Melt (2 page)

Being the youngest of three girls, it seemed to her that her sisters always had better stuff than she did. But there were advantages to being the youngest too. You could get away with things. Jess, who was six years her senior, wouldn’t have dared break her arm no matter what she’d done. She would have never been forgiven for such a vicious attack on the baby. The youngest child remains “the baby” all her life to parents and siblings. No matter her age, in their minds, she was the precious, adorable holy terror with the mad twinkle in her eyes, looking for the next opportunity to get away with some wickedness.

As recently as last month when she’d visited her sister Lee and offered to play Scrabble with her ten-year old nephew, Lee had said, “Okay, but you have to use real words with him. You can’t just make up words like you do.”

“I don’t do that anymore!” Kelly had protested. “I only did that when I was a kid because you and Jess always beat me. You let me do it because it was the only way I could ever win.”

Lee had given her one of those indulgent looks and said, “Well, I’d rather Trevor learn it correctly.”

It was no use trying to overcome the image of herself in the minds of her family members. It was like they carried around a twenty-year-old photo of her in their brains. She would forever be a mischievous girl with ratty hair and knobby knees who broke everything she touched and whose only talent was the ability to suck milk into her nose through a straw and spit it out her mouth. Nothing she’d done since then had made much of an impression. Both sisters had become much more interested in their own lives as they hit puberty, dating boys and getting married. Neither of them seemed to have noticed that Kelly was the one who held the place together after all of the rest of them had gone, after Dad left, when Mom, debilitated by grief and regret, spent her afternoons drinking and her evenings passed out. Kelly had to take care of everything after that—make sure the bills were paid and clothes washed and meals prepared. There was nobody else to do it. She became the mother of the house during her teens, and her mother became the petulant child.

When Kelly was twenty, her mother, whose health was deteriorating, decided to sell the house and move to Portland where Jess lived. They found a nice condo for her only a few blocks away from their house. Jess came down to help her move and kept saying things like, “This is the best thing you could do, Mother. Now you’ll get the care you need. I’ll make sure you get to the doctor regularly and eat properly.”

Nobody acknowledged the effort Kelly had made in the intervening years to try to cheer her mother up, to run her errands, to coax her to eat, and to try, unsuccessfully, to persuade her to quit drinking. Nobody except Jordan Westgate, her professor at Boulder, who was a patient and indulgent confidante, sympathetic and encouraging.

“The important thing is,” Jordan had told her, “you did a remarkable job. You kept both you and your mother afloat through a rough time, and you can be proud of that. Your sister may grow to understand that once she has to deal with the same frustrations you’ve been facing.”

It was a prophetic observation. A year later, Jess called in a state of desperation. “I don’t know how you put up with this all those years!” By then, Kelly had been on her own for a year and was glad she no longer had the responsibility. Maybe if she’d been more of a complainer, Jess wouldn’t have been so eager to adopt their mother in the first place. But she’d had an out-of-date image of Mom too, stuck in her head, an image of a rational, responsible woman involved in the lives of her children and husband, competently and contentedly taking care of all of their needs. It was possible Jess had even thought she was getting a free babysitter by moving their mother to Portland, but as it turned out, she didn’t think it was safe to leave her kids alone with their grandmother.

Kelly had enthusiastically reported that phone call to Jordan, who had raised her hand high above her head and declared, “Vindication!”

She had met Jordan Westgate when, as a nineteen-year old sophomore, she had reluctantly walked into Introduction to Geology hoping to get one of her required science credits out of the way without too much agony. Science had never been Kelly’s strong suit. She leaned toward the arts. For better or worse, it had been a fateful day. The brusque, wry, quick-witted woman at the front of the class had swept her off her feet, and the course of Kelly’s life for the next two years had been established.

She wondered now if Jordan would be like her sisters, incapable of updating her mind’s image of Kelly after nearly a decade. Would she still see her as a naïve child, more worthy of pity than friendship? She desperately hoped not.

She stopped walking and scanned the horizon. Somewhere out there in the vast wilderness of Greenland, perhaps within mere miles, Jordan was at work, unaware that she and Kelly were about to meet again.
After nine years, will she recognize me? Will she even remember me?

She climbed a small rise, getting a better view of her surroundings. A hundred yards ahead was a ravine. She walked up to it and peered into a rocky crevasse littered with pools of reflective water. It was too steep and too deep to cross, continuing inland for several hundred feet before meandering to the right and out of view. On the bay side, the ravine gradually widened until it met open water. There was no way around it in that direction.

She had lost the actual trail almost immediately after her solo journey began. The trail hadn’t been visible even this morning when they were actually on it. Bare rock doesn’t allow for that, but there were occasional cairns marking the way, piles of rocks placed at intervals to guide hikers along the official path. The official path, Pippa had explained, was simply the easiest one, the most direct, most level and driest, generally following the contours of the coastline. They had passed several of those cairns this morning, but she had seen none for hours. That made Kelly nervous. She had begun to question her decision to head south into the unknown instead of turning back toward Rodebay, a route she had at least already experienced. At the time, it had seemed like a no-brainer. Mileage wise, they were closer to Ilulissat than Rodebay. But that was mileage according to her GPS receiver, and with the rugged nature of the ice-carved terrain, she was beginning to understand the fallibility of that logic. It was too late to second-guess herself now. She had already traveled too far.

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.