the leaves and the vines and all of that. In one of his letters he said he felt like they were choking him at night. Where Anders grew up in Crookston there are hardly any trees at all. Have you ever been to Crookston? It’s nothing but prairie up there. He used to say that trees made him nervous, and he was joking, but still. He isn’t cut out for this. He isn’t some mediator who’s been trained to talk down the difficult cases. I understand why you sent him. Everybody likes Anders. But if Vogel has inflated its stock price then that’s Vogel’s problem. It’s not his job to fix it. He can’t fix it, and you can’t just leave him out there to try.”
Marina imagined that Karen had been making this speech in her head every morning and night while she brushed her teeth, never thinking she’d have the opportunity to deliver it to Mr. Fox himself.
“He’s never going to say this to you but even if he hasn’t been able to bring this nutcase back it’s time for him to come home. We’ve got three boys here, Mr. Fox. You can’t expect them to finish out the school year without their father.”
This time Marina recognized the sensation at the onset, the helpless buckling of joints, and was able to reach for the tall chair at the kitchen island. Surely it was Mr. Fox’s part to give Karen the letter, but then with a fresh wave of grief, Marina remembered that the letter was in her own pocket. She pulled out the chair beside her. “Sit down, Karen,” she said. “Sit next to me.”
The moment did not bring to mind her own losses. What rushed before Marina was the inherent cruelty of telling. It didn’t matter how gently the news was delivered, with how much sorrow and compassion, it was a blow to cut Karen Eckman in two.
“Anders?” Karen said, and then she said it again, louder, as if he were in the other room, as if she both believed what she had been told and denied it. All the cold that swept through Minnesota came into Karen Eckman and she stammered and shook. Her fingers began to rake at the outside of her arms. She asked to see the letter but then she refused to touch the thing, so thin and blue, half unfolded. She told Marina to read it aloud.
There was no way to say she wouldn’t do it but still, no matter how much Marina tried to edit the words as they came out of her mouth she couldn’t make them into sympathy. “Given our location, this rain,” she said tentatively, leaving out the part about governments and their petty bureaucracies. “We chose to bury him here.” She could not bring herself to say that this burial was no small task. She should have read the first paragraph, as banal as it was. Without it what was left didn’t even sound like a letter. It sounded like some thrifty telegram.
“She buried him there?” Karen said. The bellows of her lungs strained for nothing. There was no air in the kitchen. “Jesus, what are you saying to me? He’s in the ground?”
“Tell me who I can call for you. Someone needs to be here.” Marina tried to hold her hands but Karen shook her off.
“Get him out of there! You can’t just leave him. He isn’t going to stay there.”
It was the moment to promise everything, but as hard as she tried she could not assemble a single sentence of comfort. “I can’t get him out,” Marina said, and it was a terrible admission because now she could see very clearly the mud and the leaves, the ground closing in the rain, growing over immediately in tender saplings and tough grasses until it was impossible to find the place where he was. She could feel Anders’ strangling panic in all those leaves and the panic became her own. “I don’t know how. Karen, look at me, you have to tell me who to call. You have to let me call someone.”
But Karen couldn’t understand or couldn’t hear or didn’t care what might have made things easier for Marina. The two of them were alone in this. Mr. Fox had been driven from the room by the sound, the keening of Karen Eckman’s despair. She slipped down from her chair and sank to the floor to cry against the retriever, wrapping her grief around his sturdy torso while the poor animal shivered and licked at her arm. She cried there until she’d dampened the dog’s fur.
What idiots they were thinking they knew what they were doing! Marina had had to announce deaths to family members in the hospital when she had been a resident, not often, only if the attending was too busy or too imperious to be bothered. No matter how hard these daughters and fathers and brothers and wives had cried, how tightly they clung to her, it had never been that difficult to extricate herself. She simply had to raise her head and there was a nurse who knew more about how to hold them and what to say. Behind her there were charts full of phone numbers that had been compiled in advance. Available clergy were listed for any denomination, grief counselors and support groups that met on Wednesdays. The most she had been asked to do was write an order for a sedative. Marina had made the announcement of Anders’ death while giving no thought to death’s infrastructure. What about those boys standing in front of the school now, the snow growing into piles on their shoulders while they waited for their mother? How could Marina have forgotten to account for them? Why didn’t they know to find somebody first, a dozen somebodies standing ready around Karen while she absorbed the violence of the news? All of those people at the Christmas party, the women in reindeer sweaters, the men in red ties, the people Marina had seen laughing in this kitchen only a few months ago, leaning against each other with their whiskeyed eggnog, they were desperately needed now! And if they hadn’t been smart enough to bring family and friends, could they not have thought at least to slip a few sample cards of Xanax into their pockets? There was no waiting out the situation. Giving it time would only mean the Eckman boys would start to panic as a teacher led them back into the school building and told them to wait inside. They would think that their mother was dead; that’s where a child’s mind goes — always to the loss of the mother.
Marina stood up from the floor, though in her memory she had never sat down on it. She went to the phone, looking for an address book, a Rolodex, anything with numbers. What she found were two copies of the
“Call someone,” Marina said in a low voice. “Call anyone you can think of and send them over here. Call the school. Go to the school and get the boys.”
When she came back to the kitchen she saw that Pickles was lying out on the floor to the right of his owner, his sodden head resting at the joint of Karen’s hip, and to her left sat Mr. Fox, who had miraculously stepped forward in her brief absence. He was petting Karen’s head with a slow and rhythmical assurance. “It’s all right,” he said quietly. “It’s going to be all right.” Her head was against his chest and her tears had darkened the stripes on his tie from blue to black. And while it wasn’t all right, nothing close to it, she seemed able to hear the steady repetition of the words and was trying to breathe regularly.
Marina and Mr. Fox left the house an hour later, after Karen’s mother had been located, after her sister came in with her husband, bringing word that their brother was driving up from Iowa, after Linn Hilder had collected the Eckman boys from school and taken them to her own house until a sensible plan for breaking the news to them could be devised. From the moment Mr. Fox had first stood in the door of the lab with that blue envelope in his hand it had never occurred to Marina that there might be guilt where Anders’ death was concerned. It was an accident as much as being pulled under by the current in the Amazon River would have been an accident. But as they stepped into the smack of frigid wind with only Pickles there to see them out, she wondered if the people inside thought of Mr. Fox as culpable. The days were still short and the sun was already low. Certainly without Mr. Fox in the picture, the Eckman boys would be doing their homework or rolling up a snowman in the backyard. Anders would be looking at the clock in their office, saying he was hungry, his body already leaning towards the door in their thriving, living world. She thought it was possible that even if Karen Eckman and her people didn’t blame Mr. Fox in the greatest hour of their grief, the blame might still come to them later on, after time and sleep had untangled their thinking. She certainly blamed him for leaving her alone to tell Karen, and for not holding her arm as she carefully maneuvered her way down the unshoveled walk to the car. Did she blame him for sending Anders to his death in Brazil? She struggled with the handle on the passenger-side door that was half frozen down while Mr. Fox slipped into the driver’s side. She brushed the snow off the window with her hand and
