State of Wonder - Ann Patchett [49]
Of course, so no one would be bothered. Marina went back to the box. The magazines stood up neatly at the side, Harper’s, The New Yorker, Scientific American, the New England Journal. There seemed to be a host of letters from Vogel, letters from other countries, envelopes from hospitals, universities, drug research companies that were not her own. Her fingers kept flipping, flipping.
Barbara peered over the edge and watched her employer’s correspondence sift through the hands of someone she in fact did not know at all. “I’m not so sure we should be doing this,” she said in a tentative voice. It seemed it was just now occurring to her that bringing out the entire box of mail might not have been her best decision. “Unless you wrote us more letters. She doesn’t like for us—”
But there it was. Marina didn’t have to go so deep into the crate. It wasn’t such a very long time ago that he had been here. “Anders Eckman.” She dropped the blue airmail envelope on top of the stationery from her hotel. Jackie pulled up his feet quickly, as if she had set down something hot.
Barbara leaned forward, looked without touching. “My God. Who do you think it’s from?”
Anders Eckman, in care of Dr. Annick Swenson, a particularly inaccurate phrasing. “His wife,” Marina said. Once she had identified Karen’s handwriting she could find the letters quickly. Everything she pulled from the box now would have been written after he had gone into the jungle. Writing in care of Dr. Swenson in Manaus was the only chance Karen had of reaching him once he had left the city, there were no other addresses. Before he was in the jungle she would have called him or e-mailed or, if she was feeling sentimental, sent him a letter at the hotel. Karen would have told him about the boys and the snow, told him to come home now because he was sounding worse, and anyway, they obviously had not thought this through well enough at the outset. Marina knew the contents of every letter that passed through her hands and one by one she dropped them onto the bench where Jackie’s feet had been. She could see Karen sitting at the island in her kitchen, perched on top of a high stool, writing page after page in the morning after she had taken the boys to school and then again at night when she had put them to bed, her head bent forward, her blond hair pushed behind her ears. Marina could read them as if she were standing over Karen’s shoulder. Come home. The letters came singly and in pairs. They came in groups of three. Karen would have written every day, maybe twice a day, because there was nothing else she could do to help him. But she didn’t help him. Marina did not doubt that Anders knew Karen was writing him and knew that her letters had hit a wall in Manaus. He would have known his wife’s loyalty as a correspondent. But by not receiving those letters he never knew that she was hearing from him. Anders would have died wondering if any of his letters had made it out of the jungle. Who wouldn’t imagine that the boy in the dugout log would have simply taken the coins he was given and let the envelopes float in the water as soon as he had rounded the bend in the river, and that those letters were divided between the fish and the freshwater dolphins? In the meantime, Karen Eckman turned her love into industry, writing her husband with a diligence that was now spread across a low leather bench in Dr. Swenson’s apartment.
At some point Barbara had gone to sit next to her husband. They held their wine glasses and watched the growing stack of mail with a flush of guilt on their cheeks. “What will you do with them all?” Barbara asked once Marina had combed the box for the final time.
Marina leaned over to pick up the few strays that had fallen onto the floor. “I don’t know,” she said. “I’ll take them. I don’t know what I’ll do with them.”
“This one’s different,” Jackie said, and picked up a smaller envelope from the pile.
Marina took the envelope, giving it the most cursory inspection. “It’s from me.”
“You were writing to him