It was a day or two later that he found Iris—hiding out in one of the empty dormitories, curled up on a bare bottom-bunk mattress, left behind like a forgotten piece of luggage. He squinted at her for a while, unsure of his own eyes. She was small, maybe eight years old—Augie wasn’t sure—with dark, almost black hair that fell to her narrow shoulders in a tangled mass. She had round hazel eyes that seemed to be looking everywhere at once, and there was an alert stillness about her, like a wary animal. She was so still, in fact, he could almost imagine that she was a trick of the light, but then she moved and the metal frame of the bunk groaned beneath her. Augustine massaged his temples.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” he said to no one. “Come on, then.” He turned to go and beckoned her with a flick of his hand. She didn’t speak, just followed him back to the control room. He tossed her a bag of dried fruit and nuts while he heated a pot of water, and she ate the whole thing. He made her a packet of instant oatmeal and she ate that too.
“This is ridiculous,” he said to no one. Still she was silent. He handed her a book and she flipped through the pages—whether she was reading it, he couldn’t tell. Augustine busied himself with his work and tried to ignore the inexplicable, inconvenient presence of a little girl he couldn’t remember ever seeing before.
She would be missed, of course—someone would be back to collect her any minute. Surely it was only the commotion of the exodus, a crossing of wires, that had resulted in her being left behind: “I thought she was with you,” “Well, I thought she was with you.” But evening fell and no one returned. The following day, he radioed the Alert military base, the northernmost year-round settlement on Ellesmere Island. There was no answer. He scanned the other frequencies—all of them—and as he flipped through the bands a surge of dread washed over him. The amateur waves were silent; the emergency communication satellites hummed an empty tune; even the military aviation channels were mute. It was as if there were no radio transmitters left in the world, or perhaps no souls to use them. He kept scanning. There was nothing. Only static. He told himself it was a glitch. A storm. He would try again tomorrow.
But the girl—he didn’t know what to do with her. When he asked her questions she stared at him with detached curiosity, as if she were on the other side of a soundproof window. As if she were empty: a hollow girl with wild hair and solemn eyes and no voice. He treated her like a pet because he didn’t know what else to do—with clumsy kindness, but as a specimen of a different species. He fed her when he fed himself. Talked to her when he felt like talking. Took her for walks. Gave her things to play with or look at: a walkie-talkie, a constellation map, a musty sachet of potpourri he’d found in an empty drawer, an Arctic field guide. He did his best, which he knew wasn’t very good, but—she didn’t belong to him and he wasn’t the sort of man who adopted strays.
That dark afternoon, just after the sun had risen and then sunk once more, Augustine looked for her in all the usual places: buried beneath the sleeping bags like a lazy cat; twirling in one of the wheeled chairs; sitting at the table, prodding the insides of a broken DVD player with a screwdriver; gazing out the thick, dirty pane of glass at the never-ending Cordillera Mountains. She was nowhere to be seen, but Augustine wasn’t worried. Sometimes she hid, but she never wandered far without him and she always revealed herself before too long. He let her keep her hiding places, her secrets. There were no dolls, no picture books, no swing sets, nothing she could call her own. It was only fair. And besides, he reminded himself, he didn’t really care.
DURING THE LONG polar night, after several weeks of total darkness and nearly two months after the evacuation, Iris broke her silence to ask Augustine a question.
“How long till morning?” she said.
It was the first time he’d heard her make a sound, other than the eerie humming he’d grown accustomed to—that aria of long, trembling notes deep in her throat as she looked out the control tower windows, as if she were narrating the subtle movements of their barren landscape in another tongue. When she finally did speak that day, her voice came out in a throaty whisper. It was deeper than he expected, and more confident. He had begun to wonder if she was capable of speech, or if perhaps she spoke another language, but those first words fell easily from her mouth, enunciated in an American, or perhaps a Canadian, accent.
“We’re about halfway there,” he told her, with no indication that she’d done anything unusual, and she nodded, similarly unsurprised. She continued to chew the jerky they were eating for dinner, holding the strip of meat with both hands and ripping away a mouthful like a baby carnivore just learning to use her teeth. He passed her a bottle of water and began thinking of all the questions he had for her, only to realize he actually had very few. He asked her name.
“Iris,” she said, without turning away from the darkened window.
“That’s pretty,” he remarked, and she frowned at her reflection on the glass. Wasn’t that something he used to say to lovely young women? Didn’t they usually like hearing it?
“Who are your parents?” he ventured after a moment, a question he had of course already asked and couldn’t help asking again. Maybe he would finally solve the mystery of her presence here and figure out which of the other researchers she belonged to. She kept her gaze on the window, chewing. She didn’t speak any more that day, or the next.
As time wore on, Augustine began to appreciate her silence. She was an intelligent creature, and he valued intelligence above everything else. He thought of his morbid rants in the beginning, just after he’d found her, when he was still scanning the RF bands and hoping someone would return for her, would emerge from the desolate silence to scoop her up and leave him in peace. Even then, while he’d been spinning through the hows and whys—the bands were empty, she was here, etc.—she had simply accepted the reality at hand and begun to acclimate. His irritation with her presence and then with her silence faded. A kernel of admiration took root and he let his unanswered questions go. While the long night blanketed their mountaintop, the only question that mattered was the one she’d asked: how long would this darkness last.
“WHAT WOULD YOU think if I told you that star was actually a planet?” his mother had asked him once, pointing up at the sky. “Would you believe me?” He’d answered eagerly, yes, yes he’d believe her, and she told him he was a good boy, a smart boy, because that burning white dot, just above the rooftops, was Jupiter.
Augustine had adored her when he was young, before he began to understand that she wasn’t like the other mothers on his street. He was caught up with her excitement and brought down by her sadness—following her moods with fervent loyalty, like an eager dog. He closed his eyes and saw her frizzy brown hair shot with strands of gray, the sloppy line of her burgundy lipstick, applied without a mirror, the awestruck glow in her eyes as she pointed toward the brightest star, hovering above their Michigan neighborhood.
If that good, smart boy had found himself in this inhospitable place, alone except for an ancient, unfamiliar caretaker, he might have cried or screamed or stamped his feet. Augustine had never been a particularly brave child. He might have made a halfhearted attempt to run away—gathered some supplies and marched off into the desolate distance, headed for home, only to return in a few hours. And if little Augie had been told there was no home for him to return to, no mother to soothe his tantrum, no one else in the world left for him, what would he have done then?