“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 like 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, 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 the wetness 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’d 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-size rock — sand-colored 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 snowsuit. His goggles rested on top of his forehead.
I stopped touching the meteorite. Red heat lamps were clamped to the top of the tent. Standing before the other scientists, I suddenly felt like the one about to be questioned. It was hard to breathe through the balaclava.
“What do you remember about him?”
Not much, it turned out. One scientist volunteered that he often ate alone; another said he never participated in group activities 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. 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 Spanish, 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.”