State of Wonder - Ann Patchett [54]
Far outside the city the tree frogs were calling her, and the deep, rhythmic pulse of their voices set the blood flow to her heart.
Marina woke up on the cool tile of the bathroom floor, her head resting on a pile of towels. She opened her eyes and watched a bright red spider of medium size slip beneath the sink cabinet. The details of the time that had elapsed, she didn’t know how much time it was, were not clear, and for that she was grateful. She breathed in and breathed out, moved her fingers and toes, stretched open her mouth and closed it again. The shaman-induced illness had left her and in the violence of its departure had scraped out whatever illness she had had in the first place. She was alive, possibly well. Her hip was sore from the angle she had been lying at but that hardly seemed important. Carefully, slowly, she pulled herself upright and then moved the short distance over the ledge of the bathtub where she sat in the bottom just to be safe and let the hot shower beat against her head until the water slipped to lukewarm. After that she brushed her teeth and drank a bottle of water. She was sore and raw but she experienced that distinct mental clarity that marked a fever’s end. She rolled her head from side to side. She walked naked into the bedroom, a towel around her head, to find the room was clean and Barbara Bovender was sitting in a chair by the window reading the New England Journal of Medicine.
“Look who’s up!” Barbara said.
“You were leaving,” Marina said, but very little sound came out. She coughed, trying to reset her vocal cords which had been stripped from vomiting. “You were leaving.” She found the bathrobe sheet folded on the foot of the bed and pulled it around her.
“I was going to, but you got sick so fast. It really went right to work on you. I thought I should stay just to make sure you didn’t fall and hit your head on the toilet, anything like that. But you’re better, right? I can tell just by looking at you.”
“I am,” Marina said. She couldn’t bring herself to thank the person who had so recently poisoned her, nor could she deny that the poison had improved her circumstances.
“I’ve never read this article,” Barbara said, holding up the journal. “It’s fascinating, even the science parts which I really don’t follow. I kept thinking about how lucky it was that things worked out so that I was sitting in your hotel room for a couple of hours. I have to tell you, I really didn’t understand Annick’s work at all before this. To think of being able to wait and have your children whenever you want them, forty, fifty—sixty even, that would be amazing.” Barbara stopped and looked at her hostess. “You know, I’ve never asked you, do you have children?”
“I do not,” Marina said. The air conditioning had been turned up to high and she was starting to shiver in the cold. “I’d like to get dressed now.” For the first time in days she was hungry.
“Oh sure, of course.” Barbara got up from her chair. “Do you mind if I borrow this? I know Jackie would want to read it.”
“Fine,” Marina said.
“Try the dresses on and let me know which one you like.” Barbara stopped at the door. “I really am so glad it all worked out and that you’re better. I’ll tell the shaman, he’ll be so pleased. We’ll pick you up tomorrow at seven, alright?”
But she didn’t mean it as a question. Before Marina had a chance to answer, Barbara Bovender and the New England Journal of Medicine were gone.
Five
The point of an evening at Teatro Amazonas was not so much to see an opera as it was to see an opera house. They had tickets for Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice, but only because there had to be tickets for something. The building itself was the performance, the two long marble staircases curving up in front, the high blue walls piped with crisp white embellishments, the great tiled dome that must have been torn from a Russian palace by a monstrous storm and blown all the way to South America, or so a tourist had told Marina one morning when she stopped to take a picture of it with her