I turned in a circle, still looking. I imagined my brother trekking across the ice, fascinated by the world that existed beneath. My throat ached from the cold. It was impossible to distinguish land from sky.
* * *
It happened right after Eve’s seventeenth birthday, in Concord, where she had grown up. She had been reading Jane Austen in a park and was just starting home. She remembered the soft yellow blanket rolled under her arm, the page she had dog-eared, the streaks of gold in the sky. She was on the edge of the park when she felt an arm wrap around her chest. For a moment, she thought someone was giving her a hug, a classmate or a cousin. She had lots of cousins in Concord. But then there was the knife at her throat and the gray sedan with the passenger door flung open. She dropped the Jane Austen and the blanket on the sidewalk. Somewhere, she imagined, those things were in a collection of crime scene photos.
At the Burren, she’d stopped there. Her martini glass was empty. The band was playing a Bruce Springsteen cover. She balled up her cocktail napkin and asked if I wanted to dance. She was wearing a silk turquoise dress and T-strap heels. Her bracelet shone on her wrist. She took my hand and we dipped and twirled. Men watched us. One even tried to cut in.
Two days later, I woke to the sound of my bedroom door opening. It was midnight. Eve stood in the doorway in a white nightgown. She got into bed with me and started telling me the rest, or most of the rest. She lay on her back. I watched her lips move in the darkness and wondered if my brother had noticed that his wife was no longer beside him. Soon he would be departing for a monthlong research trip to study the Juan de Fuca Plate in Vancouver, leaving us in each other’s care.
The man was a stranger. He was fat around the middle. He had a brown beard and a straight white scar under his right eye. In the car, he tuned the radio to a sports station. He told her that if she did anything—scream, jump out—he would stab her in the heart. He drove them to a little house on a dirt road in Acton, where she stayed for three days.
Her parents had money. She told herself that he was just going to hold her for ransom; she didn’t allow herself to consider that maybe he had other ideas. The thing she remembered most vividly from the car ride was the radio, the sound of a crowd cheering in a stadium.
“That and one of those green, tree-shaped things you hang from the rearview mirror,” she said. “To freshen the air.” This explained why she hated Christmas trees, why the scent alone made her light-headed and queasy. On our first holiday together, she’d told us she was allergic to pine and we’d gotten a plastic tree instead.
“How did you get away?” I asked.
“I didn’t.” She blinked. Her eyelashes were so pale, they were almost translucent. “I was rescued.”
Eve had been half-right about the man’s intentions. After holding her for forty-eight hours, he placed a ransom demand; it didn’t take long for the authorities to figure out the rest. The police found her in a basement. Her wrists were tied to a radiator with twine. She was wearing a long white T-shirt with a pocket on the front. She had no idea where it had come from or what had happened to her clothes. Right before she was rescued, she remembered tracking the beam of a flashlight as it moved down the wall.
In the months that followed, the man’s attorney had him diagnosed with a dissociative disorder, something Eve had never heard of before. He hadn’t been himself when he had taken her, hadn’t been himself in Acton. That was their claim. He got seven years and was out in five due to overcrowding. Her parents advised her to move on with her life. He’s been punished, her father once said. What else do you want to happen? Now she just spoke to them on the phone every few months. They didn’t even know she had gotten married.
“Where is he now?” I asked. “Do you know?”
“I’ve lost track of him.” She tugged at the comforter. Her foot brushed against mine.
This was not a secret Eve had shared with my brother. I should have been thinking about him—how I couldn’t believe he did not know about this, how he needed to know about this—but I wasn’t. Instead I was trying to understand how anyone survived this world of head-on collisions and lunatic abductors and all the other things one had little hope of recovering from.
“I never went to therapy, but acting is having a therapeutic effect,” she said next.
“How so?” During one of her epic phone conversations, I’d glimpsed her sprawled out on the living room sofa, painting her toenails and speaking in French. I’d picked up the landline in the kitchen, curious to know who she was talking to, but there had just been her voice and the buzz of the line. I’d wondered if it was some kind of acting exercise.
“Getting to disappear into different characters. Getting to not be myself.”
I remembered her face on the stage in Medford. She was supposed to be Miranda, but her eyes had never stopped being Eve.
In time, I would learn it was possible to tell a secret, but also keep a piece of it close to yourself. That was what happened with Eve, who never told me what, exactly, went on during those three days in Acton. The floor was damp concrete. He fed her water with a soup spoon. I never got much more than that.
Of course, I could only assume the worst.
* * *
The aurora australis was Luiz’s idea of a peace offering. We met in the observation room after dinner. It had been dark for hours. Despite my studies in astronomy, I couldn’t get over how clear the sky was in Antarctica. I’d never seen so many stars, and it was comforting to feel close to something I had once loved. Annabelle and the others had gone back to work. I still hadn’t forgiven Luiz for calling my brother a beaker.
“I’ve had too much ice time,” he said. “I’ve gotten too used to the way this place can swallow people up.” In his first month in Antarctica, two of his colleagues hiked to a subglacial lake and fell through the ice, into a cavern. By the time they were rescued, their bodies were eaten up with frostbite. One lost a hand; the other a leg.
“So it’s Antarctica’s fault you’re an asshole?” I said.
“I blame everything on Antarctica,” he said. “Just ask my ex-wife.”
“Divorced!” I said. “What a surprise.”
Luiz had arrived with two folded-up lounge chairs under his arms. They were made of white plastic, the kind of thing you’d expect to see at the beach. In the summer months, when there was no night, the scientists lounged on them in their snow pants and thermal shirts, a kind of Antarctic joke.
“I got them out of storage.” He had arranged the chairs so they were side by side. “Just for you.”
We reclined in our lounge chairs and stared through the glass. Since we were indoors, I was wearing my New Hampshire gear, the tassel hat and the leather gloves. A wisp of green light swirled above us.
“Tell me more about the explosion,” I said, keeping my eyes on the sky.
The early word from the inspectors had confirmed his suspicions: a gas leak in the machine room. They were alleging questionable maintenance practices, because it was impossible to have a disaster without a cause. When the explosion happened, the three people working in the machine room were killed, along with two scientists in a nearby hallway. A researcher from Rio de Janeiro died from smoke inhalation; she and Bianca had worked together for years. Others were hospitalized with third- and fourth-degree burns. But my brother, he should have made it out. His seismograph was on the opposite end. He’d been sleeping next to it, on a foam mattress, for godsakes. Everyone thought he was crazy.
The green light returned, brighter this time. It was halo-shaped and hovering above the observation room. I hadn’t stayed with astronomy long enough to see the auroras in anything other than photos and slides. I thought back to a course in extragalactic astronomy, to the lectures on Hubble’s law and the quasars that radiated red light and the tidal pull of supermassive black holes, which terrified me. In college, I had imagined myself working in remote observatories and seeing something new in the sky.
“He thought he’d
found an undiscovered fault line,” Luiz continued. “He was compiling his data. No one believed him. The peninsula isn’t known for seismic activity. He was the only one in that part of the building who didn’t survive.”
“Where were you during the explosion?” I watched the circle of light contract and expand.
“Outside. Scraping ice off our snow tractor.”
So that was his guilt: he hadn’t been close enough to believe he was going to die. He couldn’t share in the trauma of having to save your own life, or the life of someone else; he could only report the facts. My brother had been too close, Luiz not close enough.
“We hadn’t spoken in a long time.” The halo dissolved and a sheet of luminous green spread across the horizon, at once beautiful and eerie.
“I asked him about family,” Luiz said. “He didn’t mention a sister.”
I closed my eyes and thought about my brother in that hallway. I saw doorways alight with fire and black, curling smoke. His watch felt heavy on my wrist.
“Luiz,” I said. “Do you have any secrets?”
“Too many to count.” Silence fell over us in a way that made me think this was probably true. I pictured him tallying his secrets like coins. The sky hummed with green.
Later he explained the lights to me, the magnetic fields, the collision of electrons and atoms. I didn’t tell him this was information I already knew. He reached for my hand and pulled off one of my gloves. He placed it on his chest and put his hand over it.
I sat up and took the glove back from him. He held on to it for a moment, smiling, before he let go.
“Of course,” Luiz said. “You are married.”
That afternoon, I’d e-mailed my husband from the recreation room: Still getting the lay of the land. Don’t worry: polar bears are in the north pole. He was a real estate agent and always honest about his properties—what needed renovating, if there were difficult neighbors. He believed the truth was as easy to grasp as an apple or a glass of water. That was why I had married him.
“Yes,” I said. “But it doesn’t have anything to do with that.”
* * *
As it turned out, Eve had lied about losing track of the man who had taken her. After his release from prison, she had kept very careful track, aided by a cousin in Concord, a paralegal who had access to a private investigator. It was February when she came to me with news of him. We were sitting in a windowseat and drinking tea and looking out at the snow-covered lawn. A girl passed on the sidewalk, carrying ice skates and a pink helmet.
“He’s in a hospital,” she said. “Up on the Cape. He might not get out. Something to do with his lungs.” She sighed with her whole body.
“And?” I said.
“And I want to see him.”
“Oh, Eve. I think that’s a terrible idea.”
“Probably.” She blew on her tea. “Probably it is.”
In the weeks that followed, she kept at it. She talked about it while we folded laundry and swept the front steps. She talked about it when I met her for drinks after her rehearsals—she was an understudy for a production of Buried Child at the Repertory Theater—and while we rode the T, the train clacking over the tracks when we rose aboveground to cross the river. Eve explained that her parents had kept her from the court proceedings. She had wanted to visit him in prison, but that had been forbidden too. Now he was very sick. She was running out of chances.
“Chances for what?” We were waiting for the T in Central Square, on our way home from dinner. On the platform, a man was playing a violin for change. Eve had been in rehearsal earlier and was still wearing the false eyelashes and heavy red lipstick.
“To tell him that I made it.” She raised her hands. Her gold bracelet slid down her wrist. “That I’m an actress. That I got married. That he wasn’t the end of me. That I won.”
“How about a phone call?” I said. “Or a letter?”
The T came through the tunnel and ground to a stop. The doors opened. People spilled onto the platform. A woman carrying a sleeping child slipped between me and Eve. My brother had been in Vancouver for two weeks and called home on Sunday mornings.
“You don’t understand,” she said as we boarded the train. “It has to be done in person.”
* * *
I missed the perfect chance to tell my brother everything. The day before he left for Vancouver, I went to see him at MIT. His department was housed in the Green Building. From the outside, you could see a white radome on the roof. The basement level was connected to the MIT tunnel system. The first time I visited him on campus, he told me you could take the tunnels all the way to Kendall Square.
“How about some air?” I said after I found him hunched over a microscope, surrounded by open laptops and notebooks and empty coffee mugs. The lenses of his glasses were smudged. Eve had been trimming his hair and there was an unevenness to the cut that made him look like he was holding his head at a funny angle. He was surprised to see me. I hadn’t told him I was coming.
We left campus and walked along Memorial Drive. By the river it was cold and windy. We pulled up our coat collars and tightened our scarves. We turned onto the Longfellow Bridge and kept going until we were standing between two stone piers with tiny windows. They reminded me of medieval lookout towers. We gazed out at the river and the city skyline beyond it.
I should have had a plan, but I didn’t. Rather, the weight of Eve’s secret had propelled me toward him, the way I imagined a current tugs at the objects that find their way into its waters.
“The house,” my brother said. “Is everything okay there?”
Without him realizing, he had become an anchor for me and Eve; we always knew he was there, in the background. With his departure, I could feel a shift looming: subtle as a change in the energy, the way air cools before a storm. But this was before Eve had brought up going to the Cape. I didn’t know how to explain what I was feeling, or if I should even try. I couldn’t imagine what the right words would be.
“Everything’s fine.”
“Eve says you’ve been like a sister,” he said.
“We’ll miss you,” I said. “Don’t forget to call.”
A gust nearly carried away my hat. I pulled it down over my ears. Snow clouds were settling over brownstones and high-rises. My brother put his arm around me and started talking about the Juan de Fuca Plate, his voice bright with excitement. I could detect only the slightest trace of a stutter. The plate was bursting with seismic activity, a hotbed of shifts and tremors. I wrapped my arms around his waist and leaned into him. With his free hand, he drew the different kinds of fault lines—listric, ring, strike-slip—in the air.
* * *
The near-constant darkness of Antarctica made my body confused about when to rest. At three in the morning, I got out of bed and pulled fleece-lined boots over my flannel pajamas. I put on my gloves and hat. Annabelle was babbling in Spanish. At dinner, under the fluorescent lights of the mess hall, I’d noticed a scattering of freckles on her cheekbones and thought of Eve. I had to stop myself from reaching across the table and touching her face.
The station was quiet. The doorways were dark and shuttered. I peered through shadows at the end of hallways and around corners like I was searching for something in particular—what that would be, I didn’t know. I drifted to the front of the station. In the mudroom, I surveyed the red windbreakers hanging on the wall, the bundles of goggles and gloves, the rows of boots. The entrance was a large steel door with a porthole window. I thought about opening the door, just for a moment, even though the temperature outside would be deep in the negatives. I imagined my hair turning into icicles, my eyes to glass.
Through the window, the station lights illuminated the outbuildings and the ice. The darkness was too thick, too absolute, to see anything more. When Luiz first told me that the rescue crew hadn’t found any remains, there had been a moment when I’d thought my brother hadn’t died in the explosion at all. Maybe he hadn’t even been in the building. Ma
ybe he had seen smoke rising from the station and realized this was his chance to vanish. I could picture him boarding an icebreaker and sailing to Uruguay or Cape Town. Standing on the deck of a ship and watching a new horizon emerge.
For a long time, I kept watch through the window, willing myself to see a figure surface from the night. Who was to say he hadn’t sailed to another land? Who was to say he wasn’t somewhere in that darkness? For him, I would open the door. For him, I would endure the cold. But, of course, nothing was out there.
In the observation room, after the aurora australis had left the sky, I’d turned to Luiz and said: Here’s what I want. The idea had come suddenly and with force. I wanted to go to the Brazilian station, to the site of the explosion. At first, Luiz said it was impossible; it would involve chartering a helicopter, for one thing. I told him that if he could figure out a way to make this happen, I’d stop asking questions and get on the next flight to New Zealand, the first step in my journey home. I didn’t care how much the helicopter ride cost. He promised to see what he could do.
I left the window and slipped back into the hallway. A light was still on in the recreation room. I sat in the armchair next to the phone. I’d tucked my calling card into my pajama pocket, thinking I might phone my husband. Instead I dialed the number of the house in Davis Square, which I still knew by heart. The phone rang five times before someone answered. I’d thought a machine might come on and I could leave whoever lived there now a message about polar bears and green lights in the sky. For a moment, I imagined my sister-in-law picking up. Où avez-vous été? she would say. Where have you been?
A woman answered. Her voice was high and uncertain, not at all like Eve’s. I pressed the phone against my ear. I pulled on the cord and thought about fault lines. I could see a dark streak running down my ribs, a fissure in my sternum.
“Hello?” she said. Static flared on the line. “How can I help you?”
* * *
It was a military hospital, just outside Barnstable. The morning we left, Eve talked to my brother on the phone and said we were going to see the glass museum in Sandwich. I drove. She was dressed in jeans and a gray sweatshirt, unadorned by jewelry, the plainest I’d ever seen her. She rested her socked feet on the dashboard and told me what her cousin had discovered about this man. He’d been in the military, dishonorably discharged. Years ago he’d been involved with a real estate scam involving fraudulent mortgages, but pleaded out of jail time. He had two restraining orders in his file.
The Isle of Youth: Stories Page 10