State of Wonder - Ann Patchett [17]
Was it possible that no one had troubled themselves to read the voluminous side effects of the Lariam? Marina liked to think she would have figured out the puzzle herself if her father hadn’t died when she was in college. At that point she hadn’t been back to Calcutta in three years. Had he lived and she had gone again, she would have been old enough to look into the medication herself, although it was true that a patient was less likely to question a set of symptoms she had always accepted. She had grown up believing that India gave her nightmares, seeing her father gave her nightmares, when all along it was the antimalarial. The drug, not the circumstances of her life, destroyed her chance to be with her father.
“Of course I knew it was the Lariam,” her mother said over the phone. “Your father and I were always worrying about it. You had such a terrible reaction.”
“Then why didn’t you tell me what it was?” Marina said.
“You don’t tell a five-year-old they’re going to have bad dreams. That’s like giving them an invitation to have more.”
“A five-year-old,” she said, “I’ll grant you that. But you could have explained it to me when I was ten, at least when I was fifteen.”
“I couldn’t tell you anything when you were fifteen. If I’d told you it was the pills that gave you nightmares you wouldn’t have
taken them.”
“Would that have been the end of the world?”
“If you had gotten malaria in India then, yes, I suppose it would have been. The end of the world had it killed you. I’m surprised this is still a problem. I would have thought they would have come up with a better drug to take by now.”
“They have and they haven’t. The new ones don’t make you so crazy but they also don’t protect from all the different strains of malaria.”
“So why in the world are you taking Lariam again?” her mother asked. It was the most important question and yet it only now seemed to have occurred to her. “Are you going back to India?”
What was so interesting about the nightmares now was the extent to which nothing much in them had changed. At forty-two she was still holding her father’s hand, the people around them rose up like a tide and she was then forced to let him go. It had never actually happened, this physical wrenching apart, and still her subconscious clung to the fear. Things that had happened to Marina, the memories she saw as the logical candidates for nightmares, never entered her sleeping life, and she supposed that for this she should be grateful. In her own home she got up and turned the lights on in the bathroom. Her hands were shaking and she ran a wet washcloth over her face and neck, careful not to look at herself in the mirror. It was surprising to discover that understanding the origin of her dreams offered her exactly no comfort at two in the morning. In fact, all she could think of now was her doctor’s careless admonition that she might want to jump off a roof. Her deepest fear, her father’s hand slipping from her hand, had held steady even when it was kept undisturbed in a pharmacy without her for twenty-five years.
“What about the funeral?” Marina asked Karen Eckman. They hadn’t seen each other all week, not since Marina had come with Mr. Fox on the day of the heavy snow. Now that she was leaving in the morning, both of the women thought it was important to say goodbye, though for different reasons. Marina wanted to see if Karen had given up on the idea that Anders might still be alive now that she’d had some days to sit with his death. Karen wanted to make sure Marina wasn’t thinking of backing out.
It was after dinner when Marina came by and the lengthening day had just gone dark. The boys had brushed their teeth and were watching television in the den. They were now allowed a show before bedtime every night, a childhood luxury previously restricted to weekends. Marina said hello to them when she first came in and they barely turned their heads towards her, the youngest two muttering hello in low unison when their mother insisted,