The Best American Mystery Stories, Volume 17 Page 23

  “The ice road just opened,” a man behind the counter in a coffee shop told her when she asked about it. “Should have no problem getting up there.” He looked at her doubtfully. “You got a four-by-four?”

  “No,” Zoë said. She’d sold her car before she left Michigan.

  “I know a guy who’s going up tomorrow. Probably take you with him if you split the cost of gas. I’ll ask him if you want.”

  “Thank you. I appreciate it.” What she truly appreciated was the way the man in the café didn’t ask why she’d want to go to Tuktoyaktuk this time of year, or what she was doing in the far north in the first place. Over the weekend she agreed on a fee for gas expenses and got into a truck with a silent man in his fifties who navigated them seamlessly down a ramp onto the frozen MacKenzie River.

  Zoë had heard the phrase ice road in the café without thinking about what it might mean. It meant driving on ice. Driving in slow motion with chains on the tires, fifteen kilometers an hour with the lights of enormous rigs shining ahead and behind them in the four P.M. darkness. They drove up the river to the northern edge of the world and then turned right and drove for a time over the frozen Beaufort Sea.

  The village itself was like Inuvik, only smaller, darker, more utilitarian, little windows shining bright in the permanent twilight. Daylight lasted four hours, but the stars here were brighter than any she’d ever seen. She felt that she’d traveled beyond the edge of the world and landed on some colder planet farther from the sun. Aurora borealis in the sky most nights, shifting vapors of green and yellow that she watched by the hour, sitting alone by the hotel window wrapped in blankets with the lights out. On the third day she rented a snowmobile, got a cursory driving lesson from the man who ran the rental business, and drove a little way out of town.

  Zoë liked the sound of the machine, the din and the forward momentum, but it wasn’t a smooth ride and she felt as if her bones were rattling. She stopped by the sea. She could go no farther. She climbed off the machine and walked a few paces to look out at the horizon, blue shadows of icebergs. The sun was low above the ice, the few scattered lights of Tuktoyaktuk shining in the near distance.

  “I am not unafraid,” she whispered, to Peter, to herself. She had said this first, in the dazed weeks just after the diagnosis, when they were trying to come up with words to frame the catastrophe. They had repeated it to each other in the final nine months that followed, a private phrase that conveyed hope and stoicism and terror in equal measure. The cold was getting to her now, her fingers numb inside her gloves. She turned, and for a fraction of a second Peter was standing there beside the snowmobile, smiling at her in the fading light. He was gone in less than a heartbeat, less than a blink.

  “Oh God,” Zoë whispered, “oh no, please, please...” It took a moment to restart the snowmobile; she kicked at it frantically, not daring to look up. There was movement at the edge of her vision, faint as a curl of cigarette smoke. She heard Peter’s voice as though from a long way off, but couldn’t make out what he was saying. The cologne he used to wear on special occasions hung sweet and clear in the freezing air. The snowmobile jerked into motion and her tears froze on her face. She left all the lights on in the hotel room that night and packed up to leave the north in the morning, a slow process at this time of year, performed in increments over a number of weeks. There were several runways that had to be navigated to get from the Arctic Circle to the warmer parts of the continent, and most of them were frozen over. There were long delays in northern airports, sometimes for days at a stretch. She slept on benches, ate out of vending machines, washed in public restrooms, and felt somewhat deranged. Her reflection was pale and hollow-eyed in mirrors and darkened windows, hair standing up in all directions. It wasn’t until she was sitting in the airport in Edmonton two and a half weeks later, drinking coffee after a sleepless night and staring out at an airplane that would take her farther south as soon as a storm cleared, that it occurred to her to wonder why she’d been afraid of Peter’s ghost.

  Zoë arrived in the Toronto airport and spent some time considering flights back to Michigan, but she had no desire to return just yet, and the situation seemed to call for a new continent. Zoë and Peter had made a good living dealing coke to college students and she still had a few thousand dollars at her disposal, so she flew from Toronto to Paris and lived for some time in a marginal neighborhood, trying unsuccessfully to learn French. But the lines and beauty of Paris reminded her too much of the architectural paintings Peter had been working on when they’d met at art school and her money dwindled rapidly there, so she left France and began a slow, directionless slide across the continent, heading mostly south and east.

  Zoë didn’t have much money now. There were dark little places in winter where she didn’t speak the language, and she occasionally forgot which town she was in. She found a job busing tables in Slovakia for a while. She heard there were resort jobs to be had on the Croatian coast, so she made her way through Hungary and then worked for some months as a waitress near the Adriatic Sea. On the day she saw Peter walking across the town square she packed her things and resumed a halting eastward migration, through Bosnia and Herzegovina, across a corner of Serbia and through Albania, toward Greece. It was important in those days to keep moving. She saw Peter sometimes, always at a slight distance, moving through crowds in various countries. Not looking at her, not sick anymore, seemingly in somewhat of a rush. She was perfectly aware every time that it couldn’t possibly be him—Peter was buried in her family’s plot in Ann Arbor—but that didn’t make her see him any less often.

  “I’m worried about you,” her brother said. He persisted in keeping in contact, which was thoughtful but also somehow annoying. She was trying to drift across a landscape without remembering and he kept pinning her to home.

  “There’s no need to worry,” she replied. “I’m just traveling a little.”

  “When are you coming home?”

  “I don’t have a home,” she said. “I’m like that song. I’m a rolling stone.”

  “Have you been drinking?” he asked.

  She didn’t see that this was any of his business. She took a long pull of whiskey before she answered him. “Of course not. And even if I was drinking, what difference would it make? Haven’t I always been the black sheep?” This was in Albania, at a pay phone in the lobby of a rundown hotel near the Greek border. The clerk glared at her from behind the front desk but said nothing.

  “It doesn’t matter what you’ve always been,” her brother said. “All that matters is that everyone’s worried, Zoë, we all love you,” and she understood from his voice how tired she’d made him. “We all want you to come home.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I lost Peter there.”

  In Greece, after two years of travel, she discovered that she could sell landscape paintings to tourists. Zoë disliked painting landscapes. She had other interests. On the days when she painted landscapes she spent a lot of time swearing at the canvas. In her last three years in the United States she’d taken to painting extreme close-ups of liquid in glasses, and she’d felt that she’d found something, if not her mature style, then the style that might lead to it. She’d loved the way glass and ice and liquid caught the light, the warmth of red wine in a low-lit room, the suspension of bubbles in champagne, in seltzer, lime slices trapped among ice cubes with tiny bubbles clinging silver to the peel. Her work had been shown in galleries. She’d entertained thoughts of a brilliant future. It was difficult to paint landscapes again after all these years of ice cubes and extreme martini-glass close-ups, after the two years of traveling and not painting at all, but on the other hand she was nearly out of money.

  She lived in a dilapidated inn by the sea, where she cleaned and helped the cook in exchange for a room and sold paintings to tourists for food money. Her life wasn’t unpleasant. She had come to realize the value of southern countries: she would never have imagined this quality of sunlight, the way it bleached the lands
cape, the way it seemed to pass through her, the way it burned away the darkest parts of her thoughts. She spent a lot of time on the beach with a fifth of whiskey, disappearing into brilliant light. She attracted frowns from passersby, but she didn’t think it was such a terrible thing, actually, drinking a little by the sea. She didn’t see why people had to be so judgmental about it.

  Zoë had been in Greece for six months when she decided to keep moving. She knew she wanted to remain in a southern country and she spent a long time studying maps of India, but she was afraid of malaria and she wasn’t sure how a person would go about getting vaccination shots in Greece. She’d always wanted to see Venice, so she spent two weeks trying to sell the last of her landscape paintings, abandoned the ones she couldn’t sell along the beach in the early morning, took a bus to Athens and then a cheap flight to Rome. She did crossword puzzles and read the International Herald Tribune all the way to Italy, where she found upon arrival that she had just enough money left to get to Venice by train.

  It was September and a tide had overtaken the city. The water had risen over the streets and tourists moved slowly on walkways, wearing strange boots that looked like bright plastic shopping bags tied up to their knees. In a doorway near the train station she counted the last of her money. Eighteen euros and eighty-seven cents. Her bank account was empty, and she had no credit cards. She didn’t want to spend money on a vaporetto, so she made her way on foot through the drowning city, trying not to think about how little money she had or what might become of her now. There was an unexpected pleasure in wading through the water and getting her shoes wet, childhood memories of splashing in puddles with her dog.

  Zoë came upon St. Mark’s Square, turned now into a shallow lake. She waded out over the cobblestones in water up to her knees and stood before the domes and archways of St. Mark’s Cathedral, pigeons wheeling through the air above her, and this was when she realized that she’d had it wrong: it wasn’t that she’d always wanted to come to Venice, it was that Peter had always wanted to come to Venice. He had painted this cathedral from photographs a dozen times. He was everywhere.

  She turned away and left the square, but within minutes she had landed in another of Peter’s paintings. She looked up from a bridge and was ambushed by memory. Detroit, the year before Peter got sick, their apartment filled with canvases, a Sunday afternoon: “It’s called the Bridge of Sighs,” Peter said, and stepped back from the easel so she could see what he’d done. All this time later here it was before her, an enclosed white bridge with two stone-grated windows high over the canal, somehow dimmer in life than it had been in her husband’s luminous painting.

  She crossed the bridge and spent some time wandering, watching the movement of boats from the flooded sides of canals, from the arcing bridges, these crafts gliding on the water streets. She came upon a narrow canal that Peter had never painted, a place where the water hadn’t reached the level of the promenade, and for the first time all day she was perfectly alone. She had lost track of where she was. A residential quarter far from St. Mark’s Square, houses crowded tall and silent on either side. The water of the canal was almost still.

  Zoë sat on a step and pulled her knees in close to her chest. She would have to buy food soon, and then the eighteen euros would deplete still further. She’d been dimly aware of how little money she had when she’d bought the train ticket, but it somehow hadn’t registered, all she’d really thought of was the next destination, and now she didn’t have the money to either get out of Venice or stay here. She could call her family, but she knew they’d only buy her a plane ticket back to Michigan. She could go to the American consulate, but what would they do except return her to the United States? She was looking at the rippling shadows the houses cast on the canal in the end-of-afternoon light, thinking of how she’d paint this water if she still had money for paint, and this was when she became aware of footsteps. A tall man in jeans and an expensive-looking sweater, dark curly hair and sunglasses that reflected her own pale face when he looked at her. He stopped before her and said something that she didn’t immediately comprehend.

  “Parla inglese?” she asked, in what was meant to be a steady voice. It came out wavery.

  “Can I be of any help at all?” he asked.

  There was a fleeting second when she thought she smelled Peter’s cologne in the air.

  “I don’t know,” she said. No one else was on the street, and she wondered if he’d followed her here.

  “You’re quite wet,” he said gently.

  Her jeans were in terrible condition, now that she looked at them—soaked past the knees and filthy. Her tennis shoes were waterlogged.

  “I went wading,” she explained.

  He extended a hand. “Rafael.”

  “Zoë.”

  “Zoë, may I buy you a cup of coffee?”

  “You may,” she said. There was no reason why not. She wasn’t one to decline offers of coffee from strange men. She hadn’t had coffee all day, or food for that matter, and it was nearly evening. “Would you mind buying me dinner instead?” she asked.

  “Tell me about yourself,” Rafael said. He had taken her to a small dark restaurant not far from where he’d found her, a place so narrow that she might have walked past it without noticing. The street outside was shadowed and still. He’d led her to a table in a far back corner, and now he was sipping red wine while she attacked a plate of pasta.

  “I’m a painter,” she said. “I was a painter, I mean.”

  “I see. And where are you from?”

  “The United States. But I’ve been traveling for a long time.”

  “You’re traveling alone?”

  “I am,” she said.

  “Do you have any family?”

  “A brother. I haven’t spoken to him in a while.” Memories of a pay phone in a hotel lobby in Albania, the desk clerk glaring as she capped the whiskey.

  “There’s no one else?”

  “My parents died in a car accident when I was little.” This wasn’t at all true—her parents were a seldom-thought-of presence in the suburbs of Ann Arbor, probably worried about her, faded to shadows now—but wasn’t she free to reinvent herself? This wasn’t her continent. “I have no children.”

  “But you’re married,” he said. She still wore the ring.

  “He’s dead.”

  “I’m sorry. How long have you been traveling, Zoë?”

  “Two years? Maybe three. I haven’t really kept track.”

  “A drifter.” Rafael smiled to soften the blow of the word.

  She had been reaching for her wineglass but found herself stilled by the idea. Memories of Greece, of Slovakia, of the Arctic, dark cities. “I suppose,” she said. “Yes, I suppose you could say that.”

  “I have a confession to make.” Rafael had taken off his sunglasses. His eyes were blue, and she thought him handsome; there was an easy grace in every movement, a confidence in his gaze. She liked his smile.

  “What sort of confession?” She was interested in the confession, but more interested in her pasta. It was the first time she’d eaten that day and she was having a hard time chewing slowly.

  “I followed you for a while before I approached you.”

  A quick bright star of light caught in an ice cube as she raised her water glass to her lips.

  “Really,” she said.

  “And my interest, if I may be entirely candid, was partly economic in nature. You appear to be—forgive me for speaking so bluntly—a girl of limited means.”

  “You could say that.” Zoë was aware of her appearance. She knew she hadn’t been paying enough attention to it. The cuffs of her sweater were fraying and a seam was coming apart at the shoulder. It had been some time since she’d washed her hair.

  “It happens,” he said, “that there’s a job I need done. It would take no more than an hour of your time.”

  She had all at once the same feeling she’d had those years ago on the ice outside Tuktoyaktuk, when f
or an instant she’d thought she’d seen Peter standing on top of the snow and she’d been seized by a desperate desire to flee. Rafael’s questions, she couldn’t help but notice, seemed designed to establish that she was alone in the world. Put down your glass, she told herself. Stand up from the table, thank Rafael for the meal, and walk out of the restaurant.

  “What kind of job?” she asked, instead of doing any of these things.

  “A simple delivery.”

  “Of what?”

  “A small package,” he said. “It happens to be a matter of the utmost delicacy. You’ll deliver a small package to an address near here, and in return I’ll pay you a hundred euros.”

  “In advance.”

  “Half in advance, half when you return.” He glanced at his watch. “I’ll be waiting for you here, at this table.”

  “We’re doing this now?” she asked.

  “In thirty minutes,” he said.

  “Why would you send someone you don’t know, if it’s a matter of utmost delicacy?”

  “You’re at hand,” he said. “All you have to do is knock on the door and tell whoever answers that you have a message from Rafael. You’ll step into the building, give them the package, and you’ll be on your way.”

  “And you’ll pay me a hundred euros for that?”

  “It’s important to me to see that the package gets delivered, but it isn’t possible for me to do it myself.”

  “I see.” There were things she could accomplish with a hundred euros. She could pay for a hostel for a few nights, and perhaps that would be long enough to find a new job. It was suddenly possible that she hadn’t reached the end after all. She wanted very much not to go home.