Melt (13 page)

“Yes. All the comforts of home.”

“I’ve been living like this for a few weeks already. It’s not bad. I don’t mind. The worst thing is the mosquitos.”

Kelly nodded and ran her finger over one of the itchy red bumps on her cheek.

“That reminds me,” Sonja said, reaching into her front pocket. “I have an antiseptic wipe for that cut on your leg.”

Kelly sat up and pulled her pants leg up to reveal several small scratches and one cut deep enough to have bled.

“How did you get so scratched up anyway?” Sonja asked.

“Brambles. I went through a horrible bog. There are some really nasty plants around here.”

Sonja rubbed the moist cloth gently across the wound a couple of times, producing a slight sting. “Yeah,” she said. “You should stay on the trail.”

“I would have if I could have found it.”

Sonja caressed Kelly’s calf tenderly before rolling the pant leg back into place. Then she looked up and smiled. “You’re cute.”

“Thanks. I don’t feel very cute tonight.”

“I admit you looked fresher this morning, but you’ve had a rough day. Still, pretty darn cute. The way we keep running into each other, maybe the universe is trying to tell us something.”

Kelly laughed, then abruptly cut herself off when Sonja leaned toward her, looking like she was going to kiss her. Kelly caught her shoulders and held her off.

“No goodnight kiss?” Sonja asked, rocking back onto her cot.

Kelly shook her head. “No, thanks. I’ve got a lot on my mind right now. This just doesn’t seem like the time and place.”

Sonja pressed her lips together in resignation and sighed. “Okay. I understand. It’s not that often a rocking hot lesbian shares my tent. I was thinking it was my lucky night.”

“Sorry.”

“Is Pippa your girlfriend?”

Kelly was surprised by the question. “No. We’re just friends.” She got inside her sleeping bag and lay on her side facing Sonja. The cots were nearly touching, as the tent was so small it could barely sleep two.

“So you were Jordan’s student too,” Sonja said, crawling into her own bag. “When was that?”

“Ten years ago. How long have you known her?”

“A year. I’ve had her for two semesters. She’s great, isn’t she? I was so lucky to get chosen for this fieldwork. It’s a terrific opportunity. Eight weeks in Greenland. Everybody’s so envious.”

“I can imagine. Eight weeks is quite a while to be gone, though. Nobody brought their spouses, I guess.”

“No. Malik’s lucky. He’s got all his family in town. Brian’s wife is back home and he misses her like crazy. And Julie’s single.”

“What about Jordan?” Kelly tried to make her voice sound as casual as possible. “Did she have to leave someone behind?”

Sonja narrowed her eyes slightly before saying, “Not that I know of. She’s married to her work. But she doesn’t talk about her personal life, if there is one, which I totally doubt. How about before, when you knew her?”

“She was like that then too.”

Sonja’s eyes twinkled with mischief. “Her students call her The Ice Queen.”

Kelly flinched. “Really?”

Sonja shrugged. “It’s not in a mean way. Everybody likes her. Girls especially. When she was your teacher, did you know about her? Did you know she was gay?”

“Yeah, we knew. She didn’t discuss it or anything. I mean, she wouldn’t talk about something like that, but she didn’t try to hide it.”

“Were you out then too?”

“I was just figuring things out. Jordan became a role model for me. I was looking for female role models, I guess, lesbians in particular.”

Sonja smiled knowingly. “Did you have a crush on her?”

Kelly hesitated before saying, “Yeah, sure. Who wouldn’t, right? I mean, don’t you?”

Sonja laughed, but didn’t seem inclined to answer. Was that a yes? Kelly wondered.

“Do you know anything about her?” Sonja asked. “Her family or background?”

“No, not really.” What Kelly did know, she wasn’t inclined to share with Sonja. Though the facts were skimpy and of little use to someone trying to force her way into Jordan’s private world, Jordan wouldn’t like them being shared.

Jordan grew up in a poor, religious farming family in the Midwest, one of two daughters. Her sister had remained there, marrying and having three children. As far as Kelly knew, Jordan had little to do with any of them. Their lives had grown too far apart in every way imaginable. To Kelly, Jordan had seemed isolated with no family, no lover, no close friends. All of her relationships seemed to be purely professional, except her odd friendship with Kelly. It was hard to know how to describe that, hard even to call it a “friendship,” but they had been close in a way, and Kelly believed Jordan had been fond of her.

“What about you?” she asked Sonja. “Nobody waiting back home?”

“Nope.” Sonja adjusted her pillow and laid her head flat. She held the open edge of her sleeping bag up. “You sure you don’t want to zip them together? It’s warmer that way.”

“Fortunately, it’s not a cold night.”

Sonja laughed again and zipped up her bag. “Good night.” She turned over and grew quiet.

Kelly lay on her back, listening to the soft music drifting through the still night. She gradually recognized it as smooth jazz. She wasn’t sure what time it was, but if somebody was still playing music it probably wasn’t too late. She soon concluded that she wasn’t going to fall asleep so easily after all, despite her exhaustion. She was too worried about Pippa and too aware of Jordan’s nearness.

She unzipped her sleeping bag, prompting Sonja to roll over and say, “Where ya going?”

“I can’t sleep. Is there any herbal tea?”

“You know where the coffeepot is. It’s right there.”

“Do you want anything?”

“No, thanks. I’ll be asleep in a minute.”

Kelly pulled on her jacket and went outside. The music, she discovered, came from Malik’s tent, easily identified by Atka lying just outside the entrance. The interior was dimly lit. The other two tents nearby, Julie’s and Brian’s, were both dark. This cluster of small tents was downslope from the center of the camp where the kitchen and living areas were set up. Jordan’s tent, the big one, was about fifty feet further up from there. A lantern was on inside. Jordan was still up.

Thumbing through the teabags, she selected an orange spice, noting a few packets of rooibos. That had been Jordan’s particular favorite, she recalled. Maybe it still was.

She turned to the stove to see Malik standing beside her. Startled, she gasped and clutched her chest. His black eyes were cool and expressionless. The Greenland flag on his scalp glowed pink in the night sunlight.

“Sorry,” he said in a soft, nonthreatening voice. “I did not mean to scare you. I heard you walk by.”

“I didn’t think I’d made any noise.”

“Only the feet of animals make no noise.”

Impulsively, Kelly glanced down at his feet, seeing a pair of Teva sandals and wondering what she had expected to see. Atka sat beside him, tongue hanging out the side of his mouth.

“You are making tea?” he asked.

“Yes. I don’t think I can sleep. Too worried about Pippa.”

“Let me light the stove,” he offered, lifting the lid to reveal two burners. “Pippa is a sweet little girl.”

“You know her?”

“We have lived in the same town all our lives. You see how small it is.”

“Of course.”

He struck a match and lit the stove, adjusting the flame before putting a pan of water on the burner.

“I hope I didn’t wake you up with my thunderous tromping through camp,” Kelly said.

Malik smiled. “No. I was awake, working. I never sleep well in summer. As a kid, I would stay up sometimes all night in summer. Lots of kids do that.”

“I’ve seen it. At midnight, I’ve looked out the window to see them racing past in the road on their bikes. It seems so strange.”

“Three months of the year we do not see the sun. We hibernate like bears and wait for it. In the spring, when the first ray of sunlight peeks over the hills and touches our cheek with a kiss of warmth, we awake. ‘
Seqineq nuivoq
,’ we say with joy in our hearts: The sun has risen. The frozen earth begins to melt. Out flows water, insects, plants and animals, emerging like a flood of life, swelling as the days grow longer and the great summer thaw begins. Then we sing and dance and celebrate life. No time for sleeping.”

He spoke like a poet, Kelly observed. “You said you were awake, working on something. What?”

“I am making a collection of Kalaallit stories in English, to save them for the world. It is what I do in my spare time. Some of these have never been written down in English before.”

“What a wonderful project!”

“Yes.” Malik looked pleased with her response. “I have been searching through old libraries here and in Denmark to find forgotten stories written down by European visitors in the sixteen and seventeen hundreds. I compare those to traditional stories handed down orally, trying to find the roots of our legends. But mainly I talk to old people and ask them what stories their parents and grandparents told them when they were little children. I was very glad to meet Nivi today. She invited me to come to visit her, so she can tell me all her old stories. Just like in your country where every child knows the story of Little Red Riding Hood or the legend of the tooth fairy, I hear many of the same stories over and over and that is how I know they are part of our culture and have been passed down for many generations.”

“I’d love to hear some of those stories,” Kelly said. “It’s so interesting that you work in both the science of the natural world and the culture of the people at the same time, that you’re so interested in both.”

“There is no difference to me between the natural world and the people who live in it. It is all Greenland.” He smiled, then turned to the boiling water on the stove. “Here is your water ready. I will see you in the morning and I hope to hear good news about Pippa.”

He returned to his tent, Atka at his heels, and the camp was silent again. Kelly put a teabag in a mug and poured hot water over it, then her attention was drawn back to the big tent with its circle of white light seeping through the fabric.

She impulsively opened a packet of rooibos and made a second cup of tea.

Chapter Fourteen

Staring up through the hole above, Pippa could tell it was night by the color of the sky. It was rosy gold. She didn’t know what day of the week it was. She didn’t know how long she’d been asleep. Her head hurt and her swollen ankle throbbed with pain. She sat up and gritted her teeth through the painful process of removing her boot. Finally it was off and she leaned back with a deep sigh. Her stomach rumbled so loudly it echoed through the small chamber. Too bad she hadn’t been carrying her backpack when she’d fallen in here. She could really use that ræklinger now. Not to mention her water bottle. She ran her tongue over her dry lips.

She understood now that she wasn’t in America or England or Africa, but in Greenland as she always had been. Her mind had cleared. She had fallen into this cave while picking cottongrass flowers. The ground had given way beneath her feet, plunging her into this dungeon. She also understood that it wasn’t really a cave, not in the strict sense of the term. It was a pocket created by a pile of boulders that had fallen in the ravine long ago. The space between them had filled in over time with gravel, sand and dirt, forming an airtight chamber. It wasn’t airtight anymore, she mused, looking through the opening above.

It hadn’t been airtight earlier either, she thought, not during the Viking days. That is, if everything she had just seen had actually happened.

For several minutes, she had been lying here marveling at the experience she had just had, trying to decide if she had been dreaming or if she had had a vision. It wasn’t like any dream she’d ever had. It was vivid and powerful, and the emotions of it still gripped her. She remembered earlier that she’d seen a woman’s face in the darkness, and she now knew that face was that of a Viking woman named Asa. She also believed that this was the same cave Asa had happened across in her journey home. Everything about it fit. Somehow that woman was speaking to her across the centuries.

Gradually overcoming the amazement of her vision, Pippa turned her mind to her own situation. Perhaps, she thought tentatively, Asa is trying to help me. She sat up and peered into the gloom. Hundreds of years ago, there had been at least one crevice between the rocks of this structure wide enough for a woman to fit through. If she could find that and open it up again, she might be able to get out. Because there was no way she could get out the way she had come in short of flying.

What must Kelly be going through? she wondered. She hoped she was okay. Being alone in a strange place, not knowing the route or the terrain, would she have attempted going on alone? Or was she still waiting for Pippa to reappear, frightened and huddled behind a rock against the wind?

Driven by this image, Pippa gathered her strength and tried to ignore the pain as she crawled to the edge of the chamber and shined her penlight on the wall, feeling with her fingers for the edges of boulders. The continual low howl of the wind accompanied her orderly progress as she ran her hands over cool stone. After investigating one spot, she moved in a counter-clockwise direction, using the odd rock cairn as her signpost. When she returned to that, she would have made a complete circuit.

Most of the boulders were tight against one another with little space between. About halfway along, she found one place where her hand did not meet solid rock. It was earth, gravel and dirt. She took out her pocketknife and poked into it. It was loose enough to dig into. This was one possible exit. She continued around the chamber until she was back to the rock pile. As she shined her light on the wall, she was startled to see scratches in the rock about a meter from the floor. She peered at them more closely. These were not random scratches. They were a straight line of faint characters etched into the rock. She could barely make them out in the dim light. Only a couple of them looked like letters at all and they made no sense to her. Maybe they were just random scratches after all.