Awash in Talent Read Free Page A

talk with the driver.
    Maddeningly, they didn’t leave with the truck. Their presence was totally extraneous to the long, hot afternoons with the man of my heart. I set my relatives up with folding chairs under the tent where we kept the global phone and other electronic equipment and went back to work, crouching next to Carlos. He narrated, with unbelievable panache, every move he made and every theory he had about the story behind the femur. I would have chosen that moment to last for all time, no questions asked.
    But there was a persistent, rough sound invading our enchanted space. Carlos kept looking over his shoulder, until he said, “Emily, look at your sister.”
    Painstakingly, I turned my head in the direction of the tent. Actors portraying my parents stood in complete consternation, looking down at an actress in the role of my sister, who wriggled and squirmed in the whirling dirt, maybe trying to escape the retching, hacking cough that propelled itself out of her mouth unbidden.
    “I knew it! It’s the dust. It’s full of allergens. I knew it!” My mother stooped in an attempt to hold Beth down.
    I stood up, my body already resistant to the change in position. I knocked down a couple of the little orange flags we were using to mark fossil sites and had to prop them back up. By the time I made it to the tent, the coughing had become a prolonged, moaning scream and I heard my dad say something on the global phone about a medevac helicopter to Addis Ababa.
    “No!” I shouted, knocking the receiver out of his hand. I lifted my mother’s hands off Beth and threw her over my shoulder in what I thought must be a fireman’s carry and jogged in the direction where I knew our truck would be, a half mile away. The driver took us to the site every morning from our camp and back again in the evening. We all walked the half mile each way in order to lessen the risk of disturbing the fossils. This time, my sister’s screaming filled my ear instead of the gentle hum of Carlos’s voice talking about the day’s plan with Professor Marsden.
    I hoisted Beth into the passenger side of the cab, and my parents and the driver came running up behind me. “Take her to the nearest medical facility,” I said to the driver, intending to turn back to the site, but a great clamp that turned out to be my mother’s hand stopped me from speeding off. So I climbed in, too, and the four of us sat crammed so close together that we were able to squeeze the coughing out of Beth long before the driver gestured toward what looked like a simple mud hut. The lack of movement had not stifled Beth’s her high-pitched squeal, however.
    My mother opened her eyes wide at the hut, as if by doing so she could convert it into a steel and glass grant-funded research hospital in San Francisco or Boston.
    “They’ll take very good care of her here,” said the driver.
    “I trust him,” I said as earnestly as I could, even though I wasn’t sure he was the same driver who brought us to and fro every day.
    “Anything’s fine, really,” said Beth between gasps. “Just let me out of here.”
    My dad opened the door from the inside and we all decompressed out of it. My dad and mom supported Beth’s weight between them as they walked to the uninviting corrugated metal door. An attendant in a lab coat answered the door and whisked us all inside. With the help of several more people, he absconded with Beth behind another unimpressive door. The speed with which Beth had disappeared into medical care impressed me and I tried to say reassuring things to that effect, but my parents insisted on pacing the waiting room, inspecting the plastic chairs and inscrutable pictures on the walls for something to do.
    I was the only one sitting calmly—boredly, in truth—so when the doctor came from beyond the other door, she came to me and my parents gathered around us. The doctor was breathtaking: six and a half feet tall, with large, lucid eyes and closely