“So you’re from… Minnesota? Duluth area?”
“Now that’s spooky.”
“It’s those long o’s. The flat a’s. Bit of a lilt. It’s charming, actually.”
She turned to me, unsmiling. “But you, Val. You’re blessed in a way. Your talent with words and all. Wish I could have been the one to help with the girl, but I guess high school dropouts don’t fit the bill. Wyatt wanted you up here in the worst way.” She withdrew a flask from under her seat and took a pull. “Whiskey?”
“Sure, thanks,” I said. I hated whiskey, but not nearly enough not to drink it.
“You asked why I came here, though. My husband and daughter were killed by a drunk driver a couple years ago. Wyatt tell you about that?”
“Just that it happened. I’m sorry.”
She nodded but kept her eyes on the glistening ice field. “Everything I was living for—gone, just like that.” She flipped the flask up, took a long swallow. “Best not to linger on it. Few months later, I see this ad for a cook-slash-mechanic way up north, middle of nowhere, and I think—that’s for me. I can fix anything, cook anything, and I love the cold.”
“And you have Wyatt, so you’re not totally alone.”
She shrugged. Ice crystals flashed in her mirrored frames. “He’s my boss. Had tons of them, some better, some worse. He’s not perfect, but he leaves me alone in the ways I need to be left alone.” She gestured with the bottle at the blip of yellow on the stretch of luminous sea ice before us. “Why don’t you head over to the Dome? We can do a circle around it and head on back.” I did as she asked; the machine juddered as I made the turn—too sharp—then fell into the task. “So, you got somebody back home?”
“I’m recently divorced.”
She nodded. “You use those, what are they, dating apps they’re called? Swipe right and all a that?”
I laughed. “I’ve swiped right a few times. No luck, though.”
“I see.” She shifted in her seat, offered me another sip from the flask. “So, the girl, uh, Sigrid—got her figured out yet?”
“Not exactly.” The whiskey burned down my throat. I could feel it joining forces with my meds, making me brave. “Can you tell me what it was like, thawing her out?” I asked as casually as I could.
“That day, that was something,” she said almost wistfully. She freed a beat-up pack of Marlboros from the pocket of her parka, lit one. I drove slowly so as not to distract her, give her as much time as possible to tell the story. “First of all, day we found her, there was no doubt we were gonna cut her out, bring her back. Wyatt’d already froze and thawed out Odin a couple times, and he had some confidence in that regard. Anyway, the first couple days we kept her in the Shed. The ice around her was more’n a couple feet thick in places. But when it got close, maybe a couple inches or so, we brought her into the Shack. Laid her out on a tarp on the kitchen table and just blasted the heat and never left her. Put towels around her to soak up the melt. It started to smell weird in there, like sulfur, but also like flesh, or rotted leather, or mud. I thought of my daughter in the morgue, you know, and I almost couldn’t take it, another dead girl in front of me. I even said to Wyatt ‘Why are we doing this? I can’t go through with this,’ especially after everything that happened with Andy. I mean, a mouse is one thing, but a girl…”
I felt her watching me but kept my eyes on the yellow Dome, stalwart and solitary in the dead white vista. We crept along in the lowest gear, the steering wheel rattling in my grip, the smell of diesel leaking into the cabin.
“But Wyatt, he always has things under control. He’s got his reasons for things, for what he does. Like I said, he’s been a good boss, and I felt like I owed him a little faith, you know? So we watched her till most of the ice was gone. And she became—she was just a little girl lying on the table in a rotted caribou anorak and polar bear pants and one boot, eyes open, and she looked so scared. Then we cut off her clothes real slow, real careful. You think she’s dirty now, but so much of that is stain from those wet skins. We covered her with a couple of blankets, like she was sleeping. It was crazy, what we were doing. Fucked-up for sure. I even said to Wyatt, when we found her, ‘Why not leave her? Why make a mess of things?’ But he wouldn’t have it. She was coming out of that ice. So, there she was. A human being cut out of a glacier lying on the kitchen table. I touched her hand. Her skin was so cold, but not hard anymore. It was softening by the minute, but we had to give her time, because you know things thaw from the outside in, so we were patient. But soon we checked for breathing or a pulse and of course there was nothing, so I was getting nervous. I couldn’t believe we were disrespecting a body like this, a body that had been at peace in the ice. What were we going to do now? If she was dead, and it sure looked like it, how would we bury her in the frozen ground?”