The Sparrow - Mary Doria Russell [104]
Emilio, meanwhile, helped lift Alan’s body onto the crude table and stayed behind after D.W., Jimmy and Marc left the enclosure. "Do you want me to assist?" he asked, willing but already pale.
"No," she said abruptly. Then she softened. "You don’t want this in your mind. Don’t even stay close enough to hear. I’ve done a thousand bodies, sweetheart. I’m used to it."
But not bodies like this. Not fresh; not friends. It was, in fact, among the worst, the most distressing things she’d done in a lifetime of grisly experience. And it was among the most futile. Hours later, she made the corpse presentable and called for the priests, who dressed it in vestments and wrapped it in another tarp, the plastic shroud garishly yellow, as inappropriate and unacceptable as the death it concealed.
It was dusk by then. Sitting around the small fire, the others listened to the nearby sound of falling water as Anne showered the blood and brains and excrement and stomach contents from her body, soaped away the smell, and tried unsuccessfully to put the images and sounds from her mind. When she emerged, wet-haired but dressed and apparently composed, it was too dark for D.W. to see how tired she was and how upset. He thought, perhaps, that this was not difficult for her, that she was a professional, hardened, unsusceptible to breakdown. So he called her to the fire and asked her the results.
"Let her alone," George said, putting an arm around Anne and turning her toward their tent. "Tomorrow is soon enough."
"No, it’s okay," Anne said, even though it wasn’t. "It won’t take long. There was no obvious cause of death."
"There was the rash, Doctor. Perhaps an allergic reaction to the fruit he ate?" Marc suggested quietly.
"That was days ago," Anne said patiently. "And the rash was probably a contact dermatitis. There was no indication of elevated histamine levels in his blood, but we should take whatever he ate yesterday off our list." She turned again to go to the tent, to lie down with George and to remind herself in his arms that she was alive, and glad of it.
"What about an aneurysm?" Emilio asked. "Maybe he had a blood vessel that was ready to rupture all along and this was just chance."
They were taking refuge in the concrete. Anne realized that. Faced with death, people looked for reasons, to protect themselves from its arbitrariness and stupidity. She’d been up for twenty hours. So had the others, but they’d only waited. Anne put her hands on her hips and stared at the ground, breathing deeply to control the anger. "Emilio," she said softly but precisely, "I have just completed as thorough an autopsy as can be done under these conditions. How much detail would you like? There was no evidence of internal bleeding anywhere. There was no blood clot in the heart or lungs. There was no inflammation of the gut or stomach. The lungs were clear of fluid. The liver was in remarkably fine condition. The kidneys and the bladder were not infected. There was no stroke. The brain," she said, working hard now to keep her voice steady, for the brain had been the hardest to retrieve and inspect, "was fine. There was no physical sign that allows me to declare a known cause of death. He just died. I don’t know why. People are mortal, okay?"
She turned to walk away again, looking for someplace to sit down and cry by herself, and nearly screamed when she heard D.W. ask, "What about the bite on his leg? It didn’t look like much and we’ve all been bitten, but maybe... Anne, there’s got to be a reason—"
"You want a reason?" she asked, rounding on him. He stopped talking, startled by her tone out of his own reverie. "You want a reason? Deus vult, pater. God wanted him dead, okay?"
She said it to shock D.W., to shock them all, to shut them up, and she was bitterly glad to see it work. She saw D.W. stop in midsentence, motionless, his mouth open slightly,