State of Wonder (3 page)

“Get him out of there! You can’t just leave him. He isn’t going to stay there.”

It was the moment to promise everything, but as hard as she tried she could not assemble a single sentence of comfort. “I can’t get him out,” Marina said, and it was a terrible admission because now she could see very clearly the mud and the leaves, the ground closing in the rain, growing over immediately in tender saplings and tough grasses until it was impossible to find the place where he was. She could feel Anders’ strangling panic in all those leaves and the panic became her own. “I don’t know how. Karen, look at me, you have to tell me who to call. You have to let me call someone.”

But Karen couldn’t understand or couldn’t hear or didn’t care what might have made things easier for Marina. The two of them were alone in this. Mr. Fox had been driven from the room by the sound, the keening of Karen Eckman’s despair. She slipped down from her chair and sank to the floor to cry against the retriever, wrapping her grief around his sturdy torso while the poor animal shivered and licked at her arm. She cried there until she’d dampened the dog’s fur.

What idiots they were thinking they knew what they were doing! Marina had had to announce deaths to family members in the hospital when she had been a resident, not often, only if the attending was too busy or too imperious to be bothered. No matter how hard these daughters and fathers and brothers and wives had cried, how tightly they clung to her, it had never been that difficult to extricate herself. She simply had to raise her head and there was a nurse who knew more about how to hold them and what to say. Behind her there were charts full of phone numbers that had been compiled in advance. Available clergy were listed for any denomination, grief counselors and support groups that met on Wednesdays. The most she had been asked to do was write an order for a sedative. Marina had made the announcement of Anders’ death while giving no thought to death’s infrastructure. What about those boys standing in front of the school now, the snow growing into piles on their shoulders while they waited for their mother? How could Marina have forgotten to account for them? Why didn’t they know to find somebody first, a dozen somebodies standing ready around Karen while she absorbed the violence of the news? All of those people at the Christmas party, the women in reindeer sweaters, the men in red ties, the people Marina had seen laughing in this kitchen only a few months ago, leaning against each other with their whiskeyed eggnog, they were desperately needed now! And if they hadn’t been smart enough to bring family and friends, could they not have thought at least to slip a few sample cards of Xanax into their pockets? There was no waiting out the situation. Giving it time would only mean the Eckman boys would start to panic as a teacher led them back into the school building and told them to wait inside. They would think that their mother was dead; that’s where a child’s mind goes—always to the loss of the mother.

Marina stood up from the floor, though in her memory she had never sat down on it. She went to the phone, looking for an address book, a Rolodex, anything with numbers. What she found were two copies of the
Minneapolis Star Tribune
, a scratch pad with a clean sheet of paper on top, a coffee mug that said “I Love My Library” jumbled full of pens and crayons, a piece of paper tacked to a cork board that said “Babysitter Emergency”: Karen’s cell phone, Anders’ cell phone, Anders’ office, poison control center, ambulance, Dr. Johnson, Linn Hilder. This is what it feels like when the house is burning down, Marina thought. This is why they give you a number as simple as 911 for the emergencies that will surely come, because when the flames are racing up the curtains and hurtling towards you over the floorboards you won’t know any numbers. As much as she wanted to help the wife of her dead friend, she wanted to get out of that house. She picked up the phone and dialed the name on the bottom of the list. She had to take the phone out of the kitchen in order to hear the woman on the other end. Linn Hilder was the neighbor down the street who happened to have two boys who were friends with the Eckman boys. Why, Linn Hilder had leaned out her car window not twenty minutes ago and asked them if they needed a ride home and they had said no, Mrs. Hilder, our mother’s coming. Linn Hilder was herself now crying as convulsively as Karen.

“Call someone,” Marina said in a low voice. “Call anyone you can think of and send them over here. Call the school. Go to the school and get the boys.”

When she came back to the kitchen she saw that Pickles was lying out on the floor to the right of his owner, his sodden head resting at the joint of Karen’s hip, and to her left sat Mr. Fox, who had miraculously stepped forward in her brief absence. He was petting Karen’s head with a slow and rhythmical assurance. “It’s all right,” he said quietly. “It’s going to be all right.” Her head was against his chest and her tears had darkened the stripes on his tie from blue to black. And while it wasn’t all right, nothing close to it, she seemed able to hear the steady repetition of the words and was trying to breathe regularly.

M
arina and Mr. Fox left the house an hour later, after Karen’s mother had been located, after her sister came in with her husband, bringing word that their brother was driving up from Iowa, after Linn Hilder had collected the Eckman boys from school and taken them to her own house until a sensible plan for breaking the news to them could be devised. From the moment Mr. Fox had first stood in the door of the lab with that blue envelope in his hand it had never occurred to Marina that there might be guilt where Anders’ death was concerned. It was an accident as much as being pulled under by the current in the Amazon River would have been an accident. But as they stepped into the smack of frigid wind with only Pickles there to see them out, she wondered if the people inside thought of Mr. Fox as culpable. The days were still short and the sun was already low. Certainly without Mr. Fox in the picture, the Eckman boys would be doing their homework or rolling up a snowman in the backyard. Anders would be looking at the clock in their office, saying he was hungry, his body already leaning towards the door in their thriving, living world. She thought it was possible that even if Karen Eckman and her people didn’t blame Mr. Fox in the greatest hour of their grief, the blame might still come to them later on, after time and sleep had untangled their thinking. She certainly blamed him for leaving her alone to tell Karen, and for not holding her arm as she carefully maneuvered her way down the unshoveled walk to the car. Did she blame him for sending Anders to his death in Brazil? She struggled with the handle on the passenger-side door that was half frozen down while Mr. Fox slipped into the driver’s side. She brushed the snow off the window with her hand and then rapped her bare knuckles against the glass. He had been staring straight ahead and now he turned in her direction and looked startled to see her, as if he had forgotten he hadn’t come alone. He leaned over and pushed the door open.

She fell onto the leather seat just as she might have fallen out on the pavement in front of the house had she been forced to wait there another minute. “Just take me back to my car,” Marina said. Her hands were shaking and she pinned them between her knees. She had spent most of her life in Minnesota and yet she had never been so cold. All she wanted in the world was to go home and sit in a hot bath.

It had stopped snowing but the sky hanging over the prairie was swollen and gray. The interstate, once they found it, was nothing but a beaten strip of badly plowed blacktop between two flat expanses of white. Mr. Fox did not take Marina back to her car. He was driving instead to St. Paul, and once in St. Paul to a restaurant where in the past they had had remarkable luck not running into anyone they knew. When she saw where he was going she said nothing. She could understand in some dim way that after all they’d been through it was better for them to be together. It was well after five when they slid into a booth in the back of the room. When Marina ordered a glass of red wine, she realized she wanted it even more than the bath. The waitress brought her two and put them side by side on the table in front of her as if she might be expecting a friend. She brought Mr. Fox two glasses of scotch over piles of ice.

“Happy Hour,” she said with no particular happiness. “You folks have a good time.”

Marina waited until the woman had walked away and then without preamble she repeated to Mr. Fox the single sentence from Karen’s monologue that had stuck in her head so clearly after all the others began to melt together. “If Vogel has inflated its stock price then that’s Vogel’s problem.”

He looked at her with what might have been called a wan smile except there wasn’t quite enough smile in it. “I can’t ever remember being this tired.”

She nodded her head. She waited. For a long time he waited
with her.

“You know the stock price
is
up,” he said finally.

“I know it’s up. I guess I don’t know why it’s up or that it has anything to do with Anders.”

Mr. Fox drained his first glass easily and then rested his fingers lightly on the rim of the second. He would be sixty-one in a month but the events of the day had put him safely beyond that. In the dim light of the low-hanging swag lamp with a faux Tiffany shade he could have been seventy. He sat hunched, his shoulders pressing towards one another in the front, and his glasses dug a small red groove into the bridge of his nose. His mouth, which in the past had been generous and kind, now cut across his face in a single straight line. Marina had worked at Vogel for more than six years before they ever came to this restaurant. It was plenty of time to think about Mr. Fox as her employer, her superior. For the last seven months they had made an attempt to redefine their relationship.

“The problem is this,” Mr. Fox said, his voice turned sullen. “For some time now there has been . . .” He waited, as if a combination of the cold, the exhaustion, and the scotch had stolen the very word he needed. “There has been a situation in Brazil. It was not a situation that Anders was meant to solve. I didn’t ask him to solve it, but I did think he would bring back enough information so that I would be able to handle it myself. I saw Anders as the person who would set things in motion. He would explain to Dr. Swenson that it was essential that she wrap up her research and move directly, with the help of other scientists, into the developmental phase of the drug. Then he would explain to me, based on what he’d seen, what sort of reasonable timetable we should be able to expect. The fact that Anders died in the middle of all this is a terrible thing, I don’t need to tell you that, but his death”—and here Mr. Fox paused to consider his words and take a quarter inch off the second glass—“his death does not change the problem.”

“And the problem is that this drug which you’ve been saying for a year now is all but sitting on the doorstep of the FDA doesn’t exist? It’s not that Dr. Swenson isn’t bringing it back from Brazil. You’re saying there’s nothing to bring back.” Mr. Fox was too old for her. He was five years younger than her mother, a point her mother would have been the first person to bring up had Marina been inclined to tell her about the relationship.

“I don’t know that. That was the purpose of the trip. We needed more information.”

“So you sent Anders out on some sort of reconnaissance mission? Anders Eckman? How was he qualified for that?”

“He was meant to be our ambassador. He wasn’t hiding anything, there was nothing to hide. His job was to explain to Dr. Swenson the importance of her finishing her portion of the project. Since she’s been down there she’s disconnected herself, from—” Mr. Fox stopped and shook his head. The list was too long. “Everything. I’m not entirely sure she possesses a concept of time.”

“How long ago did you last hear from her?”

“Not counting today’s letter?” He stopped to do the math in his head though Marina suspected he was only stalling. “It’s been twenty-six months.”

“Nothing? In over two years you’ve heard nothing? How is that possible?” What she meant was how was it possible he had let this go so far but that was not how he heard the question.

“She doesn’t seem to feel she’s accountable to the people who have been funding her work. I’ve given her a kind of latitude that any other drug company would have laughed at, and should laugh at. That’s why she agreed to come with us. Her money is deposited monthly into an account in Rio as per our original agreement. I’ve paid to have a research station built and I don’t even know where it is. We sent the whole thing down on a barge, freezers and tin siding, roofs and doors, more generators than you could imagine. We sent everything to set up a fully operating lab and she met the barge in Manaus and got on board and took it down the river herself. None of the workers were ever able to remember where they dropped things off.”

“If Anders found it, it wouldn’t be impossible to find.” Dr. Swenson would never see herself as accountable to Vogel, any more than she would think of herself as working for them. She might develop a drug for the purposes of her own curiosity or the interest of science, but it would never occur to her that her work was the property of the people who signed the checks. Anyone who had spent a thoughtful hour in her presence could have figured that much out. “So pull the plug. Cut the money off and wait until she comes out.”

Mr. Fox, who had been holding the remaining and mostly full glass of scotch an inch off the table, now set it down. The look on his face meant to say that she understood none of it. “The project needs to be completed, not abandoned.”

“Then it won’t be abandoned.” Marina closed her eyes. She wanted to sink into the red wine, to swim in it. “The truth is I don’t want to talk about Dr. Swenson or Vogel or drug development anymore. I know I’m the one who brought it up but I was wrong. Let’s just give the day to Anders.”