“I think this is his way of being human.”
“In my line of work, sharing research is like swapping bodily fluids, so I’m sure it’s the same with art. Not that this is art.” Then he saw Cooper’s sketch of the Terra Nova taped to the wall. “Now this—this looks like art,” he said. He leaned close to it, his eyes roaming from the ship’s figurehead to its masts and riggings. “This is fucking intricate, Cooper. You did this?”
Cooper stepped next to him. “It’s the Terra Nova. The Scottish whaler Scott brought to Pole.”
“Holy shit,” he said softly. He turned to look at her. “This is good, Cooper.”
“You can have it,” Cooper said, not quite knowing why she said it. “I mean, if you want it.”
“Of course I want it.”
Cooper reached across him to remove the sketch from the wall, and as she did so she felt she was toeing the edge, the parade passing by below her. She handed him the sketch and he set it on the desk without taking his eyes off her face. He touched her cheek with his cold hands like she was the most fragile thing on earth. They stood like this for what felt to Cooper like hours, and yet she had no desire to break their silence, or even move. Suddenly, Sal inhaled sharply and shook his head. “I’m just going to say it: I think you’re beautiful and I want to be near you. Can that be enough?”
Cooper responded by leaning into him and, hesitatingly, kissing his mouth. She pulled back to see if this had been a welcome gesture, but his eyes were closed.
She sat on the edge of her bed and watched as Sal dropped to a knee in front of her and began unlacing her bunny boots, unthreading the laces through the eyelets unhurriedly. Once he’d pulled off her boots, he held her feet in his hands and looked up at her. “You should be wearing your blue boots,” he said mildly. “They don’t get your socks wet.”
Then he helped her pull her long underwear over her head, and each time his cold hands brushed her skin, it seemed like getting a good deep breath was impossible. A sense of urgency began to rise up and grip Cooper as Sal undressed her. She scooted back on the bed to make room for him, and watched as he pulled his overall straps off his shoulders, like Cooper imagined a lumberjack might.
But as he reached for his belt, something changed in his expression—he looked at her as if seeing her for the first time, and froze. His suspenders hanging off his waist, and his blue thermal stained with old sweat, the cuffs pushed up to his elbows, he pulled away. He shook his head twice, like he was shaking off a blow.
“Oh god, what?” Cooper said. She looked down at her bare arms and curled into herself, drawing her knees up to her chest. Sal’s back was now against the canvas door.
“I don’t know,” he said, his voice strange. “Something’s wrong about this. I’m confused.”
His eyes searched the room, landing on everything but Cooper’s face. Then they found the compass, the antique compass—baroque, incongruous, but necessary. “The compass,” he said. “Who brings an antique compass to Pole?”
“Who cares?” Cooper said weakly.
“No, it says something. It means something,” Sal said. “It’s messing me up.” Cooper didn’t believe him. Of course it wasn’t the compass. They both knew this was a lie. The compass, with its dumb glass face, was itself a lie Bill had told Cooper again and again since the day he’d dropped it in her hands—that it was all you needed to navigate yourself to safety.
As she watched Sal pulling his suspenders back over his shoulders, Cooper realized there was no longer a reason not to reveal that lie—no reason not to step off the precipice, and no one to stop her from doing it. So she told him about Saganaga, how it had been during the trip to the Boundary Waters with Billie and their father two months after David was found that Cooper had gone wandering, gotten lost. She’d stumbled back into camp around ten at night, her panic long since replaced by indifference to her fate. Billie was already in her sleeping bag. Bill had been chopping wood; he hardly looked up. “You had a compass and you had our coordinates,” he’d said, as if she’d only been out to use the latrine. “Obviously, you don’t know how to use either.”
The next morning, Cooper awoke to find he’d designed a compass course outside of camp. There was a log. Then, ten feet away, a stone. About two yards from that was a Nalgene bottle. Past that, the small wooden box containing David’s ashes.
“I decided last night,” Bill said. “It’s up to you to get us to Lake Gray. You have the map and you have the compass. If we’re not there in two days, we turn back. He remains in the box.” Cooper had no time to absorb her father’s anger before he roughly shoved the antique compass into her hands. He then grasped her shoulders and positioned her until she faced the woods. “What does it say now?”
“North.”
“Wrong.”
“Who cares,” Billie said sleepily from the door of the tent. “That’s what GPS is for.” But something inside Cooper, a half-buried but strong and relentless feeling, took hold of her and said, I care.
But they never got to Lake Gray, not that time, and Cooper held the box in her lap the entire drive home.
All this Cooper told Sal not because she wanted him to understand her—it no longer mattered what he thought about her—but because she wanted him to know that, even if the compass was a lie, she was not. She told him about Cherry and Titus, about her imaginary journeys with David, how Edgar Allan Poe had infected his vision of South Pole, and how she’d come here to make sure their first idea of Pole was the right one, to reclaim it from the lies. Sal listened to all this, his chin on his chest, but when she was done, he said nothing. Cooper felt completely alone.
“I’m sorry,” he finally said, grabbing his parka from the desk chair. “I know I’m being a dick, but I really don’t know what to say. I need to think.”
Cooper understood then that she had unloaded her baggage at his feet and he’d kicked it once or twice before deciding it was too much trouble. She continued hugging her knees, head down, and listened to the rustle of his parka, the metallic étude of his zipper going up, catching, going down, then going all the way up to his neck, and, finally, the sound of his boots retreating down the hall.
Cooper got out of bed, moved her desk chair to the back wall, and climbed on it. She pushed aside the towel she’d hung over the small window, the one she’d looked out of that first day. It was nearly three in the morning, but stark sunlight poured into the room. Outside, the sky was a pale and taut canvas. She glanced down at her desk, and saw the Terra Nova sketch was gone.