Deep-Holes, by Alice Munroe

Peter went into medicine, Savanna into law.

To her own surprise, Sally became interested in geology. One night, in a trusting mood after sex, she told Alex about the islands—though not about her fantasy that Kent was now living on one or another of them. She said that she had forgotten many of the details she used to know, and that she should look all these places up in the encyclopedia, where she had first got her information. Alex said that everything she wanted to know could probably be found on the Internet now. Surely not something so obscure, she said, and he got her out of bed and downstairs, and there in no time, before her eyes, was Tristan da Cunha, a green plate in the South Atlantic Ocean, with information galore. She was shocked and turned away, and Alex, who was disappointed in her, asked why.

“I don’t know. Maybe I don’t want it so real.”

He said that she needed something to do. He had just retired from teaching at the time and was planning to write a book. He needed an assistant and he could not call on graduate students now as he had been able to when he was still on the faculty. (She didn’t know if this was true or not.) She reminded him that she knew nothing about rocks, and he said never mind that, he could use her for scale, in the photographs.

So she became the small figure in black or bright clothing, contrasting with the ribbons of Silurian or Devonian rock or with the gneiss formed by intense compression, folded and deformed by clashes of the North American and the Pacific plates to make the present continent. Gradually she learned to use her eyes and apply her knowledge, till she could stand in an empty suburban street and realize that far beneath her shoes was a crater filled with rubble that had never been seen, because there had been no eyes to see it at its creation or through the long history of its being made and filled and hidden and lost. Alex did such things the honor of knowing about them, and she admired him for that, although she knew enough not to say so. They were good friends in these last years, which she didn’t know were their last years. He went into the hospital for an operation, taking his charts and photographs with him, and on the day he was supposed to come home he died.