by Ann Patchett
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 progress is. How can she be expected to do her work if she’s constantly being monitored? This is science. This may change the course of everything. She can’t just stop and meet people. Do you know that you’re the second doctor that Vogel’s sent to see her since Christmas?”
“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 my work. I can’t even imagine what he must have been like for Annick.”
“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.
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 separated into distinct groups that any first year medical student would have been grateful to study: pectoralis major, pectoralis minor, deltoid, trapezius, intercostal. The people on neighboring towels pointed, calling for their children to watch
. They whistled and clapped.
“Not sick anymore,” Milton said.
Jackie brought his feet to the ground and sat again. The vine that encircled his ankle was hung with tiny clusters of grapes. “I’m fine.”
“That’s why I married him,” Barbara said, half of her face shielded behind enormous black glasses. “I saw him do that at the beach in Sydney. He was wearing his boardies. I said to my girlfriend, ‘That one’s mine.’ ”
“Marriages have been built on less,” Marina said, although in truth she didn’t think this was the case.
“Do you swim?” Milton asked her. He was wearing his trousers and his white short-sleeved shirt. He showed no signs of removing them.
“I know how,” she said, “if that’s what you’re asking.”
Barbara stretched along her towel, her oiled body reflecting light from every surface except for the few discreet areas covered by fabric. There was a small, circular diamond hanging in the gold chain of her anklet and it glinted along with her skin. “It’s so hot,” she cried quietly.
“Hot is what we do best,” Milton said. He had a little straw hat sitting on the top of his head and somehow it made him look cooler than the rest of them.
“Let’s go for a swim,” Jackie said, and leaned over to smack his wife’s stomach lightly with the flat of his open hand. Her whole body jumped an inch off her towel.
“The water is only going to be hotter,” she said.
“Up, up, up,” he said, and stood himself, leaning down to pull her to her feet. She paused a moment to shake the sand out of her pale hair. It was for the other beach-goers as great a spectacle as her husband standing on his hands. They were halfway to the water, their arms draped against each other’s naked waists, when they turned back to their compatriots. “You’re coming, aren’t you?” Jackie asked.
