State of Wonder

by Ann Patchett

  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.”

  “I’m going with him,” Marina said.

  Dr. Swenson shook her head. “It doesn’t work like that. Trust me, you won’t fit in there anymore. You’ve changed. You’ve betrayed your employer, and you’ll keep on betraying him, and that won’t sit well with someone like you. I changed myself once, it was a long time ago but I changed. I followed my teacher down here too. I thought I was coming for the summer. I know about this.”

  “It isn’t the same.”

  “Of course it isn’t the same. Nothing is ever the same. I wasn’t like Dr. Rapp, and still I took his place. You’re not like me but you wait, you’ll go back there and nothing will make sense to you anymore.”

  Marina came and stood beside the bed. “Good night,” she said.

  “You’ll come back,” Dr. Swenson said. “But don’t make me wait forever. There isn’t an infinite amount of time to get this work done. Easter will come back, you know. He may even be back in the morning. He’ll steal a canoe while they’re sleeping. He knows how to get home. He won’t hold it against you, what you’ve done to him. He’s a child. He’ll forgive us.”

  But Marina had seen the look on his face when Anders handed him over. She wasn’t sure Dr. Swenson was right. “Good night,” she said again, and closed the door.

  When she went back to the lab to find Anders, Alan Saturn told her he had gone to take a shower. Thomas was off looking for the box where they had put his things, hoping that not all of his clothes had been taken. Nancy and Budi sat staring at the floor in front of them. “He says he still has intermittent fevers,” Alan said finally. “Make sure he looks good when you get him on the plane. If they think he has malaria they won’t let him back in the country.”

  “Could he have malaria?” Marina asked.

  Dr. Budi looked up but she said nothing.

  “It’s the tropics,” Nancy said. “Anyone could have malaria.”

  Dr. Budi shook her head. “Anyone but us,” she said.

  Marina went back to the sleeping porch. She washed herself standing
in a basin and put on Mrs. Bovender’s nightgown. It was no longer particularly clean but it was a veritable blossom of edelweiss compared to the dress she’d been wearing. She felt sick to be in this place without Easter. She opened his strongbox, which had been returned with the cot, and there beneath the feathers and the rock that looked like an eye was the letter from Anders announcing a reward for Easter’s safe delivery. In that box she found not only Anders’ passport but her own. He had had a picture of both of them. She also found her wallet, her plane ticket, and her phone. She sat with the phone in her hands for a long time before trying to turn it on and when she finally found her nerve to push the button nothing happened. The battery was dead. She put it back in the box.

  “This was my room,” Anders said.

  Marina looked up and there he was. His beard was gone and he ran his hand over his face. It was the face she remembered. “Some Lakashi woman shaved it off for me. It seemed to make her inordinately happy. I never had a beard before,” he said. “I hated it.”

  “You look like yourself,” she said.

  “I slept here.” He pointed to the bed. “Easter was in the hammock.”

  “I know,” she said. “I figured it out.” She looked at the strongbox. “He slept with me. He had terrible nightmares after you were gone.”

  “So did I,” Anders said. He turned off the two lanterns and put the strongbox on the floor. “Move over,” he said.

  Marina stretched out on one side of the cot and Anders lay down beside her. Their noses were touching and he put his arm over her shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “No,” she said. “It’s better this way.”

  “Tomorrow we’ll go home.”

  She leaned into him. She nodded into his neck. If they fell asleep they would have to fall asleep at the same minute. They would have to hold each other very close and stay very still until they woke up again. Until this point they had embraced every year when she came to his house for the Christmas party. He would open the door wearing a red sweater and she would be standing out in the snow, holding a bottle of wine, and he would give her a quick hug and then usher her inside.

  “How was it you?” he said.

  “I don’t know. Karen wanted me to go, and Mr. Fox. I was supposed to find out what had happened to Dr. Swenson and find out how you died. I was so sorry when I heard you had died.”

  “No one thought I was missing?” he said. “No one thought it was strange that my body was gone?”

  Marina shook her head very slightly against the pillow they shared. “Dr. Swenson said they’d buried you. She thought you were dead. She was sure you were dead.”

  “But you didn’t think I was.” He put his hand on her shoulder.

  “I did,” Marina said. “Karen didn’t. She held out a lot of hope for you but I didn’t believe her. I thought she just couldn’t accept it.”

  “Then why did you come out there to find me?”

  “Barbara Bovender,” she said, and that was when she kissed him, because their mouths were so close, because he was in fact alive, because she could not explain any of it. She was in the Bovenders’ living room and Barbara was asking her, did she love him? She loved him now, but only now. On this one night, after a day of the most extraordinary circumstances that either of them would see for the rest of their lives, she kissed him to prove to herself that all of this had happened, and he kissed her because it was true, he was here. And when they pulled their bodies closer still it felt like a necessity, trying to lie together in such a small space. When she cried it was because she saw the tributary again and she saw again how easy it would have been to miss it. Had she missed it, had Barbara Bovender missed it, Anders would never have been found, and Easter never would have been lost. Anders knew this, he said as much when he held her head in his hands. When they made love it was only to calm the fears they had endured. It was a physical act of kindness, a comfort, a sublime tenderness between friends. She would have made love to Mr. Fox if he had been there, and Anders would have made love to his wife, but for this night what they had was one another, and anyway, after all that had happened between them how could they not press themselves together, press through each other with their bodies to show how deeply, if only until the plane landed in Minneapolis, that they were intertwined. Without the scant weight of what was left of him to pin her down she might have gone to stand in the shallows of the river to see if Dr. Swenson was right about Easter rowing his way home to them in a stolen canoe, maybe the same canoe Anders had floated away in. Without the warmth of her he might not have believed the reversal of his fortunes. This would be the only part of the story that they would never speak of again, the part where he lifted her on top of him, his arms as thin as sapling trees, and she put her face down on his chest and she kissed him and cried.

  In the morning, miraculously, they were both still balanced in the bed, two thin plates leaning against one another in a rack, Marina on her side, wearing Anders Eckman over her back like a blanket. She would have thought that she would go to the Martins one last time before leaving but now all she wanted was for this to be over. She was finished with the trees. The fact that she had ever considered bringing back a bag full of branches struck her now as ridiculous and slightly repulsive. The only thing to bring home was Anders. She was naked, in bed with her officemate, and in sliding out from under him she woke him up.

  “Oh, Marina,” he said, but she shook her head and leaned forward. For the last time in her life, she kissed him.

  “Let’s go home,” she said.

  And so they did, Marina wearing Mrs. Bovender’s nightgown with a pair of her pants underneath it and one of Mr. Fox’s shirts over it. She wore Milton’s hat on her head and carried Easter’s strongbox like a very small suitcase. The Saturns took them in the pontoon boat to Manaus. They were only an hour away from the Lakashi when an enormous eagle sailed over their heads low enough that they could see the expression on the face of the small monkey that dangled from its curving talons.

  “That’s a harpy eagle,” Anders said loudly, tilting himself over the side of the boat to watch it pass. “Did you see that?”

  “No one could miss that,” Nancy Saturn said. The jungle was suddenly silent in the bird’s wake, as if everything with eyes had the sense to hold its breath.

  “That was the bird I most wanted to see when I came down here. They’re almost impossible to find.” Anders’ body still strained forward in the direction of the raptor. “I can’t believe I saw a harpy eagle.”

  When they arrived in Manaus they called Milton from the pay phone at the dock. Milton, forever resourceful, had a friend at the ticket counter at the airlines who was sympathetic to their case, and while they waited for him to arrange the details of two seats on the last flight out to Miami, connecting to the first flight out to Minneapolis, they went to see Barbara Bovender to tell her that it was not her father she had seen running through the trees and how in making that wrong turn on the river she had saved Anders’ life. In telling the story to other people they told it to one another, about how they each had come to find Dr. Swenson, how Anders in his fever had wandered down to the river and gotten into a canoe, about the Hummocca who had found him half dead and floating in the bottom of his little boat though where he was he would never know for sure as all of those memories came from a place that was now fully under water, like a town that had been flooded into a lake, about the poultice they painted on him for weeks that smelled like horseradish and tar and how it blistered the skin on his chest. They became so good at talking that at one point Marina told Milton of her vision of Thomas Nkomo shot through with an arrow and Anders told Barbara about Easter being lifted from his hands though both Barbara and Marina had cried to hear it. By the time they boarded the plane, they had talked about everything except the thing they would never need to talk about. They drank Bloody Marys and watched as the Amazon grew farther and farther aw
ay on the in-flight map screen in front of them. In their reclining seats they both fell into a sleep that was deeper and more refreshing than any sleep either had had in months.

  There was a good case to be made for calling Karen from the airport in Miami and a good case to be made for waiting, for going right to the house. Marina could see that there were equal parts of love and cruelty either way it was reasoned, and though she voted to go to the house she said the decision was of course unequivocally his to make. Anders stared at the clock and the rare bank of pay phones near the gate until finally the flight was called to board. Anders and Marina both agreed they had lost their skills on the telephone. Every mile they went backwards they felt themselves turning into the people they had been, two doctors who shared an office in a pharmaceutical company outside of Minneapolis.

  Minnesota! It smelled like raspberries and sunlight and tender grass. It was summer, and everything was more beautiful than any picture she had carried with her. By the time they were in the taxi they still knew that something extraordinary had happened but they found themselves distracted, first by the tall buildings and then later by the trees that were fully leafed, by the wide stretches of prairie that let the eye sweep so easily in any direction, by the remarkable lightness of the air. Anders leaned over the seat and gave his directions to the Nigerian cab driver one turn at a time while Marina rolled down her window and let the wind press back her fingers and pull at her braided hair. For some reason she thought of driving with Milton and the Bovenders to that beach outside Manaus and the goat that Milton managed not to hit. There had never been a place in the world as beautiful as Minnesota.