Ann Patchett: State of Wonder

“A memorial service. You call it a memorial service when you don’t have a body,” Karen said.

“I’m sorry,” Marina said. “Memorial service.”

Karen leaned around the open archway to the den. The boys in their sweatshirts and flannel pajama pants slumped into the endlessly long corduroy couch. The smallest, palest boy lay over Pickles like a rug. They were bound to the television screen as if by wires. “It’s amazing what they hear,” she said in a low voice. “They don’t even have to be listening but their ears just pick it up, then I put them to bed at night and one of them says, ‘When are we having the funeral for Daddy?’ ” Karen poured herself a glass of wine and when she wagged the bottle in Marina’s direction Marina nodded.

“Funeral,” the middle boy called out without looking at them. He giggled for a second and then stopped.

Marina thought of that muddy ground where Anders was buried and reached for her glass. “I’m sorry,” she said to Karen.

“Benjy, stop that,” Karen said in a sharp voice. “No, no, it’s just something I try to be aware of. Did Anders ever tell you I majored in Russian literature in college? I’ve been thinking I should find some Russian friends. Then we could talk anywhere. Or maybe it’s just that we could talk about Chekhov anywhere.” She took her wine to the other side of the kitchen and opened the louvered door to the big walk-in pantry. Marina followed her inside. Even the pantry was neat, bright boxes of cereal standing together in a line of diminishing height. Karen returned to her point, her voice lowered. “Sometimes I think they can hear the conversations people have about us down the street. If you listened to them talk you’d think they knew everything that was going on. I mean, they don’t understand it all but somewhere or other they’ve heard it and they remember. Do you ever wonder when you stopped being able to hear everything?” Karen asked.

“I hadn’t thought about it.” Marina had no idea how much her hearing had deteriorated over the course of her life.

Karen looked blank for a minute as if part of her had walked out of the room and then, just as quickly, returned. “I got a letter today.”

There was no question and still she said Anders’ name, her heart thrumming like a hummingbird’s heart.

Karen nodded and pulled one of those same blue envelopes out of the pocket of her sweater. She set it face up on the palm of her open hand and together they stared at it like a thing that could at any minute unfold a pair of wings. There was Anders’ clear parochial penmanship across the front. Karen Eckman. . Eden Prairie. Marina liked to tell him he was the only doctor she ever knew who wrote like a Catholic school girl. “It’s the second one I’ve had this week,” Karen said. “The other one came on Tuesday but he wrote it later, the first of March. He was sicker then.”

Marina opened her mouth. There was something she was supposed to say but she couldn’t imagine what it would be. He was dead, he was sick, he was not so sick. The story rewound until the only conclusion to draw would be that Anders gets better. He leaves the jungle and returns to Manaus. He flies from Manaus and starts again from home, only this time they know enough to refuse to let him go. Marina wondered how many letters were still out there and when they would drift in, their postal route having mistakenly sent them on a detour through Bhutan. A person didn’t have to stretch very far to find a logical explanation for how this had happened, so why did Marina feel it necessary to tilt back her glass and take down all of the wine in a swallow?

“That experience, going out to your mailbox and finding a stack of catalogues and bills and a letter from your dead husband, there’s not been anything in my life so far to get me ready for that.” Karen unfolded the envelope and looked at the words but just as quickly looked away from them. She looked to Marina instead. “It makes you understand why e-mail is better,” she said. “You get an e-mail from your dead husband and you know that he’s alive out there somewhere. You get a letter from your dead husband and you don’t know anything at all.”

“Can you tell me what he said?” Marina was whispering. Maybe the letters were the one thing the boys didn’t know about yet. She wanted to ask if there was anything about Dr. Swenson and where they were working. She wanted to know where in the jungle she should look.

“It isn’t really about anything,” Karen said, as if that was something she should apologize for. She handed Marina the letter.

February 15th

Would it alarm you too much to tell you I am often alarmed in this place? What you deserve is not honesty but the sort of husband who is capable of putting up a Brave Front. But if I put up a Brave Front now after telling you so much about how miserable I am, if I paid Nkomo or one of the Saturns to put a Brave Front together for me on a separate sheet of paper which I could then copy over in my own coward’s handwriting, you would see through the ploy immediately. Then you would have to get on a plane and hire a boat and a guide and come down here to find me because you would know (having never seen a single Brave Front out of me in your life) how unimaginable things must be. So I won’t alarm you by trying to muster up courage. You’ve always been the one with all the courage anyway. It’s why you’re staying home with three boys and I’m vacationing. It’s why you were able to pull that nail out of Benjy’s heel last summer with pliers. I am not brave. I have a fever that comes on at seven in the morning and stays for two hours. By four in the afternoon it’s back and I am nothing but a ranting pile of ash. Most days now I have a headache and I worry that some tiny Amazonian animal is eating a hole through my cerebral cortex, and the only thing I want in the world, the only thing that would give meaning or sense to this existence, would be the chance to lay my head in your lap. You would put your hand in my hair, I know you would do that for me. Such is your bravery, such is my good fortune. Damn these ridiculous sheets of paper. There’s never any space. I pray like a babbling fundamentalist now that I am in Brazil and tonight I will pray that the letter carrier sends this to you so that you can feel the full weight of my love. Kiss the boys for me. Kiss the inside of your wrist.—A

Marina refolded it and gave it back to Karen, who returned it to her pocket. She put her hand on a shelf near several boxes of microwave popcorn to steady herself. It was incalculably worse than the letter from Dr. Swenson. This was Anders announcing the onset of his own death, his voice so clear and plain he might as well have crowded into the pantry with them and read it aloud. “Who are Nkomo and the Saturns?”

Karen shook her head. “He mentions names sometimes but I don’t know them. I can’t even imagine how many of the letters got lost. The letter from Dr. Swenson could have gotten lost, the one saying he was dead.” Karen ran a finger in an absent circle around the top of a can of peas. “I think I’d rather wait on the service until you come back. I’d like it if you could be here.”

Marina looked down at her, blinked, nodded.

“I never say it to them,” she said, looking towards the slightly open pantry door in the direction of her boys and their television, “that I’m not sure he’s dead. I know they need to have one answer, even if it’s the worst answer you could think of. Hope is a horrible thing, you know. I don’t know who decided to package hope as a virtue because it’s not. It’s a plague. Hope is like walking around with a fishhook in your mouth and somebody just keeps pulling it and pulling it. Everybody thinks I’m a train wreck because Anders is dead but it’s really so much worse than that. I’m still hoping that this Dr. Swenson, for some reason I couldn’t possibly put together, has lied about everything, that she’s keeping him, or she’s lost him somewhere.” Then Karen stopped and a sudden light of clarity came over her face and the panic fell away from her voice. “And I say that and I know it isn’t true. No one would do that. But then that would mean he’s dead.” She put the question to Marina directly. “Is he dead?” she asked. “I just don’t feel it. I would feel it, wouldn’t I?” Her eyes filled up and she brushed the tears back with two fingers.