State of Wonder - Ann Patchett [19]
“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