Melt (11 page)

“Can I start it up?” Brian asked, nodding toward Curly.

“Sure. Go for a spin.” She tossed him the keys, then glanced down to the dock to see a bright orange kayak on the beach. “What’s this? A visitor? That looks like Nivi’s kayak.”

“Who’s Nivi?” Brian asked.

“She’s a local. Lives nearby. I haven’t seen her since last summer. Every once in a while she’ll come by to sell us fish. Maybe she’s brought us a salmon or a halibut. I hope so because I’m tired of eating out of cans.”

Jordan walked to the center of camp just as Sonja arrived, her arm around another young woman’s shoulder, a shapely brunette wearing a T-shirt, shorts and hiking boots. Her boots and legs were splattered with dried mud and her demeanor suggested weariness.

“There’s been an accident,” Sonja explained as they approached. “We need to call for help.”

The stranger looked up and met Jordan’s eyes with her own light brown ones. Eyes the color of amber ale, searching, worried and instantly familiar. Jordan uttered an involuntary gasp.
Kelly Sheffield!

Kelly’s weary anguish was instantly transformed into shock. “Jordan!” she exclaimed, staring unbelievingly.

“You two know each other?” Sonja asked.

“Yes,” Jordan replied, rapidly collecting herself. “Kelly used to be a student of mine. What’s happened? Are you hurt?”

Kelly looked around in confusion. “Is this your camp?” Her eyes flooded with tears as she pulled away from Sonja and flung her arms around Jordan’s neck, leaning on her heavily.

“Jordan,” she gasped, “thank God! You’ve got to help. Pippa’s out there somewhere. She’s lost or hurt or…I don’t know what happened to her.”

Jordan held her loosely, stroking her back to calm her, confused and uneasy as Kelly’s sobs overtook her.

“Her friend Pipaluk,” Sonja elaborated. “She wants us to call a search team. She’s been lost for several hours now. She was lucky to run into the old woman over there.”

Jordan glanced toward the dock where Malik and Nivi stood in conversation. Still muddled, she gently freed herself from Kelly. “Yes, of course we can call for help. We have a satellite phone. I’ll make the call right now. You should come along to answer questions.”

Kelly nodded her understanding, her eyes full of emotion and bewilderment. She’s not the only one who’s bewildered, Jordan thought.
What the hell is Kelly Sheffield doing in Greenland?

Jordan led the way to her tent, Kelly close behind, wiping tears from her face but no longer crying. Jordan couldn’t shake her amazement at seeing her here. It had to be a coincidence because Kelly was clearly as surprised as she was.

She held the flap aside, then followed Kelly in. The tent was separated into two distinct rooms by a curtain made of sheets. On the right was Jordan’s personal space, her cot, dressing table, a shelf of books, a rack of clothes. On the left was a more public area with several chairs, equipment, stacks of boxes, and a long table containing a computer, radio and telephone, all the tools that kept them connected to one another and the rest of the world.

She led the way to the worktable and offered Kelly a chair, pausing to take a better look at her. She must be thirty years old now. The track of her tears stained her cheeks where they had traveled through a layer of dust. She was beautiful, Jordan noted with awe. Changed but familiar with her clear pale complexion, small ears and nose, delicate features. Jordan observed her full, feminine mouth, as alluring as before, the same mouth she had so foolishly tasted nine years ago.

The last time she had seen Kelly, Jordan recalled, her face had been also been stained with tears.

It had been on her twenty-first birthday. Jordan had invited her out for a drink to celebrate. Her first legal drink and a rare social occasion for the two of them. Jordan didn’t usually go out with students, especially not ones who were in love with her. But this was an important day. In addition to the landmark birthday, it was the last time they would see one another and they both knew they were saying goodbye forever.

Ever since Jordan had told Kelly she was leaving to take a position at UCLA, Kelly had been morose. At first, she had said she was coming to LA too, but Jordan talked her out of it. Kelly was in no position to do something like that, in the middle of obtaining her degree and with almost no money. It would have been the height of folly. “The most important thing,” Jordan had advised her, “is your education. Don’t let your emotions sidetrack you from what’s truly important.” Don’t make the same mistake I made, she could have easily added.

Kelly was fundamentally a practical girl and so she relented. Perhaps she even understood that Jordan’s departure meant that she would be free at last from a hopeless infatuation. With Jordan out of the picture, she could move on and find someone more appropriate to love.

With all of this in mind, as they said their final goodbye in the car outside Kelly’s apartment house, Jordan had gathered her in her arms for an embrace. Then she pulled back and looked into her distraught, lovely face and the outpouring of love in her eyes, and was moved to kiss her. Very deliberately on the lips, a romantic, tender kiss that lasted only a few seconds, but pulsed with sensuality and focused two years of Kelly’s desperate longing into a single moment.

That had been Jordan’s parting gift to Kelly, one kiss.

What a hypocrite!
she accused herself, grabbing the satellite phone from its charger.

At the time, she had told herself she was giving a gift to Kelly. But she’d been lying to herself. She had just wanted to kiss her, plain and simple. She’d wanted to kiss her for a long time, but she couldn’t allow it until she was leaving. When it couldn’t lead to anything. Then she had simply walked away. After two years of basking in the warm glow of Kelly’s love and giving her nothing but crumbs, she had finally released her. Jordan had given her just enough affection to keep her love alive, but never enough to nourish or satisfy it. She had been utterly selfish.

During her attempts not to exploit young Kelly, that’s exactly what she had ended up doing. She had led her on and she was ashamed of it. The only excuse she had for herself was that she too had been young. Younger, at any rate, and still learning how to protect herself from her treacherous emotions.

Back then, she hadn’t been accustomed to being worshipped. It had felt wonderful. It was heady and hard to resist. It was easy to understand why so many of her colleagues succumbed to it, taking these girls or boys as their lovers, even though they looked absurd and incurred the ridicule of their colleagues. Inevitably the young devotee was moving on to the next interesting thing, usually within a month or two. But Jordan had kept her worshipper at her feet simply by denying her what she wanted most.

She dialed the local emergency number.

“I hope somebody can get out here fast,” Kelly said, clearly distressed. “I’m so worried Pippa is seriously hurt. Or even…” Again her eyes grew moist with tears. She never had been afraid of her emotions.

Is she in love with this Pippa?
Jordan wondered as the dispatcher’s voice came over the phone: “
Alarm 112, hvad kan vi hjælpe med?
”

Chapter Eleven

Pippa’s situation was now out of Kelly’s hands. All she could do was wait and hope the search team found her in good shape.

A few steps away, one of Jordan’s students, Brian, the tall, bearded one, stirred a pot of canned stew on the camp stove while Malik, the taciturn Greenlander, stood beside him slicing a loaf of bread into careful, even slices. He was a muscular, clean-shaven man of medium height in a gray wool sweater and dark pants. Kelly found herself staring, fixated, at his head. His fine black hair was cut in a modified mohawk with a ridge of long hair across the crown and much shorter hair on the left side. On the right, it was completely shaved to display a red and white tattoo on his scalp, a depiction of the Greenland flag. The design curved around his ear and extended to his temple. She had never seen anything quite like it. In his left ear, he wore a two-inch long shark tooth earring.

Besides Sonja and these two young men, there was one other student in camp: Julie, a sporty young woman who wore her long brown hair in a ponytail and whose attitude seemed cool and critical. She brought a stack of bowls to the stove and delivered them one by one to the table as Brian filled them. They worked together in silence, a well-orchestrated team used to their routine.

Brian scratched his dense beard with his pinkie, then smiled at Kelly who sat at the table in navy sweatpants loaned to her by Sonja. She felt much better after cleaning up, though removing the mud had revealed dozens of small scratches on her lower legs.

Malik’s dog, Atka, lay curled up nearby, dozing. He was a beautiful blue-eyed husky. Unlike all the other dogs she had seen in Greenland, this one was allowed to wander freely. Atka was a pet, apparently, not a working dog.

Sonja arrived and lit a kerosene lamp that hung under the canvas ceiling sheltering the dining space. The sun had dipped below the tall cliff of the fjord, casting the camp into shadow and lowering the temperature significantly. Kelly knew it wouldn’t get any darker as the night wore on, but it would get colder. Her mind flew again to Pippa and she had to push back another wave of tears.

“How are you?” Sonja asked, pausing beside her chair.

“I’m fine. Thanks. Feeling much better.”

Everyone was present under the dining tarp except Jordan. Kelly waited in tense anticipation for her appearance.

Seeing her again after nine years had sent Kelly into a significant shock. She hadn’t been prepared, despite her many mental rehearsals. But they weren’t supposed to meet like this. All of her carefully constructed greetings had gone unexpressed. Instead, she had fallen apart all over Jordan—literally—in exactly the way she’d been determined to avoid.

She hadn’t expected such a powerful emotional impact at seeing her again. When their eyes first met, a tsunami of emotions had washed over her. She had been so confused and surprised she had been unable to formulate words or thoughts. She couldn’t remember what Jordan had said or what her face had revealed, if anything. By the time Kelly had recovered enough to pay attention, Jordan was perfectly composed and treating her like it was just another day at the office. If she had revealed any emotion, good or bad, Kelly had missed it.

It was too late now for the kind of first impression she had planned. All she could do was try to recover some decorum for the remainder of her visit.

Over the years, Kelly had had many fantasies of running into Jordan again, ranging from brief chatty dialogues to life-altering sexual encounters. On occasion, she would imagine a quite different situation in which Jordan would meet her again and be blown away by the woman she had become. She would be sorry they had ever parted and want desperately to be with her. Kelly would coolly rebuff her, saying, “I’m sorry, Jordan. You had your chance and now it’s too late.”

Despite the occasional revenge fantasy, Kelly had no resentment toward Jordan. Jordan simply hadn’t wanted her. Looking back, that made so much more sense than it had at the time when she had asked, “Why not?” The real question should have been, “Why?” She had been an inept and needy girl, a child in Jordan’s eyes. As Jordan had pointed out, it would have been unethical. “I would never get involved with a student,” Jordan had told her.

As Kelly had told Pippa, she’d had nothing to offer Jordan back then. Even so, Jordan had been kind and indulgent despite what a bother Kelly must have been. She had shown the greatest possible compassion, especially in the end.
That kiss!
So sensual. So moving. It had burned on her lips for weeks and then continued to smolder in her mind for years. It had been the first truly romantic kiss of her life and breathtakingly perfect. She’d given up any hope by then of anything but friendship with Jordan and even that had come to an end. It had been completely unexpected, that kiss. How sad and pathetic she must have seemed to compel Jordan to offer that charitable token at the end.

There was no doubt she’d come a long way since then. She was neither fragile nor pitiable now. She wasn’t that girl anymore.

But what about Jordan? Had she changed too? Almost a decade later, she looked fantastic, almost the same. Her face was leaner than it had been, the way a woman’s face loses fullness as she ages, and her hairstyle was a shorter, more utilitarian cut than the one she used to have, but still the same dusky brown color. Her eyes, her inscrutable blue-gray eyes, were unchanged, intelligent and penetrating. They were the sort of eyes that seemed to see everything and reveal nothing.

“Where’s Jordan?” Brian asked, taking his chair at the table.

“She’s in her tent,” Sonja answered. “I’ll go get her.”

As Sonja shoved her chair back, Jordan emerged from her tent and walked toward them.

She wore a green Polartek jacket over a navy turtleneck T-shirt. She walked in a relaxed gait to the table, smiling at the group, her gaze lingering briefly on Kelly before she sat down. There were no rings on her fingers; she wore no earrings or makeup. She was, as always, perfectly natural and effortlessly lovely. Kelly felt tremendously happy to find Jordan so entirely as she remembered her.

“Any word about Pippa?” Kelly asked.

Jordan shook her head. “Not yet. They wouldn’t have had time to get there yet. But with the coordinates you gave, the search area can be precisely determined, and I’m sure it won’t take them long to find her. They’re very practiced at this sort of thing.” She glanced around the table at the others as she took her chair. “Nivi didn’t stay for dinner?”

Malik put bread and butter on the table and took his chair. “I did invite her, but she wanted to get home. She took a loaf of bread. I hope that is okay.” He spoke more haltingly and with a thicker accent than Pippa’s, but his English was excellent, smooth and practiced.

Kelly couldn’t help staring at the right side of his head and his patriotic tattoo. His eyes were so dark, no pupils were visible.