“So, was she standing?” Raj asked.
“It looked like she was running.”
“Was she alone?” Nora asked.
“As far as we could tell,” he said with a heavy sigh, as if he didn’t want to be sharing this much information, but part of him was relieved to be doing so. “We took a day or two to scope out a big area, a couple of kilometers around us. Absolutely nothing out there. Nothing we could see, anyway. So we went back with this battery-powered saw, but I had to be real careful. Didn’t want to hurt her. But we did it. Cut around her and hitched this big block of ice to the cat. Towed it back here.”
“But this island has never been inhabited,” Raj said. “The literature, the history, all the charts say—”
“Look, here’s the going theory,” Wyatt said, lifting his eyes to Raj. “Last year, there was a major caribou migration change, maybe because of all the warmer summers we’ve been having—except for this one, anyway. Thousands of animals were coming through here. There’s a village a dozen miles south of Qaanaaq. Just across the water on the mainland. Very isolated. They’d been suffering a few really bad hunting seasons. Bearded seal population down by half, no narwhal, no polar bear. Even the fishing was bad. So a couple families pulled up stakes and came out here for the season.”
“What happened, do you think?” Nora asked.
“We got a lot of sleet that year. Coated the lichen, just encased it in an inch of ice. The theory is the caribou starved to death. No one ever heard from the families again.”
“Why not just return the girl to her village,” Raj said, “if that’s where you think she’s from?”
“It’ll happen soon enough.”
Raj shook his head. “So what does Pitak think of all this?”
“Remind me, Raj, why that is your concern?”
Raj took off his glasses, wiped the shining circles with the tail of his flannel shirt. His eyes big and vulnerable-looking without his spectacles. “Child of color, taken by a white man, it’s not like it’s a new—”
“Aren’t you listening, man? Nobody took her, we found her—”
Raj looped the wires of his glasses back over his ears, face hardening. Nora leaned into him a bit with her shoulder, but he ignored her. “It’s not right to keep the girl from her family, her community—”
Wyatt raised his voice a notch. “Nothing’s been proven. If she was with her family, then where are they? They would have fallen down the same crevasse, been nearby.”
“They could be anywhere—”
“People from this village, if that’s even where she’s from, speak the same dialect as in Qaanaaq, but Pitak couldn’t understand any of the sound bites I played for him. Why is that? We just don’t know her story. And don’t forget, he doesn’t know she thawed from the ice, only that I found her and she’s alive.” He took a big bite of a brownie, chewed. “People talk.”
Everyone stayed quiet. The cold violet light of the Arctic sunset poured over us, turning our faces bloodless and pale. My head pounded with exhaustion.
“What’s she like?” I asked quietly.
“What’s she like?” Wyatt shook his head. “The first day, all she did was scream. She was terrified of us, of everything. She smashed plates, lamps, dumped out all the kitchen drawers, but now, now… it’s like all the air’s gone out of her. We try, but truth is, she’s freaked-out and confused. Inconsolable.”
“Looks like you’ve got your work cut out for you,” Nora said to me.
I nodded, my heart thrumming in my chest. Inconsolable. How could I possibly comfort her? Everyone seemed wrapped up in their own thoughts. I inhaled air tainted with our breath and congealing beef stew, felt our human closeness in the cramped room, the weight of our isolation, the unsaid. I thought of the level one storm that had delayed our flight from Thule, recalled Pitak saying that even a rescue flight was at the mercy of the weather. Pictured a little girl dropped into a new world, one with complete strangers babbling nonsense words. I’d break a few things too.
Jeanne fingered a saltshaker shaped like a happy cartoon whale, absently dumping a tiny mountain of salt in the palm of her hand, then pouring it onto her plate. “I heard her crying outside my window all winter long. I kept telling Wyatt—I don’t know how many times—but he just said—”
The color rose in Wyatt’s face. “Not now, Jeanne.”