The first thing I do as my dead son is book the flight to Greenland. The grant money had already been deposited in his bank account; six months later, Harvard is either too dumb or too embarrassed to ask for it back. It was less than I’d thought. Still, it would cover the ticket and a few days’ lodging. I preferred the neatness of using the money as it had been intended, though I drew the line at accommodations. On his first trip the previous spring, Ethan had stayed at the research station – or, I should say, he’d spent the first night there. The rest of the week, he slept in a tent he pitched on the shoreline. In case, he said. We’d left it at that. But I am too old for bunk beds, shared bathrooms, a communal fridge. Besides, I was sure I, a civilian with no university affiliation, wouldn’t be allowed that kind of access. Instead, I fumbled my way through a Google search to a motel in the center of Nuuk, where I booked a single room: Four nights, five days. Long enough.
The second thing I do as my dead son is pack his passport and address book, sliding them into the inner side pocket of his duffel and zipping it shut. I’d found both in the refrigerator a few days after he died, wrapped in a plastic sandwich bag propped up behind the milk carton. I recognized them immediately for what they were; a clue. All that summer before he died, whenever Marcus or I called our son’s landline, it rang and rang; his cellphone switched straight to voicemail; our emails went unanswered. Our daughters, Meg and Diane, shrugged: no, they said, they knew no more than we did. Harvard assured us he was fine. His advisor, a Dr. Matthews, replied to my call with an email confirming Ethan was still showing up to class, clocking in and out of the research labs. In early August, a message appeared on Marcus’s phone: Twenty-three seconds of our son’s voice speaking in tones so muffled and indistinct, it sounded as though he were calling from underwater. He’d returned from a second trip to Greenland the week before, a fact we knew only because his flight information had appeared on Marcus’s computer’s calendar – transferred in that magical way from the ticket Ethan had purchased using our credit card. Ice algae, he said: one of a few points at which his voice became decipherable. We had to listen several times to make sense of the scientific words. You wouldn’t believe…Ancylonema nordenskioldii. It’s a massive…The next word was either tragedy or opportunity, two words that have no business sounding alike. Then there was the sound of the phone dropping. The rest of what he said was lost.
And then one morning mid-September I opened the door to get the mail. “Oh,” he said. How long had he been standing there? A backpack, the duffel bag: my son. Thinner, paler, but recognizable. Dark hair curling around his ears, the veins under his eyes purplish and swollen. Both hands in his pockets, as though he’d just happened upon our stoop. “Getting tricky to concentrate up there…” he trailed off. “Hoi polloi’s awfully nosy. You mind?”
The third thing I do as my dead son is call from JFK to hire a driver in Nuuk. I’d found the driver’s name in Ethan’s address book: another clue. Ned Ingstrom, of Ingstrom’s Arctic Adventures. Filed under “D”. The book Ethan had kept since high school — small, gilt-edged pages, red leather binding. A surprisingly old-fashioned organizational tool, arranged according to his own peculiar system. Marcus and I filed under “P” –Parents, I assumed. Meggie and Diana under “S” for Siblings or Sisters. I flipped through the pages of cramped handwriting until I found the listing for the Carson-Fullers research station, filed under “D”; that was also where I found Icelandic Air, a few names I thought I recognized, possibly fellow PhD students he’d mentioned in passing, someone notated simply “T/Stanford/moulin study”. Lastly, Ned Ingstrom. When I realized what was going on, I snapped the book closed.
“D”, for Disaster.
◆
Sergeant Rainey said he was dead before the car burst into flames. That the body that burned was not alive. I have to believe he meant it as a kindness. He had no way of knowing how clearly those words painted the details I’d been doing my best not to see: Ethan’s long femurs and chapped knuckles, the black swoop of hair, the thin nose. Stilled before the first lick of orange flames. My son, crackling like meat.
The force of the collision, Sergeant Rainey said, so great the gas tank exploded seconds after impact.
He noted when he declared it an accident that it was a nasty bend in the road. “Given the conditions on the roads that night,” Sergeant Rainey said, “and the weather lately,” he broke off, mashing his hat between his big hands. He’d recovered Ethan’s bicycle once, found it behind a 7-Eleven where some older boys had abandoned it after they’d had their fun. Sergeant Rainey’s eyes when Ethan slipped under my arm to take the bike back so kind I nearly kissed him. Because of that – because of the bicycle, his kindness, the crumpling sensation in my chest as I’d watched Ethan run his fingers over the handlebars, his small, sharp face pink with relief and shame – I stood silently as Sergeant Rainey told me why my son had died. I let him make his point. “These storms,” he said, “you know, Mrs. Graves, we’re getting them every week now, ugly business. They flood the ditches, those low-lying patches alongside the highway. Temperatures drop overnight, there’s black ice everywhere. It’s no one’s fault,” he added quickly. “That’s my point. No one to blame here. Just…” he took in a small breath. “It was a terrible accident, that’s all.”
Everyone telling me these things as though mine was the kind of pain that could be felt in degrees. As though one could say: here, this loss hurts less.
◆
The mission statement on the Carson-Fullers research station homepage billed the station as the “a hub for all visiting scientists”: the caption in bright yellow below the accompanying photograph read ICE STATION!!!! But I hadn’t been able to find a single picture of the building. Instead, I’d flipped past photos of people zipped into jackets the fluorescent orange of hunting gear, ridiculous fur hats, oversized sunglasses that turned them into strange fish. Photos of searing blue sky, a horizon glinting with sun. Ice as far as the eye could see. I’d kept clicking until eventually the people and landscape faded away, the last thirty or so photographs of nothing but ice— a pale grey sweep with the dull gleam of silk, a curl of white frilled like cream, blue that held a thousand variations inside of it, gradations of color running from midnight to pale, pale, robin’s egg. Ice smooth as velvet, ice ruffed like an Elizabethan collar. Ice laid out like a slice of glass, blue and spotless as sky.
I’d dismissed it as a bit of zealotry, but when I step out of the tiny airport in Nuuk, pulling Ethan’s windbreaker – nylon and too thin – close around me, that ice is all I can think of. I want to see it so badly I ache, a longing so fierce it is almost sexual. On those rare occasions Ethan had spoken about it to us, he’d used a peculiar tone, tight and furtive, as though he worried he might get caught. “Albedo,” he’d murmured one night when I found him in the kitchen, all the lights off save the small lamp on the table where he sat, his hands and the pile of papers in front of him illuminated like objects in a painting. “When sunlight hits ice,” he said, not looking up, “some portion of it – call it n— reflects back into space. We lose ice, we lose that reflection. Each percentage decrease in n translates to an increase in absorption, which translates to melt. We lose reflection, we’re lost.”
I stand on the curb, shivering. The sun – far brighter than I’d anticipated – hammers down, every surface throwing its glare back at me until I’m half-blind. I close my eyes briefly and see the ice instead, its cold incandescent, a pale green shimmer flicking across the surface. The darkness underneath a giant’s mouth open wide, swallowing the sky whole. n, for necessary.
When I open my eyes again, I spot a small blue car idling by the curb. MRS GRAVIS, reads the paper in the window. Close enough. I wave and the driver opens the door and steps out: a tall man, late twenties, his face chapped by the wind.
“Ned Ingstrom?”
He nods. He’s younger than I’d imagined, not much older than Ethan from the looks of it; shock of black hair, full cheeks, shoulders under his puffy jacket wide. “Welcome to Greenland.”
“I need to get to the Carson-Fullers station before it gets dark,” I say by way of hello, unzipping the pocket inside Ethan’s duffel bag and sliding the passport into my pocket before I let him take the bag from my arm. “Can we make it in time?”
“You’re a scientist?” I can see him taking in my thin pants and windbreaker; I see-saw my hand. “Believe they require ID. Restricted access. Authorized personnel only, far as I’ve heard.”
“We’ll see about that,” I say. When he squints at me, I relent. “I don’t need to get inside. Just close. I want to see what the ice is like over there. Water. Whichever it is right now.”
Inside the car, I glance around and picture Ethan here, in my seat, the same worn seatbelt cutting across his chest, the same awkward proximity of passenger seat to driver. I shift my body towards the window and watch as we drive through a few streets lined by colorful houses, reds and yellows and oranges like a lineup of dollhouses. Mercifully, Ned Ingstrom twirls the radio dial right away and the mournful sounds of a cello fill the car. I realize as we rattle forward that I have not thought this next part through. What will I do when we get there? What will I ask Ned Ingstrom – did you meet my dead son? What did he say? Something happened to Ethan here. I picture it as a small, distinct trauma, a black splinter sliding into his brain, throwing everything off-kilter. The boy who came back from his first trip a twenty-three year old wearing my son’s face and clothes but not him. It was difficult to put my finger on exactly what had changed. A way of speaking – the Ethan who returned spoke more rapidly, his cadences erratic. He made odd grammatical slips: further when he meant farther, laid instead of lay. He hardly ate; stubble crowded in around his chin and jawline; he wore the same thin T-shirt and jeans day after day; he blinked rapidly and then, for long periods of time, not at all. There was a gesture he began making frequently that I’d never seen before, a shrug that canted towards his left shoulder. In the days before he died, he had begun to smell – a dank, mossy smell, like the inside of a cave. Boy smell, I had thought. Though of course by then he was no longer a boy.
I stare out the window now, trying to see everything through his eyes: A country teetering at the edge of extinction. Trees a few months from sliding into the sea. Water gathering itself to foam over the rolling hills. A vast and intricate system poised to vanish in the blink of an eye. Instead what I see is lush and green and surprisingly beautiful. Wide swaths of grass the sun has set to glowing. Complete collapse, he’d written. Albedo, acceleration. On one sheet, he’d scrawled a single question again and again until the ink crowded out all but the thinnest scraps of white around the letters. How long? He’d written. How long? How long?
“Hang on,” Ned Ingstrom says: a swerve, the little car banking so far to the right I catch a glimpse of the road unwinding miles ahead, a streak of dirt in the green like a ribbon of fat cris-crossing a steak. “There—” he says, pointing. I don’t see anything at first, just more of that cropped grass stretching towards the horizon, but before I can ask what I’m supposed to be looking for, I spot a flicker of movement. A pinprick of color. “Off she goes,” Ned Ingstrom says quietly. The fox darts across the far side of the fields before disappearing behind a clump of small trees, so dark against the sky their leaves appear black. “Arctic Fox,” he says. “Just so you don’t think I’m useless as a guide.”
“Vulpes lagopus,” I say, clearing my throat. “I studied the Classics in college. Latin, Greek. Speaking of useless.”
“Qaumailissaq. Inuituiq.” A small smile. “Guess I’ve been studying it my whole life.”
“So you’re a native,” I say. “Is this your family’s tour business?”
He shakes his head. “Father’s Swedish. Came over from Stockholm when he got work with a fishing boat. It’s my mother who was born and raised here, but she never wanted much to do with tourists, no offense. The business is mine. You won’t want to miss that,” he points again and I follow his finger just in time to watch the milky hypoteneuse of a snow-covered mountain swing into view. Sunlight sends the ice crystals into a frenzy of colors. Small clusters of brilliant blues and reds detonate, diffusing shrapnel to every corner: It’s a startling display of light and color, so dazzlingly bright I have to blink to keep my eyeballs from feeling singed. As I blink, I shiver: Ethan. I can feel him. Not a ghost, the shadow of him that’s followed me around these past months, but something with presence. Something he has used death to slip into like a glove. He might be a fox, that brief whistle of life; he might be a shaft of sunlight, an oddly-shaped cloud; he might be the gust of air that just slipped through the window, lifting the hair off my neck. When he was very young, his hands moved over me as though we were a single body: He patted my cheeks, my neck, my braid. Nice world, he’d say. Nice mama, nice me. A happy child: he had been that, too. What did you see here? I ask the cold air, the grass. What in God’s name did you hope to do?
“Here, you’re shivering—” Ned puts on hand to his mouth and takes the tips of his gloved index finger in his teeth. “Really. My hands get hot.”
I hesitate mostly for show. I’d packed quickly, leaving less than seventy-two hours after I bought my ticket; I have on cotton pants, one of two sweaters, my warmest socks. I am ill-prepared for the cold. My flight left Boston on April 22nd, the date Ethan was due to fly out. When Meg hacked into his email, we’d found, among a slew of other minutiae, the airline company’s confirmation of the ticket for this third trip. He’d applied for and received the grant by then, using a portion of the funds for the ticket.
It had taken me while to understand I would go in his place. Partially this was the wax and wane of grief. The phone calls and letters that had streamed into our home for weeks finally ground to a halt; the girls went back to tending their own families, rotating through their daily routines. They had – Diane said, her voice edged with impatience; she was seven months along with her third, swollen, exhausted – to go on. To take care of the living. Even Marcus had returned to certain markers of normalcy; work, the golf course, weekly dinners with the other partners. No one tells you grief has a timestamp, but it is, like anything else people find uncomfortable, only allowed to last so long.
Except there I was. His mother. An unshakeable identity. I did not have a new baby to look to, new life swelling under my shirt. Instead, I walked through our house every morning trailed by a parade of all my sons: toddler Ethan, five year old Ethan, my baby, my only son, nine years old and crawling into bed beside me, wide-awake with growing pains, my hands on his shins, rubbing the hurt from his bones; a teenager in sneakers, leaving a trail of crumbs as he crossed and re-crossed the kitchen eating a piece of toast with incalculable slowness, his nose in a book; the feel of him gone like a twisted ankle, a pain that struck when I looked up from the dishes and caught the corner of his shirt flapping as he turned the corner or flipped an old book open and discovered his initials blacked into the inside cover. When I bought orange juice and found it unopened at the back of the refrigerator a week later. When I turned onto the landing of the staircase and heard the slow thud-thud of his descent, the slight scoliosis that gave his feet uneven weight. When I considered the pain he must have been in, the thousand ways in which I had failed him – well, I suppose I’d known all along what I would do.
“This is insane,” Marcus had said. “You don’t know the first thing about what he was doing there.”
“Please,” he said. “What do you think you’re going to find?”
“I miss him, too,” he pleaded. “I miss him so much. Lizzie, honey.” His eyes mournful as a dog’s. “You still have a family here,” he said. “You have the girls, you have granddaughters. You have me.”
“It’s not enough,” I said—not trying to be cruel, just honest. Something I decided I should do more of. How to explain? I loved Ethan most: There is no kinder way to say it. Any mother who says she doesn’t have a favorite is a liar or a fool. “I’m sorry,” I told Marcus. “I am,” I said, “but I have no choice.”
“Ma’am?”
“Call me Elizabeth.” I give myself a little shake and pull the second glove over my hand and wiggle my fingers. The plush insides are still warm from his hands. They’re too big, so I curl my hands into fists and let the fingers flop to the sides like points on a jester’s hat. “Question for you, Ned Ingstrom — do you find it warmer now?”
“Pardon?”
“A few degrees. Fractions of degrees.” A small cirrus cloud drifts in front of a distant mountain ridge and I let my eyes linger, tracking it as it slides past. When I turn back to Ned, he wears a puzzled expression. “Global warming,” I say. “Surely you’re familiar.”
He shrugs. “People are always coming up with these things.”
“It’s not some fad diet,” I say sharply. He lifts his eyebrows and I try again. “My son studied climate change– not that it’s not public knowledge. But he seemed certain Greenland was already well on its way. It was a kind of fixation, the way he insisted on it. He was sure you were about to lose all this land.”
“We lost our land to the Danes a long time ago.” He jerks his thumb left – west, I think. Or is it east? The sun is too bright, the light everywhere, blinding. “People who don’t know local politics leap to all kinds of conclusions.”
“You don’t believe in science?”
“I believe in me,” Ned says, another shrug. “My country.”
“Wait long enough,” I say grimly, “and there will be nothing left to believe in.”
We rattle around the corner and drop, as though on cue, into a small valley where water spreads out in a languid “J”, a tangle of silvers and blues, the few clouds in the sky reflected so precisely it’s as if a polished mirror has been fitted into the land. I realize I haven’t seen any birds since I arrived only when a flock of them – gulls or terns, seabirds, in any case – startles up from the water in a swirl of grey and white, banking back and forth on the wind.
There is so much more I could say and would, if Ethan hadn’t come twisting up to burst through the surface just below the birds, a breached whale. Up, up he comes – a boy again this time, nine, ten, ten and a half at most, still enough of a child to come to me when he was tired — Ethan, my son! of all of them he was the gentlest, the most thoughtful, yes, he was no good in groups, yes, he could be infuriating in his recalcitrance, yes, he retreated from the classroom, he would not join, his teachers wrote on his reports, he had trouble with transitions, he did not participate, he refused to engage in anything beyond his comfort zone, he had difficulty navigating social interactions, he failed to try, but Christ! did they not see what I saw? His neck such a tender place, his body – even when he was eleven, twelve – an instrument of such intensity, that long frame folding into his favorite windowseat at the back of the house, spider legs tucked into his chest, the heat radiating off him something I could touch, nearly, grab by the handful. He was not an easy child to know but I was his mother. He was my last, my only son. Our happy mistake, we’d called him: thirty-eight ancient for a pregnancy back then, the term geriatric. My doctor frowned; he warned me of the implications, of unforeseeable complications, predicted bedrest, a Caesarean. But I walked around humming until the moment my water broke in the kitchen.
I told Ethan that, thank God: I sang to you every day, I told him. I swam at the Y every Tuesday and Friday, submerged myself as I felt him twist inside me, the two of us floating in that cold water like Russian dolls. Yours was my happiest pregnancy, I said. I watched him move from infancy through toddlerhood, even at those young ages already fully himself; I knew his silences, their specific timbres. I knew his face when anyone interrupted his reading – chapter books at four! Imagine: so clever, so quick – the fury rising behind the full mouth, the slitted eyes. The dip of his head when someone spoke too loudly, the retreat from the room. The click-click-clack as he sat in his room playing the video games he loved, vanished into a world of trolls and orcs, sorcerers capable of splitting mountains open with a wave of a hand, dark lords who could wipe out an entire species with a single command. Later, the smell of cigarette smoke threading in from the back porch as I lingered over the dishes, pretending not to notice. I would have forgiven anything, everything, just to have him close by. I should have gathered up fistfuls of him in those moments. Shored up my reserves. This is what mothers are supposed to do, after all: Take out insurance against the future. Pretend we can protect ourselves against what’s to come.
Show me, I beg, staring out at that thick grey ice, the sky doming overhead like a white cap set on top of the world. A view so void of color it’s difficult to remember as I stand there what red looks like, orange. The names turn in my mind like words from another planet: fuschia, scarlet, magenta.. Please, I tell him. I slide my hand inside my pocket and touch my fingers to his passport photo – his eyes gold-flecked, tawny, inscrutable. Lion’s eyes, I used to say. Eat me alive, I’d say, and he’d hold up his hands, bent to claws, and roar.
I’m trying, I whisper now. Ethan, my boy. How long?
◆
In my dead son’s address book, certain pages contain sentences written around the edges in cramped black capitals. It took me weeks after finding the book to take it out of its Zip-Loc, a few days after that to actually open it and flip through. When I saw his handwriting, I once again assumed I’d found an artifact that would offer something vital. The sentences filling in what I could not. But the language was stripped of Ethan. Most of it read as though he’d copied the sentences from a textbook. The primary cause for concern stems from an unpredicted proliferation of the phytoplankton P porphyreous texeferri. CO2 has risen to unnavigable heights. Here and there, it skewed more general. Hereintofor we must assume change of immense scope is on the horizon. It seems unlikely, despite vigorous and nearly unilateral denial, that anything will survive. That part sounded like him, the person he had become. A boy who no longer held out hope.
◆
“Mrs. Graves?”
The car has stopped a few feet from the edge of the water, which stretches grey and glassy before disappearing under the ice. How long we’ve been sitting in silence I don’t know. The beach – if it can be called a beach – is all stone and pebbles, a dark plate smashed to pieces. No more than a few hundred feet out, an iceberg the size of a small skyscraper casts a cold blue light. Everything is still and quiet. The birds have disappeared. To the right, several hundred feet away, the low, dark frame of a building squats against the shoreline. There are no other cars, no signs of life.
“Ma’am?”
“Please,” I say. “Call me Elizabeth.” I swing my legs out and stand. The sun is suddenly warm and I pull off the gloves and hold them out: “Thank you for these.”
“Dying for a smoke, actually. Trade you five minutes for those gloves.”
“Done!” I can’t say it quickly enough; I don’t want to ask him anything, I just want him gone. My son is here! I want to shout at him. Can’t you see? There –sliding across the ice, dipping down behind that shoulder of rock; he was that fox, darting out from behind the tree; he is the tree, that dim wisp of cloud; he is just trying to find something to be; he is just trying to find a way to live, a way to stay on this earth a little longer. I stare out across the ice, squinting, for one airless instant I see the dark outline of a – but no. I blink. A shadow. My eyes burn. I am old, that’s all. I am ridiculous, I just, I keep losing him. I am the one who let him go. I wouldn’t see what I didn’t want to; I looked anywhere but under my nose. I should have been a mother wizard. I should have shattered the darkness with a wave of my wand. Pieced his world back together and showed him the beauty it still held, reminded him of the infinite elegance of the quadratic equation, the vanilla sweet of the cake I baked when he turned six – a cell, the nucleus stickily green, the cilia a triumph of rainbow-colored candy drops. Look, I might have said. Whatever you think you’ve lost, there is this. I could have saved him.
Ned Ingstrom steps away to take the pack from his jacket pocket, shaking a cigarette loose, and I close my eyes. I have to bite the inside of my cheek – actually chew until I taste blood to stop from asking him for a cigarette. The smell delicious, a thread of sweetness that extends lengthwise through my torso and down the insides of my legs. What would he say if I asked to put my arms around him? If I asked him to bring his mouth close to mine, just long enough to suck the smoke from his throat?
“Mrs. Graves?”
I open my eyes to find him peering at me. “Elizabeth.”
“Sorry,” he says, reddening. “Elizabeth. Do you have any questions?”
“Of course.” I make a show of digging my notebook out from my purse to hide my own flushed cheeks. My hands are shaking again, those old fingers (the shock, every time –can they really be mine? The explosion of spots across the back, the skin tissue-thin, the awful spiderleg crook to the thumbs) trembling as I hold my pen over the blank page. “First of all, where is everyone?”
He shrugs. “To be honest, I’m not out here often. From what I know, people who come to the station aren’t here to tour around.”
I stare at the building, which is smaller than I’d imagined and circled by a chain-link fence. Windowless as far as I can see. Made of concrete, it appears, and painted a grey so dark it’s nearly black. I pick my way across the rocky beach to peer over the fence but there’s nothing more to see. A sign warns of video monitoring, though I see no camera anywhere. “It doesn’t look like anyone’s been here for months.” I am aware as I say it of the accusation in my voice.
Another shrug: He has followed and stands beside me now, his big shoulders hunched against the wind. The building is ungainly, squat and hideous. Its presence transforms the landscape into something alien, as though we’re standing on the moon. My head has begun to pound. “My son was last here in August, his second visit. This place had quite an effect on him.”
“Oh?”
I clear my throat. “That’s how I got your name –he had it in his address book. Ethan,” I say. I try to keep my voice steady. “Ethan Graves. Do you remember?”
Ned Ingstrom frowns: “We get so many visitors here now, especially in high season –”
“He would have been traveling alone,” I continue stubbornly. “A few years younger than you. Dark hair, hazel eyes. Tall. Quiet. You’d remember him, I’m sure – you must have picked him up, possibly just from the airport. He had your name, you see. I said that, didn’t I. Just try to –here—” I fumble in my pocket and pull out the passport; now that I’ve put this in motion, I can hardly bear the waiting. “Remember?”
Ned Ingstrom takes the passport and scrutinizes the photo a beat, two. I try not to tap my foot. When he glances up again his face is thoughtful. “Well,” he says. “Maybe I did.”
I take the passport back – snatch it back, really, I can’t contain the sudden hiccup of joy. “And?”
“He stayed quiet,” Ned Ingstrom says slowly. “I dropped him at the research station, just like you said. I’d…I guess I’d just forgotten. Seemed nice enough. Said he was happy to be here.”
“What else?” I ask. “Did he say anything about his work?”
“Pardon?”
“He was studying bloom,” I say, impatient. “In particular, I mean – the algae. Phytoplankton with an appetite. It’s eating away at the ice.”
“And here I’ve been blaming tourists.”
“Very funny.” I take my camera out and step towards the water again, fumbling with the lens. I don’t want to look at Ned as he speaks; I don’t want to watch him struggle to remember my son. “So, did he?”
“Sorry? Oh – afraid not. Really, he seemed – you know, lost in thought. I just remember the face.”
Of course: it had been a beautiful face, an unforgettable face. The eyelashes, everyone said, wasted on a boy. “He’s the one who should be here now,” I say. I keep snapping photographs; I have to give my hands something to do or I might throttle Ned Ingstrom in an attempt to choke out something more, something better, some detail he is through whatever odd resistance or laziness refusing to provide. “He’d bought a ticket, mapped everything out. He had every intention of doing some good here.” Now that I’ve started speaking, I can’t seem to stop. There is some ugly little part of me that wants to impress Ned Ingstrom, show him Ethan was not just some idiot American here to spoil everything for fun. “He was planning to publish a paper. Share his findings.”
“On?”
“I don’t know, exactly,” I admit. “Ice. Disintegration of. Imminent demise. He didn’t tell us much. All we knew was that he planned to keep coming back.”
“But?”
“He died.”
Unlike most, he doesn’t recoil, only bows his head: I am so grateful for this I’m mortified to feel my eyes fill with tears. “I’m very sorry to hear that.”
“Thank you,” I say formally. “He was just twenty-three. An extraordinary young man. I understand I’m biased, but—” I blink rapidly, raising the camera to my eye: click. I stare into the finder, scanning the ice until I can focus on the dark spots here and there, though now my eyes – damn it! – are filling and the view is blurred and I move the camera wildly, snapping at random: click. Click. “I’ve come in his place, you see,” I continue. “An emissary of sorts. Harvard – he was getting his PhD there – expected a paper, he’d gotten some money, et cetera. I thought I could help. Get myself up here, suss out what’s what. He was studying weather patterns in the beginning, that’s how he got into this mess. Atmospheric sciences, the big picture. But then – I don’t know, exactly. He got hooked on ice.”
“Speaking of weather,” he says, squinting. “Newsman said a storm’s coming.”
I put the camera down. “I didn’t believe him at first, either. In my defense, he spoke about all of it in extremely technical terms, not exactly welcoming to the layperson. Still.” I clear my throat. “What he said about how quickly things were moving – that part I understood. The unpredictability. The speed with which systems change these days –you start seeing that as you get older. The weather’s different than it used to be. There’s a violence to the way things swing up and down now. One minute the sky’s blue, the next you’re running for cover.”
His mouth opens around his cigarette and I realize he’s smiling, a slight upward curve to those purple lips. “Sounds like a few people I know.”
“Marcus,” I say. “My husband. You wouldn’t think it to look at him, but he can be quite cruel. He told me to mind my own business — about this, I mean. Because I wanted – no, demanded – to know what had gone wrong. Imagine, our own son, and he was just fine marching along without any answers.” I put the camera back in my bag and flip open my notebook, pretending to fuss with the top of my pen. “They are all capable of exceptional cruelty.” He frowns. “Husbands,” I say. “Fathers. I suppose I accepted it for awhile – you know, men of a certain era.”
“Your son?”
The pen wobbles just as I put it to paper, taking a sudden downwards plunge. “A different generation.”
“He was sick?” Ned Ingstrom turns and blinks.
“Car accident,” I say. “A nasty bend in the highway. Black ice, of all things. I don’t actually feel like talking about it.”
“Of course,” he says, grinding his cigarette under his heel. “I apologize. That’s fine.”
But it isn’t fine, any of it. I can’t stand the sight of him: Ned Ingstrom, tall and big-boned, his red hands and cheeks, his barrel chest, the cigarette fresh from his mouth scattering embers across the snow. The unfairness of it, his intact bones, the smooth white skin of his forehead,; the fact that he saw Ethan here, some version of my son I would never glimpse, joy passing over Ethan’s face as he looked out over that stretch of colorless water, hope, perhaps, fascination, a moment of fragmentary galvanization. The unfairness of Meg and Diana, tucked back into the world of their own babies, both of them, their little girls already taking their first steps by the time Ethan’s body was put underground, Meg’s new baby just five months old – smiling, giggling, shaking her baby fists in the air, Meg laughing at the funeral, she couldn’t help herself but my God. Marcus, shuffling down the stairs for breakfast every morning, buttering toast as though everything had closed back over the wound. Me standing here on this alien land all these months later, thousands of miles from home. “I’m done.”
“Done?”
“If you’re sure you don’t remember anything –” Ned Ingstrom shakes his head. “Then I’ve gotten what I came for.” I wave my camera furiously, my pen; I will not cry in front of this careless young man. “What else is there? I’m finished, finito. All my ducks in a row, thanks.”
“Ducks?”
“Never mind!” I’m nearly shouting now. In front of us, the packed snow of the ice shelf stretches like a carpet, dusted here and there with what appears to be a delicate grey fur. The bloom. A vast, wet doom. Something Ethan had wanted to know intimately. Occasionally, in bed at night, Marcus and I had discussed the fact that Ethan never brought home a girl. Never mentioned the name of anyone in high school more than in passing. Never spoke of anyone with affection, male or female. It’s possible this was the closest our son had ever come to love. I try to look at it with that in mind — the wide expanse of glittering ice stretching to meet the thin black band of the horizon; the grey fists of clouds moving swiftly towards us; the dim sky, pulsing with buried sunlight – but all I see is death. It’s possible that for my son, there was very little distance between those two things.
◆
Something I have not told anyone: the day he died, my dead son asked me to come to his room. It was late afternoon, nearly dinner. He came to the kitchen and stood in the doorway, his head bowed slightly to accommodate the doorframe. “Mom,” he said – a word, to be honest, I had not heard him say in so long it sounded strange coming from his lips, as though he were testing out a phrase in a foreign language. “Can I show you something?” I nodded; I held up one finger. I can’t remember what was so important that I put him off. The rice needed to be stirred. The dishwasher needed unloading. The laundry needed to go into the dryer. The cat was at the birdfeeder again; I went outside to shoo her away, refilled the birdfeeder with fresh seed. I cleaned the lint filter in the dryer. I pushed the freezer door closed. I turned the heat off under the rice. When I remembered what he’d asked, at least a half-hour must have passed. More. I gave myself a little shake and started across the kitchen towards his room. And then I heard the front door slam shut, the engine start in his car, and I paused, wondering, and then I shrugged and went back to my small kitchen, where everything still looked exactly the same.
◆
“Dinner,” Ned Ingstrom says. I come to, aware we’ve stopped only because the comforting noise of tires against snow has ceased. “You do eat, don’t you?”
“Occasionally.” My head aches again. I press my fingers to my temple, shifting the skin into place. “Will it be quick?”
He consults his watch. “It’s four-thirty now. I could have you back to the motel in an hour.” He hesitates. “There’s not much of anything to eat back in town.”
I peer through the window and see a small, low building like all the others, though this one stands alone, a solitary speck of color – brick-red – in the middle of all that white. A rectangular plaque, black with gold lettering, hangs above the door: “INGSTROM’S”. I turn back to Ned.
“My mother’s place,” he says, a little sheepishly. “But the food’s excellent, swear it. People come from miles away.”
“I don’t want to stay long.”
“Half an hour,” he says quickly. “Might even enjoy yourself.”
Inside, the restaurant is brightly-lit and warm: Low ceilings, wide-beamed floors, the light wood throughout left unadorned. Ned is greeted enthusiastically by everyone – the lone waitress, a girl of no more than sixteen, the two other tables (men, all of them burned in the face as though they’d just come in from the wind), and as I watch, Ned’s face slowly turns to pink, the tips of his ears flaming. He has brought me here to make a point, I realize. He, Ned, is loved. While I, Elizabeth – Mrs. Graves, mother of three-now-two – no longer am.
I sit down quickly in the chair the waitress has pulled out for me. I am suddenly ravenous, starved. I could eat a horse.
“Salmon’s good,” Ned says cheerfully. He’s a different person than the man I’ve spent those last few hours with. His face animated, his eyes bright, he is almost handsome. Cheerful. “There’s cod, whale stew. Polar bear steak so fresh it’s practically still walking.”
“Polar bear?” I stare at the menu but the words crawl, unreadable in this dim light.
“Local specialty,” Ned says.
“But they’re endangered.” Aware as I say it of my tone. School-marmish, Marcus had called it once, frowning before he dove back into his papers. Cruel. Still, I remember the bears from the bulletin board over Ethan’s desk, a few photographs torn from magazines. A polar bear so thin it formed an umbrella of bones, hindquarters collapsing from the weight of its own spine. A cub left to survive on its own after its mother starved to death.
“They get stuck,” he says, waving at someone behind me. “Polars. They go looking for food out on the ice drifts, and every now and then, a drift breaks off. They’re strong swimmers, but when they get that far, even they know they can’t make it. Someone heads out a few weeks after they’re spotted and brings them home.”
“So they die out there? All alone.”
He doesn’t notice my distress. “Meat’s very nutritious.” He stands up quickly, saying something in a language I don’t understand. “Mrs. Graves,” he turns the shoulders of the small woman beside him so she faces me. “My mother.”
“Hello,” I say, standing before I think better of it. We had been nearly eye to eye as I sat and now I tower over this woman, peering down at the part in her hair, the stark white against the black oddly intimate. “Please, call me Elizabeth.”
“She doesn’t speak much English,” Ned puts a hand on his mother’s shoulder and she turns her face towards him and beams. “But she’s the best cook this side of the equator.” He bends, briefly, under the pretense of flicking something – a feather? A tuft of ivory fur? – from the sleeve of his mother’s shirt, but there’s no missing the look they exchange. A look like a lifeline.
“Polar bear it is,” I say, sitting back down.
Ned’s mother smiles again and says something to Ned, who nods and laughs, glancing at me with a look of apology so clear there is no mistaking it: I am being made fun of. My schoolteacher bun, my ridiculous windbreaker. My dead son.
“I’d like a drink, please,” I say loudly. “Something strong.”
“Of course,” Ned says. “Vodka OK? I think it’s all we’ve got in the way of liquor right now.” I nod, though the truth is that I’d rather drink paint thinner.
We sit in silence. I stare out the window and think about something Ethan once said to me about his work, about how it was the one thing that tethered him, a string that tied him in place. “I don’t think,” he said – his pale face pinched, one palm pressed against his forehead, “you can understand what that feels like to have this one thing. Like a second form of gravity.” A singular focus, he’d called it.
What do you think it is to be a mother? I might have shouted. What do you think I’ve been doing all these years?
“Ma’am?”
I turn, blinking back the hot squeeze of tears. “Elizabeth.”
“Sorry,” he says. “Really, I’m sorry, I just…” he blushes again and I see with a brief flash of clarity the boy he must have been – big-shouldered and awkward, well-liked by his classmates. Popular with girls and boys alike. “What I said back there – it wasn’t true.”
“Sorry?”
“Your son,” he says. “I never met him.”
“But you said—”
“I didn’t think it meant anything, but then, when I said it I didn’t know –– ah look, I told you it’d be quick.” He peers behind me, flashing an apologetic smile, and I turn to see his mother approaching, two large white plates covered with meat sending steam into the air. He leans in as his mother says something, depositing the plates on the table. “She says she hopes you enjoy your meal.”
“Bon appetit!” I say it too loudly, the false cheer ringing in my ears. When I put my fork and knife to the meat it’s disconcertingly tender, the blade of the knife sinking easily.
“I’m sorry, that’s all.”
“I don’t –” I take a bite to stopper myself; the meat is greasy and firm, with the faint taste of fish. Seals, I realize. They eat seals. I drop my fork with a clatter and pick up the mug someone has deposited beside my elbow – my drink: a coffee mug which releases a vapor so powerful when I bring it to my lips I shudder as I swallow it down. “You’re saying you never saw him,” I ask, my voice still too loud, too brash. The vodka flicking small flames along the inside of my throat. “That you have no memory of him, not a clue.”
Ned Ingstrom shakes his head. “I guess it’s possible I drove him somewhere and I don’t remember, but whatever it was, it wasn’t the research station. I meant it when I said I haven’t been there in ages. To be honest, I’m not sure it’s been used in years.”
I force back another swallow – my throat blazes – and sit back in my chair. “Years?”
Another shrug. “I handle a fair amount of business from the airport. It’d be strange if I hadn’t taken a single passenger somewhere people were making a habit of going.”
I think about that a moment. The truth is I know nothing about where Ethan went, what he did. In that sense, Marcus had it right: I had no idea what I was coming here to find. All I’d known when I left was that I had to go. “He didn’t get to come back,” I say slowly. “That seems unfair, don’t you agree? He was supposed to come back here,”
“Yes, you –”
“I’m repeating myself because it’s important,” I interrupt. “Whatever it was he saw that first visit, it wasn’t enough, understand? He wanted proof. Which means he must have seen something that made him think it was worth further investigation. He had a reason to come back,” I say, louder now; again, I can hardly seem to stop the words from coming, it’s not grief or vodka but sheer relief, another woman speaking now, some bolder, more powerful self, an Elizabeth who shouts from the rooftops, who has stopped pretending, an Elizabeth who no longer gives a flying fuck. “Don’t you see? He must have thought, I don’t know, however bleak things looked, there was some wiggle room. A grey area where he’d find…hope? Some thread of possible salvation? But some things in life don’t leave room for that sort of thing. There are hard truths, after all, absolutes. Latin declensions: nominative, genitive, dative. Temperatures rise, ice melts. People are going to die. He wanted to find a way to help. Isn’t it enough, that he wanted to try?” I shake my finger at him as though he is Ethan, no more than six, mouth covered in crumbs, the stolen cookie long gone. “Isn’t that the best we can do?”
Ned Ingstrom sits across from me, solid and heavy. “I don’t know.”
“But you do,” I tell him, suddenly insistent. I reach across the table and take both his hands in mine: Big hands, big fingers. Ned Ingstrom’s eyes flaring with surprise as I grip tight. “You’re here,” I say; I might be yelling now, I can hardly hear myself anymore but all at once I am electric with conviction and it is a glorious feeling, heart full, to feel so certain this is why I am here, this precise moment: to say this one thing. To be heard. “You lose things, sure, but you go on. You’re alive,” I shout, “and you try.”
◆
The truth: I did not want to go into his room. I delayed because I knew. I must have. I was his mother. I’d been in the house with him all those weeks, passing back and forth in front of the bedroom door that remained closed. I’d put my ear to the cool wood and tried to hear what was happening, tried to worm my way into his thoughts. After all, I had housed in my own body his tiny, flexible bones. With my own blood, I’d fed that brain. But I was no longer allowed access. And so I staved him off, pretending to be busy with the refrigerator, the fruit flies. I knew my son. I’d seen everything I needed to see and some part of me had buried it, zipped life shut over something so terrible I couldn’t acknowledge it. I’d wanted to believe having him close meant he was safe, as though nothing could happen to him under my roof. As though he were still a child, his pains fixable, hurts I could knead away with my thumbs.
After the police called, I left the phone on the counter and turned and went into Ethan’s room. It had been weeks since I’d set foot in there. When I opened the door, a noise escaped me, a groan like a rusty hinge creaking to life. What I found was its own catastrophe, an ecosystem collapsed in on itself: clothes everywhere, half-eaten sandwiches, rotting fruit piled across the furniture, a small colony of flies living in the corner of one window. The smell brought bile up the back of my tongue and I had to turn and run for the bathroom. I knelt on the cold tile a long time, vomiting until there was nothing left to come up. I still had not cried. When I finally stood and tried to walk, I was dizzy; I stumbled down the hallway; I had to inch my way back into his room, leaning against the wall.
What I saw was the room of a mind that had long unhooked itself from the world the rest of us walked around in: Piles of papers were spread across the desk, the floor. The large bulletin board above his desk had been covered with clippings and photographs, the polar bears, yes, but also dozens of photographs of bloom, row after row of those dark spores; underwater shots of alien sea creatures, small, red-speckled jellyfish, tiny crustaceans that glowed pink, animals like prehistoric spiders, their legs bunched like twigs; blasted trees; clusters of ice crystals arranged in concentric circles like bunched flowers; ripped bits and pieces of paper covered with scribbled formulas and notes, Post-Its, maps cut and pasted back together so they formed a kind of collage. Shredded bits of tape clung to every inch of one wall, some just barely keeping pieces of paper stuck to the paint and others just there, jagged arrows pointing to every corner. He’d covered one entire wall in permanent marker, numbers and symbols clustered so tightly together I couldn’t begin to decipher them. It looked like the den of something less than human, something half-beast. I understood he had left this – this monstrosity, this mad sprawl of logic and pain – for me: my first clue. He had wanted me to see it. His private madness, his grief, the battered machinery of his fine brain. He had hoped I could save him. That having been, after all, my job.
◆
The last thing I do as my dead son is send a letter to his advisor at Harvard, enclosing the address book wrapped in toilet paper I took from the motel bathroom as padding. I can’t imagine this is what you were hoping for, I write, but see for yourself: this is all there is to it. A slew of facts copied down from other sources. A bunch of nonsense. That was my big project. A lie.
But maybe you already knew none of this would matter, I write. Today, I read we lost twelve point five billion tons of ice in a single day last week. What can we do in the face of that? What is left to be learned?
I write: There’s nothing worth saving here anyway. I signed it: Sincerely, Ethan Graves.
The passport I take with me to the nearest shoreline, a few minute’s walk from the motel. The horizon draws an inky line between sky and sea. I raise my arm overhead and tip my weight back as best I can. I release my arm forward so the passport sails up and out over the water, though I crouch and begin pulling my clothes off before I can see the blackness close itself over those small pages and pull them down, down.
The water slices my feet, sends a howling current up my legs. It’s so cold I – half-ecstatic from the freeze, my mind already whipping around with the wind – picture ice cracking open around my legs, tiny fissures curving here and there like prehistoric spines.
But the slippery thing about pain: There’s no way to remember it. No matter how hard I tried to keep the memory of childbirth alive in my limbs, it faded and became anecdote, a padded code for what was. I saw the betrayal in my daughters’ faces after they’d passed through to the other side, the dark hurt blooming behind their eyes. I’m sorry, I’d said; what warning could have been great enough to prepare them? The horror, the joy. I’m sorry, I say now. I inch out, out, one excruciating shuffle step at a time. Each time, each millimeter forward – the cut of pain, the sound of my breath catching at the cold.
I stand there with the water around my ankles, the sky billowing star-studded black down to the horizon, and search the surface of the ice drifting a few feet out for spores. I can’t see much of anything, though. In the darkness there is only the light of the moon overhead – yellow, shadow-dappled, enormous. Ethan at three, four, had sung with such unabashed joy: He’d made up his own songs, nonsense things. One about the sun, something about cheese and please. When the pain fades there is only the shadow of it as a reminder. It helps, standing there, to remember him then. His had been a beautiful mind. How long? I would ask if he stood here before me. I would not be afraid to look him in the face. To ask the question back, to demand the truth: how long? How long?