Melt

by Robbi McCoy

  She had to keep reminding herself she was doing okay. She knew how to navigate. Maybe she wasn’t taking the most efficient route, but she was heading generally, steadily toward Ilulissat.

  As she prepared to start off again, she heard a faint mechanical hum and turned to search the bay. She caught sight of a metallic glint far out on the water. Focusing on it, she saw a moving object and gradually recognized it as a small motorboat. There were two men in the boat. It disappeared for a couple of seconds behind an iceberg, then reappeared.

  Thrilled, she jumped up and down and waved her arms, trying to get their attention. She let her pack drop off her shoulders and ran, stumbling over the uneven surface toward the shore. “Help! Help!” she yelled as loudly as she could, feeling the strain in her throat. But the boat continued unswervingly on its northerly course. She gradually gave up, recognizing they were too far away to hear her. The clarity of the view was deceptive. There had been no chance they would hear her, even though she had clearly heard their engine. Sound carried for long distances here, but she had been hollering against the wind. Watching the boat disappear from view, she let her arms fall slack at her sides in defeat.

  She checked the GPS receiver to see how far she’d come. If she ever doubted the evidence of the bay and the position of the sun to tell her she was going in the right direction, this device would confirm it. The line showing her track was an irregular zigzag. She had gone only two miles toward her goal, a disappointing distance. She wasn’t sure how far she still had to go. The GPS unit could only calculate her destination in a straight line and that was obviously not happening, not with this canyon blocking her path. And obstacles yet unknown. At the rate she was going, it could take all day to get to Ilulissat. At least she didn’t have to worry about darkness. The sun would hang low on the horizon all night, creating perpetual twilight.

  Heading inland, she walked alongside the canyon blocking her path, hoping it wouldn’t take too long to circumvent. The official trail was probably further inland, routed in such a way as to avoid impediments like this. On maps of the west coast of Greenland, she had seen how irregular it was, cut up into deep gorges, fjords, lakes and islands. Looking at the map, it was hard to even imagine there was a path you could walk between Rodebay and Ilulissat without a lot of swimming and rock climbing. There was nothing gentle about this place. It was ruggedly beautiful and brutally unforgiving.

  She was just one woman in the midst of all of this uncompromising land. If an observer could zoom out, Kelly imagined she would immediately disappear and in her place would be a thin strip of mountainous land, dark and barren. On the west side would be the frigid, endless sea. On the east, the massive solid ice sheet of the interior. On the tenuous fringe of bare land framing the island lived all the life possible in this country—human, animal and plant.

  She felt small and humbled in a way she had never felt before. Trudging through this strange territory, so far away from everything she knew, she was completely immaterial.

  Except to Pippa, she reminded herself. If she were alive, she would be hinging all her hopes on Kelly. I’ll make it, she reassured herself. Of course she would make it, but the real question was, how long did Pippa have? Or was it already too late?

  Chapter Two

  Eight Hours Earlier

  “Sorry, Mrs. Arensen,” Kelly said, sitting on the edge of her bed to pull on her hiking boots. “I don’t have time for breakfast. I’ll just grab a slice of that brown bread and butter on my way out.”

  Elsa Arensen stood in the doorway in a thin cotton dress that hit her pale legs midcalf. Her coarse hair, a homogenous mixture of gray and honey blonde, was pinned back from her face with pink plastic barrettes shaped like butterflies. Her somber, lined face, thin-lipped mouth and tiny gray eyes all contributed to the look of a no-nonsense woman in the crosshairs of late middle-age. She was tall and lean and sturdy, like a fence post. Her personality fit her appearance. Stern and unyielding, she was a paragon of stoic moral rectitude and she expected no less from her boarders. Among other things, the rules of the house explicitly forbade foul language and overnight guests. If there had ever been a Mr. Arensen, and one assumed there had, he had no doubt been a repressed and frustrated man. Sexual activity was not allowed in this house, not unless it was between a man and his wife. And even then, Kelly was certain, Mrs. Arensen did not approve.

  “I have some fresh baked birkes to take along,” she said in her singsong Danish accent. “It will make a nice snack, ja?”

  “Yes, that would be great,” Kelly agreed, remembering the buttery, flaky poppy seed rolls from last week. “We don’t need many. We’ll have a big lunch in Rodebay.”

  With a curt nod, Mrs. Arensen withdrew from the doorway. Kelly pulled on her jacket and slipped her arms through the straps of her backpack. She smoothed the bedspread carefully, knowing that boarders were expected to tidy their rooms, make their beds and put away their clothes. That rule had never been voiced, but Kelly had seen Mrs. Arensen in Chuck’s room, shaking her head at his clutter with genuine pain on her face.

  She gave a last glance around her room to make sure she wouldn’t cause her landlady any heartaches today. Her bedroom was small, with one double-hung window facing the back of the building. From her window she could see a sliver of the bay and bare hills above it. The curtain and bedspread were made of lacy fabrics that reminded her of the yellowed doilies in her great-grandmother’s house. Next to the twin bed was a narrow one-drawer nightstand, and in one corner a reading chair and lamp. A simple wooden table containing her laptop served as a desk. A straight-backed chair was tucked under it, softened with a faded floral cushion. The floor was bare wood polished to a high gloss, with a throw rug beside the bed and another by the door. The shared bathroom was down the hall.

  Mrs. Arensen ran a clean and comfortable house that delivered all the necessities without providing any luxuries. Chuck had stayed here before and had assured Kelly that it was the best place available. The two hotels in town were far too expensive for anything over a couple nights, and some of the other houses that opened their doors to boarders were not sufficiently equipped for guests. She hadn’t known what to expect in such a remote place, and was relieved to find the house so comfortable and so much like home. Chuck’s description of “nice” had been too vague to imagine anything. For a guy who had spent plenty of nights sleeping in dusty trenches and blown-out buildings with no power or water, his definition of nice could be all sorts of things Kelly would recoil from. She had no complaints. Except maybe for the food. Mrs. Arensen was not a good cook. Combine her lack of imagination in the kitchen with the dearth of fresh fruit and vegetables and you were faced with what Kelly termed “perpetual plates of brown.” Good beer and good bread and butter made it tolerable.

  “Elsa!” Chuck’s deep voice barreled down the hall. “Where the hell’s my Van Halen T-shirt! I hope you didn’t wash it! Nineteen eighty-four’s not coming around again anytime soon, you know?”

  He appeared in Kelly’s doorway wearing sweatpants and a plain white T-shirt, his thick brown hair damp and uncombed. His chin was freshly shaved and his salt-and-pepper mustache trimmed. His forehead was deeply creased from one of his most common expressions, a skeptical frown. Chuck was a big man with a Scooby-Doo sort of charm. In his early fifties, he was physically strong and vigorous, the sort of man who dominated a room with his presence. In the two weeks they’d been working together Kelly had come to appreciate his skills as a journalist and respect his opinions. He was cool and cynical and knew his stuff. She liked him but he rubbed some people the wrong way. A lot of people, actually, because he pulled no punches. In his youth he had been a crack political correspondent on his way to glory, the kind of arrogant, foolhardy reporter who risked his life to get a story. He never made the big time. He had rubbed too many people the wrong way and eventually found himself outside the inner circle. Now he took fewer chances. Greenland was less of a risk than the beats of his younger days, but only
because they weren’t getting shot at or having grenades tossed at them. A lot of people would not consider this tame territory.

  This was Kelly’s first extended assignment with Chuck. Prior to this, she had only furnished him with a few photos for his articles back home. She found his style refreshing and intelligent, devoid of sentimentality. He didn’t write fluff pieces. If you wanted to know the facts, he was your guy. An unapologetic carnivore, he wrote the way you’d expect him to write. He delved into the meat of a subject and presented it like a raw, bloody mass, untrimmed and unseasoned.

  He wagged his head. “I know she washed that shirt again. And you know how she washes things. She may as well take it out and pound it with a fucking rock in the river.”

  “If she hears you talking like that, she’ll be tossing you in the river next.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Naw, that old girl loves me. You know she does.”

  “She does seem to have a soft spot for you. You can get away with anything.”

  Chuck struggled constantly around Mrs. Arensen with his well-ingrained tendency toward crude language. He had complained to Kelly that every time he saw her wince at his speech, he was tossed into the abyss of Catholic guilt that had been his childhood. For reasons not too difficult to imagine, the landlady reminded him of ruler-wielding nuns.

  “Maybe I can get it out of the machine before she washes all the character out of it.” He dashed away.

  Besides Chuck and herself there were two other boarders, another American named Trevor Waddell who was an oil company scout and a Greenlander named Annalise, a woman in her twenties from Nuuk who taught a summer accounting course to the locals, a government program designed to provide marketable skills to people who were no longer able to make a living at traditional fishing and hunting. Annalise spoke little English and kept to herself. Other than mealtimes, Kelly rarely saw her. The only other resident was Mrs. Arensen’s twenty-one- year-old grandson, Jens, on summer break from his university in Denmark. He was a pre-med student who financed his education in part by taking tourists for helicopter tours. Altogether, there were six residents in the house and one cat, an old calico named Paluaq, a Greenlandic word meaning “butterfly.” Cats were rare in this country. Greenlanders, especially in the northern cities, kept dogs, not cats, but Mrs. Arensen had brought the pet with her from Nuuk where she used to live.

  Kelly went to the kitchen to pick up her bread and butter. Mrs. Arensen was cooking hot cereal in a pot at the stove. Muesli, no doubt. Kelly cut herself a thick slice of homemade bread from the loaf on the counter and smeared butter on it. The bread and the butter here were irresistible. She’d never tasted butter so good as this Danish stuff. Børd og smør, she practiced silently, reminding herself to work harder on her Danish.

  “You will care for yourself out there,” Mrs. Arensen cautioned, handing her the plastic bag of birkes.

  “Nothing to worry about,” Kelly replied breezily. “I hike all the time back home and Pippa’s done this route lots of times. I don’t expect to be back in time for supper, but any time after that.”

  Kelly ripped off a mouthful of bread as she emerged into the hallway, then went out the front door to find Chuck on the porch wringing out his sopping wet T-shirt.

  “What’d I tell ya?” he groused, jerking his head toward the shirt. “That woman’s OCD when it comes to cleaning. She’s got some kind of dirt phobia. Do you know she actually scrubs the baseboards? I saw her doing it. Whoever heard of that?”

  “Well, I—” Kelly began.

  “This thing has to last me the rest of my life,” he snarled. “The way it’s made it this far is by being washed only once in a blue moon. So what if it’s got a bit of a manly smell? What’s wrong with that?” He held the shirt up by the shoulders, shaking it out. “Shit! It’s already got some peeling here on the middle guitar.”

  The beloved shirt was a classic Van Halen design with a white VH in the center, scrollwork around that and three guitars underneath. In the background were the words Rock ‘n’ Roll.

  “Chuck,” Kelly said, “it’s not going to last forever. If I were you, I’d look for another one on eBay or something. Besides, it’s a little tight on you anyway. Thirty years has taken its toll on both of you.”

  He glared. “I got this shirt at a concert during the promotional tour of their 1984 album. That was the last time David Lee Roth performed with the group. They split right after this tour. If that isn’t enough to make this a priceless one-of-a-kind memento, how about this? That was the night I scored with Janie Grosswaithe, the hottest sophomore at Penn State. We did it in the back of my classic 1979 Dodge van while an eight-track tape of Olivia Newton-John singing ‘Let’s Get Physical’ serenaded our epic lovemaking. It was magical until a candle caught the shag carpet on fire and forced us out wrapped in faux leopard skin blankets. What a night!” He paused and regarded her with one half-closed eye. “If that was your memory, Sheffield, do you think you could replace this shirt with a soulless look-alike from eBay?”

  “Olivia Newton-John?” Kelly asked. “‘Let’s Get Physical’?”

  “On continuous play.”

  “To think, all of that was going on in your life before I was born. Amazing! And extremely vivid. I can almost picture it…but I don’t want to. Besides, I have to go or I’ll miss my boat.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Hiking. I told you.”

  “You did?” He wrinkled his forehead. Typical that her plans had zipped right through his consciousness without a pit stop.

  “Yeah. I’m taking the tour boat to Rodebay and hiking back with Pippa.”

  “Pippa? Oh!” He nodded. “The little girl who’s been hanging around here. The tour guide.”

  “Right. Sometimes I wonder how you can be a journalist with such a lousy attention span.”

  “I notice things that matter. No point cluttering up my mind with details about your extracurricular activities. When are you getting back?”

  “This evening.”

  “Good. Don’t be too late because we’ve got a morning appointment with that guy at the Jakobshavn Glacier. You’re gonna love it. You’ve never seen a glacier this big. It’ll blow your mind.”

  “Yeah, I’m stoked about that. By the way, when are we meeting with Jordan Westgate?”

  “Don’t know. I sent her an email last night. No answer yet.” He looked mildly puzzled. “Why?”

  “Oh, no reason,” Kelly said noncommittally. “Just trying to keep track of our schedule.” She hopped down the stairs and called over her shoulder. “See you tonight.”

  Be careful, she warned herself. I can’t let him figure out the truth about me and Jordan. So far she had kept her many questions about Jordan to herself, but the closer the time came to seeing her, the more excited she had become. Chuck was a shrewd investigator and could read people, an invaluable skill for a reporter. But he didn’t need to know anything about this. As far as he was concerned, she and Jordan were complete strangers who would be meeting for the first time in a few days. If it came out later that they had known each other previously, that was okay. It would just look like an interesting coincidence. But she didn’t want him to think Jordan had anything to do with her being here. For that matter, she didn’t want Jordan to think so either.

  When Chuck had sent her a rough itinerary of the trip, asking her to come along, she had been shocked to see Jordan’s name on the list of scientists he would be meeting. Kelly hadn’t ever thought much about Greenland. She’d certainly never thought about going, and she hadn’t known about Jordan’s work here.

  She had also never seriously expected to see Jordan again. She’d gone on with her life, years had gone by, and the ache and need had diminished.

  But a few hours after seeing Jordan’s name and realizing it was possible to see her again, it became imperative that she must see her again, if only to satisfy her curiosity. Sometimes opportunity created its own need. Suddenly, there was no question that she would
go to Greenland. How could she pass up a chance to see Jordan again? Under what better circumstances? They would be meeting as two people working. It would all be very businesslike, just the way Jordan liked things. No emotional messiness. Jordan had never been comfortable with that. Kelly was determined to present herself as a mature, professional woman, someone Jordan could respect and could regard, if not as her equal, then at least not as the foolish and immature adolescent she had once been.

  No more questions about Jordan, she silently reiterated. It was only a few days now before Jordan would appear before her in the flesh and all of her questions would be answered.

  Chapter Three

  When everyone was aboard the boat, the captain, Amaalik, doffed his cap and introduced himself and his eleven-year-old son Nuka in broken English. Both of them wore summer outfits of short sleeved shirts and lightweight pants.

  “Titanic iceberg,” he said, grinning cheerfully, “from here.” He waved his hat toward the bay, then laughed and ducked inside the cabin. A second later, he appeared in the window above, ready at the helm.

  “The iceberg that sunk the Titanic came from here?” asked an old woman with a British accent.

  “Yes,” Nuka confirmed. “From the Jakobshavn Glacier.”

  Kelly wasn’t sure why a tour boat skipper thought that was funny or something to be proud of, but he had carted out the same piece of trivia the first time she’d been on this tour.

  As the boat began to pull away from the dock, she leaned against the outer wall of the cabin and zipped up her coat. Next to her on a bench sat an American couple in their sixties, looking optimistically uncertain.

  The boat inched its way through the harbor, dodging icebergs. Every time it hit a chunk of ice, the American woman stiffened and pressed her lips together in an expression of alarm. She and her husband sat close on their bench, swathed in layers of protective clothing, including parkas and gloves. Despite the chill breeze coming off the water, it was a nice day. Once they reached Rodebay and got off the boat, nobody would be complaining about the weather.