She nodded. He laid his hand across her temple. “Wow, oh wow. She’s on fire. We’ve got to fly her out of here, get her to the mainland right away.”
“Let me have a look at her,” Wyatt said to me. To my surprise, she allowed him to touch her as well, even let him hold a thermometer briefly against her forehead. “Ah, okay. She’s just shy of one hundred. Poor kid. I’ve got some antibiotics. We can crush them up in her food.”
“You need to get her out of here, Wyatt.” Raj squared his shoulders, faced him.
“She has the flu. Or some kind of bug. She’ll be fine. Jeanne, get me some hamburger, and we’ll—”
“And what if she’s not?” Nora said, gathering her gear at the door.
“If there’s no improvement by morning, I’ll make a call, all right?”
Raj slipped on his boots and parka. “Those human remains from the core; I’d like to take a look at those cells.”
Nora suited up with brisk, angry movements. “I understand, Wyatt. This isn’t ideal for you, having us here. But, here we are. So maybe you should smarten up, remember you have witnesses to everything you’re doing.”
With a disgusted shake of his head, Wyatt bent to retrieve the ice core, as Raj began to set up the scope. I carried Sigrid back down the hallway, pausing as she deposited a balled-up slip of paper in my hand. Felt her intense gaze as I opened her present and examined the drawing: five circles, the last slashed red.
“Okay, Sigrid,” I said. “I think I understand.” With a soft whimper, she hugged me so tightly I could barely breathe.
twenty-one
I spent most of the night awake—in thrall—feeling, knowing, that Sigrid was ancient. Realizing that the Inuit words I’d recognized from her speech borrowed from her centuries-old language, not the other way around, and they were mostly concerned with elements of survival. A small, tantalizing window into the distant past.
The next morning, still lost in wonder, I passed Wyatt’s desk, pausing by Odin’s cage. He lay on his side in a sea of food pellets, his breathing rapid, exercise wheel still. I set down my coffee and had a closer look. “Hey, buddy.” I poked a finger through the grate, stroked his white fur. “Why don’t you eat?”
Wyatt whistled as he flipped pancakes in the kitchen.
“Your mouse doesn’t seem to be feeling too well.”
“Ah, he’s fine,” Wyatt said. “You check on the girl?”
The girl. As if she didn’t have a name. “Still sleeping.” After getting her to drink an antibiotic-laced cup of cocoa the night before, I’d put her to bed with a hot water bottle, which enchanted her. She’d dragged it under the bed with little cooing sounds.
Next to Wyatt’s computer, a drawing in Andy’s signature style peeked out from under a stack of file folders.
I stopped petting Odin midstroke.
The sweeping, skilled pen marks shouted from the page like a living presence. I freed the drawing from the pile. Caricatures: Jeanne, sporting her enigmatic smile, stood at the stove surrounded by boiling pots of stew, loaves of bread, cakes, pies; Wyatt waving and grinning as he zoomed over the frozen bay in the snowmobile.
“He made these here?” I asked, collapsing in a chair.
Wyatt finished rinsing a pan and joined me at his desk. “Seemed to calm him down.” He sat next to me. A little too close. He looked handsome in his rugged-polar-explorer sort of way: wide shoulders in double flannel shirts tucked into thermal overalls, wild hair freshly tamed, combed back after his shower. Confusion reigned: was he a monster or just a cranky, lonely, horny misanthrope, a scientist desperate to solve a mystery?
Minute by minute, I changed my mind.
Ignoring his presence, I concentrated on Andy’s artwork. There was a pen-and-ink depiction of me in my teaching clothes, but instead of placing me in the classroom, I stood in an ecstatically beautiful field of flowers. Only when you looked closely was it clear that the flowers and leaves were created with tiny words: I recognized Greek, Latin, French, German, Finnish.
A few tears surprised me. I brushed them away. “I’ve never seen this one.”
“He was missing you when he drew that. It was a long year on the ice for him without you. He talked about you nonstop. I guess twins are like that.” He pulled out another folder; other drawings spilled out: caribou crossing an ice field saturated with violet light, an Arctic hare leaping from a bank of soft snow, a polar bear dragging a bearded seal from a vent in the ice, snow splotched crimson. “I meant to give these to you,” he said. “Just couldn’t find the right time.”