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By Root 804 0

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.