Ann Patchett - State of Wonder

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.