The Best American Mystery Stories 2014

FROM Glimmer Train

I .

IN ANTARCTICA, there was nothing to identify because there was nothing left. The Brazilian station at the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula had burned to the ground. All that remained of my brother was a stainless steel watch. It was returned to me in a sealed plastic bag, the inside smudged with soot. The rescue crew had also uncovered an unidentified tibia, which might or might not have belonged to him. This was explained in a cold, windowless room at Belgrano II, the Argentinian station that had taken in the survivors of the explosion. Luiz Cardoso, the head researcher at the Brazilian base, had touched my shoulder as he spoke about the bone, as though this was information intended to bring comfort.

Other explanations followed, less about the explosion and more about the land itself. Antarctica was a desert. There was little snowfall or rain. Much of it was still unexplored. There were no cities. The continent was ruled by no one; rather, it was an international research zone. My brother had been visiting from McMurdo, an American base on Ross Island, but since it was a Brazilian station that had exploded, the situation would be investigated according to their laws.

“Where is the bone now? The tibia?” I’d lost track of how long it had been since I’d slept, or what time zone I was in. It felt very strange not to know where I was in time.

“In Brazil.” His English was accented but clear. It had been less than a week since the explosion. “It’s not as though you could have recognized it.”

We stood next to an aluminum table and two chairs. The space reminded me of an interrogation room. I hadn’t wanted to sit down. I had never been to South America before, and as Luiz spoke, I pictured steamy Amazonian rivers and graveyards with huge stone crosses. It was hard to imagine their laws having sway over all this ice. It was equally hard to believe a place this big-an entire fucking continent, after all-had no ruler. I felt certain that it would only be a matter of time before there was a war over Antarctica.

“It’s lucky the explosion happened in March.” Luiz was tall, with deep-set eyes and the rough beginnings of a beard, a few clicks shy of handsome.

“How’s that?” My brother was dead. Nothing about this situation seemed lucky.

“Soon it will be winter,” he said. “It’s dark all the time. It would have been impossible for you to come.”

“I don’t know how you stand it.” The spaces underneath my eyes ached.

My husband hadn’t wanted me to come to Antarctica at all, and when our son saw where I was going on a map, he cried. My husband had tried to convince me everything could be handled from afar. You’re a wife, he’d reminded me as I packed. A mother too.

“Did you know about your brother’s work?” Luiz said. “With the seismograph?”

“Of course.” I listened to wind batter the building. “We were very close.”

I couldn’t stop thinking about him as a boy, many years before everything went wrong: tending to his ant farms and catching snowflakes in his mouth during winter. Peering into a telescope and quizzing me on the stars. Saying tongue twisters-I wish to wish the wish you wish to wish-to help his stutter. We had not spoken in over a year.

Luiz clapped his hands lightly. Even though we were indoors, he’d kept his gloves on. I had drifted away and was momentarily surprised to find myself still in the room.

“You have collected your brother’s things, such as they are. There will be an official inquiry, but you shouldn’t trouble yourself with that.”

“I’m booked on a flight that leaves in a week. I plan to stay until then.”

“The explosion was an accident,” he said. “A leak in the machine room.”

“I get it.” Exhaustion was sinking into me. My voice sounded like it was coming from underwater. “Nobody’s fault.”

I had flown from JFK to New Zealand, where I picked up a charter plane to an airstrip in Coats Land. There had been gut-popping turbulence, and from the window I could see nothing but ice. Luiz had been the one to meet me on the tarmac and drive me to Belgrano II in a red snow tractor. I’d packed in a hurry and brought what would get me through winter in New Hampshire: a puffy coat that reached my knees, a knit hat with a tassel, leather gloves, suede hiking boots. I’d had to lobby hard to come to Antarctica; the stations weren’t keen on civilians hanging around. When I spoke with the director of McMurdo, I’d threatened to release a letter that said details of the explosion, the very information needed to properly grieve, were being kept from the victims’ families. I knew Luiz was looking me over and thinking that the best thing I could do for everyone, including my brother, including myself, was just to go on home.

“Are there polar bears here?” I felt oddly comforted by the idea of spotting a white bear lumbering across the ice.

“A common mistake.” He drummed his fingers against the table. He had a little gray in his eyebrows and around his temples. “Polar bears are in the North Pole.”

“My brother and I were very close,” I said again.

There was a time when that statement would have been true. We had been close once. During our junior year of college, we rented a house in Davis Square, a blue two-story with a white front porch. Our parents had died in a car accident when we were in middle school-a late spring snowstorm, a collision on a bridge-leaving behind the grandparents who raised us and an inheritance. My brother was in the Earth Sciences Department at MIT, and I was studying astronomy at UMass Boston. (I was a year older, but he had been placed on an accelerated track.) Back then I thought I would never grow tired of looking at the sky.

When it was just the two of us, we did not rely on language. He would see me cleaning chicken breasts in the sink and take out breadcrumbs and butter for chicken Kiev, our grandmother’s recipe. After dinner we watched whatever movie was on TV. E.T. played two nights in a row, and Maybe it was just an iguana became something we said when we didn’t know what else to do, because even though we had been close, we never really learned how to talk to each other. Sometimes we didn’t bother with clearing the table or washing dishes until morning. We went weeks without doing laundry. My brother wore the same striped polos and rumpled khakis; I showed up for class with unwashed hair and dirty socks. His interest in seismology was taking hold. He started talking about P-waves and S-waves. Fault lines and ruptures. He read biographies of Giuseppe Mercalli, who invented a scale for measuring volcanoes, and Frank Press, who had land named after him in Antarctica, a peak in the Ellsworth Mountains.

It was at MIT that he met Eve. She was a theater arts major. They dated for a semester and wed the same week they graduated, in the Somerville courthouse. I was their only guest. Eve wore a tea-length white dress and a daffodil behind her ear. She was lithe and elegant, with straight blond hair and freckles on the bridge of her nose. When the justice of the peace said “man and wife,” she called out “wife and man!” and laughed, and then everyone started laughing, even the justice. I wasn’t sure why we were laughing, but I was glad that we were.

There were three bedrooms in the house. It might have seemed strange, brother and sister and his new wife all living together, but it felt like the most natural thing. Our first summer we painted the walls colors called Muslin and Stonebriar and bought rocking chairs for the porch. We pulled the weeds that had sprung up around the front steps. All the bedrooms were upstairs. When I was alone in my room, I played music to give them privacy. At dinner I would watch my brother and Eve-their fingers intertwined under the table, oblivious-and wonder how long it would take them to have children. I liked the idea of the house slowly filling with people.

That fall my brother started his earth sciences PhD at MIT. He kept long hours in the labs, and when he was home, he was engrossed in textbooks. Eve and I spent more time together. She lived her life like an aria-jazz so loud I could hear it from the sidewalk; phone conversations that sprawled on for hours, during which she often spoke different languages; heels and silk dresses to the weekend farmers’ market. She always wore a gold bracelet with a locket. I would stare at the oval dangling from her wrist and wonder if there were photos inside. I helped her rehearse for auditions in the living room, standing on a threadbare oriental rug. I got to be Williams’s Stanley Kowalski and Pinter’s Max, violent and dangerous men. I started carrying slim plays around in my purse, like Eve did, even though I had no plans to write or perform; the act alone felt purposeful. I learned that her father was an economics professor and she had majored in theater to enrage him, only to discover that she loved the stage. I’d never met anyone from her family before.

One afternoon I went to see her perform in The Tempest at a community theater in Medford. My brother had been too busy to come. She was cast as Miranda. Onstage she wore a blue silk dress with long sleeves and gold slippers. In one scene Miranda argued with her father during a storm; somewhere a sound machine simulated thunder. Everything about her carriage and voice worked to convey power and rage-“Had I been any great god of power, I would have sunk the sea within the earth…”-but for the first time I noticed that something was wrong with her eyes. Under the lights they looked more gray than blue, and her gaze was cold and flat.

Afterward we drank at the Burren. The bar was bright and crowded. A band was unpacking instruments from black cases. We jammed ourselves into a small table in the back with glasses of red wine. Eve was depressed about the production: the turnout, the quality of the lighting and the costumes.

“And the guy who played Prospero,” she moaned. She had left a perfect lip print on the rim of her wineglass. “I would’ve rather had my own father up there.”

When the waitress came around, she ordered another drink, a martini this time. She took an eyebrow pencil out of her purse and drew hearts on a cocktail napkin.

“What do squirrels give for Valentine’s Day?” she asked.

I shook my head. My hands were wrapped around the stem of my glass.

“Forget-me-nuts.” She twirled the pencil in her fingers and laughed the way she had during her wedding, only this time I caught the sadness in her voice that I’d missed before.

She put down the pencil and leaned closer. At the table next to ours, a couple was arguing. The band tuned their guitars. When she spoke, her voice was syrupy and low.

“Lee,” she said. “I have a secret.”

In Antarctica I shared a bedroom with a meteorologist from Buenos Aires. Her name was Annabelle and she talked in her sleep. Every morning I had a three-minute shower in the communal bathroom (it was important to conserve water). I took my meals in the mess hall, with its long tables and plastic trays and harsh overhead lights. I sat with the ten Argentinean scientists who worked at the base; we ate scrambled eggs and canned fruit and smoked fish. They spoke in Spanish, but I still nodded as if I could follow. The five scientists from the Brazilian station always sat at their own table, isolated by their tragedy, which I understood. After my parents died, it took me months before I could carry on a conversation with someone who had not known them, who expected me to be young and sparkling and untouched by grief.

Four of the Argentinean scientists were women. They had glossy dark hair and thick, rolling accents. In Antarctica I’d found that personalities tended to match the landscape, chilly and coarse, but these women were kind. There was a warmth between them, an intimacy, that made me miss being with Eve. They lent me the right clothes. They let me watch the launch of their meteorology balloon from the observation room, a glass dome affixed to the top of the station. The balloon was white and round and looked like a giant egg ascending into the sky. In broken English, they told me what it was like during the darkness of winter: The sun, they said. One day it’s just not there. There are no shadows. You have very strange dreams. They included me in their movie nights in the recreation room, which had a TV, a small library of DVDs, a computer, and a phone. Once it was Top Gun, another time E.T. Everything was dubbed in Spanish, and when I didn’t get to hear the iguana line, I started to cry. I didn’t make a sound, didn’t even realize it was happening until I felt moisture on my cheeks. The women pretended not to notice.

I started wearing my brother’s watch. No matter how much I cleaned the metal, it kept leaving black rings around my wrist. With my calling card, I phoned McMurdo, only to be told that the scientists who worked with my brother had departed in anticipation of winter; all they could offer was the date he left and that their reports indicated he’d been in good health. I started pestering Luiz for a meeting with everyone from the Brazilian station, with the hope that they had more to tell.

“An interview?” he asked, frowning.

“No.” By then I’d been in Antarctica for three days, though I felt it had been much longer. “A conversation.”

The day of the meeting I dressed in thermals, snow pants, wool socks, fleece-lined boots, a hooded parka, and thick red gloves that turned my hands into paddles. I added a white ski mask that covered everything but my eyes. From Annabelle I’d learned it was called a balaclava. She had given me a laminated sheet with a drawing of a human body. Arrows pointed to what kind of layer should cover each part, to avoid frostbite.

When I first stepped onto the ice, I felt like an astronaut making contact with the surface of the moon. I wandered around the trio of heated research tents and the buzzing generators and the snow tractors. The sky was blue-black; the period of twilight, which seemed to grow smaller each day, would soon begin. By April, Antarctica would be deep into winter and there would be no relief from the dark.

I found all five of the Brazilians in the middle research tent, standing by a long white table covered with black rocks. With the snowsuits and the balaclavas, it was hard to tell who was who, though I always recognized Luiz by his height. Some of the rocks on the table were the size of a fist, others the size of a grapefruit. One was as large as a basketball.

“Meteorites,” Luiz said when he saw me looking. Apparently the ice in Antarctica preserved meteorites better than any climate in the world. His team had discovered ones that were thousands of years old.

I touched the basketball-sized rock-it was the color of sand and banded with black-and remembered how much my brother had loved the moon rock collection at MIT.

“So what did you want to ask?” Luiz wore an orange snow suit. 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 like 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, like 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 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 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.”

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 window seat 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. “Down 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 American Repertory Theater-and while we rode the T, the train clacking over the tracks whenever 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 rehearsals 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, which had been constructed by a famous architect and was the tallest building in all of Cambridge. 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 had found him hunched over a microscope. He was surprised to see me. I hadn’t told him I was coming.

“I’m gone tomorrow.” He gestured to the open laptops and the stacks of notebooks and the empty coffee mugs that surrounded him. 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. The lenses of his glasses were smudged.

“I know,” I said. “That’s why I’m here.”

We left campus and walked along Memorial Drive. By the river it was cold and windy. We pulled up the collars of our coats and tightened our scarves. We turned onto the Longfellow Bridge and kept going, until we were standing between two stone piers with domed roofs and tiny windows. They reminded me of medieval lookout towers. We leaned against the bridge and 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, I felt he had become an anchor for me and Eve; we always knew he was there, in the background, and with his departure I could feel a shift looming: subtle as a change in the energy, the way the air gets damp and cool 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 the 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 only detect 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 as if I were searching for something in particular-what that would be, I didn’t know. I drifted to the front of the station. In the mud room 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. Maybe he had seen smoke rising from the land 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 be on the next flight to New Zealand. I didn’t care how much it cost. He promised to see what he could do.

I left the window and slipped back into the hallway. A light had been left 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?”

III.

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 and the elderly, but pleaded out of jail time. He had two restraining orders in his file.

“I’m surprised someone hasn’t killed him already.” She cracked the window. The air was heavy with moisture and salt.

We drove through Plymouth and Sandwich. From the highway I saw a billboard ad for the glass museum. At the hospital-a labyrinthine gray building just off the highway-we learned he was in the ICU. We pretended to be family.

He was in a room with two other men. A thin curtain hung between each of the beds. Eve slowly walked from one to the other. The first patient was gazing at the TV bolted to the wall. The second was drinking orange juice from a straw. The third was asleep. He wore a white hospital gown. His gray hair was shorn close to the scalp. One hand rested on his stomach, the other on the mattress. I followed Eve to his bedside. His face was speckled with broken capillaries, his cheekbones sharp, his slender forearms bruised. He was on oxygen and attached to a heart monitor. I smelled something sour.

“Are you sure this is him?” I asked Eve, even though I could see the scar. It was just as she had described: a thin line of white under his eye.

“Don’t say it.” She walked over to the window and looked out at the parking lot.

“Say what?”

“That’s he’s old and frail and defenseless.” Eve turned from the window. “He’s not like that at all. Not on the inside.” She pressed her fist against her chest.

She slumped down on the linoleum floor. A nurse was attending to the patient next to us. I watched her shadow through the curtain. She carried away a tray with an empty glass on it. She told the man who had been drinking the juice to have a nice day.

“So what do we do now?” I asked. “Wake him up?”

“I’m thinking,” Eve said. “I’m thinking of what to do.”

It took her a long time to do her thinking. I listened to the din of the TV. I thought a game show was on from the way people kept calling out numbers.

Finally Eve jumped up and started digging through her purse. She took out a tube of lipstick, the garish red color she wore onstage, and raised it like a prize.

“Okay,” she said. “I have my first idea.”

She uncapped the lipstick and went to the sleeping man. She smeared color across his mouth. I stood on the other side of his bed and stared down, trying to see the evil in him. Eve used the lipstick to rouge his cheeks before passing it to me. I drew red half-circles above his eyebrows. We waited for him to wake up, to cry for help, but he only made a faint gurgling sound. His hand twitched on his stomach. That was all.

“Now I have another idea,” Eve said.

For this second thing she wanted to be alone. I looked at the clown’s face we had given this man. My stomach felt strange. On the intercom, a doctor was being paged to surgery.

“Five minutes. Three hundred seconds.” Her face was free of makeup, her freckles visible. She’d had her teeth bleached recently and they looked unnaturally white. “That’s all I’m asking for, Lee.”

After what had happened to her, wasn’t she owed five minutes alone with him? That was my thinking at the time. On my way out of the ICU, the same nurse who had picked up the juice glass asked me if I’d had a pleasant visit.

I waited on the sidewalk. I watched people come and go through the automatic doors. An old man on crutches. An old man in a wheelchair. A nurse in lavender scrubs. What was the worst thing these people had done?

Eve stayed in the hospital for fifty-seven minutes. I couldn’t bring myself to go back inside. I paced in the cold. I had forgotten my gloves and my hands were going numb. Even though I’d never smoked in my life, I asked a doctor smoking outside if I could bum a cigarette.

“These things will kill you.” The doctor winked and flipped open his cigarette pack.

When Eve emerged from the hospital, she took my hand and pulled me toward the car. We drove in silence. She rested her head against the window. When I tried to turn on the radio, she touched my wrist. Her fingertips were waxy with lipstick.

“Please,” she said.

After a half-hour on the road, I exited at Sagamore Beach. The silence felt like a pair of hands around my throat. Eve didn’t object when I parked in the designated beach lot, empty on account of its being February, or when we climbed over dunes and through sea grass. Cold sand leaked into our shoes. I didn’t stop until I reached water.

We were standing on the edge of Cape Cod Bay. The water was still and gray. Clusters of rock extended into the bay like fingers. A white mist hung over us. A freighter was visible in the distance.

“Why didn’t you come out when you said you would?” The freighter was moving farther away. When it vanished from sight, it looked like it had gone into a cloud. “What were you doing in there?”

“We were talking.” Her face was dewy from the mist. Her pale hair had frizzed. She picked up a white stone and threw it into the water.

“So he woke up?”

“Yes,” she said. “He did and then he didn’t.”

She picked up another stone. It was gray with a black dot in the center. She held on to it for a little while, turning it over in her hands, before it went into the bay.

In Cambridge she wanted to be dropped at the Repertory Theater. She had to tell the director that she couldn’t make rehearsal; she promised to come home soon. Her hair was still curled from being at the beach. Her cheeks and forehead were damp. I tried to determine if anything had shifted in her eyes.

I idled on Brattle Street until Eve had gone into the theater. Her purse swung from her shoulder, and somewhere inside it was that lipstick. I kept telling myself that the most dangerous part was over. We were home now. Everything would be the same as before.

But no. Nothing would be the same as before. Eve never talked to her director. She never returned to the house. I had to call my brother and tell him to come home from Vancouver. When I picked him up at the airport, it was late. I waited in baggage claim. Long before he noticed me, I spotted him coming down the escalator, a duffel bag slung over his shoulder. He had lost weight. His hair had grown out. I remember thinking that I wished I knew him better, that I wished we’d taken the time to learn how to talk to each other. When he finally saw me, he tried to call out, Lee, but his stutter was as bad as it had been in childhood. It took him three tries to say my name.

A report was filed. Eve’s parents-a frail, bookish couple-came into town from Concord. An investigation went on for weeks. There was no sign of Eve, no sign of foul play. As gently as he could, the detective asked us to consider the possibility that she had run away. Apparently women-young mothers, young wives-did this more frequently than people might think. I told everyone I’d dropped Eve at the theater, but the truth stopped there. Every time I tried to say more, I felt like a stone was lodged in my throat.

Because I was his sister, because we had been close, my brother knew I was holding something back. He pressed me for information. Had she been taking an inordinate amount of calls? Had anything peculiar arrived in the mail? Was she having an affair with a castmate? Had we really gone to the glass museum in Sandwich? I submitted to these questions, even though I didn’t-couldn’t, I felt at the time-always tell the truth. And I knew he was confronting his own failing, the fact that he hadn’t cared to know any of this until after his wife was gone.

We waited months before we packed up her belongings: the silk dresses, the shoes, the jewelry, the plays. Her possessions had always seemed rich and abundant, but only filled three cardboard boxes. My brother kept them stacked at the foot of his bed. When he moved, two boxes went to Eve’s parents and he took the other one with him. I don’t know what happened to her things after that.

The last time he asked me a question about Eve, we were on the front porch. It was late spring. The trees were blooming green and white. I was in a rocking chair. My brother was leaning against the porch railing, facing the street.

“Do you think you knew her better than I did?” he said.

“No.” Once I had come upon them in the upstairs hallway: they were pressed against the wall, kissing, and he was twisting one of Eve’s wrists behind her back. It was clear that the pleasure was mutual, which led me to believe that she might enjoy a degree of pain. Only my brother could say how much.

He stared out at the glowing streetlights. I could tell from the way he licked his lips and squeezed the railing that he did not believe me.

By summer we had moved into separate apartments: his on Beacon Hill, so he could be closer to MIT; mine in the North End, scrunched between a pastry shop and a butcher. I bounced from one entry-level lab job to another, my ambition dulled, while I watched my brother pull his own disappearing act: into his dissertation; into the conference circuit; into one far-flung expedition after another. The Philippines, Australia, Haiti. Antarctica. The phone calls and postcards turned from weekly to monthly to hardly at all.

I got married the year I turned thirty. My brother came, but left before the cake was served. It was too painful, watching the night unfold; I understood this without his ever saying so. I only told my husband that he had been married briefly and years ago we’d all lived together in Davis Square. Soon I had a child. I worked part-time as a lab assistant, sorting someone else’s data, and cared for him, which was not the life I’d imagined for myself, but it seemed like a fair exchange: I hadn’t kept sufficient watch over Eve, hadn’t kept her from danger. This was my chance to make it up. I tried to tell myself she was someplace far away and happy. I tried to forget that she might have been in trouble, that she might have needed us. When I looked at my son, I tried not to think about all the things I could never tell him. I tried to shake the feeling that I was living someone else’s life.

In the years to come I would start so many letters to my brother, each one beginning in a different way: Eve was not who you thought, and I don’t know how it all started, and How could you not have known? I never got very far because I knew I was still lying. The letter I finally finished-addressed to the McMurdo station but never mailed-opened with None of this was your fault.

Another thing I never told him: before leaving the house in Davis Square, I cut open one of Eve’s boxes and found her gold bracelet in a tiny plastic bag. The chain was tarnished. I popped open the locket; the frames were empty. I took the bracelet and resealed the box with packing tape. I held on to it-never wearing it, always hiding it away, even before there were people to hide it from. My husband found it once, and I said it had been a gift from my mother. I imagined other people discovering the bracelet through the years and telling each one a different story. I would carry it with me to Antarctica, tucked in the side pocket of my suitcase, though I was never able to bring it out into the open.

Not long after Eve’s disappearance, I looked up the name of her abductor on a computer: Randall Smith. I’d only heard her say it aloud once, in the hospital. After a little searching, I found an obituary. He had died the day after our visit, survived by no one. The obituary said it was natural causes, which explained nothing.

It was twilight when we flew over Admiralty Bay. Luiz said that if I watched the water carefully, I might see leopard seals. The pilot was from the Netherlands, hired for a price that would horrify my husband when the check posted. Luiz’s boss had gotten wind of our expedition and wasn’t at all pleased; that morning he’d called from Brazil and told Luiz that he was not in the business of escorting tourists. Soon I would have to get on the plane to New Zealand, as I had promised, but I wasn’t completely out of time.

The landscape was different on the peninsula. The ice was sparser, exposing the rocky peaks of mountains and patches of black soil near the coastline. When the explosion site came into view, it looked like a dark scar on the snow.

The helicopter touched down. Black headsets swallowed our ears, muffling the sound of the propellers. The helicopter swayed as it landed. I could feel the engine rumbling beneath us; it made my skin vibrate inside my many layers of clothes. Luiz got out first, then helped me onto the ice. The pilot shouted something in Dutch, which Luiz translated: soon the twilight would be gone; he didn’t want to fly back in the dark.

Together we approached the wreckage. Luiz still had his headset on. I had taken mine off too soon and now my ears buzzed. Up close, the site was smaller than I’d expected: a black rectangle the size of the swimming pool I took my son to in the summer. Nothing of the structure remained except for metal beams jutting from ridges of ash and debris. The sky was a golden haze.

“I told you there wasn’t much to see.” He slipped off his headset. His face was covered except for his eyes. I was wearing a balaclava too and knew I looked the same.

“Tell me what it was like before.”

The station had been shaped like a horseshoe. He pointed to the empty spaces where the mess hall used to be, the dormitories, the bathroom, my brother’s seismograph. Their base had been smaller than Belgrano. They didn’t have an observation room or heated research tents. Everything had been contained under one roof.

I stepped in the ash and listened to it crunch under my boots. I passed black spears of wood and warped beams. One section of the site was even more charred, the ground scooped in. I stood inside the depression and looked at the bits of metal glinting in the ash. I picked up something the size of a quarter. I wasn’t sure what it had been before; the fire had made it glossy and flat. I slipped it into my pocket and kept walking. I told myself it was evidence; I just didn’t know what kind.

The wind blew flurries of ash around my legs. On the other end of the site, I looked for some sign of my brother’s seismograph. I came across a spoon, the handle melted into a glob of metal, and a lighter. I put those things in my pockets too. More evidence. Luiz was still on the edge of the site. By then I understood he was someone who had no desire to go searching for things. He didn’t even collect the meteorites; his only concern was classifying them. The helicopter would be ready for us soon, but the sky still held a dull glow.

There were so many times when I wanted to tell my brother everything-when, in the middle of the night, I wanted to kneel by his bed and whisper, I have a secret. In Cambridge, I’d told myself these were Eve’s secrets to keep or expose; it was her life to walk away from, if that’s what she wanted. And the more time that passed, the more unimaginable the truth seemed. To admit one lie would mean admitting another and then another.

I imagined myself at home in New Hampshire, arranging everything on the living room floor. A map of Antarctica, with stars to mark the bases: McMurdo; here; Belgrano. My brother’s watch. Eve’s empty locket. The photo he mailed, without a note, when he first arrived in Antarctica. He was wearing a yellow snow suit and standing outside McMurdo, surrounded by bright white ice. Around these materials I would place the metals I had collected at the site and try to see something: a pattern, a sign. Or maybe I would just read aloud the last letter I wrote to him. Or maybe, in the helicopter, I would turn to Luiz and tell him everything.

The sky was almost dark. I was back inside the depression. I was sitting down in it and hugging my knees. I had no memory of walking over there and stepping into the hole; I had just done it automatically. Luiz was calling to me. The wind carried his voice away.

Maybe it was just an iguana, I heard my brother say.

In Antarctica, I did not know if he had denied himself the chance to get out of the burning building. I did not know what he believed I knew, or what would have changed if I’d given him the truth. I did not know if I would ever see Eve again. I did not know what had happened in that hospital room, or in Acton. Some of these things I did not know not because they were unknowable, but because I had turned away from the knowledge. In Antarctica, I decided that was the worst thing I’d ever done, that refusal.

The stars were coming out. Luiz was crossing the site, waving and calling my name. The temperature was dropping. My eyes watered. I sank deeper into the hole.

In Antarctica, I did not know that a month after I left, Luiz would become trapped in a whiteout and lose two fingers to frostbite. I did not know that the tibia would turn out to have belonged to my brother, that it would be shipped back to America in a metal box. I did not know if one day I would disappear and no one except a missing woman and a dead man would be able to tell the people who loved me why.