State of Wonder - Ann Patchett [29]
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