So go back to sleep, I told myself.
But I couldn’t.
Something felt off.
I slipped on my clothes and padded down the hall. My stomach dropped at the idea of going into the kitchen. The night before, after we’d all agreed to do nothing with the baby for the moment, Wyatt suggested putting him in the refrigerator, which caused Nora another round of hysteria. The compromise was to leave him where he was for the night: on the kitchen table, covered by a towel. As I shuffled into the kitchen, I couldn’t bring myself to look at him, even concealed, so kept my eyes averted from the table as I made my coffee, then settled on the couch near the picture window.
Eyes glazed with fatigue, I scanned the snowfield, luminous under turquoise skies. What was that? Something was advancing, slowly, steadily down to the brash ice at the shore. Hot coffee lingered in my throat, burning me. I swallowed, slamming the cup down. Bolted to the window. The red dot bobbed along, the only movement on the icy slope.
Sigrid.
What the hell was she doing?
I whipped around, scouring the kitchen. Yelped.
The baby was gone. Even the towels were gone.
I glanced back out the window. Sigrid was a red speck now. I suited up fast and woke Nora and Raj as quietly as I could.
* * *
WE PLUNGED THROUGH the violet half-light, the snow oddly soft under our boots. Even as I ran, I wondered, What is different? I whipped off my hat and stuffed it in the pocket of my parka, realizing I was too warm with it on. The air felt above freezing, full of moisture, even with the strong wind bearing down off the glacier. Our boots sank to our ankles in the snowpack.
Massive bergs floated on the horizon, an eerie Arctic skyline. My ears rang as distant blocks split and calved, exploding in the swells. Closer to us, along the beach, several dozen walruses dozed, a wide brown wedge along the line of foaming surf.
We called out to Sigrid. She ignored us. In the middle distance, she paused at a small, dun-colored lump, knelt down briefly as if to examine it, then tore off again toward the beach. Nora and Raj approached it, slowed, stopped.
From a few yards away, I realized it was a baby walrus, pulling itself along by its flippers, its old-man mustached face low to the ice; leathery wrinkled skin shuddering at our approach. It whimpered softly as if in pain. I ventured a few steps closer.
“Val, stay back,” Nora said. “He’s probably sick.”
Sigrid stopped at a relatively calm stretch of beach. Just beyond her, waves broke in a slurry of foam over chunks of ice that ground against one another with raucous squeaks and groans. Permeating the air, an overpowering fish smell from the walrus herd.
Exchanging looks, we slowed as we approached so as not to spook her. Finally, she turned to look at us. Nora uttered a little gasp. Sigrid had blackened the area around her eyes—she must have used the charcoal pencils from my box of markers and crayons. Her droopy eye looked terrible, its inflammation emphasized by the black.
“Tahtaksah,” she said. Sad. “Baby dead.”
She removed the knapsack—mine, I now realized—and laid it gently on a scattering of ice-glazed pebbles. Kneeling, she loosened the drawstring of the main compartment and eased out the towel-swathed body of the little boy. He wore a pink doll’s hat from one of the dolls she’d never played with.
Raj got down to help her, but she pushed him away. He held up his hands in defense, said, “Okay, Sigrid. Okay.”
“Don’t take it personally,” I said. “Women are the last to touch a body in her culture.”
Several yards from us, a thousand-pound bull walrus grunted and barked, eyes bulging from his regal head. He jacked himself up on his front flippers, broke from his herd, and began to waddle toward us, his bulk rolling and quaking.
“Keep your voice down,” Nora whispered. “You don’t want to startle them. Any loud noise and they’ll charge.”
I nodded. The animal paused, lowering his great muzzle to the snow as if to size up the level of threat, before wrenching his colossal bulk back in the direction of the brood.
Stumbling slightly, Sigrid made her way to the nearest floe and lay the baby down facing the great purple dome of sky. Even as she retreated from the beach, a wave, lead-colored and syrupy with cold, skulked under the berg, lifting and sucking it back among its brethren. In his pale green towel and pink hat, the child looked like a doll that had fallen from the sky. In seconds, a stronger, angrier wave lifted and swept him out several dozen yards. No one could reach him now. We all stepped back as though the ocean might take us, too.
On his floe, the baby drifted and twirled, bobbing with the ebb and flow of the swell until, one last time, he dipped down and out of sight, and all was a wash of blue and white again.