Up to This Pointe (25 page)

“You can too!” Vivian snaps. “Harp, hold her other arm, would you? She weighs about a million pounds.”

“That is
not
me!” Charlotte sobs. “It's the giant person trying to crawl out of me. Oh my
God
…”

It is suddenly very dramatic in the lobby. I hold Charlotte's arm.

“Hey!” Beard yells to us. “Quit screaming. This is a science station!”

I stand, holding Charlotte up, frozen.

“Harper,” Charlotte says. “I'm so glad you're here.”

Frozen no more.

I beam. “I wouldn't want to be anywhere else in the world. Vivian, prop her up against the wall for just a second!” I run to Beard's desk. He's reading a paperback book with the cover torn off. Gross.

Forgive,
Shackleton's voice urges me.
Be kind. Be brave.

“Bear—
Ben,
” I say, low. “Do you want my seat for the pole?”

His face is blank.

“What?”

“Go to the pole. With Allison. She'll be here in ten minutes. Be ready. If you miss it, it's out of my hands.” And I'm back with Vivian at Charlotte's side.

I've never seen more hair on a baby in my life.

“Was it like birthing a squirrel?” Vivian asks, her fingertips stroking Adelie's tiny head.

“I really couldn't say, Viv,” Charlotte says. “Next time I give birth to a woodland creature I'll be sure to take notes.”

Adelie Siku.
Siku
is the Inuit name for “Ice.” She is perfect and beautiful, a citizen of Antarctica, the United States, and McMurdo Station's first native daughter.

“Are you really coming home?” I whisper to Charlotte. “To San Francisco?”

She nods, worn out but blissed.

“Then you'll never need a babysitter,” I tell Adelie. “Auntie Harper's got you covered. I'll wear you in a BabyBjörn to ballet rehearsal.”

“No way.”

“Just until she can take a class—come on. We're never doing
The Nutcracker,
so calm yourself right down.”

“No
Nutcracker
?” Vivian says. “Isn't that ballet sacrilege?”

“Not at my studio,” I tell this tiny creature. “Auntie's superior grant-writing skills will mean anyone can take classes, even if they can't pay tuition, and our mommies will sew pretty costumes for our winter performance, called
Aurora.
And you and your friends will be all the colors of the southern sky in winter, and you will be strong and have poise and grace and lots of snow and glitter.”

“No…,” Charlotte says.

“Oh, yes!” I whisper in Adelie's tiny ear, beneath her perfect dark curls. “Glitter! Lots and lots of glittery snow and ice. Your mom loves
lots
of glitter.”

And Charlotte can deny it all she wants, but Vivian and I know; we saw our girl smile.

The rookery is bathed in ice-cold sunshine, and Vivian's smile is, too.

“Why am I crying?” she says, sniffling in the wind.

“Because you're not dead inside!” I sniffle back.

Allison and a spare flight coordinator are exploring Shackleton's Hut, but Vivian and I cannot leave the Adélies for a single moment. The babies are nuts, running all over, slipping on the ice, hopping bravely into the ocean to climb right back out and find their parents.

“We helped them,” Vivian says. “Maybe Charlotte has saved them.”

Their tiny faces, black-blue eyes in their white rings, sleek bodies—open, trusting hearts. They walk near us, curious.

“Hey,” we murmur. “We love you! Hello!”

They look up at us. Right into our eyes.

“Think they understand?” Vivian asks.

They stand so close, hold their steady gazes in the icy wind. They don't move.

“They do,” I say. “They understand perfectly.”

We climb down the cargo plane's steps to the Christchurch tarmac, and the unfamiliar September warmth is delicious. The air here is not nearly so clean, but the grass and flowers and this sun…We inhale as deeply as we can.

We are going home.

But first, we will celebrate Vivian's eighteenth birthday tonight, conveniently providing me with an adult chaperone, because tomorrow—we are traveling. Four weeks of exploration. We've got our tickets, a list of hostels, the money we've saved, and only one deadline—the lease on an apartment in San Francisco Kate and I will share starts November 1, as does my three-days-per-week sublease at Madame Simone's studio for my twelve ballet students, Willa included, already registered. We are the Starlight Ballet Studio. Also, I've got a ton of Adelie babysitting to do.

Maybe London next summer. Maybe. Maybe I will apply for San Francisco State's spring semester. Maybe I will double major in dance and choreography. Maybe minor in business so I'll understand how to keep my studio alive.

Vivian's not starting school till January, either—and with her ears pierced, who knows what kind of mischief she'll get up to. She puts her sunglasses on. She's visiting San Francisco in February. I'm visiting St. Paul in June. When there's less snow.

In the airport, I mail a plush Adélie penguin and a letter to Willa. And Kate. And to Owen. A few letters. Letters asking forgiveness. Letters of bravery and love. Outside on the curb, I soak in the sunshine. Close my eyes. The traffic noise, after months of quiet, is delicious.

“What do you think?” Vivian says.

I nod. “You ready?”

“Lead the way.”

And she does.

To one more airport, just one building where Cessnas travel to remote places.

Back to the Ross Sea. South Georgia Island, where I sit in the impossibly green grass on Shackleton's grave.

“He died on your birthday,” Vivian notes.

I nod, happy we know each other's birthdays because we are friends. “His wife spent half their marriage waiting for him to come home from the ice. Then he dies shipboard on the water, and she realized he'd been home all that time. So she let him stay.”

I give him the wildflowers I picked in the field outside the cemetery.

We follow the path over the green hills of the island, ice and ocean around us.

True south.

Ocean Beach smells like my childhood. Sounds like my future. I breathe the salt and cold and then, nearer the park, the evergreens and cypress and juniper berry and the lawn, new soil. I'm in a tank top. No coat. The fog moves in my hair. I want to hug it.

“I missed you, Fog!” I whisper.

The heavy glass doors close behind me, and my heart races at the sight of the words on the walls.
All
of the poem's words come to me:

Stars that sink to our ocean,

Winds that visit our strand,

The heavens are your pathway,

Where is a gladder land!

At the end of our streets is sunrise;

At the end of our streets are spars;

At the end of our streets is sunset;

At the end of our streets the stars.

“Harper Scott,” Owen says.

Those eyes. Still so dark, so beautiful, and kind, intent on mine. On me.

“Your hair.” He smiles.

I nod.

“Do you love it?” he asks.

“I do.”

“Me too. Can I?” He slowly moves his fingers through my hair, standing so near to me that I close my eyes and inhale the scent of him, the grapefruit soap he still uses.

“You got my postcards?” I ask.

“You've been
every
where,” he says. “They're taped to the refrigerator; it's a total pain in the ass just trying to get in there for some milk.”

“Did you get my letter?”

“Uh, yeah…the ten pages asking forgiveness for I'm still not sure what? Yeah. I got that.”

“Forgiveness for falling apart. For doing stupid, selfish things in Antarctica, not writing you back right away, all those beautiful letters, every date we went on, I read them over and over—”

“Harper, nothing you've done there or anywhere is stupid. I was a dick for trying to guilt you into staying for my own selfishness. Which, in my defense, was fueled by the fact that I was, and am, amazed by and in awe of you. So there's that.”

“Okay.”

“And I wrote you because I wanted to write you. I missed you. If you'd wanted me to stop, I knew you'd tell me.”

“Okay.”

“And your hair is so freakishly sexy, I'd like to…”

I silence him with a kiss, familiar and thrilling and
I have missed him so much.

“You read them?” he says. “The date letters.”

“Yes.”

“More than once?”

“Maybe.”

“Wow.” He smiles at the floor.

“And oh, my
shoes,
” I say. “You saved me. My life.”

“Kate got them to me.”

“Thank you. I'll never be able to say that enough. How can I…”

“Harp,” he says, and pulls me to him because, despite how hard I'm trying not to, tears are spilling.

“Every single time!” I yelp. “Can I ever spend three minutes with you and
not
cry?”

“I'm prepared now. It's okay!” he says, and he puts a white lace-edged handkerchief in my hand. “That's your welcome-home present. Now you can be proper and fancy with your depression!”

“I'm not depressed! I'm so…” He kisses me again. People are milling around the chalet, but who cares? We kiss and kiss, and he pulls me even closer until I have to pause to catch my breath.

“So to be clear, you
liked
the dates?”

“They're perfect blueprints. Can we go in order? Can we start again?”

“Really?”

“Yes, please.”

“Does that mean we have to work back up to kissing?”

“Obviously. Let's go.” I sigh happily.

“Where's your coat?”

“Not cold. Not anymore.”

“You must have been frozen.”

“I was.”

I take his warm hand in mine. My heart is buzzing. Dancing.

“Where to now?” he asks.

“Anywhere. Everywhere. And then home.”

The
truth:
from the ages of eight to eighteen, I loved ballet more than anything in life, and I knew I was going to be a ballerina. The
fact:
there was never any way in hell that was going to happen. Not just because I took just three classes a week at our small town's only ballet studio, in the basement of a former Sacramento Ballet soloist. She loved us and yelled a lot and was glad we came to class, but I think she knew she wasn't grooming any prima ballerinas. The
fact:
I was not born with the ballerina essentials—the body, the turnout, the strength, the extension, the stamina. None of it.

Besides being a former ballerina, I am a playwright who writes novels. I think in scenes, not chapters, and when imagining a story I always begin with Russian actor and director Konstantin Stanislavski's “magic if.” The “magic if” is the truth that occurs on stage, which is different from the truth of real life but is absolutely necessary for an audience to believe in a performance. It is a truth informed by facts, but not made up entirely of them. And it often begins with the question “What would I do if this were happening to me?” A question I come back to time and again when writing fiction.

Which is all to say,
Up to This Pointe
is a work of fiction informed by a ton of research about ballet and the lives of Scott, Amundsen, Shackleton, and the Winter Overers at McMurdo Station. Antarctica has always been a brutal ballet to me—a painful, terrible beauty. Both demand a nearly impossible, superhuman capability and instinct to survive. And both hold inexplicable sway over the people who fall in love with them.

Rose Wilder Lane said of writing novels, “Facts are infinite in number. Truth is the meaning underlying them.” In reality, a teenager would never be allowed to Winter Over in Antarctica. But in the reality of
Up to This Pointe,
in Wilder's words, “It is not a fact, but it is perfectly true.”

Below I've shared some of my favorite research sources with you, because trust me—the “magic if” cannot compare to the real-world magic of ballet and Antarctica. The real world we are so very lucky to live in.