Ann Patchett - State of Wonder

Three women came into the store then, one of them holding a baby, and in another minute a couple came in behind them. It seemed that they all knew one another, the way they were talking. The woman with the baby passed her baby over to another one of the women so that she could look at cooking oil.

“I need to sit down,” Barbara said. She did not say this dramatically. The two Bovenders left the store together to sit on the cement steps out front. Almost immediately Jackie came back in to get her a bottle of water.

“Ah, your poor friend,” Milton said to Marina. “I am very sorry.”

Marina nodded, unable to focus her eyes on Milton or the Bovenders or anything in the store.

When the Bovenders did get up from the steps, after Barbara had finished her bottle of water, they did not come back into the store. Rodrigo wrote out the same well-ordered receipt to charge to the Vogel account and then gathered up the things they’d wanted and put them into bags: dryer sheets, tennis balls, a new sun hat, mangoes and bananas. Marina in her rush to be unpleasant had likely broken the one thread she could have followed into the jungle. Maybe they found Anders annoying, but in his affable way he had managed to wear them down. Still, she liked to think if she had been the one who died and he was coming in as the replacement, his patience would have been limited as well.

Jackie sat up front with Milton on the way to Ponta Negra while Marina sat with Barbara in the back. They kept the windows down. In the wind tunnel that roared through the backseat, strands of Barbara’s hair would intermittently fly out and strike Marina in the face even though Barbara did her best to gather her hair in her hands and hold it down. Jackie was prone towards car sickness, and the road to the beach was neither smooth nor straight.

“It wouldn’t be better if you were cool?” Milton asked Jackie. Jackie said nothing.

“He needs the fresh air,” Barbara shouted from the back.

Marina might have noted that the air was not particularly fresh but she refrained. The Bovenders had invited her to the beach and she was determined to be grateful that they had extended themselves. When he was invited to come along on the outing and bring his car, Milton had said they needed to leave no later than six a.m. The beach, like the market, was strictly a morning affair. But the Bovenders would not hear of six. They claimed they were useless until nine at the very earliest, and while Milton and Marina were waiting for them in front of the apartment at that designated hour, the Bovenders did not make an appearance until nearly ten. It was, Marina thought, a bad start. “Wouldn’t you get motion sickness from surfing?” she asked, raising her voice to be heard over the din of circulating air. They were going fast; Jackie had said he wanted to go fast in order to get out of the car as soon as possible.

“Not a problem,” he said.

“He can surf a killer wave but on boats,” Barbara said. “My God, he can’t even look at a boat. He can’t walk down a dock.”

“Baby, please,” Jackie said, his voice weak.

“Sorry,” Barbara said, and turned her head towards the window.

“I don’t have any problems when I drive,” Jackie said.

As they rounded another hairpin curve a silky white goat trotted into the road and Milton slammed the brakes. Marina, who was not given to car sickness in the least, felt her stomach lurch up. The people in the car understood that the goat had escaped his fate by no more than four inches, but the goat understood nothing. It looked up, mildly puzzled, sniffed the blacktop, and then went on. Jackie opened the door and vomited lightly.

“I can’t let you drive,” Milton said.

“I know,” Jackie said, and he covered his eyes with his hand.

The night before at dinner the Bovenders had made a list of everything Marina should see while she was in Manaus. “There isn’t much to do around here,” Jackie had said, “so you really ought to make the effort.” They offered to take her to the beach and the Natural Science Museum but both required a car. Barbara took out her cell phone at the dinner table and called Milton. His number was programmed in.

The Bovenders had come to her. They had waited nearly a week after their unfortunate first meeting but then they called. They wanted to hear about Anders. They assumed, incorrectly, that Marina knew a good deal more about his death than she had told them.

“But what did Annick say?” Barbara leaned in close enough that Marina could smell her perfume, a mix of lavender and lime.

“She said that he died of a fever. That’s all I know. And I know that she buried him there.” The restaurant was dark with a cement floor and dried out palm fronds hanging over the bar. There were two pinball machines in the corner and they chirped and clanged even when there was no one there with the change it took to play them.

Barbara ran a tiny red cocktail straw in circles, nervously stirring up the contents of her glass. “I’m sure it would have been almost impossible for her to get the body back.”

“But people do,” Marina said. “I realize Dr. Swenson isn’t sentimental but I imagine she would have felt differently had it been her husband. Anders’ wife would have liked to see him buried at home.” She would have liked it had he never gone in the first place.

“Annick has a husband?” Barbara said.

“Not that I know of.”

“Did you speak to Annick about what should be done with Dr. Eckman?” Barbara was more inclined to do the talking. Jackie was busying himself with the hard salted strips of plantains that were served in the place of chips.

“From what I understand she doesn’t have a phone. She wrote a letter and by the time it got to Vogel he’d been dead two weeks.” Marina took a sip of some fruited rum punch Jackie had ordered for all of them. “She wrote the letter to Mr. Fox.”

Barbara and Jackie looked at one another. “Mr. Fox,” they said together ominously.

Marina put down her drink.

“Do you know him?” Barbara asked.

“He’s the president of Vogel,” Marina said, her voice even. “I work for him.”

“Is he awful?”

Marina looked at the girl and smiled. In truth she was irritated with Mr. Fox. He had gone ahead and sent her another phone and several different antibiotics and enough Lariam to see her through another six months in South America. If he had intended it as a message, it wasn’t a message that pleased her. “No,” she said neutrally, “not awful at all.”

Barbara waved her hand. “I shouldn’t have said that. But you have to understand—”

“We’re very protective of Annick,” Jackie said, nibbling the side off a plantain strip.

Barbara nodded vigorously, giving her long, jeweled earrings a good swing. Barbara had overdressed for dinner, wearing a sleeveless silk top in emerald green. She was such a pretty girl. It must be hard for her, Marina imagined, to have no place to go. “Of course you’d be upset about your friend. We’re upset about Dr. Eckman ourselves, but whatever happened it wasn’t Annick’s fault. It’s just that she’s very focused. She has to be.”

Now that Marina was in the Amazon it seemed that there was probably no end of things that could kill a person without any assignment of blame, unless perhaps the blame was assigned to Mr. Fox. “I never thought it was her fault.”

This news came to Barbara as a great relief. “I’m so glad!” she said. “Once you understand Annick you know there’s nobody like her. I was thinking that maybe you hadn’t been around her in a while, or you’d forgotten,” she said, seeming to know things she could not possibly know. “She’s such a force of nature. Her work is thrilling, but really, it’s almost beside the point. She’s what’s so amazing, the person herself, don’t you think? I try to imagine what it would have been like to have a mother like that, a grandmother, a woman who was completely fearless, someone who saw the world without limitations.”