State of Wonder (2 page)

Outside the snow had been falling in wet clumps long enough to bury every blade of new spring grass. The crocuses she had seen only that morning, their yellow and purple heads straight up from the dirt, were now frozen as solid as carp in the lake. The tiny blooms of redbud made burdened shelves of snow. Mr. Fox and Marina pushed forward through the icy slush without a thought that they were for the very first time in their relationship leaving the building together. They made the long walk from the southern quadrant of the Vogel campus to the parking lot nearly a quarter mile away. Marina hadn’t brought her snow boots. It hadn’t been snowing when she left for work.

“I’ll tell you something else,” Mr. Fox said once they were in his car, the snow brushed off and the defroster turned to high. “I never thought he’d be gone so long. I told him when he left to take his time, to get the point across, but I had thought we were talking about a week, maybe two at the outside. I never considered him staying for more than two weeks.”

“He had a hard time finding her, that threw his schedule off
to start.”

Anders had left the day after Christmas. The company had wanted him to go sooner but Christmas was nonnegotiable for the Eckmans. She had shown Mr. Fox the few letters she’d had from Anders because they confided nothing. He had mostly talked about Manaus and then about the birding trips he had taken in the jungle with a guide. To her, Anders had spoken mostly of rain. If Mr. Fox had also received letters from Anders, and she was sure he had, he never mentioned them.

“So two weeks then. Not three months. I would have told him to come back—”

“You couldn’t get a hold of him then.”

“Exactly.” Mr. Fox let his eyes trail off across the whitened landscape that smeared beneath the windshield wipers. “I would have told him there’s a message to deliver and once he gave it to her he should have gotten on a plane himself, with or without her. That was his
only job.”

“It never would have been as simple as that,” she said, as much to herself as to him. No one seriously thought the outcome of telling Dr. Swenson she needed to bring her research back to Minnesota would be Dr. Swenson packing her lab into boxes and coming home—not Anders, not Mr. Fox, not Marina. In truth, it wasn’t even essential that she come back. Had she been willing to reopen lines of communication, to prove that the drug was nearly completed, to let the company install a coterie of its own doctors who would give regular and accurate reports of the drug’s progress, Vogel would have left her in her research station for years, pouring in cash from an opened vein. But now Anders was dead and the notion of success was reduced to sickening folly. Just the thought of Dr. Swenson gave Marina the sensation of a cold hand groping for her heart. It is fifteen years ago and she is in the lecture hall at Johns Hopkins in a seat safely on the aisle of a middle row, and there is Dr. Swenson pacing in front of the podium, talking about the cervix,
the cervix
, with a level of intensity that elevates to such ferocity that none of them dare to look at their watches. No one in the crowd of a hundred will suggest that class is long over, class should be dismissed, there are other classes they are now in the process of missing. Even though Marina is a second-year resident she is attending a lecture for third-year medical students because Dr. Swenson has made it clear to residents and medical students alike that when she is speaking they should be in attendance. But Marina would not dream of missing a lecture or leaving a lecture over a matter as inconsequential as time. She is riveted in place while the slide show of atypical cells on the high wall before her flicks past so quickly they nearly make a moving picture. Dr. Swenson knows everything Marina needs to know, answers the questions Marina has not yet formulated in her mind. A tiny woman made tinier by distance fixes one hundred people to their seats with a voice that never troubles itself to be raised, and because they are all afraid of her and because they are afraid of missing anything she might say, they stay as long as she chooses to keep them. Marina believes the entire room exists as she exists, at the intersection of terror and exaltation, a place that keeps the mind exceedingly alert. Her hand sweeps over page after page as she writes down every syllable Dr. Swenson speaks. It is the class in which Marina learns to take notes like a court reporter, a skill that will serve her for the rest of her life.

It strikes Marina as odd that all these years later she still remembers Dr. Swenson in the lecture hall. In her mind’s eye she never sees her in surgery or on the floor making rounds, but at a safe, physical distance.

K
aren and Anders Eckman lived on a cul-de-sac where the neighbors drove slowly knowing that boys could come sledding down a hill or shooting out between the shrubbery on a bike. “That one,” Marina said, pointing to the red brick, and Mr. Fox pulled the car to the curb. Marina and Anders must have made about the same amount of money. They never talked about it but they did the same work; Anders had been at the company a few years longer than Marina so he could have made a little more. But Marina’s house, which was quite small and still too big for her, was paid for. She made regular contributions to charity and let the rest of her money languish in the bank while Anders paid for this house, piano lessons, teeth straightening, summer camp, college accounts. How had he managed, three sons and a wife, and who would pay for this life now that he was dead? For a while she sat there, imagining the various birthday parties and Christmases, endless pictures of boys with presents, knotted ribbon and torn-up gift-wrap in piles of red and silver and green, until finally the snow laid a blanket over the windshield and cut off the view.

“Now this is a surprise,” Karen Eckman said when she opened the door, both hands grasping the choke chain of an enormous golden retriever; she was a small woman, and it didn’t look like a battle she would win. “No!” she said loudly. “Sit!” She was wearing a white knit stocking cap pulled down over her ears and her coat was just behind her, thrown across a chair in the front hall. Marina was blanking on the dog’s name, though there was a picture of him on Anders’ desk along with pictures of Karen and the boys. He pushed his mallet head against Karen’s hip and gave two sharp barks at the unimaginable good fortune of guests in the middle of the day.

“You’re leaving,” Mr. Fox said, as if this meant maybe they should leave as well.

Karen shook her head. “No, no, you’re fine. I’ve got plenty of time. I was going to swing by the store on the way to pick up the boys but I can do that later. Come inside. It’s freezing.” The dog lunged forward when they entered, hoping for the chance to jump up, but Karen, who had at best twenty pounds on the animal, managed to drag him to the side of the entry hall. “You get back, Pickles,” she said. “You sit.”

Pickles did not sit, and when she let him go she rubbed her hands to work out the indentations the chain-link collar had left. In the kitchen everything was neat: no cups on the countertop, no toys on the floor. Marina had been to the house before but only for parties when every room and hallway was pressed full of people. Empty she could see how big the place was. It would take a lot of children to fill in the open spaces. “Would you like some coffee?” Karen said.

Marina turned to put the question to Mr. Fox and found that he was standing almost directly behind her. Mr. Fox was not taller than Marina. It was something he joked about when they were alone. “No coffee,” Marina said. “Thank you.” It wasn’t a bright day but what light there was reflected off the snow and cast a wide silvery band across the breakfast table. Through the big picture window Marina saw a jungle gym standing on a low hill in the backyard, a rough fort gathering snow on its slanted roof. Pickles leaned up against Marina now and he batted her hand with his head until she reached down to rub the limp chamois of his ears.

“I can put him up,” Karen said. “He’s a lot of dog.”

Pickles stared at her, his vision unfocused by the ecstasy in his ears. “I like dogs,” Marina said, thinking it was vital that he stay. The dog would have to stand in for their minister if they had one. The dog would be Karen’s mother, her sister, whoever it was she wished was standing next to her when everything came down. The dog would have to be Anders.

She glanced back at Mr. Fox again. Every second they were in the house without telling her what had happened was a lie. But Mr. Fox had turned towards the refrigerator now. He was looking at pictures of the boys: the two youngest ones a couple of washed-out towheads, the older one only slightly darker. He was looking at a picture of Anders with his arms around his wife and in that photo they were not much older than children themselves. There were pictures of birds, too, a group of prairie chickens standing in a field, an eastern bluebird so vibrant it appeared to have been Photoshopped. Anders took a lot of pictures of birds.

Karen pulled off her hat and pushed her straight pale hair behind her ears. The flush that had been in her cheeks from the momentary burst of cold had faded. “This isn’t good news, right?” she said, twisting the rings on her finger, the modest diamond and the platinum band. “I’m glad to see you but I can’t imagine you’re just dropping by to say hello.”

And for a split second Marina felt the slightest surge of relief. Of course she would know. Even if she hadn’t heard she would know in that way a soul knows. Marina wanted so badly to put her arms around Karen then, to give her condolences. She was ready for that if nothing else. The words for how sorry she was ached in the back of her throat.

“It’s not good news,” Marina said, hearing the catch in her own voice. This was the moment for Mr. Fox to tell the story, to explain it in a way Marina herself did not fully understand, but nothing came. Mr. Fox had given himself over to the refrigerator photos. He had his back to the two women, his arms locked behind, his head tilted forward to a picture of a common loon.

Karen turned her eyes up, shook her head slightly. “The letters have been crazy,” she said. “I’ll get two in a day and then nothing all week. They don’t come in any sort of order. I got one a couple of days ago that didn’t have a date on it but it must have been pretty recent. He sounded like he was half out of his mind. He’s definitely writing to me less now. I think he doesn’t want to tell me he has to stay longer.”

“Karen, listen.”

Pickles lifted his head as if
listen
was his command. He sat.

“It isn’t his job,” Karen said, and while she looked at Marina she pointed her finger at Mr. Fox’s back. “He doesn’t like the jungle. I mean, the birds, he says the birds are spectacular, but the rest of it is making him crazy, the leaves and the vines and all of that. In one of his letters he said he felt like they were choking him at night. Where Anders grew up in Crookston there are hardly any trees at all. Have you ever been to Crookston? It’s nothing but prairie up there. He used to say that trees made him nervous, and he was joking, but still. He isn’t cut out for this. He isn’t some mediator who’s been trained to talk down the difficult cases. I understand why you sent him. Everybody likes Anders. But if Vogel has inflated its stock price then that’s Vogel’s problem. It’s not his job to fix it. He can’t fix it, and you can’t just leave him out there to try.”

Marina imagined that Karen had been making this speech in her head every morning and night while she brushed her teeth, never thinking she’d have the opportunity to deliver it to Mr. Fox himself.

“He’s never going to say this to you but even if he hasn’t been able to bring this nutcase back it’s time for him to come home. We’ve got three boys here, Mr. Fox. You can’t expect them to finish out the school year without their father.”

This time Marina recognized the sensation at the onset, the helpless buckling of joints, and was able to reach for the tall chair at the kitchen island. Surely it was Mr. Fox’s part to give Karen the letter, but then with a fresh wave of grief, Marina remembered that the letter was in her own pocket. She pulled out the chair beside her. “Sit down, Karen,” she said. “Sit next to me.”

The moment did not bring to mind her own losses. What rushed before Marina was the inherent cruelty of telling. It didn’t matter how gently the news was delivered, with how much sorrow and compassion, it was a blow to cut Karen Eckman in two.

“Anders?” Karen said, and then she said it again, louder, as if he were in the other room, as if she both believed what she had been told and denied it. All the cold that swept through Minnesota came into Karen Eckman and she stammered and shook. Her fingers began to rake at the outside of her arms. She asked to see the letter but then she refused to touch the thing, so thin and blue, half unfolded. She told Marina to read it aloud.

There was no way to say she wouldn’t do it but still, no matter how much Marina tried to edit the words as they came out of her mouth she couldn’t make them into sympathy. “Given our location, this rain,” she said tentatively, leaving out the part about governments and their petty bureaucracies. “We chose to bury him here.” She could not bring herself to say that this burial was no small task. She should have read the first paragraph, as banal as it was. Without it what was left didn’t even sound like a letter. It sounded like some thrifty telegram.

“She buried him there?” Karen said. The bellows of her lungs strained for nothing. There was no air in the kitchen. “Jesus, what are you saying to me? He’s in the ground?”

“Tell me who I can call for you. Someone needs to be here.” Marina tried to hold her hands but Karen shook her off.