Bee and Elgin Set Out for Antarctica to Search for Bernadette

Bee and Elgin’s journey to Antarctica begins as an attempt to repair a damaged father-daughter relationship, but its stated purpose of closure conceals Bee’s determination to find Bernadette. The voyage therefore carries two aims from the outset: Elgin hopes the trip will let him spend time with Bee again, while Bee is traveling toward the missing person she refuses to treat as merely a memory.

Background and Decision

The journey takes shape amid Elgin’s affair with Soo-Lin Lee-Segal and the pregnancy that follows. When Soo-Lin reminds him that she cannot travel to Antarctica, Elgin explains that he has already told Bee they could go. Bee believes the trip might help her find closure, he says, and the idea came from her. His explanation also reveals the personal stake underneath the plan: the voyage is the only way Bee will let him spend time with her, and he misses her.

The departure is imminent rather than abstract. The season’s last trip leaves in two days; there is space aboard the ship, and the family has a travel credit that would otherwise expire. The expense is substantial, but Elgin says he owes the journey to Bee and insists to Soo-Lin that Bee is a good kid. Soo-Lin regards the plan as tragic, but her account records the decision at the moment it becomes irreversible: Elgin and Bee are leaving the next day. The trip is at once a practical use of an expiring credit, a response to Bee’s estrangement, and Elgin’s attempt to meet an obligation to his daughter.

The Southbound Journey

Bee’s account of the journey begins with an arrival in Santiago at six in the morning. She has never flown first class before, and the seat’s transformation into a bed, the crisp white comforter, and a warmed eye pillow filled with flaxseed and lavender make the flight a sharply physical novelty. She sleeps for ten hours. Elgin cautions her not to get used to the comfort; Bee smiles, then remembers that she hates him and puts on the eye pillow. Even in this small exchange, travel does not dissolve their conflict. Its comforts and their shared destination coexist with Bee’s anger.

At the airport, the immigration queue is enormous, but an officer waves them through to an empty window reserved for families with small children. Bee is fifteen and initially resents being treated as though she were little; then she decides to accept the advantage. A military-fatigues-clad officer takes a long time with their passports, repeatedly looking from Bee to her passport. The scene makes the journey’s passage through official checkpoints part of Bee’s personal experience: she notices how others read her, just as she remains alert to what this trip means to her.

The Ship and the Stated Purpose

After their passports are stamped, Bee and Elgin emerge from a tent and follow a white line toward the captain. Hearing that title sends Bee running down a splintery dock, so eager that she feels her excitement carrying her. She approaches a man in a navy suit and white hat as Captain Altdorf and introduces herself as Bee Branch, adding that Bernadette Fox is her mother. Only then does she see his badge: Captain Jorges Varela, from Argentina. Her mistaken identification does not blunt the force of the introduction. At the threshold of the voyage, Bee identifies herself through the mother she has come to find.

Elgin arrives huffing and puffing after Bee runs ahead. She apologizes, begins crying, and tells him that seeing so many pictures of the Allegra has given her closure. Bee immediately identifies this as a lie: seeing a ship cannot itself provide closure. Since leaving Choate, she has learned that Elgin will let her do almost anything if she calls it closure. That rationale has allowed her to sleep in Bernadette’s Airstream, stay away from school, and now travel to Antarctica. Bee finds the idea of closure offensive because it seems to require forgetting her mother. Her explanation to Elgin is therefore a cover, not the motive: she is going to Antarctica to find Bernadette.

Two Journeys at Once

The voyage is consequently both a search and a fragile reunion between father and daughter. Elgin’s stated hope is to spend time with Bee; Bee’s willingness to travel gives him that opportunity, but does not mean she has forgiven or trusted him. Her remembered hatred on the flight and her tears at the dock keep the strain visible even as they move together toward the ship. The expedition can bring them into shared space without resolving what lies between them.

The journey’s threshold scene concentrates its emotional contradiction. Bee runs toward the ship in excitement, names her mother to the man she mistakes for its captain, and then uses the language of closure to conceal the search she has actually undertaken. The ship is not, for her, a device for leaving Bernadette behind. It is the route by which she hopes to reach her. Elgin may have arranged a trip that gives him time with Bee, but Bee’s private purpose gives the voyage its decisive direction.