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By Root 753 0

” 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