problem for us to stay for a while. It’s not a problem for me anyway. I can do my work anywhere. It’s really harder for Jackie.”
“What do you do?” Marina said, using the pronoun in the plural.
“I’m a writer,” Barbara said.
Jackie raised his hand and ran his open fingers through his hair. “I surf,” he said.
Harder, yes. Marina thought about the bath-warm water of the Rio Negro inching along towards the Rio Solimoes so that they could flow together into the Amazon. She was planning to ask him something about this, how surfing constituted work or how he planned to solve the current problems of his employment, when the only other person she knew in Manuas came through the open door. When Milton saw the three of them together he was extremely pleased. He had left his suit in the closet at home and was dressed for the weather. All his light cotton clothes were neatly pressed. “Perfect!” he said. “You found each other without me.”
Marina extended her hand to the driver. Because she knew him to be a problem solver she was especially glad to see him again. “I was just out taking a walk.”
“A bad time of day for walking but this is very good,” Milton said. “I am relieved. I have been telling them to go to your hotel.”
Jackie had wandered off to pick up the store’s lone can of tennis balls. It seemed that there was nothing Rodrigo hadn’t thought of. Barbara in turn shot her eyes to Milton who seemed startled by the severity of her glance. “I’m sorry,” he said, before he knew what he might be apologizing for.
Barbara sighed and tried to brush a medium-sized insect off the front of her sundress. It was hard-shelled and black and the tiny spikes on its legs held stubbornly to the fabric but she seemed not to notice any of this. She put her thumb beneath her index finger and gave the bug a single, dislodging flick. “You’ll forgive me,” she said to Marina, who imagined she would. “Part of what we try to do is keep Annick hidden — from the press that comes down, from other doctors and drug companies trying to steal her work. You never know who someone really is no matter what they tell you.”
“I am terribly sorry,” Milton said.
“The press comes here?” Marina said.
Barbara looked at her. “Well, they will once they hear about her research. They did before we got here. What really matters is that people shouldn’t distract her. Even people with very good intentions.” She was trying to be firm but she lacked experience.
“Dr. Singh works for Vogel,” Milton said in an attempt to make up for his indiscretion. “She and Dr. Swenson are employed by the same company. They sent her here to—” He looked at Marina but he had to stop there. She hadn’t told him why they’d sent her.
“Vogel”—she looked at Marina—“I’m sorry but that is my point exactly. Vogel is the worst. All they want to know is what her
“I do,” Marina said. If she were in any way inclined to have compassion for the girl she would have stopped her then, but at the moment she did not. Jackie had come back now and he kept the can of tennis balls in his hand. Maybe he wanted them. Maybe he knew a court nearby where they could play.
“You know Dr. Eckman?”
“We worked together.”
Barbara shrugged her pretty shoulders which were gold along the tops and gold down her arms. “Well, if he’s a friend of yours, I’m sorry. He’s a perfectly nice guy but he was a huge distraction. He hung around here forever, always asking questions, always wanting to go along. He was a distraction to
“He took me birding,” Jackie said.
“I tried to explain to him that Annick didn’t have the time, but he wasn’t going to go until he saw her. She finally came and picked him up. For all I know he’s still out there.”
“He isn’t,” Marina said. “Or he is. He’s dead.” It wasn’t the girl’s fault of course, not any of it, but Marina found her sadness transposed itself easily into anger.
Jackie put down the tennis balls then and took Barbara’s hand in a gesture of sympathy or solidarity. She watched the color drain from the girl, from her face, her neck, all the blood was rushing to her heart. Even the gold receded from her shoulders.
“Dr. Swenson buried him at the research station where she works. She told us that in a letter. She sent us very little information about his death, but, as you say, she’s busy. Dr. Eckman’s wife wanted me to come down to see if I could find out what happened. She wants to know what she should tell their children.”
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.
Four
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.
