I see the red bandanna as he swings himself over the side of the inflatable and begins to pull it up on the sand, not far from the makeshift hot tub where Thom looks up from taking photos of the wading passengers. As soon as Keller’s feet hit the ground, Thom’s face breaks into a smile, and I watch the two of them shake hands and slap each other’s backs. And by the time Keller turns around, I’m right there, my arms around his neck even before he has a chance to speak.
“This is an illegal landing, you know,” I whisper into his ear. His shaggy hair whips against my face in the wind, carrying the scent of the sea.
“You going to report me?”
“Maybe.” I pull back to look at him, at the spreading grin creasing his face, which is thinner than when I last saw him, but also, somehow, more relaxed.
“What are you doing here?” I ask. “You can’t land all those passengers, can you?”
He shakes his head. “We’ve got a few VIPs who paid big bucks for a special landing,” he says. “Group of ten. We’ll bring them over later tonight. But when I heard the Cormorant was here, I couldn’t miss the chance to see you.”
“You’re crazy, you know that?” I say. “You’ll get fired. Again.”
He kisses me. “It’ll be worth it.”
I look around—a few yards away, Kate is still in the hot tub with two other passengers, and Thom is stowing equipment in a Zodiac. The beach is otherwise empty; for the moment, I’m free.
I grab Keller’s hand, and we make our way inland, toward relative privacy behind a large rusted oilcan where, about twenty feet away, a chinstrap penguin stands alone. We’re not exactly out of sight here, but we’re out of earshot, and the penguin is the only one watching us.
“I’m sorry I—” I begin.
He puts a chilly finger to my lips. “I don’t have much time here,” he says, “so let’s not waste it.”
He pulls something from his pocket, then reaches for my hand. He turns my palm upward and lays the object down in my beat-up glove.
At first I can’t tell what it is, exactly—it looks like a thick, tarnished, silvery ring with some kind of engraving—but when I hold it up and look closely, I recognize it. The penguin tag I’d given him, completely transformed.
On the outside of the narrowed band are six numbers and the word Argentina. On the top is a raised setting into which is nestled a ruddy stone, barely larger than the face of a pencil eraser; the white streaks veining the layers of pink resemble the wave of a mountain range.
“It’s Argentina’s national stone,” Keller says, “rodocrosita. Nothing fancy,” he adds, “but somehow I didn’t think you’d want a big diamond from Tiffany’s.”
I look from the ring to Keller’s face.
“I love you,” he says. He takes the ring and pulls off my glove. “I figured if we make it legal, you’ll finally believe we can find a way to be together.” He slips on the ring.
I hold my hand up so I can get a better look. The tag-turned-ring is both elegant and sturdy against my red, chapped skin—the only piece of jewelry I’ve ever been given. “I always wanted to wear a penguin tag. It seems only fair, given how many I’ve doled out.”
He smiles. “I have a jeweler friend in Boston who’s a wizard.” He takes my hand. “By the way, you haven’t said anything.”
“About your tagging me, you mean? What do you need for your field report? I’m a known-age bird—”
“—who still hasn’t chosen a mate.”
I laugh. “Is there a question on the horizon, Mr. Sullivan?”
“Will you marry me, Ms. Gardner?”
I look down at the ring again, then back up at Keller. I press my body against his, my gloveless hand against his neck. “Yes.”
“I came so close to asking you over the phone because I didn’t think I’d get a chance to see you,” he says. “I know the timing isn’t the best—”
Then I lean back in his arms so I can see his face again. “It couldn’t be better,” I say. “There’s something I need to tell you.”
Right then, loud voices bark from my radio, and I reach toward my hip so I can turn off the volume. Just for a few more minutes.
But from the corner of my eye I see Thom bursting into a sprint, running toward a gathering crowd near the base of a cliff. Keller sees him, too. “Something’s happened,” he says. “We better go.”
“Wait—” But Keller’s already racing after Thom, so I follow, pulling my glove back on as I jog over the rough sand. We reach the crowd, and I touch my stomach briefly before looking up at the cliff, which ascends sharply above the black sand.
Nigel, who was supposed to be giving a tour, is near the top, around what would be the fourth floor of this five-story mountain, and down below, around the second floor, clinging to the rocky surface like a gecko, is Richard.
“What the hell,” I mutter, and, next to me, Thom is shaking his head. Nigel should have known better than to rock-climb with tourists around.
Nigel’s not unlike me—here as a historian because it’s a way to get to Antarctica. At seventy years old, he’s hardy but decidedly old-school, and he’s never quite learned that, on these trips, he’s no longer an explorer or a researcher but a tour guide, and he needs to set a good example. He’s an old dog, Keller said once, as an excuse, and he was right. Nigel’s cracked, leathered face bears the marks of four decades of frostbite and sunburn; his nose is a permanent, unnatural shade of red, and his beard is white with age and sun—I’d once been astonished to see a photo of a young Nigel, black-haired and smooth-faced. When he’d worked for the British Antarctic Survey, he helped restore the survey’s research huts across the continent and, later, helped dismantle them. Last winter, he told me how he’d helped dismantle the Station J hut at Prospect Point, clearly conflicted about the orders to take it down. “Tough choice,” he said, “preserving history or preserving the continent.” We’ve become comrades in conflict as we guide heavy-footed tourists across the ice.
Still, Nigel tends to forget that he is not here on his own, that when he is on the staff of the Cormorant, he is being watched at all times—not just by Glenn but by the tourists. And apparently, when he decided to climb up the sheer side of a bluff in plain view of a tour group, he had a copycat, who is now stuck. Richard had made it about twenty feet up, but now he isn’t moving, too high to jump down, and too unstable to keep going up.
Thom is on his radio, telling Glenn what’s going on, and in the meantime Keller moves closer to the cliff, shouting up at Richard as Nigel shouts down. Through the grayish haze, a light snow is falling, slickening the rocks that Richard is trying to hold on to with his bare hands and rubber boots. As I get closer, I can see him searching for a better hold, his whole body quivering with the exertion of trying to stay put. The ground twenty feet below him is rocky and rough, and I hope he hasn’t looked down.
Nigel’s gaze is locked on Richard, and even though Nigel’s snow-flecked beard covers most of his face, I can see he is serious, focused.
“Stay where you are,” Keller calls out to Richard. “Don’t move.”
But at the sound of Keller’s voice, Richard turns, and as he does his balance shifts, and rocks crumble beneath his boots, the stones tumbling down toward us.
“Hang on!” Nigel shouts.
Richard has managed to find a solid piece of rock, and he hugs the cliff, stable for the moment, shoulders ticking upward with each short breath. He’s not going to last long, and my own breath begins to shorten as I realize what might happen here. A tourist, dead on our watch. His own fault—but that won’t matter. He shouldn’t have come here; he doesn’t belong. Really, none of us do. As I watch the trembling of his body, his arms and legs straining to keep a hold, it feels suddenly as if it’s the ridge itself that’s quaking, the island shuddering underneath us—as if this long-dormant volcano is awakening, ready to reclaim the isla
nd, the entire continent, all of us who are doing our part, bit by tiny bit, to destroy it. I feel as if we’re poised for disaster, as if the cliffs might break apart at any moment, as if the seas might start to boil, as if we might all be buried in another layer of carcasses, bones over bones—the goddess Gaia’s final revenge for all her grievances.
Nigel has climbed up about ten feet, to a small plateau, and he’s now on his stomach, lowering a rope toward Richard. Meanwhile, Keller has begun climbing up the side of the cliff toward Richard and is about halfway between him and the ground.
From below, Keller snatches the rope, looping it around his hand. Richard’s grip loosens, and his body begins to peel away from the face of the cliff—but Keller reaches out, catching his wrist.
Both men drop, falling fast—and then the rope grows taut, jerking them hard against the side of the cliff. Nigel slides forward on his stomach, his arms bracing against the rocks at the edge as he struggles to keep himself from going over.
Keller is holding on to Richard’s wrist with his bare hand, his other hand clinging to the rope, which has to be cutting painfully into his skin.
Nigel lowers the rope at a rapid, almost free-fall pace. Richard scrapes against the jagged wall on the way down. Keller is holding tightly on to Richard, but then his other hand begins to slip. When they are about six feet off the ground, the rope finally, inevitably, rips through Keller’s grasp, and the two of them tumble onto the rock- and snow-strewn sand.
“Oh my God.”
I haven’t even noticed that Kate has been watching right beside me; she rushes toward Richard, her winter clothes having been quickly donned again, ski pants stuck above her boots, her coat unzipped.
She helps Richard stand up. “Are you okay?” she asks. She sounds more vexed than concerned.
“I think so.”
I kneel next to Keller as he gets to his feet, his hand bloodied and torn. “Oh, no.”
“It’s fine,” he says. He takes off his bandanna and wraps it around his hand, blood darkening the fabric.
With Thom now at his side, Richard takes a tentative step, then another. As he looks down at his own body, as if to make sure it’s still intact, I see a round beige disk behind his ear—a seasickness patch. He keeps his head lowered for a few moments, looking embarrassed. Finally he turns to look at Keller, and then up at Nigel, who is gingerly making his way down the face of the cliff. He doesn’t look at his wife.
“Thanks,” he says in Keller’s direction, still not making eye contact. “It didn’t look that difficult from the ground.” Then he starts walking toward the boat landing. His shoulders slump, and his gait is hesitant and awkward.
Kate stares after him, her expression incredulous. As Thom hands her Richard’s jacket, she glances toward Keller’s wrapped-up hand. “I’m so sorry,” she says.
But Keller’s eyes are looking past her, and I turn to see Glenn approaching, walking in that rapid, no-nonsense way that means he’s pissed off. Nigel is now on the ground, collecting the rope. His hands, too, are scraped and bleeding.
Glenn plants his feet and glares at Keller. “I should have known. Can you go anywhere on this planet without causing trouble?”
“It’s not his fault, Glenn,” Thom says. “Keller and Nigel saved the guy’s life.”
“That passenger never should’ve been up there in the first place.”
“What’re we supposed to do, chain them to the beach?” I can’t help but come to Nigel’s defense. “He snuck up there before Nigel could stop him. We can’t control the crazy ones.”
“This doesn’t concern you.” Glenn turns his glare on me, then Keller. “I’d like to speak with Nigel,” he says coldly, nodding pointedly at Kate, who I hadn’t realized is still standing there, taking in every word.
Thom takes her arm, and Keller and I join them as they begin walking back toward the landing site.
“Is your husband always such a daredevil?” Thom asks Kate.
She shakes her head, visibly upset. “No. Not at all.”
“You might tell him to lose the seasick patch,” I tell her. “Those things have some weird side effects.”
She looks alarmed. “Like what?”
On a voyage about six years ago, a man came up to me during a landing asking where he was—he had no idea he was in Antarctica. He wore a medicated seasickness patch, and once it was removed, he recovered completely within twelve hours. Not everyone suffers side effects, but when they occur, they can be serious.
“All sorts of things,” I say to Kate. “Blurred vision, confusion—in rare cases, hallucinations. I’m just saying, if this isn’t like him—you never know, it could be the meds. At any rate, you should take him to the ship’s doctor. Make sure he’s really okay.”
She nods, and she looks so overwhelmed that I feel bad for not speaking to her more gently. “I’m sorry about your hand,” she says to Keller.
“Don’t worry about it.”
Richard is waiting at the landing site, eyes on the ground, and Thom helps them both into a Zodiac. I feel Keller’s hand on my back.
“I better go,” he says. “I’ve stayed too long already.”
I don’t want him to go—there’s too much more to say—but when I look over my shoulder and see Glenn and Nigel approaching, I know we don’t have time.
Keller hauls the Zodiac into the water, and, with one foot in the boat, he leans over to kiss me one more time. I feel the icy water through my rubber boots as I move as close as I can. His mouth feels different now, and it’s not just the wind-chapped lips, the prickle of his beard; he’s looser, and there’s a give in his touch that I’ve never felt before, a lack of the old intensity, as if it had dropped away like the life he’d been planning to leave behind in Boston. Maybe he finally had.
After he spins the boat away from shore, I pull off my glove again and look at the ring. It’s nothing I can imagine any woman wanting, a recycled piece of metal with a chunk of marbled stone in its center. It’s beautiful. It’s perfect.
JUST AFTER THE announcement that dinner is being served, I wander into the ship’s library to waste a few minutes; we naturalists always go into the dining room last so we can sit where the empty seats are. I scan the bookshelves, looking for something to distract me.
I glimpse a book on a table and pick it up. Alone, Byrd’s book. I wonder for a moment who had plucked it off the shelves this afternoon, who might’ve sat here reading it, perhaps leaving it to return to later.
I think of Keller, who embraced aloneness after his marriage fell apart. At least he’d been married once and wants to try it again. My whole life has been stats and inventories and censuses and hypotheses. People like Kate think I’m worldly because they’ve met me at the end of the earth, but in reality my world is very small.
Most of the time, I keep myself preoccupied with the birds; I’ve rarely let myself succumb to the charms of the males of my own species. There was Dennis. There was Chad, in college, who never knew the extent to which he’d altered my life. There was a professor in graduate school, an ornithologist twice my age. And, in the years after that, my love life consisted of little more than the occasional blind date set up by Jill and other university colleagues who worried I didn’t get out enough. I’d eventually give in, unravel my hair, wear something other than cargo pants and fleece—but nothing ever lasted more than a few weeks, a couple of months; I’d eventually break it off, or the guy would save me from having to do it by bowing out first.
Traveling, of course, makes relationships a challenge, though perhaps it’s only an excuse. I often thought my eagerness to see the world stemmed from my father’s long absences; his work kept him in cities across the country more often than at home, and it was rare to see him even on holidays. I came to believe that whatever was out there had to be far better than what was at home in Missouri.
He was also the on
e who’d fostered my curiosity. When he was home, he’d take me “fossil hunting,” which in St. Louis meant amateur geological digs at the sides of highways. My father would pull off the road, and, along an I-170 road cut, we’d find the shells of crinoids and corals, unearthed by construction crews that had dug into the limestone hills. “All this was underwater once,” my father would say, waving his arm around the flat, suburban landscape. “Right where we’re standing—this used to be the bottom of the ocean.”
I was vaguely aware of my mother’s dislike of these outings, the fact that my father would arrive home after a week or two away and set right out again, with me, on what she called “silly scavenger hunts.” Yet we didn’t talk about any of this—denial was, for us, as natural as breathing—and her unhappiness remained veiled in offhand comments rather than actual conversations.
I, too, learned to keep quiet, having discovered early the perils of being curious, of speaking one’s mind, of asking the wrong questions. Early one summer, when I was about eight years old and poking around in the briefcase my father had left on the bed while he packed for yet another business trip, I’d caught a glimpse of something colorful—a flash of red and pink—and automatically reached for it. I pulled out a greeting card with a watercolor heart on the front, and as I opened it my father snatched it from my hand. I’d caught only the word love.
“Deborah,” he snapped. “You know better than to mess with my things.”
He never spoke sharply to me. And he never called me Deborah.
“Is this for Mom?” I asked.
A pause. “Yes. Of course.”
“But her birthday isn’t until November.”
“It’s a surprise,” he said. “So don’t say anything to her, okay? It’s going to be a very special birthday.”
By late November, I’d forgotten all about it. My father was home for Thanksgiving that year, and he was still in town for my mother’s birthday a week later. We had a snowstorm that week, and I went outside to help him shovel the driveway. When it was too cold and icy for fossil hunting, this was one of the few chances we had to be together. As he shoveled the snow to the side of our long driveway, I packed it together to make a short, thick snow wall. When he was finished, he helped me decorate it with turrets and a few guard snowmen. I remember the way he smiled at me—his eyes, usually set somewhere in the distance, looking this time directly into mine.
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