State of Wonder - Ann Patchett [8]
Marina stood up from the floor, though in her memory she had never sat down on it. She went to the phone, looking for an address book, a Rolodex, anything with numbers. What she found were two copies of the Minneapolis Star Tribune, a scratch pad with a clean sheet of paper on top, a coffee mug that said “I Love My Library” jumbled full of pens and crayons, a piece of paper tacked to a cork board that said “Babysitter Emergency”: Karen’s cell phone, Anders’ cell phone, Anders’ office, poison control center, ambulance, Dr. Johnson, Linn Hilder. This is what it feels like when the house is burning down, Marina thought. This is why they give you a number as simple as 911 for the emergencies that will surely come, because when the flames are racing up the curtains and hurtling towards you over the floorboards you won’t know any numbers. As much as she wanted to help the wife of her dead friend, she wanted to get out of that house. She picked up the phone and dialed the name on the bottom of the list. She had to take the phone out of the kitchen in order to hear the woman on the other end. Linn Hilder was the neighbor down the street who happened to have two boys who were friends with the Eckman boys. Why, Linn Hilder had leaned out her car window not twenty minutes ago and asked them if they needed a ride home and they had said no, Mrs. Hilder, our mother’s coming. Linn Hilder was herself now crying as convulsively as Karen.
“Call someone,” Marina said in a low voice. “Call anyone you can think of and send them over here. Call the school. Go to the school and get the boys.”
When she came back to the kitchen she saw that Pickles was lying out on the floor to the right of his owner, his sodden head resting at the joint of Karen’s hip, and to her left sat Mr. Fox, who had miraculously stepped forward in her brief absence. He was petting Karen’s head with a slow and rhythmical assurance. “It’s all right,” he said quietly. “It’s going to be all right.” Her head was against his chest and her tears had darkened the stripes on his tie from blue to black. And while it wasn’t all right, nothing close to it, she seemed able to hear the steady repetition of the words and was trying to breathe regularly.
Marina and Mr. Fox left the house an hour later, after Karen’s mother had been located, after her sister came in with her husband, bringing word that their brother was driving up from Iowa, after Linn Hilder had collected the Eckman boys from school and taken them to her own house until a sensible plan for breaking the news to them could be devised. From the moment Mr. Fox had first stood in the door of the lab with that blue envelope in his hand it had never occurred to Marina that there might be guilt where Anders’ death was concerned. It was an accident as much as being pulled under by the current in the Amazon River would have been an accident. But as they stepped into the smack of frigid wind with only Pickles there to see them out, she wondered if the people inside thought of Mr. Fox as culpable. The days were still short and the sun was already low. Certainly without Mr. Fox in the picture, the Eckman boys would be doing their homework or rolling up a snowman in the backyard. Anders would be looking at the clock in their office, saying he was hungry, his body already leaning towards the door in their thriving, living world. She thought it was possible that even if Karen Eckman and her people didn’t blame Mr. Fox in the greatest hour of their grief, the blame might still come to them