Wyatt got comfortable at his desk; Sigrid returned to her scribbling. “I’ve never been more passionate about what I’m doing.” He leaned forward, his face half in shadow. “I’m not just curious about stuff. I have to know. Those odd striations a mile down in the ice, what’s the explanation? How does the world work? It’s almost like sexual frustration, which is pretty much my constant state anyway.” He laughed ruefully. “It’s like I’m a little pissed off all the time that I don’t have the answers to my questions right away. But if I had them, what would be left for me to care about?”
He lowered his voice. “And, Val, listen. I loved Andy—you know that—but I care about all my students. So many of them are going to go on to change the world. They’re doing it now. I’m very proud…” He rubbed his forehead, exhaustion plain in the deep creases of his face. “So what’s left? I’ve got these cores, this fifteen-year body of work, which I’m damned proud of. But now, now? It’s the girl. The girl is everything. The reality of her, the science of her, the why of her. Let me show you something.”
He lifted the top off a long, low freezer in the kitchen. A fog of dry ice billowed into the stale air of the room. Slipping on canvas gloves, he reached in and gingerly lifted out a tube of ice four inches in diameter and a yard long: an ice core.
“See this? Pulled it out of Glacier 27G this morning. I’ve got dozens of these. This is going in the walk-in freezer in the Shed tonight—they degrade if they’re not kept in super-cold conditions. It’s fifty-three below in there. Anyway, I’ve sent hundreds of these back to the states, which is, in total, hundreds of thousands of years of data.” He held up the steaming rod. It glistened in the light that flowed like violet-colored syrup from the window. “You’re looking at a couple decades of climate information—hydrogen and oxygen isotopes, levels of CO2—all compressed into a few centimeters a year. I could spend years reading all of these, trying to understand what was happening during different time periods. It’s like a book written on fine paper. A really, really long book. A puzzle with a million pieces. The difficulty is seeing the whole thing, the patterns among all the clues about temperature, precipitation, volcanic activity—even wind speed and direction—but it all drives me crazy some days, you know? The most sophisticated computers in the world work on this data, and still we have more questions than answers.” He slipped on a pair of magnifying-lens glasses and peered at the core. “Is that what it’s like with Sigrid, Val? Too many puzzle pieces?”
Hearing her name, Sigrid lifted her head and watched us, wary.
I sipped at the dregs of my red wine, dreading my answer. “Her language isn’t rooted in any known language. Certain words are similar enough to West Greenlandic to be loanwords—”
“It’s been more than two weeks.” His tone shifted, chilled. “Closer to three.”
“Look, I’m making progress.” My hand trembled; the skin painfully cracked and raw. Wine shuddered in my cup. “She’s coming along in her own way.”
But I was lying. Again. Sigrid was clamming up, wanting only to wander around outside, watch Nora and Raj do their dives, sit on the counter as Jeanne cooked or hang out with her in the Shed. She was fretful, fidgety, and distracted. Something felt off.
Wyatt nestled the ice core in its wooden sleeve and tucked it back into the freezer. “Fine. I’ve got some homework for her, right here.” He plunged his hands deep into the icy fog and lifted out a shoebox-sized terrarium, its base scattered with what looked like thumb-length orange and black furry turds. Sigrid squinted at the glass box.
“See these little guys?”
I got to my feet and looked down into the clear case.
“Very special creatures. Orange things are Arctic caterpillars. Black guys are Upis beetles. Frozen solid. For weeks now.” He shook them a bit in the glass box; they rattled against its sides. I thought of his slides: muscle, blood, stomach. “These insects can survive any kind of cold, as much as a hundred degrees below zero. Indefinitely.”
In bare feet, Sigrid stepped on her pile of drawings as she made her way to us. Wyatt seemed unable to hide a look of satisfaction. He winked at her. Set the terrarium on the coffee table, its upped edge at her eye level. I sat next to her. She remained expressionless, but he seemed oblivious or simply without fear of acting the fool with children. “So, what happens in nature, when winter comes,” he said, getting all ginned up, sidling up to me like a coconspirator, “is that the caterpillar’s heart will completely stop beating. Then its gut will freeze, followed by its blood. Then the remainder of its body will freeze. It survives all this by producing a cryoprotectant in its tissues. It’s a kind of sugar that protects the cells from the damage freezing does.”