State of Wonder - Ann Patchett [40]
“Jackie,” the young man said, and Marina shook his hand as well. The accent she thought was Australian but she wasn’t positive. They seemed too tan to be English.
Rodrigo said something to Barbara and she squinted at him slightly when he spoke, as if she were translating each word separately and then reassembling them into a sentence in her head.
“Nos?”
“Dr. Swenson,” he said.
“Yes, of course,” Barbara said, looking almost relieved. “You’re looking for Dr. Swenson.”
“People don’t look for us,” Jackie said.
“That’s because nobody knows where we are,” Barbara said, and then she laughed. “That makes it sound like we’re hiding.”
Marina tried to put this couple together in her mind with Dr. Swenson. She tried to picture the three of them standing together in the same room. She could not. “I’ve left letters for you.”
“For us?” Jackie asked. “At the apartment?”
“At Dr. Swenson’s apartment building. I left them at the desk.”
At this point Rodrigo got the ladder and climbed up towards the ceiling to get a box of dryer sheets. The hierarchy in which different items were desired, needed, and sold, could clearly be charted based on what was closest to the ceiling and what was closest to the floor. Dryer sheets appeared to be hovering on the edge of obscurity for everyone in Manaus save Barbara Bovender.
“All the mail goes straight into a box,” Jackie said. “Annick picks it up when she comes into town.”
“Or she doesn’t,” Barbara said. “She isn’t very good about the mail. I’ve told her I’d open it for her, sort it all out, but she says not to bother. I think at the heart of it she just doesn’t care.”
Jackie turned then to face his wife. Was she his wife? The Bovenders could have been siblings or cousins. The general resemblance they bore to one another was striking. “She has a lot on her mind.”
Barbara nodded, half closing her eyes, as if she were considering all the many weights Dr. Swenson had to bear. “It’s true.”
“We have a postbox,” Jackie said. “That way when we get to the next town they’ll forward it on.”
“Are you leaving?” Marina asked.
“Oh, we will, sooner or later,” Barbara said. She looked over at Rodrigo who now had the box of dryer sheets in his hand. “We’re always leaving. We’ve stayed here longer than anywhere.”
Somehow Marina was hoping she didn’t mean Manaus. She couldn’t imagine how she would last out the week. “In Brazil?”
“No, here,” Jackie said, and held up his open hand as if he meant to say that they had spent an endless stretch of time in Rodrigo’s store.
Barbara then got a serious look on her face and tilted the slender rack of her shoulders towards Marina. “Do you know Annick?”
Marina hesitated so briefly that neither of the young people saw it. “I do,” she said.
“Well, then you know. Her work is so important—”
Jackie interrupted her. “And she’s been really good to us, my God.”
“It’s not like I think we’re helping her,” Barbara said. “We’re not scientists. But if she thinks we’re helping her, if there’s anything we can do to contribute, then it’s not a problem for us to stay for a while. It’s not a problem for me anyway. I can do my work anywhere. It’s really harder for Jackie.”
“What do you do?” Marina said, using the pronoun in the plural.
“I’m a writer,” Barbara said.
Jackie raised his hand and ran his open fingers through his hair. “I surf,” he said.
Harder, yes. Marina thought about the bath-warm water of the Rio Negro inching along towards the Rio Solimões so that they could flow together into the Amazon. She was planning to ask him something about this, how surfing constituted work or how he planned to solve the current problems of his employment, when the only other person she knew in Manuas came through the open door. When Milton saw the three of them together he was extremely pleased. He had left his suit in the closet at home and was dressed for