The Best American Short Stories 2014 (50 page)

“So what did you want to ask?” Luiz wore an orange snowsuit. His goggles rested on top of his forehead.

I stopped touching the meteorite. Red heat lamps were clamped to the top of the tent. Standing before the other scientists, I suddenly felt like the one about to be questioned. It was hard to breathe through the balaclava.

“What do you remember about him?”

Not much, it turned out. One scientist volunteered that he often ate alone; another said he never participated in group activities such as evening card games and Ping-Pong. He sang in the shower on occasion, an American song no one recognized. He had a stutter, though sometimes it was barely noticeable.

“What about the other times?” I asked.

“He could barely say his own name,” Luiz said.

“How much longer was he supposed to stay with you?” I wished I had a notepad. I would remember everything, of course, but writing it down would have made me feel official and organized, like I was asking questions that might lead us somewhere.

“Two more weeks,” Luiz said.

“And when did you last see him?”

There was silence, the shaking of heads. Someone thought they saw him the morning of the explosion, pouring a cup of coffee in the break room.

“Nothing else?” These weren't the questions I came with, not really, but maybe if we kept talking a door would open and I could ask something like
Did you know he had a sister?
or
Did he seem happy?
or
What did he love about being here?

“I crawled out of the station.” The words came from the woman in a sharp burst, like a gunshot. The hood of her parka was down and auburn hair peeked through the top of her balaclava. Bianca, that was her name.

“On my stomach, through fire, smoke. This is what I remember.” She swept her hand toward the group. “No one was thinking about your brother. We barely knew him. We can't understand what you're doing here.”

She pulled up her hood and walked out of the research tent. The other three scientists looked at Luiz, who shrugged and said something in Portuguese before following her.

I watched them go. The tent flapped open, revealing a pale wedge of sky. Already I was failing as a detective.

“I didn't mean for it to go like that,” I said.

“You want to know the truth?” Luiz said. “Your brother was a beaker.”

“A what?”

“A beaker. A scientist who can't get along with the others. It wasn't a privilege for him to be at our station. They were tired of him at McMurdo.”

At breakfast Annabelle had bragged that she could teach me to say
asshole
in any language. If you spent enough time in Antarctica, you learned a little of everything.

“Ojete.”
I picked up a meteorite the size of a grape and threw it at his feet.
“Ojete. Ojete.”

Luiz looked down at the rock, unfazed. I left the tent and walked away from the station. I tried to run but kept slipping on the ice. When I finally stopped and looked back, the U-shaped building was minuscule against the vastness of the land. It was like standing in the middle of a white sea—ice in all directions, stretching into infinity. I pulled at the balaclava. I wanted to take it off but couldn't figure out how. The thought of venturing any farther was suddenly terrifying.

Annabelle had explained that most researchers came for short stints, a handful of months. Few stayed as long as a year, as my brother had. There was the feeling that nothing but the elements could touch you out here, and I understood that was something he would have appreciated. Since we had been close, I could make these kinds of calculations.

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. My breath made white ghosts in the air. It was impossible to distinguish land from sky.

 

II.

 

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 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 next to him. Soon he would be departing for a month-long 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 turned 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 things in mind. 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 lightheaded 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 ever ventured into 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 soupspoon. 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 many 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 God's sake. 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 super massive 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 with an office 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 my glove. 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 at 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 a baseball 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.”