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

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.
    “W hat 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, the eldest saying nothing at all. Mr. Fox had made a mistake in telling Marina that she had been the first choice to go find Dr. Swenson instead of Anders. She now saw the entire world in terms of alternate scenarios.
    “A memorial service. You call it a memorial service when you don’t have a body,” Karen said.
    “I’m sorry,” Marina said. “Memorial service.”
    Karen leaned around the open archway to the den. The boys in their sweatshirts and flannel pajama pants slumped into the endlessly long corduroy couch. The smallest, palest boy lay over Pickles like a rug. They were bound to the television screen as if by wires. “It’s amazing what they hear,” she said in a low voice. “They don’t even have to be listening but their ears just pick it up, then I put them to bed at night and one of them says, ‘When are we having the funeral for Daddy?’ ” Karen poured herself a glass