and a humungous roast beef sandwich oozing caramelized onions. There was pie for dessert.
She slid in where she could, next to their leader. She liked Ray Berringer—a man devoted to his “bugs”—although beyond the cruises she didn’t see much of him. Biology did its thing, chemistry did its. This division of departments had always seemed peculiar to her. What they were now calling “Western science” was just beginning to grasp that everything was connected, something Alaska Natives had known forever.
Ray, mouth full, nodded to her. His Sealife Center cap sat a little askew on his head, and graying neck hair merged with his untrimmed beard above a frayed T-shirt collar. She knew he loved the cruises, was clearly more comfortable as a salty sailor than a tweedy professor. Every year different faculty and students came on the cruises, but Ray was a fixture. He was the one who made sure the research happened, who wrote the grants and filed the reports.
She was still not entirely sure why Professor Oakley—Jackson, as she now knew him—had left. He had work he couldn’t do from the ship. He and Ray didn’t get along, for whatever reason—two alpha dogs, she suspected. But he’d also told her he was finding the whole thing “awkward.”
“The whole thing” she understood to include her. In recent weeks their relationship had passed from advisor and student to something she hesitated to call “love,” but included spending nonacademic time together and, yes, sex. “Chemistry,” they had joked. They had good chemistry, were drawn together by—what? It wasn’t just physical attraction; they interested one another. Perhaps it was their differences. In any case they were both adults—she had taken her time getting through school—and they had been discrete. She had felt confident that they could continue to be adult, discrete, and professional on the ship. Apparently he hadn’t shared her confidence. Or something.
She played the scene over in her head. Their few minutes in the ship’s lab, where he’d found her labeling jars. “I’m not staying.” Her confusion; they were already halfway down the bay. “You know this work better than I do.” Her protests. “I already told Berringer. It’s done.” Her questions. His answers, his excuses. “It’s not about you,” he said at one point. The whole thing, he said, was awkward.
At the end, he’d reached out and cupped the side of her face, and she had felt the heat. He said, “You’ll do a great job.”
Now, squeezing in among her colleagues, she tried being cheerful. “Unbelievable weather.”
Ray swallowed. “It will be interesting. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such stratification so late in the year.”
Across from them, Tina and Robert were trading Sven and Ole jokes. In Tina’s joke Ole was doing a striptease in front of a tractor. Helen guessed it was OK to tell bigoted jokes about Minnesotan farmers. They were not a protected minority, not that she knew of. People were more careful about telling Eskimo jokes these days; at least they didn’t tell them so much in her presence. Her own sense of humor tended to be less hah-hah, quieter, culture-based. The small teasings and subtle ironies of the Iñupiat weren’t always obvious to others, but Arctic cultures wouldn’t have lasted long without them. They’d needed ways of amusing themselves in the cold and dark. More critically, humor diffused conflict and kept people alive.
Helen grimaced at the ridiculous punch line, Ole’s confusion between “attract her” and “a tractor.”
On Ray’s other side, his daughter picked at her food. Clearly she’d taken more than she could eat, eyes bigger than her stomach. How many times had Helen’s grandmother—her aana—told Helen and her cousins when they were small about the boy who ate too much? They’d loved that story, which went on and on, the greedy boy eating all the berries and greens and fish until he eventually ate a whole whale and drank an entire lake. It was a funny story, but it also taught a lesson.
Those cousins—most of them—still lived on the North Slope and were married with children of their own, or not married but with children. Helen was old now—twenty-six—to not have children, and she knew some of her girl cousins wondered about her and felt sorry for her. In their minds children were essential; a woman without them was incomplete, lacking, lonely. They would never say this, but they would tease her: Where is your baby? At Thanksgiving she would see them all in Igalik, at the holiday feast and the wedding of the cousin who was having her second baby. She was looking forward to that.
Now, with another bite of her sandwich, she watched Ray’s hand sneak over and snatch a potato chip from his daughter’s plate. The girl had turned toward the kitchen and didn’t notice. Ray did it again, walking his fingers like a spider across the space between them. This time Aurora noticed and swatted at his hand with a little shriek. It must have been an old routine for them. The sweetness of the play caught Helen unawares, and she raised her napkin to cover her smile.
Ray turned to her with mayonnaise on his mustache. “We’ll be a fine team, you and me and this bunch of galoots.”
After lunch, back on deck, more of the essential monkey work. Helen tightened a last cap, stood to stretch her back. Tina and Cinda were debating something about the bottle numbering system, and she turned from them to watch the ship’s wake drawing its long, frothy line across the blue. She could never look at the ocean and see just the surface; her eye wanted to take her down, as though into the illustrations she’d loved in grade school: past the little fish and the magnified plankton near the top to the jellyfish drifting below and then the bigger fish, always sharks, on down to the huge halibut stirring the mud on the bottom and the crabs and anemones and corals, all the waving tentacles and open mouths, marine snow falling, the big whales coming up from a dive, all that hidden world. What was the number? Ninety-nine percent of the living space on the planet is in the oceans? And they knew so little about it, still?
“Oh, man, have I got the farts,” Tina said.
“Methane,” Cinda said. “Twenty times more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas. You’re killing us.”
“Yeah, me and seven billion other people. Not to mention the cows.”
Alex came out and took away more bottles for filtering.
“Dude,” Tina shouted after him, “take a break. Save some of that for us.”
Cinda looked up at Helen. “That was cool about the press release, how much it made the news. People are starting to pay attention. What seems weird is that no one’s screaming about it being a hoax. You’d think the nutcases who oppose climate science would have a problem with the ocean absorbing CO2 from the atmosphere. What’s up with that?”
The press release that Jackson had sent out had, in fact, been drafted by Helen. In Helen’s draft, it had explained for those who were still new to the idea what ocean acidification was and raised the alarm about the change in pH that they were tracking in Alaskan waters. In its final form, though, the statement focused more on the fact that ocean acidification was being studied at the university’s new Office of Ocean Acidification Science, and it didn’t mention that it was a danger, right now, to sea life. Helen had felt a little hurt by this—that she missed the assignment somehow. She was more hurt that Jackson hadn’t talked to her about the edits. When she’d asked why he decided to downplay the new data that suggested—showed—that Alaska’s cold waters were already significantly affected by acidification, his answer—not entirely convincing to her—was that the point of the release was to announce the new office. He reminded her of the “rule” that a letter to the editor or a press release should be limited to one point; otherwise people got confused. One subject. Next time, another subject.
Cinda’s question might have
