A PHYSICAL PAIN envelops me so fully I can hardly tell where it’s coming from. Susan offers me acetaminophen, but I shake her off. Even something stronger wouldn’t help—even if I had no body at all, I’d feel the shock and tremble of all that we’ve lost. At least without medication, I can focus on something: every ache, every twinge, every throb.
Kate makes us tea, and we wait together, taking turns looking helplessly out the porthole. The Cormorant’s engines are running, but we’re still at anchor. Rescuers have already pulled hundreds of bodies from the water, and the decks of the British and Russian icebreakers that have arrived to help are lined with corpses. And when Glenn and Nigel appear at the cabin door, their expressions grave and focused on Kate, I know instantly that Richard is now among them.
I watch Kate’s face lose its color. Though it’s hard for me to walk, I insist on accompanying her as she follows Glenn and Nigel to a Zodiac. She takes my arm, as if to help me, but I can feel her shaking. Glenn tells us that a Russian team found a Zodiac grounded on a sheet of ice, with two frightened Australis passengers inside. Not far away, the Russian crew discovered a body, buoyed by his life preserver.
When we board the icebreaker, they take us into a room. Richard’s body lies stretched on a makeshift table. He wears a life jacket stamped with the tour company’s logo. His face is a whitish blue, his skin slick and waxy. Kate reaches out to touch his face. “At last,” she murmurs to me, “he looks almost relaxed.”
In the Zodiac on the way back to the Cormorant, she asks Glenn the question I’m not able to ask myself: “What about Keller?”
“Nothing yet,” Glenn says.
“But you’ll keep looking?”
“We need to head back soon,” Glenn says, his eyes meeting mine. “But the others are going to keep looking, yes.” For the first time, I hear Glenn’s voice waver, on the edge of breaking.
“Then I’m staying, too,” I hear myself say. Glenn doesn’t answer, but I feel his hand on my shoulder, and he keeps it there until we return to the Cormorant.
Back on board, Kate brings me a bowl of soup, which I can’t eat. Amy comes by to see me, but I can’t talk. I press my face to the glass of the porthole, where I continue to stare out at the water—dirty with brash ice and with debris from the wreck, from the rescue operations—and think of all it has taken.
Nigel, Amy, and a few crew members will remain with the other rescue teams—more bodies need recovering; the Australis is leaking fuel. The recovery work has only just begun.
I look over at a nearby ice floe. An Adélie has just leapt onto it and turned his head to the side, considering the ship. I want to call out to him, warn him to get away—that soon he will be covered in oil; he will lose his body heat, his ability to swim and mate and feed his chicks. But Adélies are territorial. They don’t know how to leave.
THE PAIN AND nausea get worse, and it’s only when I notice the bleeding that I realize I’ve neglected what’s happening inside my own body, where a part of Keller is still alive.
Susan doesn’t have the equipment on board to offer the reassurances I need, but she instructs me to stay in bed. “The body will take care of itself,” she tells me, and this is an odd source of comfort, this reminder that we’re all just bodies in the end, like all other animals.
I sleep fitfully, waking from nightmares of broken eggs, of skuas scavenging dead penguins, of baby chicks drowning in meltwater. I think of the penguins I’ve observed over the years, those who’ve lost their young to predators or bad weather or bad timing. They move on, I remind myself; they can’t afford to stop.
But this doesn’t mean they don’t mourn. When I close my eyes, I can see the Magellanic penguin watching over her mate’s lifeless body at Punta Tombo. I see Adélies wander their colonies, searching for mates that never return; I see chinstraps sitting dejected on empty nests. And, perhaps most clearly of all, I see the grieving of the emperors. The female returns, searching, her head poised for the ecstatic cry. When her calls go unanswered, she lowers her beak to the icy ground. When she locates her chick, frozen in death, she assumes the hunched posture of sorrow as she wanders across the ice. And then, when it’s time, she’ll let the sea take her far away, as I’m doing now.
The Drake Passage
(58°22'S, 61°05'W)
One thing the animal kingdom had not yet taught me is that hope is more punishing than grief.