My Last Continent(29)

We had only talked once; phone calls were expensive and hard to coordinate; with limited bandwidth, Skype wasn’t allowed. After that first call, after I could no longer see Keller’s face or hear his voice, as he wrote about overwintering—the biting chill, the inky dark, the supernatural green light of the aurora australis—he only seemed farther and farther away.

His choosing to stay made sense to me—he’d suffered losses that would never fully heal, and perhaps he thought the austral winter in Antarctica would help because, with the onset of darkness, the notion of time disappears along with the sun. That he could trade our plans so easily for an overwinter at McMurdo proved that he was ready to build a new life for himself, but it was one that didn’t include me.

I had worked hard to let him go, and I’m wholly unprepared to see him again, here on the Cormorant, though I should’ve known it would happen. Antarctica is a small world.

After introducing us, Glenn leaves us standing there.

“What are you doing here?” I ask.

“I have a job, same as you.”

“You could’ve told me, at least.”

“How?” Keller says. “You stopped writing me back. You didn’t return my calls.”

I look down at my hands, red from the chill in the air, and try to settle the thoughts swarming through my head, to articulate what I want to say. “It seemed pretty clear that was what you wanted, by staying at the base, then going back to Boston—”

“I only went back to Boston because I hadn’t heard from you. Where was I supposed to go?”

“It’s fine; I get it,” I say. “You did what you had to do. So did I.”

A crackle through Keller’s radio startles us both, and he pulls it from his waist—it’s Glenn, calling with a chore.

“Can we talk later?” Keller asks, and I shrug.

Despite my casual gesture, the knowledge that Keller is on board stays with me every second. The day is chaotic, with my attention pulled in myriad directions—helping the expedition team sketch out a rough itinerary, gathering data and photos for the presentations I’ll give during the journey, pitching in wherever I’m needed—and I see Keller only in passing, within groups of crew members or other naturalists. Yet my heart rate quickens at the sight of him—and even when he’s not around, I feel his proximity like an electric current, a frayed wire, loose and dangerous.

Finally, after the ship is prepped and everything quiets down, I go out to the uppermost deck, the one reserved for crew. In the evening dusk, I look at Tierra del Fuego as thick clouds hover over the mountains and creep down amid the sunset-hued buildings of Ushuaia. Opposite are the calm waters of the Beagle Channel, from where we’ll begin our journey tomorrow evening.

I hear the creak of a hatch opening, then the sound of footsteps on the deck. It’s Keller approaching, smiling just as I remember—a quick, easy smile with a hint of sadness underneath. He carries a worn paperback in his gloved hands. Seeing him, I feel a familiar cool hollowness, like an ice fog settling into a valley—the way I’d felt long after leaving him at McMurdo.

I’d kept busy the spring after I left, working on my data and writing a paper on my findings at the Garrard colony; when the days in Oregon grew long and bright, I taught a summer school class and then got a last-minute gig in the Galápagos on another ship from the Cormorant’s tour company. I’d returned to Antarctica as usual last season, and being on the peninsula felt far enough from Ross Island that I managed not to think too much about Keller. By then, I didn’t know where he was; I’d let our correspondence go months earlier.

Now, as I look at him on the deck, with the breeze in his hair and his eyes fixed on mine, it seems as if time has frozen, as if I’m back in the same moment at the Movement Control Center at McMurdo, when he told me he was staying behind.

He holds up his book, its pages fluttering in the night’s breeze. Alone by Richard Byrd. I’d read the book years ago, a memoir by the first person who’d wintered by himself on the continent.

“The first time I read this,” Keller says, “it was about two years after Ally died, after Britt and I split up. I came across Byrd’s home address—it’s right there in the book—and I knew exactly where it was. He lived on Brimmer Street, in Beacon Hill, not even a mile away from me.”

He palms the book between his hands. “I was still at my old job, so the next morning, I worked a half day from home, then headed over to Beacon Hill on my way to the office. It wasn’t hard to find the address, but I began to doubt it was Byrd’s real house because there wasn’t a plaque or anything setting it apart—and this was the home of a man who had three ticker-tape parades in his honor during his lifetime, and a state funeral after he died, a man who’s buried in Arlington National Cemetery. So I was about to keep walking when a woman emerged from the house with a bag of garbage. I said hello and blurted out that I was admiring her house. Without missing a beat, she said, ‘So you’ve read the book.’ I said yes, and then she invited me in for a tour.”