State of Wonder - Ann Patchett [2]
“I shouldn’t have sent him,” Mr. Fox said.
She raised her head then and took his hand in her hands. Mr. Fox had no reason to wear a lab coat. Today he wore a dark gray suit and striped navy tie, and while it was a dignified uniform for a man of sixty, he looked out of place whenever he strayed from the administrative offices. Today it occurred to Marina that he looked like he was on his way to a funeral. “You didn’t make him go.”
“I asked him to go. I suppose he could have turned me down but it wasn’t very likely.”
“But you never thought something like this would happen. You didn’t send him someplace dangerous.” Marina wondered if she knew this to be true. Of course there were poisonous snakes and razor-toothed fish but she pictured them safely away from the places where doctors conducted scientific research. Anyway, the letter had said he died of a fever, not a snake bite. There were plenty of fevers to be had right here in Minnesota. “Dr. Swenson’s been down there for five years now. Nothing’s happened to her.”
“It wouldn’t happen to her,” Mr. Fox said without kindness in
his voice.
Anders had wanted to go to the Amazon. That was the truth. What are the chances a doctor who worked in statin development would be asked to go to Brazil just as winter was becoming unendurable? He was a serious birder. Every summer he put the boys in a canoe and paddled them through the Boundary Waters with binoculars and notepads looking for ruddy ducks and pileated woodpeckers. The first thing he did when he got word about the trip was order field guides to the rain forest, and when they came he abandoned all pretense of work. He put the blood samples back in the refrigerator and pored over the slick, heavy pages of the guides. He showed Marina the birds he hoped to see, wattled jacanas with toes as long as his hand, guira cuckoos with downy scrub brushes attached to the tops of their heads. A person could wash out the inside of a pickle jar with such a bird. He bought a new camera with a lens that could zoom straight into a nest from fifty feet away. It was not the kind of luxury Anders would have afforded himself under normal circumstances.
“But these are not normal circumstances,” he said, and took a picture of his coworker at her desk.
At the bright burst of the flash, Marina raised her head from a black-necked red cotinga, a bird the size of a thumb who lived in a cone-shaped daub of mud attached to the tip of a leaf. “It’s an ambitious lot of birds.” She studied every picture carefully, marveling at the splendors of biodiversity. When she saw the hyacinth macaws she experienced one split second of regret that she wasn’t the one Mr. Fox had tapped for the job. It was a singularly ridiculous thought. “You’ll be too busy with birds to ever find the time to talk to Dr. Swenson.”
“I imagine I’ll find a lot of birds before I find Dr. Swenson, and when I do find her I doubt she’ll pack up on the first day and rush back to Johns Hopkins. These things take finesse. Mr. Fox said that himself. That leaves me with a lot of daylight hours.”
Finding Dr. Swenson was an issue. There was an address in Manaus but apparently it was nowhere near the station where she did her field research; that location, she believed, needed to be protected with the highest level of secrecy in order to preserve both the unspoiled nature of her subjects and the value of the drug she was developing. She had made the case so convincingly that not even Mr. Fox knew where she was exactly, other than somewhere on a tributary off the Rio Negro. How far away from Manaus that tributary might begin and in which direction it ran no one could say. Worse than that was the sense that finding her