Ann Patchett: State of Wonder

“What if he isn’t dead?”

Marina pressed her head deep into the pillow. “He’s dead, Karen.”

“Why? Because we got a letter from some crazy woman in Brazil who nobody’s allowed to talk to? I need more than that. This is the worst thing that’s ever going to happen to me. It’s the worst thing that’s going to happen to my boys ever in their entire lives, and I’m supposed to take a stranger’s word on it?”

There had to be an equation for probability and proof. At some point probability becomes so great it eclipses the need for proof, although maybe not if it was your husband. “Mr. Fox is going to send someone down there. They’re going to find out what happened.”

“But say he’s not dead. I know you don’t believe it but just say. Say that he’s sick and he needs me to come and find him. In that case there isn’t any time to wait for Mr. Fox to reassemble his committee to find someone else to send to Brazil who has no idea what he’s doing.”

Slowly Marina’s sight adjusted to the darkness. She could make out the shapes in her bedroom, the dresser, the lamp. “I’ll talk to him. I promise. I’ll make sure he gets this done right.”

“I’m going to go down there,” Karen said.

“No, you’re not.” It was all a form of shock, Marina understood that. Maybe tomorrow Karen wouldn’t remember this conversation at all.

The phone was quiet for a long time. “I would,” she said. “I swear to God if it wasn’t for the boys.”

“Look,” Marina said, “this isn’t something that any of us can figure out now. You’ve got to get some rest. We have to give Mr. Fox a chance to find out what he can.”

“I gave Mr. Fox everything I’ve got,” she said.

That afternoon Marina had thought that Karen would never speak to her again, that she would always blame her for bearing the news. The fact that she was the person Karen Eckman called in the middle of the night felt something like forgiveness, and for that forgiveness she was deeply grateful. “What time did you take the sleeping pill?”

Marina waited. She watched the glowing second hand pass the three, the six, the nine.

“Karen?”

“You could go.”

So now Marina understood what this conversation was about. When Karen said it, a picture of Anders came very clearly into Marina’s mind: his back was against an impenetrable bank of leaves, his feet in the water. He was holding a letter. He was looking down river for the boy in the dugout log. He was dead. Marina might not have a great deal of faith in Dr. Swenson but Dr. Swenson wasn’t the sort to announce a death where no death had occurred, that would constitute a frivolous waste of time. “You’re the second person to tell me that tonight.”

“Anders said you knew her. He said she was a teacher of yours.”

“She was,” Marina said, not wanting to explain. Marina was from Minnesota. No one ever believed that. At the point when she could have taken a job anywhere she came back because she loved it here. This landscape was the one she understood, all prairie and sky. She and Anders had that in common.

“I know how much I’m asking,” Karen said. “And I know how terrible you feel about Anders and about me and the boys. I know that I’m using all of it against you and how unfair it is and I still want you to go.”

“I understand.”

“I know you understand,” Karen said. “But will you go?”

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.