State of Wonder (41 page)

On the shore Anders was pointing to his chest, he was pointing to the boat. A single heron skated down the river. After a long discussion he called again to Marina. “They want you to bring in the boat.”

Once again Marina waited for her fear but somehow it held back. “Should I?”

“Do it,” Anders said. “They have you anyway. Just give them a little bit, a jar of peanut butter to start.”

Marina nodded and reached for the throttle, and when she did Easter came around from behind her. He put his hands back on the wheel. She put one hand on his head and pointed for him to go into shore and he nodded.

“Is that Easter?” Anders said. “I don’t have my glasses anymore.”

“I made a mistake,” she said.

It was only fifteen feet and they came in slowly. The men waded out and the women kept to the shore behind them. Anders was very close now and she could see the hollow of his cheeks beneath his beard and she could see his eyes. When the Hummocca came to the boat Marina could see the shape of their heads was in fact slightly different from the Lakashi just as Dr. Swenson had said. They were not as tall as the Lakashi and Anders towered over them. She handed the one who looked like he was in charge the jar of peanut butter and for a moment he struggled with what to do with it, his hands squeezing the jar. He looked up at Marina, maybe he had meant for her to help him or maybe he meant to kill her, but what he saw there on the boat was Easter. The man with the yellow forehead stood there waist deep in the water, his chest against the pontoon, and the look on his face was the same look that had been on her own face a moment before when she first saw Anders, a cross of joy and disbelief, a look that was willing to accept that which was not possible. He turned and called to a woman on the shore who put the child she was holding on the ground and walked out into the water. Once she had seen Easter from a distance, she tried to move faster and the water held her back. She called to him, stretching out her arms, the trembling in her body sending out a ring of small waves into the water. And then she was there, pulling herself onto the boat and Easter shrank back behind Marina, his hands around her waist as tight as a snake.

Anders was out in the water, and then his hands were on the boat. He was calling out to the Hummocca with two sharp syllables. The woman scrambled up on the deck, her short legs muddied and wet. She knelt behind Easter, her wet arms covering his arms, encircling Marina’s waist. She wailed a single word again and again while Easter stayed perfectly still, holding fiercely to Marina. The woman behind him was rocking. The man with the peanut butter jar was saying something to Anders that was not said in rage.

“They want Easter,” Anders said. He was holding onto the side of the boat now, his hands on the deck. He was nodding at the other men in the water who were talking faster and faster now, one hand holding up an arrow, the other making circles in the air. Anders looked at Marina. For the first time she could see his eyes very plainly. “Give them Easter and we can go.”

“No,” she said. That could not be possible. She had brought gifts. She had come for Anders. She put her hands over the woman’s hands, over Easter’s hands. Their arms made a structure that held her up. She shook her head. “We’ll give them the Rapps.”

“This isn’t a choice. They can keep all of us and the boat. Do it now while they’re confused. We have no bargaining power at all here.” Anders helped himself slowly onto the boat and, bending before Marina, he unlocked the layers of hands. Only then did Easter see him clearly and understand why they had come here at all. He reached for Anders’ neck and made the sound he made in his sleep, a high trenchant cry that stood in place for the words
Not dead. You are not dead.
The Hummocca looked up from the water and were amazed to see their boy knew this white man and that clearly he loved him so well.

“Not this,” Marina said. “If we stay with him we’ll all be together.”

“Go get the oranges and the peanut butter,” he said, one hand on the back of Easter’s head, his face in Easter’s neck. Anders kissed the boy, his hair and ear and eye. They would have less than a minute together. The woman was standing now, her hands on Easter’s back.

Marina got the fruit and the peanut butter and handed it over the edge, filling up every hand that was raised to her. Then Anders held Easter out by the waist. The boy’s feet were bare and he was wearing dirty yellow shorts and a blue T-shirt that read “JazzFest 2003.” Marina made a note of all of it, as if there was someone she could describe him to later on, an agency that went to look for missing children. Anders handed Easter to the up-reached hands of the man in the water and the woman slipped over the side of the boat to stand with him. The look on the boy’s face as his eyes went from Marina and Anders and back to her again was one of terrified misunderstanding. It was something worse than she had seen when the snake had him because the snake he had understood. He stretched out his hands to her and Marina closed her eyes. She left him there. She let him go.

The boat was turned around now and Anders was driving. In a minute they were full speed down the narrow turns of the river and Marina kept her eyes closed, one hand fixed to the pole that held the ragged cover over the center of the boat. She had accounted for her own death, and certainly she had accounted for Anders’, but she had not been ready for this.

“They would have taken him,” Anders said. “If they killed us, if they didn’t kill us, Easter would have stayed with them.”

He took a turn too fast and the basket of Rapps bounced twice and then sailed off the back of the boat and spread out over the water, an offering of little blue corks. Marina just caught the edge of the nightgown before it flew away and she tied it in a knot around her waist. She wished she had eaten a handful of the mushrooms herself. She would have been glad to have lost her mind. She would have been grateful to see God. There were so many things to say to Anders that she said none of them. She wanted to know what had happened to him all this time, and how he had gotten there, if he was still sick, but Easter stood in front of every question. She had not lost him or killed him. She had taken him into the jungle and given him away and there was nothing that anyone could say in the face of that. Once they were far enough away Marina drove the boat and Anders lay at the front of the deck with his eyes closed and his hands folded across his chest. When she looked at him sleeping she remembered that 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?”