It was too cold for indecision. She stepped inside and he shut the door. Abby took a deep breath, letting warmth settle back inside her lungs, and then looked at him warily. 'I didn't know you'd be out here.'
'I think we were set up by Norse. He sent us on the same mission.'
'Mission?'
'To find some toys, right? I thought he was coming out, too, but…' Meet on neutral ground, Norse had suggested. He hadn't said with whom. Quite the matchmaker. 'Look, I didn't plan this, but I'm glad you came out. Really. I'm surprised but… please don't go.' Somehow he had to make things right.
She remembered she was angry about Gabriella. 'If Bob did this, then I'm mad at him, too.'
'Please.' He lifted his arms to take her parka. 'It's a long winter.' His conciliatory tone softened her. Hesitantly, she let it slip off.
'I thought I was meeting him,' Lewis explained, hanging her coat on a peg. 'But maybe not, if he sent you, too. He said it's all for station morale.'
She looked cautious. 'I don't know whether to believe you.'
'Really, he's playing with us both. We're just another experiment.'
'Which I'm fed up with. I don't need his help. Or yours.'
'That's what I said. Except…'
'Except what?'
'Except maybe we should start over. Here, on new ground.'
'You thought or Doctor Bob thought?'
'Abby, I got drunk and screwed up the other night. That's not an excuse but it wasn't what I wanted to happen. I wanted things to happen with you. I'm frustrated. Frustrated at how things haven't gone as I planned. Frustrated at myself.'
It was apology enough to get her to reluctantly sit, let him help her shuck off her snowy boots, and, with that, concede that she wasn't immediately leaving. 'We're all frustrated, Jed,' she admitted. 'It's been a hell of a winter.'
'Yes. So now that the bad stuff is over, let's have a truce, okay?'
'What about her?' She'd be damned if she'd say the name.
'There is no her! That's the whole point. I ran after you. Didn't you hear me?'
She glanced away, letting her eyes roam the room.
'I haven't even seen her,' Lewis added. 'I think she's embarrassed, too.'
'Well.' Abby was looking for a way to answer without answering. 'Welcome to the club, then, if we've both been sent here by our group therapist.' Her voice was quiet, resigned.
He smiled. They were going to talk, at least in a general way. 'How many clubs does this place have, anyway?'
She considered the light question seriously. 'The entire Pole is a club, I guess. So's Antarctica. The science community itself. This is a sub-branch.'
'Half hippie hideaway, half slumber party.'
'It's not Architectural Digest. I think of it as a den, or burrow.' She allowed a slight smile. 'I've always liked it. If anything ever goes wrong, I've thought this is where I'd come to wait for the end.'
She meant the generator but he had to laugh. 'If anything ever goes wrong! You should have camped out here weeks ago!'
'You know what I mean.'
'Yeah. It's cozy.'
'And hot. How high did you crank the heat, anyway?'
'Enough to get the rest of your stuff off.'
She looked at him skeptically and he grinned.
'It's part of my plan, make it a sauna and watch 'em strip. Works with all the girls.'
Abby snorted at that joke and shed her nylon bib overalls, keeping on the fleece pants and vest underneath. He enjoyed a glimpse of her stretching and bending even while pretending to politely glance around elsewhere. Men called her Ice Cream because they wanted her to melt. Yet while Abby was attractive, she didn't make him uncomfortable the way Gabriella did. Somehow her presence made him content, like the beauty of a flower. She hung up the overalls next to her parka, water from her boots pooling on the plywood by the door. 'Why would it matter where you waited?' he asked her.
'I'd want to die at home.'
'Jesus. Let's not be morbid.'
'How can we not?' She meant the deaths, the makeshift graves.
'It's been hard, hasn't it?' he said.
'Nothing like what I hoped.'
'But it's over, I think. So we should be friends again.'
'We've never not been friends. You can be angry at a friend and still be friends.'
'So you're still mad?'
She sighed, her look one of exasperation, but an exasperation as much at herself as him. 'Yes, but I don't have an excuse for my anger. No claim to you, I mean. I know that. I admit that. I'm trying to be honest about things. I've been thinking a lot about what's going on.'
'And?'
'And I'm not doing very well handling it alone.'
'We do have Doctor Bob.' It was meant as a kind of joke, but his frustration was portrayed in a sarcastic tone that popped out before he could control it.
'Are you jealous, Jed?'
It took him a moment to admit the truth. 'Yes. He's… smooth.'
'I pulled away from you because I was afraid how I felt about you, not Bob. I don't have the same feeling about Norse. He's too smooth. And that's what I've been thinking about.'
Now Lewis was curious. 'Maybe we'd better sit more comfortably.'
She nodded, pointing him to the torn couch. He sat, sinking in a squeal of springs. Instead of sitting next to him she plopped cross-legged down on one of the mattresses, facing him. 'Have you noticed what's been going on?' she began.
'The dying?'
She shook her head. 'The Pole. What it feels like here.'
'Cold.' It was flippant, an attempt to lighten things.
'No, our perspective. We're so low to the ground that we can't see very far. It's almost like treading water. And then as the sun set the horizon kind of shrank in on us. We went from seeing little to seeing almost nothing, on the really dark nights. Step beyond the lights and you step into a void. It's like we're floating, which in a sense is true, since we're on this ice. And at the same time the sky is so clear we're not just looking at the atmosphere but beyond it, out to the universe. It's exactly as if we've blasted into space.'
'Doctor Bob again.'
She shook her head. 'His focus is on the compound, the way all us little bits glue together or fall apart. He's a social scientist studying a spaceship. But to me we're individual atoms after a Big Bang, flying away from each other while maintaining this faint gravity. That's how the station makes me feel, anyway. Maybe it's that all these people here are too close, physically, and so as the winter closes in it forces you deeper inside yourself just to get away. If you're not careful the Pole starts to take you over. Like the monster in The Thing, except it's the Pole itself. Your sleep cycle, your appetite, your hormones, your periods, your energy, your habits: Everything begins to slide out of whack when the sun leaves. And the more you try to run after yourself, the more you seem to fall into yourself, leaving everyone else behind. Do you know what I mean?'
'Sort of.'
'It's isolating. We know each other but we don't know each other because if we all admitted what we're feeling it would create this kind of psychic whirlpool which might suck us all down. So we're wary. But some people reach out: you, Bob, even Gabriella.'
'But not you.'
She took a breath, hesitating, then plunged ahead. 'A woman learns to be cautious with men. Guys want to
