“Robin, you must be about frozen to death,” he said and, curling himself around the biotech, he led her into the bunkhouse.
“Tell Robin to stay away from Bob.” Katherine had said that the day before she died. Anna wondered if ghosts felt jealousy.
Or if the warning had nothing to do with affairs of the heart.
19
Anna found the strength to eat two large bowls of Honey’s stew. Usually Robin ate with a healthy appetite, replacing the calories her work burned by the thousands. Tonight she stared at the bowl as if it were a crystal ball too muddy to show the future. When Anna would remind her to eat, she would take a bite. Bob decided to assume mothering duties and all but spoon-fed her, till she stood abruptly and left the room.
He started to follow.
“Sit down,” Anna ordered. “You haven’t had dessert yet.”
Menechinn reared back, pushing out his chest and pulling in his chin, and glared around the table, searching for support. The message was in Jonah’s eyes and the rigid way Ridley held his butter knife:
Eat cake or die.
Anna took another mouthful of stew. A woman had to keep her strength up.
Adam made it back as the cake and ice cream with chocolate sauce was being dished up. “What took you so long?” Ridley asked when Adam came into the kitchen. The question was not friendly. Adam’s coming to the rescue was canceled out by the fact that, had he been there in the first place, no one would have needed rescuing.
“I went back for the Sked,” Adam said mildly. “It wasn’t all that far. Maybe three hundred yards from the trail.” He dished up what was left of the stew, took a spoon from the deep-fat fryer with the clean flatware and settled in the chair Robin had vacated.
Three hundred yards. Every cell in Anna’s body would have sworn it was closer to six or seven miles. So strong was the feeling, she might have argued the point, had she not been distracted with more important matters: watching to be sure Jonah put enough chocolate syrup on her ice cream.
“I put her in the carpenter’s shop with the wolf,” Adam said as he slathered a piece of bread with peanut butter.
“She would have liked that,” Bob said gravely, and all of them stared at him for a moment.
“That she will, Bob. I know how much she meant to you.” Adam spoke in the same mild way he had when Ridley snapped at him. It was impossible to tell if he mocked Bob or sympathized with him. Anna chose mocked. Bob chose sympathized.
“She did, Adam. Thank you. There’s been a distinct lack of feeling around here. Robin’s the only one who seems to care and she’s being left to isolate herself.”
Jonah clunked a full plate of cake and ice cream in front of Bob.
“GENTLEMEN AND GENTLE LADY, it is time to get naked,” Jonah announced. He rose from the table and returned shortly with a plastic bucket, which he ceremoniously gave Anna.
“I’ll see if poor little Robin wants to sauna,” Bob said, pushing his chair back from the table. “Lord knows, it would do her good.”
“Allow me,” Anna said sourly. “It so happens I’m going that way, being it’s my bedroom and all.”
Bob did his pulled-back smile.
Sauna was a tradition in the north. On Isle Royale, during Winter Study, it took on its early importance; it was the most efficient way to get clean in a cold climate where there was no running water. Anna’d thought she was too tired to do more than fall on the bed, but the promise of deep heat and a shampoo revived her sufficiently that she could return to the room to get her towel and soap.
Robin was sitting on her bed, staring at her hands.
Anna sat on the bed opposite, no more than five feet between them.
“What happened?” she asked simply. Normally the shock of seeing a chewed-up corpse might account for a young woman’s imploding, but Robin had not gone catatonic at the sight of the dismembered body. It had been later, while the body was being packaged, or shortly thereafter.
“We-” Robin began, then stopped. The decision to keep a painful secret was clear on her young face. Robin wasn’t a practiced liar.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve got to work some things out.”
Anna waited, giving her time to talk if she changed her mind. That she was speaking at all was a giant step forward. “Okay,” Anna said. “Come sauna.”
“No.” Robin tipped her head farther down and her hair fell around her face.
“You smell like Ridley’s feet,” Anna said untruthfully. “Take your clothes off. I’ll wait for you.”
Robin stood obediently and stripped, as did Anna. Wrapped in towels, Robin in her mukluks and Anna in her clogs, each with a plastic pail, they left the room. Naked as the day he was born, Jonah was in the common room.
“Pure sex,” he said and slapped a wiry thigh frosted with white hair. “You girls control yourselves.”
Robin actually smiled.
“Even worn down as we are, it’ll be tough,” Anna said.
Jonah dashed out ahead of them.
They left through the door of the working kitchen. Snow fell into Anna’s clogs as they hurried through the narrow band of trees between the outhouse and the building next to the carpenter’s shop that housed the sauna. Wind snatched at their towels and whipped Robin’s hair with such fury that strands of it stung across Anna’s cheeks and she let the younger woman go ahead of her. They ran the last ten yards.
In the small anteroom was a single bench and a row of pegs. Three towels already hung there. Anna and Robin added theirs to the line, put their footwear on the bench and, pails in hand like children going to the beach, went inside.
The sauna was built of fragrant cedar and heated by a cast-iron potbellied stove. Benches rose in tiers on two of the walls. The stove and a woodpile took up part of the third. On top of the stove was an iron tank filled with water heated to just short of boiling. To the left of the door was another tank with cold water. A single candle placed on the lower bench near the cold water lit the room.
Candlelight made the walls golden brown, the corners fading into darkness. Jonah and Adam sat side by side on the top bench, arguing good-naturedly about whether Matt Damon or Leonardo DiCaprio was the greatest actor of the twenty-first century. Ridley was standing by the cold-water tank filling his bucket.
Oddly enough, the sauna, close and dark and hot, never struck Anna as claustrophobic. A small, dark room filled with naked male strangers, yet it had never felt threatening.
A sauna was the closest thing to a womb a person could find. In the north, where the tradition was untainted with the fear of nudity that most of the U.S. labored under, men and women took saunas together. And for the length of the sauna, they were fraternal twins, or, in this case, quintuplets. Jonah made no sexual jokes. No one exchanged loaded glances.
Anna climbed to her favorite place, the corner nearest the stove and closest to the ceiling. In its dark embrace, she pulled one leg up, hugged it and put her chin on her knee. Haloed in candlelight, Ridley stood, working shampoo through his hair. Unbraided, it was past his shoulders and dark brown untouched by gray. His body was beautiful, shoulders wide and legs strong, the muscles corded from use, nothing artificially bulked from the gym. The graceful, delicate hands were echoed in his small feet.
Anna watched him without thought, the way she might rest her eyes on a cat stretching in the sun simply because it was beautiful. Adam scooted down and Ridley filled his bucket for him. Between Anna and the light, Adam was limned in gold that ran in ripples through the muscles of his arms and stomach. Long and stringy, he coiled himself like a spring, washing the bottoms of his feet. When Ridley returned to the bench, sliding in beside Anna and dropping his head back against the cedar, Jonah joined Adam, dippered water into his bucket from the hot and the cold till it suited him, then poured it over his head. The old pilot was hewn down to bone and gristle. White beard and body hair glistened in the candle’s flame till he seemed shrouded in a thin fog. Anna drifted for a moment, dreaming of feisty silver dragonflies with rimless spectacles on their multi-faceted eyes.