State of Wonder

by Ann Patchett

  “I’ll come in with you,” he said.

  She shook her head. “I’m going to go on to the gate. Anyway, you need to get home, get ready for work.” She didn’t know why she said it. She wanted to stay with him forever.

  “I have a little going-away present,” he said. “I was coming over to give you this last night but I got sidetracked.” He leaned across her to open the glove compartment, from which he took a small black zippered pouch. He pulled the zipper back and took out a complicated-looking phone. “I know what you’re going to say, you already have a phone. But trust me, it isn’t like this. They say you can make a call from anyplace in the world on this thing. You can check your messages, send e-mail, and there’s a GPS. It can tell you what river you’re on.” He looked so pleased with it all. “It’s all charged up and ready to go. I programmed in my phone numbers. I put all the instructions in the bag. I thought that maybe you could read them on the plane.”

  Marina looked at the bright silver face. It could no doubt shoot and edit a short documentary film about a pharmacologist who goes to the Amazon. “I’m sure I’ll need to.”

  “The man at the store told me you could make a phone call from Antarctica.”

  Marina turned and looked at him blankly.

  “I want to stay in touch with you, that’s all I’m saying. I want to know what’s happening.”

  She nodded and put the phone and the phone’s tiny manuals in her purse. For a moment they both sat quietly. Marina thought they were working up to goodbye.

  “About the dreams,” he said.

  “They’ll stop.”

  “But you’ll keep taking the Lariam?”

  They were bathed in the fall of light pouring out through the high sheets of glass in front of the airport. Why did airports always have such ridiculously high ceilings? Was it meant to ease you into the notion of flight? Mr. Fox looked at her very seriously and so she said, “Of course.”

  He sighed and took her hand. “Good,” he said, and gave the hand a squeeze. “Good. There must be a huge temptation to throw them in the trash if they give you dreams like that. I don’t want you going down there—” He stopped himself.

  “And getting a fever,” she said.

  Mr. Fox seemed suddenly distracted by Marina’s hand, as if he were making a study of its shape and size. It was her left hand, of course, he was on the left side of the car, and he took his own left hand and slid the tips of his fingers down her third finger, as if he were putting a ring there, except there wasn’t any ring. “You’ll go down there, find out what you can, and take the next flight home.” He lifted his eyes to hers. “Do you promise?”

  She said yes. He was still holding on to her finger. She wanted to ask him what it meant, if it meant what she thought it meant, but if she was wrong she couldn’t bear the answer at this particular moment. They got out of the car together. Marina, with the finely honed sense of a native, would say that the windchill had fallen into negative numbers, although the woman on the radio had said tomorrow the temperatures would climb back up near forty. Such were the inconsistencies of spring. He took her bag out of the trunk of his car and he held her and kissed her and exacted one more set of promises of how careful she would be and how quickly she would return, and when all of that was done Mr. Fox got back into his car and drove away. Marina stood there in the cold watching the taillights until she could no longer be certain which set were his, then she wheeled her bag into the airport’s main terminal and pulled it up to an embankment of chairs. First she opened the zippered phone case he had given her and after removing the phone and the paperwork searched with some real sense of expectation for a ring. It was the only place he could have hidden it, and if he had, well, that would be something, because then she supposed she would use the phone to call him and say yes, she would marry him. But when she had untangled the cord to the charger and found nothing but her own foolishness she put it all back. She put the manuals in her carry-on just in case she was able to make herself read them on the plane and then she pushed the phone inside her suitcase. She ran her hands carefully around in her folded shirts and underpants and extra shoes until she found the small bag which bore a striking resemblance to the bag the phone came in, the one she used for pills: aspirin, Pepto-Bismol tablets, Ambien, broad-spectrum antibiotics. She took out the bottle of Lariam and without so much as a thoughtful glance dropped it in the trash can beside her. She felt that there was something deeply flawed in her imagination that she hadn’t even considered the fact that the pills could just be thrown away.

  Unfortunately, throwing away the pills did not throw away the dreams, not until whatever was left of the Lariam had cycled through her blood stream, and so with little more than three hours of sleep to back her up she tried to stay awake on the plane. Vogel had bought her a first-class ticket to Miami and then on to Manaus, and the big seat took her in its arms, tilted her back, and told her repeatedly to rest. At seven thirty in the morning the man beside her in a charcoal gray suit asked the flight attendant for a Bloody Mary. She wondered if they had given Anders a first-class ticket, or, for that matter, a cell phone with GPS. She doubted it. The recirculated air carried the lightest scent of vodka and tomato juice. Marina’s head dipped to the side and there was Mr. Fox again, holding her ring finger, telling her to come home. Her head shot up.

  Mr. Fox’s wife was named Mary. Mary had died of a non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma at the age of fifty-five. It was the same year Marina came to Vogel. If Marina was given to armchair analysis, and she was not, she supposed a case could be made that despite Mr. Fox’s protests to the contrary, the very thing that drew him to Marina was the fact that she was younger and therefore less likely to re-create the situation he had already endured, although that hardly explained why he was sending her to Brazil. In the pictures of Mary that Mr. Fox kept out, one of her alone that was in the kitchen, and another in the den with their two daughters on a rafting trip, she looked like someone Marina would like. She had a good face, her eyes opened wide, her thick wheat-colored hair pulled back in a ponytail. Mary had taught math at a prep school in Eden Prairie that both of their girls had attended. “They gave us a great break on tuition,” Mr. Fox said, holding the picture. “Ellie,” he said, pointing to the smaller of the two girls, “looks just like her mother. She’s doing her internship in radiology at the Cleveland Clinic, married an English teacher of all things. And this one, Alice, she isn’t married.” He moved his finger over to the darker of the two girls. “She’s an international bond trader in Rome. She went to Italy her junior year at Vassar and that was it for her. She believed she was supposed to be Italian.”

  Marina stared at their faces. The girls were little, maybe six and eight. It was difficult to imagine them as doctor and banker. Mary in the picture was younger than Marina was now, her health shimmering like the pinpoints of light spreading out across the water behind her. They are standing on the bank of a river in front of an overturned canoe, pine boughs feathering the edges of the frame. They are holding up their paddles and smiling, smiling at Mr. Fox, who is himself not yet forty when he pushes down the button on the camera.

  “I had thought that they would all stay here,” he said, standing the picture back in the bookshelf. “Maybe the girls would go away to school, but then they’d come back and live near us, get married, have children. I hadn’t given much thought to our dying back then but if you had asked me I would have said that Mary would outlast me by a good ten years at least. She was at the top of the actuarial tables. She ate her vegetables and went hiking and never smoked and had so many friends. I would have bet every dime I had on her.” He tapped his fingers against the top of the frame. “It seems ridiculous now, doesn’t it, that kind of naïveté?”

  If anything, it seemed to Marina that naïveté was key. It was the thing that had allowed Karen to marry Anders and have those three children, their shared belief that he would always be there to take c
are of them. She and Anders both were too naïve to think that either one of them might die in these early years when they were both so essential to one another and to their sons. Had they thought for a minute that things might turn out the way they did they never would have had the courage to begin. Marina’s own birth had been engendered by naïveté: her mother’s, thinking that love would win out over the pull of an entire country; her father’s, thinking he could leave a country behind for one Minnesotan. Had they not been so hopeful and guileless her birth would have been impossible. Marina reimagined her parents as a couple of practical cynics and suddenly the entire film of her life spooled backwards until at last the small heroine disappeared completely. Naïveté may be the bedrock of reproduction, the lynchpin for the survival of the species. Even Marina, who understood all of this, was still able to think that Mr. Fox was possibly, obliquely, suggesting they might marry.

  Marina had been married once herself, though she didn’t think it counted for much of anything now. They had married in the beginning of their third year of residency and divorced at the end of the fifth, and in the two and a half years that intervened they were virtually never awake at the same time. Marina often thought that if it hadn’t been for the wedding, which was modest, it would have simply been a failed relationship with a nice man she really never thought of anymore. She had been naïve herself, thinking that they could make a marriage work at that particularly difficult point in their training, despite the fact that everyone they knew had told them otherwise. She was certain that love would prevail, and when it didn’t, she had lost not only her marriage but her ingenuous self. Marina and her husband bought their own divorce kit at an office supply store and amicably filled out the paperwork at the kitchen table. He took the bedroom furniture, she took the living room furniture. In a gesture of kindness, she offered up the kitchen table and the chairs that they sat in, and because he knew she meant it kindly he accepted. Her mother flew to Baltimore to help her find a smaller apartment and pack up half of the wedding gifts that she hadn’t wanted in the first place. What Marina had wanted very much was the chance to lie on the sofa in the living room and maybe drink a glass of scotch while crying in the afternoon but there wasn’t time. She had turned thirty the week before. She had six hours left before she had to be back at the hospital. The thing that Marina was feeling the end of so acutely, the thing that made her want to take to the sofa in the middle of the day, was not the end of her marriage but the end of her residency in obstetrics and gynecology. Four years into her five-year program she had switched to clinical pharmacology, enrolled in a Ph.D. program, and doomed herself to another three years of school. Even though her mother had come to Baltimore to help her through her divorce, Marina didn’t tell her what it was she was actually breaking up with. She didn’t tell her that the life she had ruined was not her own nor Josh Su’s but someone else’s, someone she didn’t even know. She did not tell her mother about the accident, nor about the Spanish Inquisition that had followed. She did not tell her about the switch to pharmacology until she was a year into the program and then she mentioned it so casually that it seemed like the most natural thing in the world. She did not tell her mother about Dr. Swenson.

  Marina pulled her coat around her shoulders. Beneath the plane was a soft white bank of clouds that shielded passengers from the landscape below. There was no telling where they were now. She let her head tip back and thought that no harm could come from the smallest sip of sleep. She knew how to close her eyes for two minutes. It was a magic trick she had picked up in her residency, falling asleep in the corner of an elevator and then waking up on the right floor. She would give her head a quick shake and then walk straight to the patient’s room, not exactly refreshed but, for the moment, reinforced. She pressed the button on the armrest and let her seat recline. She set her internal alarm for five minutes and gave in to the sleep that had been pulling at her since the nightmares had thrown her out of bed this morning. But this time when the elevator doors opened she was not in Calcutta. She was at Vogel, looking down the hallway at the tile floor and humming lights, and suddenly she changed her mind about everything. She should have told Anders about Dr. Swenson. It was hard to see what bearing her story would have on his trip to the Amazon but still she had chosen not to tell him as a means of protecting herself, not because he shouldn’t have had the information. Anders would have been grateful for any insight, she could see that now, and it seemed possible that this one additional fact could have changed his outcome. He might at least have been wary. The more she thought of it the faster she went down the hall. All of the windows set into the doors of the labs and offices were dark. Everyone had already gone home.

  Except Anders.

  He was at his desk, his back towards her. She always got to work before him in the morning. He had to drop the boys off at school. She almost never came in and saw him sitting there and the joy that broke over her at the sight of his tall, straight back, his faded hair, made her cry out. “I was afraid I’d missed you!” she said. Her heart was beating so fast, 150, she thought, 160.

  The look on his face was half surprised. “You did miss me. I was all the way out to the parking lot and I realized I’d left my watch.” He slipped the band over his left hand, fastened down the catch. Anders always took his watch off in the morning, they all did, too much hand washing, too many times in and out of latex gloves. “What’s wrong with you? You look like you’ve been running.” He reached over and put his hand on her shoulder and then he started to shake her, gently at first and then forcefully. “Miss,” he said, as if they had never met before. “Miss?”

  Marina opened her eyes. The man in the suit was shaking her shoulder and the flight attendant was peering into Marina’s face, entirely too close. When Marina opened her eyes she was looking directly into the woman’s mouth, her lipstick a thick brownish pink, obscene. “Miss?”

  “I’m sorry,” Marina said.

  “I think you were having a dream.” The flight attendant pulled back, giving Marina a bigger picture. How early must she have gotten up this morning in order to put on that much mascara? “Would you like a glass of water?”

  Marina nodded. The trick of Lariam was to figure out which part was the dream and which part was her waking life: Vogel she knew, Anders and the lab. It was the plane that smacked of nightmares.

  “I don’t like to fly myself,” the suited man told her and held up his Bloody Mary. “I medicate.”

  “I don’t mind flying,” Marina said. There was something she had meant to tell Anders.

  “It certainly seemed like you mind it,” the man said. Maybe he was concerned, or bored, or inappropriately friendly, or midwestern friendly. Nothing was clear. She took the glass of water that was handed to her and drank it down.

  “I have bad dreams,” Marina said, and then she added, “on planes. I won’t fall asleep again.”

  The man looked at her skeptically. After all, they were in this together now, seatmates. “Well, if you do, should I wake you up or just let you go?”

  Marina thought about it. Either way it was a loss. She didn’t want to scream in front of him and she didn’t want him shaking her arm either. The intimacy of sleeping next to strangers, much less twitching and making noises, was unbearable. “Let me go,” she said, and turned her shoulders away from him.

  She had been going to tell Anders about Dr. Swenson. It was a funny business, the subconscious mind, thinking that it could rewrite history. It would never have occurred to her to tell him what had happened when he was alive, and now that he was dead she was certain she should have. The great, lumbering guilt that slept inside of her at every moment of her life had shifted, stretched. Wasn’t it logical that guilt should awaken guilt? Marina Singh had had an accident a long time ago, and after that she had removed herself from the obstetrics and gynecology program. She had never told her mother, who thought that her daughter had had an illogical change of heart
late in her training, or Mr. Fox, who never knew her to be anything other than a pharmacologist. The people who did know the details of what had happened, Josh Su, the friends she had at the time, one by one she found a way not to know them anymore. She no longer knew Dr. Swenson. With a great deal of concentrated effort she had found the means to stop repeating the story to herself. She no longer traced the events through the map of her memory, studying the various places where she had been free to make different choices.

  Marina Singh had been the chief resident and Dr. Swenson was the attending. On this particular night, or as the review board had called it, the night in question, she was working at the County Receiving Hospital in Baltimore. It was a busy night but not the worst. Sometime after midnight a woman came in who said she’d been in labor for three hours. She had already had two children and she said she hadn’t been in any hurry to come to the hospital.

  “How are you feeling now?” the flight attendant asked.

  “I’m fine,” Marina said. Her eyes were dry and she concentrated on keeping them open.

  “Well, don’t feel embarrassed. This nice man here woke you up

  in time.”

  The nice man smiled again at Marina. Something in that smile implied that he was sheltering a small flame of hope that there would be a reward for his good deed.

  “Some people’s seatmates aren’t so thoughtful,” the flight attendant said. She was lingering. There wasn’t much to do in first class, not enough people to take care of. “They let them snore and scream and carry on until you can hear them in the rear lavatory.”

  “I’m fine now,” Marina said again, and she turned her face to the window, wondering if there was an empty seat at the back of the plane.

  She tried to separate what had happened that night from her deposition. She tried to place herself back at the actual event instead of the endless and exhaustive retelling of that event. The patient was twenty-eight, African-American. Her hair was straightened and pulled back. She was tall, broad shouldered, enormously pregnant. Marina was surprised to remember how much she liked the woman. If the patient had been afraid she never showed it. She talked about her other children in between her contractions and sometimes through them: two girls, and now they were having their boy. Marina paged Dr. Swenson and told her the patient’s contractions were four minutes apart and she hadn’t begun dilating. The infant’s heart rate was unstable. Marina told Dr. Swenson that unless the situation improved they would need to do a cesarean.