She blew a lungful of smoke out a crack in the window. We sat just beyond the Dome in a world of white, the low sun spearing us with icy late-afternoon beams. “Why don’t you cut the motor? You need to practice starting her up a few times anyways.”
Nodding, I turned off the ignition, cutting the heat, the glow of the dials; stilling the shaking joystick. Immediately I missed the reassuring hum of the motor. In seconds, the temperature plummeted in the cab, the vicious cold slipping through every crack in metal or glass. My blood grew gelid in my veins as I clutched the wheel.
“Then her left hand twitched under the blanket. We both yelped and jumped back. After a while, I thought we both imagined it. But then her jaw dropped, and her mouth opened and closed, so we checked for a heartbeat—nothing. So: boom—right away, Wyatt was on her with the defibrillator. Just about bounced her off the table she’s so small, but he did it again and nothing. She wasn’t breathing. Eyes still glazed over, both hands still—like what we’d seen was just some side effect of a body thawing—and I begged him to stop, but he wouldn’t. I begged him in Frances’s honor—Frances was my daughter—to stop. I said, ‘Wyatt, maybe this is some rigor mortis thing setting in, just leave her be.’？”
Her voice had broken a little. I didn’t dare start the machine and break the spell. A searing breath of icy air whooshed up my spine, encircled my legs and feet in a frigid vise. Hatless, gloveless, Jeanne seemed oblivious to the cold; it seemed to enliven her.
“I smelled flesh burning, but he kept at it long after I would have, you know, given up. But that’s not Wyatt. That’s just not him. He willed that girl alive. I was in the corner in a pile sobbing, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry, forgive us this unholy thing,’ to whatever gods this girl prayed to. I was begging him, begging him to stop, Val, you understand?”
I nodded, teeth chattering, but she wasn’t looking at me; she was gazing out at all the white, deep in thrall of the Enormity, which seemed to be drawing the tale out of her. “Must have been the tenth try, something changed. You could feel it in the room; this crackling energy filled it up. He was looking down at her, smiling. From where I sat, I saw her hand shoot up and sort of smack his arm, and I screamed and jumped up and ran over. The girl was coughing and gagging, threw up all over the floor but she was breathing! She was breathing. Wyatt, I mean, he was spattered with puke but he had this look of rapture, like he was in his own sorta church. Standing next to him like that, watching her try to catch her breath, this little filthy, naked child, hair in knots, I was trying to understand where on God’s earth she had come from and what had happened to her. And I felt like, in a weird way, we were her parents, or her second set of parents, you know what I’m saying? I mean, he started her little heart, but we worked together to bring her out of the ice, to bring her alive. Think about that.”
She reached under the dash and withdrew a dog-eared photo, handed it to me. A younger, thinner version of Jeanne, fresh-faced and quite pretty, almost delicate-looking, her eyes not buried in thick flesh and sadness, pushed a young girl on a swing. A tall man in a flannel shirt stood in the background, hands stuffed casually in baggy jeans, smiling as he watched. “That’s my husband, Adam. My daughter, Frances.”
“I’m so sorry for your loss. She was beautiful, what a great smile.”
She took back the photo, passed her rough thumbs over her husband and daughter’s image. Said, “Pitak thinks God saved Sigrid because killing all her family and all the hunters who were going after those herds of caribou was too much of a punishment. It was this act of mercy, you know?”
“Could be.”
She turned to me. “I’m sorry you were punished. To lose your brother like that. Your twin, even.”
My fingers stiffened with cold; I forced myself to move them. “Tell me what it was like, Jeanne, to find my brother that day.” The gates seemed open, so I had to try. I steeled myself for her answer.
She took another sip of whiskey; her face closed down. I wondered if we’d be able to start the motor again, or if the cold would knock it out. “Wyatt found him, not me.”
“What happened the night before?”
“Come on, you… Wyatt must have told you everything by now.”
“He told me his version.”
“Well, I don’t know what you’re getting at,” she said testily. “There’s only one version.” She pushed herself up in her seat, capped the flask. “But all right, if you need to hear about it so bad. Him and Wyatt had some contest going on for months about trying to find out what made Odin thaw out alive. They messed around with everything: shellfish, moss, lichens, flowers, even pollen—every kind of combination of stuff. That night they were drinking, laughing a lot. Drunk. Or maybe they were arguing, it was none of my business. They were the best of friends, they didn’t need me around.” She flicked her half-smoked cigarette out the window; the wind sucked it away. “Well, that’s half-true. Wyatt still needed me for day-to-day stuff ’cause Andy wasn’t great at the nitty-gritty, you know, he wasn’t great at doing the kind of homework you gotta do around here to stay alive: scouting glaciers for the safest routes, keeping track of equipment. You got to be Johnny-on-the-spot with this stuff, it’s life-and-death. Don’t get me wrong, I liked him, he was a good man—”