State of Wonder

from the jungle very early on. They were mostly about birds. I showed them to Mr. Fox. I’ll give them to you if you want them.”

“For the boys,” she said. “It would be good I think to keep everything together. For the future.”

Marina was not claustrophobic by nature, and the pantry was as big as a hotel elevator, but she was ready to open the door and step outside. The canned green beans and bottled cranberry juice and packets of instant oatmeal in sweet, assorted flavors were beginning to press towards her, taking up more and more of the space. “I don’t know how long I’ll be gone.”

“Well, whatever you do, don’t stay.” Karen tried to say this lightly. “That’s the big mistake.”

After they said their goodbyes, Marina left the Eckman house and walked out alone into the subdivision beneath the endless expanse of velvet night. She gave herself a moment in the enormous darkness to shake off the small, bright closet she had been in. She wondered if there would be some time in her life, ten years from now, or twenty, when she would not be thinking about that letter. Such is your bravery, such is my good fortune. Probably not. In his death, her officemate had become her responsibility. While she understood Karen’s position on hope she wouldn’t have minded a little bit of it for herself. How gladly she would go to Brazil to find Anders! But her job was to confirm his death and finish his work. All those years in the smallest lab at Vogel working on the same reports, they had grown accustomed to completing the other’s data.

Marina filled her lungs with frozen air and smelled both winter and spring, dirt and leftover snow with the smallest undercurrent of something green. That was another thing she and Anders had in common: they were both profoundly suited for Minnesota. She wanted to develop a fear of flying that would keep her from ever going farther than the Dakotas in her car. Like her mother and all her mother’s people before her, those inexhaustible blondes who staked their claims in verdant prairies, Marina was cut from Minnesota, the soil and the starry night. Instead of growing up inquisitive and restless, she had developed a profound desire to stay, as if her center of gravity was so low it connected her directly to this particular patch of earth. The frigid winds raced across the plains with nothing in their path to stop them but Marina, who stood there freezing for one more minute before finally getting into her car.

Back at home she found Mr. Fox waiting in her driveway, engine running and heater on. When he saw her he rolled down his window. “I’ve been trying to call you,” he said.

“I went to tell Karen goodbye.”

She could have told him about the letter but there was so little time left, and anyway, what could she say? This week hadn’t gone the way either of them would have liked. They had seen each other mostly at the office in the presence of Vogel’s board. Given the circumstances, the board had wanted Marina to have a complete and detailed account of their expectations for her trip. Did she understand exactly what was expected of her? Fly to Manaus, go to Dr. Swenson’s apartment there, they had an address, Anders had found some people who knew where la, la, la. Marina was scrambled by the lack of sleep and agitated by the Lariam. She found herself sitting through those meetings and listening to nothing, moving her Vogel Pharmaceutical ballpoint in designs that resembled cursive writing. Even when she gave moderately articulate replies to their nervous questions she wasn’t listening. She was thinking instead of her father and how she had missed his death because she hadn’t wanted to leave school in the middle of the semester. As with so many other critical matters in her early life, she had been protected from the seriousness of the situation. She had been told only that he was ill and he hoped that she could visit soon. Given that information she had thought there was plenty of time, when in fact there had been none at all. She was thinking of her mother who had been asked not to attend his funeral and so waited in the hotel room in deference to the second wife. She was thinking of Anders and his birding guides and wondering if Dr. Swenson would have kept them. Anders would be so happy if she made the effort to look for some birds while she was there. She would use his binoculars to find them. Surely when Dr. Swenson said in her letter that she was keeping his few possessions this would include his binoculars. And his camera! She would use his camera to take pictures of birds for the boys.

“May I come in?” Mr. Fox asked.

Marina in the dark, in the cold of early April, nodded her head and he followed her to the door of her house and stood very close behind. He shifted to the left and then slightly to the right and then stopped and pressed himself against her back while she dug for her keys in her purse. He was trying to shield her from the wind. It was that tenderness that brought the tightness to Marina’s throat and before there was a chance to stop herself she was crying. Was she crying for Karen and her letter? For Anders while he wrote it, or for those pajama-clad boys? Was she crying because of the Lariam, which made her cry at newspaper stories and radio songs, or because she really would have given almost anything to let this cup of Brazil pass from her? She turned and put her arms around Mr. Fox’s neck and he kissed her there under her porch light where anyone driving by could have seen them. She kissed him and held on to him as if a great crowd of people were trying to pull them apart. The cold and the wind did not matter. Nothing mattered. They had played this thing all wrong. They had made terrible decisions about waiting to see where their relationship would go, about not being together openly. They agreed there was no point in becoming the topic of other people’s conversations, especially if things didn’t work out. Mr. Fox was always quick to tell her that he didn’t think things would work out. The problem, he said, was his age. He was too old for her. Even when they were lying in bed, his arm beneath her shoulders, her head on his chest, he would talk about how he would die so many years before her and leave her alone. It would be better if she found someone her own age now and not throw away these good years on him.

“Now?” she would say. “Do I have to find someone else right this minute?”

Then he would press her closer and kiss the top of her head. “No,” he would say, running his open hand down the side of her arm. “Probably not this exact minute. You could put it off for a little while.”

“I could die first, you know. There’s a perfectly good chance.” She had said it because in truth Marina wanted very much for this relationship to work, and because there was a medical fact worth pointing out as well: the younger ones go first all the time. But coming into her house on this night she thought about those conversations in a different light, and so they kissed each other while thinking of her death rather than his. Logically speaking, Anders’ death portended nothing for Marina, but Anders was dead and he hadn’t thought it was a possible outcome for his trip. Karen hadn’t thought it was possible or she never would have let him out the front door. Mr. Fox was sorry, genuinely sorry, that he had ever asked Marina to go and he told her so. Marina said she was sorry she had agreed. But Marina had been a very good student and a very good doctor and a very good employee and lover and friend and when someone asked her to do something she operated on the principle they had asked because it was important. She had succeeded in life because she had so rarely declined any request that was made of her, how would the Amazon be different? They banged their legs against the coffee table as they tried to move through the house without turning on lights. They pressed against a wall in the dark hallway. They fell into her room, into her bed, and stayed there until they had exhausted themselves with every act of love and anger and apology and forgiveness they could think of that might stand in for what they did not have the words to say. It was after all of that, when they were finished and had fallen asleep, that Marina started screaming.

It was a while before she could explain herself. As much as a minute passed before she could be fully awakened and so kept on in the world of her dream in which screaming was the only possible option. When she opened her eyes Mr. Fox was there and he was holding her upper arms and looking like he was about to start screaming himself. She almost asked him what was wrong, then she remembered.

“I’m taking Lariam,” Marina said. There was no saliva in her mouth and without the lubrication the words were sticking on her teeth. “It’s the side effect. Nightmares.” She was on the floor with the bedspread around her bare shoulders. She covered her face with her hands and thought she could hear the sweat running down her neck. Her flight from the St. Paul — Minneapolis airport left at six forty-five in the morning and she still had a little last minute packing to do. She wanted to be sure to water the plants and take all the perishables out of the refrigerator. She was awake now, wide awake. She would just stay up.

Mr. Fox, who was crouched down in front of her, put his hands gently on her knees. “What in the world did you dream?” he said.

And even though she wanted to tell him the truth because she loved him, she could not imagine putting the dream into words. She told him the same thing she used to tell her mother: it was something generically awful, she didn’t remember.

When Mr. Fox drove her to the airport it was twenty degrees. Marina clicked off the radio before they had the chance to announce the windchill. The dark of morning seemed deeper than anything night had been able to come up with. They were addled by their decisions, their lack of sleep. They didn’t take into account how early it was and