State of Wonder - Ann Patchett [128]
“No,” Marina said, though the thought of going up there alone was not without problems.
Dr. Swenson rubbed at her temples. “What do we know for certain, Dr. Singh? I am a seventy-three-year-old woman who is pregnant and short. But women who are older and shorter and more pregnant than I have made it up and down these ladders every day of their lives, including the day of their delivery.”
The T-shirted man leaned over the floor and looked at them with expectation. “Vir! Vir!” he said.
“Oh good,” Dr. Swenson said. “He has a little Portuguese. He says we should come.” She looked up again. “I suppose we should.”
“We also know for certain that none of those women was having her first child at seventy-three,” Marina said. “They had a lifetime of experience in climbing the ladders, pregnant or not. They were used to it.”
Dr. Swenson turned to her and nodded her approval. “Well said, and I admire your willingness to argue against your own best interests. Now stay one step behind me and prepare yourself to be an ox. You are very strong, aren’t you?”
“Very,” she said. And so they climbed, Marina stretching her long arms around her professor, her hands just beneath Dr. Swenson’s hands, her strong thighs beneath Dr. Swenson’s thighs, and up they went towards the wretched weeping and the husband’s calls of “Agora.” Now!
Benoit had been sent ahead with instructions that the family should have waiting a large quantity of water that had been twice boiled and twice strained, and the first thing they saw were the buckets, which were not clean themselves, sitting in a row. Benoit, who had avoided Marina since the incident with the snake, was nowhere in evidence. The woman lay on the floor in a pile of blankets and both the woman and the blankets were so wet they looked like they’d been dredged up from the river. Spreading across the floorboards beneath her was a dark, soaking stain. Their guide was kneeling beside his wife, holding her hand, rearranging her wet hair with his fingers while the other members of the household went about their business. An elderly man with no shirt stretched out in a hammock while two small children, a boy and a girl, pushed him back and forth, laughing ecstatically every time he swung away. Three women, one with a baby on her breast, were tying strings of red peppers together while a man in the corner sharpened a knife. When Dr. Swenson arrived at the top of the ladder she was panting and they all snapped up their heads in attention. She pointed to a wooden crate and one of the younger women ran to bring it to her. She sat down and was offered a gourd full of water which she accepted. Even the woman on the blankets quieted herself to acknowledge the honor she had been shown. To think that Dr. Swenson had come to her house!
Marina didn’t know if she should first attend to the patient or the doctor, when in fact she wasn’t sure she had the skills to help either one of them. “There’s the bag,” Dr. Swenson said, and gave a nod towards the floor. “You’ll find what you need. I’ll tell you, I’m impressed to have managed this.” She covered her heart with her hand. “I haven’t gone up a ladder since this whole ordeal began.”
Marina unzipped the bag and ran her hand in circles inside, heartsick to see how little she had to work with. There was a bar of soap in a box, no scrub brush, some packaged, disinfected towels, packaged gloves, a prepackaged surgical kit, some various medications that rolled around the bottom of the case looking paltry. There were two silver shoehorns with their ends bent back. Marina held them up. “What are these?”
“Shoehorns!” Dr. Swenson reported happily. “Rodrigo got a whole box of them once years ago. They make brilliant retractors.”
Marina put the shoehorns in her lap and bowed her head. “How can I sterilize them?”
“How can you sterilize anything? You can’t, Dr. Singh. This is what it is. Go ahead and wash up in the first bucket,” Dr. Swenson