I reached for the next slide and froze. What am I doing here? I didn’t even know what I was looking for. Blood like a rush of wind in my ears.
The tinkling of an alarm, distant.
The snoring stopped.
My hand shook.
I stopped breathing.
Listened.
Just the buzz of the light over the stove, the malevolent silence from the boundless waste outside the window.
Head pounding, sweating in the chilly room, I put the slides back in reverse order, praying I’d gotten it right. My hand hovered over the test tubes of blood—That empty ring—I couldn’t quite think straight—had I removed a test tube and put it somewhere?
Closing my eyes, I mentally sequenced what I’d just done, praying it was right. Shut the fridge. Padded down the hall, pausing in the shadow of Wyatt’s door. Caught in a triangle of light cast by his lamp, wearing a ragged T-shirt and sweats, Wyatt sat on his bed facing his window, one arm tied off with a length of rubber cord. Poised at the crook of his elbow, he held a needle, plunger at the ready. Perhaps he sensed me there, because his leonine head had begun to turn just as I slipped away and out of sight.
eleven
Sparks flew between Jeanne’s hands as she welded two pieces of metal shelving together, unaware I had come in until the wintry blast from the open door of the Shed hit her. She cut the power and flipped back the face guard of her helmet. She didn’t smile.
“Where’s the kid?” She slipped off her welding gloves and tossed them on the workbench.
“Sleeping. Is this a good time to do this?”
“Good as any. Just about done repairing these shelves,” she added with a touch of pride as she stashed her tools in cubbies above a long worktable truncated at one end by a circular saw. A floor-to-ceiling walk-in freezer took up nearly a third of the space, its door padlocked. Why lock a freezer? I knew the ice cores were stored there, but what else might be?
The thought occurred to me—unbidden—that I had never seen Andy’s body. I’d been too upset to identify it. Dad had taken care of that horrific task. Andy had been cremated, because he’d always told me he wanted his ashes to be scattered over the ocean. He’d said, If I ever die out here, don’t waste a minute grieving for me. Grieve for this dying world of ours, a request I could not seem to fulfill.
My breath bloomed white in the frosted air. Shivering, I wrapped my scarf a little more snugly around my neck. I was there because of Wyatt’s latest dictum: Everyone on-site needed to know how to use all the vehicles. That morning he had run me through the basics of operating the snowmobile, but directed Jeanne to school me on the ins and outs of the snowcat.
And I was praying for a quick lesson. Jeanne put me on edge; something about her was a cautionary tale I hadn’t yet deciphered. The chronic anxiety in her face, her downcast eyes, as if some Sisyphean task consumed her. In fact, she never stopped moving. First to rise, last in bed, she was forever cooking, cleaning, sweeping, hauling, repairing gear, clearing snow. If there was nothing left to do, she’d manufacture a task: flush out the snowmobile lines, fortify the struts in the Dome, rearrange the dry goods in the pantry. She’d even repaired the doll Sigrid had smashed, gluing back together every ceramic shard of its flush-cheeked face. It sat on a high shelf glaring down at us, red lips frozen in its Chiclet-toothed smile, pigtails retied tight.
* * *
WITH A GUST of canvas and machine oil, Jeanne creaked open the passenger door of the cat and heaved herself up next to me. The sun, rallying at its highest point of the day—just cresting the horizon—seemed to be beam cold down on us. A brisk wind rattled the machine as we sat on the glinting ice field. Once I got the hang of remembering to raise and lower the ice blade and rev the motor just so, I had us—after a few clumsy fits and starts—rolling across the tundra toward the frozen bay.
“What brought you here, Jeanne?” I asked after a few nearly companionable minutes.
She didn’t answer right away, and I began to wonder just how awkward this trip would get. But after she knocked around in the glove compartment, slipped on a pair of glacier glasses, and handed me a pair, she cleared her throat to speak. “Not big on being around people, but you could probably tell about that. I’m one of eight kids, the only girl. The only way I could see my dad was to hang out in his garage, and I turned out a better mechanic than any of my brothers. My mom was a pastry chef for this Italian bakery. Cute place. Lots of real whipped cream. She taught me all her secrets too, so in those ways I was blessed.”