State of Wonder

by Ann Patchett

  “A memorial service. You call it a memorial service when you don’t have a body,” Karen said.

  “I’m sorry,” Marina said. “Memorial service.”

  Karen leaned around the open archway to the den. The boys in their sweatshirts and flannel pajama pants slumped into the endlessly long corduroy couch. The smallest, palest boy lay over Pickles like a rug. They were bound to the television screen as if by wires. “It’s amazing what they hear,” she said in a low voice. “They don’t even have to be listening but their ears just pick it up, then I put them to bed at night and one of them says, ‘When are we having the funeral for Daddy?’ ” Karen poured herself a glass of wine and when she wagged the bottle in Marina’s direction Marina nodded.

  “Funeral,” the middle boy called out without looking at them. He giggled for a second and then stopped.

  Marina thought of that muddy ground where Anders was buried and reached for her glass. “I’m sorry,” she said to Karen.

  “Benjy, stop that,” Karen said in a sharp voice. “No, no, it’s just something I try to be aware of. Did Anders ever tell you I majored in Russian literature in college? I’ve been thinking I should find some Russian friends. Then we could talk anywhere. Or maybe it’s just that we could talk about Chekhov anywhere.” She took her wine to the other side of the kitchen and opened the louvered door to the big walk-in pantry. Marina followed her inside. Even the pantry was neat, bright boxes of cereal standing together in a line of diminishing height. Karen returned to her point, her voice lowered. “Sometimes I think they can hear the conversations people have about us down the street. If you listened to them talk you’d think they knew everything that was going on. I mean, they don’t understand it all but somewhere or other they’ve heard it and they remember. Do you ever wonder when you stopped being able to hear everything?” Karen asked.

  “I hadn’t thought about it.” Marina had no idea how much her hearing had deteriorated over the course of her life.

  Karen looked blank for a minute as if part of her had walked out of the room and then, just as quickly, returned. “I got a letter today.”

  There was no question and still she said Anders’ name, her heart thrumming like a hummingbird’s heart.

  Karen nodded and pulled one of those same blue envelopes out of the pocket of her sweater. She set it face up on the palm of her open hand and together they stared at it like a thing that could at any minute unfold a pair of wings. There was Anders’ clear parochial penmanship across the front. Karen Eckman . . . Eden Prairie. Marina liked to tell him he was the only doctor she ever knew who wrote like a Catholic school girl. “It’s the second one I’ve had this week,” Karen said. “The other one came on Tuesday but he wrote it later, the first of March. He was sicker then.”

  Marina opened her mouth. There was something she was supposed to say but she couldn’t imagine what it would be. He was dead, he was sick, he was not so sick. The story rewound until the only conclusion to draw would be that Anders gets better. He leaves the jungle and returns to Manaus. He flies from Manaus and starts again from home, only this time they know enough to refuse to let him go. Marina wondered how many letters were still out there and when they would drift in, their postal route having mistakenly sent them on a detour through Bhutan. A person didn’t have to stretch very far to find a logical explanation for how this had happened, so why did Marina feel it necessary to tilt back her glass and take down all of the wine in a swallow?

  “That experience, going out to your mailbox and finding a stack of catalogues and bills and a letter from your dead husband, there’s not been anything in my life so far to get me ready for that.” Karen unfolded the envelope and looked at the words but just as quickly looked away from them. She looked to Marina instead. “It makes you understand why e-mail is better,” she said. “You get an e-mail from your dead husband and you know that he’s alive out there somewhere. You get a letter from your dead husband and you don’t know anything at all.”

  “Can you tell me what he said?” Marina was whispering. Maybe the letters were the one thing the boys didn’t know about yet. She wanted to ask if there was anything about Dr. Swenson and where they were working. She wanted to know where in the jungle she should look.

  “It isn’t really about anything,” Karen said, as if that was something she should apologize for. She handed Marina the letter.

  February 15th

  Would it alarm you too much to tell you I am often alarmed in this place? What you deserve is not honesty but the sort of husband who is capable of putting up a Brave Front. But if I put up a Brave Front now after telling you so much about how miserable I am, if I paid Nkomo or one of the Saturns to put a Brave Front together for me on a separate sheet of paper which I could then copy over in my own coward’s handwriting, you would see through the ploy immediately. Then you would have to get on a plane and hire a boat and a guide and come down here to find me because you would know (having never seen a single Brave Front out of me in your life) how unimaginable things must be. So I won’t alarm you by trying to muster up courage. You’ve always been the one with all the courage anyway. It’s why you’re staying home with three boys and I’m vacationing. It’s why you were able to pull that nail out of Benjy’s heel last summer with pliers. I am not brave. I have a fever that comes on at seven in the morning and stays for two hours. By four in the afternoon it’s back and I am nothing but a ranting pile of ash. Most days now I have a headache and I worry that some tiny Amazonian animal is eating a hole through my cerebral cortex, and the only thing I want in the world, the only thing that would give meaning or sense to this existence, would be the chance to lay my head in your lap. You would put your hand in my hair, I know you would do that for me. Such is your bravery, such is my good fortune. Damn these ridiculous sheets of paper. There’s never any space. I pray like a babbling fundamentalist now that I am in Brazil and tonight I will pray that the letter carrier sends this to you so that you can feel the full weight of my love. Kiss the boys for me. Kiss the inside of your wrist.

  —A

  Marina refolded it and gave it back to Karen, who returned it to her pocket. She put her hand on a shelf near several boxes of microwave popcorn to steady herself. It was incalculably worse than the letter from Dr. Swenson. This was Anders announcing the onset of his own death, his voice so clear and plain he might as well have crowded into the pantry with them and read it aloud. “Who are Nkomo and the Saturns?”

  Karen shook her head. “He mentions names sometimes but I don’t know them. I can’t even imagine how many of the letters got lost. The letter from Dr. Swenson could have gotten lost, the one saying he was dead.” Karen ran a finger in an absent circle around the top of a can of peas. “I think I’d rather wait on the service until you come back. I’d like it if you could be here.”

  Marina looked down at her, blinked, nodded.

  “I never say it to them,” she said, looking towards the slightly open pantry door in the direction of her boys and their television, “that I’m not sure he’s dead. I know they need to have one answer, even if it’s the worst answer you could think of. Hope is a horrible thing, you know. I don’t know who decided to package hope as a virtue because it’s not. It’s a plague. Hope is like walking around with a fishhook in your mouth and somebody just keeps pulling it and pulling it. Everybody thinks I’m a train wreck because Anders is dead but it’s really so much worse than that. I’m still hoping that this Dr. Swenson, for some reason I couldn’t possibly put together, has lied about everything, that she’s keeping him, or she’s lost him somewhere.” Then Karen stopped and a sudden light of clarity came over her face and the panic fell away from her voice. “And I say that and I know it isn’t true. No one would do that. But then that would mean he’s dead.” She put the question to Marina directly. “Is he dead?” she asked. “I just don’t feel it. I would feel it, wouldn’t I?” Her eyes filled up and she brushed the tea
rs back with two fingers.

  Nothing would be lovelier than a lie now, a single dose of possibility. But if Marina gave her that then she would be nothing but another fishhook in Karen Eckman’s mouth. She said that Anders was dead.

  Karen put her hands in her pockets, looked to the very clean wood plank floor. She nodded. “Was he writing to you?”

  Marina understood the question but she left it alone. “He sent me a postcard from Manaus and two letters 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 a
nd 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 that the drivers in that fierce commuter traffic for which they had allotted so much extra time weren’t even awake yet. When he pulled into the lane for departing flights it was five fifteen in the morning.