Where'd You Go, Bernadette: A Novel (29 page)

Dad would burst in, still carrying the cold on his clothes, full of information and stories. He’d show me pictures on his camera, and
say the photos didn’t do it justice. Then he’d go to the dining room for lunch, and bring me back something, then afterward he headed back out for the afternoon excursion. My favorite time was the evening recap, which I’d watch on TV in my room. Every day, the scuba divers went down and videotaped the seafloor. In this hostile, black water, it turns out there’re millions of the craziest sea creatures I’d ever seen, things like glassy sea cucumbers, worms covered with graceful, foot-long spikes, fluorescent-colored sea stars, and copepods, which are spotted and striped, like out of
Yellow Submarine
. The reason I’m not calling any of them by their scientific names (not like I even would) is because they don’t have names yet. Most of this stuff humans are seeing for the very first time.

I tried to love Dad and not hate him for his fake cheer and the way he gets dressed. I tried to imagine what Mom saw in him back when she was an architect. I tried to put myself in the shoes of someone who finds every little thing he does a total delight. It was sad, though, because the thought of him and all his accessories always made me sick. I wished I’d never made the connection about Dad being a gigantic girl, because once you realize something like that, it’s hard to go back.

Sometimes it was so great I couldn’t believe how lucky I was that I got to be me. We’d pass icebergs floating in the middle of the ocean. They were gigantic, with strange formations carved into them. They were so haunting and majestic you could feel your heart break, but really they’re just chunks of ice and they mean nothing. There were ebony beaches dusted with snow, and sometimes there was a lone emperor penguin, giant, with orange cheeks, standing on an iceberg, and you had no idea how he got there, or how he was going to get off, or if he even wanted to get off. On another iceberg, a smiling leopard seal, sunning herself, looked like she wouldn’t hurt a fly, but she’s
one of the most vicious predators on earth, and she’d think nothing of leaping up and grabbing a human in her razor teeth and pulling him into the freezing water and shaking him until his skin slid off. Sometimes I looked over the edge of the ship at the sea ice, like white jigsaw puzzle pieces that will never fit together, and passing through sounded like clinking cocktails. There were whales
everywhere
. Once, I saw a pod of fifty killer whales, mommies and babies, frolicking in a pack, blowing happily, and penguins hopping across the inky ocean like fleas, then propelling themselves to safety on an iceberg. If I had to choose, that would be my favorite part, the way the penguins pop out of the water and onto land. Hardly anyone in the world gets to see any of this, which put pressure on me to remember it especially well, and to try to find words for the magnificence. Then I’d think of something random, like how Mom used to write notes to put in my lunch. She’d sometimes include one for Kennedy, whose Mom never wrote her notes, and some were stories that would take weeks to play out. And then I’d get up from my seat in the library and look through the binoculars. But Mom was never there. Pretty soon, I stopped thinking about home, and my friends, because when you’re on a boat in Antarctica and there’s no night, who are you? I guess what I’m saying is, I was a ghost on a ghost ship in a ghost land.

One night, it was the evening recap and Dad brought me a plate of cheese puffs, then went back up to the lounge, and I watched it on TV. A scientist gave a presentation about counting penguin chicks as part of an ongoing study. Then it was time to announce the plan for tomorrow, which was going to Port Lockroy, to a British military outpost left over from World War II, which was now an Antarctic heritage museum where
people live
and run a
gift shop
and a
post office
. Where we are all encouraged to
buy Antarctic penguin stamps
and
mail letters home!

My heart started doing gymnastics and I paced around wildly, repeating, Oh-my-God-Oh-my-God-Oh-my-God, waiting for Dad to burst through the door.

“Well, ladies and gentlemen,” came the voice through the speakers. “That was another wonderful recap. Chef Issey has just informed me that dinner is ready.
Bon appétit
.”

I flew up to the lounge because maybe Dad was sitting there stunned, but the gathering had broken up. A pack of people was shuffling down the stairs. I ran to the back and took the long way to the dining room. There was Dad, sitting at a table with some guy.

“Bee!” he said. “Would you like to join us for dinner?”

“Wait, weren’t you at the recap?” I asked. “Didn’t you hear—”

“Yes! And this is Nick, who’s studying the penguin colonies. He was telling me he always needs helpers to count penguin chicks.”

“Hi…” I was so scared of Dad in that moment that I took a step back and bumped into a waiter. “Sorry… hi… bye.” I turned around and walked as fast as I could out of there.

I ran to the chart room, which is a gigantic table with a map of the Antarctic Peninsula laid across it. Each day, I’d watch crew members mark our ship’s path with a dotted line, and afterward passengers would drop by and painstakingly copy it onto their maps. I pulled open a huge flat drawer and found the map of Mom’s journey. I placed it on top and followed with my finger the dot-dot-dot. Sure enough, her ship had stopped at Port Lockroy.

The next morning, Dad was at the gym, and I went out on deck. Plunked onto the rocky shore was a black wooden building, L-shaped, like two Monopoly hotels, with white window trim and cheery red shutters. Penguins dotted the landscape. The backdrop was a field of snow, looming over which was one big, pointy mountain rising above seven smaller scrunched-together ones, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

Dad had signed up to go kayaking with the first group, then to Port Lockroy with the second group. I waited until he was gone, then ripped the tags off my red parka and snow pants and suited up. I fell in with the stream of passengers clomping, astronaut-like, down the stairs to the mudroom. It was full of lockers and had two huge openings on either side where floating docks were tethered. I headed down a ramp to a sputtering Zodiac.

“Port Lockroy?” confirmed a crewman. “Did you scan out?”

He pointed me to a stand with a computer. I scanned my ID badge. My photo popped up on the screen, along with the words
ENJOY YOUR TIME ASHORE, BALAKRISHNA!
I felt a surge of annoyance at Manjula, who was supposed to have made sure I got called Bee, but then I remembered she was an Internet bandit.

A dozen red suits crammed into the Zodiac with Charlie at the motor. It was mostly women who had all seen enough penguins for one lifetime and felt the need to start
shopping
. They were bursting with questions about what there was to buy.

“I don’t know,” Charlie said with a tinge of resentment. “T-shirts.”

It was the first time I’d been out on the glassy water. Bitter wind attacked me from all sides. My whole being instantly shrank, and any time I moved, my skin hit a new cold patch in my snowsuit, so I became trapped in stillness. I turned my head the teeniest bit possible, just enough to see the shore.

The closer we got to Port Lockroy, the building strangely got smaller and smaller, which was the first time I got scared. Charlie gunned the engine and drove the Zodiac onto the rocks. I belly-rolled off the big inflated side and dropped my life jacket. I scrambled across the big rocks, avoiding the singing gentoo penguins guarding their rock nests until I reached a wooden ramp leading to the entrance. A British flag flapped in the cold gray wind. I was the
first one there, and I flung open the door. Two girls, college-aged, kind of goofy and enthusiastic, greeted us.

“Welcome to Port Lockroy!” they said in British accents.

It was one of those miserable situations where it was just as cold inside as it was outside. I was in a room with turquoise-painted walls. This was the gift shop, with colorful banners hanging from the ceiling; tables full of books, stuffed animals, and postcards; and glass cubbies of sweatshirts, baseball hats, and anything you could embroider a penguin on. There were no signs of Mom, but why would there be? This was just the gift shop.

Across this room was an opening leading to the rest of Port Lockroy, but the English girls blocked it. I kept it together and acted interested in the bulletin boards while the other passengers trickled in and oohed and aahed at the swag. Even the sudoku lady had torn herself away from the library for this outing.

“Welcome to Port Lockroy,” alternated the girls. “Welcome to Port Lockroy.”

It seemed like we had been standing there for an hour already. “Where is everyone who lives here?” I finally asked. “Where do you live?”

“You’re looking at it,” said one. “Let’s wait for everyone to get in before we begin the lecture.” Then they started up again, “Welcome to Port Lockroy.”

“But where do you
sleep?
” I asked.

“Welcome to Port Lockroy. Is that everyone? Oh, we have some more coming.”

“Is there, like, a dining hall where everyone else is?”

But the girls looked right over my head. “Welcome to Port Lockroy. OK, it looks like we’re all here.” One of them began her spiel. “During World War Two, Port Lockroy was a secret outpost for the
British military—” She stopped because the group of Japanese tourists had just entered, and with them, the usual low-grade confusion. I couldn’t take it anymore. I squeezed past the English girls.

There were two small rooms. I went left, into an old-fashioned command center with desks and rusty machines full of dials and knobs. But no people. At the far end was a door marked
DO NOT OPEN.
I passed a wall of decaying books and pulled at the door. Blinding light blasted me back: it led outside to a snowfield. I closed the door and backtracked to the other room.

“In 1996 the U.K. Antarctic Heritage Trust paid to turn Port Lockroy into a living museum,” one of the girls was saying.

This room was a kitchen, with rusty stoves and shelves full of weird food rations and British tins. There also was a door marked
DO NOT OPEN
. I raced to that and yanked it open. Again… eye-watering snow shock.

I quickly shut the door. Once my eyes readjusted, I returned to the main section and tried to figure things out. OK, there were only three doors. The front door where we came in, and these other two leading outside…

“During the war, Port Lockroy was home to Operation Tabarin—” the girls went on.

“I don’t understand,” I butted in. “How many people live here?”

“Just the two of us.”

“Where do you
live
live?” I said. “Where do you sleep?”

“Here.”

“What do you mean,
here?
”

“We roll our sleeping bags out in the gift shop.”

“Where do you go to the bathroom?”

“We go outside—”

“Where do you do your laundry?”

“Well, we—”

“Where do you shower?”

“This is how they live,” a tourist lady snapped at me. She had freckles, blue eyes, and a bunch of gray in her blond hair. “Stop being rude. These girls come down for three months and pee in a tin can for the adventure.”

“It really
is
just the two of you?” I said weakly.

“And the cruise ship passengers like you who come visit.”

“So nobody has, like, gotten off one of the ships to live with you…?” The sound of the words coming out of my mouth, and the whole idea that Mom would be here waiting for me, struck me as so babyish that all of a sudden I burst into the most babyish tears. Swirled into my humiliation was anger at myself for letting my hope gallop off so stupidly. Snot sheeted down my face and into my mouth and down my chin and onto my new red parka, which I had been excited about, because we got to keep it.

“Dear God,” the freckled lady said. “What’s wrong with her?”

I couldn’t stop crying. I was trapped in the fun house of pemmican rations, photographs of Doris Day, crates of whiskey, a rusty can of Quaker Oats where the Quaker Oats guy is a young man, Morse code machines, long johns with butt flaps hanging from a clothesline, and baby bibs that read
ANTARCTICA BEACH CLUB
. Charlie, chin lowered, spoke into the radio clipped to his parka. Lots of concerned ladies asked, What’s wrong?, something I now know how to say in Japanese, which is
Anata wa daij
budesu?

I burrowed through the gathering nylon mass and made it out the front door. I stumbled down the ramp and, when I got to the bottom, clambered over some big rocks as far as I could go and stopped at a little inlet. I looked back, and there were no people. I sat down and caught my breath. There was one elephant seal, swaddled in her own blubber, lolling on her side. I couldn’t imagine how she
was ever going to move. Her eyes were big black buttons, oozing black tears. Her nose, too, was oozing black. My breath was dense clouds. The cold seized me. I didn’t know if I’d ever move again. Antarctica was truly a horrible place.

“Bee, darling?” It was Dad. “Thank you,” he said quietly to a Japanese lady who must have led him to me. He sat down and handed me a handkerchief.