State of Wonder - Ann Patchett [26]
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.
“I think you were having a dream.” The flight attendant pulled back, giving Marina a bigger picture. How early must she have gotten up this morning in order to put on that much mascara? “Would you like a glass of water?”
Marina nodded. The trick of Lariam was to figure out which part was the dream and which part was her waking life: Vogel she knew, Anders and the lab. It was the plane that smacked of nightmares.
“I don’t like to fly myself,” the suited man told her and held up his Bloody Mary. “I medicate.”
“I don’t mind flying,” Marina said. There was something she had meant to tell Anders.
“It certainly seemed like you mind it,” the man said. Maybe he was concerned, or bored, or inappropriately friendly, or midwestern friendly. Nothing was clear. She took the glass of water that was handed to her and drank it down.
“I have bad dreams,” Marina said, and then she added, “on planes. I won’t fall asleep again.”
The man looked at her skeptically. After all, they were in this together now, seatmates. “Well, if you do, should I wake you up or just let you go?”
Marina thought about it. Either way it was a loss. She didn’t want to scream in front of him and she didn’t want him shaking her arm either. The intimacy of sleeping next to strangers, much less twitching and making noises, was unbearable. “Let me go,” she said, and turned her shoulders away from him.
She had been going to tell Anders about Dr. Swenson. It was a funny business, the subconscious mind, thinking that it could rewrite history. It would never have occurred to her to tell him what had happened when he was alive, and now that he was dead she was certain she should have. The great, lumbering guilt that slept inside of her at every moment of her life had shifted, stretched. Wasn’t it logical that guilt should awaken guilt? Marina Singh had had an accident a long time ago, and after that she had removed herself from the obstetrics and gynecology program. She had never told her mother, who thought that her daughter had had an illogical change of heart late in her training, or Mr. Fox, who never knew her to be anything other than a pharmacologist. The people who did know the details of what had happened, Josh Su, the friends she had at the time, one by one she found a way not to know them anymore. She no longer knew Dr. Swenson. With a great deal of concentrated effort she had found the means to stop repeating the story to herself. She no longer traced the events through the map of her memory, studying the various places where she had been free to make different choices.
Marina Singh had been the chief resident and Dr. Swenson was the attending. On this particular night, or as the review board had called it, the night in question, she was working at the County Receiving