Then she turned ten, her mother got married, and the ratio shifted. Shattered. They moved to Canada with her new husband and Jean was pregnant before the year was out, giving birth to twins a few months after Sully turned eleven. Jean stopped working, gave up her research, and fell into motherhood, became immersed in it. She was absorbed by her newborn twins in a way she had never been absorbed by her firstborn. The pride Sully felt in her mother dissipated. What had all those afternoons alone been for, if this was what came of it? All the work, all the sacrifice? The twins got bigger and bigger—they started talking and Jean taught them to call her Mommy. Sully had never called her that. There was nothing left for her, no room for an angry teenager in their new family, so she applied to boarding school and returned only when the dorms were closed and there was nowhere else she could go. At first she hoped for some kind of argument from her mother, pleading phone calls, groveling letters—some recognition of Sully’s anger—but her absence was accepted without disagreement. Sully graduated, skipped the ceremony, and went south for college, back to where she’d been happiest.
Jean died before Sully got her degree—an unexpected fourth child, stillborn. She never woke up from the surgery and Sully didn’t make it back in time. The embalmers made her up to look like someone Sully didn’t recognize. At the funeral she sat next to the twins, little girls with honey-brown eyes and auburn hair, like their father. She realized she was an orphan. What remained of this family had never belonged to her.
Harper sat down next to her. He slid a cup of black coffee toward her. She jolted back to attention, ashamed; she was mourning the wrong person.
“You look like you might need this,” he said.
She smiled, to make him feel better, but the expression felt foreign on her face, like a mask that didn’t fit.
“I do,” she said, and took a sip. It burned the roof of her mouth, but she didn’t mind. It was a relief to feel something tangible, something immediate and uncomfortable to distract her from everything else, even if it was only for a moment.
“I’m sorry. About yesterday,” she said, and took another sip.
He shook his head slowly, his lips pressed together. “That’s not something for you to be sorry about. We all need different things. You needed time. You seem better today. I’m glad.”
She shrugged and wrapped her hand around the mug in front of her. “I guess I’m coherent, if that’s what you mean.”
“Ha,” he said, a joyless laugh cut short. He chewed on his lower lip, embarrassed. Laughing was not allowed, not yet. “It’ll do for now.”
Sully stood up and left her coffee mug on the table, still full. She hovered for a moment, unsure what to do next, where to go. “I’m going to work,” she finally said.
“Work,” Harper agreed, nodding. “I think Thebes is already in the comm. pod. He’ll be glad to see you.”
“Then that’s where I’ll be,” Sully replied.
THIRTEEN
THEY’D BEEN AT Lake Hazen for almost two weeks—long enough to explore every corner of the camp—and yet something about the radio shed still made Augustine uneasy. He avoided it, as though there was too much power behind the door, too much reach; an ear to hear things he didn’t want to know. There was no telescope here, no window to the stars, so instead of working he spent his time playing with Iris. They walked out to the little island in the middle of the lake and sneaked up on the Arctic hares, laughing as the hares bounded across the ice in a panic, leaping onto the shore and disappearing into the mountains that ringed the basin. He taught her chess with an old plastic set they found, a few pennies in place of missing pawns. They made snow sculptures.
And they feasted. The abundance and variety of nonperishable foods in the cook tent were thrilling after the monotony of the survival rations at the observatory. It was a museum of cans—canned pot roast, meat loaf, whole roast chickens soaked in brine, tuna fish, every kind of vegetable he could think of, even eggplant and okra; energy bars, protein bars, granola bars, shortbread bars, meat bars; powdered eggs, powdered milk, powdered coffee, powdered pancake mix; a shocking amount of butter, lard, and Crisco. Iris fell in love with fruit cocktail, treasuring every syrupy cherry with her eyes closed and a small smile on her lips. Augie was more enthused with the baking supplies, the possibility of conjuring something fresh and warm, and he began to experiment with pound cakes and scones studded with chocolate chips and raisins, then progressed to loaves of bread. The supplies of baking soda and baking powder alike were enormous, a stock that would last a dozen men a dozen years, and there were similarly vast quantities of onion and garlic powder, cayenne, cinnamon, nutmeg, curry, salt, black pepper. He’d scarcely used an oven since he was a boy, when he’d kept his mother company, but the pleasures of measuring and mixing and greasing the pan came rushing back to him. His mother had often begun ambitious projects in the kitchen and usually failed to finish them, leaving the chaos and the raw ingredients for Augie to deal with while she became distracted by something new. He’d forgotten he was good at finishing these projects, but more than that, he’d forgotten he enjoyed it. It was an unfamiliar feeling. He struggled to remember the last time he’d actually enjoyed something.
The days continued to lengthen and the snow around them to shrink. Grass sprouted on some of the lower hills surrounding the camp, then a few wildflowers popped up, crowding together in clusters of color, bordered by the remains of the snow. The equinox slipped past, and before Augie knew it the solstice was bearing down on them—the arrival of the midnight sun. He’d never been in the Arctic for a full polar day before; he had always fled south when the cargo planes began arriving on their biennial supply runs in the summer, when the stars disappeared from the sky for the season, leaving him with nothing to do and no reason to stay. As the weather warmed and the snow melted he began to realize how much he had missed.
When he’d chosen the Barbeau Observatory as a research destination five years ago, he was already an old man, near the end of his career, beginning to understand what a mess he’d made of things. He was drawn by the isolation and the punishing climate, the landscape that matched his interior. Instead of salvaging what he could, he ran away to the top of an Arctic mountain, nine degrees shy of the North Pole, and gave up. Misery followed him wherever he went. This fact didn’t faze him and it certainly didn’t surprise him. He had earned it, and by then he expected it.
Now, as he watched Iris dart along the shore, skipping rocks over the ice sheet, a strange sensation came over him, a muddle of contentment and regret. He had never been so happy and so sad all at once. It made him think of Socorro. Those years in New Mexico were the sharpest, the most vivid memories he had. Only now, decades later, did he finally understand that Socorro had been his best chance to have a life that felt like this—sitting by the edge of the lake, smelling spring, watching Iris, feeling grateful and complete, feeling alive. When he met Jean all those years ago, she lobbed him out of cool contemplation and into the heat of emotion. He couldn’t observe her; he had to have her, to be seen by her. She was more than a subject, a variable to be quantified. She unnerved him, confused him. He’d loved her, of course he had, he could admit it now, but it wasn’t so easy back then. She was twenty-six and he was thirty-seven when she told him she was pregnant. All he could think of were his parents and his own cruel experiments. He didn’t want to be in love. He told Jean he’d never be a father. Never, he said. She didn’t cry, he remembered that because he’d expected her to. She’d only looked at him with those big, sad eyes. You’re so broken, she’d said. I wish you weren’t so broken. And that had been that.