South Pole Station

C.

As she sent off the e-mail, Cooper wondered again why her older sister chose to spend her days photocopying new-age manuscripts and preparing their mother’s morning yerba mate. Billie claimed nepotism was her only chance at gainful employment after years of failed attempts, and perhaps this was true. Their mother, Dasha, had climbed the ranks at Janus Books after becoming interested in the questions of “The Seeker.” The Seeker was on a journey for meaning, and stuffed into her tribal-feather double-fringed medicine-bag purse were books like the Tao Te Ching, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and Ernest Holmes’s collected works. After several years in middling editorial positions at Janus, Dasha had learned the hand grips, the passwords, the ritual work, whatever it was that launched a former paralegal into a position of Masonic power, and was now executive editor. In the decade she’d been there, Dasha had transformed Janus Books from a quiet publisher of self-help books, a kind of lapdog for the self-actualizing, to a frothing Aquarian beast. It hadn’t escaped Cooper’s notice that this ascent took place as David succumbed to mental illness. This fact bothered Cooper—she wasn’t quite sure why. Clearly selling self-help books was her mother’s coping mechanism, and didn’t we all need coping mechanisms? Still, as a rule, Cooper avoided Janus’s myrrh-scented halls. But she also understood you had to say goodbye to your mother if you were departing for the seventh continent—even if your mother was wearing a dashiki.

It was Billie who met Cooper at Reception. Her older sister was imperious, angled, beautiful, and cool. Bette Davis in army-navy tactical cargo pants and a black tank top. Even though she couldn’t snow camp, Billie had been, until recently, the Goslings’ Best Hope: the one with the brains, the Algonquin wit, the ability to produce obscure Jack London references at the perfect moment. These were traits that were highly valued by their father, and so Billie honed them until she could wield them like a prison shank to keep Cooper, and her talent, at bay. Of course, Billie had talent to burn. She’d gone to New York on a playwriting fellowship, begun dating an artisanal tobacconist, and after eighteen months found herself in the midst of fleeting success—a run at the Lortel with the play she wrote between waitressing shifts, an Obie nomination, and the inevitable inability to pen a second play.

Soon, Billie was back in Minneapolis, living in the guest bedroom of Dasha’s warehouse-district loft, humiliated by her failures and determined to play out that narrative for as long as possible. In the meantime, she assisted her mother by logging copyedited changes to The Visigoth Manager: Germanic Paganism in the Workplace, and pretended nothing hurt.

As Billie walked Cooper down one of the hallways toward Dasha’s office, she’d said, “Did you know that when you do book deals with certain lady folk singers from the sixties, you have to put into the contract that her hotel rooms will be outfitted with reiki candles and a synthesizer?” She stopped in front of a door and knocked. “Such wisdom I have gained while working here.”

“Come in,” Dasha commanded. Billie pushed open the door, and promptly disappeared around a corner. Cooper found her mother leaning back in her Herman Miller Aeron chair, feet on desk, glasses atop forehead, Sontag stripe gleaming in the cold glow of energy-efficient lights.

“Hello, dear.”

“Hello, Mother.”

“Please don’t call me ‘Mother.’”

Cooper did jazz hands and shouted: “Hello, Mommy!” This, at least, produced a smile.

“Sit down, honey.” Cooper sat in the chair next to the door and waited. Dasha only stared at her, smiling, so Cooper said, “I am now seated.”

Dasha looked at her searchingly. “Ant-ar-tica?”

“Antarctica. There’s a C in it.”

“Polar bears.”

“Penguins.”

“Clearly, I need to brush up on my geography skills.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Cooper replied.

Dasha sighed deeply. “I want you to know that I understand what you’re trying to do, and I give this venture my—”

“Mom, please, no blessing, no benedictions, no burning sage. I just came to say goodbye. Can we just do ‘goodbye, good luck, I’ll miss you’? I don’t even need the ‘I’ll miss you.’”

“You have my blessing.”

“Don’t need it, Mom,” Cooper half-sang.

“Sweetheart, for me, a blessing is not approval.”

“Then what is it? Because it sort of sounds like you’re giving me the okay. I don’t need an okay.”

“Well, for me a blessing is a sincere wish that you get what you want out of this experience. When will I see you again?”

“Next September.”

Dasha seemed genuinely surprised. “A year?”

“That’s what I signed up for.”

Dasha placed her fingertips together and looked up at the ceiling. “Blessing or not, I need to say this before you leave or else I won’t have done my job as a parent: you are an exceptional talent, but you are also a thirty-year-old woman who has never held a long-term professional job in her life. You’re thirty, Cooper. I need you to hear the starkness in that. At thirty, routes begin to disappear. And at some point you have to answer for what you are—whether that’s a success or a failure.”

“What if I’m a Seeker?”

“I’d like to be validated by hearing an answer from you,” Dasha snapped. The tone of the conversation—the way it resonated like a faint echo of the kinds of conversations Cooper had had with her mother before the Seeker had absconded with her—soothed Cooper’s nerves.

“Let’s see what it looks like when I return,” she said. Dasha’s face fell. These words must have been lodged in some capsule in Cooper’s brain, ready to be deployed at exactly the wrong time: David’s parting words to them on Christmas, when they’d let him drive himself back to the group home because he’d been so good about his medication, so lucid, that it was almost like he was restored. (“Louie DePalma is back!” Billie had shouted after two glasses of Shiraz.) He’d asked about Cooper’s painting, about Billie’s writing. He’d been funny, brilliant—beautiful. Cooper had felt guilty tailing him in her Tempo until he got to the intersection of Forty-sixth and Blaisdell, a couple of blocks from the Damiano House, the group home where he’d been living since his last 5150. When David’s counselor had called Bill and Dasha to let them know he hadn’t come home that night, and later, when the police put out the “Missing Vulnerable Adult” flyer, Cooper realized she’d failed him a million different ways.

“I know you and Billie choose not to talk about him with me,” Dasha said, her voice brittle. “I know you blame me for not being more in tune with what was happening, and I think—”

Cooper felt her stomach begin to churn. “Mom—please.”

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