My parents had gone to the Amazon in search of the mapinguary, a giant primate that was nicknamed the Sasquatch of Brazil. In his letter, Lugo talked about floating away from the jungle city of Iquitos, the muddy water, tarantulas, bats, and tree frogs. The shade of the massive canopy leaves. The isula ants — so toxic, a single bite could cause hallucinations — that coated the low-hanging vines. The heads of alligators that, from a distance, resembled floating wood. My mother was skilled at imitating animal calls, particularly birds and monkeys. She had a special empathy for the howler monkeys, he wrote. He said the dangers were too numerous to list and my parents had fallen prey to the greatest: beauty. The Amazonian coral snake was one of the most stunning in the world, black as coal and vividly banded with red and yellow. My parents and Lugo were on land, following a set of unusual tracks, when the coral snake slunk into their path. My mother leaned down to take a picture and the snake leapt forward and bit her wrist. As my father rushed to her side, the snake lunged at his ankle. There was nothing to be done. Not even the river people had developed a remedy for this kind of snakebite. They were both dead within an hour. In my mother’s last minutes, she shouted a man’s name over and over. Calvin, Lugo said. She kept screaming for Calvin. And it was the most tortured sound he’d ever heard.
I’d looked up from the letter then. I had no idea who Calvin was. In fact, I was positive I had never heard her utter the name before. Perhaps it was a blessing your father died first, Lugo wrote next. And then he signed his name. He listed an address where I could reach him if I wanted to know more. I wrote back right away, filling page after page with questions. I needed to gather the details, to be able to picture the entire story, but Lugo never replied. I’d always intended to let my brother read Lugo’s letter — after we moved, after he was settled at his new school, after he stopped waking me in the middle of the night to listen to the noises in the wall. But none of that passed, and I knew he might never hear the whole story. I didn’t think it was right, but it was how it had to be.
I worked at a bookstore downtown, a thirty minute T ride from our apartment on the outskirts of Cambridge. The shop specialized in antique books and we averaged about five customers a week, but combined with my parents’ estate, doled out in small monthly payments by Aunt Lucille, the salary was enough. The owner had said other employees developed mold allergies and subsequently quit, but I was determined to stick it out and never left home without a bottle of Afrin tucked inside my purse. The bookstore reminded me of my first year in boarding school, the year I ate my lunch in the library while reading The Count of Monte Cristo or Wuthering Heights, the year books taught me to not be lonely.
Work became harder once it was summer and Denver was out of school. He was attending a day camp at the Cambridge YMCA, where he played tennis and swam, but after finding the hole, he refused to leave the apartment. They wouldn’t have made me go to camp, he’d said. They wouldn’t have liked me hanging around with philistines when I could be exploring instead. He was referring to our parents — he had stopped calling them Mom and Dad when we moved to the city — and I was pretty sure “philistine” was a word he’d picked up from our mother (she often used it in reference to Aunt Lucille) and that he didn’t even know what it meant, but I was too tired to request a definition. We finally agreed on some guidelines — no going outside the neighborhood, no games involving superglue or fire, no bothering the people next door — but I felt uneasy leaving him alone. He was only twelve and I never knew when he would invent an urgent reason to break one or all of my rules. Still, coming into work had its perks. The Public Gardens were across the street and some afternoons I saw squirrels chasing each other up sycamores, picnickers spreading their blankets across the grass. And this guy dropped by every Wednesday, looking for a first edition of Moby Dick.
Jordan was older than me by five years. He always wore jeans, a black T-shirt, and leather sandals. He was clean-shaven and smelled faintly of citrus. We talked whenever he visited and I liked to think that was why he kept coming back, seeing as we’d never had a first edition of Moby Dick and had no hope of acquiring one anytime soon. Jordan knew my parents were gone and that I was looking after my brother. I’d told him it was a car crash — my standard line because it didn’t lead to more questions.
I hadn’t spent much time with anyone but Denver since we came to the city. My last encounter was right after the funeral, with an ex-boyfriend from high school. It happened in the attic of my parents’ house, while the wake was bustling downstairs. When it was over, I cried for hours and after trying to console me for a while, he put on his clothes and left. Sex and dating just weren’t practical now, with my job and Denver and the violent sadness I was trying to keep from breaking through. And yet today passed slowly because tomorrow was Wednesday and that meant I would see Jordan.
I spent most of the afternoon in the back of the store, the office door cracked so I could hear the bells that jingled whenever someone entered. A Gorky print hung on the wall behind the desk; it was a painting of the artist and his mother, billowy figures done in whites and tans with a single jolt of maroon, the faces round and smudged. I liked to pretend they watched over me while I worked at the computer, which I’d been using to research all the universities where my mother ever lectured or taught, looking for someone named Calvin. During the spring, I exhausted all the places she and my father visited after they became successful, plus Syracuse and Brown, where she’d been an adjunct professor before she married. But this morning on the T, I remembered one place I hadn’t checked: a university in Michigan that gave my mother a fellowship after she finished her graduate work. She had talked a lot about winter in Michigan, the pointed icicles that hung from tree branches and the blue gloss of frozen lakes. She had an office on the top floor of a stone building, where she researched her first important paper. It was during that winter in Michigan when she realized she didn’t want to be a laboratory scientist, but an explorer, a time before she met my father, a time when she was still discovering who she wanted to be — or had decided to become someone else. I was hopeful as I scanned the roster of current and former faculty, but didn’t find what I was looking for. I went through the entire list a second time to be certain. No Calvins.
I leaned back in the chair and looked through the doorway. The air was warm and thick with dust. There was an air conditioner, but it rattled and sputtered, so I kept it off. One section of the store consisted entirely of antique maps. I liked to find maps of the places my parents had been and study the geography, imagining them crossing the blue lines of the Kalambo River in Tanzania or climbing the brown peaks of Mount Abu in India. The phone rang. I ignored it at first, then realized it might be my brother and answered. It was Denver, calling to tell me the hole in the street was actually a tunnel that led to the other side of the world.
