Ann Patchett - State of Wonder

“They are a decent, well-organized people.”

“You went to Radcliffe.”

“I didn’t love it.”

Easter slept through all of it. Marina looked down on him in the bed. His shirt and arms and face were smeared with blood. Somehow in all of this she hadn’t noticed it before. She would get a cloth and wash him. She could wash him while he slept. “Imagine Dr. Rapp fathered a child down here,” she said, remembering the example of Alan Saturn in his argument with his wife and working to calm her voice. “Should the son or the daughter of the greatest mind in botany just wander around in the jungle for the rest of his or her life, not having any access to their own potential?”

“Do you think his children aren’t here? Do you honestly think such things never happened? You should ask Benoit to take you to the next vision quest or whatever you want to call it.” Dr. Swenson shook her head and then walked over to sit in the one small chair in the room. She sat on top of Marina’s second dress and her other two pair of underpants as the chair was where she kept her things. “I am very tired, Dr. Singh,” she said and pushed back her hair with her hands. “I have sciatica in my left leg and the child is sitting on my bladder. It begins to thrash whenever I lie down. I am glad to have conducted this piece of research on myself because it makes me realize something I might not have otherwise taken into account: women past a certain age are simply not meant to carry children, and I can only imagine that we are not meant to bear them or to raise them either. The Lakashi are used to it. This is their particular fate. They can hand off their infants to their granddaughters. They don’t have to raise them. That is the only reward for these late-life children: you know they won’t be your responsibility. I had never felt old before this, that is a fact. I have avoided mirrors my entire life. I have no better sense of what I look like at seventy-three than I did at twenty. I’ve had some arthritis in my shoulder but nothing to speak of. I keep on. I have kept coming down here, kept up with my work, Dr. Rapp’s work. I have not lived the life of an old woman because I was not an old woman. I was only myself. But this thing, this child, it has made me firmly seventy-three. It has made me older than that. By straying into the territory of the biologically young I have been punished. I would have to say rightfully so.”

Marina looked at her teacher, looked at her feet filling out a battered pair of Birkenstocks, looked at the way gravity pinned her to the chair. She asked the most ridiculous question of all, only because she had been so recently asked herself. “Did you ever want to have children?”

“What is it you said to me just now? There was a time? Maybe there was a time. To tell you the truth I can’t remember. From where I sit I would tell you that having a child is akin to plotting your own death, but I delivered thousands and thousands of babies in my day and it seemed at least in that moment many of the mothers were happy. I know it wasn’t like this for the young.” Dr. Swenson closed her eyes and though her head stayed balanced and upright she seemed to be asleep.

“Should I walk you back to your room?” Marina asked.

Dr. Swenson considered the offer. “What about Easter?”

Marina looked back at him, noted the regular rise and fall of his chest. “He’s not going to wake up. He’s had a long day.”

“That’s the one you want,” Dr. Swenson said, bringing their conversation back to its beginning although this time she seemed to be offering him up. “One who’s older, one who’s smart, one who loves you. If someone ever told me I could have had a child like Easter I would have done it, only I would have done it a long time ago.”

Marina nodded, and using both of her hands she pulled Dr. Swenson up from her chair. “We can agree on that.”

“You were smart to stay with us, Dr. Singh. I kept waiting for you to go, but I’m starting to see that you are genuinely interested in our work.”

“I am,” Marina said, realizing for the first time that she hadn’t been thinking about leaving at all. Then she took Dr. Swenson’s arm and together they walked down the stairs and side by side on the narrow path back through the jungle to the lab.

At the lab, Marina borrowed some soap and a pot, and when she was in the river took off her dress and held herself under the warm clouded water for some time. There was a complicated, ineffectual shower rigged up behind the lab that required hauling bags of water up from the river and running them through a filtering system but it would have been no match for all she was hoping to remove. Bringing her head above the surface, opening her eyes to the light falling at a low slant across the water, she was surprised to find that she no longer felt afraid of the river. She would have thought it would be the other way around. She scrubbed her dress and then used the rough fabric of the dress to scrub herself, then sank a final time and swam back into her clothes. She emerged dripping from the water still stinking, though perhaps not as much. Then she convinced the Lakashi women to let her put a pot of water down at the edge of their fire and while she waited for it to heat up a woman came and sat behind her, combing out Marina’s wet hair with her fingers and then braiding it. If there were men in the tribe who hoped to one day escape their circumstances by becoming naturalists, the women all seemed to share a common dream of hairdressing. There was no more denying their desire to groom than one could stop those little African birds from riding on the backs of crocodiles and pecking out insects, and while Marina had fought them at first, pulling their hands from her hair whenever they gathered it back, she had finally given over to it. She had learned to relax beneath their touch. While the woman braided and tugged, Marina watched the river, counting the fish that popped the surface. She counted eight in all.

When her hair was finished and the water was hot enough she carried it back to the porch. It was finally getting dark and the evening was lovely and young. While the bats spun out of dead trees to announce the dusk, Marina washed the snake off of Easter. He woke up just enough to squint at her vaguely while she worked her cloth down his arms and between his toes. She wiped his face and rubbed his hair and was very gentle as she wiped down his stomach and chest which were already blossoming into a spectrum of purple and green. When she was finished he turned himself over with great difficulty and let her do the other side. She spread a clean sheet beneath him the way she had seen nurses do, it was a skill she had forgotten she had: change a bed with someone in it. So he had been a cannibal once, if only in another lifetime. In light of all that had happened it was hardly worth mentioning.

It was on the fourth morning after the trip to the trading post that Marina saw Dr. Budi and the second Dr. Saturn walking through the jungle. It was very early, much earlier than she normally would be out, but something had crawled beneath the net above her bed and bitten her near the elbow and the bite, now swollen and hot, had prevented her from going back to sleep. She used what scant morning light was available to inspect the snake’s long-lasting tattoo that had deepened the color of Easter’s bruises to eggplant and spread from his armpits to his groin. When she had assured herself yet again that these bruises were merely horrible and not a sign of some underlying medical catastrophe, she dislodged herself from the sleeping child and went in search of the coffee that Dr. Budi, always working, was sure to have made. It was still fifteen minutes short of full daylight when she saw her colleagues on the other side of a giant termite mound, the ground between them trembling with industry. She waved and called good morning and they stopped abruptly, looking at her as if she were the last person they had ever expected to see in the Amazon. After a pause, Dr. Saturn leaned down to whisper something in Dr. Budi’s ear and Dr. Budi, after what appeared to be consideration, nodded her approval. The two doctors then made their way towards her, cutting a wide berth around the termites.