In the bathroom, among the bright green tiles, Helen peeled her daughter’s T-shirt from her trembling limbs. Jane was thirteen, all knees and elbows and already an inch or two taller than her mother, though her face still had the soft, round shape of childhood. Her skin was clammy, her T-shirt damp with sweat. She didn’t resist as Helen guided her into the bath, but when her body hit the icy water, she recoiled and her teeth started to chatter. She tried to stand up, but Helen pushed her gently back down.
“We have to get your fever down,” she said. “I know it’s cold. I’m sorry.”
Jane’s skin was nearly translucent in the afternoon sunlight that filtered in through the high windows. The girls had nicknamed this the Frog Room. Everything in the Frog Room was green: dark green tiles on the floor with lighter green circles in them, green-tiled walls, green pedestal sink, green tub, even a green bidet. The toilet was in a separate, smaller room, also green. A bottle of Eau Vive sat next to the girls’ toothbrushes in their holder by the sink; the tap water wasn’t safe here, not even for brushing, so they refilled the bottle from a metal machine in the kitchen that treated the water some way, made it safe for drinking and cooking.
The house in Antananarivo had been provided, fully furnished, by the company that employed Helen’s husband as a project manager to oversee the construction and repair of roads and bridges between the capital and the port at Tamatave, a task that had been complicated considerably since the destruction wrought by Cyclone Geralda a few months after they’d arrived. It had been the worst tropical cyclone of 1994, not just in Madagascar but globally, and months later, the telephone lines near the coast were still mostly inoperable. Not that they usually worked reliably anyway, even in the city. The electricity was often out, too, sometimes for hours or days at a time. Helen and the girls had gotten used to eating and doing homework by candlelight.
Jane sank reluctantly down into the cold water, but she continued to tremble violently. Helen sat on the edge of the tub, a book spread open in her lap. Where There Is No Doctor, it said on the cover. She’d been advised to buy it before they’d left the States by the nurse at the travel vaccine clinic, who’d given her a hard look as she said it and had made sure that Helen wrote the title down. Helen had dutifully ordered a copy from her local bookstore. Just in case, she thought. Now she thumbed through the pages, looking for anything related to fever. Cold bath, yes. Medicine to reduce temperature. Jane had already taken the maximum dose of Tylenol, doled out carefully from a bottle in the storeroom that they’d brought with them from home. She couldn’t have more for another two hours. Water. Oh! Jane needed to drink more water.
“Mom,” Jane said weakly, pulling herself upright. “I want to get out.”
“Not yet,” Helen said, distracted. “A few more minutes.”
Where had she put Jane’s glass? She’d need to go downstairs to refill it. When she looked up, she was startled to see tears tracing silently down her daughter’s cheeks. Jane’s body was shaking so hard that the water sloshed wildly around her. Helen gripped the book in her lap, trying not to think about the way her daughter looked. Pale, lifeless. Like a ghost.
The words on the page swam before her, useless. Why had she agreed to come here? To bring the children? What could she possibly have been thinking? She shouldn’t have let Steven talk her into it. She’d already found a nice apartment where she and the girls could live, right by their old school so they wouldn’t have to transfer. But he’d begged and pleaded. One more chance. She couldn’t just throw their entire life away, could she? What about the girls? Didn’t they deserve a family? It was one time, he swore. He’d never do anything like that again. She hadn’t meant anything to him anyway, not like Helen. Not like their family. He’d been working too much lately, they’d had no time to connect. And then this offer came along. It would be a fresh start, an adventure, something to bring them closer together again, far away from all of that. Helen had relented.
Jane’s fever wasn’t their first brush with illness in this place. Last Christmas, when they’d gone up to the coast at Nosy Be, both girls had gotten violently ill after eating plates of spaghetti at the hotel. It wasn’t even a hotel, really, just a handful of thatched-roofed bungalows scattered across the beach and one larger bungalow that contained the front desk and the restaurant. It was the tomatoes, Helen had realized belatedly. It must have been. They’d been cooked in the sauce, but the curling skins were still present, and who knows what they’d touched in the soil, in the kitchen, on someone’s hands? Helen had been warned by the nurse at the embassy against eating anything that couldn’t be peeled. Mangos and bananas were okay, but strawberries were forbidden, even in ice cream. How could she have overlooked the dangers of tomato skins? Perils lurked everywhere: hepatitis, cholera, malaria, dysentery, typhoid fever, and plenty of other illnesses caused by viruses and bacteria that Helen didn’t know and couldn’t name. A litany of enemies, all impassive to human suffering, interested only in their own replication and survival. Who knew which one might be responsible this time?
At the coast, the girls had been sick for three days, fighting over a single shared toilet, plus a bucket that the hotel staff had thoughtfully brought out for them. Unable to hold anything down, they were both dangerously dehydrated by the time they began to tolerate little sips of bottled water. In the end, they’d both recovered and the vacation had gone on as planned. Soon they were dog-paddling in the ocean with rented snorkeling masks, calling for Helen to come and look while Steven sat in a lounge chair in the sand, reading a copy of Le Monde he’d managed to get from somewhere and casting sidelong glances at the women walking along the shore, printed lambas wrapped like sarongs around their slender waists. In the water, brightly colored creatures darted to and fro through miniature forests of coral. The sand was white, the ocean a clear, pale turquoise under a cloudless sky. It was impossibly beautiful, unreal, as if they were floating inside a picture postcard. On the beach, barefoot boys with machetes had scampered up the trunks of coconut palms to retrieve the fruit for tourists. With a few deft strokes, they’d remove the green husk and hack off the top of the shell so you could drink the water inside. Then they’d cut the fruit into pieces for you to eat. All this for a few hundred francs, the dirty bills pressed into their warm, waiting hands.
Helen hadn’t even had the book with her on that trip, a mistake she hadn’t repeated since.
“Mom,” Jane said again, and this time, Helen relented.
“Okay,” she said, gripping a slippery shoulder as Jane, unsteady, climbed out and sat on the edge of the tub. She wrapped a towel around her, drying her long hair with one corner and pressing her wrist against Jane’s damp forehead. It was so hot she drew back, startled. In all her years of tending her children, neither of them had ever felt so hot. In the U.S., she’d never even had to bring them to the hospital for a fever, except for once when Katherine was a baby. Now that she did need to, there was no emergency room. No hospital that she could take her to. When the Wilsons’ daughter had broken her arm, she’d been flown to Johannesburg to have it set, but when Helen had called the embassy this morning, the nurse there told her there were no flights available for two days and traveling that far might well make Jane worse. The best thing now, the nurse assured her, was to keep Jane at home and try to get the fever down.
She’d tried to reach Steven at the contractor in Tamatave, too—he’d been working out of town all week—but the call wouldn’t go through. She pictured him sitting at a café table somewhere, a bottle of the local beer in one hand, laughing with his colleagues. Probably having a great time. Unencumbered. Oblivious. She’d been so stupid to think that coming here would change anything.
Alone, she led Jane slowly down the hall to her bedroom, pulling the mosquito netting back from the bed and easing her daughter onto the clean white sheet, freshly pressed this morning by Lalaina, the maid. Jane reached for the coverlet, but Helen pulled it away.
“Just the sheet,” she said. “We have to keep you cool.”
“But I’m freezing,” Jane said plaintively, trembling.
Helen picked up the glass thermometer from the bedside table and held it up.
“Open,” she said.
Jane complied, but her eyes were glassy, her gaze distant. Helen waited three minutes, timing it by the little travel alarm clock next to the bed. Light streamed into the room through a set of glass-paned French doors that lead out to a narrow balcony the length of the house’s second story. She pulled the thermometer from Jane’s mouth and held it up, turning the glass to read the mercury inside. One hundred and five. Still! No, that couldn’t be right. Had the bath not helped at all? She held the thermometer by its glass tip and shook it back and forth until the mercury receded to the little split arrow near the base.
“Again,” she told Jane, brushing the sticky hair from her forehead. Jane opened her mouth, obedient, and Helen slid the thermometer under her tongue. After three more minutes, she checked again. One hundred and five.
A slow panic began to spread outward from her center, across her chest and down her abdomen. Nothing was working. She’d done everything the book had said to do. She checked the time. An hour until the next dose of Tylenol. She didn’t know what else to do. She went down to the living room, picked up the phone to try the embassy again, but there was no dial tone. The lines must be down. Back upstairs, she paged through the book again, desperate now to find something, anything, she might have missed. As she carefully reviewed the fever checklist for what felt like the hundredth time, Jane made a sound.
Helen looked up, startled. She had to calm down. She didn’t want to scare her daughter.
“Katherine, look,” Jane said, pointing. Helen looked toward the place she indicated, through the mosquito netting beyond the foot of the bed, but saw nothing.
”Katherine’s at school, darling. She’s not here,” Helen said.
“Don’t you see them?” Jane asked, undeterred.
Helen felt sick. “See who?” she asked.
“Everyone!” Jane said. “They’re having a party for me.” A slow smile spread across her features, and Helen saw her eyes, a little brighter now, darting back and forth, following movement she couldn’t see made by people who weren’t there. Helen reached out and grasped her daughter’s sweaty hand, clutching the damp fingers in her own. Despite herself, hot tears pricked the corners of her eyes. She turned her head so Jane wouldn’t see, but she wasn’t looking anyway. She was busy watching the party guests, and she started to murmur softly under her breath.
Understanding slowly wrapped around Helen’s throat and constricted her breathing: Jane could die. What was to stop it? Lalaina had lost a young niece just last year, Helen knew. How foolish she’d been to think that it couldn’t happen to her own girls, that their white skin somehow made them invincible. Either Jane’s fever would come down, and she would get better, or it wouldn’t. And she wouldn’t. Helen’s absolute powerlessness was suddenly clear to her, and she found herself floating above the scene in her daughter’s bedroom, detached, watching the woman at her child’s bedside rock back and forth as if soothing an infant.
Jane, beatific with her pale skin and vacant smile, didn’t notice. She continued to murmur softly to herself. It would be another full day before her fever would break and release her, reluctantly, from its ravening grip. Outside, a breeze stirred and slipped across the rice paddies in the valley below, climbing the hill into the garden and rustling the leaves in the peach trees. Beyond them, in front of the high garden wall topped with glittering shards of brown and green glass, birds of paradise swayed gently on their stalks, their flaming wings outstretched, ready to explode into flight.
Jocelyn Craig-Golightly grew up in Madagascar and the US. She currently lives in Germany with her wife, daughters, and cats.