he had been dead for months now and that in order to bring him back she had given up everything she had known in the world. Anders who she had worked with every day, Anders who she knew very well and not at all, was once again alive. He slept as if he had stayed awake the entire time he had been gone and there were moments she wondered if he were dead again but she wouldn’t stop the boat to see. From time to time it rained and when it didn’t rain the light thinned in the tops of the trees and the bats began to loop out across the water. It wasn’t hard to drive the boat. Why had she ever thought she needed Easter to come with her? Marina wrapped the nightgown around her head and face and squinted through the insects of early evening.
When Anders finally woke up hours later it was from a nightmare. His hands shot up into the air and he gave one short cry and then sat. It was pitch dark by then and Marina drove slowly, shining the light of the boat onto shore. She was worried she would drive past the Lakashi, that she would turn up some tributary and be lost all over again. Anders looked at the river and then the boat, he looked at Marina. From a distance they could just make out some small spots of fire down the river. “I had a lot of time to imagine my rescue,” he said. “Army Rangers, soldiers of fortune, even the Lakashi. Mostly I thought it would be Karen.”
“It should have been Karen. She wanted to be the one but I told her she had to stay home with the boys.”
Anders closed his eyes so that he could see them more clearly. “How are the boys?”
“Everyone is fine.”
“In all the times I dreamed of this, I never once saw you as the one coming to get me.”
“I thought you were dead,” she said to him.
“I was dead,” Anders said.
It wasn’t long before the voices of the Lakashi spread over the water and pulled them in. Marina was grateful for their fire, their enormous noise. For the first time in weeks she wondered what time it was. There were men swimming out to the boat and then men pulling themselves on board and as soon as they stood on the deck they were silent. Two unimaginable things had happened: Anders was with her and Easter was gone. Marina killed the engine, afraid she would run over someone in the dark, and the swimmers pulled the boat up to the dock. The men leaned in towards Anders, the burning branches high above their heads. They did not slap him but set their branches in the water where the fire hissed out. One by one slipped over the edge. Voice by voice the singing ceased. In the darkness Anders caught hold of Marina’s hand.
Thomas Nkomo was standing on the dock with a flashlight as if he had been waiting there all day for Marina to remember him. Her first thought when she saw him was of the arrows that had fallen on the boat but she did not bother to tell him that she had saved his life as well. Thomas went to Anders and took him in his arms and the two tall thin men held one another. Dr. Budi came up behind him and then the Saturns and each one took their turn.
“Easter?” Nancy Saturn said, looking around her.
“We left him there,” Marina said. The Lakashi were walking away from them and the lights from all those burning sticks trailed into the jungle in every direction while the doctors walked to the lab.
Marina took the path back to Dr. Swenson’s. She didn’t have a flashlight but the moon was bright. When she went inside she saw that her cot was gone.
“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 night with his fevers you really think you would have taken him back to the cannibals?”
“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.”
