and boxes, plastic bins, plastic tubs, boxes of food, bottles of water, smaller boxes of test tubes and slides. She found a broom, a pile of cloths, a giant spool of twine. There was not a drawer or a shelf. There was not a logical place to put a pen, there was no logic to any of it. And then she remembered that Anders’ pens had gone to Easter when he died. That was the boy’s legacy, a handful of Bics. She went back to the sleeping porch, shined the light on some buckets, traced the beam of light around the line where the wall met the floor, and there, just beneath the hammock, she saw a metal box, bigger than the kind used for documents and smaller than the kind used for tackle or tools. She went down on her knees and reached beneath the boy, slid the metal over the rough hewn planks of flooring. There was no lock, just a fold-over hasp that kept the box shut. On the top was a small metal tray full of feathers and she held them up in groups of two and three and four, more than two dozen feathers in colors Marina had never realized feathers came in, lavender and iridescent yellow, each one perfectly clean, the barbs zipped up tight. In the tray there was a rock that in its size and marking looked startlingly like a human eyeball. There was a perfect fossil of a prehistoric fish pressed into shale and a rolled-up red silk ribbon. Beneath the tray was a blue Aerogram envelope with the word EASTER written on the front and when unfolded read: Please do all that is within your power to help this boy reach the United States and you will be rewarded. Take him to Karen Eckman. There was his address, his phone number. All expenses will be reimbursed. REWARD. Thank you, Anders Eckman. Beneath that, the note was written out again in Anders’ college Spanish. He did not speak Portuguese and so the Spanish was his best chance. Marina sat back on her heels. There was a pocket-sized spiral notebook that contained the alphabet, a letter on each page, each of them printed in uppercase, and at the end the word Easter and then the word Anders and then the word Minnesota. Anders’ driver’s license was in the bottom of the box along with his passport. Maybe Easter had wanted his picture or Anders wanted him to have it. There were three twenty dollar bills. There were five rubber bands, a half dozen pens, a handful of coins, American and Brazilian. Marina was dizzy. She had meant to wake the boy up, to write the word Anders, one of the three words he knew. She would point to the word and then point to her bed. Did Anders sleep here? but she didn’t have to ask the question now. She put everything back the way she had found it. She arranged the feathers, closed the lid, and slid the box to the wall. She turned off the flashlight and followed the moon back to Anders’ bed and crawled inside. He had shown her his passport the day it came in the mail. The cardboard cover was stiff. His picture captured nothing of him. Even the color was off. The picture on his driver’s license was better. “You didn’t have a passport?” she asked him.
“I did,” he said, sitting on her desk and looking over her shoulder so he could see it again. “My junior year of college.”
Marina looked up at him then. “Where did you go?” Marina regretted that she had never spent a year abroad. She could never bear the thought of being so far from home.
“Barcelona,” he said, lisping shamelessly. “My parents wanted me to go to Norway. But who leaves Minnesota for a semester abroad in Norway? When I was there I never thought I’d go home. I used to write the letter in my head to my parents, explaining that I was meant for sun and sangria and siestas. I was the happiest American in Spain.”
“So what are you doing here?”
Anders shrugged. “My time was up. Somehow I wound up going home. I went to medical school. I never went back.” He took the passport from her and looked at it again. “Don’t you think the picture is good? I look so serious. I could be a spy.”
Marina didn’t dream that night. Whatever price the Lariam exacted on her subconscious had been paid that afternoon on the boat, but