When Eve emerged from the hospital, she took my hand and pulled me toward the car. We drove in silence. She rested her head against the window. When I tried to turn on the radio, she touched my wrist. Her fingertips were waxy with lipstick.
“Please,” she said.
After a half hour on the road, I exited at Sagamore Beach. The silence felt like a pair of hands around my throat. Eve didn’t object when I parked in the designated beach lot, empty on account of it being February, or when we climbed over dunes and through sea grass. Cold sand leaked into our shoes. I didn’t stop until I reached water.
We stood on the edge of Cape Cod Bay. The water was still and gray. Clusters of rock extended into the bay like fingers. A white mist hung over us. A freighter was visible in the distance.
“Why didn’t you come out when you said you would?” The freighter was moving farther away. When it vanished from sight, it looked like it had gone into a cloud. “What were you doing in there?”
“We were talking.” Her face was dewy from the mist. Her pale hair had frizzed. She picked up a white stone and threw it into the water.
“So he woke up?”
“Yes,” she said. “He did and then he didn’t.”
She picked up another stone. It was gray with a black dot in the center. She held on to it for a little while, turning it over in her hands, before it went into the bay.
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 remembered thinking 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. An 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.
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 abundant, but only filled 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 in 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 him ever saying so. I told my husband 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 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 me telling each one a different story. I carried 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 heard her say it aloud only 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.