Keller’s lips turn up in a half smile. “She showed me the paneled library on the first floor with a carved oak fireplace mantel, where Byrd planned his journeys. She showed me the little backyard where Byrd tried to keep penguins after one of his trips. It was unbelievable that she did that—she didn’t know me; I could’ve been any kind of lunatic. But I knew why when I told her she should put a plaque up on the building. She shrugged and said, ‘Nobody remembers Byrd anyway.’ ” Keller looks up, his eyes meeting mine. “That was the day I quit my job. I wanted to do something worth remembering.”
“And so you became a dishwasher at McMurdo.”
He smiles. “I thought of it as a temporary distraction—the part where I got away from it all and discovered what I wanted to do. I had no idea this would be what I really wanted. Which meant I had to start over, catch up to you.”
“You thought leaving me was the best way?”
“For the record, I never planned to stay on,” he says. “I never wanted to separate, but that was my chance—to learn as much as I could, to become something new. I tried to explain it. If only you’d picked up the phone.”
He steps closer, leaning his body next to mine against the railing. “I wasn’t ready to go home. Not then.”
“But you weren’t planning to go home,” I say. The cry of a petrel in the distance adds a background whining note to my voice. “You were planning to come to Oregon with me.”
“And wash dishes in Eugene?”
“There were other options. Other ways to come back down here.”
“Like what? By staying, I could put the hours in, learn how things worked. Whenever I wasn’t working, I was out helping anyone who needed it.”
“So why’d you leave McMurdo at all?”
“Because that was only the beginning of the journey.” He takes my cold hands, and I don’t resist. “You were the destination.”
I shake my head, my mind trying to return to the way it was between us, wanting to get it all back.
“What is it?” Keller asks.
“Just trying to remember the last time you kissed me.”
Keller puts a hand on one side of my face, and as he slips his hand to the back of my neck, he pulls me forward and kisses me, a long slow deep kiss that in an instant melts away the icy edges that had frozen since I left McMurdo.
Finally he steps back and looks at me. “So,” he says, with that grin of his. “Does that jog your memory?”
I try to look nonchalant, though my hands are shaking. “Vaguely.”
He kisses me again, and we stay out on the deck for a long time, huddled together, trying to fit the past two years into the next two hours as night settles over Ushuaia.
It doesn’t take us long to pick up where we’d left off—and, as at McMurdo, our time together is so unpredictable, so divided among shipboard duties, that every moment feels tenuous, as if we might easily lose each other again.
Over late nights on the crew deck, Keller fills me in on what he’s been up to the past two years: He’d done legal consulting as he went back to school full-time, earning a master’s in ecology, behavior, and evolution in only two semesters. He wrote his thesis on the impact of rising global temperatures on Adélies, and he impressed the APP enough for them to recommend him to Glenn as a naturalist this season so that he could gather data on Petermann Island.
I’d known that, with Thom taking time off, I’d have a new research partner on Petermann, but I’d assumed it would be one of the long-timers from the APP. And then, after six whirlwind days on board the Cormorant, one of the other naturalists escorts Keller and me to the island by Zodiac, with two weeks’ worth of supplies.
As soon as the Cormorant recedes into the Penola Strait, Keller and I work quickly to establish our small camp, pitching all three tents though we know one will remain empty. After a week of pent-up sexual energy on board, we’re both eager to take advantage of being alone, at last. As I lie naked in the tent, my body awakening in the cool air, under Keller’s hands, I realize the extent to which I’d let myself grow numb, forgetting the pleasures to be found in my own skin. The tent is tight and cramped, not unlike our individual sleeping quarters on the Cormorant—but now, rather than the hum of the ship, we hear the sounds of the penguins and waves lapping the bay; rather than dry heated air, the night is alive with a gelid summer mist. It’s effortless, being together again, as if it were days later rather than years, and the emotional scrim that had begun to envelop me falls away again. Keller, too, seems more at peace, as though he has shed the very last of his former self, traces of which I’d seen when we first met. Now he’s only muscle and bone, as if distilled down to his very essence—the part of him I still feel may be just out of my reach.