—
And then there was nothing to do but wade through the thick molasses hours until Katya would arrive in Vilnius. Her plane was scheduled to arrive the following morning. I had already called Johnny Depp and arranged for him to ride with me to the airport to fetch her. I was worried I wouldn’t be able to communicate with the cabby. I hadn’t quite been aware of how much I needed Vera’s Russian to get by, but now that she was in the hospital and the program was over, I didn’t hear English anywhere. It was like a curtain of incomprehensibility had come down all around me. It was hard to separate this from my emotional state.
I visited Vera in the hospital that day, only to discover that she had broken out in hives from one of her medications. They were unlike any hives I had ever seen. Pink welts the size of quarters covered her entire body, worst around her collarbones where they were a deep raspberry. Her eyes were almost swollen shut. She was just whimpering under the blankets in her room, unable to talk or answer my questions.
I lost it completely, storming around, yelling for a nurse, for an orderly, for a doctor, somebody who spoke English. It must have just happened because none of them knew about it yet, but in the moment it seemed like a sign of some dangerous and malevolent neglect. It was only when I saw how alarmed the nurses and doctors were, how they rushed to Vera with syringes of antihistamines, how they brought cold cloths for her eyes and helped me build a nest for her on the couch in the dayroom, that I calmed down. They weren’t trying to hurt her. They turned on the TV for us, brought her an apple juice. There was an episode of Friends on, dubbed in Lithuanian. We watched it together and by the end of it, the swelling had gone down enough for Vera to talk a little bit, and she said, “You don’t even need to know what they are saying for this show to be comforting.”
When visiting hours were over, no one asked me to leave, and I stayed for another two hours, just watching TV with her. I didn’t ask her about the dragon. I didn’t tell her I had read her e-mails and her computer files. I couldn’t see the point of it. For one thing, I knew her doctors wouldn’t want me dredging up her delusions, making them fresh in her mind. But that wasn’t really why I didn’t bring it up. It was that there was nothing she could say to explain to me. There was no piece of information I needed from her, or rather, the one piece of information I needed didn’t really exist. It was madness, and that was all.
When I left, I had a conference with the doctor on call. The hives had gone down, but since it seemed to be a reaction to her medication, she would have to switch, which meant she would have to stay for at least another several days.
“It might mean another round of psychosis,” he warned. “Probably not. But it isn’t out of the question.”
I nodded, helpless. What else could we do?
Katya, I thought, as I walked home in the bright, horrifying sunshine. Katya, come quickly.
—
The next morning, on the way to the airport to get Katya, I was as nervous as if I were taking her to the prom. I met Johnny Depp on the corner by our apartment where he was waiting with a cab. I suppose I had imagined us riding to the airport in silence. I really would have preferred to pretend he wasn’t there at all. But it became obvious right away that this was not going to be possible. He was in a chatty mood. He kept rubbing his hands up and down his slacks on the tops of his thighs as we made our way out of the city.
“How is Rūta?” I asked.
“Mad at me,” Johnny Depp said.
“What did you do?” I asked. I wasn’t worried about prying. He clearly wanted me to ask.
He paused for a minute, then said, “My Fulbright was over this spring. So I’m going back to the States at the end of the summer. And it turns out that all this time, she’s been waiting for me to ask her to marry me. To come with me to live in America.” He laughed a little, flashed a nervous smile with those glaringly white teeth.
“And you’re not going to ask her?”
“Not a chance.”
I thought about the beautiful Rūta in her orange knit dress with her familiarity with torture and her sweet laugh like wind chimes sounding. “Why not?” I asked.
“She has a kid,” he said, not looking at me, but out at the city we were slowly leaving behind.
I had not known that Rūta had a child. She seemed too young for children. Too beautiful and fresh. “How old?” I asked.
“A little boy. He’s six. I’m just not ready to be a father, if you know what I mean,” he said, and laughed again. “But he’s a great kid. It’s not that.”
“How long have you been together here?” I asked.
“Two years,” Johnny Depp said.
Of course Rūta had been thinking he would ask her to marry him. Of course it had never occurred to her that he could enter her life, playact Daddy to her child for two years, and then leave as though the whole thing were a lark.
“But, it’s like, she doesn’t get that where I am in my life, I don’t have a steady income — you know? I can’t just, like, get married.”
“Right,” I said.
“It’s not that simple,” he said.
“It is, though,” I said.
“What?”
I don’t think he had been expecting me to contradict him. I hadn’t been expecting myself to contradict him, either. We were out of the city now, on a narrow highway going through pine forest. There were no buildings or human habitation in sight.
“Do you love her?” I asked.
“Of course I love her,” he said.
I shrugged. “So marry her.”
“But I can’t do that,” he said.
“Sure you can. You can do whatever you want. It’s your life.”
He shook his head, perplexed that I was failing to understand his predicament. “But I can’t be responsible for her. I can’t, like, move her to a whole different country with her kid and take care of them. I don’t have any money!”
“You’d figure it out,” I said.
“It’s not that easy,” he said.
“No,” I agreed. “It wouldn’t be easy at all. It’s just that it’s that simple. But simple and easy are different.”
Johnny Depp said nothing. I had clearly pissed him off, and I was glad. Glad to have this opportunity to give Johnny Depp the gift of being contradicted. The airport came into view. “Whatever,” he said. “My life, so I guess I get to decide what I want to do with it.”
“I couldn’t agree more,” I said.
When we got to the airport, he volunteered to wait in the cab while I went inside to collect Katya. I was expecting to wait for a while, loitering outside of baggage claim, but her flight had gotten in early and she was sitting on top of her suitcase just inside the doors, eating an apple. I wondered for a moment where she had gotten it. Was it an apple she had brought with her? Was it an American apple? I don’t know why I found the idea of this so enchanting.
She got up and threw her arms around me. I don’t think she had hugged me since we were eighteen. Her arms, while thin, were surprisingly strong. “Come,” I said, letting her go. “I’ve got a cab.” I rolled her suitcase for her, and she followed me, wordlessly, as though this was something we did all the time. Before getting in the back of the cab, she tossed her apple core out onto the spotless pavement.
“Katya!” I said, aghast. It seemed perverse to me that she would assume she had the right to litter here in this strange country that she had only just arrived in.
“It’s for the birds,” she said, and waved me off. “How is she? Tell me everything.”
Probably it had been unwise to pick a fight with Johnny Depp on the way to the airport, as now it was awkward to talk to Katya freely with him listening, sullen and slumped in the front passenger seat, but the story itself eventually broke down my reserve and in the end I almost forgot he was there. Katya had been in the air for a full twenty-six hours, so I hadn’t gotten to tell her about the hives. “I don’t know what state she’ll be in when we see her,” I said, and relayed the doctor’s warning about the possibility of a return to psychosis.