Wyatt turned toward Jeanne. She stood by the snowcat, far from earshot, watching us.
“Well, she’s not remembering right.” He pointed to his head as if to say Jeanne’s a little off, haven’t you noticed?
I ignored his bid for a wink and a nod. Waited. The alcohol like hot ice in my veins.
“Okay. Let’s go over it again. Andy and me were working on our separate projects. I was cataloging the cores. He was… experimenting with different ideas about Odin. But he was pretty depressed. Nothing was working out for him. I know he was looking at some permafrost studies and getting freaked out by them. He was a gloom and doom kind of guy a lot of the time. Look…”
My voice rose to a fever pitch. “Jeanne said she heard you laughing, that you guys were having a great time. Such a great time she went off to work in the Shed, and—”
“Val, you’ve got to calm down, okay? Just calm—”
“I’m calm.”
“You need to take a few steps away from that thing, come on, a few steps toward me…”
“I’m fine where I am.”
He hazarded a few paces closer, arm outstretched. “Just take my hand, okay?”
My body felt wooden with cold, molten with vodka and fury. The always-setting sun bled frozen gold beams across the expanse.
His expression shifted from one of concern to something darker, as if another possibility had opened up for him.
He let his hand drop to his side. “Val,” he stage-whispered, as if someone was listening, “no matter how badly you may want it to, my story’s not going to change just because you keep asking me the same damned questions over and over. It’s not going to suddenly turn into some kind of fucking revelation for you, or for me, or for anybody, okay?” He took another step toward me, ice squeaking under his boots. Spitting distance away. “It’s going to be the same horrible, sad, tragic story, I’m sorry to say. It could have been something as stupid as Andy going out for his chocolate. He was always hiding his stash from me. He liked it frozen, and he knew I’d find it in any of the freezers, so he probably had a place outside. Could have been something as stupid as that. Just that idiotic and simple. Him going out for his chocolate. Maybe he got turned around out there somehow, we’ll never know.”
“Andy hated frozen chocolate.”
Wyatt took another step toward me, closing the gap between us. One push and I would go careening into hell.
“I got him to like it.” His face so close I could see snowflakes landing on his eyelashes, smell the smoky wet wool of his hat.
“I don’t believe—”
“I don’t get you, Val. You’re an enigma to me. I haul you all the way up here to do a job, something I was under the impression you were uniquely good at, by the way, and all you do is fuck me over. Andy’s all you’ve been thinking about. I should have known. No wonder you’ve got nothing on the girl.” His countenance took on an ugliness, as if he were making some terrible calculation; my own pale, small face reflected twice in his lenses. He glanced back at Jeanne, nodded. A signal? She turned away, busied herself with something on the sled.
“Has all this been a waste of time, Val?”
A fresh wind savaged my cheeks; in vain I tried to feel my fingers in my gloves, to feel the contours of Andy’s lead heart. Cold shivered from the crevasse, calling me down.
“Because that’s what we should be discussing here. Have I wasted four precious weeks? Would we all be better off without you? What do you think?”
He stood legs spread apart, spiked boots dug into the ice, a human wall. Behind his shoulders, mountains sliced black daggers up into the sky, dove gray in the purplish light.
“Enlighten me, Val,” he said. “What the fuck do you want from me? Do you want to go home? Is that it? Because I can arrange that. I can get Pitak here in a day and a half—”
“I want to stay.” My voice barely audible over the siren call of the fissure.
“I think—no, I know you know more than you’re telling me about the girl. That’s what concerns me. You keeping secrets from me.”
I took a step away from the abyss and toward him, close enough to hug. He didn’t budge. “I know this, Wyatt. You have zero chance with Sigrid without me.”
Jeanne fired up the cat. Swung it in a tight circle away from us, idling as she faced toward home, as if whatever happened between us was something she didn’t want to witness. Without a word, Wyatt turned and trudged across the bleak stretch of ice toward the cat. Each of his steps left me more alone in the Enormity, set me deeper into a bloodless blue-gray world, the light ominous over the shimmering expanse. He did not look back. Climbed into the cat next to Jeanne. All pride erased, I broke into a run, crying out to the both of them to wait for me, begging not to be left behind.