State of Wonder - Ann Patchett [160]
“I had them move it this afternoon. I didn’t think you were coming back.” Dr. Swenson was lying in bed, a lantern burning on the table beside her.
“Anders is here,” Marina said, standing by the door.
Dr. Swenson raised up her head. “Barbara Bovender was right?”
“He’s in the lab.”
“I don’t know another story to match this,” Dr. Swenson said, shaking her head. “I will be glad to see Dr. Eckman. Easter must be thrilled. I always thought he blamed himself for letting him get away. Dr. Eckman must have gone down to the river. I’ve been thinking about it all day and that’s what I decided. One of the canoes was missing. He must have crawled inside and floated away. Then somewhere out there the Hummocca found him.”
“Easter is gone.”
“What do you mean, gone?”
“The Hummocca took him. That’s how I got Anders back. A man and a woman took him off the boat. They seemed to think that Easter belonged to them. They were very definite about it.”
There came across Dr. Swenson a wild look and she pushed herself up to sitting with her hands. Her nightgown was old and torn at the neck. “You have to go back there. You have to go and get him.”
Marina shook her head. “I can’t.”
“I won’t accept that you can’t. Obviously you can. You got Dr. Eckman and you will get Easter. He’s deaf. He doesn’t understand what’s happened. You can’t just leave him there.”
But Marina had already left him, and she understood that in life a person was only allowed one trip down to hell. There was no going back to that place, not for anyone. “Where did you get him?” she said.
“I told you.”
“Tell me again,” Marina said.
Dr. Swenson sank back into the pillows. She waited a long time before she spoke. “I didn’t tell you because you wouldn’t have liked the story. But that matters less now, doesn’t it? No one tells the truth to people they don’t actually know, and if they do it is a horrible trait. Everyone wants something smaller, something neater than the truth.”
“Where did you get him?”
“They gave him to me. He came here. In the jungle one tribe knows what another tribe is doing, I told you that, tribes with which they have no obvious means of communication. One day the Hummocca sent for me. This was probably eight years ago, I’m not positive. Two men came in a canoe to get me but I wouldn’t go with them. I knew who they were. Dr. Rapp had had some dealings with the Hummocca thirty years ago, nothing that was good. The next day the same two men came back with a child between them in the bottom of the boat. He was fantastically sick. There was pus and blood running out of both of his ears. Children die out here constantly, that’s why so many of them are needed. I can only imagine this child belonged to someone who was very important because they had brought him to me. They got their point across without benefit of a mutual language, they wanted him saved, and after that they left him here. I certainly didn’t ask them to. He had a fever of a hundred and six, a bilateral mastoiditis, probably meningitis. He was already deaf, there was nothing I could have done about that. Three days later the same two men were there again, wanting him back. He was on IV penicillin, fifty thousand units Q6H. It wasn’t as if I could send him off in the canoe.”
“So you kept him?”
“I told them the boy was dead. That would have been the case if it hadn’t been for me. The fact of the matter is had they waited a few weeks I would have given him back, but they came too early, and he was too sick to go. I couldn’t explain any of that, but I knew enough to tell them he was dead.”
“You could have sent him back later.”
“He was sick for a month, as sick as anything I’ve seen. By the time I brought him back they would have forgotten about him. A deaf child? They wouldn’t have known what to do with him. Do you think you wouldn’t have done the same thing? He was Easter even then, you know. After a month of feeding him and washing him and staying up all