My Last Continent (25 page)

“How're you doing?” she asks. “I heard you broke your ankle.”

“Just a fracture.” I turn away from her and stumble toward the porthole, swallowing hard against another wave of nausea, my hands hovering around my middle. “I hate being stuck on board like this.”

“I know the feeling,” she says.

“Your husband does, too,” I say, turning around. “Did you hear? About how he found Keller and they found me?”

She nods, then wraps her arms around herself. “I'm glad. I mean, I know he screwed up the first time—”

“Don't worry about that. We're all grateful he snuck out again, as stupid as it was. I should thank him. Where is he?”

“Up in the lounge, I think,” she says. “I asked him not to come down here because you need to rest.”

“This is your cabin?”

“I wanted you to have a quiet place to recuperate. Richard and I aren't going to get any sleep anyway.”

“You didn't have to do that.”

She smiles. “And you'll be happy to know he's taken off that patch, finally.”

“Good.”

Kate takes a step closer, studying me. “Are you okay? You look really pale.”

“I'm just a little queasy, that's all.”

She glances at the bandage on my forehead. “That doesn't sound good. I should go find Susan.”

“No,” I say. “Not necessary.”

“But if you hit your head—”

“It's not that,” I say. “I'm pregnant.”

Kate smiles, then turns to the little coffee bar all the staterooms are equipped with. “Peppermint tea,” she says over her shoulder. “I've been drinking it like water. It helps a lot.”

After handing me the mug of tea, Kate sits down on the bed across from mine and asks me how far along I am. I repeat what Susan had told me, with a little difficulty, my stomach beginning to churn again. I take a few sips of tea but can't handle more and put the mug on the top of the storage compartment between the beds.

Kate takes a blanket from the closet and lays it over me. The gesture is so kind that I don't have the heart to tell her I'm already too warm. Sitting cross-legged on the other bed, she tells me she's planning to tell Richard about her own pregnancy as soon as they're off the boat, maybe over a nice dinner in Ushuaia or Santiago, when they're back on land and everything is feeling more normal.

Maybe it's the sound of her voice that soothes me, or the exhaustion catching up with me, or the fact that the nausea is finally abating—I let my eyes shut, and the next thing I know, I'm waking up with a shudder.

Kate is gone, but when I raise my head I see Susan across the room. She's got her back to me, rummaging in her medical bag.

“How long have I been asleep?” I ask. “Where's Kate?”

She doesn't answer but comes over with a glass of water. “How're you feeling?” she asks.

“Not bad. A little sick earlier. Better now.” Yet when I sit up, my head spins, and I feel a bolt of pain shoot through my temple.

Disoriented, I lie back down and try to look out the porthole, but all I can glimpse is a faint glow of light. The ship's not moving, but I don't otherwise have a sense of where or when. There's no clock down here, and my diver's watch is gone. “What time is it?”

“About four.”

“In the afternoon?” It feels as though I'd slept for more than a couple of hours.

“No, morning,” she says. “You slept through the night. You really needed it.”

“All night?” I'd slept for more than twelve hours. The
Australis
would be underwater by now, her fuel leaking. Finding any more survivors would be more than we could hope for.

I struggle again to sit up. “How's the rescue going?”

Susan looks as though she hasn't slept at all, her eyes puffy and barely open, her mouth taut with tension.

“We're still at Detaille,” she says. “There's a flotilla of ships out there now.”

“So why aren't we heading north?”

She pauses. “They're still looking for two people.”

This could only mean one thing. “You mean two of our people.”

She nods.

“Who?”

But she doesn't say anything.

“Who, Susan?”

“One is Richard Archer.”

I'm not surprised by this, but I feel a pang of sympathy for Kate. I wait for Susan to speak again, and when she doesn't, I ask, “Who's the other one?”

“Why don't you rest a bit more?” she says.

“Susan, just tell me.” When she doesn't, I answer my own question. “It's Keller, isn't it?”

She nods.

I feel something inside me sink and drown.

“They're looking for him now, Deb. Everyone is, crew from all the ships.” She pauses. “They'll find him.”

I reach out and clutch her hand. “You've got to get me out there. Wrap up this leg and shoot me full of whatever you have to. I need to be out there looking.”

“Deb,” she says. “You can barely walk.”

“He saved me,” I say. “You can't just let me sit here and do nothing.”

Susan's eyes begin to water.

I try to breathe, try to stay calm. But I know the odds.

I turn away from Susan and shut my eyes. I hear the rumble of Zodiacs outside, the occasional petrel cry. Then I feel the ship tremble, hear the engines come alive. This means they're preparing to leave, with or without Keller, with or without Richard. I can tell by the vibrations that they haven't fixed that damaged propeller. The ship feels shaky, unwhole.

A PHYSICAL PAIN
envelops me so fully I can hardly tell where it's coming from. Susan offers me acetaminophen, but I shake
her off. Even something stronger wouldn't help—even if I had no body at all, I'd feel the shock and tremble of all that we've lost. At least without medication, I can focus on something: every ache, every twinge, every throb.

Kate makes us tea, and we wait together, taking turns looking helplessly out the porthole. The
Cormorant
's engines are running, but we're still at anchor. Rescuers have already pulled hundreds of bodies from the water, and the decks of the British and Russian icebreakers that have arrived to help are lined with corpses. And when Glenn and Nigel appear at the cabin door, their expressions grave and focused on Kate, I know instantly that Richard is now among them.

I watch Kate's face lose its color. Though it's hard for me to walk, I insist on accompanying her as she follows Glenn and Nigel to a Zodiac. She takes my arm, as if to help me, but I can feel her shaking. Glenn tells us that a Russian team found a Zodiac grounded on a sheet of ice, with two frightened
Australis
passengers inside. Not far away, the Russian crew discovered a body, buoyed by his life preserver
.

When we board the icebreaker, they take us into a room. Richard's body lies stretched on a makeshift table. He wears a life jacket stamped with the tour company's logo. His face is a whitish blue, his skin slick and waxy. Kate reaches out to touch his face. “At last,” she murmurs to me, “he looks almost relaxed.”

In the Zodiac on the way back to the
Cormorant,
she asks Glenn the question I'm not able to ask myself: “What about Keller?”

“Nothing yet,” Glenn says.

“But you'll keep looking?”

“We need to head back soon,” Glenn says, his eyes meeting mine. “But the others are going to keep looking, yes.” For the first time, I hear Glenn's voice waver, on the edge of breaking.

“Then I'm staying, too,” I hear myself say. Glenn doesn't answer, but I feel his hand on my shoulder, and he keeps it there until we return to the
Cormorant
.

Back on board, Kate brings me a bowl of soup, which I can't eat. Amy comes by to see me, but I can't talk. I press my face to the glass of the porthole, where I continue to stare out at the water—dirty with brash ice and with debris from the wreck, from the rescue operations—and think of all it has taken.

Nigel, Amy, and a few crew members will remain with the other rescue teams—more bodies need recovering; the
Australis
is leaking fuel. The recovery work has only just begun.

I look over at a nearby ice floe. An Adélie has just leapt onto it and turned his head to the side, considering the ship. I want to call out to him, warn him to get away—that soon he will be covered in oil; he will lose his body heat, his ability to swim and mate and feed his chicks. But Adélies are territorial. They don't know how to leave.

THE PAIN AND
nausea get worse, and it's only when I notice the bleeding that I realize I've neglected what's happening inside my own body, where a part of Keller is still alive.

Susan doesn't have the equipment on board to offer the reassurances I need, but she instructs me to stay in bed. “The body will take care of itself,” she tells me, and this is an odd
source of comfort, this reminder that we're all just bodies in the end, like all other animals.

I sleep fitfully, waking from nightmares of broken eggs, of skuas scavenging dead penguins, of baby chicks drowning in meltwater. I think of the penguins I've observed over the years, those who've lost their young to predators or bad weather or bad timing. They move on, I remind myself; they can't afford to stop.

But this doesn't mean they don't mourn. When I close my eyes, I can see the Magellanic penguin watching over her mate's lifeless body at Punta Tombo. I see Adélies wander their colonies, searching for mates that never return; I see chinstraps sitting dejected on empty nests. And, perhaps most clearly of all, I see the grieving of the emperors. The female returns, searching, her head poised for the ecstatic cry. When her calls go unanswered, she lowers her beak to the icy ground. When she locates her chick, frozen in death, she assumes the hunched posture of sorrow as she wanders across the ice. And then, when it's time, she'll let the sea take her far away, as I'm doing now.

The Drake Passage
(58°22'S, 61°05'W)

O
ne thing the animal kingdom had not yet taught me is that hope is more punishing than grief.

We don't know much about animals' capacity for hope. We do know that they grieve, that they are joyful and playful and mischievous and clever. We've seen animals work together toward a common goal, and we've seen them use tools to get what they want. Despite what many believe, they are not so different from us.

Yet we can't know their hearts and minds; we can only watch their behaviors. One winter, I watched an Adélie penguin minding her nest during an unexpected snowstorm. Soon covered with snow herself, she didn't move. Her eggs would never hatch, and even if they did, her newborn chicks would freeze, or drown—but still she didn't leave them. Was this instinct? Or was it hope? Did she wish, as I'm wishing now, for something that by all accounts would be nothing short of miraculous?

During the journey home, I remain confined to my bunk. I don't sleep, though I need the rest, and with every sway and dip through the Drake, I cling to the sturdy wooden slats of the bunk and dare to hope—even as part of me wonders whether hope is only a blind instinct as well.

And, with nothing but time to think, I try to piece together what happened to Keller.

Richard must have still had medication in his system, and he was apparently suffering from some mad, misplaced belief that he was helping the rescuers—whatever the reason, he decided to go back into the water to search for that elusive person he'd been obsessed with rescuing. Kate said he seemed desperate to assist, to prove he could do something good, perhaps to make up for his rock-climbing stunt on Deception Island, which he still felt bad about.

She'd seen Richard getting into a Zodiac with Keller, and she'd shouted after him, but they were too far away to hear. She saw Keller and Richard arguing, Keller pointing back toward the
Cormorant
several times, then finally tossing up his hands, as if he realized he couldn't argue with Richard anymore. Then they took off in the Zodiac. That was the last Kate saw of them.

They must've been heading for the
Australis,
looking for more victims, dodging the pack ice, their path steadily growing narrower. From what Glenn told us, the ice had closed in after the
Cormorant
retreated to Detaille, making rescue efforts nearly impossible. At that point, only one other small cruise ship had arrived to help.

Keller would have been constantly stopping and backing up, turning around to try to find a good route. I can see him clearly in my mind—the weight of each passing moment on
his tensing shoulders, the reluctance to let even one opportunity to find more survivors slip by. When one route dead-ended in a sheet of ice, he would try another, and then another.

At some point, Keller took off his life jacket and gave it to Richard.

This I know because Kate said when Richard got into the Zodiac, he wasn't wearing a life jacket, but Keller was. Richard's body was found only because he was buoyed by a life preserver, and the fact that Keller has not been found is likely because he wasn't.

Keller, still determined, would aim their rubber boat into the narrow channels of ice, firing forward at full force, the ice tearing at the sides, scraping as it broke away beneath them. He would know that the Zodiac's multiple compartments allowed for some damage, and that, at a time like this, saving lives was more important than salvaging a rubber boat. He would push ahead, and gradually the ice would begin to loosen its grip as the river widened. They would emerge into a broad lake of liquid that allowed them to turn back in the direction of the
Australis
.

Keller would have been too focused on the ice ahead to pay much attention to Richard. And Richard, unable to think clearly, would have been focused only on finding that survivor he thought he'd left behind. Was it possible he'd seen something that wasn't there? I remember Keller's words:
It's thanks to his delusion about someone else being out there that we found you.

Is it possible to hate Richard for finding me, and losing Keller?

During the course of the rescue, I heard crew members
say they'd glimpse a body writhing on the ice and approach it through the fog and snow only to find, once they got closer, that it wasn't a human but a seal. Or they'd see a jacket floating by, only to fish it out and discover it empty.

I don't know what could have gotten Keller out of the safety of the Zodiac without a life jacket unless it was to help someone. Someone who was there, or someone who Richard thought was there.

Keller would kill the engine, bring the Zodiac up hard against the side of the ice—and this is where I'm at a loss.

I can only surmise that Richard believed he saw something, and that Keller believed him, too. I envision Keller on the ice, looking around.

Perhaps he did see someone. Or Richard insisted someone was there. Maybe he pointed, and Keller ventured forward, walking gingerly, peering into the water from a safe distance away.

But why had Richard left him behind?

As crazed as he was, I doubt Richard would deliberately leave Keller stranded on the ice—his intentions were good, and, according to Kate, his biggest enemy had always been himself. And maybe that was it—maybe he was still, at that moment, trying to prove himself a hero. To redeem himself for everything he thought he'd done wrong on this trip, to make up for every argument he'd had with his wife.

We know that two
Australis
passengers were found alone in a Zodiac—
We were stranded on the ice; we would'
ve been goners. But after he got us in the boat, he wouldn't take us to shore. Said he had to keep looking for someone
—and this is when I think things took a turn.

Richard had heard them somehow—two women, calling for help. At first he shook it off, knowing he had to wait for Keller, or thinking it was just the wind, the sounds of birds overhead—but soon he realized that they were human voices, and he turned to see their small figures through the fog, waving their arms, shouting at him.

Richard would yell out to Keller, who by then was too far away to hear—and, having heard the desperation in their voices, would decide to save the women, then return for Keller.

He would start up the Zodiac, but it would prove far more difficult to pilot than he'd anticipated. It changes direction easily, and he would have trouble keeping his arm steady. With each bump into a wedge of ice, he would lose his balance, each time taking another precious few seconds to regain it.

He would look up to see if he was making progress. He wasn't. He was driving and driving, and yet these two women didn't seem any closer. Turning around, he could still see Keller against the white of the ice.
Be right back,
he would promise. Richard would wish, suddenly, that he hadn't left him there.

But the two women stranded on the ice would be closer now, closer to him than Keller, and he would see that their floe was teetering dangerously in the wind. He had no choice but to save them first, and then return to Keller.

This we learned from the women: Richard approached the ice floe, slamming into it and struggling to keep the boat adjacent to the edge of the floe. The women managed to scramble into the Zodiac just as the ice began to tumble and crack be
neath them. They were cold, shivering uncontrollably. They'd been in a damaged lifeboat that had capsized amid the crushing ice, and they'd been fortunate to have clambered onto ice instead of falling into the water. They'd been separated from the other eight passengers with them. Two, they knew, had managed to climb onto another wedge of ice, but they'd been soaked through and had likely succumbed to hypothermia. The others, they suspected, had probably drowned.

Do you have any blankets?
one of them asked.

Richard shook his head, turning the boat around and heading back to where he came from, back to Keller.

Thank God you saw us,
the woman said.
I don't know how much more time we had on that ice. Where are you taking us?

I don't know,
Richard said, peering into the mist.

The woman looked around, confused
. Where are we going, then?

I have to pick up someone.

Where?

He's just over there
.

But by then Richard could no longer see Keller—the women both said no one was there. Richard seemed to panic; he had a hard time catching his breath. They said he kept trying to get closer, skirting around the edge of the ice as if this person might appear by magic.

One of the women asked:
Are you sure there's someone out here?

I saw you, didn't I?
Richard barked.

Okay, okay,
she said. She opened a storage hutch in the Zodiac and found a blanket, which the women spread across their shoulders. They huddled close together, becoming
more and more worried about Richard's increasingly freakish ­behavior.

Who are you looking for?
the other woman asked, watching Richard strain to see across the ice ahead. Again Richard didn't answer, and a few moments later he began to shake, the spastic movements of his hand on the steering post causing the Zodiac to lurch and hiccup in the water.

Hello!
Richard screamed out into the fog.
Hello!

There was no answer.

He never said Keller's name.

Help me,
Richard said, but when one of the women stood and tried to take over the steering post, Richard shook her off, losing control of the Zodiac again. He stumbled as they hit a large sheet of ice, tumbling out of the boat and falling hard onto the ice.

The women screamed, and one of them leaned over the side, reaching for Richard, while the other tried desperately to control the Zodiac, to keep it against the ice.

But Richard didn't want to get back into the boat.
Be right back,
he told them, pointing ahead.
He's just over there
.

It's hard to imagine what happened next—Richard and Keller both stranded on the ice, too far apart to find each other, and eventually too lost in fog for the women to help them. No radios—and, for Keller, no life jacket.

I force myself to consider Richard, what he must have felt, how he must have suffered—it's the only way I'll be able to understand, and to forgive.

I imagine him stumbling across the ice, paranoid and irrational. The wind would've been brisk, pushing down the clouds, darkening the sky. At some point he must have slipped,
or the ice must've cracked beneath his feet, or a wave knocked him down—somehow, he ended up underwater, choking on salt water, lungs burning.

Something similar would likely have happened to Keller, but for Richard, the life vest would have tugged him upward. Due to a large abrasion on the top of Richard's head, Kate was told that he'd likely been sucked under a sheet of ice so that when he rose up he met a cold glass ceiling, solid and unyielding.

He'd have clawed his way across the ice from below, the tips of his fingers raw, until he'd eventually reached open air. By then, he was exhausted, depleted. He attempted to heave himself out of the water but didn't have the strength, his hands too tattered and numb even to hold on, and so he could only float, his life preserver wedged up against his ears, his cheeks, as the weight of his body pulled him downward.

This is where I stop.

I can't envision what more happened to Richard because I can't allow myself to think of Keller's last moments.

What I do try to imagine about Keller is that some part of it was peaceful—that he didn't suffer when he was plunged into the ocean, that he was visited by the curious penguins he loved, that he drifted away gently, that his last thoughts of life, of me, of us, were hopeful, even happy. That he felt, finally, at home.