“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 next. 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 it: 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 on-stage, and raised it like a prize.
“OK,” 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 seagrass. 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. The 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 cast mate? 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 filled only 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 pr
essed 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 told my husband only 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 how I would tell 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, like 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 snowsuit 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 fros
tbite. 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.
Contributors’ Notes
CHARLES BAXTER is the author of twelve books of fiction and nonfiction. His most recent collection, Gryphon: New and Selected Stories, was published in 2011. “Charity” will appear in There’s Something I Want You to Do, to be published in February 2015. “Bravery,” from last year’s Best American Short Stories, is also part of that collection. He lives in Minneapolis and teaches at the University of Minnesota.
• I have been writing stories about virtues and vices, a kind of decalogue, and I found myself thinking about charity. At first nothing suggested itself, and I sat for a few days with my head in my hands in front of the big stupid blank face of the desktop computer. It occurred to me that I had just written a story called “Chastity,” in which my protagonist, Benny Takemitsu, gets mugged, and I thought, “I wonder who did that?” Whoever did it had to be desperate. Whoever it was, I thought, might be a good soul in the grip of something truly terrible. So I wrote it that way. The ending was nowhere in sight until I remembered something a diplomat once told me about a certain custom at African weddings to honor those who are no longer with us. The events of several sections of the story take place in the part of the city of Minneapolis where I walk every day. Most of the story was improvised, based on what I knew about the characters.
The Best American Short Stories 2014 Page 40
