State of Wonder

Ten

Every morning Marina extricated herself from the sleeping limbs of the lightly drugged child and took the path to the field of Martins. She didn’t follow the native example and wait for five days to pass. She was thinking it was possible that five days from now she would be out of this place and so she wanted to stuff herself with the bark, to turn herself into medical evidence before she went home. Her goal was to make up for all the bark she hadn’t eaten in the past and anticipate the bark she would never eat in the future. This was her moment, the perfect now. She didn’t mind making the trip deep into the jungle by herself anymore, though there was never a morning when she didn’t run into other women eventually, both Lakashi and the doctors. Dr. Budi said there was scientific precedent for going to chew the trees so often at the beginning. They said they’d had a loading dose as well. Maybe it was just the excitement of the discovery, or maybe it was something the body had been starved for all along. Dr. Budi told Marina that even at this early stage she would be inoculated against malaria and that her window for monthly fertility would be extended from three days to thirteen. Beyond that, Marina had begun to wonder if there wasn’t something mildly addictive in the fenneled bark, something that kept the Lakashi women trudging back to the trees long after they were sick to death of babies, something that kept the doctors at their desks for years after they were ready to go home. Maybe Dr. Rapp had been correct in his original assessment that there was some mild connection between the mushrooms and trees, the smallest touch of narcotic in the bark that kept the women leashed to the forest.

As for herself, Marina dreamed of Martins. They were there, slim and stately, in front of her eyes before she opened them in the morning, and when she drifted off at night she was walking towards them. It was the thought that she could become addicted to anything in this place that first made her realize it was time to leave the Amazon, though everything was pointing towards departure. In one week she had sewn together the eyelid of a girl who had been bitten by the very monkey she had worn around her neck. It took both of her parents to hold the child down while Marina worked with too heavy a needle and too thick a thread to reassemble the delicate tissue. When she asked Dr. Swenson about getting some human rabies immunoglobulin, Dr. Swenson said she would first need to see a slide of the monkey’s brain. She had removed a six-inch wedge of wood from between the third and fourth toes of a man who was cutting down trees to make boats to ride to Manaus. Three men had dragged him down to the lab without so much as a tourniquet, leaving Marina to do her best to piece together muscles and bones whose names she could no longer remember. The terror of the jungle was now redefined by the work it could dream up for her. While the other doctors, no doubt relieved that they had not been asked to perform the task themselves, praised her to the point of ridiculousness, the Lakashi peered over her porch railing at night and raised up on their toes to sniff her neck whenever they were close. It was clear to Marina that no good was going to come of this. She was tired of her two dresses, tired of waking up in the middle of the night trying to figure out how she could take Easter with her when she left. She was unnerved both by Dr. Swenson’s repeated references to “our” delivery date and by the letters from her dead friend that she found waiting in her bed at night. She wanted out of all of it, but still, it was just now light in this beautiful, singular stand of trees and she cupped her hand around the slender trunk of one of them and leaned in.

Marina had never seen the rooms where the other doctors lived. There was a small circle of huts behind the lab but the lab was where they worked and ate and stayed to talk in the evenings. She had known for some time that one of the huts contained the mice that were forced into repeated pregnancies, their heavy bellies bumping against their exercise wheels, and now she knew that another hut was full of mosquitoes. Their larvae grew in tepid water inside of plastic trays that stacked into a tall rack of metal shelving. When they were ready to hatch they were transferred into large plastic buckets with a piece of pantyhose stretched across the top that was held in place by a rubber band. From there the mosquitoes were infected with malaria. It might have been because everyone felt so confident in the success of their vaccinations that they could afford to be so sloppy in their protocol, but when Alan Saturn first showed them to Marina she did not feel comfortable with the hundreds of flying insects per bucket banging their minuscule weight against a web of nylon.

“Feeding time at the zoo,” Alan said, and soaked a large wad of cotton in a cup of sugar syrup. “Go on and give them a taste of what they really want. Breathe on them. Just lean over and exhale.”

And so she did, and they flung themselves upward in one ineffectual black fist. Marina stepped back.

“Mammalian breath, that’s what draws them. It’s only the females that bite, you know. The males neither contract nor spread the protozoa.” He dropped the cotton onto the hosiery and the mosquitoes went in like sharks for bloody chum. He watched them for a minute. “They always hold up their end of the bargain.”

There were two plastic flyswatters tacked to the wall, their wire handles rusted. “How do you test yourself?” she asked, not entirely certain she wanted to know.

“We take five mosquitoes out of the infected bucket,” he said, tapping the lip of the bucket she’d just breathed into. “When I first came here you should have seen what we went through. We’d put on hazmat suits, seriously, face masks, gloves. As if every tenth mosquito outside isn’t carrying anyway. Now I just stick a net in there. I know what I’m doing. I put those five in a cup with a piece of nylon over the top, then I hold the cup on my arm, on my leg, it doesn’t matter. When I have five bites I kill the mosquitoes and run them under the microscope on a slide to make sure they were all infected. That’s pretty much it.”

“That’s it?”

“Well, then you wait. The malaria will present in ten days. But it doesn’t present. It hasn’t for any of us.”

“So how can you be certain your mosquitoes are good?”

“The microscope tells us that, and then from time to time we infect one of the men in the tribe from the same batch. Ten days later, clockwork, he has malaria. We bring in some of the women and the same group of mosquitoes can bite them all day long and it’s nothing.” Alan was leaning over another bucket. He blew in before giving them the cotton.

“And this man who contracts malaria, how does he agree to this?”

He stood up and shrugged. “I suppose if this man had a lawyer it could be said that he hadn’t agreed, or that he hadn’t been made fully aware of what he was agreeing to. I’ve got some Cokes in here, I don’t tell Annick that. They love them.”

“You give them a Coke for getting malaria?”

“Don’t make this out to be the Tuskegee Institute. Chances are excellent that these men have had malaria before, or that they would have had malaria eventually. The difference is that when they get it in this room we’re also going to cure it. Curing malaria isn’t the problem, you’ll remember; the problem is figuring out a way to vaccinate against it. If they get sick for a couple of days in the name of developing a drug that could protect the entire tribe, the entire world, then I say so be it.”

“Yes,” Marina said, feeling a little uncomfortable with the argument. “But they don’t say so be it.”

Alan Saturn picked up his buckets and began to arrange them on the counter. “It’s good to get out of the American medical system from time to time, Marina. It frees a person up, makes them think about what’s possible.” He took an empty plastic cup off the table and held it out in her direction. “Do you feel like trying it? At least you can count yourself as fully informed to all the risks, and you will have saved one unfortunate native from standing in your place. The best part is, all you’ll wind up with in the end is five itchy bumps.”

Marina considered her Lariam, long gone. She considered her father. She looked inside the cup and shook her head. “I think I’ll wait.”

“Research doesn’t happen in a Petri dish, you know, and mice only go so far. It’s the human trials that make the difference. Sometimes you have to be the one to roll up your sleeve.”

But Marina didn’t stay. She wanted more bark before she became part of the experiment.

Dear Jim,

I see how this could take years, how no amount of time would ever be enough to figure out everything that’s going on here, but I’m going to begin the business of trying to get home. The first thing I’ll have to figure out is the boat. Given Dr. Swenson’s investment in keeping me I doubt she’ll be quick to offer hers. But boats do go by and I know the direction of Manaus. Some days I think I’ll see one and swim out to it, and if Easter swims with me then who would stop us?

Marina wrote more letters now. She wrote them every day. Dr. Budi left her pack of stationery open on her desk and Nancy Saturn was generous with her stamps. She would take Easter with her to the river and they would skip rocks from the shore or go for a swim. Boats did go by — a child in a canoe, a rare river taxi on its way to the Jinta — but then two or three days would pass with nothing. She made Easter keep watch when she was working, leaving him alone with the letters. It would never have occurred to her that it was possible for the system to work, except that it had worked, Anders had mailed letters, who knew how many letters, and some of them found their way to Karen. Yet as often as she wrote to Mr. Fox she hadn’t really told him anything. She hadn’t told him about the malaria or Dr. Swenson’s pregnancy or Anders’ burial. Those things she needed to say to him herself.

Easter and Marina liked the river best at six o’clock when the sun was spreading out long across the water and the birds had just begun to make their way home for the night. They sat on the damp banks, as far away as they could from the heat of the Lakashi’s fire. It was too early to eat and still she wanted to leave the lab for a while, stretch her legs and roll her neck. Sometimes she would sit for twenty minutes, thirty minutes, and other nights she would stay until it was dark. She had never seen a boat go by once it was dark but it was such a pleasure to sit and watch the hot red ball of the sun sink fully down into the jungle that she made the excuse that one might come. Easter pointed out every fish that broke the river’s surface and she pointed out the bats swimming through the purple evening sky. She had gotten very used to spending her time with someone who said nothing at all. She found that watching the coming on of night without feeling any need to comment on it brought about a sense of tranquility that she had rarely known.

It was in that tranquility a boat was spotted in the distance.

She heard it before she saw it, the sound of a well-maintained engine pushing effortlessly ahead. That was in itself worthy of notice as the boats she was familiar with here came in two varieties: the completely silent canoe/raft/floating bundle of logs, and anything with a grinding motor. She got to her feet with four letters in her hand, one for her mother and one for Karen and two for Mr. Fox. The boat was coming on fast, a small round dot of light fixed to the front that was pointing up river, and Easter, ever the thinker, jumped up and grabbed two long branches from the edge of the fire, one for Marina and one for himself, and they stepped into the water until it was up to their knees and they waved the branches overhead. A boat that fast was surely headed to Manaus eventually, even though it was going in the wrong direction for now. She wanted that boat. She swung the fire over her head and let out a high, bright sound, a sound she never would have guessed she had in her. She hoped it would encompass every language in which the words Stop the boat could be spoken. Whether the people on the boat heard her it would be impossible to say, sitting as they were just on the cusp between near and far, but the Lakashi heard her, and they ran through the jungle faster than any boat could travel and picked the fire apart and lit sticks from one another’s sticks and then let out a giant howl, their own particular shibboleth, and all of this so Marina could send off her mail. Bless the Lakashi, and for this one night bless them for watching her too closely, because suddenly their shoreline was ablaze and the noise they made was deafening and the boat, which was almost on them now was certainly slowing out on the dark river though it wasn’t slowing enough to give the impression of stopping, and Marina, buoyed up on the energy of the people, called out with the lungs of a soprano, “Stop the boat!”

All sound stopped, the Lakashi startled into a brief silence by the intensity in Marina’s voice, even the frogs and insects for an instant held their breath. She wasn’t used to it herself, the power of her own voice, and so in the new silence she called again, “Stop the boat!” And the boat, which was past them now, stopped. It turned and slowly came towards the dock, its spotlight sweeping the crowd on the shore slowly, left to right.

“Correspondência!” Marina called. She had been reading a Portuguese dictionary at night along with the Dickens. “Obrigado, obrigado.” She came out of the water and ran down the planks of the dock, the letters in one hand, the burning branch in the other, and the light from the boat leapt across her and then returned. It hit her squarely in the face and froze her in mid-step. In her own defense she closed her eyes.

“Marina?” a voice asked.

“Yes?” she said. Why did this not seem strange, someone calling her name? It was because of the light she could not make sense of what was happening.

“Marina!” The voice was happy now. She did not know the voice, and then she did. The second it came to her he spoke his name. “It’s Milton!”

The enormity of Marina’s happiness was caught in that light. Of all the tributaries in all of the Amazon he had wandered onto hers. Milton her protector, Milton who would know exactly how to set everything to right. She threw her branch into the water and let out a scream of joy which took the shape of his name, “Milton!” But the scream that met hers was high and entirely female and there bounding over the edge of the boat and into her arms came Barbara Bovender wearing a short khaki colored dress with a stunning number of pockets. Milton was driving the boat for Barbara Bovender! The light of every Lakashi torch was caught in the reflective sheet of her wind-tangled hair. Marina embraced the narrow back of her friend who clung to her neck and whispered in her ear too softly to be heard above the cries of the Lakashi. She smelled of lime blossom perfume.

“How are you here?” Marina said. There was no sensible way to say it — how did you find us and why did you come and how long can you stay and will you take me with you when you leave? Easter bounded down the dock on a wave of childlike glee and straight into Barbara’s arms, burying his face in her hair. Marina felt the smallest ping of something — jealousy? That couldn’t be right. It was so much to take in and it was all too wonderful and confusing. The Lakashi were continuing to sing and the smoke from all the fires was as blinding as the spotlight from the boat. Marina was climbing over the edge of the boat to throw her arms around Milton, her feet bare, her dress torn at the left side seam, her hair neatly combed and braided because she had been sitting for a long time watching the sunset. She put out her arms to Milton and he took her hands, his arms out straight, and turned her entire body so that she could see there was in fact a third person there, and because that person was not catching the light it took her a moment to understand. It should have been Jackie and it was not Jackie.

“Marina,” said Mr. Fox.

It was just that one word, her name, and suddenly she was certain of nothing. Could she embrace him? Did they kiss? In the torch light she could make out that all three of the visitors wore a similar expression, a look that was hollowed out and exhausted, possibly terrified, a look that Marina no doubt must have had on her own face that first night she came down the river to see the burning Lakashi torches. The other doctors would be walking down from the lab by now. They would have heard all the ruckus and come to see why this night was different from all other nights. Could she kiss Mr. Fox in front of Dr. Swenson? In front of Barbara Bovender? She had never mentioned that part to any of them, that Mr. Fox was the person in all the world she kissed. “I’ve been writing to you,” she said, and held out the letters to him like a defense. He was wearing a white cotton shirt like Milton’s and she wondered if he had come down in a wool suit. Had Milton taken him to Rodrigo’s late at night to buy him clothes? “I was flagging down the boat to see if it would take my letters to you.” He took the letters. He took her hand.

“I haven’t had any letters,” he said. His voice was hoarse. “I haven’t heard from you.” The time she had been gone had aged him, the boat trip had aged him. How long had he been in Brazil? How long had it taken him to wear the Bovenders down? “I didn’t know what had happened to you. Are you hurt?”

“I’m fine,” Marina said.

“There’s blood all over your dress.”

Marina looked down and sure enough there was, but she couldn’t remember who it once belonged to or how much of it was just a stain she hadn’t been able to scrub out. The Lakashi were coming on board now and they grinned as they slapped Mr. Fox who flinched at first and then raised his hand in what appeared to be self-defense. Marina pulled him back. They were slapping Milton and Barbara Bovender, pounding out their particular and aggressive form of welcome. Already two women had their hands deep in the white gold of Barbara’s hair and she struggled hopelessly to get away. A suitcase was held aloft and then passed overhead and Marina leapt up to grab it. “Milton!” she called out, “don’t let them take the bags!”

Milton managed to wrestle the remaining duffels and totes away from the natives. He waved to Easter, who came on board and gave Milton a hearty slap at the waist and then began to loop his arms through the various handles of bags.

Marina took Mr. Fox’s hand and held it tightly. “We have to keep an eye on Barbara. She won’t be able to manage this.”

“I wouldn’t worry about Mrs. Bovender,” he said in a flat voice. This was not the reunion they were supposed to have. She wished he would have waited in the Minneapolis airport for her to come back. It wouldn’t have been too much longer. Once they were on the dock he let go of her hand. Maybe it wasn’t a good thing the boat had come at all. There was no aligning Minnesota to Amazonia. There was no explaining one world to the other. Dr. Swenson was walking towards them.

“Enough of that,” she said, clapping her hands. “Leave her alone now.” The two Lakashi women who fought over Barbara’s hair had settled their differences, leaving her in under a minute with two long braids already tied off at the ends with pieces of thread pulled from their own dresses. Dr. Swenson walked by Barbara with barely a glance. “We’ll be talking about this,” she said as she passed, and Barbara dropped her head. When she got to the end of the dock her full attention turned to Milton. “Whose boat is this?”

“It belongs to a friend of Rodrigo’s,” Milton said.

“Rodrigo’s friends don’t have money like this.”

“One of them does,” Milton said. “The man who bottles Inca Cola. Rodrigo sells it in the store.”

Dr. Swenson nodded. “Did you bring supplies or only guests?”

“Rodrigo put together a list of what you must need by now, plus some things you’ll like. He had just gotten in a full case of oranges and he sent them all to you. I think he did a very good job.”

Having dealt with two of the travelers, she turned to the third. “You no doubt moved heaven and earth for this, Mr. Fox.”

Mr. Fox stood on the dock and stared at Dr. Swenson and stared at the entire flaming tableau that spread behind her. A bat spun down perilously close to the top of his head and he did not flinch. “We have had a difficult trip. There is clearly a great deal to discuss, including the heaven and earth I have moved, but for now you should tell us where we will be sleeping.”

“I don’t know where you’ll be sleeping,” Dr. Swenson said, making no concessions to civility. “We are working here, not running a Hyatt.”

The Lakashi, sensing there was no further call for celebration, began stacking their burning sticks into a single raging bonfire that threatened to spread to the dock they were standing on. Thomas Nkomo stepped forward, waving his hand and bowing quickly to the guests. “Let us work this out away from the fire,” he said calmly. “We will make sure everyone is accommodated.” Once he had herded them gently to shore he told Barbara Bovender that she would follow Marina, and Mr. Fox would bunk with him, and Milton—

“I can sleep in the boat,” Milton said.

Thomas shook his head. “There is a cot in the lab near Dr. Swenson’s station. She will be happy to have you sleep there for tonight.”

“Let’s leave your assumptions of my happiness out of this,” Dr. Swenson said. As she turned and walked back up the dock, Marina could see that Dr. Swenson was limping badly and wanted to go to her and lend her an arm, and she wanted to go with Mr. Fox because Thomas of all people would give them a moment together without asking questions, but instead she took Barbara Bovender’s hand and led her through the jungle towards the storage shed.

“Do you know where we’re going?” Barbara asked.

“I do,” Marina said.

Jackie had left for Lima five days before, this being the season when the surf rose along the Peruvian coast with such ferocity that it cleared the lesser surfers from the beaches and brought forth the greater ones from other continents. The Bovenders had talked it over at length and decided this would be a good time for both of them. Barbara could work on her novel and he could spend a couple of weeks curled in the lip of a giant wave. “We went over everything that could possibly happen and decided there was nothing that I couldn’t handle myself.” She was sitting in the chair on top of Marina’s extra dress. She closed her eyes and shook her head. “We didn’t take Mr. Fox into account. I told him I didn’t know where Annick was. That lasted about three minutes.”

“He’s better at it than I was.”

Mrs. Bovender’s blue eyes went round at the thought of it. “He’s better at it than anyone. Vogel holds the lease on the apartment. He said I would be on the curb in an hour. He got Milton, Milton got the boat. I said, fine, good luck, and then he said I was coming with them. Milton’s never been out here before and I’d only come with Jackie. Half the time I came with him I was asleep. Jackie gets seasick unless he’s the one driving the boat. I was supposed to tell them how to get here? Oh God, it was awful, we’d pass one river and then I’d start to think a half an hour later that that was the river we were supposed to turn on.”

“But you got them here,” Marina said. She wasn’t sure she could have done it.

“Marina, we left two days ago. All those rivers, all those trees. I get turned around in Manaus.” Her hands were shaking and so she sat on them. “Do you have a cigarette? I would really love a cigarette.”

“I’m sorry,” Marina said.

“Thank God Milton was there. At first Mr. Fox asked me a lot of questions, mostly questions about you, but once he was convinced I really hadn’t heard from you he stopped talking to me altogether.” There was something about Barbara’s hair, the two yellow braids hanging over her shoulders, that had robbed her of her considerable sophistication and left behind a fourteen year old girl. “I was staring out at the river bank every second. I felt like I was trying to intuit where you were, like it was my responsibility to know, and I didn’t know. Mr. Fox wouldn’t believe me when I told him I didn’t remember. He thought I was still trying to throw him off Annick’s trail, like it would be great fun for me to take us all out on the river and get us lost. And then I saw another river, a small one, and all of the sudden I was sure it was the right one. The opening would have been so easy to miss. If I had been looking on the other side of the boat for just a minute we would have kept going. Mr. Fox and Milton didn’t see it at first, and they both perked up then because I was so sure. We went up that river for half the day and everything was quiet. Most of the time I was still thinking I’d gotten it right, and then I started to think we had gotten it wrong, and I was just about to say that, I was getting up my nerve, when we came around a bend and there were all these people on the shore in loincloths with their foreheads painted yellow. It was like they’d been standing there forever, waiting for us, and I didn’t remember exactly what the Lakashi looked like. I was so tired by then and I was so confused by all the wrong choices I’d already made that I honestly didn’t remember.”

Marina leaned forward from the bed where she was sitting. She put her hands on Barbara Bovender’s knees. All of the rivers in the Amazon and she knew which one this story had taken.

“So I said, ‘There they are!’ and Milton was slowing down the boat and he was whispering to me, ‘Are you sure, are you sure?’ He’s met the Lakashi before. They come down to Manaus selling timber, sometimes they’ve come with Annick. He knows this isn’t right, and then I know it isn’t right, and the river is narrow there and they all raise up these bows and arrows and they’re huge.” She is crying now, and she takes her trembling hands out from beneath her legs and begins to wipe her eyes.

“You’re okay,” Marina said. “You found me. Milton got you out.”

She nodded but her fingers could not get far enough ahead of the tears to wipe them all away, there were simply too many of them. “He did. He was so fast. Milton deserves some sort of medal. He’d never driven that boat before and he slammed it around so fast we nearly went over. When I looked back the air was full of arrows. Arrows! How can that be possible? And then I saw something. I thought I saw something.”

“What?” Marina said.

She shook her head. “It was worse than anything, worse than Mr. Fox or us getting lost or those people shooting at us.” She looked up at Marina and blinked her eyes and for a moment the crying stopped and a look of utter seriousness crossed her pretty face. She took Marina’s hands. “I saw my father running through the trees,” she whispered. “I don’t know what you’d call it, a vision, a visitation? He was coming straight towards me, coming down to the water, and I threw myself on the bottom of the boat. There were arrows in the boat and Milton said not to touch them. I tried to look back for him but Milton said to keep down. Marina, my father is dead. He died in Australia when I was ten years old. I think about him all the time, I dream about him, but I’ve never seen him. He came there for me because he knew I was going to die.”

“Did Milton see him, or Mr. Fox?”

She shook her head. “Mr. Fox was on the deck and Milton was driving. I don’t think they would have been able to see him anyway. I think he was only there for me.”

“Who would have known you were missing?” Dr. Swenson was saying to Mr. Fox when Barbara and Marina walked into the lab. Dr. Budi could not stop shaking her head and the two Drs. Saturn stayed very close together. The misery that comes from having a good imagination was writ large on Thomas Nkomo. “I suppose the Inca Cola man would have wanted his boat back at some point. When Jackie Bovender came home from his surfing expedition in two or three weeks they would have come here together. Don’t you think so, Barbara? He would have come looking for you then.”

Barbara Bovender, now the center of everyone’s nervous attention, made the slightest gesture towards a nod.

Dr. Swenson held out a hand towards this confirmation. “One man missing a boat, one man missing a wife. What do you think I should have told them when they arrived? I wouldn’t have had any idea where you were.”

“If you had a telephone no one would have to risk their lives to find you,” Mr. Fox said. How was it possible that Marina could not go to him? Why didn’t he come to her now having survived a rain of poison arrows? How could he not take her in his arms regardless of who was in the room? He looked so out of place in his lightly embroidered white shirt and khaki pants, as if he had dressed up for a party whose theme was the Amazon.

“This is about my not having a telephone? Do you think Dr. Rapp came to the Amazon with a telephone? I am trying to finish my work. First you send a man down here who dies and when you decide to follow him it seems you are determined to die yourself and take two of my people with you. It is disruptive, Mr. Fox, can you understand that? You do not advance your own case by continuing to throw these tragedies in my path.”

“I was looking for Dr. Singh,” he said, tapping his glasses up the bridge of his nose with his index finger, a nervous tic Marina knew to be the slightest outward manifestation of simmering fury. “I hadn’t had any word from her. I couldn’t take the chance that another one of my employees was sick or in danger.”

Another one of your employees, Marina thought. Well, there you have it.

“But you endanger them yourself!” Dr. Swenson said. “You throw a person in the river and then make a spectacle of jumping in to save them.”

Before Mr. Fox had a chance to answer, Dr. Budi stepped between them. “I must ask that you stop this now,” she said, her voice unexpectedly strong. “Dr. Swenson, this is not right for you. This argument has ended. You must sit.”

The room fell suddenly silent and in the silence they could hear the unexpected sound of Dr. Swenson struggling to catch her breath. There was no ignoring Budi’s advice. Dr. Swenson sunk down heavily in her chair and put her swollen feet up on a box in front of her. Nancy Saturn came over with a glass of water and Dr. Swenson waved her away. When she spoke again her voice was calmer. “Look at as much data as you need to reassure yourself, Mr. Fox. The two Drs. Saturn will help you. Tomorrow when it’s light, Dr. Budi will take you to see the Martins, and after that you will get back on the Inca Cola and go to Manaus. That is all the hospitality I am capable of extending.”

“Dr. Singh is coming with us.” Mr. Fox said. It was not a romantic gesture but the first counteroffer in an ongoing negotiation.

Dr. Swenson shook her head. “That will not be possible. Dr. Singh has agreed to stay until I deliver my child.” She put her swollen hands on either side of her belly. “The big reveal, Mr. Fox. Seventy-three years old and I am pregnant. If you trouble yourself to look around in the morning you will see that I am not alone in my condition. We are very close to being able to bring you what you want if you could only control your impulse for disruption. I’m keeping up my end of the bargain. I expect you to start keeping yours.”

For a moment Mr. Fox was too far behind. He had missed the rodent trials, the studies in higher mammals. He had no knowledge of a first efficacious dose or the multidose safety studies. He had seen no reports on the probability of technical success, and then suddenly he was six months into the first human dose. First in Man, that’s what it would always be no matter how inherently sexist the implications. Given all there was to absorb it took a moment for the news to settle in, but when it did the look on Mr. Fox’s face was as tender and pleased and surprised as it had been on a night thirty-five years before when his own wife Mary had made a similar announcement. He took a few tentative steps towards Dr. Swenson. He softened his voice. “How far along?”

“Nearly seven months.”

“I’m not qualified to do the section,” Marina said to her. “I’ve told you that. You need to go to a hospital.”

“I would feel more comfortable with Dr. Singh,” Dr. Swenson said. “We can’t afford any breaches in security at this point. I can’t go to the city to have a child. I’ve seen her operate several times now. She does a brilliant job. I have no questions as to her complete competence.”

While Marina had come far enough to contradict Dr. Swenson when they were alone, she still lacked the skills to do so publicly. There was no way to point out that these compliments were her road to perdition.

“We could bring in an obstetrician from Rio,” Mr. Fox said. “We could bring one in from Johns Hopkins if you’d like.” He had already forgotten about the trip from Manaus, about Mrs. Bovender, about the Hummocca. The drug worked, that was all he had ever needed to know. He didn’t care about the paperwork, the trees, he didn’t need to see Marina. He could get back on the boat tonight.

“What I would like is what I have already said. I trained Dr. Singh myself. You can spare her for a little while longer.”

“I can,” Mr. Fox said.

Marina started to say something but Dr. Swenson cut her off. “Dr. Budi is right, I am tired. Walk with me back to the hut now, Dr. Singh. I’ve done enough for tonight.” She held up her hand and Marina took it. The skin between Dr. Swenson’s fingers was cracked and bleeding. Mr. Fox touched Dr. Swenson’s shoulder before they left the room and she nodded at him in return.

Once they were safely under the cover of darkness, the stars spreading their foam over the night sky, Marina started in. “I told you I wasn’t going to stay,” she whispered sharply over the grind of insects’ wings, over the endless repetition of frogs croaking. “Did you think you could just lease me out from my employer?”

“Hold on to yourself for two more minutes,” Dr. Swenson said.

Dr. Swenson’s hut was the one closest to the lab. It was a small room with a single bed and a dresser, a folding table with two chairs. Dr. Swenson struggled up the four stairs, leaning her weight against Marina, and when she came inside she sat down heavily on the bed. “I’m going to have to lie down,” she said, and with that she stretched over the bed, her stomach pointing up. She sent forth a low moan, though whether it was pain or the relief from pain Marina could not be sure. “Be a friend and pull off my sandals, Dr. Singh.”

Marina struggled with the Birkenstocks but managed to get them loose. Dr. Swenson’s toes were sunk halfway into her swollen feet which had an unnatural purple cast. “Don’t make me feel sorry for you,” Marina said. “The more I worry about you the more certain I am that you need to go to a hospital with doctors who know what they’re doing.”

“You know what you’re doing,” Dr. Swenson said, “and you will feel sorry for me because that is your nature. There’s nothing I could do to prevent that.”

Marina sat down on the edge of the single mattress. “Who’s the man in the picture?” She took Dr. Swenson’s wrist between her fingers. Her pulse was almost too rapid to count.

Dr. Swenson turned and looked at the frame on her bedside table. It was a black-and-white photograph of a tall, thin man with a very fine nose standing in the jungle. He was wearing a white shirt and seemed to be looking over the shoulder of whoever was holding the camera. “Never ask a question if you already know the answer. I find that the most irritating habit.”

“He’s very handsome,” Marina said.

“He was,” she said, closing her eyes.

“Where’s the blood-pressure cuff?”

She pointed down to the red bag on the floor and Marina got the cuff and a stethoscope. “The baby is dead, Dr. Singh. It died yesterday, maybe the day before. I was going to tell you tonight but then the company arrived. You can go on and try to listen but nothing has moved. I’m not certain when it moved last. I haven’t been able to find a heartbeat.”

Marina put her hand on her teacher’s arm but Dr. Swenson shook her off. “Go on,” Dr. Swenson said. “Try.”

Marina put the scope in her ears, ran the drum across Dr. Swenson’s belly, trying one spot and then another and then another.

“There’s nothing there,” Dr. Swenson said.

“No,” Marina said. She took her blood pressure then and then took it again to make sure her reading was correct. “One seventy-two over one fifteen.”

Dr. Swenson nodded. “I have preeclampsia. There is no Pitocin. There is a syrup the locals use to bring about labor in these circumstances, a boiled-down extract of crickets or some such thing but for the time being I am finished with my own human experimentation. I don’t think I’d survive labor anyway. So the bad news is you will have to do the section and the good news is you won’t have to wait two months to do it. Mr. Fox will leave tomorrow with the proof he needs that the drug is viable, and that in itself will buy us a great deal of time. If you could stay here just a little while after the surgery to make sure there are no complications I would appreciate it. Later I’ll have Easter and the Saturns take you back to Manaus in the pontoon. Can you do that?”

“I can put you on that boat in the morning and we can go to a real hospital with real medicine and a sterile surgical room and an anesthesiologist. I’m not going to operate on you with a syringe full of Ketamine.”

Dr. Swenson waved her hand. “Don’t be ridiculous. We have bags of Versed for special occasions.”

There were things to say about that but Marina let them go. “These are serious circumstances. I know it isn’t what you want but you have got to think like a medical doctor and not an ethnobotanist. If you go with Milton and Mr. Fox you’ll be there in half the time. You could be there tonight, which, considering your blood pressure, is what you should be doing anyway. You’d never put this off if it were someone else.”

“Listen to what I’m saying the first time, Dr. Singh. I don’t have the energy to keep repeating myself. I’m not going anywhere tonight, so if I die before you have the chance to save me the onus will be completely my own. You can’t have Mr. Fox take me to the hospital. Then all of his dreams will be shattered and subsequently my dreams will be shattered as well. I will not sacrifice a potential malaria vaccine for a hospital bed in Manaus. I am asking you to do this surgery as a way of saving myself from having Alan Saturn do it. I don’t know that I have asked you for so much in the past that you would find this single request something you are unable to grant.”

Marina waited, considering the horror of it all. In the end she could do no better than a nod of the head.

“There is of course every reason to think that this will kill me in the end.” She opened her eyes and looked at Marina. “It’s difficult to say if this is an outcome of the drug or the circumstances of age. Whether or not I am finished remains to be seen, but I want you to know that the drug is finished, at least the fertility aspect. Mr. Fox can go and cry in his cups. With a little luck we’ll be able to keep that news from him for a few more years while he finances a malaria vaccine.”

Marina shook her head. She wrote it off to the circumstances. In a couple of months when all of this was behind her Dr. Swenson would feel differently. “You shouldn’t say that. You’ve worked on it for too many years to let it go.”

“And how shall we test it further? I’ve been eating this bark for years. I’ve seen my own menstruation return at sixty. I’ve lived through the pimples and the cramps and I will tell you there was nothing there to enjoy. I did not need to see that aspect of my youth again.”

“That’s why they have NHV, normal healthy volunteers. No one expects that you should do all of this yourself.”

“We would have to find a great many childless seventy-three-year-old women who were willing to be impregnated in order to evaluate safety. Chances are we would kill the lion’s share of them in the course of the drug trials.”

“Chances are,” Marina said. She brushed down the insane wires of Dr. Swenson’s hair with her hand.

“Don’t be tender, Dr. Singh. We’re fine the way we are. I only tell you this because I want you to know that if anything happens to me now, anything, it is not your fault. I’ve brought this on myself in the interest of science and I don’t regret any of it. Do you understand that? This has all been to the positive. We are very close to securing a vaccine, and in addition to that we know what the body has told us all along, postmenopausal women aren’t meant to be pregnant. That is what we had to learn.”

“It might not work at seventy-three. That doesn’t mean it couldn’t work at fifty. This isn’t the time to throw everything away.”

“Let the fifty-year-olds console themselves with in vitro as they have in the past. I have no intention of unleashing this misery on the world because I trust women to stop trying at a sensible age.” She shook her head. “So it’s good then,” she said, “it’s good. I’m going to go to sleep now. I want you to get some sleep, too. We’ll do this tomorrow in the afternoon when everyone has left and there’s plenty of light. Do your best to get them off early. Milton and Barbara would swim out of here, I feel sure of it, but Mr. Fox may try to linger. Once you get them on the boat, go and ask Dr. Budi to assist you. There’s no sense in telling her tonight.”

“Alright,” Marina said. She pulled the mosquito netting down over the bed. She turned down the flame in the lantern but she couldn’t seem to make herself go.

“You’re still here,” Dr. Swenson said finally.

“I thought I’d wait until you fell asleep.”

“I know how to sleep, Dr. Singh. I don’t need you to watch me unless it is something you are trying to learn to do yourself.”

When Marina got back to the lab, Dr. Nancy Saturn was explaining the relationship between the Martin trees and the purple martinets to Mr. Fox, and Thomas Nkomo was showing him the charts of pregnancies, birth weights, live births, and they were all lying to him in everything they chose not to tell. Milton and Barbara made sandwiches out of the store-bought bread they had brought with them. Everyone was helpful. Everyone was getting along.

“Have you seen all of this?” Mr. Fox said to Marina when she came over to them.

“I have,” she said. “I’ve been here a long time.”

“It’s remarkable work. Truly remarkable work.” He was smiling at her now without the slightest trace of collusion. He was simply happy. The drug would soon be in hand, the stock would exceed expectations, his risk would be lauded by generations of board members to come.

Dr. Budi handed her a sandwich on a plate, potted chicken after so many weeks of potted ham. “Dr. Swenson?” she asked.

“Her blood pressure is high,” Marina said.

Mr. Fox looked up and Marina shook her head. “She’s tired. She just needs rest, that’s all. There should be as little stress as possible.” It was a line of dialogue she remembered from meeting with patients years ago. It always comforted them. Anyone could embrace the idea that the answer was rest.

“We’ll leave in the morning,” Milton said.

“After we’ve seen the trees,” Mr. Fox said.

Marina waited another minute for old time’s sake. Mr. Fox bent back over the data and she wanted very much to put her hand on the crown of his head. It was probably better that he didn’t look at her, that he didn’t take her aside and whisper his true plan in her ear. If he loved her now, it would only be sadder later on when he realized that she had lied to him along with all the others. He would leave her once the whole thing fell apart. It might be years, but once he understood that he was holding a malaria vaccine instead of a drug for fertility and that she had known it and done nothing to stop it, nothing to save him, he would break with her in every possible way. That loss would be infinitely harder to take if he had ever loved her. “Let’s go to bed now,” she said quietly. Then he did raise his head, looking at her as if to say that surely he misunderstood.

“I’m with you,” Barbara Bovender said, slipping the second half of her sandwich into one of the many pockets on her dress. The two of them took Easter with them while the rest of the group called good night, while Mr. Fox said good night.

“How does this work?” Barbara asked, looking again at the configuration of the sleeping porch.

“I have the cot and Easter has the hammock, but Easter sleeps with me so I guess that leaves you with the hammock. I’ll grant you that it isn’t much but it’s better than winding up on the floor somewhere.”

Easter was sitting on the floor wiping off the bottoms of his feet with a rag. It was the one bedtime ritual Marina had taught him.

“Look,” Barbara said, twisting a fat yellow braid around her fingers. “I know this is your place, but if you wouldn’t mind terribly could I sleep with Easter? It’s just for tonight. I’ve been half out of my wits all day. Frankly, if he wasn’t here I’d be asking to sleep with you, and I don’t think the two of us would fit in that bed.” She looked sadly at the child. “It’s been a bad time for Jackie to be gone.”

Marina nodded. She understood completely the calming powers of Easter. Still, as she shook the marmoset scat out of the hammock, she thought of how on this particular night she would have preferred not to sleep alone herself.

That night Marina dreamed not of her own father but of Barbara Bovender’s father as he ran through the trees towards the river. When she woke up she had one leg and both of her arms hanging over the edges of the reeking hammock and her first thought was of the Martins. There was only the smallest bit of light coming onto the porch and Barbara and Easter were still sleeping, Easter in the nylon shorts he’d worn the day before and Barbara in a white cotton nightgown. For a moment Marina looked at them and marveled that such things as nightgowns had ever existed and that the people who owned them thought to wear them to bed. She took her flashlight and walked out into the jungle, keeping the beam pointed low to the ground as it was still so early the tarantulas would just now be making their slow crawl home. She wanted to get to the trees and back before anyone else was out. She was fairly certain there was some other quality in the bark that no one was talking about and she knew she wasn’t going to make it through this particular day without it. She thought of how she would come out here on her last day and saw off a few branches from the trees on the farthest edge of the perimeter. She would saw them into smaller and smaller pieces and tie them together with twine and she would bring them back with her, a little something for herself. She pictured herself in her kitchen, a freezer full of twigs, taking them out only when she needed one, sitting alone in her living room scraping the bark down with her teeth, and while she was thinking about this she came perilously close to putting her foot into a nest of ants. She stopped and watched them cut a determined path through the leaf litter. She was walking too fast. She kept her eyes down for the rest of the way and when she finally looked up again it was to see the morning sun coming through the Martins at an easterly slant, the full illumination of the thin yellow trunks, the high crowns of pink flowers brushing the edges of the barely blue sky. Maybe she wasn’t sorry not to be going back on the boat today. As she touched her mouth to an already soft opening in the bark, a feeling of peace and well-being spread through her veins. She wondered if in fact it was really time to go at all.

She saw the first three Lakashi women coming towards the trees in the same dresses they wore every day, the same dress she wore every day, and they raised their hands to wave to her. Marina waved back and moved quickly to the side of the stand. In the distance, she could hear the disembodied voice of Nancy Saturn lecturing on the purple martinet, the digestion and excrement versus the larval sack. Marina only knew one way out of the trees. One would think she could walk out in any direction and make a circle back around the edge but that wasn’t the case. She needed a path. She had to leave the same way she came in or she would get lost. She had a distinct desire to run straight into the jungle, but why? What was there to run from? Mr. Fox was her lover, the Saturns were her friends. Either way she had already stood there too long.

“Marina!” Alan called.

She went to them. The Lakashi were busy at their trees and the gentle sound of their mastication was a comfort to her. One of the women patted her bottom as she walked past, her mouth firm to the bark. It was her nurse. Marina patted the back of her head.

“She’s gone completely native,” Alan said to Mr. Fox.

Like everything else around this place, Mr. Fox looked better in the light of day standing between the trunks of the Martins. He had on a blue shirt this morning and a darker pair of pants. She couldn’t quite believe that in his rush to find her he had brought a change of clothes. “I was meaning to ask about the dress last night.”

Marina brushed off the front of the coarse fabric. “It’s the local uniform.”

“What happened to your clothes?”

Marina shook her head. “A misunderstanding,” she said. “Really, the dress has been fine.”

“If my legs looked as good as yours I’d wear one too,” Nancy Saturn said.

While Marina’s legs were of sound basic construction they were also bruised, unshaven, scabbed, and covered in a fierce topography of insect bites. It struck Marina then that it wasn’t only Mr. Fox she was lying to. She was lying to the other doctors, her friends, who would certainly have wanted to know that she had more than a professional relationship with the man they were trying to snow. A small Lakashi woman who had finished her requisite amount of bark came up behind Marina and gave her shoulder two hard taps and Marina sat down on the ground with thoughtless obedience. She didn’t mind sitting down in the Martins. All of the insects save the purple martinets cut a wide berth around this part of the jungle. The woman untied the end of Marina’s braid and combed out her hair with her fingers.

“Is this a service?” Mr. Fox asked.

“You can’t stop them,” Marina said. “There is absolutely no fighting this.”

“I had long hair the first month I was here,” Nancy said, nodding at Marina. “They were all over me. As soon as I cut it off I was invisible to them.”

“They fix Budi’s hair every morning,” Alan said. “They come to her hut.”

“So you’ve gotten used to the place?” Mr. Fox said, and for the first time he sounded as if he were speaking to Marina as if she were someone he had met before.

She nodded. “Finish your tour and then I’ll take you back. You can catch me up on everything I’ve missed at work.”

Mr. Fox agreed to this and went off with the Saturns. Marina listened to their voices — Martins and martinets and not a single mention of Rapps. She leaned forward from where she was sitting and picked one, the smallest, bluest mushroom that grew at the base of the tree. It was hardly bigger than her little finger. She brought it to her nose and sniffed it like a daisy and the woman who was braiding her hair began to laugh. She leaned over Marina’s shoulder and sniffed the mushroom herself, then she put her arms around Marina from the back and hugged her, giggling into her neck until Marina had to laugh herself. When the woman finished Marina’s hair she took the mushroom from her fingers and, giving a quick, furtive glance to either side, popped it in her mouth and walked away.

The Saturns stayed behind with their litmus paper and their cotton swabs while Marina walked Mr. Fox back to the lab. The Lakashi trickled past, raising their hands to her.

“You’re popular here,” he said.

She stopped and turned to him. She took his hands. They had gone to Chicago together once, gotten a fancy room at the Drake and stayed in bed until noon. “I wrote to you. Some of the letters will get there eventually. The second suitcase was lost and I didn’t have the phone.” Three more women came by. One of them reached down and slapped Marina’s thighs and Mr. Fox let go of her hands. “Don’t worry about them,” she said. “They don’t report back to anyone.”

“Still,” he said.

“It doesn’t matter,” Marina said. “No one cares what we’re doing. It didn’t matter before either.” She kissed him then because she didn’t know if there was ever going to be another chance. She remembered that she must smell horrible although she could no longer smell much of anything herself. The snake had burned it out of her.

He stayed with the kiss for only a second. There were too many women walking past and they were laughing quietly with each other. “You’re fine,” he said, pulling away. “You’re going to be home soon and we’ll have time to talk about everything. All of this is better than anything I could have imagined, and I have you to thank for much of that. It was very brave of you to come down here alone. I see that now.” He turned away from her then and took a step forward and Marina saw the snake, his foot coming down right on top of it as she grabbed him and pulled him back, pulled him into her with a not inconsiderable strength. It was a little lancehead, small enough to be immature. She had seen the picture in one of Anders’ books and she recognized it an instant before it darted away into the

high grass.

“Marina!” he said sharply, but she had hold of him now so tightly he could not get away and she did not immediately let him go. Instead she put her lips very lightly to his ear.

“Snake,” she said.

As soon as they were back Marina went to check on Dr. Swenson and found Barbara coming up the path. Her eyes were red and cheeks were flushed. Marina didn’t know if she had just now been crying or if it was leftover from all the crying the night before. “She’s alright,” Barbara said, and stepped in front of Marina. “But you shouldn’t go in there. She said she wanted to rest now.”

“You’re back to guarding the gate.”

Barbara was wearing white linen pants and a tight navy top and Marina wondered if she had packed it thinking the outfit had a certain nautical look that was appropriate for river travel. “Maybe you could put in a good word for me then, tell her I’m still doing my job.”

“Is she going to fire you for bringing out Mr. Fox?”

She looked back towards the door she had just come out of to make sure Dr. Swenson wasn’t standing there watching. “I don’t know. She may just be trying to scare me. She says she hasn’t decided. I think she looks awful, by the way. I had thought the idea of waiting until later to have children was such a good one, and now I’m not so sure.”

“It isn’t a good one,” Marina said.

Mrs. Bovender put her arm through her friend’s arm and together they walked towards the water. “I don’t know how you’ve lived out here. You were so miserable in Manaus but this is a thousand times worse. Maybe I’d be lucky if she fired us. I want to go back to Australia. I hate this entire country. Jackie hates it here.”

“Then you should go.” Marina found herself wanting to comb and braid the yellow hair which spread around Barbara’s shoulders like a loose blanket. She was thinking that maybe the desire to groom was yet another component of the Martins that had yet to be traced.

“The thing is,” Barbara said, “we’ll never find a gig as easy as this one anyplace in the world.”

Barbara Bovender gave Marina much of what was in her suitcase before she left: two pairs of lacy underpants and a matching bra and the white cotton nightgown and a jar of face cream that smelled like jasmine. Mr. Fox gave her the white shirt he had worn the day before and his extra pants which she planned to tie up with a piece of twine. Milton gave her his straw hat.

“But you wear this hat,” she said.

He shrugged. “I can wear another hat.”

She held it for a minute, looked at the thin red ribbon band. She put it on her head and immediately felt braver for it. “I’ll bring it back to you,” she said.

“Then it would be so valuable to me I could never wear it.”

It occurred to Marina then that she should have run off with Milton that first moment she saw him in the airport. She should have begged him to take her to Rio where they could have vanished together into the crowds of dancing girls and handsome men. She and Easter went down to the dock and said goodbye to their three friends. She kissed all three of them and only Mr. Fox was embarrassed. Then she slapped each one on the waist. The Lakashi came down and stood with Marina and Easter and together they watched the beautiful Inca Cola boat pull away. Marina put her hand on Easter’s head to comfort herself. Everyone waved. Long after the particular details of their features became small and blurred down the river she could still make out the gleam of Barbara Bovender’s hair, which had turned into a great flaxen flag in the wind.

The future was a terrible weight and Marina stood on the dock for a long time after the boat was out of sight and felt it press down on her. Finally she went to the lab to look through the surgical supplies, and talk to Dr. Budi about assisting, and take whatever means were available to forestall the inevitable, but Dr. Swenson was there at her desk in front of a large spread of paper: file folders and typed reports and hand written notes pulled from spiral notebooks.

“You aren’t really going to fire the Bovenders, are you?” Marina asked.

“Since when do you care about the Bovenders? They were the ones that kept you in Manaus for so long.”

“You’re the one who kept me in Manaus,” Marina said. “They were just doing their job.”

“So in the case of Mr. Fox they didn’t do their job well, or I should say she didn’t do it at all.”

“But in the end it served your purpose, their coming here. It all turned out for the best.”

“We are not in a rush, Dr. Singh, but neither is there an endless amount of time for what needs to be accomplished. You’ll forgive me if I don’t care to focus myself on the matter of the Bovenders’ employment with the time that I have. There is so much to do here. I’ve been trying to organize some things, just in case.” Her thick fingers cut and recut the stacks in front of her like a deck of oversized cards. “But I see now there’s no doing it. It would take a solid three months of work to make them even passingly useful to anyone other than myself. I realize now I’ve been too cryptic, I’ve kept too much in my head. There are some things here I can hardly make sense of myself. I can see now I’ve been very optimistic. I should have taken failure into account.”

“The failure of what?” Marina said. How far away was the boat now? Was it possible that one of them could have had a change of heart, if not Mr. Fox then Milton or Barbara? Couldn’t they insist on turning around to go back for her?

Dr. Swenson looked over the top of her glasses. “I think it is safe to say we will be making surgical history today, though God knows we won’t be getting credit. I can’t imagine there have been any other women my age having cesareans.”

Marina sat down heavily and put her elbows on the table and in doing so frightened a handful of small bats that nested inside the table’s lip. Five or six of them went spinning around the room, lost in the bright light of day, until one by one they stuck to the walls and flattened out like thick daubs of mud.

“There could certainly be a problem with bleeding, but Dr. Nkomo has offered himself for a transfusion if we need one. He’s A positive. That’s a stroke of luck.”

“Do you have a bag?” Marina asked. What they had and what they lacked was a source of great mystery.

“One line, two needles, gravity does the rest.”

“You must be kidding me.”

Dr. Swenson shook her head. “You would be amazed at all the things that are possible in a state of deprivation. It’s only a matter of thinking things through. Just take your time, Dr. Singh. There’s no reason to rush this. That was your downfall in Baltimore. Rushing is the greatest mistake.”

Marina sat up, a sound like a bell ringing in her head. “Baltimore?”

Dr. Swenson looked at her without bemusement or compassion, two of the things that Marina might have hoped to see, then she glanced back at her papers. “You thought I didn’t remember that.”

“Because you didn’t remember that. When I met you in Manaus at the opera you didn’t know me.”

“That’s true, I didn’t. It came to me later, not long after we were back, and by that point it didn’t make any difference.” She plucked a thick article out of the stack, scrawled a note across the top in illegible writing, and placed it in a blue cardboard file. “I only bring it up now because I don’t want it weighing on you going into surgery. That’s why I had you do that cesarean, you know, not just to see if you could do it. I wanted you to get your confidence up. You made a very common mistake that night at the General. You rushed, nothing more than that. Had it not been the eye you would have forgotten all about it in a week. Everyone at some point nicks a skull, nicks an ear. It was just your bad luck that the head wasn’t positioned another centimeter in either direction. In retrospect the real loss was your quitting the program. If I had known you better then I would have stepped in. At the time though,” she shrugged, “it was your decision. This will be easier for you. There isn’t the pressure of a baby to save.”

Marina sat down in a chair beside the desk, and there it went, the burden of her lifetime, taken. She wondered if she could have turned the Lakashi baby. She looked down at her hands. She wondered what they might have accomplished.

“It would have been remarkable if it had worked out, to have had a child at this age, to have had the chance to see myself in a child. I wouldn’t have ever thought about it except for the fact that we came very close.” She made another note, equally unreadable, and put it on the other side of the desk. “Be sure to freeze it, Dr. Singh. There are tests that I’ll want to do later. I’ll want to see what levels of the compound are in the tissues.”

Marina nodded. She would have liked to know what any of it meant, especially the part that concerned her, but she was lost. Mr. Fox was speeding down the river now and she wanted him to come back. She would tell him everything. She would start with her internship and bring the story right up to today.

Dr. Swenson looked at her watch, and then she took it off her swollen wrist and laid it on the desk. When she stood up from her chair she struggled, the great and looming failure of her pregnancy going before her. “We should get to work now, don’t you think? There’s nothing else here that I can do.”