The Isle of Youth: Stories (11 page)

“Where do you want to go?” Jean-Paul asked. We were running down a street lit by globular lamps.

I remembered the first thing I took an interest in when studying a map of Paris on the plane. I read about its history in the guidebook and charted its path on the map with my fingertip.

“To the river!” I said.

By the time we reached the Seine, we had given up on running. We knew better than to feign being young and carefree for very long. The paint was making my face itch. I scratched the side of my nose. I had lost my sash and my robe billowed open. When I looked down at my sundress, it seemed unfamiliar, a stranger’s clothes. The Seine stretched out before us, dark and endless. We took a small set of stairs down to the concrete sidewalk that lined one side of the river. The path was lit by goldish hanging lights. We walked along the river, underneath one of the bridges and past an empty bench. Jean-Paul smoked a cigarette and gave me drags. The concrete wall beside us insulated us from city sounds. For a long time, the bells were the only noise I heard.

“You forgot your case,” I said when I realized he wasn’t carrying it.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “One of the others will take it.”

“How did you learn acrobatics?”

“I went to an acrobatics school in Normandy,” he said. “I was taught by the same man who taught my father.”

“It seems like it would get tiring, all that performing.”

“I like having a job where I get to wear a mask all day.”

When he asked what I did, I tried my best to explain my job as a forensic accountant. I worked in the offices of a divorce lawyer in Hartford and spent my days examining bank statements and stock portfolios, trying to figure out what really belonged to whom, where money had been hidden or lost or spent. I hoped the office would be understanding when I called to tell them I was extending my vacation.

“Once our office had a case where the wife had been grinding up tiny amounts of glass and mixing it into her husband’s food for the last year of their marriage,” I said.

“Maybe it’s best your husband left when he did.”

“Maybe so.”

A riverboat, the bottom exploding with blue phosphorescent light, drifted past us; music and voices rolled across the water. When the quiet returned, I stopped walking. Jean-Paul faced me. I touched his shoulder, right where the silk rose into a little peak, with my paint-smudged fingers.

“Take off your mask,” I said.

“Sorry,” he said. “It’s against the code.”

I wondered what the mask was hiding, if he was elaborately scarred. “I’ll take off my mask if you take off yours.”

He smiled. “But I already know what you look like.”

“You don’t know my name. I never told any of you my name.”

“I’ve already made one up for you,” he said. “I do that when I meet people.”

“And?”

“It’s Sabine. What do you think?”

“Not even close.”

I took off my mask and let my bathrobe fall onto the concrete, the black silk pooling at my feet, and undid the straps on my sandals. It looked as though a wizard had evaporated, leaving behind everything but the body. I took one sweeping step toward the edge of the path and jumped into the water cannonball style, knees clutched to my chest like a terrified child.

I plunged beneath the water. I didn’t open my eyes. I considered what might be resting under me: dead bodies with gnawed fingers and peeling skin, bottles, disposed-of murder weapons, coins, disintegrating love letters. I felt the gentle pressure of the current, the fabric of my dress sticking to my skin.

After I surfaced, I opened my eyes and slicked back my hair. I wiped my face and looked at the white paint bleeding across my hands. Jean-Paul was standing on the bank in his underwear and mask, his red jumpsuit and ballet slippers heaped on the concrete. He slipped into the river tentatively, as though the water was causing him pain.

When he reached me, he put his hand on the back of my head. I looked at his lips and nose and ears. His mask had slipped to the side and I saw one of his eyes. Whiteness had collected in the corner of it. I rubbed the remaining paint from his face with my fingertips. His mask and black hair made me think again of Zorro. I traced a Z on his bare stomach. I hoped another riverboat didn’t pass through.

“Did anyone ever tell you that you look like Zorro?”

“What is Zorro?”

“It’s not important.”

“Do you have a place to stay tonight?”

“I want to take a train south. To the beaches. I want to see things.” The idea of traveling south had come out of nowhere, but I liked the way the words sounded, the way they felt, as they left my mouth.

“But you’ll need a place to dry off, change clothes, get some sleep.”

“I could do that anywhere.”

Jean-Paul gripped my waist and hoisted me out of the water. I made a V with my arms and he spun me around, his hands moving over my stomach and the small of my back. I saw the gray walls of the Seine and the cars and a person crossing a bridge. All the lit-up windows and the glowing peak of the Eiffel Tower. I tipped my head back and saw the red blink of a plane in the sky. And then he brought me back down.

ANTARCTICA

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 Argentinean 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 to not 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 had 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 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 to just go on home.

“Are there polar bears here?” I felt oddly comforted by the idea of 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; I was studying astronomy at UMass Boston (I was a year older, but he was on an accelerated track). Back then I thought I would never grow tried 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 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 on 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 had 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 was a photo 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 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 something was wrong with her eyes. Under the lights, they looked more gray than blue, and her gaze was cold and flat.