State of Wonder

Two

First things first. Marina made an appointment with an epidemiologist in St. Paul and got a ten-year vaccine for yellow fever and a tetanus shot. She got a prescription for an antimalarial, Lariam, and was told to take the first pill immediately. After that she would take one pill a week for the duration of her trip, and then one a week for four weeks after her return home. “Watch this stuff,” the doctor told her. “It can make you feel like jumping off a roof.”

Marina wasn’t worried about jumping off a roof. Her worries were centered around plane tickets, packing, English-Portuguese dictionaries, how much Pepto-Bismol would be enough. From time to time she thought about the upper quadrant of her left arm, which, since those two shots, felt like both needles had broken off their respective hypodermics and were now lodged in her humerus like a pair of hot spears. She allowed these more practical concerns to stand temporarily in place for her thoughts of Anders and Karen and Dr. Swenson, none of whom she could manage at the moment. It wasn’t until the third night after she took the first tablet of Lariam that Marina’s thoughts swung sharply in the direction of India and her father. In the process of leaving for the Amazon, she had inadvertently solved a mystery that at present was the farthest thing from her mind: What had been wrong with her childhood?

And then the unexpected answer: these pills.

It came to her in the night when she bolted up from her bed, out of her bed, drenched and shaking, the dream still so alive she wouldn’t blink her eyes for fear of calling it back, though really there was no avoiding it. She knew this one by heart. It was the same dream that had marked the entirety of her youth, intensely present and then gone for years, returning at the very moment she was careless enough to forget about it. Standing there beside her bed in the dark, the sheets soaked, her pillow and nightgown soaked, she came to the clear and sudden realization that she had taken Lariam as a child. Her mother never told her but of course she must have, starting the dosage as prescribed, the first pill taken a week before departure, then every week while away, then for four weeks after they returned. Pills meant it was time to see her father as surely as digging through desk drawers to find the passports and dragging the suitcases up from the basement. India pills, her mother had called them. Come and take your India pills.

Marina had only the most cursory memories of living in an apartment in Minneapolis with both of her parents but she could summon them back without any effort. Look, there is her father standing at the front door shaking the snow from the black gloss of his hair. There he is at the kitchen table writing on a tablet, a cigarette in the saucer beside him burning slowly to ash, his books and papers arranged in such precise order that at dinner time they had to sit on the floor in the living room and eat off the coffee table. There he is at her bed at night, pulling the covers beneath her chin, tucking them in on either side. “Snug like a bug?” he asks her. She nods her head against the pillow, the only part of her free to move, and gazes at his lovely face only inches above hers, until she can no longer keep her eyes open.

Marina did not forget her father in his absence, nor did she learn to accept the situation over time. She longed for him. Her mother often said that Marina was smart in just the way her father was smart, and that explained why he was so proud that she excelled in the very things that interested her the most: earth sciences and math when she was a little girl, calculus, statistics, inorganic chemistry when she was older. Her skin was all cream and light in comparison to her father’s and very dark when she held her wrist against her mother’s. She had her father’s round, black eyes and heavy lashes, his black hair and angular frame. Seeing her father gave her the ability to see herself, the comfort of physical recognition after a life spent among her mother’s people, all those translucent cousins who looked at her like she was a llama who had wandered into their holiday dinner. The checkers in the grocery store, the children at school, the doctors and the bus drivers all asked her where she was from. There was no point in saying, Right here, Minneapolis, though it was in fact the case. Instead she told them India, and even that they didn’t always understand (Lakota? asked the gas station attendant, and Marina would have to work very hard not to roll her eyes because her mother had explained that eye-rolling was the height of rudeness and was never an appropriate response, even to very stupid questions). Being the child of a white mother and foreign graduate-student father who took his doctoral degree but not his family back to his country of origin after he was finished had become the stuff of presidential history, but when Marina was growing up there was no example that could easily explain her situation. In time, she came to tell herself that she practically was from India because after all her father was from there and lived there and she had visited him there every two or three years when enough money had been saved. These dramatic trips were discussed and planned as great events, and as Marina marked off the months then weeks then days on her calendar what she was longing for was not only her father but an entire country, that place where no one would turn around and look at her unless it was to admire her good posture. But then, a little less than a week before she left, the dreams would begin.

In the dreams she is holding her father’s hand. They are walking up Indira Gandhi Sarani towards Dalhousie Square or following Bidhan Sarani in the direction of the college where her father is a professor. The farther they go along the more people start to come out of buildings and alleyways. Maybe the power has gone out again and the trams have stopped and all the fans in all the kitchens have stopped so that people who were in their apartments have come out to the street because the crowd is pushing in closer and closer as more people are joining in along the edges. There is the heat of the day to contend with and then the heat of so many bodies, their sweat and perfume, the sharp scent of spice carried in the smoke of vendors’ fires and the bitter smell of marigolds strung into garlands, and all together it begins to overwhelm her. Marina can’t see where she’s going anymore, only the people pressing into her, hips wrapped in crimson saris and dhoti-punjabis knocking her from side to side. She reaches out her hand and pats a cow. She can hear the persistent music of jewelry weaving through the shouted conversations, bangle bracelets stacked halfway to the elbow and anklets covered in tiny bells, earrings that function as wind chimes. Sometimes when the masses shift her feet are lifted from the ground and for a moment she is held a few inches aloft, a small weight distributed over various points on other people’s bodies as she drags behind her father like a low kite. She feels her shoe knocked loose from her foot and she calls for her father to stop, but he doesn’t hear her over the roar of voices. She can still see the little shoe flashing yellow on the hard packed ground not two steps behind them in the crowd. It is perfectly still, untrampled, and though she knows she isn’t supposed to, she lets go of her father’s hand. She dives for her shoe but the crowd has already swallowed it, and as quickly as she turns back the crowd has swallowed her father as well. She calls for him, Papi! Papi! but the ringing of bells, the calling and crying of beggars, has taken the sound from her mouth. She doesn’t know if he even realizes she’s gone. Some other child could have attached himself to her father’s hand when she fell off, in India the children are very fast. And then Marina is alone somewhere in the sea of Calcutta, folded inside the human current of chattering Hindi which she does not understand, her body swept along while she cries, at which point she would wake up sweating, nauseated, her black hair soaked to the skull. She would run down the hall to her mother’s room, throw herself into her mother’s bed, crying, “Don’t make me go!”

Her mother took her up in her arms, put a cool hand on her forehead. She asked her what the dream was about but Marina always said she couldn’t remember, something awful. She did remember, but wouldn’t speak it for fear the words would somehow cement the images into reality. From then on she had the dream every night: she had it on the plane going over to Calcutta and woke up screaming. She had it in the flat her father rented for her and her mother not far from his office at the college so that they would not disturb his second wife, his second children. They were separated getting onto a bus, her father let her go while they were swimming in the sea at a crowded beach. After so many dreams that were so much alike she became terrified of sleep. She was terrified the whole time they were in India, so much so that at the end of every trip both of her parents agreed that it might all be too much for her. Marina’s father said he would try to come to Minnesota more often, but that was never practical. Once they were back at home, after a week or two, the crowds that haunted her sleep would begin to dissipate, thin into smaller groups, and then break apart altogether. Slowly, Marina would forget them, and then her mother would forget, and within a year it would once again be decided that she was a much bigger girl now and maybe they should start thinking about a trip to India sometime in the future.

Was it possible that no one had troubled themselves to read the voluminous side effects of the Lariam? Marina liked to think she would have figured out the puzzle herself if her father hadn’t died when she was in college. At that point she hadn’t been back to Calcutta in three years. Had he lived and she had gone again, she would have been old enough to look into the medication herself, although it was true that a patient was less likely to question a set of symptoms she had always accepted. She had grown up believing that India gave her nightmares, seeing her father gave her nightmares, when all along it was the antimalarial. The drug, not the circumstances of her life, destroyed her chance to be with her father.

“Of course I knew it was the Lariam,” her mother said over the phone. “Your father and I were always worrying about it. You had such a terrible reaction.”

“Then why didn’t you tell me what it was?” Marina said.

“You don’t tell a five-year-old they’re going to have bad dreams. That’s like giving them an invitation to have more.”

“A five-year-old,” she said, “I’ll grant you that. But you could have explained it to me when I was ten, at least when I was fifteen.”

“I couldn’t tell you anything when you were fifteen. If I’d told you it was the pills that gave you nightmares you wouldn’t have

taken them.”

“Would that have been the end of the world?”

“If you had gotten malaria in India then, yes, I suppose it would have been. The end of the world had it killed you. I’m surprised this is still a problem. I would have thought they would have come up with a better drug to take by now.”

“They have and they haven’t. The new ones don’t make you so crazy but they also don’t protect from all the different strains of malaria.”

“So why in the world are you taking Lariam again?” her mother asked. It was the most important question and yet it only now seemed to have occurred to her. “Are you going back to India?”

What was so interesting about the nightmares now was the extent to which nothing much in them had changed. At forty-two she was still holding her father’s hand, the people around them rose up like a tide and she was then forced to let him go. It had never actually happened, this physical wrenching apart, and still her subconscious clung to the fear. Things that had happened to Marina, the memories she saw as the logical candidates for nightmares, never entered her sleeping life, and she supposed that for this she should be grateful. In her own home she got up and turned the lights on in the bathroom. Her hands were shaking and she ran a wet washcloth over her face and neck, careful not to look at herself in the mirror. It was surprising to discover that understanding the origin of her dreams offered her exactly no comfort at two in the morning. In fact, all she could think of now was her doctor’s careless admonition that she might want to jump off a roof. Her deepest fear, her father’s hand slipping from her hand, had held steady even when it was kept undisturbed in a pharmacy without her for twenty-five years.

“What about the funeral?” Marina asked Karen Eckman. They hadn’t seen each other all week, not since Marina had come with Mr. Fox on the day of the heavy snow. Now that she was leaving in the morning, both of the women thought it was important to say goodbye, though for different reasons. Marina wanted to see if Karen had given up on the idea that Anders might still be alive now that she’d had some days to sit with his death. Karen wanted to make sure Marina wasn’t thinking of backing out.

It was after dinner when Marina came by and the lengthening day had just gone dark. The boys had brushed their teeth and were watching television in the den. They were now allowed a show before bedtime every night, a childhood luxury previously restricted to weekends. Marina said hello to them when she first came in and they barely turned their heads towards her, the youngest two muttering hello in low unison when their mother insisted, the eldest saying nothing at all. Mr. Fox had made a mistake in telling Marina that she had been the first choice to go find Dr. Swenson instead of Anders. She now saw the entire world in terms of alternate scenarios.

“A memorial service. You call it a memorial service when you don’t have a body,” Karen said.

“I’m sorry,” Marina said. “Memorial service.”

Karen leaned around the open archway to the den. The boys in their sweatshirts and flannel pajama pants slumped into the endlessly long corduroy couch. The smallest, palest boy lay over Pickles like a rug. They were bound to the television screen as if by wires. “It’s amazing what they hear,” she said in a low voice. “They don’t even have to be listening but their ears just pick it up, then I put them to bed at night and one of them says, ‘When are we having the funeral for Daddy?’ ” Karen poured herself a glass of wine and when she wagged the bottle in Marina’s direction Marina nodded.

“Funeral,” the middle boy called out without looking at them. He giggled for a second and then stopped.

Marina thought of that muddy ground where Anders was buried and reached for her glass. “I’m sorry,” she said to Karen.

“Benjy, stop that,” Karen said in a sharp voice. “No, no, it’s just something I try to be aware of. Did Anders ever tell you I majored in Russian literature in college? I’ve been thinking I should find some Russian friends. Then we could talk anywhere. Or maybe it’s just that we could talk about Chekhov anywhere.” She took her wine to the other side of the kitchen and opened the louvered door to the big walk-in pantry. Marina followed her inside. Even the pantry was neat, bright boxes of cereal standing together in a line of diminishing height. Karen returned to her point, her voice lowered. “Sometimes I think they can hear the conversations people have about us down the street. If you listened to them talk you’d think they knew everything that was going on. I mean, they don’t understand it all but somewhere or other they’ve heard it and they remember. Do you ever wonder when you stopped being able to hear everything?” Karen asked.

“I hadn’t thought about it.” Marina had no idea how much her hearing had deteriorated over the course of her life.

Karen looked blank for a minute as if part of her had walked out of the room and then, just as quickly, returned. “I got a letter today.”

There was no question and still she said Anders’ name, her heart thrumming like a hummingbird’s heart.

Karen nodded and pulled one of those same blue envelopes out of the pocket of her sweater. She set it face up on the palm of her open hand and together they stared at it like a thing that could at any minute unfold a pair of wings. There was Anders’ clear parochial penmanship across the front. Karen Eckman. . Eden Prairie. Marina liked to tell him he was the only doctor she ever knew who wrote like a Catholic school girl. “It’s the second one I’ve had this week,” Karen said. “The other one came on Tuesday but he wrote it later, the first of March. He was sicker then.”

Marina opened her mouth. There was something she was supposed to say but she couldn’t imagine what it would be. He was dead, he was sick, he was not so sick. The story rewound until the only conclusion to draw would be that Anders gets better. He leaves the jungle and returns to Manaus. He flies from Manaus and starts again from home, only this time they know enough to refuse to let him go. Marina wondered how many letters were still out there and when they would drift in, their postal route having mistakenly sent them on a detour through Bhutan. A person didn’t have to stretch very far to find a logical explanation for how this had happened, so why did Marina feel it necessary to tilt back her glass and take down all of the wine in a swallow?

“That experience, going out to your mailbox and finding a stack of catalogues and bills and a letter from your dead husband, there’s not been anything in my life so far to get me ready for that.” Karen unfolded the envelope and looked at the words but just as quickly looked away from them. She looked to Marina instead. “It makes you understand why e-mail is better,” she said. “You get an e-mail from your dead husband and you know that he’s alive out there somewhere. You get a letter from your dead husband and you don’t know anything at all.”

“Can you tell me what he said?” Marina was whispering. Maybe the letters were the one thing the boys didn’t know about yet. She wanted to ask if there was anything about Dr. Swenson and where they were working. She wanted to know where in the jungle she should look.

“It isn’t really about anything,” Karen said, as if that was something she should apologize for. She handed Marina the letter.

February 15th

Would it alarm you too much to tell you I am often alarmed in this place? What you deserve is not honesty but the sort of husband who is capable of putting up a Brave Front. But if I put up a Brave Front now after telling you so much about how miserable I am, if I paid Nkomo or one of the Saturns to put a Brave Front together for me on a separate sheet of paper which I could then copy over in my own coward’s handwriting, you would see through the ploy immediately. Then you would have to get on a plane and hire a boat and a guide and come down here to find me because you would know (having never seen a single Brave Front out of me in your life) how unimaginable things must be. So I won’t alarm you by trying to muster up courage. You’ve always been the one with all the courage anyway. It’s why you’re staying home with three boys and I’m vacationing. It’s why you were able to pull that nail out of Benjy’s heel last summer with pliers. I am not brave. I have a fever that comes on at seven in the morning and stays for two hours. By four in the afternoon it’s back and I am nothing but a ranting pile of ash. Most days now I have a headache and I worry that some tiny Amazonian animal is eating a hole through my cerebral cortex, and the only thing I want in the world, the only thing that would give meaning or sense to this existence, would be the chance to lay my head in your lap. You would put your hand in my hair, I know you would do that for me. Such is your bravery, such is my good fortune. Damn these ridiculous sheets of paper. There’s never any space. I pray like a babbling fundamentalist now that I am in Brazil and tonight I will pray that the letter carrier sends this to you so that you can feel the full weight of my love. Kiss the boys for me. Kiss the inside of your wrist. —A

Marina refolded it and gave it back to Karen, who returned it to her pocket. She put her hand on a shelf near several boxes of microwave popcorn to steady herself. It was incalculably worse than the letter from Dr. Swenson. This was Anders announcing the onset of his own death, his voice so clear and plain he might as well have crowded into the pantry with them and read it aloud. “Who are Nkomo and the Saturns?”

Karen shook her head. “He mentions names sometimes but I don’t know them. I can’t even imagine how many of the letters got lost. The letter from Dr. Swenson could have gotten lost, the one saying he was dead.” Karen ran a finger in an absent circle around the top of a can of peas. “I think I’d rather wait on the service until you come back. I’d like it if you could be here.”

Marina looked down at her, blinked, nodded.

“I never say it to them,” she said, looking towards the slightly open pantry door in the direction of her boys and their television, “that I’m not sure he’s dead. I know they need to have one answer, even if it’s the worst answer you could think of. Hope is a horrible thing, you know. I don’t know who decided to package hope as a virtue because it’s not. It’s a plague. Hope is like walking around with a fishhook in your mouth and somebody just keeps pulling it and pulling it. Everybody thinks I’m a train wreck because Anders is dead but it’s really so much worse than that. I’m still hoping that this Dr. Swenson, for some reason I couldn’t possibly put together, has lied about everything, that she’s keeping him, or she’s lost him somewhere.” Then Karen stopped and a sudden light of clarity came over her face and the panic fell away from her voice. “And I say that and I know it isn’t true. No one would do that. But then that would mean he’s dead.” She put the question to Marina directly. “Is he dead?” she asked. “I just don’t feel it. I would feel it, wouldn’t I?” Her eyes filled up and she brushed the tears back with two fingers.

Nothing would be lovelier than a lie now, a single dose of possibility. But if Marina gave her that then she would be nothing but another fishhook in Karen Eckman’s mouth. She said that Anders was dead.

Karen put her hands in her pockets, looked to the very clean wood plank floor. She nodded. “Was he writing to you?”

Marina understood the question but she left it alone. “He sent me a postcard from Manaus and two letters from the jungle very early on. They were mostly about birds. I showed them to Mr. Fox. I’ll give them to you if you want them.”

“For the boys,” she said. “It would be good I think to keep everything together. For the future.”

Marina was not claustrophobic by nature, and the pantry was as big as a hotel elevator, but she was ready to open the door and step outside. The canned green beans and bottled cranberry juice and packets of instant oatmeal in sweet, assorted flavors were beginning to press towards her, taking up more and more of the space. “I don’t know how long I’ll be gone.”

“Well, whatever you do, don’t stay.” Karen tried to say this lightly. “That’s the big mistake.”

After they said their goodbyes, Marina left the Eckman house and walked out alone into the subdivision beneath the endless expanse of velvet night. She gave herself a moment in the enormous darkness to shake off the small, bright closet she had been in. She wondered if there would be some time in her life, ten years from now, or twenty, when she would not be thinking about that letter. Such is your bravery, such is my good fortune. Probably not. In his death, her officemate had become her responsibility. While she understood Karen’s position on hope she wouldn’t have minded a little bit of it for herself. How gladly she would go to Brazil to find Anders! But her job was to confirm his death and finish his work. All those years in the smallest lab at Vogel working on the same reports, they had grown accustomed to completing the other’s data.

Marina filled her lungs with frozen air and smelled both winter and spring, dirt and leftover snow with the smallest undercurrent of something green. That was another thing she and Anders had in common: they were both profoundly suited for Minnesota. She wanted to develop a fear of flying that would keep her from ever going farther than the Dakotas in her car. Like her mother and all her mother’s people before her, those inexhaustible blondes who staked their claims in verdant prairies, Marina was cut from Minnesota, the soil and the starry night. Instead of growing up inquisitive and restless, she had developed a profound desire to stay, as if her center of gravity was so low it connected her directly to this particular patch of earth. The frigid winds raced across the plains with nothing in their path to stop them but Marina, who stood there freezing for one more minute before finally getting into her car.

Back at home she found Mr. Fox waiting in her driveway, engine running and heater on. When he saw her he rolled down his window. “I’ve been trying to call you,” he said.

“I went to tell Karen goodbye.”

She could have told him about the letter but there was so little time left, and anyway, what could she say? This week hadn’t gone the way either of them would have liked. They had seen each other mostly at the office in the presence of Vogel’s board. Given the circumstances, the board had wanted Marina to have a complete and detailed account of their expectations for her trip. Did she understand exactly what was expected of her? Fly to Manaus, go to Dr. Swenson’s apartment there, they had an address, Anders had found some people who knew where la, la, la. Marina was scrambled by the lack of sleep and agitated by the Lariam. She found herself sitting through those meetings and listening to nothing, moving her Vogel Pharmaceutical ballpoint in designs that resembled cursive writing. Even when she gave moderately articulate replies to their nervous questions she wasn’t listening. She was thinking instead of her father and how she had missed his death because she hadn’t wanted to leave school in the middle of the semester. As with so many other critical matters in her early life, she had been protected from the seriousness of the situation. She had been told only that he was ill and he hoped that she could visit soon. Given that information she had thought there was plenty of time, when in fact there had been none at all. She was thinking of her mother who had been asked not to attend his funeral and so waited in the hotel room in deference to the second wife. She was thinking of Anders and his birding guides and wondering if Dr. Swenson would have kept them. Anders would be so happy if she made the effort to look for some birds while she was there. She would use his binoculars to find them. Surely when Dr. Swenson said in her letter that she was keeping his few possessions this would include his binoculars. And his camera! She would use his camera to take pictures of birds for the boys.

“May I come in?” Mr. Fox asked.

Marina in the dark, in the cold of early April, nodded her head and he followed her to the door of her house and stood very close behind. He shifted to the left and then slightly to the right and then stopped and pressed himself against her back while she dug for her keys in her purse. He was trying to shield her from the wind. It was that tenderness that brought the tightness to Marina’s throat and before there was a chance to stop herself she was crying. Was she crying for Karen and her letter? For Anders while he wrote it, or for those pajama-clad boys? Was she crying because of the Lariam, which made her cry at newspaper stories and radio songs, or because she really would have given almost anything to let this cup of Brazil pass from her? She turned and put her arms around Mr. Fox’s neck and he kissed her there under her porch light where anyone driving by could have seen them. She kissed him and held on to him as if a great crowd of people were trying to pull them apart. The cold and the wind did not matter. Nothing mattered. They had played this thing all wrong. They had made terrible decisions about waiting to see where their relationship would go, about not being together openly. They agreed there was no point in becoming the topic of other people’s conversations, especially if things didn’t work out. Mr. Fox was always quick to tell her that he didn’t think things would work out. The problem, he said, was his age. He was too old for her. Even when they were lying in bed, his arm beneath her shoulders, her head on his chest, he would talk about how he would die so many years before her and leave her alone. It would be better if she found someone her own age now and not throw away these good years on him.

“Now?” she would say. “Do I have to find someone else right this minute?”

Then he would press her closer and kiss the top of her head. “No,” he would say, running his open hand down the side of her arm. “Probably not this exact minute. You could put it off for a little while.”

“I could die first, you know. There’s a perfectly good chance.” She had said it because in truth Marina wanted very much for this relationship to work, and because there was a medical fact worth pointing out as well: the younger ones go first all the time. But coming into her house on this night she thought about those conversations in a different light, and so they kissed each other while thinking of her death rather than his. Logically speaking, Anders’ death portended nothing for Marina, but Anders was dead and he hadn’t thought it was a possible outcome for his trip. Karen hadn’t thought it was possible or she never would have let him out the front door. Mr. Fox was sorry, genuinely sorry, that he had ever asked Marina to go and he told her so. Marina said she was sorry she had agreed. But Marina had been a very good student and a very good doctor and a very good employee and lover and friend and when someone asked her to do something she operated on the principle they had asked because it was important. She had succeeded in life because she had so rarely declined any request that was made of her, how would the Amazon be different? They banged their legs against the coffee table as they tried to move through the house without turning on lights. They pressed against a wall in the dark hallway. They fell into her room, into her bed, and stayed there until they had exhausted themselves with every act of love and anger and apology and forgiveness they could think of that might stand in for what they did not have the words to say. It was after all of that, when they were finished and had fallen asleep, that Marina started screaming.

It was a while before she could explain herself. As much as a minute passed before she could be fully awakened and so kept on in the world of her dream in which screaming was the only possible option. When she opened her eyes Mr. Fox was there and he was holding her upper arms and looking like he was about to start screaming himself. She almost asked him what was wrong, then she remembered.

“I’m taking Lariam,” Marina said. There was no saliva in her mouth and without the lubrication the words were sticking on her teeth. “It’s the side effect. Nightmares.” She was on the floor with the bedspread around her bare shoulders. She covered her face with her hands and thought she could hear the sweat running down her neck. Her flight from the St. Paul — Minneapolis airport left at six forty-five in the morning and she still had a little last minute packing to do. She wanted to be sure to water the plants and take all the perishables out of the refrigerator. She was awake now, wide awake. She would just stay up.

Mr. Fox, who was crouched down in front of her, put his hands gently on her knees. “What in the world did you dream?” he said.

And even though she wanted to tell him the truth because she loved him, she could not imagine putting the dream into words. She told him the same thing she used to tell her mother: it was something generically awful, she didn’t remember.

When Mr. Fox drove her to the airport it was twenty degrees. Marina clicked off the radio before they had the chance to announce the windchill. The dark of morning seemed deeper than anything night had been able to come up with. They were addled by their decisions, their lack of sleep. They didn’t take into account how early it was and that the drivers in that fierce commuter traffic for which they had allotted so much extra time weren’t even awake yet. When he pulled into the lane for departing flights it was five fifteen in the morning.

“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 care 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.

And Dr. Swenson said, she was very clear on this, that Marina was to wait. She was not to do the section without her.

“Can you see anything down there?” asked the man in the suit.

“No,” Marina said.

“I don’t know how you can stand it. Me, I can’t do the window seat. If it’s all they’ve got I pull the blind. I tell myself we’re in a bus. I used to not be able to fly at all and I went to a class where they taught us to hypnotize ourselves into thinking we were on a bus. It works as long as I have a drink. Do you want a drink?”

Marina shook her head.

“Part of the paper?”

Marina looked at him. He was pale with high red cheeks, a fellow traveler who wanted her to ask him why he was flying to Miami and if that was his final destination. He wanted her to tell him she was going on to South America so that he could be impressed and ask her what she planned on doing there, and she would do none of that. She would do nothing for him.

She had done C-sections before but on that night she was told to wait and monitor and call back in one hour if there was no improvement. The fetal heart rate dropped and climbed, dropped and climbed, and still the patient wasn’t dilated. Marina paged Dr. Swenson the second time, and she waited and waited but there was no call back. When she looked at the clock she realized that only forty-five minutes had passed, not an hour. The rules were intractable. She had not followed the rules. It was exactly the thing Marina had always admired about Dr. Swenson until she was the one trying to get her on the phone. The patient was a talker, and they had time to talk. She said she was exhausted but that it wasn’t so much the labor. She said her two-year-old had kept her up all night the night before with an earache. Her husband had dropped her off in front of the hospital. He was driving their girls out to his mother’s and that was two hours away. Two hours out and two hours back but at the rate she was going he’d be there for the birth so she said she didn’t mind waiting. She wanted him there. He had missed the first two, circumstances, she said, not his fault. Her voice was strong, louder than it needed to be in the small room. “You always forget what childbirth is like,” she said, “but I don’t remember it being this hard.” Then she laughed a little and said, “That’s the whole point, right? You don’t remember, because if you did remember no one would ever have kids again and then what would happen? That would be the end of everything.” It was one thirty. It was two. It was three. No calls were returned. Marina delivered two other babies while the woman waited and both of the births were so easy they hadn’t needed a doctor at all. Women for the most part knew how to push out an infant. Even when they didn’t know there was no stopping them. Marina went back to check on the woman again. The doctor was terrified, the patient was patient. Back in the days when Marina played this film in her head every hour, waking and sleeping, this was the part she watched most carefully. She slowed down the tape to a crawl. She looked at every frame separately. She was not terrified that the patient would die or that she would lose the baby, she was terrified that she was doing something wrong in the eyes of Dr. Swenson. She was thinking that if she had followed instructions and waited another fifteen minutes to call the first time then none of this would be happening. Surely she had learned her lesson now. Surely Dr. Swenson was almost there. The nurses understood all of this. Even as they were prepping the patient for surgery and calling the anesthesiologist to wake him up they were saying, We’re just getting things ready for Dr. Swenson so she can walk right in. Marina should have called another doctor but she never even thought of it. She had stretched the time out too far trying to cover herself. If she hadn’t waited so long, if she hadn’t waited until everything was crashing and there was no other choice but to go ahead, she would have taken more time.

The plane dropped sharply and then righted itself. It was an air pocket, a blip, but for a split second every person on the plane heard the same voice in their head, This is it. The man in the suit grabbed her wrist, but by the time his hand was on her arm it was over, forgotten, everything was fine. “Did you feel that?” he said.

She hadn’t started in the right place. The deeper truth of the story was someplace years before this, at the beginning of her residency, or in medical school that first day of class when she saw Dr. Swenson down in the pit of the lecture hall. There were no words for how much she admired her, her intelligence, her abilities as a doctor. All of the students did. In every moment Dr. Swenson’s students were eager and anxious. She didn’t bother to learn their names and yet they lived their lives to the letter of her law. She was harder on the women in the group. She would tell them stories of her own days in medical school and how when she came along the men knit their arms together to keep her out. They made a human barricade against her, they kicked at her when she climbed over them, and now all the women were just walking through, no understanding or appreciation for the work that had been done for them. It wasn’t that Marina had ever wanted to be like her, it wasn’t in her. She had just wanted to see if she was capable of spending five years of her life living up to Dr. Swenson’s standards, and she wasn’t. All of a sudden she felt drunk. Somewhere very far away she could feel the presence of a man beside her. He had let her go. She could never have told this story to Anders, even if it would have put him on his guard, even if that might have been the thing to save his life. He had three sons of his own, after all. The skin of the patient’s belly was stretched to the point of startling thinness, like a balloon that had been blown up too far. Marina remembered there was a sheen to it. She cut the skin, dug through the fat for the fascia. She had thought there was no time left. Her hands were working at triple speed, and there was the uterus. She thought that she was saving the baby’s life because she was so fast, but the instant she realized he was occiput posterior, looking straight up, the blade had caught his head right of center at the hairline, cutting until she stopped in the middle of his cheek. It used to be that she could feel it in her own face, the straight incision, the scalpel slicing through the eye. The child’s father could feel it when he came back to the hospital that night to find his wife sedated and his son scarred and blinded in one eye. Marina met him in the hallway and told him what she had done. She saw him flinch in exactly the way she had flinched. He was not allowed to see the baby then. The specialists were already working but some things cannot be set to right.

They did not terminate her residency. Marina remembered this with no small amount of wonder. When all of it was over and the lawsuit was settled, she was allowed to go back. The patient had liked her, that was the hell of it. They had spent the whole night together. She wanted the settlement money but she didn’t want Marina’s head on a pike. She said that other than that one mistake she’d done a good job. That one mistake. So Marina was left to mete out a punishment for herself. She could not touch a patient or face her classmates. She could not go back to Dr. Swenson, who had said in the deposition that the chief resident had been instructed not to proceed alone. Over the three hour period the fetal heart rate kept getting lower but every time it reversed. It kept coming up. Maybe in another hour or two she would have dilated. Maybe in another ten minutes the baby would have died. No one knew the answer to that. Marina was a sinking ship and from the safety of dry land Dr. Swenson turned her back and walked away. Marina suspected in the end Dr. Swenson had no idea who she was.

Anders was never going to stay home. Not when there was a chance to leave in the winter and see the Amazon, to photograph the crested caracaras. And anyway, he had already left, he was already dead, she was flying to Brazil in hopes of finding out what had become of his body. She had been up all night with the patient, she had been up all night blinding the child, and now her eyes dropped, opened, dropped. This was the cost of going to find Dr. Swenson: remembering. She went to the lab at Vogel even though she had promised the man beside her on the plane that she would not. She went down the dark hall to their dark lab and there she picked up the picture of the Eckman boys that sat on Anders’ desk, all three of them caught in a fit of hilarity that would hereafter be thought of as belonging to another lifetime. The picture, whose small subjects were so incandescent they seemed to throw off a little light of their own in the dark room, was in her hands when the door opened again. Anders had forgotten what this time? Wallet? Keys? It didn’t matter. She only wanted him back.

“Come now, Mari,” her father said. “It’s time to go.”

It was so perfect that Marina nearly laughed aloud. Of course he was there now, of course. There was a part of the dream that did not follow her into waking — this part — where her father comes into the room and says her name. The part when they are together for a while, the two of them, before things go wrong. The way things ended always obliterated the genuine happiness that had come before and that shouldn’t be the case. The truth was so much more complicated than that. It was made up of grief and great rewards and she needed to remember all of it. “I was looking at this picture,” she said, and held it out to him. “Aren’t these handsome boys?”

Her father nodded. He looked good in his yellow kurta and pressed trousers. He looked fit and rested, a braided belt circling his trim waist. Marina hadn’t thought of it before but they were very nearly the same age now. She understood it was the business of time to move forward but she would have been glad to stay exactly in this moment.

“So you’re ready?”

“I’m ready,” she said.

“Good, alright then, hold on to me.” And he opened the door and they stepped out together into the empty hallway of Vogel. For a moment there was a wondrous quiet and Marina tried to appreciate it while understanding that it couldn’t last. One by one the doors opened and her colleagues came out to meet her father and shake his hand and behind them came Indians, more and more of them, until it felt like all of Calcutta was pouring in beside them, raising their voices over the din of other people’s conversations.

“I know where the staircase is,” Marina said into his ear. “We can get there.”

Her father couldn’t hear her, it was simply too loud. They pressed ahead, holding on to each other for as long as was possible.