State of Wonder by Ann Patchett Read Free Book Online Page A

stacked halfway to the elbow and anklets covered in tiny bells, earrings that function as wind chimes. Sometimes when the masses shift her feet are lifted from the ground and for a moment she is held a few inches aloft, a small weight distributed over various points on other people’s bodies as she drags behind her father like a low kite. She feels her shoe knocked loose from her foot and she calls for her father to stop, but he doesn’t hear her over the roar of voices. She can still see the little shoe flashing yellow on the hard packed ground not two steps behind them in the crowd. It is perfectly still, untrampled, and though she knows she isn’t supposed to, she lets go of her father’s hand. She dives for her shoe but the crowd has already swallowed it, and as quickly as she turns back the crowd has swallowed her father as well. She calls for him, Papi! Papi! but the ringing of bells, the calling and crying of beggars, has taken the sound from her mouth. She doesn’t know if he even realizes she’s gone. Some other child could have attached himself to her father’s hand when she fell off, in India the children are very fast. And then Marina is alone somewhere in the sea of Calcutta, folded inside the human current of chattering Hindi which she does not understand, her body swept along while she cries, at which point she would wake up sweating, nauseated, her black hair soaked to the skull. She would run down the hall to her mother’s room, throw herself into her mother’s bed, crying, “Don’t make me go!”
    Her mother took her up in her arms, put a cool hand on her forehead. She asked her what the dream was about but Marina always said she couldn’t remember, something awful. She did remember, but wouldn’t speak it for fear the words would somehow cement the images into reality. From then on she had the dream every night: she had it on the plane going over to Calcutta and woke up screaming. She had it in the flat her father rented for her and her mother not far from his office at the college so that they would not disturb his second wife, his second children. They were separated getting onto a bus, her father let her go while they were swimming in the sea at a crowded beach. After so many dreams that were so much alike she became terrified of sleep. She was terrified the whole time they were in India, so much so that at the end of every trip both of her parents agreed that it might all be too much for her. Marina’s father said he would try to come to Minnesota more often, but that was never practical. Once they were back at home, after a week or two, the crowds that haunted her sleep would begin to dissipate, thin into smaller groups, and then break apart altogether. Slowly, Marina would forget them, and then her mother would forget, and within a year it would once again be decided that she was a much bigger girl now and maybe they should start thinking about a trip to India sometime in the future.
    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