* * *
The near-constant darkness of Antarctica made my body confused about when to rest. At three in the morning, I got out of bed and pulled fleece-lined boots over my flannel pajamas. I put on my gloves and hat. Annabelle was babbling in Spanish. At dinner, under the fluorescent lights of the mess hall, I’d noticed a scattering of freckles on her cheekbones and thought of Eve. I had to stop myself from reaching across the table and touching her face.
The station was quiet. The doorways were dark and shuttered. I peered through shadows at the end of hallways and around corners like I was searching for something in particular — what that would be, I didn’t know. I drifted to the front of the station. In the mudroom, I surveyed the red windbreakers hanging on the wall, the bundles of goggles and gloves, the rows of boots. The entrance was a large steel door with a porthole window. I thought about opening the door, just for a moment, even though the temperature outside would be deep in the negatives. I imagined my hair turning into icicles, my eyes to glass.
Through the window, the station lights illuminated the outbuildings and the ice. The darkness was too thick, too absolute, to see anything more. When Luiz first told me that the rescue crew hadn’t found any remains, there had been a moment when I’d thought my brother hadn’t died in the explosion at all. Maybe he hadn’t even been in the building. Maybe he had seen smoke rising from the station and realized this was his chance to vanish. I could picture him boarding an icebreaker and sailing to Uruguay or Cape Town. Standing on the deck of a ship and watching a new horizon emerge.
For a long time, I kept watch through the window, willing myself to see a figure surface from the night. Who was to say he hadn’t sailed to another land? Who was to say he wasn’t somewhere in that darkness? For him, I would open the door. For him, I would endure the cold. But, of course, nothing was out there.
In the observation room, after the aurora australis had left the sky, I’d turned to Luiz and said: Here’s what I want. The idea had come suddenly and with force. I wanted to go to the Brazilian station, to the site of the explosion. At first, Luiz said it was impossible; it would involve chartering a helicopter, for one thing. I told him that if he could figure out a way to make this happen, I’d stop asking questions and get on the next flight to New Zealand, the first step in my journey home. I didn’t care how much the helicopter ride cost. He promised to see what he could do.
I left the window and slipped back into the hallway. A light was still on in the recreation room. I sat in the armchair next to the phone. I’d tucked my calling card into my pajama pocket, thinking I might phone my husband. Instead I dialed the number of the house in Davis Square, which I still knew by heart. The phone rang five times before someone answered. I’d thought a machine might come on and I could leave whoever lived there now a message about polar bears and green lights in the sky. For a moment, I imagined my sister-in-law picking up. Où avez-vous été? she would say. Where have you been?
A woman answered. Her voice was high and uncertain, not at all like Eve’s. I pressed the phone against my ear. I pulled on the cord and thought about fault lines. I could see a dark streak running down my ribs, a fissure in my sternum.
“Hello?” she said. Static flared on the line. “How can I help you?”
* * *
It was a military hospital, just outside Barnstable. The morning we left, Eve talked to my brother on the phone and said we were going to see the glass museum in Sandwich. I drove. She was dressed in jeans and a gray sweatshirt, unadorned by jewelry, the plainest I’d ever seen her. She rested her socked feet on the dashboard and told me what her cousin had discovered about this man. He’d been in the military, dishonorably discharged. Years ago he’d been involved with a real estate scam involving fraudulent mortgages, but pleaded out of jail time. He had two restraining orders in his file.
“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 another. 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: a thin white line 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 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 onstage, and raised it like a prize.
“Okay,” 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 abnormally bright. “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 picked up the juice glass asked 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. A woman 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 went 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 pack.