“Last week.” Stone-faced, Wyatt clicked his PC alive. “Saint-Eustache in Canada. Small town north of Montreal. Temperatures bouncing all week from fifty, sixty degrees to zero or below. Friday? Boat ride on the Saint Lawrence. Four people freeze to death. Why? How?” He clicked some more. “The week before. Amsterdam, ten p.m. A woman’s walking her dog along the seacoast. Both found dead the next morning, frozen solid. You think nothing’s going on out there? You think what I’m doing here with the girl isn’t important? It might be the most important science on earth right now—”
“Why didn’t you film it?” Raj said quietly.
“What?”
Raj crossed his slippered feet on the coffee table just next to the ice core. “Sigrid thawing out alive.”
Sweat popped on Wyatt’s brow. “We just didn’t. We were too caught up in what was happening.”
“You know, whenever I go to thaw a child from the ice, I set up my camera first thing.”
“Get your fucking feet away from that core.”
Raj didn’t acquiesce; in fact, he settled in a bit. “You’re telling me you didn’t think of that? You weren’t interested in proof?”
Wyatt swung his arm down. Punched Raj’s feet, sending them—and a couple glasses of beer—flying off the table, just missing the core. The glasses shattered against the wall as Raj was knocked sideways. He sprang to his feet like a boxer, Nora at his side. I breathed the hoppy stink of beer as it soaked into the rug.
“All I’m asking is for you to goddamn listen,” Wyatt said, face dark. “You think you can just hear me out?”
Raj shook his head in disgust, wandered over to the counter, and poured himself and Nora two more glasses of beer.
“This is science,” Wyatt hissed. “It’s messy. It’s flawed. You know that. Look, the slightest wobble of the sun—”
“The sun wobbles?” Raj said.
“It can. It does. It’s complicated, but the tiniest shifts can cause extremely fast freezing and thawing events. Big changes in the ice sheet can create its own weather, its own crazy swings. You know that. You can’t deny that. They don’t know what caused the Little Ice Age, but I bet it did terrible things to people’s lives. Decimated their food sources. Drift ice must have bottled up entrances to the fjords. Bowhead whales couldn’t get through. It completely disrupted migration patterns for caribou, birds, seals, everything. It would have pitted people against each other for resources.”
With great care, Wyatt picked up the core and placed it in the low kitchen freezer. “I mean, think about it! Those winds must have been nuts. People’s number one priority—besides finding food—must have been protecting themselves from those goddamned piteraqs.”
A tinny, mechanical sound quieted him. Sigrid’s new favorite toy, a windup walking polar bear, marched into view from the hallway. It churned along in lockstep, face fixed in a perky bear-smile, until, slowly, it ran out of gas and stopped dead, one plastic foot midair.
I jumped up. “Sigrid?”
No answer.
I sprinted down the hall. She sat slouched with her back against her door, feet sticking out from her sweater, chin dropped onto her chest as if the weight of her head was too much. Listlessly she fidgeted with Rudolph’s nose, now just a few red strings. “Bahl.” She looked up at me with exhausted eyes.
I put my hand on her forehead—too hot—and picked her up. She didn’t resist. I held her against me, the knotted cord of her spine heartbreakingly slight under my hand as I carried her into the living room.
Everyone spoke at once.
“She okay?” Raj said.
“Sigrid, sweetheart.” Nora rushed over to us. “What are you doing up?”
“You hungry, kiddo?” Jeanne opened the fridge, pulled out a bowl of leftover fried fish.
“What’s wrong?” Wyatt came toward us, hands on hips.
Sigrid moaned and turned her head away from the crowd of concerned faces, resting her chin on my shoulder. Nora touched her forehead, grazed her cheeks, said, “Shit.”
“She sick?” Wyatt said.
“Maybe the flu or something,” I said. “She’s got no resistance, after all.”
Raj approached her. “Hey, honey, it’s Seal Man.” At the sound of his voice, she turned toward him; her face brightening a bit. His gentleness moved me. “Not feeling so great, huh. Okay for me to just touch your forehead for a second?”