“She seems better,” Nora said with a little laugh.
“Her fever’s gone, but have you seen her eye?”
“No…”
“Sigrid.” I got up and gingerly approached her. Nora followed. “Look at me.”
She spun around as if she understood me, her face full of intelligence, soft brow furrowed. The outer corner of her left eye drooped and was tearing up. She shrank back but let us both have a brief look before getting fed up and turning toward the window.
“Has Wyatt seen this?” Nora asked.
“He says she’s fine. Says kids get pink eye.”
Nora walked around the bed for a closer look. “That’s not pink eye. But it could be a kind of palsy that goes away when the cold goes away—”
“You really believe that, Nora?”
She sighed. “I don’t know what to believe anymore.”
Sigrid’s door swung open; Wyatt’s haggard face appeared. The sight of the two of us talking seemed to embarrass him slightly, but he recovered fast. “Raj and Jeanne and me are ready to go. Cats are loaded up. Think you can get her suited up in a couple of minutes?”
I said, “She’s not well enough to go, Wyatt.”
“I don’t think it’s a good idea either,” Nora said.
He shifted his weight in the doorway, a rifle slung over one shoulder gleaming in the dimness. “We discussed this last night and we agreed, remember? I need all of you to help out. She can’t stay here alone.”
“Why don’t I stay back—” Nora started.
“Her fever’s gone,” he said. “She won’t even have to leave the cat. I’ve got blankets, hot chocolate. She’ll be like a bug in a rug.”
Neither of us said a word.
“Get her dressed,” he said, pulling the door shut behind him.
* * *
THE SUN WAS a smear of yellow paste between the pearl-gray worlds of land and sky. Though the air was still, it nipped at the flesh. Wrapped in Jeanne’s old red parka, Sigrid settled next to me in the back seat, occasionally drumming on the window with her fingers. Her fascination with glass was not lost on me; perhaps the last “window” she’d looked through was much less miraculous, affording her only light and shadow through lengths of stretched seal intestine.
As we approached the glacier, Sigrid gave off an air of mania, rambling to herself in low tones, not even attempting to make herself understood. Behind us, we towed a Dr. Seussian contraption Jeanne had built—its use a mystery—a circular plate as big as a garbage can lid she’d hooked up to a motor.
In the front seat—Jeanne riding shotgun—Wyatt motored on, inscrutable behind his mirrored glasses as we crawled along the rough, uneven ice toward the glacier that undulated over the mountain pass. To our left, the land sloped down to the beach. Slashes of red stained the gray and white brash ice.
Wyatt thrust the cat into neutral; behind us, Nora and Raj did the same in their snow machine. He cracked the window to help clear the steam; a horrendous smell leaked in. Three starved-looking polar bears, their ribs evident under loose, dull hides even from a distance, ripped at the beached body of a rotting beluga whale, the ocean heaving small bergs at them as they tried to drag it out onto shore and fight over it at the same time. All three bears halted their efforts and turned their bloody faces to us, as in: Who else do we have to kill in order to eat our meal? One lost interest in the whale entirely and started a huffing sort of run toward us, enormous black footpads flashing in all the white, leaving a trail of gore in the snow. Wyatt took us out of neutral fast, and soon the bear lost heart and turned back. Scoured by salt wind and mist, the red turned pink, then was erased, and all was blue gray again.
As we crawled up the glacier between gleaming ice cliffs, Sigrid broke out of her odd funk. She squirmed into the front seat and sat on Jeanne’s lap, eking a rare laugh out of her. Jeanne’s device clanking and banging, we coasted a few yards across the ice side by side toward the glacial lake, until we stopped and all was silent. Already the shadows of the cats stretched nearly halfway across the lake as the sun flattened on the horizon. More than ever, a desperate loneliness seemed to dwell in this place.
Wyatt broke the silence. “Val, you and Sigrid stay in the cat.” He unlatched the door and jumped out onto the ice, Jeanne right behind him. But there was no keeping Sigrid in that cab. She grabbed the door handle and swung herself out and down to the ice, glancing back at the sled where Wyatt, Jeanne, Nora, and Raj gathered around the ungainly piece of equipment.