Ann Patchett - State of Wonder

“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.