “I owe you my life, man. My fucking life.”
Smiling, the pilot climbed back into the plane. “Eat them slowly, friend. See you in seven weeks.”
Seven weeks.
Wyatt, Jeanne, Nora, and Raj headed toward the bleak buildings, all of them banana yellow, doors painted orange, like children’s toys dropped in a sea of white. Andy had told me the bright colors made the buildings easier to spot during a blizzard. I wondered which orange door he’d come out of that terribly cold night just five months ago. Would we be walking through it with all the gear, talking and laughing and getting to know one another just yards from where he had lain his head for the very last time? Tripping across the hallowed ground where he’d taken his last breath, hopefully past all pain? Maybe he was at peace; how could I know? Maybe he was in ecstasy that he’d finally taken the step he’d been mulling for so long, drifting off where none of us who loved him wanted him to go.
The wind froze tears to my cheeks; I leaned into it and headed toward the blur of yellow and orange and the sound of human voices.
five
Wyatt cracked open the door, motioning for me to hurry up, so I slipped in behind everyone else. For a minute or two we all crowded together awkwardly in the drab hallway, shedding our parkas and stomping the snow off our boots as we coughed the dry, cold air from our lungs.
Powerfully built through the shoulders and arms and well over six feet, Wyatt towered over all of us, but his gait—a tendency to walk along the outer edges of his feet—brought an odd delicacy to how he entered a room. According to Andy, most of the little toes on each foot had been lost to frostbite during an assignment manning a weather station in Antarctica. Still, he wore the ruggedly handsome face of a man who spent most of his six decades outside; he was bearded, black hair salted with white, dark eyes under heavy brows, a strong chin, and a good set of teeth.