Ann Patchett - State of Wonder

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.

The minute she stepped into the musty wind of the tropical air-conditioning, Marina smelled her own wooliness. She pulled off her light spring coat and then the zippered cardigan beneath it, stuffing them into her carry-on where they did not begin to fit, while every insect in the Amazon lifted its head from the leaf it was masticating and turned a slender antenna in her direction. She was a snack plate, a buffet line, a woman dressed for springtime in the North. Marina handed over her passport to the man at the desk whose shirt bore all the appropriate badges and tags of his office. He looked hard at her picture, her face. When asked, she said she was visiting Brazil on business. While her planned response to the question “How long will you stay?” was two weeks , she changed her mind just as she opened her mouth.

“Three weeks,” she said, and the man stamped an empty page in a booklet filled with empty pages.