State of Wonder

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.”

Marina could remember that exact feeling. It was a thought so briefly held and deeply buried that she could barely dredge it up again: What if Dr. Swenson were my mother? She made a mental note to call her mother before she went to bed tonight, even if it was very late. “But what does that have to do with Mr. Fox?”

“He bothers her,” Jackie said, as if he had suddenly woken up and found himself in a restaurant, in a conversation. His blue eyes peered out brightly through the fringe of his overly long bangs. “He writes her letters asking her what she’s doing. He used to call her.”

“That’s when she got rid of the phone,” Barbara said. “It happened years before we got here.”

Marina took the slice of pineapple off the edge of her glass, dipped it into her drink and ate it. “Is that really so intrusive? She does work for him after all. He is paying for everything, her research, her apartment, this dinner. Isn’t he entitled to know how things are going?”

Barbara corrected her. “He doesn’t pay for it. The company pays for it.”

“Yes, but the company is his job. He runs it. He hired her. He’s responsible.”

“Is the person who commissions van Gogh responsible for the painting?”

Marina wondered if she would have come up with a similar quip of logic when she was twenty-three or however old Mrs. Bovender actually was. She was quite sure she would have felt the same way. It was exactly Dr. Swenson’s brio she had been drawn to, the utter assuredness with which she moved through the world, getting things done and being indefatigably right. Marina had not met her like again, and she was glad of that, and she was sorry. “I suppose that van Gogh would be responsible for making good on his sale, and that if he didn’t show up with the painting after a vastly extended period of time it would be within the rights—”

Barbara put her cool hand on Marina’s wrist. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Mr. Fox is your boss, Dr. Eckman was your friend. I shouldn’t be running on about this.”

“I understand your point,” Marina said, making a conscious effort to get along.

“We’ll try to find a way to get word to Annick, and if we can’t we’ll just entertain you ourselves until she comes back.”

Marina took a long pull off her drink, even though there was a distinct voice in her head telling her not to. “You don’t have to do that.”

“Of course we do,” Barbara said, and sat back peacefully in her chair as if everything had been decided. “It’s what Annick would want.”

By ten o’clock the world was a furnace cracked open in a closed room, but just outside of Manaus people crowded the river’s bank on a Wednesday to lie across towels spread out in the sand. Children played in the shallows while adults swam wide circles around them. Their voices, the screaming and laughing while they splashed one another, sounded less like words and more like the call and answer of birds. Milton in his infinite wisdom had brought a large striped umbrella in the trunk of his car and stabbed it repeatedly into the sand until it was able to stand upright and provide a circle of shade. It was in that limited field that he and Marina sat on towels, their arms around their knees. Marina had gone to buy a swimsuit from Rodrigo that morning and the only possible option, which is to say the only one-piece, was cheap and bright and had a small skirt that made her look like an aging figure skater. She wore it under her clothes now, unable to imagine what had ever made her think she would go into the water. The Bovenders, who had no interest in the umbrella or its protection, were, without their clothes, unnerving. Jackie wore a pair of cutoff shorts that rode dangerously below the sharp protrusions of his hipbones, while Barbara’s bikini was carelessly tied together with a series of loose strings. It seemed that the desired effect of their swimwear was to make their fellow beach-goers feel a strong breeze could strip them bare. At one point Jackie yawned, tilted forward into the sand, and raised himself into a handstand. The muscles in his arms and back