State of Wonder - Ann Patchett [161]
“I wouldn’t have taken someone else’s child,” Marina said.
“Of course you would,” Dr. Swenson said. “You would take Easter from me now. You never had any intention of leaving here without him and I never had any intention of letting him go. He was mine. He was my boy and you gave him away.”
Were he here she would have put him in a canoe tonight and rowed the boat herself in the dark all the way to the Amazon River. “I would have taken him,” she said. “You’re right. Except that now I don’t have the chance. Why did you let me take him back there? Why didn’t you tell me it wouldn’t be safe?”
“He didn’t belong to them,” Dr. Swenson said. “He was mine.”
Marina sat with this but there was nothing to say. She would have sworn that Easter was hers. “Anders and I are leaving in the morning.”
“Take Dr. Eckman back to Manaus if you have to, or let someone else take him, but I still need you here.”
“I’m going with him,” Marina said.
Dr. Swenson shook her head. “It doesn’t work like that. Trust me, you won’t fit in there anymore. You’ve changed. You’ve betrayed your employer, and you’ll keep on betraying him, and that won’t sit well with someone like you. I changed myself once, it was a long time ago but I changed. I followed my teacher down here too. I thought I was coming for the summer. I know about this.”
“It isn’t the same.”
“Of course it isn’t the same. Nothing is ever the same. I wasn’t like Dr. Rapp, and still I took his place. You’re not like me but you wait, you’ll go back there and nothing will make sense to you anymore.”
Marina came and stood beside the bed. “Good night,” she said.
“You’ll come back,” Dr. Swenson said. “But don’t make me wait forever. There isn’t an infinite amount of time to get this work done. Easter will come back, you know. He may even be back in the morning. He’ll steal a canoe while they’re sleeping. He knows how to get home. He won’t hold it against you, what you’ve done to him. He’s a child. He’ll forgive us.”
But Marina had seen the look on his face when Anders handed him over. She wasn’t sure Dr. Swenson was right. “Good night,” she said again, and closed the door.
When she went back to the lab to find Anders, Alan Saturn told her he had gone to take a shower. Thomas was off looking for the box where they had put his things, hoping that not all of his clothes had been taken. Nancy and Budi sat staring at the floor in front of them. “He says he still has intermittent fevers,” Alan said finally. “Make sure he looks good when you get him on the plane. If they think he has malaria they won’t let him back in the country.”
“Could he have malaria?” Marina asked.
Dr. Budi looked up but she said nothing.
“It’s the tropics,” Nancy said. “Anyone could have malaria.”
Dr. Budi shook her head. “Anyone but us,” she said.
Marina went back to the sleeping porch. She washed herself standing in a basin and put on Mrs. Bovender’s nightgown. It was no longer particularly clean but it was a veritable blossom of edelweiss compared to the dress she’d been wearing. She felt sick to be in this place without Easter. She opened his strongbox, which had been returned with the cot, and there beneath the feathers and the rock that looked like an eye was the letter from Anders announcing a reward for Easter’s safe delivery. In that box she found not only Anders’ passport but her own. He had had a picture of both of them. She also found her wallet, her plane ticket, and her phone. She sat with the phone in her hands for a long time before trying to turn it on and when she finally found her nerve to push the button nothing happened. The battery was dead. She put it back in the box.
“This was my room,” Anders said.
Marina looked up and there he was. His beard was gone and he ran his hand over his face. It was the face she remembered. “Some Lakashi woman shaved it off for me. It seemed to make her inordinately happy. I never had a beard before,” he said. “I hated it.”
“You look like yourself,” she said.
“I slept here.” He