I nodded. I thought of the video Fang had shown me of Vera naked, claiming to be God’s daughter. I thought of the way she had talked to me and Daniel, oratorical, unstoppable, her knife almost an afterthought, a kind of shiny, dangerous conductor’s baton. I understood suddenly that even if this place was stupid, even if their medication didn’t work, even if they kept Vera in padded cells and refused to let me see her, I still had no choice but to put her here. Because I didn’t know how to take care of her on my own. My mouth was incredibly dry.
“When will I be able to see her?” I asked.
“It could be hours, it could be days.”
—
I left the duffel of Vera’s clothes with an orderly and threw away the chocolate cake and cabbage rolls in a trash can on the street. I had nowhere to go, but I found the idea of returning to the apartment repugnant. I began walking, and walking felt like the answer, felt like the only thing that could help me, and so I just kept doing it.
It turned out that you could traverse pretty much the entire old town of Vilnius in a big triangle, simply by making lefts on the three main drags, so I did this for maybe three hours. At times I stopped and bought coffee. Once I bought a cinnamon bun that I immediately threw away. I bummed a cigarette from an old man. That seemed to help. I walked until the balls of my feet were on fire and I had blisters on my heels.
On Gedimino prospektas there was a small museum, a portrait gallery, and I paid thirty litas to go inside. I wandered through the paintings. Most of them were of men, historically or locally significant men. They were fat and red-nosed and jowly, or else thin-necked and hollow-eyed, like mean turkeys. They all looked like alcoholics. They all looked incredibly sad. I kept picturing them as babies for some reason. They looked like babies holding broken toys, trying not to cry. One of the uncanny things about the actual experience of walking around Vilnius was that everyone looked the same. City of diversity though it was, Poles and Lithuanians and Russians and Belorussians looked remarkably alike. In the States, there were so many kinds of faces. In California, there were people from all over Asia, people from Mexico, people from Polynesia. Black people, white people, all colors and shades of brown people. But here, all of the people looked related, like one huge extended family. The men in these portraits could have been brothers or cousins. And they all looked like me.
Katya had called to accuse me of having the genes for mental illness on my side of the family because she knew about my father. She was the only one I had told. I had written her a letter, pouring out the whole truth at the end of that summer, and it was the only one she had responded to. “He sounds like a nut job,” she wrote. “Try to forget him.” At the time, I thought it was hilarious that Katya of all people would impugn someone else’s mental stability. She was herself such a nut. But the idea stuck with me. There was no proof that my father was actually mentally ill, but there were details that suggested it. When he had shown up to that “date” with my mother, he had been wearing a trench coat, and he kept asking her questions then scribbling her answers in a small notebook. She found out later he was also tape-recording all their conversations. Was he really mentally ill? I didn’t know. But I worried about it enough. Enough so that when Vera was first diagnosed, I felt guilty.
It was my greatest fear — that I was carrying his genes like undetonated grenades, and I had given them to Vera by mistake. Maybe that was why I had wanted to believe Herkus was the grandson of a Nazi. I wanted to believe there was someone who was more genetically tainted than myself. Or I wanted to believe that genetics didn’t matter, that even though my father was inside me, in every single cell of my body, he couldn’t touch me. He didn’t know me. He had nothing to do with my fate, with my life, with my choices. I had to believe that or else the quarantine that I had spent my life building against him would be for nothing.
I left the portrait gallery when I started to feel like I couldn’t breathe. Outside, it was bright and sunny. I realized I was in front of the jewelry shop where I had bought the amber necklace that I had given to Susan, and the guilt was immediate and lacerating. I had given Vera’s necklace to someone else. I had taken something special, and I had given it away like it didn’t matter. Obviously it was absurd to think Vera wouldn’t have had the episode if I had just given her the necklace, but I couldn’t shake the feeling. I went inside, determined to buy Vera something. It was the same woman who had helped me before. She had long curly hair and she wore glasses on a chain around her neck.
“Back again,” she observed, and I only murmured, not wanting to talk. I was scanning the cases and cases of jewelry, looking. I ran my fingers through some necklaces hanging on a stand on the countertop and they seemed too light, made of plastic. Was any of this amber even real? It all looked so cheap.
I left without buying anything. A blister had burst on my heel. The blood and fluid had stuck my sock to it. I walked quickly, finally understanding where I was going, where I had been trying to walk all along.
—
I banged on the door to Susan’s hotel room with my fist like I was in a rainstorm, waiting to be let in, but there was no answer. I don’t know why I had been so sure she would be in. Perhaps because I needed her to be. Feeling weirdly off script, I wandered back downstairs and was just about to leave when I saw her eating lunch in the hotel restaurant. When she saw me, she waved, delighted.
I sat down at her table. I felt like I was intruding into another world. She was wearing a white button-down shirt that seemed too white, impossibly white, and she was eating salmon carpaccio and drinking mineral water. Her skin was visibly moist and soft-looking, as though she had just applied lotion. The sun shone in her hair. I felt like a crusty monster and I had an instinct to hide my hands under the table even though they were perfectly clean.
“I’m so glad to see you,” she said. “I’ve been having the most gorgeous lunch and then what could be more perfect but that you show up! Order something. I’ll get you a menu.”
“I’m not really hungry,” I said. I would have preferred to have this conversation in her room. I felt exposed in the bright and airy restaurant.
“Is everything all right?” she asked, and I was grateful to be given such a clear cue to begin my narrative. I told her as best I could about the night before, about the situation with Vera, her episode earlier in the fall, all of the complicated reasons we had taken this trip together. She listened sympathetically, nodding, her brow knit. And the more she listened, the more I let the story pour out of me. The sense that there was something tainted in our very bloodline. My growing unease with Grandma Sylvia and who she may have been. What did it mean to escape with your life? What did it mean to live through all of that? Was it possible ever to heal?
“I just feel like an utter failure as a father,” I said, “and an utter failure as a human being.” My eyes were hot and stinging and I worried that soon I would begin openly weeping at her table.
She nodded, pressed her lips together. I waited, but she didn’t say anything. “I’m sorry,” I said, suddenly aware that something was wrong. “Should I not have told you that?”
“No,” Susan said. “No, I think it’s very natural that you would need to talk about all this. And it seems like you’ve had a very traumatic experience with your daughter. And I’m very sympathetic. I am.”
“I knew you would be,” I said. “I was just feeling so completely lost and adrift in this city. You know, when you’re in a strange place you don’t have any cues as to who you are, and I thought: Susan is the only person I really know here.”