“That voice… it was like I knew her all along—”
Wyatt shoved himself from the table; the cracked plates rattled. “Knock it off, Jeanne,” he hissed under his breath. “We’ve talked and talked about this.”
Jeanne looked around, searching for a sympathetic face; perhaps that was mine, because her gaze rested there. Wide set and gray, her eyes contained an emptiness that chilled me, a toxic agony that echoed my own. “She was calling for help, but Wyatt, he wouldn’t let me go out and find her, wouldn’t let me go out and let her in—”
“I’m supposed to let you head out for a stroll when it’s seventy degrees below zero?” Wyatt said evenly. “To what, chase some phantom?”
She smiled eerily at me. “Well, she’s here now, isn’t she?”
Wyatt got to his feet, slammed his chair into the table. Outside, the wind voiced its rage, the building rattling like a toy.
I felt a presence in the doorway and turned to look. A pitifully small Inuit girl hovered in the shadows. High, wide cheekbones under bottomless black eyes, ruddy skin that glowed with the heat of the room. Above her quivering upper lip, a drop of clear snot trembled from her nose. Her ink-black hair looked as if a mad person had cut it. Her body was lost in an enormous Christmas sweater featuring Santa’s sleigh and eight reindeer flying up over one shoulder. Its hem swept the floor—it had to be Jeanne’s or Wyatt’s. As she scanned the room, taking in the three newcomers, her eyebrows met in an upside-down V of concern. Slowly, evenly, I got to my feet and said, “Hello, I’m Val,” in West Greenlandic.
The girl let out a scream, pivoted, and bulleted down the dark hallway.
six
A cold, sharp light filtered through my frost-rimed window at just past six, bringing the weird palm trees and grinning coconuts into focus. Already I missed my cramped, lonely apartment. I missed warmth and plants and trees and couldn’t imagine Andy or anyone else loving this brutal, desolate place, but he had.
The smell of coffee drew me from my room. Jeanne’s door stood ajar, bed made tight, creepy dolls neatly arranged sitting against the pillows and staring straight ahead. Raj and Nora were nowhere to be seen.
Bearded like a pirate, salt-and-pepper hair escaping his cap, Wyatt hunched over his computer, mousing over a map on the screen.
“Right there,” he said as I approached with my coffee, pointing to a tiny black dot on a vast glacier. “That’s where we found her.”
It looked impossible. A little girl alone, frozen in place ten feet down the wall of a crevasse. To truly understand her—the realization hit me viscerally—I had to go to this place, no matter how doped up I needed to be.
“I’d like you to take me there. Can you?” My hands rang with pain at the thought of venturing into this white void.
“Your job is to be here, with the girl. It’s not like we have time to waste—”
“My job is to figure out her language, but part of that is knowing as much as possible what happened to her. At least see where she came from.”
He took a bite of a waffle smeared with Nutella and tossed it back down on his plate. “I’ll think about it.”
“Do you buy the story about those caribou hunters who disappeared?”
He looked relieved by the change of topic. I tried to focus on the screen, not on his stockinged feet, especially the empty pouches where his toes were supposed to be. Without boots for support, his walk was shuffling, awkward, though he didn’t seem the least bit self-conscious about it.
“It’s just… where did everyone else go? Why was she alone?” He shook his head. “I am honestly fucking mystified. I’m not sure I believe the story. News gets pretty diluted around here. People don’t keep track of things very well. And it’s a good twenty miles to the mainland. Would they really come here for some caribou, the numbers of which could have been exaggerated? And why would they bring their families? Why wouldn’t just the men go?” He dosed his coffee with a splash of fresh cream Jeanne had swooned over when she unpacked it the evening before. “But, you know, crazier things have happened here, that’s for sure. Those people had nothing, they were desperate. And I know the route the hunters would have taken—but with everything going on, I haven’t had the chance to go out there and really search.”
He zoomed in to the featureless expanse, as if by staring long enough, the mystery of the girl in the glacier would reveal itself. The screen turned pure white, the dot a faint smudge.