The Coldest Continent
It’s sunny at the end of the world. Maude wants to tell someone, but she has no one to tell. The sentence ticks through her mind as she settles into one of the many empty chairs in the cruise ship’s glass-walled library, surrounded on all sides by the roll of forty-foot waves. Yesterday, she stood at the stern with the other passengers and watched the familiar greens and browns of Argentina recede into a monochromatic, blue-on-blue view. Now, seemingly every other passenger is stuck horizontal through this lurching loop.
Most endure the nausea in their cabins, only occasionally emerging, pale-faced and wobbly-legged, for oatmeal and mashed potatoes. It’ll take the ship three days to get through the Drake Passage, on its way to the Antarctic Peninsula. Maude plans to take advantage of the nearly empty ship for as long as she can. Maybe writing as the ground seesaws beneath her will finally force her unbudgeable writing project to budge. She watches the froth of water as the ship bucks through the waves—cresting, dropping, cresting, dropping. She can’t decide what is worse: the relentless view or the blank document open on her computer. The cursor blinks, taunts.
She types and deletes: The molar jiggled; a tectonic plate shifted.
She tries again: They incinerated her teeth with the rest of her bones.
Dana would have made fun of her––don’t be so maudlin, Maude––but Dana wasn’t here. Maude missed her, but she also hated her. She hated Dana for that early-morning phone call from Dana’s dad, hated Dana for letting her SUV roll on her way to a weekend retreat. She hated Dana for the conversation Maude had with Dana’s dad after the funeral, when he explained about the tickets to Antarctica and he knew Dana would still want Maude to go. Maude hated Dana because she knew she couldn’t cancel, not with Dana in her ear, whispering, Don’t be such a baby, you bitch.
For years, Maude had been developing an idea for her second novel, an idea she only told Dana about in fragments. Tooth Rift would be about an iceberg that was slowly cleaving from the continent and a woman who realizes this rift exists in her mouth as a loose molar. Whenever she presses her tongue to the dental crown, the rift grows wider. Dana glommed onto the idea because, she insisted, they would need to go to Antarctica for research purposes. She had her family money; she’d buy their tickets; Maude didn’t have to worry about that part of it. They’d go together and they’d vacation in parkas. Dana would drink martinis and Maude would write. Dana insisted it was a perfect plan, but Maude refused. She didn’t want Dana’s charity, and she knew that, even if the publisher of her first book was interested in this next one, any advance she got would only end up being equal to whatever she still owed the IRS from the year before. Over drinks, Maude would mention a new plot point she’d come up with––how, if the woman’s gums bled, the blood would taste like salt and metal and ice––and Dana would pull out her phone and say, “Great, I just have to book it.”
Maude wishes she knew what finally made Dana purchase their cabin on this particular trip, if it was something Maude had said or done or if Dana had just gotten drunk one night and thought, “fuck what Maude wants.” She always thought she knew Maude better than Maude knew herself. Probably, she did.
The ship tips sideways and Maude is brought back into the library, into her body. A body she resents because it’s still here, whole, still demanding food and care, even though all Maude wants is to disappear beneath the weight of Dana’s absence. The words aren’t coming. She slams the computer shut and, using the rope tied up along the walls for support, slowly makes her way back to her cabin.
At dinner, Maude finds an empty seat at a table in the far corner, next to guests she doesn’t recognize. As a bowl of bread circulates, a middle-aged woman with box-dyed red hair talks about how she’s slept through the last two days thank god and a man sitting next to Maude says that he had to go get a scopolamine patch from the doctor and there was a woman down there, puking into some poor guy’s boot.
Across from Maude, a man says, “Oh yes, that’s me. Thank you.” It’s like her radio has been switched back to the table’s channel. The man is talking to a woman with long silver hair and a turquoise statement necklace. In a glass-thin voice, the woman says, “You know what, I thought so. I loved your book and then I saw you do an interview with Good Morning America and I thought, a man that handsome shouldn’t get to be good with words, too.”
Maude blinks. She blinks again. She knows who this man is. His blond hair, that slalom bend in his nose, the butt dimple in his chin, and that same humble frown she recognizes from the author photo published alongside every glowing review of his debut novel. Matthew Carruth. One of “America’s Great Novelists,” if you believe any of the interviews he gave after the release of Amniotic, a family saga told from the perspective of an unborn fetus. Maude had read it and considered it fine, pretty readable, but definitely putdownable. The publisher knew what they were doing when they led publicity with Matthew’s face. Amniotic came out two months after Maude’s debut, a novella with an independent press, which maybe a hundred people read. Feral, about a boil growing on a queen’s inner thigh.
The woman is still talking. “I was just so impressed. Who knew someone could be capable of capturing the voice of an unborn baby, but golly, you did it!” Matthew’s face is twisted into a version of gratitude. “Are you here for research? You must tell me.”
“Sort of,” Matthew says. He looks askance at Maude, who does her best to keep her face neutral. She doesn’t want him to know that she knows who he is.
“I can’t imagine a writer coming here and not writing about it,” the woman says.
Matthew scratches at his chin. Maude recognizes this move. He regrets that he’s about to make the table uncomfortable. “My dad died in June. We’d talked about coming down here together. The last great frontier, all of that. He obviously didn’t make it, but. And, well, here I am. I guess I will probably write about it.” He gestures out through the windows. “It’s a grossly idyllic place to mourn.”
Maude follows the table’s gaze, out toward where Matthew gestured at the snowcaps bobbing through the low roll of waves. She tries to think of the crayon colors for all that blue—indigo, bluebell, cornflower, denim—but grows bored with the sameness of it all. Where are the browns and reds of her loss? The green and orange of grief? Anger shivers across her skin, under her fingernails. She says, “Do you really think writing about him would help?”
Maude wants to swallow her words as soon as they’re out. The woman with the turquoise necklace looks furious, maybe in Matthew’s defense or maybe because Maude has shifted Matthew’s attention. Matthew is the only one who doesn’t seem shocked or appalled. He’s smiling.
“It couldn’t hurt, could it?”
“Too much too soon.” Maude pushes a potato into her mouth and chews.
“Well, I’ll take that into consideration.” Matthew sets his knife on the rim of his plate. “Can I ask what brought you here?”
“I won a raffle.”
“That’s a pretty generous raffle.” Matthew’s looking across at her and Maude understands what that gaze means. She looks away. The woman with the turquoise necklace glares in Maude’s direction. Maude wants to snap the necklace off her neck, wants the clasp to pinch at her skin, wants this woman to understand the sting of loss. In response to the woman’s question, “You have to tell us about your next book,” Matthew asks which expeditions she’s the most excited for. Maude bites into a butter-slick square of steak. A string of meat wedges itself between her back teeth.
Maude dips her paddle through the clear water and looks down, trying to discern some shape, some movement, but it’s like the water’s clarity is so complete, it swallows itself. She weaves her way between the brash ice that peppers the cove. Water slaps against the kayak’s fiberglass hull. Sun bounces off the bright white of the untouched snow, so Maude has to squint in order to look around her at the other guests in their kayaks taking selfies with the ship behind them, then at the sheared-off faces of icebergs looming above. At a naturalist’s lecture yesterday, Maude learned that the bluest faces are newly calved, still fresh and dense and unbleached by the sun.
A couple years before, Dana sent Maude an email with the text, “reminded me of you,” and a link to a video. Two scientists stand at the top of a bluff, next to a camera they’ve set to record an ice field. They’re recording a time lapse, so there’s space for them to wander around, take their own photos, sink their boots into the snow, open their mouths and taste the chill air. One of them is on the phone and the other says, “It’s starting, Adam, I think. Adam? It’s starting…” The way the ice cracks down the middle like an egg, revealing centuries of hidden snow. A boom. A break. An entire city-sized chunk: cleaved.
Now, Maude pictures Dana as her calved bit, how much the cold air stings at the fresh face of that loss. She rows her kayak backward, keeping the big iceberg in her view, hoping it’ll break apart right here, right now. Knowing it won’t.
Maude is sitting in one of the lounge’s corner chairs, a visual history of dentistry splayed open on her lap and a wide view of that uncalved berg in front of her. Dana’s here, even if she isn’t, sitting in the empty chair at her side, wincing at every new illustration of extractions and long-rooted molars. Dana hated teeth but loved being creeped out. Once, after going to the dentist, she’d returned to their apartment and dumped a bag full of floss, lollipops, and one mold cast of a perfect row of teeth out onto Maude’s bed. Dana could afford whatever she wanted, and still, she stole little mementos wherever she went. “I deserve a reward,” she’d said before popping a lollipop between her lips. What she really meant was that she needed control, and taking these mementoes was the one real way she’d found to have it.
A man’s hand descends into view, his pointer finger tapping at an illustration of a gaping mouth and mold-spotted teeth. “How it feels to write, yeah?”
Maude watches Matthew put down two glasses of wine—one red, one white—on the small, round table between them, next to a clear bud vase with a single purple flower poking out. If Dana were here, she’d carefully pluck up that bud vase and lower it into her purse “for safe keeping.” Instead, Matthew lowers himself into Dana’s empty chair. He pulls his ankle up to rest on the opposite knee. His nose and cheeks are a burnished red. He gestures at the wine glasses. “Didn’t know which you’d prefer, so got both.”
Maude picks up the glass of red, even though she prefers white. She can hear Dana telling her to hit on Matthew, to touch his elbow, go on, don’t be such a wuss. Just see what would happen. Men: another way Dana found control. As much as Maude hates Dana not being here, at least it means she doesn’t have to pretend to listen to her bad romance advice.
“So, I have something to confess.” He clears his throat. “I, uh, knew who you were. Have known since before we left. I recognized you from that interview you gave last year to Bookforum, from that photo they took of you posing in the middle of Atlantic Avenue. Then I read Feral and—I haven’t read a book like that in I don’t know how long. Thank god she’s here, I thought when I saw you. I’d been feeling like such an outsider, and then, there you were! Another outsider.”
Maude tries not to let him see her surprise. Matthew Carruth read her book. Matthew Carruth recognized her before she recognized Matthew Carruth. She shivers with discomfort and wonders what she’d been doing, when she didn’t know that someone was watching. She says the first thing that comes to mind. “I’m sorry about what I said at dinner.”
“What? No. It’s okay. I loved the look on Lisa’s face.” Matthew scratches at his chin with the back of his hand. “I’ve been thinking about what you said. And I still disagree.”
“Maybe you should think about it some more.”
Matthew’s high trill of a laugh startles Maude. “Yeah, okay,” he says. “I’ll get back to you.”
Back in her cabin, Maude pulls the room’s long, black desk until it faces the window, places the green bud vase with its purple morning glory in the corner—she hadn’t bothered hiding it in her purse, like Dana would have, just picked it up and walked out of the lounge with it—and opens her laptop. Dana bought these tickets so Maude would finally write her book, so Maude’s going to force herself to finally write her book. She’ll write with the view of floating floes and sunny, cold-bright sky. She’ll write with that absence like a growing maw beside her.
At the top of the blank page, Maude places the tip of the character’s tongue against the molar and pushes. Nothing happens. The sentence is empty, cold. She deletes it and tries again. A description of roots burrowing into gums. A flaccid attempt at letting chunks of ice break off from the continent. A body that feels wrong, claimed by every country, not claimed by anyone. All of it is bad. Maude deletes, types, deletes, deletes, deletes.
Two truths and a lie.
Dana’s voice, again. She scratches behind her ear like she can flick the voice away. But maybe she needs to exorcize Maude before she can turn her attention to that fictional, fickle molar. She’ll play this game that they played until they knew too much about each other. Before it became ‘three lies and no truths’ or ‘one truth and two lies’ or ‘no truths and no lies.’
Okay, Maude thinks, I can start there. She puts her fingers on the keyboard and types, “Dana.” That’s all she has. She puts a full-stop after her name. At least that part feels right.
Come on, M. I’m bored up here. Humor me. Two truths and a lie.
Maude can’t not respond. She never ignored Dana, no matter how much she wanted to, and that can’t change now, even if Dana is just a voice in her head.
I can’t play with someone who isn’t here.
Sure you can. Try. Here, I’ll go first. Okay, two truths and a lie: I’m dead, I’ve slept with Clint Eastwood, and I have a birthmark shaped like Italy.
That’s too easy.
Just because I never showed you the birthmark doesn’t mean I don’t have it.
The boat passes through the Lemaire Channel at 6 a.m. and over the Antarctic Line at 11 p.m. The sun won’t set again until they turn around and head north. Passengers crowd into the bridge to watch the boat move from one side of the invisible line to the other. A waiter walks around with champagne to refill glass flutes. The captain rings a large bell and announces that they’ve passed over the line. When nothing else happens, the bridge empties. Passengers filter back into their cabins, pull their curtains against the bright, steady sun, and tuck themselves into bed.
Maude doesn’t bother going back to her cabin. She knows she won’t be able to sleep. Exhaustion feels as far away as grass and trees and dirt. With her book, she heads to the top of the ship, sure she’ll have the library to herself and her memory of Dana. But then there’s Matthew, bent over a table, folding a blank sheet of paper. Before she can turn to leave, he’s saying, “Oh, Maude! Hi!” and “Guess I’m not the only one who couldn’t sleep.”
Maude takes a seat and looks at the mess of papers across the table. She can only sort of guess what he was trying to do, based on the crumpled balls around his feet. A triangular, wrinkled thing sits on top of a stack of papers.
“Not quitting my day job,” he says.
“This seems pretty expert to me.”
“My dad used to do origami all the time. I never asked him to show me how, and now.” Matthew picks up the deformed crane and flicks it through the air. It doesn’t fly far, isn’t even halfway graceful, before it tumbles, bounces off the table, and lands upside down on the carpet.
“What was your dad like?”
It’s not so much like Matthew had been waiting for someone to ask, but more like Maude’s question interrupted an inner tally he’s been keeping, just waiting to vocalize it. Matthew describes his father’s garden first, how it grew down the hillside behind his house, how his father spent every morning out back, checking on the flowers and the blueberry bushes and the hydrangeas. The orchard was his favorite, a small square of earth at the far end of the property, where he grew Asian pears and lemons. “He was the best librarian that high school had ever seen,” Matthew says. “When he retired, they threw a party for him at Applebee’s and then renamed the library in his honor. I haven’t been back since. But I’ve seen pictures.”
As Matthew talks, Maude compares his dad to Dana. Dana refused to go into their school’s library because, she said, it smelled like old ham. Matthew’s dad loved watching Law & Order in the morning with his coffee; Dana watched episodes of SVU muted so she could make up her own dialogue. Matthew’s dad’s favorite meal was mushroom risotto; Dana’s was box macaroni and cheese with extra cheese stirred in.
“I thought I knew what it’d be like to lose someone. But you don’t know. Not until you do.” From the expression on Matthew’s face, Maude can tell he thinks he’s giving her a warning, not describing her life back to her. It takes everything she has not to throw her book in his face.
Maude puts the poorly made origami crane on her desk and opens her computer. Still, that same page, blank except for “Dana.” Matthew didn’t worry that putting his dad to the page would erase pieces of who his dad had been. Maude wishes she had that confidence.
Maybe the thing Maude is having the hardest time squaring is the before and the after and how that schism should look on the page. It feels false in a way fiction never does to Maude. The disarticulated accident would look like: Dana, driving; Dana, crashing; Dana, empty-eyed; Dana, gone. And then what?
In the document, Maude starts to list the things she remembers Dana stealing: three petri dishes, a ceramic frog, a stack of metal condiment cups, a book of hymns from her lab partner’s mom’s memorial, two Planned Parenthood pens, a butterfly hair clip.
Maude deletes the list and goes into the bathroom. Beneath a steaming shower, she worries at her back tooth. She wonders what her tongue might dislodge.
On shore, a naturalist named Tomas, a forty-something Argentinian, leads Maude’s group toward a rocky crag at the top of a steep hill. Maude does her best to keep her gaze on the colonies and mother penguins they pass, and not on the red patch of Matthew’s parka, just a few people ahead of her. When they reach the top, Maude drops her parka onto a round of snow. It’s warm and bright so high up. The wind has dropped off. Matthew settles on the rock and Maude sits beside him. Red mites swarm over the exposed rock between them.
To their right, a glacier stands tall and long over the cold, clear water. “You know,” Matthew says, “calving is a form of ice ablation.” Matthew presses two fingers against his parka’s front pocket, as if pointing at his heart. “The ice separating from the glacier. Every time I think of that, I think of my dad, getting a cardiac ablation to fix his a-fib.”
“Ablation with the double meaning. Like cleaving,” Maude says. Matthew rubs his palms down his thighs. Maude wants him to look back at her. She’s about to tell him about her project—the ice rift, the cavity—when Tomas kneels on the snow next to her.
“Good,” Tomas says. “I think I’ve timed this right. I was hoping.” He gestures for the other passengers to gather round and points at the glacier. As they watch, the glacier face cracks. It happens slow, and then all at once. Already, Maude can sense the blue behind it, the ice that hasn’t seen air in decades. The glacier’s break ricochets through the bay.
*
Maude’s list of things that Dana stole—an ex-boyfriend’s work ID card, a shawl from a boutique where the clerk had yelled at her for tracking in mud, a set of wax taper candles, two air plants that she immediately (accidentally) killed—becomes a list of every word that’s made Maude feel closer to the landscape outside— bergy bits, air bubbles, cataclysm, glaciation, erosion, katabatic, tectonic, rookery—becomes a cavity, a growth, a semi-colon, an ellipse, a blank page.
“Hold on!” Thuds, muttered curses, the soft pattering of feet across carpet, and then the cabin door swings open and Matthew is there, wearing a loose white t-shirt and flannel pajama pants. When Maude sees his heavy blinks and the soft slouch of his shoulders, she takes a step back. “I’m sorry,” she says, “I just. I couldn’t sleep, and I thought. I should…”
Before Maude can turn, Matthew reaches out, wraps his large hand around her forearm, and pulls her inside. His cabin is three times the size of hers, with its small living room that opens out into a bedroom and tall windows that frame the banks of brightly lit snow the boat drifts past, headed toward its morning mooring.
“I would’ve cleaned,” Matthew says. Maude is about to protest, but his hand takes hers and wraps it around a rocks glass he’s just filled with a finger of whiskey. He grabs his parka and long johns from where they’re piled on the couch and gestures for her to sit. There’s enough room for him to join her on the couch, but instead he pulls over a chair from the dining table.
Now that she’s here and he’s there, looking across at her, waiting for her to say something, Maude doesn’t know what she was thinking. She leans forward and grabs the book next to his heel, expecting a nonfiction history of the sociology of whales, but instead it’s a ragged copy of a Clive Cussler mystery. “My dad’s favorite,” Matthew says. His voice sounds hoarse, tired. Maude flips through the pages. Some of them are marked up with a ballpoint pen—a star here, an underline there. Remnants of Matthew’s dad.
“Dana was an Agatha Christie girlie. Read all of them twice, I’m pretty sure.” Maude traces a line of pencil across the page, not realizing she said Dana’s name out loud until Matthew leans forward and asks, “Who’s Dana?” She wants to take it back immediately, but there Dana is, out in the open. Dana would’ve loved that. Maude slaps the book closed and says, “My best friend.”
“Where’s she, then? She make you come here alone?”
“Something like that.” Part of Maude wants to tell him the truth, wants to tell him about the car crash. But a bigger part of Maude feels like a black hole. She tips the whiskey into it, then crosses the room for a refill. She offers the bottle to Matthew, but he shakes his head.
“Did you go to the lecture yesterday?” Maude asks. She paces in a wide circle, tracing her finger over the pieces of him strewn around the room. She feels him watching her, but he doesn’t make a move to stand or ask her to stop. “I didn’t see you there.”
“I had a hard one yesterday. Decided to stay in.”
A slick of hatred coils around Maude’s heart. He claims his grief so easily. Yesterday at the lecture, Tomas had talked about how rising temperatures meant centuries old snow was melting away, revealing long-preserved unknowns. Scientists had unearthed a mummified colony of penguins; their eight-hundred-year-old corpses looked like they’d just died, their feathers still sewn to the penguin meat. Traces of a supernova had been found near a German research station––ancient cosmic dust. A satellite recently mapped a mess of tectonic plates beneath Antarctica, revealing what the naturalist called a “graveyard of continents.” Part of Maude loves all these stories bobbing to the surface like bones. Part of her wishes they’d stayed hidden, like maybe there are some stories we’re not meant to know.
Maude reaches a sideboard, where a dozen malformed origami tumble in an open box. She pulls out one yolk-yellow creation that looks like a giraffe or a boat, when she feels Matthew standing beside her. “Please,” he says, taking the origami from her and placing it back in the box.
“You’re getting better.”
“I’m not.”
For the first time since meeting Matthew, Maude senses an edge in his answer. A small spark she’s been waiting to feel grows in the base of her belly. He’s standing close enough for their arms to touch, for her to smell his cologne—Cedarwood? Bergamot? Dana would’ve known—for her to see the outline of his muscles beneath the plain white T he’s wearing. It’s enough. She takes a step toward him. His nostrils flare, but he doesn’t step away.
The kiss is soft, nice. Maude opens her lips, teases her tongue against his. The first thought Maude has is that they should’ve been doing this a lot sooner. The second is that she can’t wait to tell Dana about Matthew’s technique—nice, sloppy, could use some work. She reaches her hands forward to clasp at his shirt, surprised to find that her body is eager to feel itself flush against his, but her hands meet air and Matthew’s standing a foot back, his chin lowered into his chest, his ears a bright, hot red.
Every self-protective nerve in Maude lights on fire. He holds up his hand and shakes his head. “I’m sorry,” he says. From the lilt in his voice, the soft drop of each syllable, it’s clear that he is. Maude hates him. “I’m not really myself right now. Maybe later? When things aren’t so fresh.” Matthew cups his palm over the back of his neck and looks up at Maude through unnecessarily thick eyelashes. She stops herself from rolling her eyes.
“I get it,” she says, even though she doesn’t. She wants to yell at him that she’s raw too, that’s the whole point. They’re both lesser versions of themselves, and wouldn’t sleeping together fix that for a little while? But he’s already retreated, pulled on a linty sweater with a faded college logo on the front, grabbed a water bottle from the mini fridge.
“I can’t trust myself right now, and my feelings.” He’s still talking. Had he been talking this whole time, and Maude had just stopped listening? “And I don’t want you to get caught up in the wreckage of grief.”
“I don’t mind wreckage,” Maude says. She hears how weak the words sound. The chuckle Matthew allows her is small and wet. They stand like that, looking at each other from across the room, for a minute. Maybe longer. Maude wishes she knew what Matthew saw when he looked at her. If she seems as pathetic and weak as she feels, standing there, less than she’d ever been before and getting smaller every day.
The ship’s gift shop is bright and gaudy and heavy with merchandise: ship-branded pullovers and fleeces and vests and gloves and t-shirts, gourmet chocolate, stuffed seals, stacks of postcards, even cufflinks and necklaces with whale fin charms. The cashier is busy flicking through a gossip rag and smacking on her gum, thoroughly ignoring Maude as Maude trails her hand over mugs printed with maps and maps printed with cartoon penguins.
Maude stops in front of a display of leatherbound journals, embossed with the outline of Antarctica. She presses her thumb over the peninsula, trying to smother the area where the ship is now. Dana would’ve bought this journal for Maude, would’ve wrapped it up and written a nice note on the first page about filling the journal with all of Maude’s “brilliant thoughts,” and Maude would’ve thanked her and quietly deposited it with all the other unused journals that Dana had bought her.
Dana’s absence gapes, widens. Maude picks up an iceberg-scented candle, rolls it from one palm to the other.
Over the intercom, the captain says, “Get your jackets on. Get your boots on. Come meet us in the mudroom.” Maude glances outside––it’s still morning or it’s midnight or it’s noon––and sees a cove, which has frozen over into a wide tract of ice. Somehow, the ship has wedged itself into the thick layer of ice, like a pick lodged in a slab of stone. Maude’s not eager to be around the other passengers and the idea of seeing Matthew makes her shudder.
The passengers fan out across the ice in clusters. Some take photos of mountains in the distance, some take photos of the boat, some train their cameras on the lumbering ice at the other end of the cove. Maude moves off to the side, jumps a few times to test the ice beneath her, then sits and crosses her legs. She likes being at this distance, being able to see the threats well before they approach. At least Antarctica has that going for it––mostly, you see your predator as soon as they see you.
Of course, until Maude hears the crackle of a radio to her left and Tomas lowers himself to the ground beside her. He tells her that the ice sheet they’re on is an acre wide and will be gone within the month. He lists everything he’s seen that he doesn’t think he’ll see again: huge glaciers that have vanished between trips, receding ice shelves, ice slabs covering the water. He says he misses the continent already, even while he’s here, standing on its snow, looking up at its mountain ridges, breathing its air. She wonders where that loss lives in his body and if it aches like Dana’s loss does in hers.
Maude fills her palm with a crackle of hardened snow. She wishes she could take it back onto the boat with her, tuck it into a glass bottle and keep it. She wishes so many things.
Maude loves scotch. She thought she was a gin girl, but turns out, she loves how gross scotch is. She loves how three glasses of scotch make her feel. And she’s fine with Tomas’s hand, squeezing her upper thigh.
Maude tells Dana if she just goes on the blank page already, Maude will only write good things about her. She’ll describe Dana’s luscious long locks. She’ll write about all the community service Dana meant to do, about the demand for Dana on the four dating apps she rotated through, about Dana’s commitment to her skincare routine. Maude won’t write down any of Dana’s jokes that didn’t land or about the burnt rice probably still stuck to the bottom of the pot in Dana’s sink. But the cursor blinks and the page stays empty.
Maude rearranges the trinkets on her desk—the champagne flute, the origami, the ratty Clive Cussler book, the iceberg-scented candle, the silver cufflinks—and then rearranges them all again. Dana’s being too quiet. She knows what Dana would say. Something about having a body. Something about needing to stop overthinking.
Tomas is leaning against the frame when Maude opens the door. He’s wearing a pair of stained jeans that look one size too tight and a loose t-shirt whose hem dips below his collarbone. He hands Maude a crinkled water bottle, half full of what looks like fifty dollars worth of scotch.
“You weren’t in the lounge,” he says. Maude can’t tell him how seeing that shelf of ice grow smaller through the windows in the library made her feel compacted and impossible, how it made her realize that her time on the ship was coming to an end and all she’d managed to accomplish was blaming her best friend for an absence that couldn’t be helped. But Maude doesn’t want to say any of this, so she accepts the water bottle, and then somehow it’s not scotch in her mouth, but Tomas’s tongue. He presses her back against her open door. It’s not awful—it’s something—so Maude doesn’t push him away. She opens her mouth beneath his.
While his tongue presses against her gums, Maude imagines syringes and aspirators, incisors and root canals, enamel and milk teeth. She pictures how his skull must look beneath the skin, his tongue like it’s part of a plastic model kit on display in a dentist’s office.
The door slams shut behind them. Tomas backs Maude up against her desk, one finger playing at the waistline of her jeans, when he stops and takes a step back. Maude’s body floods with relief, until she sees that he’s looking at the objects lined up along the back edge of the desk. The way he says, “cufflinks?” she knows that he knows they didn’t come wrapped up in tissue paper in a ship-branded gift bag. His gaze flicks over the champagne flute, the candle, the cutlery.
“It’s an accident,” Maude says, not knowing exactly what she means.
Tomas shakes his head, even as his thumbs rub circles over her hipbones. “The captain should know.”
How can Maude explain to Tomas that she was trying to fill the absence, plug it with anything she could find. Doing what Dana would’ve done was the only way Maude could remember that she was here, in a body, and Dana wasn’t, and eventually that was going to have to be okay.
Instead, Maude says, “I’ll return them,” and pushes Tomas out the door.
With the candle, the cufflinks, and the origami placed to the left of the keyboard and the journal, the two forks and one knife, and the champagne flute placed to the right, Maude opens the empty Dana document and begins to type.
For the first time in Maude doesn’t know how long, the words flow. Everything Maude puts to the page feels both urgent and true. First, Maude writes about the summer she and Dana became friends—realizing they shared a boyfriend, angrily sipping lemonade from glasses as sweaty as their furrowed brows, comparing notes on his sex techniques, agreeing to break up with him and move in together. They’d lived in that mouse-infested Bushwick apartment for five years, before Dana moved to Tennessee because her nonprofit work needed her more than Maude did.
After she’d gone, Maude kept finding gaps in her belongings, dustless rings on her shelves where an award or a jar or a vase had been. Like Dana had insisted on continuing to remind Maude of her absence, even as Maude got more and more used to the silence every day. Now, Maude places that vase and jar and award back onto the shelf in her memory, alongside the afternoons she and Dana spent eating General Tso’s chicken and hate-watching Gilmore Girls; mornings when Dana made Maude the worst french toast she’d ever had, but she’d never had anyone make her food before, so she couldn’t complain; and late nights when neither of them could sleep, so instead Dana told Maude stories about her childhood, which Maude chose to believe, no matter how many absurd turns they took.
The necklace. The candle. The champagne flute. They’d worked. It was like they’d brought slices of Dana into the room, the slices that Dana had once taken away, all those years ago. Maybe they hadn’t been working because no one knew what she’d done. But now Tomas knew. And now Dana was on the page.
When they pass back through the Lemaire Channel, headed north again, finally, no passengers gather on the bridge, no bells are rung, no bottles of champagne popped. It’s two days until they’re in the Drake Passage. Four days until Maude can get off the ship, get away from everything, fly home.
The boat sets down anchor at Port Lockroy. Groups take turns visiting the outpost, a black house that stands stark against the thin scrim of snow around it. Maude runs her fingers over the Port Lockroy–branded items for sale inside—paperweights, coin purses, trinket dishes, and hip flasks. She steps around the other passengers, crowded into the small room, and sends a small “thank you” smile toward the two cashiers before stepping outside.
The glass whale paperweight is cool and slick against Maude’s palm, where she’s tucked it into the front pocket of her hoodie. She walks to the far edge of the rocky beach, on the other side of a dingy that looks rotted through, its hull ragged and darkly bare-boned, and lowers herself onto a medium-sized, flat stone with a view of the cove and the anchored ship straight ahead.
Maude sees Matthew leave the small hut. She sees him see her, and then decide to walk in her direction. He pauses a few feet away, his jacket folded over his arm and his hands pushed into his pant pockets. “You didn’t have to leave the other night.” Before, Matthew had always seemed overly confident to Maude. Now he just looks small and silly, shifting his weight from one leg to the other like a wobbling dashboard hula dancer.
“You didn’t want me there.” Maude can hear how taut the words are.
“I didn’t say that, did I?” The sound of the rocks scrabbling against each other as Matthew lowers himself to the ground next to Maude makes Maude wince. She knows it can’t be comfortable. He clears his throat again and says, “It’s just been hard to think about anything else, with my dad still so present for me.”
He shakes off a handful of pebbles that have pressed themselves into the heel of his hand, then pulls his knees into his chest. He reminds Maude of an oversized tween. She’s surprised he hasn’t grown a constellation of acne across his cheeks overnight. It makes her want to pat him on the head and tell him everything will be okay.
She thinks about Dana’s first kiss—a pimply twelve-year-old named Dylan who had a collection of My Little Ponys, one of which Dana stole after the kiss. “You don’t have to feel like that, you know,” she says. “You can choose not to.”
“Excuse me?” The words come out as prickled as the pebbles he just swept from his palm.
“I felt that way after Dana died. Like the ground had become quicksand and everything I tried to grab at help burnt my skin. Nothing was safe.”
“Dana, your best friend.” He says this, dropping his chin into his chest, as if carefully rearranging some pieces in his mind.
“That idiot died and now I’m here without her, and the only way I’ve ever felt okay is—” Maude pulls the glass whale out of her hoodie pocket and places it in Matthew’s upturned palms. She looks down at Matthew, expecting something like gratitude but only finding a veiled sadness as he rolls the whale over and picks at the price sticker, still pressed into the left fin. Maude pushes forward. “I never understood why she did it, but then I took your origami and it was like the world solidified, just a bit, around me. It stopped being this treacherous jello. Not because I was molding myself back into the world, but because the world was molding itself to be more like me. The world was learning loss alongside my loss, was holding some of my loss for me, and that pressure on my heart became just a little more bearable. You get it, right?”
“I don’t know what to do with that,” Matthew says, his words a blurry mutter. He pushes himself up to standing, careful to keep the whale from touching the rocks, and Maude scrambles after him, grabbing for his wrist, convinced that if she can just get him to understand, it will make both of them better. Matthew flinches backward at her touch.
“You should try it. It’s like finding a back door through the grief.” Maude’s not completely sure she knows what she’s trying to do, but part of her thinks that if he could only understand what she means, things would be okay. They’d fuck and she’d sit next to him in his oversized cabin, writing about Dana while he wrote about his dad. They’d grieve together in a linear way that made sense.
But when he says, “Try stealing?” and she can hear the drip of malice in his words, she knows it’s all gone sideways.
“No, I—” Maude’s thoughts are all knotted up. She knows she’s losing him. “Whatever your dad would have done. Try that. It’ll be like he’s here with you again. Like before.”
Matthew tugs his arm from Maude’s grip and rubs his opposite hand over where the skin has gone white. “I don’t need your advice.”
“It’s not advice. It’s just something that’s working. And I think—”
“Working is probably a strong word.”
“I know you miss your dad.”
“Fuck you.” Matthew’s already walking away when he spits this over his shoulder at Maude. The words are filled with a vitriol she’s never seen in him. She wants to take it all back, but part of her knows that she can’t. She did the right thing, explaining herself to him. No matter what he chooses to do with it.
Maude watches as Matthew walks back into the gift shop and, a few moments later, emerges empty handed.
Dana is a geomagnetic pole. Dana is a gale. Dana is hoarfrost, sleet, and sea ice. Dana is white-out. Dana is wind chill. Dana is disappearing.
It’s the last formal dinner on the ship. By the time Maude makes it into the dining room, there’s only one chair left, opposite Matthew and flanked by passengers Maude vaguely recognizes. Waiters come around with wine. Tables are released one by one to go to the buffet, where steam rolls from silver food warmers filled with potatoes and steak and chicken. Maude had been hungry, but now that she’s here, she only has an appetite big enough for one cut of meat and a heap of salad. She notices Matthew notice her plate, but he doesn’t say anything. The salad crunches loudly as she eats, letting the conversation continue around her, without her, until she hears her name, a cough, her name again.
“Maude, right?” The woman to Maude’s left asks. “Matthew says you’re a writer.”
“Oh.” She’s surprised Matthew mentioned her. She wants to know what else he said. “Yeah, I mean. Yeah.”
“What brought you on the trip?”
Maude tries to remember how she answered this question before, at the beginning, when Matthew asked. She can’t remember, and she finds her body settling into an exhaustion too big to come up with another lie. She makes eye contact with Matthew across the table and says, “I’m afraid sometimes that if a tooth loosens, Antarctica will float away.” Everyone at the table frowns, so she keeps going. She tells them about the slab of continent that’s been eroding and the fissure that runs through it like a promise. And then she tells them about the molar, how loose it is in the gums, and how easy it would be to ruin everything: the mouth, the continent, the ocean.
The faces around the table all twist in different permutations of confusion, including Matthew’s. Maude doesn’t mind. She’s lost her molar, her continent, her ocean.
“Just one jiggle,” she says. “That’s all it takes.”
The last time Maude saw Dana, it was through a computer screen. Dana’s face pixelated and lagged as they talked about family and meal prep and reality TV. It was a slow, quiet conversation. Neither had many updates. Work was fine. Home was fine. What else was there to say? They carried their computers from room to room as they folded clothes, put the dishes away, read through the mail. And then Dana’s face froze and the call cut out. Neither bothered to call back. They had so much time. They’d try again later.
The boat is empty again. They’re back in the Drake Passage—only one more day until they reach land; reality; browns and reds and greens. Tomorrow, Maude will step on solid ground and the return to stillness will feel like a different form of destabilization. She’s so close to home, she can almost smell the stale air in her apartment, feel the scratch of her in-need-of-washing cotton sheets. How far she’s gone only to have nothing change.
Today, the stern bucks against the waves. Maude follows a rope down the hall, up two flights of stairs, through a heavy door, out onto the empty deck. She’s not supposed to be out here, but what she’s here to do won’t take long. It’s late and she’s chosen a spot on the deck that the bridge can’t see. She’s sure she won’t be caught. The sky has darkened to a cobalt blue—the darkest it’s been all week—and water lashes up from below, spraying over Maude and making her thin pajamas heavy.
Maude doesn’t have enough space in her suitcase for everything she’s taken over the last week, but she refuses to return them. Matthew, the ship’s owner, that woman with the box-red hair—they don’t need to keep their origami, their necklace, their snowglobe. She hopes they’ll be able to feel the moment the items they go underwater. She hopes she’s not the only one who has to learn the art of loss. Who has to figure out what to do in the after.
The origami catches in the wind, fluttering and flailing before disappearing. The necklace, the candle, the racecar, the journal—all drop quickly and cleanly into the water. Maude watches for the moment they hit the wake, but it’s impossible to tell the small splash they make from the boat’s much larger scrape through the forty-foot waves.
Maude doesn’t know if letting these items loose will also loosen Dana from her page. The thought of that opens a fresh ache inside her chest, the width and texture of a pinecone. The water bottle, the sunglasses. They’re all molars that have come unrooted, entire continents that Maude is saying goodbye to, until all that’s left in their place is freshly calved flesh.
Maude lets the snowglobe roll off her palm. She watches it drop. She thinks she sees a splash when it disappears.