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picture of Anders came very clearly into Marina’s mind: his back was against an impenetrable bank of leaves, his feet in the water. He was holding a letter. He was looking down river for the boy in the dugout log. He was dead. Marina might not have a great deal of faith in Dr. Swenson but Dr. Swenson wasn’t the sort to announce a death where no death had occurred, that would constitute a frivolous waste of time. “You’re the second person to tell me that tonight.”
    “Anders said you knew her. He said she was a teacher of yours.”
    “She was,” Marina said, not wanting to explain. Marina was from Minnesota. No one ever believed that. At the point when she could have taken a job anywhere she came back because she loved it here. This landscape was the one she understood, all prairie and sky. She and Anders had that in common.
    “I know how much I’m asking,” Karen said. “And I know how terrible you feel about Anders and about me and the boys. I know that I’m using all of it against you and how unfair it is and I still want you to go.”
    “I understand.”
    “I know you understand,” Karen said. “But will you go?”

Two
    F irst things first. Marina made an appointment with an epidemiologist in St. Paul and got a ten-year vaccine for yellow fever and a tetanus shot. She got a prescription for an antimalarial, Lariam, and was told to take the first pill immediately. After that she would take one pill a week for the duration of her trip, and then one a week for four weeks after her return home. “Watch this stuff,” the doctor told her. “It can make you feel like jumping off a roof.”
    Marina wasn’t worried about jumping off a roof. Her worries were centered around plane tickets, packing, English-Portuguese dictionaries, how much Pepto-Bismol would be enough. From time to time she thought about the upper quadrant of her left arm, which, since those two shots, felt like both needles had broken off their respective hypodermics and were now lodged in her humerus like a pair of hot spears. She allowed these more practical concerns to stand temporarily in place for her thoughts of Anders and Karen and Dr. Swenson, none of whom she could manage at the moment. It wasn’t until the third night after she took the first tablet of Lariam that Marina’s thoughts swung sharply in the direction of India and her father. In the process of leaving for the Amazon, she had inadvertently solved a mystery that at present was the farthest thing from her mind: What had been wrong with her childhood?
    And then the unexpected answer: these pills .
    It came to her in the night when she bolted up from her bed, out of her bed, drenched and shaking, the dream still so alive she wouldn’t blink her eyes for fear of calling it back, though really there was no avoiding it. She knew this one by heart. It was the same dream that had marked the entirety of her youth, intensely present and then gone for years, returning at the very moment she was careless enough to forget about it. Standing there beside her bed in the dark, the sheets soaked, her pillow and nightgown soaked, she came to the clear and sudden realization that she had taken Lariam as a child. Her mother never told her but of course she must have, starting the dosage as prescribed, the first pill taken a week before departure, then every week while away, then for four weeks after they returned. Pills meant it was time to see her father as surely as digging through desk drawers to find the passports and dragging the suitcases up from the basement. India pills, her mother had called them. Come and take your India pills .
    Marina had only the most cursory memories of living in an apartment in Minneapolis with both of her parents but she could summon them back without any effort. Look, there is her father standing at the front door shaking the snow from the black gloss of his hair. There he is at the kitchen table writing on a tablet, a cigarette in the saucer beside him