State of Wonder - Ann Patchett [152]
“The Lakashi can look after themselves.”
Dr. Swenson shook her head. “Not if the world comes in to take the Martins, to take the Rapps. I will get over this surgery or I won’t. Other people can take care of me but who can take care of them? The truth is, I could just keep thinking up reasons you had to stay. I understand you well enough for that.”
“You’ve done a good job so far,” Marina said, wringing out a cloth to wash Dr. Swenson’s face and neck.
“Sit still for a minute,” Dr. Swenson said, pushing her hand away. “Sit down. I’m trying to tell you something important. This is a conflict I am facing. I am telling you I want you to stay and at the same time giving you a reason to go.”
“You aren’t giving me any reason to go.”
“That’s because you won’t be quiet. You won’t stop moving all the time.”
Marina sat down and held the wet cloth in her hands. It was cool. She’d let the extra ice melt in the bowl.
Dr. Swenson, small in her bed, looked up at the ceiling. There was a fly circling over her head and Marina disciplined herself not to shoo it away. “Barbara Bovender came to see me the morning that she left. She was worried that I was going to fire her, and because she was worried she told me the story of her visit to the Hummocca. It was a story that Milton had already told me, but she wanted to tell it again to show me how she had suffered for the cause. She sat in that chair where you are now and she cried. She told me she was so close to death that she had seen her father running through the jungle towards her, waving his hands, her father who had died when she was a child.”
It was Barbara Bovender they were talking about? Not the child with the curling tail? Not Vogel? Not something that had happened thirteen years ago at Johns Hopkins? “She told me the same story,” Marina said.
“She told you the same story? Then I would imagine you have come to a similar series of assumptions.” Dr. Swenson looked at Easter sitting in the doorway. She kept her eyes on him for a long time. “I didn’t realize she had told you.”
“What assumptions?” Marina asked. It was a quiz of some sort and she had no idea what the answer was.
Dr. Swenson looked at her the way she always looked at her, as if everything was obvious. “Mrs. Bovender is a very tall, pale blonde. Wouldn’t her father be the same? I can’t help but think that what she saw was a white man in the jungle, a man who was not her father but from a distance, in her fear, might have looked something like him. He was running through the trees towards her, she was in a boat. She couldn’t have seen him for more than a few seconds. I asked her if he had said anything, if he had spoken to her in English. She told me that her father had called for her to wait.”
For the first time since she had left Manaus, that last morning when she had woken up standing in front of the air conditioner having dreamed about her father, Marina Singh was cold. She was so cold she thought her bones would break. She put the wet cloth back in the bowl. She felt as if there were ice around her heart. “He isn’t dead.”
“I would swear to you with everything I understand about this place that he was dead, but no, I did not see it for myself. Sometimes when Dr. Eckman was very sick he would wander off. He never went very far. We found him in the storage room once. Once he fell over the railing of the sleeping porch and hurt his shoulder. I left Easter there to watch him. Dr. Eckman would start to get up and Easter would put him back to bed. Easter was a very good steward of Dr. Eckman. The boy had grown attached to him, the way he’s grown attached to you. Then one night he came into my hut well after midnight and he was frantic, frantic. He pulled me out of bed. I barely got my feet in my shoes and he was pulling me back to the storage hut. It was pouring rain that night, a blinding rain, and Easter was crying like it was