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.