My Last Continent (15 page)

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.

He was also the one who'd fostered my curiosity. When he was home, he'd take me “fossil hunting,” which in St. Louis meant amateur geological digs at the sides of highways. My father would pull off the road, and, along an I-170 road cut, we'd find the shells of crinoids and corals, unearthed by construction crews that had dug into the limestone hills. “All this was underwater once,” my father would say, waving his arm around the flat, suburban landscape. “Right where we're standing—this used to be the bottom of the ocean.”

I was vaguely aware of my mother's dislike of these outings, the fact that my father would arrive home after a week or two away and set right out again, with me, on what she called “silly scavenger hunts.” Yet we didn't talk about any of this—denial was, for us, as natural as breathing—and her unhappiness remained veiled in offhand comments rather than actual conversations.

I, too, learned to keep quiet, having discovered early the perils of being curious, of speaking one's mind, of asking the wrong questions. Early one summer, when I was about eight years old and poking around in the briefcase my father had left on the bed while he packed for yet another business trip, I'd caught a glimpse of something colorful—a flash of red and pink—and automatically reached for it. I pulled out a greeting card with a watercolor heart on the front, and as I opened it my father snatched it from my hand. I'd caught only the word
love
.

“Deborah,” he snapped. “You know better than to mess with my things.”

He never spoke sharply to me. And he never called me Deborah.

“Is this for Mom?” I asked.

A pause. “Yes. Of course.”

“But her birthday isn't until November.”

“It's a surprise,” he said. “So don't say anything to her, okay? It's going to be a very special birthday.”

By late November, I'd forgotten all about it. My father was home for Thanksgiving that year, and he was still in town for my mother's birthday a week later. We had a snowstorm that week, and I went outside to help him shovel the driveway. When it was too cold and icy for fossil hunting, this was one of the few chances we had to be together. As he shoveled the snow to the side of our long driveway, I packed it together to make a short, thick snow wall. When he was finished, he helped me decorate it with turrets and a few guard snowmen. I remember the way he smiled at me—his eyes, usually set somewhere in the distance, looking this time directly into mine.

Later, we took my mother out to dinner at Pasta House—which had my favorite food, toasted ravioli—and later, back home, we seated my mother at the dining room table, where my dad presented her with a birthday cake. It was from Schnucks, but even a supermarket cake was more of an effort than he'd made in years. While Mark and I stood next to her, Mom looked like a child herself as she blew out the single candle on top, then moved on to open the card and the long, slender, gift-wrapped box on the table.

After my father helped my mother try on the delicate gold bracelet he'd given her, she opened the card—and that's
when I remembered. “That's not the card with the heart on it,” I said.

My dad pursed his lips together and didn't answer. The knife Mark was using to cut the cake stopped deep inside and stayed there, and my mother's face seemed to shrink into itself, like a deflated balloon. I don't even remember how our little party ended; I only remember the silence that followed and eventually became the norm.

I didn't know my mother had once been different until I found an old photograph of her and my father, tucked away in a drawer of the dining room sideboard. It looked like summer, and they were sitting together on a balcony, leaning against the railing, my father behind my mother, his arms around her waist. They were both laughing, looking at something happening to the left of the photographer. My dad held a cigarette and my mom a glass of wine; they wore their hair and clothes long and loose. I hardly recognized them when I saw it—they were so rarely together now, and so rarely smiling—and for a long time afterwards I studied them closely, trying to see my dad's once-thin frame, to imagine my mother's face round and happy.

As we grew up, Mark did his best to take my father's place during his long absences. He covered all my dad's chores; he was the last one to bed, after walking around the house turning off the lights, making sure the front and back doors were locked. On summer nights, he'd stand over the grill, my mother handing him a plate of pork chops and foil-wrapped corn, while she and I made deviled eggs and salad and opened cans of fruit.

Why my mother didn't leave my father, I don't know—
maybe she wanted to, and maybe she'd even tried. She spent a lot of time praying. When I was twelve and got my first period—she'd never sat me down for “the talk,” so even armed with sex ed and biology, it took me half the day to realize what was happening—she waved me out of the room, as usual, without opening her eyes or lifting her head. I rummaged in the cupboard under her bathroom sink and helped myself to her supply of tampons. Another two months went by before she noticed.

Back then, my favorite companion was nonhuman. That year, when my father was home for my birthday, he took me to the shelter to adopt a cat—an orange tabby I named Ginger. He'd done this without my mother's knowledge, and when we got home, she refused to let Ginger inside. “I don't want dirt and fleas in my house,” she told us. I was allowed to set up a bed in the garage for Ginger, who spent her days outside, and my father installed a cat door. But I left my bedroom window open at night, and when I called her, she would walk along the roof's gutter and climb in; eventually I'd find her waiting there as soon as I opened the window. Sometimes she would bring me a dead mouse, which I tossed out into the yard. Ginger snuggled with me all night—I liked having her furry body next to me, her light heartbeat—and she woke me every morning around dawn, before my parents got up, as if she knew we'd both be punished if we got caught, and I'd open the window for her to slip out again.

The wild kingdom had always appealed to me more than the human one, but it wasn't until I watched the Adélies feeding their chicks that I saw my family reflected in their ­behavior. The female Adélie makes her fluffy, charcoal-­
colored chicks chase her around for food; the chicks tumble over each other to eat, and one invariably goes hungrier than the other—but their mother wants to ensure that the stronger chick, the one most likely to survive and usher in a new generation, will get the most attention, the most food. To my own mother, I was the weaker chick: As soon as she realized I was more interested in grad school than in marriage, she focused her attention on my brother, who settled down with his college sweetheart, Cheryl; he remained in suburban St. Louis, where he played the role of faithful son year-round, no travel required. When I called home to tell my mother I'd gotten accepted to graduate school, she said, “Did you hear Cheryl's pregnant again?” That was all.

I suspect she turned her attention to my brother because he'd replaced my father in so many ways, but he was also her only other chance at family—Mark and Cheryl, the happy couple, their three kids. Mark never bent or broke the rules; he didn't find things he wasn't supposed to, or, if he did, he never spoke of them. I'd been the one to force my mother to acknowledge what she hadn't wanted to see, and I don't think she ever forgave me for that.

It became clear six years ago, the last time I was home for the holidays. Helping my mother prepare Christmas dinner, I watched her put a place card for my father on the dining room table, even though he hadn't been home for Christmas for the past two years. Earlier, she'd sent me out to the liquor store for the Scotch he liked because we were out. And when I scooped chopped onions into the vegetarian stuffing I was making, she let out a gasp, then insisted I take them out. “Your father hates onions, remember?” she said.

I looked down into the mixing bowl; the onions were still on top, and I sighed and began to spoon them out. She stood over my shoulder, watching, then pointed out a few bits of onion that had slipped down the side of the bowl.

“When are you going to stop?” I asked her. “Just because you make everything perfect doesn't mean he's going to magically appear.”

She stared at me with her flat gray eyes, then reached over and yanked the bowl away. “I'll do it, then,” she said.

“Mom—”

She picked up a knife and began to scrape the rest of the onions from the cutting board into the garbage. “If this is your idea of help, I don't need it,” she said and waved the knife in my direction, as if for emphasis. “Go on.”

I stood there for a moment, but she ignored me, so I left the kitchen and stepped out the back door, taking comfort in the cold.

Now I look out the library's view window, doubting whether I'm equipped for what's ahead—marriage, parenthood—when my relationship with Keller has so far been as precarious as the lives of the penguins. For us as well as them, everything depends on near-perfect timing, and as I stare at the ring he's given me, as much as I want to bring our lives together, finally, for good, I wonder if such a future is possible for me, the weaker chick.

ONE YEAR BEFORE SHIPWRECK

Booth Island

W
e've spent the morning on Booth Island, taking tourists on walking tours, and now, as the passengers are finishing their lunches and taking early-afternoon naps on the
Cormorant,
Keller and I are wrapping up some census work for the Adélies. We've split up to cover the entire colony in the three hours we have, and I've lost sight of him as I study the birds in the rocky nests in front of me.

The project's goal this season has been to do an Adélie count during the peak of their egg laying—which Thom and another
APP
researcher did two months earlier—and again toward the end, which Keller and I will do on our last voyage in another two months, just as the chicks are getting ready to fledge.

Yet now, in the middle of the breeding season, it's not looking good—broken eggs are scattered around the colony, and skuas perch on the slopes above, waiting to swoop down upon errant or abandoned chicks.

I pause and stare at an Adélie sitting on an egg, knowing
there's no way the chick inside is going to make it. By the time we're back for the final count, his parents will be heading north, and he won't be old enough to fledge. Unable to fend for himself, he'll die of starvation, or end up prey for skuas. A few yards away, two charcoal-fluffed chicks sit alone on a rock, shivering, squeaking for food. They won't survive much longer if they don't have a parent show up soon.

As a scientist, I'm not supposed to let this break my heart, but it does.

I linger for a moment, watching the chicks, wanting to pick them up and wrap them into the warmth of my parka and take them home.

I go back to the landing site to meet Keller. The beach is deserted, which doesn't make sense; we'd arrived together in one Zodiac, and I hadn't heard its engine start up again. Then again, you can't hear much of anything over the wind and the sounds of the birds.

I feel a sharp beat of panic at the thought of how unimaginable it would be if anything were to happen to Keller. There's been a certain distance between us on this trip, which isn't entirely unusual—on these expeditions, we are little more than fellow crew members; we don't have the luxury of time or space for much else. I often wish we were back at McMurdo, that we could've stayed there forever—gotten jobs in maintenance or in the galley, in the store or in the bar. Just to stay together.

Now, standing alone on the beach wondering where he could be, I'm about to call him on the radio. Then I see a Zodiac approaching—it's him, his sunglasses coated in sea spray.

“About fucking time,” I say, trying to cover my relief. “Any
one ever tell you it's not polite to leave a person stranded on an island?”

He only smiles, stopping the Zodiac a few yards from shore. “Get in,” he says.

I wade through water nearly up to my knees, feeling the icy chill against my boots. Keller holds out his hand to help me into the boat. He guns the engine as we leave the beach, hugging the shoreline as he swings around a small, snowcapped hill.

“Where are we going?” I ask.

“You'll see.”

His back is to me, and I can't tell what he's up to. I watch the movement of his shoulders as he guides the boat, his weathered hands on the tiller. It still amazes me that this lawyer-turned-dishwasher knows nearly as much about these birds and these islands as I do.

The bergs rise tens to hundreds of feet above us, their craggy white tops etched with the deep blue of older ice beneath. Below the surface, the ice fans out, turning the water a Caribbean greenish blue. Ahead, on a small, indigo-steeped iceberg, a chinstrap penguin flaps its wings as if waving at us. Then it flops onto its stomach and slides into the depths below.

As I gaze out at the white face of the largest berg, its rime scratched with forked edges revealing the old, dark-blue ice deep within, I wonder if Keller and I might age together as beautifully, whether we can last in a world in which everything is melting, disappearing.

Keller glides into a precipitous, stony landing spot. Above us, a gentoo colony is nestled into the staggered, snow- and
moss-covered hills. Keller jumps out into knee-deep water and yanks the Zodiac farther ashore, then holds out his hand for me.

As we climb over the slate-colored rocks toward the base of the hill, he says, “There's someone I've been wanting you to meet.”

He leads me up to the colony, staying clear of the penguin tracks. The penguins let out a chorus of growls as we pass by—the same sound they use to ward off the skuas.

“What have you been doing over here?” I ask.

“Sit down,” he says instead of answering, indicating a large, flat piece of granite. When I sit on the edge, he waves me farther back, so I scoot toward the middle. “Good—right there,” he says.

“What the hell are you up to, Keller?”

“You'll see.” He sits next to me, and I hold my breath for a moment, realizing how completely alone we are, for the first time so far on this journey—away from the ship, the crew, the passengers, with no eyes on us except the penguins'.

But Keller is looking straight ahead, at the gentoos, almost as if I'm not there. From this height, I can see past the iceberg skyline into the gray-green water beyond. The sun begins to poke through the fog, creating a silvery haze, and its blurred reflection appears on the surface of the water, illuminating the smaller chunks of ice that float like stepping-stones toward the icebergs.

“Nice spot,” I say. “I don't think I've ever been here.”

He smiles and shoves his sunglasses atop his head, as if to get a clearer view. He nods toward the sharp, steel-colored points of the rocks, rising from the hillside like spires. “Like cathedrals, aren't they?”

As the sounds of the penguins fill my ears, I think of the
last time I'd been in a real cathedral, the Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis, during that last Christmas at home. My schedule makes it easy to skip holidays; I'm usually on my way to Antarctica, heading home, or on board. I send cards and gifts for my brother's kids, and I leave a voice mail when I know they're at Midnight Mass. The rest of the year, I stay in touch with each of them, separately, via e-mail and birthday phone calls. We live our own lives, and I spend my winters with those whose behaviors I recognize most—the chinstraps, the gentoos, the Adélies.

And Keller. He and I sit on this rock, quiet, right next to each other. After a few minutes, a lone gentoo, a male, emerges from the colony and begins to meander toward us. I watch his bobbing head—black, with two swirls of white above the eyes, flourishes of pale shadow. The marks meet in a thin band on the top of his head and are sprinkled with flecks of white, like spilled salt. He raises his orange bill in the air.

“Here's the little guy I want you to meet,” Keller says.

I laugh. “You two know each other?”

“I call him Admiral Byrd.”

“Admiral Bird?” It takes me a second, and then I get it. “Oh. After Richard Byrd.”

As the penguin approaches, I remain still. My legs are stretched out in front of me, ankles crossed, and the penguin hops over to the toes of my boots and gives them a few curious pecks.

“I banded him last year,” Keller says. “He just came right up to me, climbed onto my shoes, nipped at the equipment.”

Byrd turns his head to the side to look at both of us. He begins walking around toward the edge of the rock.

“Sit back,” Keller says. “Here, put your legs up.” With his hands on my knees, he guides my legs into another position: thighs parallel with the ground, feet flat, knees slightly apart.

As I'm focusing on my legs, Admiral Byrd is hopping up, stone by stone, and, a moment later, he's right next to me. He's about two feet tall, and from where I'm sitting, he looks me in the eye. I notice the metal band at the spot where his left wing meets his body.

“You've got to be kidding,” I say.

I drop my hands. Admiral Byrd takes a few more steps, then in one swift and inelegant move, propels his body onto my lap, belly first.

I gasp at the surprising weight of him; in all my years of research, I've never had a penguin sprawled in my lap like this, relaxed as a cat. I grip the rock with my hands to stay balanced, pressing my feet down into the snow.

“He looks a little heavier this year,” Keller says. He reaches for my hand and pulls off my glove. He covers the top of my hand with his palm and places it on Admiral Byrd's feathered black coat.

Our usual contact with penguins is nothing like this; we touch them only to put on bands, to weigh them, to do the unpleasant but necessary things to learn about and, we hope, eventually to save them. I hate knowing that every time we come near, it could shorten their lives, that every contact must be pure terror, even if it lasts only a few moments.

Tentatively, I run my hand down the penguin's back, his feathers smooth and soft and firm. I can feel his heartbeat through the thin skin of my waterproof pants.

“One day,” Keller says, “I was sitting in the snow making
some notes, and he jumped into my lap. I couldn't believe it. I snuck over here this morning, during breakfast, to see if he was still here. I knew it was him even before I looked at his band.”

“What happened? I mean, how'd he become so socialized?”

“I have no idea. I thought it was a one-time thing. When he climbed into my lap that first time, I thought he was sick, or dying. I wasn't sure I'd see him again. And even when I saw him, I didn't know if he'd do this again, until just now.”

“He could be a whole new project for you. The penguin who thought he was a lapdog.”

A few minutes later, Admiral Byrd raises his head and wiggles forward. Keller moves aside to make room as Byrd clumsily eases his body off my lap and hops down from the rock, as slowly and patiently as he arrived. He wades into the water, as if to gauge the temperature, then dives under.

I turn to Keller. He's watching me, smiling, squinting a little as the sun breaks through. He's still holding my glove and hands it to me. I take it, my hand cold and dirty from the penguin's feathers. I get to my feet, turning to take in the vistas from another angle.

“I like it here. No room for landings. Just us and Admiral Byrd.”

“And about a thousand other gentoos.”

“You've been holding out on me,” I say. “I didn't know you'd been over here.”

“I'm not holding out.” He looks at me. “I just wanted to surprise you. Me being here at all—it's only possible because of you. I wanted, for once, to show you something you haven't seen yet.”

I hold his gaze, remembering the first time we kissed, as
we observed the Adélies; remembering how he'd followed me day in and day out, his curiosity about the birds insatiable. “So you're my teacher now.”

I wrap my arms around his neck and settle in there, the way Admiral Byrd had settled in to me. We stand like that a long time, the wind rippling through our hair, against our jackets. I let go first, and I look out at the water, where Admiral Byrd had disappeared a few minutes earlier. When I turn to Keller, he nods toward the Zodiac and says, “We better be getting back.”

I'm standing close to him, and we're so very alone, and I try not to think ahead, to when we won't be. When we're apart, I feel a tension run through me, an elastic band stretched too thin, but when we're together, Keller calms me, much the way this landscape does; there's a stillness about him, a quiet peace, that I haven't been able to keep with me when we part. I wish we could stay here, just the two of us, with the penguins, build our own rocky nest and somehow survive.

Keller is looking at me as if he knows what I'm thinking, but he doesn't move; neither of us do, for a long couple of minutes. Then he steps away. “Come on,” he says. “It's getting late.”

I don't want to leave, and, as if sensing this, Keller stands by, waiting as I take one long, last look around. Finally we begin walking back to the beach. We climb into the Zodiac, and as I sit down on its rubbery edge and he fires up the engine, I say, “I'm glad I met you.”

He smiles at me, then turns away, his eyes focused ahead, as we speed away from the island.