How High We Go in the Dark(8)

Day 68: Dear Yumi, the team went into a nearby village today and we saw a girl that reminded me of you. Her mother and father were holding her hands, all three of them bundled up to their eyeballs, waddling over the ice. Your father and I took you ice-skating once. You probably don’t remember, but you pushed a metal walker across the rink, grasping it for dear life. But then your father took off your skates, held you in his arms, and the two of you flew around the rink. I miss him. Maybe I should have stayed longer, explained better. But all I can do right now is remain here, so very far from where I want to be. Maybe it’ll all be worth it one day. Maybe it won’t, and we’ll have lost all this time (and your grandfather will have been right). But know that what I’m doing here is trying to give you a future filled with light.

After I finished Annie’s examination, I went outside to join Maksim and Dave for a cigarette. The temperature dropped quickly at dusk. I tried to inhale without inviting in the cold like when I was younger and smoked outside of bars and restaurants, meeting people through our shared nicotine exile. I hung back for a moment as Dave practiced his Russian with Maksim, watched the sky as it transformed into an orange haze over a never-ending sheet of fresh snow. Somewhere, at that moment, footprints in powder recorded the day of small animals and the slow migration of bison. Somewhere, thirty thousand years ago, perhaps the snow recorded someone who loved Annie, walking far away from here.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Maksim said.

“It is,” I said.

“And depressing as hell,” Dave said.

“It’s Siberia,” Maksim said.

“We didn’t realize Clara had a daughter,” Dave said.

“Maybe he doesn’t want to talk about this,” Maksim said.

I breathed the smoke in deeply and fell into a coughing fit. Maksim handed me a flask, which I gladly sipped to cool my throat.

“It’s okay,” I said. “She’s almost ten.” I pulled out my phone, showed them photos of Yumi and Clara and Ty, all of us together.

“It’s tough having those kinds of connections out here,” Dave said. “Pretty sure my marriage has been in the shitter for a while now.”

“Any updates on how long the quarantine will be in effect?” I asked.

“We’ve seen some reaction from amoeba test subjects to the virus that we found inside Annie. It’s like their cytoplasm began to either seep through their outer membrane or crystallize. We’re not telling our governments just yet. We need to know what we have first, what it might mean, if anything, for humans,” Dave explained. “Don’t want them overreacting.”

Maksim handed me the flask again, told me they’d make a Siberian out of me yet. If I closed my eyes, I could imagine Clara standing at the edge of the crater, looking back through the darkening forest, searching for a speck of light from the outpost.

A week later, mainstream news outlets called Annie “Another Missing Link” and “The Wonder Girl of Ancient Siberia” after the analysis of her genome was completed. Part Neanderthal and part something only superficially human, she possessed genetic traits similar to those of a starfish or octopus. What exactly this would have looked like in Annie was unclear, but the frail girl I’d previously imagined would have been highly adaptable to whatever the Ice Age had thrown at her. She was a fighter. She was filled with possibility. Most of the lab buzzed with video interviews and celebrations, the promises of research grants and new equipment. No news of the virus within Annie had been publicized, and we’d been instructed not to reveal anything. Dave and Maksim grew increasingly busy, trapped in their labs despite their assurances to us that everything was under control. I wondered if Clara would have told us about any of this had she lived.

I video-called my wife and Yumi. They were both wearing construction-paper crowns when they answered. I said I would be home soon, maybe a month or two, and I wanted to believe this was true. Yumi had been chosen to play the sun in a school play and had started taking violin lessons. My wife’s sister and brother-in-law had moved in to help, since Miki held regular art shows in New York, and other relatives stopped by on weekends, resulting in regular potlucks.

“I sold two paintings of Clara and Yumi,” my wife added. “A couple in Brooklyn said they could sense the love between them, and also a kind of longing. I didn’t intend that, but I couldn’t help noticing the sadness in Clara’s eyes.”

“I think she was happy out here,” I said.

When Yumi chimed in after, I told her about an extraordinary girl who had the lungs and heart of an Olympic athlete, and who may have possessed the ability to heal from minor wounds in a matter of hours like a starfish or an octopus.

“Like a superhero?” Yumi asked.

“Kind of,” I said.

“But you said she got sick.”

“Everyone gets sick sometimes,” I said. “And that’s why I need to stay here for a little while longer. I want to make sure people don’t get sick if they don’t have to.”

“But you’re okay?”

“I’m okay.”

After Yumi left the call, I reassured my wife that what I had said was true. I told Miki to make teriyaki beef for the next family dinner, to soak it in sauce overnight in the fridge, and to cut the meat extra thin because that’s how Yumi likes it. I promised I would call if anything changed.