Robert Masello - Blood and Ice

Michael was so busy figuring out his game plan-what would be the best way to capture the image of what lay inside the ice? — that he didn't acknowledge her words. The play of light and shadows, not to mention the problems with reflections off the ice, was going to be murder. But that was part of the challenge. He lifted his green goggles up on top of his woolen hat and took a light reading.

“Michael,” Betty said, “maybe we should slow down and think this through.”

“Think what through?” Michael said.

“The process of extracting these bodies. This job might require extensive lab facilities-and, say, X-ray and MRI capabilities-that we don't have down here.”

“Darryl's convinced that he's got all the equipment and facilities he needs,” Michael said, though he was given pause. Was he rushing headlong into this? Inflicting damage to what could prove to be a truly miraculous discovery?

“It isn't just a question of removing them safely,” Tina added. “That's easy. It's preserving them afterwards that's hard.”

Wouldn't Darryl know what to do? And wasn't the whole Antarctic basically just a vast deep freeze? Even if the bodies were taken from the ice, couldn't they be kept sufficiently cold to keep them from deteriorating?

Whatever the answers to those questions were, right then he had work to do. The find wasn't just a boon to Eco-Travel- it was also the sort of thing that national magazine awards were made of. He had to pay attention and not muck it up. Before backing off, Joe Gillespie, his editor, had actually given him grief that he'd come back without any pictures from his tragic misadventure in the Cascades. Sometimes Michael suspected that the scoop was all that counted with Gillespie.

Once Michael had decided on the right cameras and equipment, he took a series of shots through the ice-first of the man, whose face was still largely concealed, then of the woman. Capturing the quality of the ice, without losing too much to the reflections and refractions, made the work extremely tricky, but Michael liked that. The good stuff was always the hardest to get. At his behest, Betty and Tina went back to work and he took a couple of dozen shots of them, as they shaved or cut away more of the ice, and one or two of Ollie, who'd waddled over to see if the ice shavings littering the ground were edible.

The wind was really picking up, and the sheet-metal fence, though firmly planted, was rattling so loudly it was hard to talk over it. Michael had to shout at Tina and Betty just to get them to move to the right or the left, into the light or out of a shadow, and he quickly sensed he was making them uncomfortable. The ice queens weren't the kind of people, he suspected, who relished publicity or having their pictures taken. “Just one more,” he said to Betty, “with the hand drill about six inches higher.” It was obscuring the face of Sleeping Beauty.

Betty obliged, holding the drill in place while Michael hastily adjusted a light that the wind had blown out of position. The full illumination was falling on the ice, and he moved closer to pick up as much detail in the shot as possible. Whether it was from the extra wattage, or the work that Betty had been doing all morning, the face of the woman came into fuller view than ever before. Michael could see the auburn hair caught beneath the rusted chain, the glimmer of a white pin, and the emerald gleam in her eyes. Her expression was the one he remembered from the second time he'd found her underwater, and he marveled that he could have thought it had changed. Funny, what tricks the memory could play on you. He ran off a couple of shots, but his own shadow was falling into the frame, and he had to lower his shoulder and move a few inches to one side. He focused another shot, and even as he did so, he could swear that something had changed again. He had a great eye for detail-his photography teachers had always remarked on it, and so did his editors-and he knew that something in the image was different. Something tiny, something ephemeral. But as he shifted position again, he saw it happen-he saw the pupils of her eyes contract.

He lowered the camera, then looked at the digital images he had just recorded. Back and forth, from one to the other. And though the change was infinitesimal, he could still swear it was there.

“Found you!” he heard Darryl call out, over the windy rattling of the metal fence. “You've got a call on the SAT phone-someone named Karen! They're holding it for you.” Darryl took in the work that Betty and Tina had done on the ice block. “Wow! You've made a lot of progress.”

Michael nodded, and said, “Leave everything just the way it is. I'm coming back.”

“I don't think you should leave the lights on,” Betty said.

She was right. Michael tucked his camera back inside his anorak, then, before heading for the administration module, flicked them off. The block of ice instantly went from a shimmering pillar to a somber monolith.

December 11, 3 p.m.

“I'm sorry,” Karen was saying, “did I take you away from something important?”

“No, no, I always want to hear from you. You know that.” But his heart was in his mouth every time that they did talk on the SAT phone. It was very unlikely she was bringing him good news. “What's up?”

With his foot, he pushed the door to the communications room closed, and hunkered forward on the armless computer chair.

“I just thought I'd let you know that Krissy's leaving the hospital, so you don't need to try calling there anymore.”

For a second, his spirits lifted-Kristin was going home? — but there was nothing jubilant in Karen's tone, so he asked, “Where is she going?”

“Home.”

Now he was puzzled again. That was a good sign, wasn't it? “The doctors think she's improved enough to go home?”

“No, not really, but my dad does.”

That sounded about right. Mr. Nelson was not one to let professionals get in the way.

“He thinks they're not doing enough for her-enough physical therapy enough cognitive stuff-and he's decided to hire all his own people and just have them come to the house, where he can monitor them.”

“Who's going to run the car dealerships?”

“Don't ask me. This is his big idea, and we're all just along for the ride.”

That, too, sounded like the family dynamic; Kristin had been the only one who ever actively refused to go along. And though Michael did not doubt for one minute Mr. Nelson's love for his daughter, he also saw this as a way-a final, irrefutable way-for him to gain control over her again, entirely.

“When is this happening?”

“Tomorrow. But they've been making the arrangements-for hospital beds, ventilators, round-the-clock nurses-for the past week.”

“So,” Michael said, absentmindedly rubbing his left shoulder, “she's going to be back in her old room. That might be good for her.”

“Actually, her old room is upstairs-I don't need to tell you that,” she said, with a wry laugh, “and it's too hard to get everything up there. So we're converting the family room instead.”

“Oh, right. That makes sense,” he said, a burst of static suddenly interfering with the connection. He was trying to sort through it all-was this a good idea, or just a desperate one? Even with nurses coming and going at all hours, how could her parents and her sister really oversee her recovery?

A recovery that Michael had understood, from the doctors, to be impossible.

Lord knows he had tried to believe in it. For the whole of that long, cold night in the Cascades, and for much of the next day, he had forced himself to think only optimistically; he had willed himself to believe that she would wake up and come around again, just as soon as he got her back down the mountain. At daybreak, he'd crawled out of the sleeping bag he'd shared with her all night and rubbed as much feeling back into his own limbs as he could. He had a big purple bruise on his thigh, where he'd been lying on a carabiner, and his left shoulder still ached. He unwrapped another PowerBar and wolfed it down. As he looked up at the dawn sky, he could see a private plane buzzing by overhead. For the hell of it, he waved his arms, shouted, and even blew his whistle, but the plane didn't bank its wings to signal that they'd seen him, much less return for another look. It disappeared to the west, and the only sounds remaining were the cries of birds and the rustling of the wind.