“Do you want to go outside?” I gestured at the door.
She nodded, not taking her eyes off me as if I might change my mind.
“Say, outside. Outside.”
“Ou-sigh…”
She slid her agile body to the floor with a thud and padded over to me, her sweater catching on and dragging a piece of a Lego set across the rug behind her. She reached up and rattled the doorknob, brow furrowed as she burned a you promised look into me.
What was I doing? Was this insane? Maybe, maybe not. I’d been running around after her for a week up and down the halls of this place; surely I could keep up with her outdoors for a few minutes.
“Then we have to get dressed, do you understand?” I grabbed her boots and set them next to her. She jammed her bare feet in them as I brandished her socks in front of her. “With socks.” She whipped off the boots and hurried on the socks. I started to layer up too. Every article of clothing I laid before her she dutifully put on.
We stood at the door, parka’d, snow-panted, mittened, and mufflered. It never occurred to me to sign the log. “Are you ready?”
She nodded, pulling her hat down halfway over her eyes.
“Say outside.”
She smiled a little. “Ou-sigh.”
“Are you going to stay with me? Walk with me?”
A slow nod.
“Hold my hand? Not run away?” I held out my hand. She took it. “Be a good girl?”
She nodded yesyesyesyesyesyesyes.
“Do you love me?” I asked, smiling.
She actually smiled back. Nodded once more. Of course it wasn’t real, but it felt good all the same.
Gripping her hand tightly in mine, I opened the door.
She jerked her hand free and charged away from me like a scruffy little rocket, sending me tripping and stumbling forward onto hard-packed snow, the air bitter in my lungs. Behind us, the rime-powdered beach. Black dots—bullet-shaped seal heads—bobbed in the rich blue water. Before us, the glacier that led to the ice lake snaked up the mountainside, disappearing in the pass that cut through the peaks.
Which is where she was headed. Quickly she grew smaller and smaller in all the terrible white. I looked down: I still clutched her mitten.
I ran screaming for her to come back, my eyes tearing, glazing my cheeks.
My oversized snow pants and parka slowed me, binding my limbs. Snot froze and cracked in my nostrils as my steps shortened, stalling in the mounting drifts. The slope steepened. Undaunted, the girl flew higher and higher.
“Girl! Girl, come back!”
The dot turned to look at me, then went back to running, but began to lose steam, alternating brief rests with short spurts up the slope. Still, she would not stop. She was like a train chugging up a track, whipping up billowing clouds that obscured, then revealed her bright red parka. I called out to her again, my voice splintering in the brittle air. Gasping, I rested my hands on my knees—my lungs felt a third their normal size—thought how the StairMaster had failed me so completely, what a waste! I couldn’t catch this girl, and at that moment she felt like the only person on this earth who meant anything to me.
“Stop!” I pleaded. “You’ve got to stop!”
She slowed to a walk but seemed to make just as much progress. Still, I began to close the gap between us. I cursed my stupidity, the huge risk I had taken. Remembered what Wyatt had said about polar bears: Why do you think I’ve got a rifle with me every second I’m outside?
The girl scrambled along the lip of the glacier as if looking for a foothold, then disappeared into a funnel of snow. My heart spun in my chest. Had she fallen into a crevasse?
Wind swept the ice clean; she had dropped to her knees.
I pitched toward her, collapsing next to her; her tiny form lost in Jeanne’s spare parka. “Girl, are you all right? Girl?”
“Tahtaksah,” she cried as she gazed up at the break between the cliffs. She reached up her one bare hand—purple with cold—moaning two words over and over. They sounded vaguely like West Greenlandic for mother and father, but—tahtaksah—the word felt like pure emotion. Does it mean longing? Grief? I knelt on the ice and touched her shoulder; she didn’t push me away. “What are you doing? Where are you going?”
But, of course, I knew where she was going.
“Come on,” I said. “We can’t do this alone, we have to go back.”
She wrenched herself around to look at me. That face: forlorn, bereft, but also determined—I’ll never forget it—so much older than her age. I reached down for her bare hand, but she pulled it away and began a run-walk sort of totter down the hill. I followed at a respectful distance, thanking the gods of the Arctic for her acquiescence. She trundled along in the vague direction of the Shack, but soon it was clear that wasn’t her destination. I thought to stop her but could see the fight had left her, so why not let her have her time outdoors? She was headed to the beach, where a gang of big bergs battled for position along the horizon.