Where'd You Go, Bernadette: A Novel (30 page)

“I thought she was here, Dad.”

“I can see why you might have thought that,” he said.

I cried a little, but then stopped. Still, the crying continued. It was Dad.

“I miss her, too, Bee.” His chest jerked violently. He was bad at crying. “I know you think you have a monopoly on missing her. But Mom was my best friend.”

“She was
my
best friend,” I said.

“I knew her longer.” He wasn’t even being funny.

Now that Dad was crying, I was, like,
both
of us can’t be sitting on rocks in Antarctica crying. “It’s going to be OK, Dad.”

“You’re absolutely right,” he said, blowing his nose. “It all started with that letter I sent Dr. Kurtz. I was only trying to get Mom help. You have to believe me.”

“I do.”

“You’re great, Bee. You’ve always been great. You’re our biggest accomplishment.”

“Not really.”

“It’s true.” He put his arm around me and pulled me close. My shoulder fit perfectly under his shoulder. I could already feel the warmth from his armpit. I nestled in closer. “Here, try these.” He reached into his parka and pulled out two of those pocket-warming heat biscuits. I yowled, they felt so good.

“I know this trip has been hard on you,” Dad said. “It’s not what
you wanted it to be.” He let out a big gooey sigh. “I’m sorry you had to read all those documents, Bee. They weren’t meant for you. They weren’t something a fifteen-year-old should have had to read.”

“I’m glad I read them.” I didn’t know Mom had those other babies. It made me feel like there were all these children Mom would rather have had, and loved as much as she loved me, but I was the one who lived and I was broken, because of my heart.

“Paul Jellinek was right,” Dad said. “He’s a great guy, a true friend. I’d like us to go down to L.A. and spend some time with him one day. He knew Bernadette best. He realized that she needed to create.”

“Or she’d become a menace to society,” I said.

“That’s where I really failed your mom,” he said. “She was an artist who had stopped creating. I should have done everything I could to get her back.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I didn’t know how. Trying to get an artist to create… it’s gigantic. I write code. I didn’t understand it. I still don’t. You know, I’d forgotten, until I read that
Artforum
article, that we used Mom’s MacArthur money to buy Straight Gate. It was like Bernadette’s hopes and dreams were literally crumbling around us.”

“I don’t know why everyone’s so down on our house,” I said.

“Have you ever heard that the brain is a discounting mechanism?”

“No.”

“Let’s say you get a present and open it and it’s a fabulous diamond necklace. Initially, you’re delirious with happiness, jumping up and down, you’re so excited. The next day, the necklace still makes you happy, but less so. After a year, you see the necklace, and you think, Oh, that old thing. It’s the same for negative emotions. Let’s say you get a crack in your windshield and you’re really upset.
Oh no, my windshield, it’s ruined, I can hardly see out of it, this is a tragedy! But you don’t have enough money to fix it, so you drive with it. In a month, someone asks you what happened to your windshield, and you say, What do you mean? Because your brain has
discounted
it.”

“The first time I walked into Kennedy’s house,” I said, “it had that horrible Kennedy-house smell because her mother is always frying fish. I asked Kennedy, What’s that gross smell? And she was, like, What smell?”

“Exactly,” Dad said. “You know why your brain does that?”

“Nuh-uh.”

“It’s for survival. You need to be prepared for novel experiences because often they signal danger. If you live in a jungle full of fragrant flowers, you have to stop being so overwhelmed by the lovely smell because otherwise you couldn’t smell a predator. That’s why your brain is considered a discounting mechanism. It’s literally a matter of survival.”

“That’s cool.”

“It’s the same with Straight Gate,” he said. “We’ve discounted the holes in the ceilings, the wet patches in the floors, the cordoned-off rooms. I hate to break it to you, but that’s not how people live.”

“It’s how we lived,” I said.

“It
is
how we lived.” A long time passed, which was nice. It was just us and the seal and Dad whipping out his ChapStick.

“We were like the Beatles, Dad.”

“I know you think that, sweetie.”

“Seriously. Mom is John, you’re Paul, I’m George, and Ice Cream is Ringo.”

“Ice Cream,” Dad said with a laugh.

“Ice Cream,” I said. “Resentful of the past, fearful of the future.”

“What’s that?” He asked, rubbing his lips together.

“Something Mom read in a book about Ringo Starr. They say that nowadays he’s resentful of the past and fearful of the future. You’ve never seen Mom laugh so hard. Every time we saw Ice Cream sitting there with her mouth open, we’d say, Poor Ice Cream, resentful of the past, fearful of the future.”

Dad smiled a big smile.

“Soo-Lin,” I started to say, but even uttering her name made it difficult to keep talking. “She’s nice. But she’s like poop in the stew.”

“Poop in the stew?” he said.

“Let’s say you make some stew,” I explained, “and it’s really yummy and you want to eat it, right?”

“OK,” Dad said.

“And then someone stirs a little bit of poop in it. Even if it’s just a teeny-tiny amount, and even if you mix it in really well, would you want to eat it?”

“No,” Dad said.

“So that’s what Soo-Lin is. Poop in the stew.”

“Well, I think that’s rather unfair,” he said. And we both had to laugh.

It’s the first time during this whole trip that I let myself really look at Dad. He had on a fleece headband over his ears and zinc oxide on his nose. The rest of his face was shiny from sunblock and moisturizer. He wore dark mountain-climbing glasses with the flaps on the side. The one lens that was taped over didn’t show because the other lens was just as dark. There was really nothing to hate him for.

“So you know,” Dad said, “you’re not the only one with wild ideas about what happened to Mom. I thought maybe she’d gotten off the ship, and when she saw me with Soo-Lin she somehow dodged us. So you know what I did?”

“What?”

“I hired a bounty hunter from Seattle to go to Ushuaia and look for her.”

“You did?” I said. “A real-life bounty hunter?”

“They specialize in finding people far from home,” he said. “Someone at work recommended this guy. He spent two weeks in Ushuaia looking for Bernadette, checking the boats coming in and out, the hotels. He couldn’t find anything. And then we got the captain’s report.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Bee,” he said carefully. “I have something to tell you. Have you noticed I haven’t been frantic about not being able to get email?”

“Not really.” I felt bad because only then did it occur to me that I hadn’t thought about Dad at all. It was true, he’s usually all into his email.

“There’s a huge reorg they’re probably announcing as we sit on these rocks.” He checked his watch. “Is today the tenth?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe.”

“As of the tenth, Samantha 2 is canceled.”

“Canceled?” I didn’t even understand how that word could apply.

“It’s over. They’re folding us into games.”

“You mean for, like, the Xbox?”

“Pretty much,” he said. “Walter Reed pulled out because of budget cuts. At Microsoft, you’re nothing if you don’t ship. If Samantha 2 is under games, at least they can ship millions of units.”

“What about all those paraplegics you’ve been working with?”

“I’m in talks with the UW,” he said. “I’m hoping to continue our work over there. It’s complicated because Microsoft owns the patents.”

“I thought you owned the patents,” I said.

“I own the commemorative cubes. Microsoft owns the patents.”

“So, like, you’re going to leave Microsoft?”

“I
left
Microsoft. I turned in my badge last week.”

I’d never known Dad without his badge. A terrible sadness poured in through my head and filled me to the brim, like I was a honey bear. I thought I might burst of sadness. “That’s so weird,” is all I could say.

“Is now a good time to tell you something even weirder?” he said.

“I guess,” I said.

“Soo-Lin is pregnant.”

“What?”

“You’re too young to understand these things, but it was one night. I’d had too much to drink. It was over the moment it began. I know that probably seems really… what’s a word you would use… gross?”

“I never say gross,” I said.

“You just did,” he said. “That’s what you called the smell at Kennedy’s house.”

“She’s really pregnant?” I said.

“Yep.” Poor guy, he looked like he was going to barf.

“So basically,” I said, “your life is ruined.” I’m sorry, but something in me made me smile.

“I can’t say that thought hasn’t occurred to me,” he said. “But I try not to think of it that way. I’m trying to frame it as my life being
different
.
Our
lives being different. Me and you.”

“So me and Lincoln and Alexandra are going to have the
same
brother or sister?”

“Yep.”

“That’s so random.”

“Random!” he said. “I’ve always hated when you used that word. But it is pretty random.”

“Dad,” I said. “I called her Yoko Ono that night because she was the one who broke up the Beatles. Not because she’s Asian. I felt bad.”

“I know that,” he said.

It was good that sappy-eyed seal was there, because we could both just watch her. But then Dad started putting in eyedrops.

“Dad,” I said. “I really don’t mean to hurt your feelings, but…”

“But what?”

“You have way too many accessories. I can’t keep track of all of them.”

“It’s a good thing you don’t have to, isn’t it?”

We were quiet for a while, and then I said, “I think my favorite part of Antarctica is just looking out.”

“You know why?” Dad asked. “When your eyes are softly focused on the horizon for sustained periods, your brain releases endorphins. It’s the same as a runner’s high. These days, we all spend our lives staring at screens twelve inches in front of us. It’s a nice change.”

“I have an idea,” I said. “You should invent an app so that when you’re staring at your phone, it tricks your brain into thinking you’re staring at the horizon, so you can get a runner’s high from texting.”

“What did you just say?” Dad spun his head to look at me, his mind in high gear.

“Don’t you dare steal my idea!” I gave him a shove.

“Consider yourself warned.”

I groaned and left it at that. Then Charlie came over and said it was time to head back.

At breakfast, Nick the penguin-counter asked me again if I’d be his assistant, which did sound pretty fun. We got to leave before everyone else, in our own Zodiac. Nick let me stand next to the outboard and steer. The best way to describe Nick would be to say that he didn’t have any personality, which sounds mean, but it’s kind of
true. The closest he came to personality was when he told me to scan the horizon wide, like a searchlight, back and forth, back and forth. He said after he was down here the first time driving a Zodiac that he went back home and immediately got into a car accident because he was looking left to right, left to right, and ended up rear-ending the car directly in front of him. But that’s not personality. That’s just a car accident.

He dropped me off at an Adélie penguin colony and gave me a clipboard with a satellite map marked with some boundaries. This was a follow-up to a study a month back, where another scientist had counted the eggs. It was my job to see how many had successfully hatched into chicks. Nick sized up the colony.

“This looks like a complete breeding failure.” He shrugged.

I was shocked by how casually he said this. “What do you mean, a complete failure?”

“Adélies are hardwired to lay their eggs in the exact same place each year,” he said. “We had a late winter, so their nesting grounds were still covered with snow when they made their nests. So it looks like there’s no chicks.”

“How can you even tell?” Because there was no way
I
could see that.

“You tell me,” he said. “Observe their behavior and tell me what you see.”

He left me with a clicker and headed off to another colony, saying he’d return in two hours. Adélies may be the cutest penguins of all. Their heads are pure black except for perfect white circles, like a reinforcement, around their tiny black eyes. I started at the top left corner and clicked each time I saw a gray fuzz-ball sticking out from between an Adélie’s feet. Click, click, click. I worked my way across the top of the mapped area, then dropped down and worked my way
back. You have to make sure not to count the same nest twice, but it’s almost impossible because they’re not in a neat grid. When I was done I did it over again and got the same number.

Here’s what surprised me about penguins: their chests aren’t pure white but have patches of peach and green, which is partially digested krill and algae vomit, which splatters on them when they feed their chicks. Another thing is penguins stink! And they’re loud. They coo sometimes, which is very soothing, but mostly they screech. The penguins I watched spent most of their time waddling over and stealing rocks from one another, then having vicious fights where they’d peck each other until they bled.

I climbed high on the rocks and looked out. There was ice, in every possible form, stretching forever. Glaciers, fast ice, icebergs, chunks of ice in the still water. The air was so cold and clean that even in the way distance, the ice was as vivid and sharp as if it were right in front of me. The immensity of it all, the peacefulness, the stillness and enormous silence, well, I could have sat there forever.

“What behavior did you observe?” Nick asked when he got back.

“The penguins that spent most of their time fighting were the ones with no chicks,” I said.

“There you go,” he said.

“It’s like they’re supposed to be taking care of their chicks. But because they don’t have any, they have nothing to do with all their energy. So they just pick fights.”