Ann Patchett - State of Wonder

“You’re popular here,” he said.

She stopped and turned to him. She took his hands. They had gone to Chicago together once, gotten a fancy room at the Drake and stayed in bed until noon. “I wrote to you. Some of the letters will get there eventually. The second suitcase was lost and I didn’t have the phone.” Three more women came by. One of them reached down and slapped Marina’s thighs and Mr. Fox let go of her hands. “Don’t worry about them,” she said. “They don’t report back to anyone.”

“Still,” he said.

“It doesn’t matter,” Marina said. “No one cares what we’re doing. It didn’t matter before either.” She kissed him then because she didn’t know if there was ever going to be another chance. She remembered that she must smell horrible although she could no longer smell much of anything herself. The snake had burned it out of her.

He stayed with the kiss for only a second. There were too many women walking past and they were laughing quietly with each other. “You’re fine,” he said, pulling away. “You’re going to be home soon and we’ll have time to talk about everything. All of this is better than anything I could have imagined, and I have you to thank for much of that. It was very brave of you to come down here alone. I see that now.” He turned away from her then and took a step forward and Marina saw the snake, his foot coming down right on top of it as she grabbed him and pulled him back, pulled him into her with a not inconsiderable strength. It was a little lancehead, small enough to be immature. She had seen the picture in one of Anders’ books and she recognized it an instant before it darted away into the

high grass.

“Marina!” he said sharply, but she had hold of him now so tightly he could not get away and she did not immediately let him go. Instead she put her lips very lightly to his ear.

“Snake,” she said.

As soon as they were back Marina went to check on Dr. Swenson and found Barbara coming up the path. Her eyes were red and cheeks were flushed. Marina didn’t know if she had just now been crying or if it was leftover from all the crying the night before. “She’s alright,” Barbara said, and stepped in front of Marina. “But you shouldn’t go in there. She said she wanted to rest now.”

“You’re back to guarding the gate.”

Barbara was wearing white linen pants and a tight navy top and Marina wondered if she had packed it thinking the outfit had a certain nautical look that was appropriate for river travel. “Maybe you could put in a good word for me then, tell her I’m still doing my job.”

“Is she going to fire you for bringing out Mr. Fox?”

She looked back towards the door she had just come out of to make sure Dr. Swenson wasn’t standing there watching. “I don’t know. She may just be trying to scare me. She says she hasn’t decided. I think she looks awful, by the way. I had thought the idea of waiting until later to have children was such a good one, and now I’m not so sure.”

“It isn’t a good one,” Marina said.

Mrs. Bovender put her arm through her friend’s arm and together they walked towards the water. “I don’t know how you’ve lived out here. You were so miserable in Manaus but this is a thousand times worse. Maybe I’d be lucky if she fired us. I want to go back to Australia. I hate this entire country. Jackie hates it here.”

“Then you should go.” Marina found herself wanting to comb and braid the yellow hair which spread around Barbara’s shoulders like a loose blanket. She was thinking that maybe the desire to groom was yet another component of the Martins that had yet to be traced.

“The thing is,” Barbara said, “we’ll never find a gig as easy as this one anyplace in the world.”

Barbara Bovender gave Marina much of what was in her suitcase before she left: two pairs of lacy underpants and a matching bra and the white cotton nightgown and a jar of face cream that smelled like jasmine. Mr. Fox gave her the white shirt he had worn the day before and his extra pants which she planned to tie up with a piece of twine. Milton gave her his straw hat.

“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.