A love story for someone's parents' 30th anniversary

     I once had a fever so severe that no one could say with any certainty whether I would live or die. My father was an anthropology man, and we were living in a place with lovely people who did not speak a word of my language, and a pack of gangly dogs who begged for scraps, and far too many mosquitoes. I was nine years old.
     A woman in a brightly colored shawl came to see me during one of my bouts of foggy consciousness, and she lay hands on me and spoke in a mumbling, lilting tongue that made me feel as if she were a sorcerer from a Disney film. Afterwards, I heard my parents arguing loudly outside of our 3 room shack. My mother was accusing my father of witchcraft and false hopes while my father rebuked her, gently, humbly, but with a vague threat of limited tolerance.
     The shack was charming in its own way, full of mosquito nets and clay pots. It suited us fine, with my parents sleeping on a pair of cots in one room while I slept in the room that acted as whatever it needed to be to suit our moods. There was a fairly inviting outhouse, as far as outhouses go, and a spacious kitchen with a wood stove and an oven. An ice box kept the limited meat we could find cold. We often ate with the locals who dined on bizarre things like insects and frogs, but sometimes my father would drive to town in his 1961 Jeep and come back with a leg of lamb or even some steaks.
     I lay on my living room cot and stared at a mosquito net, sweating so profusely that I could feel the liquid pooling in the small of my back. It had been days since I could draw a clear distinction between wakefulness and sleep, but my parents' voices, moving in and out of earshot, were sucking me into a very clear reality.
    "--never been here in the first place!" my mother snarled.
    "No one asked you-- couldn't stay-- good for her anyway," my father replied in an even tone brimming with unreleased viciousness.
    "--Tommorow!" my mother finished before her angry footsteps faded away.
    "Good luck getting her on a plane in this state," mumbled my father to himself as he entered the shack. He spotted my open eyes and came to sit beside my cot. He folded his legs under himself and brushed my hair from my eyes.
     "You're awake," he said. "How do you feel?"
     "Better, a little, I think," I responded. My father wiped hair from my forehead again, and his hand came away dripping.
     "I can tell what's real now," I told him.
     "I guess you heard your mom and me out there, huh?" my father said.
     "I don't want to leave," I said. "I can't go home without you."
     "You won't need to," my father told me. "Your mom is scared, that's all."
     "Scared of what?" I asked.
     "Of losing you," he said, simply, while wrapping a coil of my long, blond hair around his wrist. "She couldn't live without you."
     "She loves me a lot," I said.
     "She does, and so do I."
     "You could live without me, though," I insisted.
     "I couldn't," my father replied. "I couldn't even when your mom asked me to. That's why you're here. I couldn't leave you, so I convinced your mom to come here with you, and oh god--" He was sobbing now. He buried his face in my hair and cried. "I'm sorry," he heaved. "I'm so, so sorry."
    "Dad?" I said. He sat up and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand.
    "What baby?" he asked, his voice sounding all weird and wobbly from crying.
    "Go tell mom," I said.
     And he did.