He burst out onto the blinding white mountain, snapping a pair of mirrored ski goggles over his eyes to dull the brightness. He could see the shape of her, down the mountain path, just beyond the outbuildings. It looked as if she was lying on the ground, but he couldn’t be sure, he only knew that the color was wrong—she was dressed in bright blue, the color of her long underwear, not the color of her parka. Spring was coming, but it was still devastatingly cold. Augustine ran down the path, past the cluster of outbuildings, and arrived at her side out of breath and half-blind with the white glare. Iris was sitting up, cross-legged in the snow, wearing only her thin winter silks and the thick wool socks she slept in. He collapsed next to her—the adrenaline that had gotten him this far this quickly was nearly spent. He began taking off his own parka to give to her.
“Are you all right?” he asked as he struggled with the toggles. “Where’s your parka, my god, your boots? How long have you been out here, are you crazy?” His voice steadily elevated in volume until he was practically shouting. He finally got his parka off and wrapped it around her like a blanket. Taking her tiny hands in his, he felt the hot but not-too-hot flush of healthy circulation. He leaned back and looked her over, carefully this time. She smiled, an uncertain slant to her brow, as if she was worried about him—as if he were the one acting strange. She extracted her hands from his grip, reached out, and touched his bristled cheek with her warm fingers.
“Look,” she said, pointing toward a nearby valley. He followed her finger and saw the small herd of musk oxen they used to watch, back when the sun was just beginning its return. The herd had been away for the last week or two, having undoubtedly found some other valley to graze in. Augie had barely noticed their absence, but clearly Iris had. She paid attention to things like that.
“They’re back,” she whispered with rapt excitement. Augie watched with her for a moment as the animals nuzzled the snow for the grass just beneath it. He closed his eyes and caught his breath, listening to the soft squeak of their hooves in the snow and the scrape of their horns against the frozen ground. When he opened his eyes, Iris’s expression was full of wonder, her face illuminated with curiosity. He pulled her onto his lap and she didn’t protest, just made herself comfortable, laying her head against his shuddering heart. Augie wrapped his arms around her. His lungs finally relaxed, his voice left his throat and sank back into his sternum. He exhaled, long and slow. Somewhere a wolf howled, but it was far away and Augustine wasn’t scared. He was just tired and worried, feelings he was beginning to grow accustomed to.
“Please, can we go back now?” he asked her.
She nodded, her eyes still on the herd, and together they rose to their feet. He looked down at her socks, crusted with snow, and asked, “Shall I carry you?” They both knew quite well that he was barely able to haul his own weight back. She shook her head, wordlessly pressing his parka back into his hands, returning it to the person who needed it more. She waited until he had redone the toggles, then they plodded back up the mountain, between the outbuildings, along the zigzag of the steep mountain path, to the observatory.
In the control room Augie checked her extremities—every toe, every finger, even the tip of her nose, searching for the frostbite he was certain must be lurking. She humored him. He tried to remember the symptoms he’d read about before he came here: discolored skin, a waxy texture. When he found nothing amiss, he began to doubt the dependability of his own mind. He went over the details again: the sight of her from the control room, the brilliant blue of her winter silks against the white of the tundra, the crust of snow and ice clinging to the wool nap of her socks, the sensation of her warm hand against his cheek and her compact body on his lap. The herd before them, the sounds of their grazing. There was no room for doubt in his recollections.
His mind rewound, back to the beginning. He envisioned finding her just after the evacuation, alone in one of the outbuilding dormitories, sitting on a bottom bunk with her arms wrapped around her knees. He thought of the first time she spoke, to ask how long the polar night would last; of them walking together under the vivid stars; their trip to the hangar, the wolf, the sounds of her anguish and the severity of her distress; his fever, the sickly dreams, her ministrations throughout. Had she gotten sick, too? Was she ill in some way that he couldn’t see? Was he? Perhaps he was still in bed—still fevered after killing the wolf down by the hangar.
He held her wrist and found her pulse, beating briskly. Her hair was tangled and greasy, thick clumps of matted curls hanging around her neck and a halo of softer, shorter wisps framing her pale face. He pressed her forearm and watched the brief white thumbprint appear and then fade to pink. She was an ordinary, healthy girl. Iris watched him knowingly, as if she could read his mind, which both comforted and unsettled him. He asked her not to leave the observatory without him and she shrugged, a gesture that filled him with irritation. He hadn’t asked for this, hadn’t wanted a companion, had never signed up for another life to care for, especially now, at the end of his days, but—she was here. And so was he. They were stuck with each other.
He considered her for a moment, her unkempt hair, the way the curls were threatening to merge into lumpy dreadlocks. There was something feral about her, he realized, and he was suddenly ashamed of himself. Carried along by a gust of proprietary resolve, he went to fetch the wooden comb he ran through his beard occasionally. When he wordlessly offered it to her she didn’t seem to know what to do with it, looking at it like a foreign object. The comb was inadequate, and the task of untangling her hair was enormous, but Iris was patient with him and he was determined to make this child—a child he had somehow ended up responsible for—look more like a little girl and less like a musk ox. He did his best. In the end there were a few pieces he had to cut off, and he tried to even out the ends in some semblance of a hairstyle. The dark curls ended abruptly just below her ears and a short set of bangs had become necessary when the tangle that flopped into her eyes proved impossible to disengage. Iris ran her hands through her new hair and nodded her approval. There was no mirror, but she seemed to enjoy the bounce and sudden lightness, whipping her head back and forth to test the movement of her new ’do.
They ate together afterward, among the snippets of dark, matted hair: soup, saltines, and a can of ginger ale between them. After he had swept up the clippings and washed the dishes, Augie moved to his ham radio station and turned on the equipment, sinking into his chair. It had become a daily routine. He watched Iris open her astronomy book and begin to read, pressing her lips together and holding the covers tightly, as if the tome might run away. Occasionally she reached up and took a curl between her fingers, testing the texture of it, rolling it around her pointer finger and then releasing it. There was still something wild about her, Augustine thought, as he watched her play with her hair, but it was harder to pinpoint now. She looked like a recently adopted stray—unaccustomed to care, but no longer abandoned. Neither of them moved from their seats until the sun had sunk and the daylight had dripped down behind the mountains, moving off to saturate some other skies.