State of Wonder (36 page)

“Marina!” The voice was happy now. She did not know the voice, and then she did. The second it came to her he spoke his name. “It’s Milton!”

The enormity of Marina’s happiness was caught in that light. Of all the tributaries in all of the Amazon he had wandered onto hers. Milton her protector, Milton who would know exactly how to set everything to right. She threw her branch into the water and let out a scream of joy which took the shape of his name, “Milton!” But the scream that met hers was high and entirely female and there bounding over the edge of the boat and into her arms came Barbara Bovender wearing a short khaki colored dress with a stunning number of pockets. Milton was driving the boat for Barbara Bovender! The light of every Lakashi torch was caught in the reflective sheet of her wind-tangled hair. Marina embraced the narrow back of her friend who clung to her neck and whispered in her ear too softly to be heard above the cries of the Lakashi. She smelled of lime blossom perfume.

“How are you here?” Marina said. There was no sensible way to say it—how did you find us and why did you come and how long can you stay and will you take me with you when you leave? Easter bounded down the dock on a wave of childlike glee and straight into Barbara’s arms, burying his face in her hair. Marina felt the smallest ping of something—jealousy? That couldn’t be right. It was so much to take in and it was all too wonderful and confusing. The Lakashi were continuing to sing and the smoke from all the fires was as blinding as the spotlight from the boat. Marina was climbing over the edge of the boat to throw her arms around Milton, her feet bare, her dress torn at the left side seam, her hair neatly combed and braided because she had been sitting for a long time watching the sunset. She put out her arms to Milton and he took her hands, his arms out straight, and turned her entire body so that she could see there was in fact a third person there, and because that person was not catching the light it took her a moment to understand. It should have been Jackie and it was not Jackie.

“Marina,” said Mr. Fox.

It was just that one word, her name, and suddenly she was certain of nothing. Could she embrace him? Did they kiss? In the torch light she could make out that all three of the visitors wore a similar expression, a look that was hollowed out and exhausted, possibly terrified, a look that Marina no doubt must have had on her own face that first night she came down the river to see the burning Lakashi torches. The other doctors would be walking down from the lab by now. They would have heard all the ruckus and come to see why this night was different from all other nights. Could she kiss Mr. Fox in front of Dr. Swenson? In front of Barbara Bovender? She had never mentioned that part to any of them, that Mr. Fox was the person in all the world she kissed. “I’ve been writing to you,” she said, and held out the letters to him like a defense. He was wearing a white cotton shirt like Milton’s and she wondered if he had come down in a wool suit. Had Milton taken him to Rodrigo’s late at night to buy him clothes? “I was flagging down the boat to see if it would take my letters to you.” He took the letters. He took her hand.

“I haven’t had any letters,” he said. His voice was hoarse. “I haven’t heard from you.” The time she had been gone had aged him, the boat trip had aged him. How long had he been in Brazil? How long had it taken him to wear the Bovenders down? “I didn’t know what had happened to you. Are you hurt?”

“I’m fine,” Marina said.

“There’s blood all over your dress.”

Marina looked down and sure enough there was, but she couldn’t remember who it once belonged to or how much of it was just a stain she hadn’t been able to scrub out. The Lakashi were coming on board now and they grinned as they slapped Mr. Fox who flinched at first and then raised his hand in what appeared to be self-defense. Marina pulled him back. They were slapping Milton and Barbara Bovender, pounding out their particular and aggressive form of welcome. Already two women had their hands deep in the white gold of Barbara’s hair and she struggled hopelessly to get away. A suitcase was held aloft and then passed overhead and Marina leapt up to grab it. “Milton!” she called out, “don’t let them take the bags!”

Milton managed to wrestle the remaining duffels and totes away from the natives. He waved to Easter, who came on board and gave Milton a hearty slap at the waist and then began to loop his arms through the various handles of bags.

Marina took Mr. Fox’s hand and held it tightly. “We have to keep an eye on Barbara. She won’t be able to manage this.”

“I wouldn’t worry about Mrs. Bovender,” he said in a flat voice. This was not the reunion they were supposed to have. She wished he would have waited in the Minneapolis airport for her to come back. It wouldn’t have been too much longer. Once they were on the dock he let go of her hand. Maybe it wasn’t a good thing the boat had come at all. There was no aligning Minnesota to Amazonia. There was no explaining one world to the other. Dr. Swenson was walking towards them.

“Enough of that,” she said, clapping her hands. “Leave her alone now.” The two Lakashi women who fought over Barbara’s hair had settled their differences, leaving her in under a minute with two long braids already tied off at the ends with pieces of thread pulled from their own dresses. Dr. Swenson walked by Barbara with barely a glance. “We’ll be talking about this,” she said as she passed, and Barbara dropped her head. When she got to the end of the dock her full attention turned to Milton. “Whose boat is this?”

“It belongs to a friend of Rodrigo’s,” Milton said.

“Rodrigo’s friends don’t have money like this.”

“One of them does,” Milton said. “The man who bottles Inca Cola. Rodrigo sells it in the store.”

Dr. Swenson nodded. “Did you bring supplies or only guests?”

“Rodrigo put together a list of what you must need by now, plus some things you’ll like. He had just gotten in a full case of oranges and he sent them all to you. I think he did a very good job.”

Having dealt with two of the travelers, she turned to the third. “You no doubt moved heaven and earth for this, Mr. Fox.”

Mr. Fox stood on the dock and stared at Dr. Swenson and stared at the entire flaming tableau that spread behind her. A bat spun down perilously close to the top of his head and he did not flinch. “We have had a difficult trip. There is clearly a great deal to discuss, including the heaven and earth I have moved, but for now you should tell us where we will be sleeping.”

“I don’t know where you’ll be sleeping,” Dr. Swenson said, making no concessions to civility. “We are working here, not running a Hyatt.”

The Lakashi, sensing there was no further call for celebration, began stacking their burning sticks into a single raging bonfire that threatened to spread to the dock they were standing on. Thomas Nkomo stepped forward, waving his hand and bowing quickly to the guests. “Let us work this out away from the fire,” he said calmly. “We will make sure everyone is accommodated.” Once he had herded them gently to shore he told Barbara Bovender that she would follow Marina, and Mr. Fox would bunk with him, and Milton—

“I can sleep in the boat,” Milton said.

Thomas shook his head. “There is a cot in the lab near Dr. Swenson’s station. She will be happy to have you sleep there for tonight.”

“Let’s leave your assumptions of my happiness out of this,” Dr. Swenson said. As she turned and walked back up the dock, Marina could see that Dr. Swenson was limping badly and wanted to go to her and lend her an arm, and she wanted to go with Mr. Fox because Thomas of all people would give them a moment together without asking questions, but instead she took Barbara Bovender’s hand and led her through the jungle towards the storage shed.

“Do you know where we’re going?” Barbara asked.

“I do,” Marina said.

Jackie had left for Lima five days before, this being the season when the surf rose along the Peruvian coast with such ferocity that it cleared the lesser surfers from the beaches and brought forth the greater ones from other continents. The Bovenders had talked it over at length and decided this would be a good time for both of them. Barbara could work on her novel and he could spend a couple of weeks curled in the lip of a giant wave. “We went over everything that could possibly happen and decided there was nothing that I couldn’t handle myself.” She was sitting in the chair on top of Marina’s extra dress. She closed her eyes and shook her head. “We didn’t take Mr. Fox into account. I told him I didn’t know where Annick was. That lasted about three minutes.”

“He’s better at it than I was.”

Mrs. Bovender’s blue eyes went round at the thought of it. “He’s better at it than anyone. Vogel holds the lease on the apartment. He said I would be on the curb in an hour. He got Milton, Milton got the boat. I said, fine, good luck, and then he said I was coming with them. Milton’s never been out here before and I’d only come with Jackie. Half the time I came with him I was asleep. Jackie gets seasick unless he’s the one driving the boat. I was supposed to tell them how to get here? Oh God, it was awful, we’d pass one river and then I’d start to think a half an hour later that that was the river we were supposed to turn on.”

“But you got them here,” Marina said. She wasn’t sure she could have done it.

“Marina, we left two
days
ago. All those rivers, all those trees. I get turned around in Manaus.” Her hands were shaking and so she sat on them. “Do you have a cigarette? I would really love a cigarette.”

“I’m sorry,” Marina said.

“Thank God Milton was there. At first Mr. Fox asked me a lot of questions, mostly questions about you, but once he was convinced I really hadn’t heard from you he stopped talking to me altogether.” There was something about Barbara’s hair, the two yellow braids hanging over her shoulders, that had robbed her of her considerable sophistication and left behind a fourteen year old girl. “I was staring out at the river bank every second. I felt like I was trying to intuit where you were, like it was my responsibility to know, and I didn’t know. Mr. Fox wouldn’t believe me when I told him I didn’t remember. He thought I was still trying to throw him off Annick’s trail, like it would be great fun for me to take us all out on the river and get us lost. And then I saw another river, a small one, and all of the sudden I was sure it was the right one. The opening would have been so easy to miss. If I had been looking on the other side of the boat for just a minute we would have kept going. Mr. Fox and Milton didn’t see it at first, and they both perked up then because I was so sure. We went up that river for half the day and everything was quiet. Most of the time I was still thinking I’d gotten it right, and then I started to think we had gotten it wrong, and I was just about to say that, I was getting up my nerve, when we came around a bend and there were all these people on the shore in loincloths with their foreheads painted yellow. It was like they’d been standing there forever, waiting for us, and I didn’t remember exactly what the Lakashi looked like. I was so tired by then and I was so confused by all the wrong choices I’d already made that I honestly didn’t remember.”

Marina leaned forward from the bed where she was sitting. She put her hands on Barbara Bovender’s knees. All of the rivers in the Amazon and she knew which one this story had taken.

“So I said, ‘There they are!’ and Milton was slowing down the boat and he was whispering to me, ‘Are you sure, are you sure?’ He’s met the Lakashi before. They come down to Manaus selling timber, sometimes they’ve come with Annick. He knows this isn’t right, and then I know it isn’t right, and the river is narrow there and they all raise up these bows and arrows and they’re huge.” She is crying now, and she takes her trembling hands out from beneath her legs and begins to wipe her eyes.

“You’re okay,” Marina said. “You found me. Milton got you out.”

She nodded but her fingers could not get far enough ahead of the tears to wipe them all away, there were simply too many of them. “He did. He was so fast. Milton deserves some sort of medal. He’d never driven that boat before and he slammed it around so fast we nearly went over. When I looked back the air was full of arrows. Arrows! How can that be possible? And then I saw something. I thought I saw something.”

“What?” Marina said.

She shook her head. “It was worse than anything, worse than Mr. Fox or us getting lost or those people shooting at us.” She looked up at Marina and blinked her eyes and for a moment the crying stopped and a look of utter seriousness crossed her pretty face. She took Marina’s hands. “I saw my father running through the trees,” she whispered. “I don’t know what you’d call it, a vision, a visitation? He was coming straight towards me, coming down to the water, and I threw myself on the bottom of the boat. There were arrows in the boat and Milton said not to touch them. I tried to look back for him but Milton said to keep down. Marina, my father is dead. He died in Australia when I was ten years old. I think about him all the time, I dream about him, but I’ve never seen him. He came there for me because he knew I was going to die.”

“Did Milton see him, or Mr. Fox?”

She shook her head. “Mr. Fox was on the deck and Milton was driving. I don’t think they would have been able to see him anyway. I think he was only there for me.”

“W
ho would have known you were missing?” Dr. Swenson was saying to Mr. Fox when Barbara and Marina walked into the lab. Dr. Budi could not stop shaking her head and the two Drs. Saturn stayed very close together. The misery that comes from having a good imagination was writ large on Thomas Nkomo. “I suppose the Inca Cola man would have wanted his boat back at some point. When Jackie Bovender came home from his surfing expedition in two or three weeks they would have come here together. Don’t you think so, Barbara? He would have come looking for you then.”