State of Wonder - Ann Patchett [158]
Anders was out in the water, and then his hands were on the boat. He was calling out to the Hummocca with two sharp syllables. The woman scrambled up on the deck, her short legs muddied and wet. She knelt behind Easter, her wet arms covering his arms, encircling Marina’s waist. She wailed a single word again and again while Easter stayed perfectly still, holding fiercely to Marina. The woman behind him was rocking. The man with the peanut butter jar was saying something to Anders that was not said in rage.
“They want Easter,” Anders said. He was holding onto the side of the boat now, his hands on the deck. He was nodding at the other men in the water who were talking faster and faster now, one hand holding up an arrow, the other making circles in the air. Anders looked at Marina. For the first time she could see his eyes very plainly. “Give them Easter and we can go.”
“No,” she said. That could not be possible. She had brought gifts. She had come for Anders. She put her hands over the woman’s hands, over Easter’s hands. Their arms made a structure that held her up. She shook her head. “We’ll give them the Rapps.”
“This isn’t a choice. They can keep all of us and the boat. Do it now while they’re confused. We have no bargaining power at all here.” Anders helped himself slowly onto the boat and, bending before Marina, he unlocked the layers of hands. Only then did Easter see him clearly and understand why they had come here at all. He reached for Anders’ neck and made the sound he made in his sleep, a high trenchant cry that stood in place for the words Not dead. You are not dead. The Hummocca looked up from the water and were amazed to see their boy knew this white man and that clearly he loved him so well.
“Not this,” Marina said. “If we stay with him we’ll all be together.”
“Go get the oranges and the peanut butter,” he said, one hand on the back of Easter’s head, his face in Easter’s neck. Anders kissed the boy, his hair and ear and eye. They would have less than a minute together. The woman was standing now, her hands on Easter’s back.
Marina got the fruit and the peanut butter and handed it over the edge, filling up every hand that was raised to her. Then Anders held Easter out by the waist. The boy’s feet were bare and he was wearing dirty yellow shorts and a blue T-shirt that read “JazzFest 2003.” Marina made a note of all of it, as if there was someone she could describe him to later on, an agency that went to look for missing children. Anders handed Easter to the up-reached hands of the man in the water and the woman slipped over the side of the boat to stand with him. The look on the boy’s face as his eyes went from Marina and Anders and back to her again was one of terrified misunderstanding. It was something worse than she had seen when the snake had him because the snake he had understood. He stretched out his hands to her and Marina closed her eyes. She left him there. She let him go.
The boat was turned around now and Anders was driving. In a minute they were full speed down the narrow turns of the river and Marina kept her eyes closed, one hand fixed to the pole that held the ragged cover over the center of the boat. She had accounted for her own death, and certainly she had accounted for Anders’, but she had not been ready for this.
“They would have taken him,” Anders said. “If they killed us, if they didn’t kill us, Easter would have stayed with them.”
He took a turn too fast and the basket of Rapps bounced twice and then sailed off the back of the boat and spread out over the water, an offering of little blue corks. Marina just caught the edge of the nightgown