State of Wonder (7 page)

“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.