State of Wonder (39 page)

“But you wear this hat,” she said.

He shrugged. “I can wear another hat.”

She held it for a minute, looked at the thin red ribbon band. She put it on her head and immediately felt braver for it. “I’ll bring it back to you,” she said.

“Then it would be so valuable to me I could never wear it.”

It occurred to Marina then that she should have run off with Milton that first moment she saw him in the airport. She should have begged him to take her to Rio where they could have vanished together into the crowds of dancing girls and handsome men. She and Easter went down to the dock and said goodbye to their three friends. She kissed all three of them and only Mr. Fox was embarrassed. Then she slapped each one on the waist. The Lakashi came down and stood with Marina and Easter and together they watched the beautiful Inca Cola boat pull away. Marina put her hand on Easter’s head to comfort herself. Everyone waved. Long after the particular details of their features became small and blurred down the river she could still make out the gleam of Barbara Bovender’s hair, which had turned into a great flaxen flag in the wind.

The future was a terrible weight and Marina stood on the dock for a long time after the boat was out of sight and felt it press down on her. Finally she went to the lab to look through the surgical supplies, and talk to Dr. Budi about assisting, and take whatever means were available to forestall the inevitable, but Dr. Swenson was there at her desk in front of a large spread of paper: file folders and typed reports and hand written notes pulled from spiral notebooks.

“You aren’t really going to fire the Bovenders, are you?” Marina asked.

“Since when do you care about the Bovenders? They were the ones that kept you in Manaus for so long.”

“You’re the one who kept me in Manaus,” Marina said. “They were just doing their job.”

“So in the case of Mr. Fox they didn’t do their job well, or I should say she didn’t do it at all.”

“But in the end it served your purpose, their coming here. It all turned out for the best.”

“We are not in a rush, Dr. Singh, but neither is there an endless amount of time for what needs to be accomplished. You’ll forgive me if I don’t care to focus myself on the matter of the Bovenders’ employment with the time that I have. There is so much to do here. I’ve been trying to organize some things, just in case.” Her thick fingers cut and recut the stacks in front of her like a deck of oversized cards. “But I see now there’s no doing it. It would take a solid three months of work to make them even passingly useful to anyone other than myself. I realize now I’ve been too cryptic, I’ve kept too much in my head. There are some things here I can hardly make sense of myself. I can see now I’ve been very optimistic. I should have taken failure into account.”

“The failure of what?” Marina said. How far away was the boat now? Was it possible that one of them could have had a change of heart, if not Mr. Fox then Milton or Barbara? Couldn’t they insist on turning around to go back for her?

Dr. Swenson looked over the top of her glasses. “I think it is safe to say we will be making surgical history today, though God knows we won’t be getting credit. I can’t imagine there have been any other women my age having cesareans.”

Marina sat down heavily and put her elbows on the table and in doing so frightened a handful of small bats that nested inside the table’s lip. Five or six of them went spinning around the room, lost in the bright light of day, until one by one they stuck to the walls and flattened out like thick daubs of mud.

“There could certainly be a problem with bleeding, but Dr. Nkomo has offered himself for a transfusion if we need one. He’s A positive. That’s a stroke of luck.”

“Do you have a bag?” Marina asked. What they had and what they lacked was a source of great mystery.

“One line, two needles, gravity does the rest.”

“You must be kidding me.”

Dr. Swenson shook her head. “You would be amazed at all the things that are possible in a state of deprivation. It’s only a matter of thinking things through. Just take your time, Dr. Singh. There’s no reason to rush this. That was your downfall in Baltimore. Rushing is the greatest mistake.”

Marina sat up, a sound like a bell ringing in her head. “Baltimore?”

Dr. Swenson looked at her without bemusement or compassion, two of the things that Marina might have hoped to see, then she glanced back at her papers. “You thought I didn’t remember that.”

“Because you
didn’t
remember that. When I met you in Manaus at the opera you didn’t know me.”

“That’s true, I didn’t. It came to me later, not long after we were back, and by that point it didn’t make any difference.” She plucked a thick article out of the stack, scrawled a note across the top in illegible writing, and placed it in a blue cardboard file. “I only bring it up now because I don’t want it weighing on you going into surgery. That’s why I had you do that cesarean, you know, not just to see if you could do it. I wanted you to get your confidence up. You made a very common mistake that night at the General. You rushed, nothing more than that. Had it not been the eye you would have forgotten all about it in a week. Everyone at some point nicks a skull, nicks an ear. It was just your bad luck that the head wasn’t positioned another centimeter in either direction. In retrospect the real loss was your quitting the program. If I had known you better then I would have stepped in. At the time though,” she shrugged, “it was your decision. This will be easier for you. There isn’t the pressure of a baby to save.”

Marina sat down in a chair beside the desk, and there it went, the burden of her lifetime, taken. She wondered if she could have turned the Lakashi baby. She looked down at her hands. She wondered what they might have accomplished.

“It would have been remarkable if it had worked out, to have had a child at this age, to have had the chance to see myself in a child. I wouldn’t have ever thought about it except for the fact that we came very close.” She made another note, equally unreadable, and put it on the other side of the desk. “Be sure to freeze it, Dr. Singh. There are tests that I’ll want to do later. I’ll want to see what levels of the compound are in the tissues.”

Marina nodded. She would have liked to know what any of it meant, especially the part that concerned her, but she was lost. Mr. Fox was speeding down the river now and she wanted him to come back. She would tell him everything. She would start with her internship and bring the story right up to today.

Dr. Swenson looked at her watch, and then she took it off her swollen wrist and laid it on the desk. When she stood up from her chair she struggled, the great and looming failure of her pregnancy going before her. “We should get to work now, don’t you think? There’s nothing else here that I can do.”

Eleven

M
any hours after the surgery, and well after dark, Easter and Thomas took the mattress off the cot on the sleeping porch and carried it to Dr. Swenson’s hut. They had to take out the table and push the two chairs against the wall but in the end there was enough room for Easter and Marina to sleep. Not that Marina was sleeping, she was watching Dr. Swenson, watching the parade of every nocturnal creature in the Amazon as it wandered through the room. It seemed that they were all attracted to the light, which made her think of that first night in Manaus and Rodrigo’s store. The next day she sent Benoit over for the cot frame and the mosquito netting. Easter brought his strongbox with him. For a moment Dr. Swenson opened her eyes and watched while they rearranged the furniture again. “I don’t remember asking the two of you to move in,” she said, but before Marina could launch her explanation Dr. Swenson had fallen back to sleep.

Aside from her quick morning trips to the Martins, Marina stayed close to her patient, watching her pass in and out of fevers. In her lucidity Dr. Swenson was demanding, wanting to talk to Alan Saturn about mosquitoes, wanting briefings on the data that had been collected since her surgery, wanting Marina to take her blood pressure. Then just as quickly the fever came back and she cried in her sleep, great flooding tears. She would ask for ice and Marina would go and get the small block she kept in the freezer where they stored the blood samples, chipping it into shards with a knife. It was the same freezer where she kept the child with the curving tail. Sirenomelia. It was two days before Marina remembered the name for it. The only time she had ever heard of it was in a lecture on birth abnormalities Dr. Swenson had given at Johns Hopkins. It flashed by in a single slide,
Sirenomelia, Mermaid Syndrome, the legs of the fetus are fused together into a single tail, no visible genitalia. It is nothing you’re likely to see
. And there it went; with a click and a brief flash of blackness they were on to the next slide. The only person who ever stood to know what it would have been like to have Dr. Swenson for a mother had not lived to meet the experience. A life of such extraordinary beginnings had, in the end, amounted to little more than a science experiment. Marina had rested her hand on the tiny head for a moment when the whole thing was over, just before Budi covered it over to keep it from the insects and took it off to the lab.

In her fevered dreams, Dr. Swenson often gave bits and pieces of lectures, and sometimes it was a lecture Marina remembered, “Ectopic Pregnancy and the Damage to Fallopian Tubes.” She fell into another broken sleep, the blood of Thomas Nkomo making a slow loop through her veins. Marina gave her fluids and tinkered with the antibiotics. For all that they lacked in the jungle their assortment of antibiotics was as comprehensive as any hospital pharmacy. She checked the incision, watched for excessive swelling. She sat in the small room with the door open and read the copious notes on malaria. As the days went by, Dr. Swenson’s fevers would stop and then start again. Marina upped the dosages, beat them back. It was days before they could sit her up, and then stand her up. Marina worried about clots. With Easter on one side and Marina on the other, Dr. Swenson walked halfway down the path to the lab. When she was safely back in bed, too tired even to sleep, Marina read to her from
Great Expectations
. That became their new routine, and if the chapter was particularly good, or the day particularly dull, Dr. Swenson would ask Marina to read her some more. Easter sat on the floor with his paper and pad and practiced bending straight lines into the alphabet. Marina wrote out
Dr. Swenson
and put it on Dr. Swenson’s chest. She wrote the word
Marina
and put it in her lap.

“Did you think I’d forget?” Dr. Swenson said, looking at the piece of paper when she woke.

“I’m trying to give him a few new words,” Marina said.

Dr. Swenson put the piece of paper back on her chest and patted it there. “Good. Let him remember this. Dr. Eckman was always trying to teach him to write
Minnesota
. That was never going to do him any good.”

“You never know,” Marina said.

“I do know. I think about Dr. Eckman now. There is something very specific about having a fever in the tropics, very unlike having a fever at home. Here you feel the air burning into you, or you are burning into it. After a time one loses all parameters, even the parameter of skin. I think he couldn’t possibly have understood what was happening to him.”

“Probably not,” Marina said. It had been almost a week since Easter had left one of Anders’ letters in the bed. He must have run out of them. Easter was sitting shirtless by the door and the sun fell over exactly half of him, one leg and one arm, the left side of his face. The bruises had in time faded down to a dull green.

“How well do you think I am now?”

“You’re through the worst of it but I wouldn’t say you’re well. That will take a long time. You know more about it than I do.”

Dr. Swenson nodded. “That’s what I’ve been thinking myself. Dr. Budi, Dr. Nkomo, even the botanist could look after me now.”

In fact they came to visit every day. Just that morning Dr. Budi brought a bouquet of pink blossoms from the Martin trees in a drinking glass, who knows how she had managed to get them. They were there on the bedside table, the heavy blossoms crossing the face of Dr. Rapp. The Lakashi came too, the women keeping a silent vigil outside the window while they unbraided and rebraided one another’s hair. Any one of them would have taken care of her if given the chance. Marina told her as much.

“None of them would do the job like you. I trained you myself, after all. You do your follow-up the way it’s meant to be done. I would like to keep you on, Dr. Singh. You certainly could manage Vogel, keep them happy while everyone else did their work. The other doctors like you. The Lakashi have bonded to you in much the way they bonded to Dr. Rapp. Someone is going to need to look after them once I’m gone. I don’t think any of the others could do that.”

“The Lakashi can look after themselves.”

Dr. Swenson shook her head. “Not if the world comes in to take the Martins, to take the Rapps. I will get over this surgery or I won’t. Other people can take care of me but who can take care of them? The truth is, I could just keep thinking up reasons you had to stay. I understand you well enough for that.”

“You’ve done a good job so far,” Marina said, wringing out a cloth to wash Dr. Swenson’s face and neck.

“Sit still for a minute,” Dr. Swenson said, pushing her hand away. “Sit down. I’m trying to tell you something important. This is a conflict I am facing. I am telling you I want you to stay and at the same time giving you a reason to go.”

“You aren’t giving me any reason to go.”

“That’s because you won’t be quiet. You won’t stop moving all the time.”

Marina sat down and held the wet cloth in her hands. It was cool. She’d let the extra ice melt in the bowl.

Dr. Swenson, small in her bed, looked up at the ceiling. There was a fly circling over her head and Marina disciplined herself not to shoo it away. “Barbara Bovender came to see me the morning that she left. She was worried that I was going to fire her, and because she was worried she told me the story of her visit to the Hummocca. It was a story that Milton had already told me, but she wanted to tell it again to show me how she had suffered for the cause. She sat in that chair where you are now and she cried. She told me she was so close to death that she had seen her father running through the jungle towards her, waving his hands, her father who had died when she was a child.”

It was Barbara Bovender they were talking about? Not the child with the curling tail? Not Vogel? Not something that had happened thirteen years ago at Johns Hopkins? “She told me the same story,” Marina said.

“She told you the same story? Then I would imagine you have come to a similar series of assumptions.” Dr. Swenson looked at Easter sitting in the doorway. She kept her eyes on him for a long time. “I didn’t realize she had told you.”

“What assumptions?” Marina asked. It was a quiz of some sort and she had no idea what the answer was.

Dr. Swenson looked at her the way she always looked at her, as if everything was obvious. “Mrs. Bovender is a very tall, pale blonde. Wouldn’t her father be the same? I can’t help but think that what she saw was a white man in the jungle, a man who was not her father but from a distance, in her fear, might have looked something like him. He was running through the trees towards her, she was in a boat. She couldn’t have seen him for more than a few seconds. I asked her if he had said anything, if he had spoken to her in English. She told me that her father had called for her to wait.”

For the first time since she had left Manaus, that last morning when she had woken up standing in front of the air conditioner having dreamed about her father, Marina Singh was cold. She was so cold she thought her bones would break. She put the wet cloth back in the bowl. She felt as if there were ice around her heart. “He isn’t dead.”

“I would swear to you with everything I understand about this place that he was dead, but no, I did not see it for myself. Sometimes when Dr. Eckman was very sick he would wander off. He never went very far. We found him in the storage room once. Once he fell over the railing of the sleeping porch and hurt his shoulder. I left Easter there to watch him. Dr. Eckman would start to get up and Easter would put him back to bed. Easter was a very good steward of Dr. Eckman. The boy had grown attached to him, the way he’s grown attached to you. Then one night he came into my hut well after midnight and he was frantic, frantic. He pulled me out of bed. I barely got my feet in my shoes and he was pulling me back to the storage hut. It was pouring rain that night, a blinding rain, and Easter was crying like it was the end of all the earth. I assumed that Dr. Eckman was dead. I remember feeling surprised, as sick as he was I had thought he would pull through. We came onto the porch and Easter had a flashlight. He showed me the bed, he showed me the room. Dr. Eckman was gone. While Easter was asleep in his hammock Dr. Eckman had wandered off in the night. I went to wake Benoit and he rounded up a group of Lakashi, but no one could find him. Not that night or all the next day. We never found him. You’ve been out there. It isn’t so hard to imagine that a man who was very sick would last about twenty minutes in the jungle at night. He would step on a spider. He would crawl into the hollow of some rotting tree and never wake up. Something had eaten him, something had dragged him away. I didn’t know what it was but he was gone, Dr. Singh, he was as gone as any man who had died, and so that’s what I said. I told the other doctors the Lakashi take away their dead in the middle of the night. I wrote a letter saying we had buried him. And I believed I had handled the situation with as much humanity as was possible until Barbara Bovender turned up the wrong tributary and saw her father.”

Marina had thought she understood this place. She had spotted the lancehead after all, she had cut apart the anaconda. She had performed surgeries she was neither licensed nor qualified to perform on a dirty floor and had eaten from the trees and swum in the river in a bloody dress only to find out that none of those things were on the test. There was in fact a circle of hell beneath this one that required an entirely different set of skills that she did not possess. She would have to go there anyway. She had been foolish enough to think that she had given up everything when in fact she could see now that she hadn’t even started. Anders Eckman could still be alive. Anders her friend, Anders father of three, was down the river with the cannibals waiting for another boat to go by. “Is there any safe way for me to do this?” she said finally.

Dr. Swenson covered her eyes with the heels of her hands. “No. In fact, I imagine they’ll kill you.”

Anders took off his lab coat and put on his jacket that was hanging on the back of the door. He retied his tie, took his briefcase off the desk. “If I have to go to one more meeting it is going to kill me,” he said to Marina.

Marina looked out the open door. Somehow it was still morning. It wasn’t two hours ago that she had been eating the Martins. “I should go now,” she said.

“After we’ve thought it through,” Dr. Swenson said. “First there has to be a plan.”

Marina shook her head, thinking of Karen Eckman and what she had said about Anders not being comfortable with the trees. She would have walked off the path at that moment. She would have gone straight into the jungle to find him. “I don’t think tomorrow’s going to be any better.” And with that she left, Easter trailing behind her. She could hear Dr. Swenson calling her name as she went past the lab but she didn’t go back. They could have talked it over for the rest of their lives. Marina only wanted to be on the boat, out on the water, heading towards Anders and her own fate. She was floating now, caught in a current that pulled her ahead and to her surprise she did not mind it. She was content to float, to be pulled under or tossed up. She would give herself over to the force of the river if the river took her to Anders. She would have gone straight to the dock but she needed to take something with her. She was trying to think of what she could offer the Hummocca in exchange for her friend. She looked around the storage room, opening boxes, and found ten oranges left in the bottom of the crate. She took them along with the peanut butter. She put the white nightgown Barbara Bovender had given her around her neck like a scarf, thinking if there was in fact a universal language of surrender it would at least give her the means to do so. She wished for buttons and beads, knives and paint. She wished for something other than syringes, litmus papers, glass tubes with rubber stoppers, bottles of acetone. She sat down on a box of fruit cocktail and closed her eyes. She saw Anders sitting on his desk looking through birding guides to the Amazon. She tried to think of something that was as valuable as Anders’ life. And then Marina remembered the Rapps.