They’ve found a piece of that plane, says the radio, the one that disappeared almost a year ago. A piece of that plane has washed ashore on the coast of Madagascar, battered and wave-tossed, full of stories it’s just dying to tell someone. Experts on the radio say this means the plane likely crashed in the Indian Ocean.
“Of course it crashed in the Indian Ocean,” says Caroline, stirring her coffee. She puts no milk in her coffee, and no sugar, but she stirs it anyway, around and around, just to watch it move. Nora, sitting across from her sister, is lost in the black whirlpool in her cup. She is thinking about lost things.
“Well, people thought it was sucked into a black hole,” she says, “or like a wormhole or like some space-time thing.”
Nora is remembering how Christopher used to explain things like black holes to her, using the precisely-chosen language of someone who is too smart for his own good. She tries to remember the black holes themselves, and how they worked, but she can’t. All she can conjure is greed. One hungry slurp and a whole plane can be gone, a whole meteor, like a fly into a frog’s mouth.
“People are seriously dumb,” says Caroline. She puts down her spoon. “That’s all I’m saying.”
Caroline writes test questions for the ACT, and has little faith in other people’s intelligence.
Nora sips her own coffee, which contains both milk and sugar. They’re in the kitchen of her small apartment. It’s cramped but it gets morning sun. Nora is using Christopher’s cup, a kitschy and faded garage-sale mug that she gave him once, so that he’d have his own at her apartment. On the side is a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon: “What I lack in ambition,” it says, “I make up for in absolutely nothing.”
“This is Christopher’s mug,” she tells Caroline, casually. She’s been trying not to say it.
“God, I knew you were going to say something like that,” says Caroline. “You’re such a piner, Nora. Don’t start pining on me, please. How entertaining do you think that is?”
“I’m not here to entertain you,” says Nora, in a voice so soft it sounds lost at sea.
“No,” says Caroline. “I’m here to help you. So if I don’t feel like going into therapy mode, I’m not going to, thanks.”
Caroline goes to the sink to wash out her empty mug. She uses it to water the plants on the window sill, which are doing surprisingly well for having not been watered in a week. When Christopher left, Nora had the urge to kill something.
Caroline moves through Nora’s apartment with the license of an older sister. She touches what she wants, she opens what she wants, she adjusts what she wants. She thinks she can do no wrong here, Nora sees. She thinks she will fix all the things Nora has neglected.
“Are we doing this or what?” says Caroline.
When the plane disappeared, it was summer and Christopher’s air conditioner had broken. Nora was secretly glad, because she loved a good mystery and because she hated air conditioning. Christopher’s apartment was always too cold. He had a pet parakeet and Nora didn’t know how it survived in the airtight, climate-controlled living room. Weren’t these things from the tropics? The parakeet would make little kissing noises to itself while they were having sex sometimes, as if feeling left out. Afterwards, you had to murmur to it, make it feel wanted again. “Pretty bird,” you had to say. “Pretty bird.”
“God, imagine all those people,” Nora said, when the radio told them about the disappearing plane. “Here one minute, gone the next.”
“It probably crashed into the Indian Ocean,” Christopher said. He was by the window with a screwdriver, trying to fix the air conditioning unit. Christopher was a physicist and he was good at seeing the mechanical workings of things, how tiny movements led to other movements.
Nora pictured the bottom of the Indian Ocean. Would they have reached it yet?
Christopher gave her a key to his storage unit the day before he left for Germany, where he would be doing a two-year physics degree. “It’s a copy,” he told her. She took this to mean that she would not be seeing him again.
On Nora’s bed is a box of things she is supposed to move to the storage unit for him: some plates, a couple of dress shirts, the lamp from his bedside table. She presses the switch on the lamp, which she has done many times before. Nothing happens.
At the bottom of the box is an old toothbrush, which Christopher has somewhat inexplicably kept. Nora runs her fingers over the bristles, over all the mouth cells clinging to them. The remnants of meals he ate with her, the remnants of her own spit in his mouth. The smell of Christopher’s toothpaste, which is the smell of his teeth. Maybe one day this will brush Christopher’s teeth again, she thinks, and her fingertip cells will mix with his mouth cells one more time.
Before they leave for the storage unit, they feed the parakeet, who now sits in Nora’s living room. Caroline makes kissing noises at it. It makes kissing noises back.
“Aw,” says Caroline. “You sure you don’t want me to take him?”
Caroline is, in fact, a compulsive pet hoarder. She has five cats and twelve fish and three rabbits and a rat. Like all hoarders, she calls herself a collector.
The parakeet pecks gently at Caroline’s finger. Mutual love is rare, Nora thinks, and she’s not sure she wants her sister to have it. “I’m keeping it, Caroline,” she says. “I said I would.”
“You don’t owe that man anything,” Caroline says. She pulls her finger from the birdcage and snaps upright to face Nora. “What favor has he ever done for you, huh?”
Nora looks at the parakeet’s little white face, its beady eyes. It’s so hard to relate to birds. They can’t possibly be thinking what you think they’re thinking.
The fact is, parakeets can live for ten to fifteen years, and Christopher’s is only four. By the time this parakeet dies Nora could be old, married to some other man, their children burying Christopher’s parakeet in some idyllic Midwestern backyard.
Nora doesn’t want to think about the strange man who will one day be calling this bird pretty.
No sign of the plane was found in the Indian Ocean. News reports called it a mystery. They talked about “false leads” and “dead ends” and “no trace.” People said it had been pirated, shot down, held political prisoner. People said it had been hit by a meteor. People said it had been swallowed in a wormhole.
“What about black holes?” said Nora. “Who’s to say it wasn’t a black hole? I mean do we really understand these things?”
“Yes,” said Christopher, “we do. Black holes are massive, dense objects that attract all matter and light inside them with their intense gravitational pull. And they exist only in outer space.”
He had fixed the air conditioning unit and they spent their hot Saturday afternoons in his cold apartment. Nora started taking long, scalding baths and pretending that they were Arctic hot springs. From the tub she could hear Christopher murmuring to his parakeet. “Pretty bird,” he said, over and over. He was trying to teach it to talk. “Pretty bird.”
After her baths Nora would walk naked into Christopher’s bedroom and put on a seductive voice. “Well aren’t you the handsome bird?” she would say, taking his hand.
“Not now, Nora,” he’d say. “Your skin is burning.”
Nora and Caroline drive north through the city to Uncle Bob’s Super Storage Center.
“Look, stop thinking about it,” says Caroline. “He’s a dead loss. You know that.”
Things like this are enough to reassure Caroline. She’s engaged to a city planner from New York. She drums her ring fingers on the steering wheel, as if to remind herself they’re still there.
“You’re so young, Nora,” she says. “You’ll find someone. All that.” She’s eight years older, solidly into her thirties.
“Hey, try this,” Caroline says. “A car averages twenty-seven miles per gallon. If gas costs four dollars a gallon, about how much would gas cost for this car to travel two thousand miles?”
“That doesn’t help, Caroline,” says Nora. “That never helps.”
“You didn’t even think about it.”
“I didn’t want to,” says Nora.
Uncle Bob’s Super Storage Center is dark and graying. Paint flakes off the rows and rows of blue doors. Nora can feel the heavy dust behind these doors, as it gathers like storm clouds.
They find Christopher’s unit and fit his key copy inside it. It’s the first time this key has touched this lock, and the storage unit seems to shrink back at the unfamiliar touch, knowing it is not Christopher. Inside, maybe things are shifting, hiding themselves.
Nora heaves open the unit’s flaking blue door. Christopher’s things lie in heaps: rugs, scarves, basketballs, wooden chairs. A stack of unreturned library books. A cup of old pens.
“It’s weird,” says Nora, perching the box atop a crate of dusty file folders. “His apartment is so sparse.” She runs her hand over a tower of teacups, feeling soft cobwebs collect on her fingertips. “I never would have thought he’d have all this stuff.”
“He’s afraid he’ll need it someday,” says Caroline. “That’s the only reason anyone keeps anything.”
In the days before Christopher left for Germany, Nora went to his apartment to help him pack, and stayed there packing late into the evening while he went back to the lab. He was busy finishing up his experiments, or training the new lab techs, or building lasers or whatever it was he did there.
Meanwhile, in his cold, emptying apartment, Nora taped boxes. She addressed them to Christopher, in Germany, in the future, and she imagined this future Christopher picking them up a week later in some European post office. Maybe, she thought, as she blocked out the letters in precise Sharpie, this was a second Christopher—not her Christopher but some alternate, German version. Maybe that was the Christopher who was going to get a physics degree. Maybe her Christopher was staying here in his unfurnished apartment, with nothing but some dishes, a couple shirts, a lamp, and an old toothbrush. And a parakeet. And Nora.
To this German Christopher, she mailed kitchen pots and jeans, and the plain black sheets from Christopher’s bed. She mailed him a few expensive-looking books on thermodynamics, as well as the German copy of Harry Potter Christopher swore he was understanding: Harry Potter und der Stein der Weisen. The boy in the cover illustration had sharp, Germanic cheekbones. These were the things that Christopher was afraid he would need someday.
Then she sat on the stripped bed and waited for Christopher to come back.
Sometimes, during those last evenings alone in Christopher’s apartment, Nora played with the parakeet. This meant standing at its cage for long stretches of time, making kissing noises. Teaching it to talk. “Harry Potter,” Nora tried, “und der stein der weisen.”
“Pretty bird,” said the bird.
“What I lack in ambition,” Nora said, “I make up for in absolutely nothing.”
“Pretty bird,” said the bird.
Now, Nora peers at it through the cage with a dull sense of affinity. The radio confirms that the plane part found does, indeed, belong to the one lost somewhere near the Indian Ocean. Pieces find the shore sometimes, improbably. Sometimes things creep back from the seventy-five percent of this planet that is sea.
Nora sticks a finger through the cage bars and the parakeet bites her. She can feel herself beginning to pine. Caroline, gone home now with her pet collection and her fiancé, is right. Nora bores herself.
Nora goes to her kitchen closet and gets out two cardboard boxes. In one of them, she puts a few plates from her kitchen, a couple of her blouses, her toothbrush. The Calvin and Hobbes mug, still unwashed and ringed from her coffee with Caroline. In the other box, she puts the parakeet.
The parakeet does not like this. He makes very loud, angry kissing noises. Nora box-ties its box and gives it some air holes.
She drives north through the city to Uncle Bob’s Super Storage Center. She leaves the parakeet in the car and carries the other box down the long, gray corridors to Christopher’s storage unit.
Heaving up the blue door, she thinks about leaving a note and decides against it. Instead, she puts the box on top of the one that she left there this morning, and straightens them until they look just so. Nora isn’t sure if Christopher will ever come here to claim the essentials he has left. They are heavy with dust and they cower a little each time the storage unit door is opened, like neglected children.
She goes back to her car and the parakeet. The parakeet has quieted, and now it seems to be muttering softly to itself, as if trying to remember something on the tip of its tongue. Do parakeets have tongues? This is the kind of thing that Christopher would know, if he were here.
Nora drives to the post office. In the parking lot, she uses a Sharpie to trace the German address she has traced so many times. She imagines Christopher’s hands on this box. She imagines him running his finger over her familiar handwriting, opening the box, finding the bones of a bird he might have needed someday. What are the odds of this? she thinks. What are the odds of lost pieces finding their way back to you across oceans? What are the odds of mutual love?
In the post office parking lot, Nora calls Caroline’s cell phone. “I changed my mind,” she says. “You can have the bird.”
The morning Christopher left for Germany, he woke up here, in Nora’s well-heated, fully furnished apartment. He sat at the table, sipping tea from the Calvin and Hobbes mug with his peculiar precise sips, as if his lips can measure tea to the milliliter as it passes over them. He read Harry Potter in German.
Christopher studied the book intently, his mouth moving in the shape of strange vowels, tasting them, measuring them: ö, ü, au. Each whispered sound was like a tiny sigh. The sunlight on his face was dusty and perfect, the yellow of yolks.
Five hours later, he boarded a plane for Berlin. Watching it take off, Nora thought about people lost at sea, and black holes that could swallow you out of the sky in one gulp. And then Christopher’s plane disappeared, out over the Atlantic.