by Roxie Noir
A whirlpool opens up in my stomach.
“Yes, you can,” I say, shoving my glasses up my nose. They’re not even properly fixed yet, though I glued them together last night since Wilder’s tape job was starting to come apart.
“In fact, it’s pretty easy, all you have to do is leave me alone and not get in a plane to an Arctic research station just because you think you can do whatever you want and have whoever you want with no consequences,” I go on. “Maybe I came here without telling you because I didn’t want you around and didn’t want you showing up and trying to kiss me again. You think of that?”
“Yes,” he says.
“Then what the hell?”
“I couldn’t forgive myself if I let you go again,” he says quietly.
“You say that to all the girls you bang?” I snap.
I’ve got that unsteady feeling in my throat that means I’m about to cry, and I clench both of my wet fists, trying to get myself under control.
“Or do you only say this shit to the girls you bang on the side while you’ve got some other girlfriend who’s prettier and funner and has bouncy hair and laughs the right way at your jokes? The girls who you can string along so you can laugh about it later with your buddies when you crawl back into whatever hole you crawled out of and tell them oh hey, I really had that girl Imogen going again, she thought I was into her for real can you even believe it—”
“You think I flew to the end of the earth in that tiny fucking plane so I could laugh about it later?” he says, incredulous. “I know you know how getting in one of those things felt.”
I sigh, shutting my eyes because he’s right and I hate it.
“I got into that thing because I had to come see you,” he goes on, his voice quiet and serious. “I got into that thing and flew it for almost ten hours even though I was shaking the entire time because I wanted to see you again. I want to listen to you talk about musk oxen family sagas and I want to hear you laugh when you make an awkward joke and I want you to wake me up in the middle of the night to—”
The door opens, one of the chess players comes out. He’s middle-aged, gray-haired and wearing a puffy vest.
“Everything okay?” he asks, brow slightly furrowed as he glances at the broken mug at our feet, the tears streaming down my face.
“Fine,” I say, and point at my foot. “Just clumsy.”
He nods and starts walking away. I try to wipe some tears off my face, but I just smear tea on myself, which makes me cry harder.
I’m sure the flight attendant never breaks mugs and sobs like a little kid and then smears tea all over herself, I think self-pityingly. I bet she’s even pretty when she cries.
“Imogen—”
“I can’t do this again,” I tell him.
I finally manage to look into his eyes, holding my breath for strength. Tears are still leaking down my face, and I’m barely holding it together without sobbing, snot going everywhere.
“I already did this once,” I go on, my voice a miserable stage whisper because I don’t trust myself. “And, you know, I can forgive myself for believing you when we were out there because it was a weird situation, and there was a lot of stress, and I thought I was going to die and people make bad decisions when they think they’re going to die.”
I swallow hard and force myself to take a deep breath.
“I’d do it again,” he says.
“Don’t be stupid.”
“Don’t tell me what to do,” he murmurs, teasing.
I laugh despite myself, wipe my hand on my pants, finally wipe off some of my tears.
“Once was enough,” I tell him. “That’s all I’ve got in me.”
“Squeaks—”
“Don’t. Please.”
Wilder reaches out, smooths a strand of hair back against my head. His thumb brushes tears off of one cheek and I breathe deep, force myself not to lean into his touch like a cat.
“Let me say something,” he murmurs, his hand still on my face. “You don’t have to believe me. You don’t have to say anything back, you don’t even have to acknowledge me, you can just walk away. Just let me tell you.”
I don’t want to hear it. I don’t. I know that whatever he’s about to say is going to make this a billion times worse and harder and then I’m going to spend ages second-guessing any decision I make, but despite myself I nod.
“I loved you ten years ago and couldn’t admit it,” he says. “That’s why I came. Because even if it took a plane crash and a broken ankle and a bunch of nearly dying, I finally figured out that I love you, I did then, I do now, and I’d crash the plane again in a second if it led me back to you.”
I push my glasses onto my head, rub my eyes with my hands.
“Please don’t crash another plane,” I whisper.
“There’s no one else,” he says. “Amy was just… a distraction. She’s nice, but she was a way to pass the time.”
I want to believe him. I do. My whole body wants it, from my busted ankle to the top of my head, all my nerves harmonizing in a symphony of this feels right.
Just say yes.
“It’s different this time, I swear, Squeaks,” he murmurs. “Please believe me.”
I bite my lip, trembling, my voice untrustworthy as I look up at Wilder again, pure desperation in his eyes.
He’s telling the truth this time, I think.
He came all the way here. He has to be.
Once burned, though.
“I can’t do this again,” I whisper.
Twice shy.
Chapter Forty
Wilder
She turns and walks away, leaving faint wet footprints down the hall until she finally picks a door and heads through it, not looking back even once.
I feel like I’m tearing down the middle. I feel like I’ve got a part of myself that I didn’t even know could get hurt that’s being slashed to pieces with a dull knife, hacked through until the edges are ragged and ugly and bleeding.
I could call after her. I don’t. I could chase her, but I don’t, because what good is going to come of that? I already followed her all the way to the tundra, a thousand miles from real human civilization. Following her another twenty feet down a hallway isn’t how I fix this.
Slowly, I bend down and grab the big pieces of the shattered ceramic mug that’s at my feet, careful of the sharp edges. I’m suddenly aware that the tea’s cold, that it soaked through my shoes, that my shirt is still damp from how much I sweated while I was flying here.
And it didn’t work. Maybe the craziest thing I’ve ever done. Probably the hardest, and it didn’t work. I don’t know what I was expecting, but not this.
I guess I thought she’d at least kiss me back. That she’d at least agree to think about it, give us a trial or something.
I stare at the pieces of broken mug in my hand, and I want to throw it back on the floor, maybe against the wall. Break it even harder than it’s already broken, storm out of the station, jump into the tiny plane I rented and take off.
I want to find another woman here — literally any woman would do — seduce her in five minutes, tell her my name just so she’d scream it loud enough for Imogen to hear when I fucked her. I want to pull someone’s hair and imagine Imogen, on the other side of the wall, crying.
And for a moment I nearly do something. I nearly throw the broken mug and storm down the hallway, anger seething through my veins that I didn’t get what I want.
That I came all the way here and she still doesn’t believe me. That I flew here, in the exact same kind of plane we crashed in, that for hours and hours in the air I had visions of crashing again, alone this time. That I did it just to see her again, and she turned me down.
At the far end of the hall, a door opens. My head snaps up but it’s not Imogen, just another girl with thick black hair in a topknot. She gives me a weird look, then turns and walks the other direction, but in that moment the spell of my anger is broken, cold tea dripping through my fingers
as I crouch on the floor.
You can’t do the same thing you did before and expect different results, I suddenly think.
I pick up another shard of ceramic, this this one slips and when I grab it tighter it cuts the pad of my finger.
“Shit,” I mutter, dropping it as a drop of blood blossoms out of me, but the sharp pain breaks the spell, red liquid dripping into the spilled tea.
This was a disaster. It didn’t work and now I’m out several thousand dollars in plane rental and jet fuel, not to mention I’m fucking lucky that the Canadian Air Force didn’t get called on me for pulling this stunt.
I stand, ceramic pieces in my hands. I head back to the lounge where I was waiting, and I pull the door open, nod at the two other people in there still bent over a chess board. I throw the ceramic pieces into the trash and grab about twenty paper towels from a dispenser, head back into the hallway.
I clean up the mess I made. I wipe down the floor and the wall where it splashed until there’s no trace whatsoever, going back for more paper towels twice.
When I’m done I stand there, in the hallway, and I look at the shiny sealed concrete floor and I think: there, I made one piece of this better.
I leave the next morning, early, after one of the most awkward nights of my life. Imogen avoids me like the plague, and even though we’re two people in the same fairly small building, I don’t force the issue.
It’s not that I’m giving up. But I did, finally, realize something: doing the same things will produce the same results. She doesn’t want to talk any more, I won’t make her.
Instead, I try to come up with a cover story for the other scientists, who all seem to regard me as a particularly interesting specimen, like I’m an insect who can walk and talk.
Grace, the girl with the black hair in the top knot, frowns at me over the lasagna someone makes for dinner.
“You flew here alone because you thought it sounded fun?” she asks.
It’s dead clear that she thinks I’m an idiot, so I grin at her, idiotically.
“Sure!” I say, false enthusiasm in my voice. “Imogen kept talking about how much she likes doing research here, so I figured I’d stop by and see her! All day outside, watching some funny animals have sex, what’s the downside?”
“It’s cold, it’s uncomfortable, and it’s for serious scientific inquiry. It’s not a resort. There are no drinks with umbrellas,” she says, still dead serious.
I’m still grinning as I fork lasagna into my mouth. If they want to think I’m a total moron, it’s fine with me, mostly because I know that if I want to completely and utterly tank any chance of ever speaking to Imogen again, I’d tell them the real story.
So, rich kid mistakes research station for Club Tundra it is.
“Guess I got it wrong!” I say. “Neat place you got here, though.”
She gives me another baffled look, so everything’s going according to plan.
They give me a pair of sweatpants that someone left here last research season along with a hoodie, and let me sleep in one of the mens’ bunk rooms, but not before the woman in charge — Wanda, the short round one who was also my welcoming party — lectures me at length about what a risk I took flying in unannounced and how lucky I am that they didn’t shoot me and how it’s a good thing they didn’t refuse to let me land, how they’re able to feed me for a day, etc.
I smile and nod through all of it, even though I’m not sorry in the least.
Even though I feel like I carved Imogen’s name onto my still-beating heart and she just walked away, I’m not sorry.
I leave the next morning, still in the borrowed sweatpants, and before I get on the plane again I puke my guts out in the bathroom. I can’t stop remembering the way it felt to plummet out of the sky, the sense of complete and total helplessness I felt when I realized that nothing I did had any effect.
The ground rushing up and up. The certainty that I was going to die, that my last thought was going to be what the hell just happened?
And then I get up, I flush the toilet, and I get on the plane. I force myself to taxi and take off even though my whole body is trembling, even though my mind is nearly blank from panic.
Hours later I land in Yellowknife, and thirty minutes after that I’m drunk on cheap whiskey in the tiny airport’s only bar, trying desperately to knock the endlessly looping plane crash from my head.
Chapter Forty-One
Imogen
Pierre opens the freezer in the lounge as I open the trash can, tossing my tea bag in. Luckily, no one’s said anything about the mug I broke, even though I was afraid I’d be relegated to only sipping water from my cupped hands or something.
“Travis!” Pierre shouts, his wiry frame perfectly upright, his eyes closed.
“Yo,” Travis responds from across the room, where he’s sitting on a couch, using his laptop.
“You cannot put samples in the lounge freezer,” Pierre says, his eyes still closed, his back rigid. “I’m well aware that the proper storage facility is in another building, and you don’t like going outside because it’s cold, but this freezer is for food and you absolutely, positively—”
“It’s just dirt,” Travis says, looking bewildered. “It’s not like, meat or shit or anything.”
“If it’s dirt, why is it in the freezer?” Pierre asks, exasperated.
“So it doesn’t thaw.”
“What does it matter if dirt thaws?”
“Well, there’s organisms in the permafrost,” Travis says, twirling his pen around in his fingers. “And so I need to put them under the microscope when I get a chance, but I dunno if thawing them—”
“If there are organisms then it is not just dirt, is it?!” Pierre exclaims. “That, Travis, is precisely why we have separate storage for…”
I take my leave of the lounge, because while it’s true that Travis shouldn’t be storing dirt samples in the same freezer where people get ice for drinking, Pierre can really get going sometimes, and I just can’t take it right now.
I hobble down the hallway. Past the spot where I last saw Wilder, where he kissed me and I broke the mug and then ran away, and just like I have for the past two days, I wonder if I fucked up.
I wonder if I’m too cautious, if I should be more trusting, more open, more willing to believe that people can change. I wonder if I should follow my heart more instead of my brain, because while my brain seems great for most things, I’m not sure this is one of them.
I just know that there’s still a few tiny splotches on the wall where whoever cleaned it up missed a spot, and looking at them hurts. It feels like there’s a fish hook connected to my ribcage and someone’s trying to reel me in, pulling me backwards with a sharp pain somewhere in my heart-region.
It feels a little like I can’t breathe when I think of him saying I loved you and couldn’t admit it.
Then I shake my head slightly and continue on. I’ve got movement data that needs transcribing, some scat samples waiting in the proper storage area that I should really deal with, and I’ve been thinking of starting a blog about the many and varied romantic tribulations of the musk oxen I’ve been watching.
It’s much more dramatic than you’d think.
“Hey, Imogen!” a voice calls out behind me.
I turn, careful not to spill my tea.
“Phone call,” calls Kelly.
My heart clenches and my skin goes cold because I immediately wonder what awful thing has happened that would make my parents call out of the blue like this, instead of emailing or Skyping or something.
My brother was in a car crash, I think.
One of my parents had a heart attack.
My dad fell while skiing and broke his hip, and since he’s starting to get up there in years that’s pretty bad, though replacement hip technology has come a really long way lately…
The research station has a landline, sort of, though it’s through a satellite so I don’t know if you can exactly call it that. I hea
d into the office-type-room, where the receiver is just hanging out on a desk and Kelly sits down again, looks at her computer.
Wilder crashed his plane again. He really did it, just to prove something, that moron…
“Hello?” I say, panic clutching my chest.
Mentally, I run through all the bad things that could have happened, my mind a cacophony of crashes and spills and hospital beds. Why else call here, like this?
“Hey there, Squeaks,” Wilder says, his voice perfectly relaxed and casual.
I freeze, blinking in surprise. I wasn’t expecting him, not at all.
I swallow hard, my mouth dry.
“What’s wrong?” I ask. At the desk, Kelly ignores me studiously, trying to act like she’s not listening but of course she is. She’s five feet away.
Wilder chuckles.
“What’s wrong is I hadn’t talked to you in a few days,” he says. “I like the sound of your voice.”
I turn toward the wall, where there’s a safety poster about how to treat hypothermia. Every room’s got one.
“You called the station,” I say.
“Your parents wouldn’t give me your phone number so I had to get creative if I wanted to talk to you,” he says, his voice low and slow, almost a drawl. “I might have made up some story about needing to double-check a serial number on a microscope so that my company could send up a replacement. You do have microscopes up there, right?”
“Of course we have microscopes,” I say, off-handedly. “You just called to… call?”
“Is it that strange?”
“Kind of,” I say, still feeling hesitant. “You’re sure that nothing terrible has happened and you’re not just soft-pedaling it because you think I’m going to freak out if you tell me my brother was in a car crash?”
“Squeaks, I promise that if your brother was in a car crash I’m the absolute last person on this green earth that your parents would tell,” he says, a smile in his voice. “If he has, I don’t know shit about it. I just know I wanted to talk to you.”
