Maksim nodded and said I should get some rest after the long trip. He told me Clara’s belongings were in a box in her sleeping pod, waiting for me.
When I departed for Siberia, my granddaughter, Yumi, sobbed at the airport even though, at almost ten, she insisted she was fine. Miki asked me again if I was absolutely sure about doing this. At least wait a few months, she said, so you’re not heading into winter. But I knew that if I stayed, I’d delay indefinitely, and the specter of my daughter would have faded from this faraway land.
I never could picture the place where Clara had chosen to disappear in her final years. When Yumi asked Miki and I where her mother was, we would point to a map, search Google Images for the Batagaika Crater and northern Siberia. My wife helped Yumi make papier-maché dioramas of the region that they populated with tiny toy bison, dinosaurs, and 3D-printed facsimiles of our family, on an expedition where time didn’t matter.
“Your mother loves you,” I’d reassure Yumi. “Her work is important.” And part of me believed this, but I’d also given Clara an ultimatum the last time we were all together, telling her she needed to come home, that it wasn’t fair to Yumi or to us. Apart from the postcards and the occasional video calls with Yumi, I hadn’t spoken directly to my daughter in over a year.
Before I realized her research outpost was an international effort, I’d imagined Clara roughing it in a yurt, falling asleep beneath animal fur, cradled by the light of the Milky Way. I saw now that her sleeping pod was a three-by-ten-meter cocoon, nested into the wall of one of the domes. Lined with thermal fleece, it had LED lighting, bookshelves, a fold-away worktable, and cargo netting for storage. I searched a duffel of her belongings that I found tucked into the netting—clothes, toiletries, one of her disaster journals, a personal diary, an old iPod, a few artifacts she’d procured on her travels—but the item I’d most hoped to retrieve, Clara’s crystal necklace, was nowhere to be found. I hoisted myself onto her bunk and removed my hiking boots, peeking under the mattress and inside a ventilation grate, anywhere she might have hidden her pendant for safekeeping. My feet had baked during the long journey, and the cheese-like odor filled the bunk, mixing with the stale scent of cigarettes and sweat that permeated the rest of the station. I lay back for the first time since leaving America and searched through Clara’s iPod, stopping at the Planets suite by Gustav Holst. The triumphant horns of the Jupiter movement transported me to happier times when Clara’s wonder was still caught up in the stars, like when she insisted her third-grade solar system project had to be at the correct scale or got into trouble at science camp for inventing a story about the lost star sister of the Pleiades that was once visible in the ancient African sky. What did Clara think of when she looked at the cosmos dancing above the gray of the tundra here? I grabbed her diary and began flipping through it, trying to hear her voice again.
Day 3: It’s amazing how the interior of the crater has already given birth to patches of green. Mammoth tusks protrude from the mud, while new plant life takes root. With the frequent landslides and ice melt creating temporary streams, the whole area has become a washing machine, mixing up the new and the ancient. Everybody here understands what’s at stake. It’s hard to ignore the Earth when it slowly destabilizes beneath you as you sleep, when it unlocks secrets you never asked for or wanted. On my first night, I stood outside and listened. And maybe it was my imagination, but I could have sworn I heard the soil churning, the dance of a million dead insects, early humans, and wolves.
Day 27: In the wild, most parents will fight to the death to protect their young. On some level, I know my parents understand this. I do not answer their messages because I’ve said all that’s left to be said. I believe Yumi hears the song of the Earth when she sleeps. I have to believe she knows why I can’t be there for her plays and soccer games and all the other things. She’ll be okay. My colleagues here have children, too. They say their kids don’t understand or that they aren’t as close as they would like to be. But we’re here to ensure that they and their children and their grandchildren can breathe and imagine—and so they don’t have to deliver the eulogies of so many species. Happy birthday, Yumi. If you ever read this, know that I never stopped thinking of you.
I set the notebook aside and returned the iPod to the duffel bag, noticed another item wedged in the corner, wrapped in a pair of fleece socks: a worn photo and a carved figurine. The picture was taken three years ago, when we’d met up with Clara in southern Alaska. Yumi had just turned seven, and I was excavating a four-hundred-year-old Yupik village that was slowly washing out to sea.