State of Wonder - Ann Patchett [125]
“They were very fond of Anders,” Thomas said, patting her shoulder. “They would have given him every care.”
“It was raining hard that week,” Dr. Budi said. “It was very hot. The Lakashi would not bury him where we asked and we could not bury him ourselves.”
“So you gave him up.” She saw Karen so clearly in her mind, sliding down to her kitchen floor, taking the dog in her arms. Karen had felt it fully even then, never having seen this place. “It was the only thing Dr. Swenson said in her letter, that he had been buried in keeping with his Christian traditions. I don’t even know if he had any Christian traditions but I doubt he planned to be buried in a jungle by a group of people eating mushrooms.”
“She said it to comfort you,” Dr. Budi said.
“Let’s go back,” Nancy said, and put an arm around Marina.
There was no one clear point of loss. It happened over and over again in a thousand small ways and the only truth there was to learn was that there was no getting used to it. Karen Eckman had wanted Marina to go to Brazil to find out what had happened to her husband, but now that she was here she understood what Dr. Swenson had told her in the restaurant that first night after the opera: it could have been anything, any fever, any bite. It never was remarkable that Anders had died; the remarkable thing was that the rest of them were managing to live in a place for which they were so fundamentally unsuited. Karen had wanted to believe that knowing what Anders had died of and where he was buried would make a difference, but it wouldn’t and it didn’t. At some point Marina would have to figure out a way to tell her that.
Marina went back to the porch with the taste of Martins still on her tongue and found that Easter was up and gone. She looked through the sheets to see if there was a letter from Anders but there was nothing. Easter was no doubt showing off his bruises to the other children. She had already seen him laying two sticks in the mud very far apart to show them how long the snake had been. She wondered at what point he had lost his hearing and if he understood enough about language to miss it when there was so great a story to tell. She would have loved to know how the snake had lodged itself in his memory, if he thought of it as the terror it was or as a great adventure, or maybe he didn’t think of it at all except as the source of the dull ache in his chest. Marina had to admit she really didn’t know what Easter thought about anything. His nightmares had abated since the snake, he no longer cried out in the night, though that could have been the Ambien or the comfort of sleeping the entire night in her bed. It could have been that once an anaconda had squeezed him half to death there really wasn’t anything left to be afraid of.
Outside, Marina heard Dr. Swenson calling her name, and she went and leaned over the porch railing.
“You’ve been gone half the morning, Dr. Singh,” Dr. Swenson said. She was with a Lakashi man wearing shorts and a gray T-shirt that he had sweated through. The men wore T-shirts as a means of dressing up, certainly anyone coming early in the morning to seek an audience with Dr. Swenson would find a shirt to put on. He was holding a small red canvas duffel bag with both hands. From this particular angle, looking down on the two of them from a height of eight or ten feet, she couldn’t imagine that she had ever missed Dr. Swenson’s pregnancy. She was nothing but belly.
“There was a lot to talk about,” Marina said, and she had every intention of talking to Dr. Swenson about it as well: Anders’ burial, and who was funding the research for the malaria vaccine. But the man standing next to Dr. Swenson was bobbing up and down on the balls of his feet and twisting his hands back and forth against the straps of the bag and it was difficult to concentrate on anything but him. He twitched like he was trying unsuccessfully to conceal the fact he was crawling with ants.
“Talk we will, Dr. Singh. It’s not a short walk. There’s plenty of time to catch up, but I need you to come with me now.”
“What