THIS YEAR I’M dreading my visit home more than usual. Alec’s family has just moved to Kansas City, so he’s spending the holidays there. My cat, Ginger, is gone—she’d disappeared after I left for college. The first time I came home to find her missing, I put up signs and checked the shelter, to no avail. I feel her absence most acutely at night, alone in my childhood bed, and I can only hope that she’s found a new family, one that welcomes her more than mine did.
My father’s empty seat at the table is filled by Mark’s new son, Christopher, the first grandchild. I’m watching the baby examine a soft plush rattle, holding it up to his face, when my mother suddenly says to me, “Deborah, are you all right?”
I swing my head toward her, not realizing until that moment how intensely I’d been staring at Christopher. “I’m fine.”
“You don’t look well,” she says. “You look like death warmed over.”
“I’m fine,” I repeat, and a few moments later I get up and lock myself in the bathroom. A glance in the mirror tells me she’s right—my face is pale, eyes sinking into dark hollows—and I prepare myself to tell them, if they ask again, that it’s because of work, because of finals. But it isn’t.
I turn my back on my reflection and lean against the sink, taking deep breaths. I always feel most alone when I’m here at home, but this year the feeling is sharper than ever, and I can’t help but think it’s because I’ve made a dreadful mistake.
The next night is a repeat of every other—it’s all about the baby—and for a moment I wonder what it might’ve been like to have come home pregnant. Though my mother hopes I will one day have a big family, at this stage of my life it would’ve been scandalous—but it also would’ve made me less invisible.
When I run this notion by Alec over the phone, he convinces me otherwise. “You don’t want that sort of attention, believe me,” he says. “You did the right thing.”
Still, the emptiness I feel goes beyond the solitude I’m used to and often enjoy. It’s that something was there, a chance at something, and then it wasn’t—I’d had it and given it up, destroyed it, and would never get it back. I’m on the bus heading back to Columbia when I finally figure out what I’ve lost: the chance to have another person in the world I could relate to, someone who might turn out to be a little bit like me, someone I could love, who would love me back.
The Gullet
(67°10'S, 67°38'W)
The code Mayday, always repeated three times, signals that a ship is in urgent, life-threatening danger. There are no degrees of Mayday—just the one word—and because we haven’t received any further information from the bridge, for me, right now, this leaves room for interpretation, for doubt and hope.
Both these emotions mingle in my mind as I gingerly move across the ice. After stepping on board the Cormorant long enough to change into a dry sweater, find a dry parka, and tell Kate to keep her idiot husband on board, I rushed back out—only to find that my Zodiac had been appropriated by another crew member, leaving me to find my way to the wreck of the Australis on foot, over the ice.
I make it only about ten yards before I begin to pass survivors on the ice, wet and shaking in the freezing rain and sharp wind. I help guide them to the Cormorant and ask if they know Keller, but his name doesn’t register—these people are barely capable of responding to even the most basic of questions. The state in which we’re finding the survivors—and the fact that we haven’t heard anything from the Australis in the past three hours—means that something more than an ice collision has happened on that ship. There’s no leadership, no order, and the result is turning an already grave situation into a tragic one.
I continue to describe Keller to one passenger after another, but no one knows him. Despite the slickening of the ice under my feet, I begin to make tangible progress toward the Australis, and a fifty-yard stretch with no stranded passengers allows me to hope that things may not be as bad as they seem.
Then, ahead in the mist, I encounter a group of twenty survivors, immobile on a large swath of ice. I find a secure trail to them and begin leading them back toward our ship, a shivering procession of cold bodies and warm breath, of fear and blind faith.
And then I realize that while I’ve been following a slightly different path back, I should have seen the Cormorant by now, or someone should’ve seen me; I’d radioed that I was bringing in more passengers. I strain my eyes ahead, but through the mist I don’t see even the shadow of our ship. This could mean only one thing—that with the winds at thirty knots, Glenn had to pull back, and this means that we’re stranded.