Ann Patchett - State of Wonder

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.”