stopped and the sun was beating the pavement and buildings and people and dogs into a flat sameness. She didn’t want to walk to the river or the market hall and so she walked for a while around the square in the choking humidity thinking of how Anders must have walked around the square as well. Maybe he hadn’t felt hopeless when he came here. Maybe he was glad to go on day-long birding excursions into the jungle and drink pisco sours alone at the bar at night. Marina bent over to look at the carved trinkets that a group of natives were selling off a blanket. She picked up a bracelet that could have been smooth painted beads or red seeds with holes drilled through the centers. She let the woman on the blanket tie it to her wrist with a complex and permanent set of knots and then bite off the ends, her lips somehow never touching skin. One of the children, a narrow-chested boy of nine or ten, looked through the menagerie of tiny carved animals that were spread out in front of him and picked out a white heron that was two inches high, a tiny fish caught in the needle of its beak, and he handed it to her. Marina had meant to refuse it, but once she held it up she thought it was in fact very fine, better than anything else she had seen, and so she agreed to buy the heron and the bracelet for a handful of bills she thought worked out to be about three dollars U.S. She put the little bird in her pocket and walked down a series of side streets, careful to keep all her turns in mind. She wasn’t in the mood to get lost. The farther she walked the more she noticed that no one was looking at her. The small boys with stacks of T-shirts and dazzling butterflies pinned to boards inside cheap wooden frames didn’t follow her. The ice cream vendors didn’t call to her, nor did the man with the mustache and a small monkey on each shoulder who was barking at tourists in Portuguese. With her black hair caught back in a barrette beneath the hat she’d bought and her cheap clothing and her flip-flops, she was able to pass in Manaus the way she was never able to pass in Minnesota. Here they looked at her and seeing someone who looked something like a woman they knew, looked away. When she was spoken to it was only a simple greeting, that much she understood, and she nodded her head in recognition and kept walking. Anders would have been mobbed everywhere. He was so blue-eyed and overly tall, his skin was very nearly luminous, as unfamiliar to these people as snow itself. Any passerby could see deeper into Anders than he could the Rio Negro. Marina thought of all the times he’d come to work on Monday after a weekend spent paddling the boys around some lake in the summer, and how his skin would be scorched, his lips and nose already starting to peel. “Haven’t you heard of sunblock?” Marina said. “Hats?”
“They keep all that information from men.” He didn’t wear a tie to work on those days and his shirt collar stayed open. The sore, red visage of his neck was something Marina made a point not to look at. Who thought it would be a good idea to send Anders to the equator? Her own skin was darker now. The sun had extended its reach past the hats and creams. It was inevitable.
When Marina turned again, a turn that was as aimless as all the others she had made, she found herself back at Rodrigo’s store. There were no crowds out front this time, no one peering in the window. In the daylight it didn’t appear to be such a compelling attraction. The street outside was empty of people, empty of cars. In fact when she went inside, thinking she would say hello, buy a bottle of water, there was only one young couple in the store, a man and woman in their twenties pointing up to something that was over their heads. The woman was long-limbed and tan in a red sundress and she stretched to try and reach for whatever it was she wanted. Her long yellow hair, which was held away from her face by a large pair of sunglasses pushed back on her head, was the brightest aspect of the room, as it seemed that Rodrigo was no more inclined towards electricity during the day than he had been at night. The young man, who may have been a little taller than the woman, stood back in his T-shirt and baggy shorts and watched her stretch. His hair was pale brown and shaggy and his face, which was nearly too pretty, was half covered up in what was either a beard or several days spent not shaving. They hadn’t noticed her come in, and so Marina watched them, in part because they made an unusual sight for Manaus, and in part because she was sure that they were the Bovenders.
She had pictured the Bovenders as being closer to her own age, without any of the drama inherent to so much bony attractiveness, but the minute she walked in the store she revised the imaginings of her idle mind. There was a tattoo banding the young man’s ankle, a decorative vine, and around the woman’s ankle a small gold chain. Marina had exactly one word of description to work from, bohemians, and these were the only two bohemians she had seen in three days.
Rodrigo came into the store from a room behind the counter. He told the couple something in Portuguese and the young woman disagreed and once again reached above her head helplessly while the young man folded his arms across his chest. Was it the soap pads she wanted? When Rodrigo turned for the ladder he saw Marina standing just inside the open door and in the course of a single second he placed her, remembered who it was she wanted to find, and was pleased at the luck of being the one to make the introductions. “Ola! Dr. Singh!” he said, and when the young couple turned to see who it was Rodrigo knew, he opened his hands towards his other guests. “Bovenders.”
The young Bovenders, in possession of a highly evolved social instinct, were beaming as they walked towards her. If they had been working to avoid her they were masters at hiding it. In fact, it seemed as if meeting her in this store on this afternoon was the very thing they were most looking forward to in all the world and they would not hold it against her that she had come a little late. “Barbara Bovender,” the young woman said, extending her hand. She smiled to show the slight disorder among her large white teeth.
“Jackie,” the young man said, and Marina shook his hand as well. The accent she thought was Australian but she wasn’t positive. They seemed too tan to be English.
Rodrigo said something to Barbara and she squinted at him slightly when he spoke, as if she were translating each word separately and then reassembling them into a sentence in her head.
“Nos?”
“Dr. Swenson,” he said.
“Yes, of course,” Barbara said, looking almost relieved. “You’re looking for Dr. Swenson.”
“People don’t look for us,” Jackie said.
“That’s because nobody knows where we are,” Barbara said, and then she laughed. “That makes it sound like we’re hiding.”
Marina tried to put this couple together in her mind with Dr. Swenson. She tried to picture the three of them standing together in the same room. She could not. “I’ve left letters for you.”
“For us?” Jackie asked. “At the apartment?”
“At Dr. Swenson’s apartment building. I left them at the desk.”
At this point Rodrigo got the ladder and climbed up towards the ceiling to get a box of dryer sheets. The hierarchy in which different items were desired, needed, and sold, could clearly be charted based on what was closest to the ceiling and what was closest to the floor. Dryer sheets appeared to be hovering on the edge of obscurity for everyone in Manaus save Barbara Bovender.
“All the mail goes straight into a box,” Jackie said. “Annick picks it up when she comes into town.”
“Or she doesn’t,” Barbara said. “She isn’t very good about the mail. I’ve told her I’d open it for her, sort it all out, but she says not to bother. I think at the heart of it she just doesn’t care.”
Jackie turned then to face his wife. Was she his wife? The Bovenders could have been siblings or cousins. The general resemblance they bore to one another was striking. “She has a lot on her mind.”
Barbara nodded, half closing her eyes, as if she were considering all the many weights Dr. Swenson had to bear. “It’s true.”
“We have a postbox,” Jackie said. “That way when we get to the next town they’ll forward it on.”
“Are you leaving?” Marina asked.
“Oh, we will, sooner or later,” Barbara said. She looked over at Rodrigo who now had the box of dryer sheets in his hand. “We’re always leaving. We’ve stayed here longer than anywhere.”
Somehow Marina was hoping she didn’t mean Manaus. She couldn’t imagine how she would last out the week. “In Brazil?”
“No, here,” Jackie said, and held up his open hand as if he meant to say that they had spent an endless stretch of time in Rodrigo’s store.
Barbara then got a serious look on her face and tilted the slender rack of her shoulders towards Marina. “Do you know Annick?”
Marina hesitated so briefly that neither of the young people saw it. “I do,” she said.
“Well, then you know. Her work is so important—”
Jackie interrupted her. “And she’s been really good to us, my God.”
“It’s not like I think we’re helping her,” Barbara said. “We’re not scientists. But if
