told her in the restaurant that first night after the opera: it could have been anything, any fever, any bite. It never was remarkable that Anders had died; the remarkable thing was that the rest of them were managing to live in a place for which they were so fundamentally unsuited. Karen had wanted to believe that knowing what Anders had died of and where he was buried would make a difference, but it wouldn’t and it didn’t. At some point Marina would have to figure out a way to tell her that.
Marina went back to the porch with the taste of Martins still on her tongue and found that Easter was up and gone. She looked through the sheets to see if there was a letter from Anders but there was nothing. Easter was no doubt showing off his bruises to the other children. She had already seen him laying two sticks in the mud very far apart to show them how long the snake had been. She wondered at what point he had lost his hearing and if he understood enough about language to miss it when there was so great a story to tell. She would have loved to know how the snake had lodged itself in his memory, if he thought of it as the terror it was or as a great adventure, or maybe he didn’t think of it at all except as the source of the dull ache in his chest. Marina had to admit she really didn’t know what Easter thought about anything. His nightmares had abated since the snake, he no longer cried out in the night, though that could have been the Ambien or the comfort of sleeping the entire night in her bed. It could have been that once an anaconda had squeezed him half to death there really wasn’t anything left to be afraid of.
Outside, Marina heard Dr. Swenson calling her name, and she went and leaned over the porch railing.
“You’ve been gone half the morning, Dr. Singh,” Dr. Swenson said. She was with a Lakashi man wearing shorts and a gray T-shirt that he had sweated through. The men wore T-shirts as a means of dressing up, certainly anyone coming early in the morning to seek an audience with Dr. Swenson would find a shirt to put on. He was holding a small red canvas duffel bag with both hands. From this particular angle, looking down on the two of them from a height of eight or ten feet, she couldn’t imagine that she had ever missed Dr. Swenson’s pregnancy. She was nothing but belly.
“There was a lot to talk about,” Marina said, and she had every intention of talking to Dr. Swenson about it as well: Anders’ burial, and who was funding the research for the malaria vaccine. But the man standing next to Dr. Swenson was bobbing up and down on the balls of his feet and twisting his hands back and forth against the straps of the bag and it was difficult to concentrate on anything but him. He twitched like he was trying unsuccessfully to conceal the fact he was crawling with ants.
“Talk we will, Dr. Singh. It’s not a short walk. There’s plenty of time to catch up, but I need you to come with me now.”
“What’s the problem?” Obviously there was a problem. The man was moaning. She could hear him now above the din of the insects though he seemed to be making a concerted effort to be quiet in the same way he was trying his best, she could tell, despite all his movement, to stay still. It wasn’t just that Dr. Swenson had convinced the Lakashi to submit to her tests, they were as afraid of her as any group of first-year interns. The clear accomplishment of the man in the gray T-shirt was that he wasn’t screaming.
“You’ll like this,” Dr. Swenson said, and turned back to the path they had come down. “This will be right up your alley.”
Marina was out the door and down the steps. Dr. Swenson did not wait for her and had continued to carry on their conversation alone. “I know how much you’ve been looking forward to practicing medicine while you’re here. I think we’ve found you an opportunity.”
Even with Dr. Swenson six or seven months pregnant Marina had to rush to keep up with them. The man was setting the pace and the pace was quick. She kept a close eye on the ground. Marina had a particular fear of breaking her ankle. “I didn’t say that.”
Dr. Swenson stopped and turned to Marina. The man now looked petrified. It was imperative they continue their forward motion. He raised up the bag in case she had forgotten it and began a quick monologue in Lakashi, but Dr. Swenson held up her hand. “You did. You remember, on the boat. We were discussing the girl with the machete in her head.”
“I do remember,” Marina said, marveling at how the panic rising up in her was obliterating all of her questions: Why did you give Anders over to them and why did you lie about it and there was something else after that but now she couldn’t remember. “I thought it was right for you to attend to the cases that presented themselves.”
“That presented themselves to me as a doctor, or you as a doctor. Either way, you waved the Hippocratic oath above our heads like a flag so now you’ll have the chance to bask in its glory.”
“I’m a pharmacologist.”
To the man’s great relief Dr. Swenson started walking again. The sun was high and bright and very hot. “Yes, well, I can’t get on the floor and in this village things happen on the floor, and if you’re planning to tell me that they should bring his wife to the lab, I’ve already suggested that. She can’t go down the ladder. As much as I am opposed to hosting a medical clinic in my office, I am considerably more opposed to house calls.”
“What’s wrong with his wife?”
Dr. Swenson passed a dead log covered in bright red butterflies and the breeze that she made caused them to startle and disperse upwards into a bright red cloud. “It has something to do with the birth of a child. If you are ever betting on the nature of a local tragedy you’ll never go broke putting your money on that one. For the most part they do it remarkably well but the sheer volume in which they reproduce brings forth a certain number of errors.”
“Do you know what this error is?” Marina was walking faster and faster when everything in her was saying she should stop.
Dr. Swenson shook her head. “No idea.”
“But you said you didn’t want to interfere.” Interference in the medical needs of an indigenous people suddenly struck Marina as the worst possible idea. She could see now the virtue in leaving them alone, of observing without imposition. “You distinctly said there was someone—”
“The county witch doctor, yes. His malaria has flared again. He’s running such a fever we’ve been asked to go by and check on him later. There is also, you will be pleased to know, a midwife, who is presently in labor herself. She is being attended by the midwife-in-training, who is her daughter. The daughter would feel much more comfortable if we stopped in.”
“Who told you this? It isn’t possible.”
“The messages are collected by Benoit, who brings them to Dr. Nancy Saturn. Benoit and Dr. Saturn can stumble along together in Portuguese. Frankly, the chain of communication is so weak that we might arrive and find out none of this is true. I do a better job communicating with Easter than I do most members of the tribe.”
In the jungle they passed the stilted huts of several families who leaned against the railings and waved. An enormous fallen branch blocked the path for a moment but their scout dragged it away before they had the chance to wonder how they might crawl through. Marina began again. “Dr. Swenson, you have to listen to me. I am not the person for this job. There are other doctors here and any one of them, I promise you, is better qualified.”
“Shall we ask the botanist?” Dr. Swenson said sharply. “Or one of the other three? I doubt they have ever been out of a lab in their lives. You forget I have worked with these
Marina felt such a sudden weight in her feet that she looked down at them, sure she must have stepped in something.
“Cheer up, Dr. Singh. It’s your chance to do good in the world.”
Marina’s scalp was wet with sweat and it ran down the sides of her face and the back of her neck. She was going over notes in her mind and finding that entire pages of them were missing. Of course there was a chance that everything was fine, that they would arrive to find nothing but a long labor and a nervous husband. If it were only a matter of delivering the child because everyone else was indisposed, well, she could do that. Anyone could do that. She was only hoping there would be no cutting involved. Where was the bladder exactly? When she walked away from her last C-section it had never occurred to her that this was a skill she might someday be called to use again. Why should she have stayed current, attended the conferences, read the journals? She wasn’t even boarded in
