“We’ve already met,” Keller says, extending a hand.
I take it. Keller’s hand, ungloved, is warm and rough. I let my eyes hover on his.
“Briefly,” I say, withdrawing my hand. “A while back.”
I haven’t seen Keller since the day I left him at McMurdo, two years ago. He looks at once the same and different—still beautiful, his skin a little more weathered, his stubble a little scruffier. Most noticeable of all, he exudes a confidence he hadn’t had before. He looks as though he belongs here.
Keller had e-mailed me faithfully from the station during his austral winter, and over my own long, humid summer in Eugene, I tried to understand his decision, to put myself in his shoes. I even envisioned him on that bus instead of me, pictured myself staying behind for months of lightless cold while he left for home alone. Yet I wasn’t sure I’d have been able to make that decision as effortlessly as he had.
We had only talked once; phone calls were expensive and hard to coordinate; with limited bandwidth, Skype wasn’t allowed. After that first call, after I could no longer see Keller’s face or hear his voice, as he wrote about overwintering—the biting chill, the inky dark, the supernatural green light of the aurora australis—he only seemed farther and farther away.
His choosing to stay made sense to me—he’d suffered losses that would never fully heal, and perhaps he thought the austral winter in Antarctica would help because, with the onset of darkness, the notion of time disappears along with the sun. That he could trade our plans so easily for an overwinter at McMurdo proved that he was ready to build a new life for himself, but it was one that didn’t include me.
I had worked hard to let him go, and I’m wholly unprepared to see him again, here on the Cormorant, though I should’ve known it would happen. Antarctica is a small world.
After introducing us, Glenn leaves us standing there.
“What are you doing here?” I ask.
“I have a job, same as you.”
“You could’ve told me, at least.”
“How?” Keller says. “You stopped writing me back. You didn’t return my calls.”
I look down at my hands, red from the chill in the air, and try to settle the thoughts swarming through my head, to articulate what I want to say. “It seemed pretty clear that was what you wanted, by staying at the base, then going back to Boston—”
“I only went back to Boston because I hadn’t heard from you. Where was I supposed to go?”
“It’s fine; I get it,” I say. “You did what you had to do. So did I.”
A crackle through Keller’s radio startles us both, and he pulls it from his waist—it’s Glenn, calling with a chore.
“Can we talk later?” Keller asks, and I shrug.
Despite my casual gesture, the knowledge that Keller is on board stays with me every second. The day is chaotic, with my attention pulled in myriad directions—helping the expedition team sketch out a rough itinerary, gathering data and photos for the presentations I’ll give during the journey, pitching in wherever I’m needed—and I see Keller only in passing, within groups of crew members or other naturalists. Yet my heart rate quickens at the sight of him—and even when he’s not around, I feel his proximity like an electric current, a frayed wire, loose and dangerous.
Finally, after the ship is prepped and everything quiets down, I go out to the uppermost deck, the one reserved for crew. In the evening dusk, I look at Tierra del Fuego as thick clouds hover over the mountains and creep down amid the sunset-hued buildings of Ushuaia. Opposite are the calm waters of the Beagle Channel, from where we’ll begin our journey tomorrow evening.
I hear the creak of a hatch opening, then the sound of footsteps on the deck. It’s Keller approaching, smiling just as I remember—a quick, easy smile with a hint of sadness underneath. He carries a worn paperback in his gloved hands. Seeing him, I feel a familiar cool hollowness, like an ice fog settling into a valley—the way I’d felt long after leaving him at McMurdo.
I’d kept busy the spring after I left, working on my data and writing a paper on my findings at the Garrard colony; when the days in Oregon grew long and bright, I taught a summer school class and then got a last-minute gig in the Galápagos on another ship from the Cormorant’s tour company. I’d returned to Antarctica as usual last season, and being on the peninsula felt far enough from Ross Island that I managed not to think too much about Keller. By then, I didn’t know where he was; I’d let our correspondence go months earlier.
Now, as I look at him on the deck, with the breeze in his hair and his eyes fixed on mine, it seems as if time has frozen, as if I’m back in the same moment at the Movement Control Center at McMurdo, when he told me he was staying behind.