My Last Continent(38)

He takes the water and aspirin but doesn’t say anything. I give his hair a quick tug and say, “See you tomorrow.”

As I open the door, I look back and watch his expression change—a furrowed brow, a quick smile, something ­wistful—and then I shut the door behind me and walk across the garden.



LATE THE NEXT afternoon, as twilight falls, I’m trying to focus on my lesson plans when Gatsby’s yowl at my back door gives me an excuse to get up from the kitchen table.

I let him in and step away as he shakes the water from his long fur. He stretches, then jumps up onto one of the kitchen chairs and starts a bath. “You hungry, Gatsby?” I ask, scratching the top of his head. He pauses and looks at me, then resumes bathing. He’s sometimes hungry, sometimes not—such is life between two households—and I keep cans of cat food among the beans and soups in my cupboard for the days that he is.

I glance out the window, across the garden, and am surprised to see the windows mostly dark, the house quiet. I picture Nick inside alone, hungover, and I feel a little guilty for having invited Gatsby in when he should be keeping his real owner company.

I sit back down at the table and return to work, but it’s not long before I hear a knock. It’s Nick, blinking rain out of his eyes, holding a stack of mail and a bottle of wine. I open the door to let him in.

“Isn’t that the bottle I brought last night?”

“It’s probably the only thing I didn’t drink,” he says.

He puts the wine down on the table and leafs through the mail. “Thanks for coming by,” he says, lifting his eyes briefly as he hands me my mail—a couple of bills and Conservation magazine. “You didn’t need to clean up, though.”

“You barely let me anyway.”

He motions toward the wine. “Where’s your corkscrew?”

I get the corkscrew from the drawer next to the stove, and, while he opens the bottle, I plunk down two wineglasses on the table.

Nick tilts his head toward my laptop and says, “What’re you working on?”

As I sit down again, I shove the laptop and my folders across the table, out of the way. “Class stuff.”

He fills our glasses and sits down across from me, in the chair next to Gatsby’s. “I want to apologize for last night,” he says.

I’ve been half-hoping he didn’t remember. “No need.”

“It wasn’t fair,” he says. “Your life is your business. Your love life especially.”

“Don’t be like that. I want you to be a part of my life.”

“But only a few months out of the year, right?” He looks at me and shakes his head. “Will you ever get that place out of your system?”

“Why, so I can settle down here in Eugene? Build a picket fence and have a few kids?”

“What’s so wrong with that?”

“You’re lucky, Nick. Your work is right here in our backyard—Bombus vosnesenskii, Bombus vandykei. The Pygoscelis penguins are in short supply around here, in case you haven’t noticed.”

“Right,” he says with a laugh. “Like you didn’t choose penguins for the very reason that they take you to the other end of the planet.”

I don’t answer.

“It has cost me, you know,” he says. “Staying here.”

“What do you mean?”

“I was supposed to get married,” he says. “Years ago, before you moved in. This cottage was going to be her art studio. She got a job with a magazine in New York and decided to take it.”

“And?”

“We told ourselves we could make a commuter marriage work,” he says. “But the truth was, we were both stubborn. Selfish. I thought she’d move back here, and she assumed I’d join her in New York. Neither of us got what we wanted.”

“You did what you had to do. Why’s that so wrong?”

“Because I regret it. Because I couldn’t see past the present moment—that I might want something different one day. Do you think I wouldn’t take off to the other side of the globe if I could? That I wouldn’t be in Antarctica myself, if it had bumblebees?” He meets my eyes, studying me. “Don’t you worry you’ll have regrets?”

The sound of a fist on the front door is so jarring in the following silence that we both jump. Nick’s leg bumps against the table, rattling our wineglasses. He follows me as I walk through the living room.

I open the door to see Keller, his rain jacket soaked, water dripping off the brim of his Antarctic Penguins Project baseball hat. He’s close enough to touch, but I stand there, stunned, the rain breezing in, my heart beating in my ears. I haven’t seen him since we parted ways in Ushuaia almost eight months ago. I try to speak, taking in the glitter of the porch light in his eyes, his breath in the cool evening air, and I only get as far as parting my lips.