The Best American Short Stories 2014 (52 page)

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 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 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 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.

C
HARLES
B
AXTER
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.

Harry Albert, who narrates “Charity,” appears in another story of mine, “Vanity,” in which his younger and more vain self appears.

I have always wanted to write a story that begins, “He had fallen into bad trouble.” This is that story.

 

A
NN
B
EATTIE
is assembling a new collection of stories.
The New Yorker Stories
was chosen by the
New York Times
as one of the top ten books of 2010.

• I surprised myself by writing this because I thought the central incident—which does not even appear in the story—was strange and haunting, and it has bothered me for years. Maybe I'll write that another time. Once I started piecing together the story, I realized that the truth mattered not at all, but that a conflation of people and places served my purposes better. Is this oblique? Probably I didn't want to write the one moment I so vividly remembered from real life, since writing isn't about getting down on paper what I remember, and also because I still don't know what to make of it. So I made something else, which my agent responded to in part by saying that she recognized X in the story, and only then did I realize that she was quite right, and that I'd conflated X with Y. Lest I seem to be writing about chromosomes, let me say that this is a story I decided to keep hidden from myself, but that the goings-on seemed to happen of their own accord and that this story exists in a parallel universe with the story I didn't write. I'd been to Philadelphia (which I don't know well) recently with my husband, and somehow the visuals were there for me like a painted backdrop—those (forgive me) repurposed buildings, the restaurants so unlike those in New York, the fact that I'd walked by an apartment building that seemed anonymous yet attention-getting—and it made me wonder what kind of people lived there.