The Doctor and the Diva (64 page)

“Don’t you like it here?”

“I’m homesick,” he said.

“What do you miss?”

“Everything.” His face fell into his palms as he wept.

She heard a noise behind them. Ravell stood in the doorway in a striped dressing robe.

“I miss the Talcotts and their big house on the Cape.”

Her heart dropped and beat dully.
Mrs. Talcott,
she thought, with a hard knot of bitterness. She pictured the matronly Mrs. Talcott as she’d always been: with a book open on her lap, lifting her fat wrists to reach into a box of chocolates. Erika recalled the letter in the form of a diary that Quentin had been keeping for Mrs. Talcott.
My darling Mother,
it began.

Ravell pulled up a wicker chair and placed one hand on Quentin’s knee.

“What else do you miss?” Ravell asked.

Quentin rested his head against the back rim of the settee and closed his eyes, wetness caught between his lashes, settling there, crystallized.

“I miss my father,” he whispered.

After Erika and Ravell rode horses down the beach to Mayaro and back, she dismounted and headed into the house. A groomsman led their horses away while Ravell went off to tend to patients in the plantation’s infirmary.

The house felt changed from the moment she entered it, though she could not have said why. Servants chattered in the kitchen, and she caught sounds of someone tipping a bucket and sluicing the floor, dragging a mop. Nothing unusual there. But as she turned and entered the hallway to her room, she saw that the door had been left open. It was never open. Three of her shoes had been flung in her path—heels upside down, a buttoned boot collapsed on its side. She could have tripped over them. One of her petticoats had been dropped there, too. It had landed like a parachute.

In Erika’s room, Uma stood at the mirror, brushing her hair upward, holding it off her neck with one hand. She was wearing one of Erika’s corsets, her silk stockings, and other undergarments of hers.

The lid of the trunk yawned open, every private thing removed. Dresses and shirtwaists had been tossed on the bed, or cast on the floor. Perfume had been dumped from bottles.

“What have you done?” Erika heard herself blare. She gripped the crown of her head, and swayed as though onstage.

The other servants’ feet pounded toward them, but Uma did not even turn her head. She went on stroking her hair with the silver brush.

“She’s raving—like her parents!” Erika told Ravell that night.

They stood on a promontory overlooking the sea.

“It’s not a healthy situation for her—or for us,” he said, “to keep her on here. I’ll ask Hartley to make inquiries among his friends about another position for her.”

“What about Ajeet and her baby? They’re your children. You can’t send them elsewhere.”

Ravell looked at her. “Do you expect me to separate them from their mother?”

Erika said nothing more. It would take time, of course, to secure a new situation for a servant. Such a change could not happen the next day, or the day after that.

Uma did not return to the house for the rest of the week. Then the cook, who suffered from headaches, took to her bed. Munga stepped in to take charge of their meals, and he must have ordered Uma to help carry plates to and from the kitchen.

On a Saturday evening Munga concocted a stew of lamb, plantains, and spiced yams—a favorite of Ravell’s. Erika remembered the sweetly flavored meat from long ago, how Munga splashed the lamb with a minty marinade. But that night after they put the first forkfuls to their mouths and tasted, Ravell pressed his napkin to his lips and spat into it. “Soap,” he said. “The food tastes of soap.” Erika, too, was sorry that she had swallowed.

Ravell pushed his chair back and stomped into the kitchen to find Uma.

“Are you trying to threaten us?” he cried.

“I’m sending you away!” he shouted. “Do you hear me? We can’t have you here any longer, lurking and distressing people!”

Q
uentin went down to the lagoon to search for a dead toucan somebody told him they’d seen by some bushes. He thought he would wrap it in a pillowcase and arrange for it to be stuffed and preserved. He would take the toucan back to Boston, as a gift for his father.

From beyond the thickets of mangroves where he stood, his ears caught the sounds of a little boy’s shrieks and protests and desperate hollering.

Quentin lifted his head and walked toward the commotion. In the middle of the lagoon, Uma stood in the rowboat and Ajeet leaned over the side, straining and reaching his small arms in vain to catch hold of the baby, who had fallen into the water. Uma grabbed Ajeet and lifted him up. Her four-year-old son squirmed in her arms. He wriggled down the front of her, hammering at her thighs with his fists.

She threw Ajeet into the deep water.

Quentin froze. Only then did he realize that she had also deliberately tossed her own baby into the lagoon.

Uma pushed off with the oars, turning her back on Ajeet as he struggled and flailed. In the rowboat she headed around an island, and was gone around the bend.

Quentin ran closer to where Ajeet and the baby were. While the four-year-old thrashed and tried to keep his head above water, the baby floated facedown, not moving at all. The lagoon was deep and Quentin had not yet learned to swim in water over his head, but a dugout waited on the bank, so he climbed inside it and paddled sloppily toward them, as best he could.

Ajeet saw him. The lagoon must have felt black and thick and bottomless to his struggling legs, but he was a strong little boy, and his arms flew like small windmills, his neck high out of the water as he fought his way in Quentin’s direction.

Quentin wanted to help the baby first, because he was so tiny, so helpless, his shirt drifting like a shroud over his head. The baby’s bare bottom appeared yellow under the water, his small legs motionless, floating behind him.

Quentin would have tried to go straight to the baby, but the baby drifted at a distance, and the dugout reached Ajeet first.

When the canoe neared Ajeet, Quentin extended the paddle like a long stick. “Grab hold!” he shouted to Ajeet.

The four-year-old caught the oar, and Quentin tried to reel him in. But when the younger boy reached the boat, Quentin leaned too far over the side, pulling Ajeet by both wrists. The dugout flipped over, and they both descended into watery darkness.

Munga was the first to notice the empty canoe. As far as he could see, there was no one to save, but the capsized dugout made him worry.

He led Ravell and Erika down the path, all three of them running. When Ravell ran around the lagoon’s perimeter, he noticed what appeared to be a piece of laundry floating near the bank. Coming closer, he saw a little body rotate, softly turning, with one tiny arm flung east, the other west.

Ravell jumped into the water and scooped up the baby, brought him to land. Water streamed from the toddler’s shirt and Ravell’s clothes. He took the baby’s body firmly and flipped him over. Ravell knelt and lowered his face close to the child’s. He pinched the baby’s nostrils shut as he turned his head left, inhaled, and pressed his mouth against the child’s, blowing air.

When his efforts came to nothing, Ravell set the baby’s body on the ground. As the tiny, lifeless boy lay on his back, Ravell placed the child’s hands neatly, one on top of the other, across his little chest. Crouching beside him, Ravell kissed the child’s forehead and bowed his own head in grief.

A spear of sadness went through Erika. The sight of that blue-faced toddler made her think of the stillborn daughter who had passed through her own body, and she sensed that Ravell must have been reminded of that loss, too.

But then another emotion flashed through her, and that was fear. Erika knew that Quentin had gone down to the lagoon after breakfast, and now it was long past lunch. Her neck grew stiff as she surveyed the lagoon, not wanting to scan for the sight she dreaded, but forcing herself to hunt with her eyes.

She stood on the bank and called her son’s name. She screamed for him to answer, and Munga called out a phrase loudly in Hindi, hoping for Ajeet to scamper from behind a tree on the opposite shore.

Ravell stood up, put his fists on his hips, and looked out over the water. “The other children might have been in the canoe with the baby. We’ve got to keep searching,” he announced. The words rushed out of him.

He swam out to the capsized dugout, righted the canoe, and brought it back. The paddle had already drifted to shore. As Erika and Munga climbed into the boat, their heels knocked the bottom with the sound of wood on wood. If they hoped to find anyone alive in this vast lagoon—anything besides an anaconda coiled around a tree trunk, or a rare manatee—they had to glide quickly. It was a matter of time.

Her hand was a visor, the sun a blade in Erika’s eyes, as she squinted through the mangroves. She must not think about the lifeless infant. The baby could not be saved. Her breaths hurt as if she were sprinting, but the dugout moved slowly—far too slowly, as they all knew.