Andrea Barrett - Ship Fever - Stories

“Fine,” Bianca said. “A little ragged, a little jagged. I almost got arrested but that was last night. You have any coffee?”

Rose poured her a cup, noting the fine tremor in Bianca’s hands and the way her pale hair stuck out in all directions. Rings beneath her eyes, a stain on the front of her shirt; a general air of funky poverty. For the last few months she’d been supporting herself by proofreading organic gardening articles for a magazine in Vermont. Rose suspected that Bianca needed another loan.

Bianca rose from her chair and paced the small room. “What a drive,” she said again.

Rose tried to shape the cloud of her sister’s words into a plot as linear as the graph on her computer screen. “When did you leave?”

“Last night — seven o’clock? Maybe eight?”

“From Brattleboro ?”

Somehow Bianca had been on the road for almost twenty-four hours. Rose had driven twice to the house Bianca had shared for the last year with two potters, a fiber artist, a disk jockey for an alternative radio station, and an herbalist — a three-hour drive, no more, up Route 91 to a tiny road that led back into the hills. In the middle of nowhere stood a fussy Victorian with porches and peculiar windows. There were chickens in the yard, and two tethered goats and a mound of firewood as big as a shed. Rural, and yet nothing like Hammondsport. In the vegetable garden off to the side was a good-sized patch of marijuana, chastely surrounded by tasseled corn. Inside, dope plants hung in the stairwell like dead men, drying upside down.

Bianca stuck both hands into her mass of hair with her fingers outspread like rakes. “I didn’t drive straight, ” she said impatiently.

When Rose raised an eyebrow Bianca laughed. “Not straight through,” she said. “Not straight, either. We were having a little party at the house, checking out the new weed. And then I got this idea to visit you, and I got in the car but when I hit Brattleboro I remembered I hadn’t seen Tommy in a while. I told you about him. So I drove over to North Conway and woke him up, and he was crabby at first but we had some drinks and did a few numbers and then we got to talking about Margie and Don — you remember, my friends from Vancouver? — and Tommy said they’d moved to Maine so I thought I’d just buzz over and see them but when I got there they weren’t home and so I decided to swing by Keene and see another friend but halfway there this cop stopped me and…”

“Bianca,” Rose said quietly. “When’s the last time you slept?”

“Tuesday?” Bianca said. “I think.” It was Thursday now.

Rose stared at the data she’d been plotting and then turned her computer off. Bianca said, “I think I called Dad last night.”

“You did?” Rose said. She’d had a rule for some time, which was one of the things that stood like a wall between her and Bianca; she forbade herself to dwell on their past. At the moment she was also forbidding herself to think of their father, who had recently announced that he was getting married and was considering selling the winery.

“I’m not sure. I think I might have. From a phone booth — New Hampshire? Maine? I don’t know, I don’t remember what I said to him. I think I was stupid.”

Bianca in a phone booth in the middle of the night, babbling at their father the way she was babbling now; it was more than Rose could bear to contemplate. If she’d known how to do so, she would have cut her past away with a knife. “How about I take you home?” she said. “I’ll make you some dinner, you can have my bed. I’ll sleep on the couch.”

“No, no, no,” Bianca said. “Here. I’ll sleep here. On the floor — I don’t want to be in your way, I don’t want to be any trouble. And I brought food and stuff to drink — everything for a picnic.” She had this plan, which she’d hatched in the car and would not reveal to her sister yet. It depended on them staying in the lab.

She reached into her knapsack and took out a bottle of Jim Beam and another of tequila; lemons, salt, tortilla chips, two cans of bean dip, and a jar of salsa; then a loaf of dill-and-wheatberry bread and an ounce of dope, a chunk of hash, some papers, and a pipe. “This cop?” she said. “Last night, when he stopped me, I was sure he was going to look in here. He asked me why I was driving so late, and…”

“Okay,” Rose said. “I get the picture.” She shut the office door.

“Relax,” Bianca said. “Who’s here? You’re the only one who keeps such wacky hours.”

She pushed the door open again and Rose let it stay that way. Bianca was right: no one else would be in the building except a few security guards and the night cleaning staff. Perhaps a handful of graduate students, running experiments or crunching numbers — but no one like Rose, none of the senior staff. They’d all be safely back in Newton or Concord, having dinner with families and dogs. She didn’t socialize with them. She was single, she lived by herself in a studio with a broken-down couch and a wall of books and no TV. She had no friends, no pets, at the moment no lover. The lab was cheery and well-lit, the only place in the world where she felt at home. Her sister was here.

Bianca said, “So?” and Rose said, “Well. We could camp out here, I guess.”

We demolished almost everything in the pack. Bianca gave Rose a bracelet she’d picked up in Maine and Rose clasped the heavy metal around her wrist. After midnight it started to rain, and we opened the window in Rose’s office and stuck our heads out to catch the falling water. This felt so good that we exchanged a glance and then dropped through the window to the empty ground below. We were as high as kites, as high as Denali, which Bianca had once climbed but which Rose had never seen. Bianca was perfectly comfortable, but Rose felt like she’d lost her mind.

We ran across the wet grass until we reached the fringe of woods at the edge of the grounds. A creek wound between the trees, and Bianca was the first to shed her clothes and flop down in the shallow water. We were both soaked to the skin already, and so Rose didn’t resist when Bianca grabbed her ankle and pulled her in. The rain was cool but not cold, the night was warm but not hot. The water flowing through the creek seemed to have no temperature at all.

Rose leaned against a boulder with her legs floating in the creek and watched the stars swirl and dance above her head. One star blazed red and then crossed the path of another. It might have been a satellite, or perhaps it was only a plane. Her sense of time was so deranged that she couldn’t judge its speed. Against the sky she saw substrates and binding sites, inhibitors and antagonists. She said to Bianca, “Don’t you miss doing science?”

Bianca, rolling happily in the mud on the bank, said, “Don’t you miss this?” Her white skin was painted brown. She meant, not the mud specifically, but the fact that it was late, that we were alone, that our minds were shattered almost completely, and that we were doing something forbidden. This was the state in which, as girls, we’d held at bay our mother’s loss and the taunting of our schoolmates. This was the state in which the rivalry between us dissolved. We couldn’t mention the dissolution because we seldom admitted the rivalry. How could we have admitted that we eyed each other’s lives and work with envy?

“I do,” Rose said. “I miss it something awful. But I’d miss work more if I couldn’t do it.”

We did not talk about the scene that had led Bianca to abandon science: a moment, in Bianca’s third year of graduate school, when we had fought bitterly over the interpretation of some data for a paper we were writing together. It was not the argument that had sundered us but Rose’s refusal to join Bianca in a certain ritual during which we might have asked our dead mother for advice. Rose had firmly turned her back on this.