I was lost.
I listened again.
And again.
My face grew hot. Breath clouding the screen, I leaned in close, as if proximity might help.
Nothing—all I understood was raw emotion.
I sat back. Tried to recall all I knew linguistically about where Wyatt was—where Andy had died.
Three main dialects of Greenlandic were spoken in Greenland: West Greenlandic, East Greenlandic, and Inuktun, which had only about a thousand native speakers. In grad school, I’d been fascinated by this culture built from animal skin, sinew, bone, stone, snow, and ice, but in the end, I became more of a generalist. I deciphered languages quickly—given enough context and clues.
I got up and paced, holding my drink. The reality was, I didn’t have to do anything. I could pretend I never opened the email. Ignore Wyatt’s calls. All I wanted was to crawl back home and hide with my booze and my misery and never come out.
If only I hadn’t heard her voice! I could have forgotten the whole thing. But even after the clip stopped playing I could still hear her, feel the sound, a high thrum in my jaw. Talking to Wyatt—even emailing him—brought back all the horror with Andy, but who was this girl? And why no picture or video—was there something he didn’t want me to see? I turned, taking stock of the four walls of my tiny world. My achingly familiar posters, bookshelves, knickknacks—even my framed honors and awards—both comforted and repulsed me. It’s just a phone call, Val, I thought. For the love of God, you can do this.
I knocked back the rest of my Amaretto and picked up the landline to dial Wyatt halfway around the world at his climate research station on Taararmiut Island, translated “land of shadows,” off Greenland’s northwest coast. Already my palm was slick with sweat as I listened to the odd dud-dud-dud of the international call. If it wasn’t too cloudy, and the antennae hadn’t been ripped away by the near constant fifty-mile-per-hour winds, the satellite call would go through, and there would be simply no going back.
two
I pushed through the doors of my father’s nursing home, wondering how many more Saturday mornings I would spend with him—out of a sense of obligation, an old, warped love, or some fantasy that one day he might actually like me. Or, more practically, how many more Saturday mornings he would be here on earth.
Head down, I signed in on a clipboard at the nursing station counter.
“Hey, Val,” said Carla, the head nurse, sliding the window open and peering out at me. “How’s it going?”
She knew about Andy and was a good person, but I plastered on a fake smile as an answer because I just didn’t feel like sharing for one second how it was actually going. “How’s my dad today?” I asked.
“He’s good,” she said, moving on briskly to business—with relief, it seemed. “Hates the new activity schedule. Then again, he hated the old one, too. Skipped breakfast again.” She glanced over a form she’d been filling out when I walked in, before looking back up at me. “He’s in the lounge.”
“Thanks,” I said, now fully anticipating a dad storm cloud and suddenly glad to be sneaking in a box of caramels, which were his favorite, though forbidden on his diabetic diet.
A rehabbed hotel built in the twenties, the home retained the tang of disinfectant, air barely cooler than the heat-blasted day. Sad zebra fish mouthed dully against the glass of an aquarium as they swam in a fog of their own excrement, exquisite combs fluttering.
As if he’d become part of the furniture, my ninety-one-year-old dad, Dr. Joseph Chesterfield, climate scientist, once a strapping six-foot-four hard charger with a fierce intellect and fiercer temper, the terror of climate research stations around the world, sat motionless, sunk deep in the belly of his favorite wingback chair, knobby knees jutting up higher than its arms, several inches of hairless shin on display between pant cuff and fraying polyester sock. He’d dragged the chair to the window for a view of the outside world, a place I knew he missed desperately.
He was fast asleep. I considered my options. I could catch up on some grading back at the office, Marie Kondo my spice cabinet, ride the stationary bike in my bedroom for precisely three miles—
He opened one aquamarine eye. “You said ten o’clock.”
“I lost track of—”
“It’s ten past eleven,” he stated firmly, with no watch, clock, or phone in sight. I glanced up at the wall clock behind him. Exactly ten past eleven. He hitched himself up to a slightly more organized position, swept back cottony wisps of hair, and gestured to a matching chair. “Sit,” he said. “Contemplate the universe with me.”