by Ann Patchett
“I’m with you,” Barbara Bovender said, slipping the second half of her sandwich into one of the many pockets on her dress. The two of them took Easter with them while the rest of the group called good night, while Mr. Fox said good night.
“How does this work?” Barbara asked, looking again at the configuration of the sleeping porch.
“I have the cot and Easter has the hammock, but Easter sleeps with me so I guess that leaves you with the hammock. I’ll grant you that it isn’t much but it’s better than winding up on the floor somewhere.”
Easter was sitting on the floor wiping off the bottoms of his feet with a rag. It was the one bedtime ritual Marina had taught him.
“Look,” Barbara said, twisting a fat yellow braid around her fingers. “I know this is your place, but if you wouldn’t mind terribly could I sleep with Easter? It’s just for tonight. I’ve been half out of my wits all day. Frankly, if he wasn’t here I’d be asking to sleep with you, and I don’t think the two of us would fit in that bed.” She looked sadly at the child. “It’s been a bad time for Jackie to be gone.”
Marina nodded. She understood completely the calming powers of Easter. Still, as she shook the marmoset scat out of the hammock, she thought of how on this particular night she would have preferred not to sleep alone herself.
That night Marina dreamed not of her own father but of Barbara Bovender’s father as he ran through the trees towards the river. When she woke up she had one leg and both of her arms hanging over the edges of the reeking hammock and her first thought was of the Martins. There was only the smallest bit of light coming onto the porch and Barbara and Easter were still sleeping, Easter in the nylon shorts he’d worn the day before and Barbara in a white cotton nightgown. For a moment Marina looked at them and marveled that such things as nightgowns had ever existed and that the people who owned them thought to wear them to bed. She took her flashlight and walked out into the jungle, keeping the beam pointed low to the ground as it was still so early the tarantulas would just now be making their slow crawl home. She wanted to get to the trees and back before anyone else was out. She was fairly certain there was some other quality in the bark that no one was talking about and she knew she wasn’t going to make it through this particular day without it. She thought of how she would come out here on her last day and saw off a few branches from the trees on the farthest edge of the perimeter. She would saw them into smaller and smaller pieces and tie them together with twine and she would bring them back with her, a little something for herself. She pictured herself in her kitchen, a freezer full of twigs, taking them out only when she needed one, sitting alone in her living room scraping the bark down with her teeth, and while she was thinking about this she came perilously close to putting her foot into a nest of ants. She stopped and watched them cut a determined path through the leaf litter. She was walking too fast. She kept her eyes down for the rest of the way and when she finally looked up again it was to see the morning sun coming through the Martins at an easterly slant, the full illumination of the thin yellow trunks, the high crowns of pink flowers brushing the edges of the barely blue sky. Maybe she wasn’t sorry not to be going back on the boat today. As she touched her mouth to an already soft opening in the bark, a feeling of peace and well-being spread through her veins. She wondered if in fact it was really time to go at all.
She saw the first three Lakashi women coming towards the trees in the same dresses they wore every day, the same dress she wore every day, and they raised their hands to wave to her. Marina waved back and moved quickly to the side of the stand. In the distance, she could hear the disembodied voice of Nancy Saturn lecturing on the purple martinet, the digestion and excrement versus the larval sack. Marina only knew one way out of the trees. One would think she could walk out in any direction and make a circle back around the edge but that wasn’t the case. She needed a path. She had to leave the same way she came in or she would get lost. She had a distinct desire to run straight into the jungle, but why? What was there to run from? Mr. Fox was her lover, the Saturns were her friends. Either way she had already stood there too long.
“Marina!” Alan called.
She went to them. The Lakashi were busy at their trees and the gentle sound of their mastication was a comfort to her. One of the women patted her bottom as she walked past, her mouth firm to the bark. It was her nurse. Marina patted the back of her head.
“She’s gone completely native,” Alan said to Mr. Fox.
Like everything else around this place, Mr. Fox looked better in the light of day standing between the trunks of the Martins. He had on a blue shirt this morning and a darker pair of pants. She couldn’t quite believe that in his rush to find her he had brought a change of clothes. “I was meaning to ask about the dress last night.”
Marina brushed off the front of the coarse fabric. “It’s the local uniform.”
“What happened to your clothes?”
Marina shook her head. “A misunderstanding,” she said. “Really, the dress has been fine.”
“If my legs looked as good as yours I’d wear one too,” Nancy Saturn said.
While Marina’s legs were of sound basic construction they were also bruised, unshaven, scabbed, and covered in a fierce topography of insect bites. It struck Marina then that it wasn’t only Mr. Fox she was lying to. She was lying to the other doctors, her friends, who would certainly have wanted to know that she had more than a professional relationship with the man they were trying to snow. A small Lakashi woman who had finished her requisite amount of bark came up behind Marina and gave her shoulder two hard taps and Marina sat down on the ground with thoughtless obedience. She didn’t mind sitting down in the Martins. All of the insects save the purple martinets cut a wide berth around this part of the jungle. The woman untied the end of Marina’s braid and combed out her hair with her fingers.
“Is this a service?” Mr. Fox asked.
“You can’t stop them,” Marina said. “There is absolutely no fighting this.”
“I had long hair the first month I was here,” Nancy said, nodding at Marina. “They were all over me. As soon as I cut it off I was invisible to them.”
“They fix Budi’s hair every morning,” Alan said. “They come to her hut.”
“So you’ve gotten used to the place?” Mr. Fox said, and for the first time he sounded as if he were speaking to Marina as if she were someone he had met before.
She nodded. “Finish your tour and then I’ll take you back. You can catch me up on everything I’ve missed at work.”
Mr. Fox agreed to this and went off with the Saturns. Marina listened to their voices—Martins and martinets and not a single mention of Rapps. She leaned forward from where she was sitting and picked one, the smallest, bluest mushroom that grew at the base of the tree. It was hardly bigger than her little finger. She brought it to her nose and sniffed it like a daisy and the woman who was braiding her hair began to laugh. She leaned over Marina’s shoulder and sniffed the mushroom herself, then she put her arms around Marina from the back and hugged her, giggling into her neck until Marina had to laugh herself. When the woman finished Marina’s hair she took the mushroom from her fingers and, giving a quick, furtive glance to either side, popped it in her mouth and walked away.
The Saturns stayed behind with their litmus paper and their cotton swabs while Marina walked Mr. Fox back to the lab. The Lakashi trickled past, raising their hands to her.
“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.
“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 th
ings 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.
