“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 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 godsakes. 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 supermassive 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 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 an apple 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 windowseat 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. “Up 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 Repertory Theater — and while we rode the T, the train clacking over the tracks when 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 rehearsal 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. 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 said after I found him hunched over a microscope, surrounded by open laptops and notebooks and empty coffee mugs. The lenses of his glasses were smudged. 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. He was surprised to see me. I hadn’t told him I was coming.
We left campus and walked along Memorial Drive. By the river it was cold and windy. We pulled up our coat collars and tightened our scarves. We turned onto the Longfellow Bridge and kept going until we were standing between two stone piers with tiny windows. They reminded me of medieval lookout towers. We 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, he had become an anchor for me and Eve; we always knew he was there, in the background. With his departure, I could feel a shift looming: subtle as a change in the energy, the way air cools 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 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 detect only 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.