State of Wonder - Ann Patchett [149]
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 things 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