“I never hate you,” she said. She must have her eyes closed, I thought. I pictured her in her house, in her kitchen with garlic hung above the sink, the dishrag printed with little pigs. I pictured her dark hair, now cut short. Her face that had grown pointier and more feral and even more beautiful as she had gotten older. I closed my own eyes tighter.
“You hated me when we left the farm,” I said.
“No, not hate.” She sighed. “I was disappointed. But you did what you were going to do, you know? You were a Lucas being a Lucas. You didn’t like that place. I was foolish to think you would, but I was a young girl and I didn’t understand people then. I didn’t understand things seemed so different to different people. I thought you and I were the same person. But it turned out better, don’t you think, Lucas? You were right. We couldn’t have stayed there.”
“Do you ever think about Chloe?” I asked.
“Chloe? Who is Chloe?”
“The girl on the farm.”
“Oh,” Katya said, “I had forgotten her. You still think about that girl?”
“All the time,” I said. A breeze was drifting into Vera’s room through the open window that I had failed to close after pulling her back into the room. I had not told Kat that Vera had tried to escape by climbing out onto the roof. I had not told Kat about the moment I had Vera in my arms, but knew I wouldn’t be able to keep her from falling if she slipped. “I wonder how she is. If she stayed there, or where she wound up. If she ever got to go home. She kept saying she missed her mom, and I’ve always wondered about her mom, and about what made her run away from home in the first place.”
“You worry too much about such things,” Kat said.
“Probably.”
“I never hated you. Who could hate you, Lucas? You are too full of light.”
“I always felt guilty. I left you stuck with all the responsibility. The guy always gets away scot-free, the girl has to raise a baby. It’s not fair. I got to go to college, I got to—”
Katya laughed. “No, Lucas. You got nothing. I never thought that, that I was stuck with her. You would send me these desperate letters, and it was so clear you had nothing. I had everything. I had her.”
I opened my eyes. I was looking at a jumbled pile of Vera’s clothes. I saw the pretty purple sundress I had bought her.
“But you are a very good person, Lucas,” she went on. “You don’t have even an ounce of meanness in you. Your whole life, I am willing to bet there is not one single person who hated you. Sure, I was mad at you because you didn’t do what I wanted you to do. But you are really a very good person. The joke is on you if you don’t already know that.”
The joke was on me. That phrase kept coming back to me as I walked to the hospital, as I climbed the steps past a melty bronze statue, as I waited in the waiting room to be taken to Vera. I was impatient to see her. I had brought a notebook in which I had written down all of Katya’s questions and where I could take down everything the doctors said. I also brought a slice of chocolate cake and a plate of cabbage rolls from a bakery/cafeteria thing I found on the way, as well as some clothes for her to wear, casual things, jeans, T-shirts, some frighteningly skimpy underwear that appeared to be the only kind of underwear she owned. I didn’t bring her any books or her laptop. The hospital, when I called to check that I had the visiting hours right, had said that I could bring books, just not the laptop, but I didn’t think it was a good idea.
But when I got to the ward, they wouldn’t let me see her. At first I couldn’t get anyone who spoke English, but after a while they found someone for me.
“She is too agitated for visitors right now,” the nurse said.
“But I’m her father,” I said.
“She can’t have any visitors,” the nurse said again. She was a blonde in her forties with a wide, practical mouth. She’d had to deal with family members like me a thousand times, her look said. “Right now she is very agitated and she is in the quiet room.”
“She’s in isolation?” I asked. I imagined the quiet room as the padded cell so often depicted in movies, Vera straitjacketed and flailing. Last night she had been so calm, it was hard for me to understand why she needed to be locked up by herself. What had they done to her?
“Someone checks on her every fifteen minutes or so,” the nurse said.
“But you’re saying I can’t even see her. I can’t even visually ascertain that she is actually here?” I had made a horrible mistake. I should never have left her here. These people were not to be trusted. They were holding her hostage, practically. “Can I at least look at her? Can I just watch her through a window or something?”
“As I said, she is too agitated.” The nurse was clearly getting irritated with me. Her English was really very good. It was weird that my brain could register being impressed by her at the same time as I was starting to get really and truly frantic.
“Can I speak with a doctor?” I asked. “I need to speak to a doctor.”
“It’s the weekend,” the nurse said, “so we don’t have much staff on, but I will see what I can do. Maybe I can find a doctor to talk to you.”
“Maybe you better,” I said, in a tone that was so childish and impotent that I was immediately embarrassed for myself. The nurse just stared at me for a beat and then sighed.
She left me in the waiting room for a long time, and I sat, awkwardly cradling my sweaty paper bag of cabbage rolls and chocolate cake, the duffel of Vera’s clothes at my feet. There were surprisingly good oil paintings on the walls. But then, it seemed painters were abundant in Vilnius. You could buy an oil painting for thirty bucks off a blanket on Gedimino prospektas. Art was easy here. Alcohol was ink.
—
It was a different doctor than last night, not the tall, bald man with the shiny pate, but a woman in her early fifties with dark hair in a braid. She was short and trim, almost girlish, and she bounced on little leather loafers as she led me to her office. In American hospitals, mental or otherwise, my consults with doctors had usually taken place in hallways, waiting rooms, or at the foot of the patient’s bed. Grandma Sylvia’s death, a protracted process, had been full of such conversations, my mother and some doctor in a hallway, as I sat on the floor, leaning against a wall, reading a sci-fi novel.
But here I was led to an actual office, filled with books and simple furniture, an academic’s office. It reminded me of my own office at Orange Coast College. But the doctor had very little information. She had diagnosed Vera as bipolar I. They had not yet contacted her doctor in the States because such contact had to be made through written official correspondence. She listed Vera’s medications and their dosages, and I wrote them down studiously in my notebook, as well as the doctor’s name, which I had her spell for me twice but which I was still pretty sure I had gotten wrong. All of this was attended by a peculiar physical sensation that my chair was slowly sinking into the floor as though into sand.
“Why is she in solitary?” I asked.
“Sometimes when a patient is first admitted with acute mania, the drugs that block the production of dopamine initially cause the brain to go into overdrive producing more and more dopamine to try to fix the blockade. This can result in an intensification of the existing mania, and in your daughter’s case, very acute psychosis.”
I stared at the doctor. It appeared that what she was saying was that the drugs they had given Vera had actually made her worse. I almost wanted to laugh, it was so awful. “What did she do, though? Surely she must have done something?”
“I wasn’t on duty at the time, I only got here in the morning, but my understanding is that she removed her pajamas and she entered the rooms of other patients naked and was trying to wake them up and assemble them so she could…give a kind of sermon, or a speech.”