“My poor baby,” Katya said, and insisted the cab drop us off not at the apartment but at the hospital, bags and all. “You will carry them,” she told me. “Who pays him?” she asked. “This guy?” She jerked her thumb at Johnny Depp.
“How much was the trip?” I asked.
“Forget it,” Johnny Depp said. “The program will cover it.”
“No,” I said, “I insist. This is beyond anything the program should cover.”
Johnny Depp took off his sunglasses and his eyes were soft. “I’m really sorry that this is happening to Vera,” he said. “I don’t think I realized the full extent of things when you told me on the phone. We’ve got the apartment booked for another week for you, but please know, if there is anything that I can do, or that the program can do for you, we are more than happy to. Just call.”
I shook his hand. I wondered if he would ask Rūta to marry him. Probably he wouldn’t. I didn’t think I had the power to single-handedly change his mind, by any means. And yet. He pushed his floppy hair back out of his eyes with his other hand and gave me a weird salute.
And I followed Katya into the mental hospital, dragging her huge rolling suitcase behind me.
Chapter 15
“Dear Mother” Word doc Created by User on 7/18 Deleted by User on 7/18
Dear Mother,
I already know that I am not going to send you this letter. Some communications must take place outside of time. Some of the things we have to say to each other would break our voices if we tried to say them, or would make the ears of our listeners leak dark blood. What I have to say to you is something that probably cannot even be contained in words, though if it can be captured at all, it can only be fleetingly embraced by the curves of the letters of an electronic document that will never be sent and will most likely be immediately deleted. Like electrons aware of being observed, the truth will pretend to be something more sensible if it is aware you are looking at it. But when the truth is all by itself, it is chaotic and manifold.
It wounds me deeply that you do not believe I am well. That when Papa called you and told you about the acid, you were so unmoved. Weren’t you even a tiny bit hopeful? Don’t you want me to be well?
And yet, I know I am not well. It is not my wellness that I wish to argue over. It is that my reality has never truly mattered to you. You have been so uncurious. Your irony has been a thick protective coating keeping you from the world, from me, from any true confrontation with yourself. The character of my delusions matters to you as little as the character of my thoughts. All of it is discounted, as though I were happening in another world that is not entirely real to you.
I know and understand all of the reasons you could not be with my father. I can see your side of things completely. But did you ever stop to wonder what I would have wanted? What would have been best for me? I do not think you ever did. How could you think that nothing was better than something? Do you remember how I would throw fits in the car and refuse to get out, demanding that you find him for me, that you take me to him? Do you remember how I cried and cried, asking why he didn’t want me?
You always said Dedushka Pavel was more of an American than you were, and you would say this with such pride. You came to this country when you were seven! You are American! Certainly you are not Russian or at least not as Russian as you think, though I know that part of the reason you stay with Misha is because he came later when he was a teenager, and so he lends credibility to your narrative: the émigré fantasy. Everything is framed for you by how conflicted you feel simply to be existing. Your feelings are of immense importance to you. Nothing is as real as your feelings: not facts, not truths, not even the existence of other people with their distinct points of view. Sometimes I imagine that being you is like being a fly, where the world can only be seen in fragments by your giant compound eye which turns everything into a peculiar reflection or distortion of your own pretty face.
And on the other hand: your pretty face. If you knew how much I missed you, it would break your heart. How much I long for the intimacy we shared when I was a child. You would let me sleep in your bed, the two of us in T-shirts and underwear. I remember exactly the warmth of your skin, the smell of the bed, the slithering sound of your hair on the pillowcase. Back then you had that brown duvet with the feather patterns on it that was impossibly soft. You threw it away because it got moth holes, I think, but it was the best duvet cover in the history of the world, and every time I see a bed, what I think about is how inferior the duvet cover is compared with that duvet cover.
I loved living with Dedushka and Babushka. I loved the raisin-bread French toast that Babulya would make me that she would spread with cream cheese instead of syrup. I know you always hated Babulya, you thought she was cloying and annoying. But I loved how completely she loved me. I was addicted to that warmth. Things were always the same with Babulya. She was always interested in my homework and willing to make me a snack.
I know you didn’t see her that way. For you she was still the pushy stage mother who wanted you to be a star, who wanted you to be in that McDonald’s commercial where the guy was a total asshole, who wanted the world to admire you even more than she wanted you to be happy. I know, and I can see your side. But my side of it is that I adored her.
I can see why you couldn’t bear to contact my dad. I can see why you kept him at a distance. I can see why you hated him, and I can even see why you hated the parts of him you saw in me. Traces of the enemy in my genes. But my side of it is that I kind of like him. And I see what you liked in him. And I think you were kind of a shit to him. And I wonder what would have happened if you had been brave enough to try to love him.
Is it so hard to try to love people? I feel like you always give up too soon. But we are worth loving, all of us, even though you are also right: We are ruined. There is something terrible about each of us. Dedushka, Babushka, me, Lucas. You are terrible too, you know. You are. And it is your terribleness that makes me love you so violently, Mama. It was the times you were kind of shitty to me that make me love you all the more.
You would get so angry at me, you would have to leave, shaking, and take Babushka’s car and go on one of your drives. I asked you once what you did on your drives and you said you listened to Leonard Cohen and pretended that all of us were dead. That we had all died in a horrendous car crash and you had been left completely alone.
You must have felt so suffocated by us, Mama.
Or do you refuse to love us because you worry that none of us love you? Is it the weight of trying to guess what all of us are thinking that makes you wake up in the middle of the night, out of breath, and go to the mirror to sit and brush your hair, unaware that your small daughter has woken up and is watching you in the darkness as the brush makes its pass, again and again, over the black river of hair? That sound, the sound of hair being brushed in the dark, is the sound of all sadness and terror to me. You never smiled at yourself in the mirror, only stared.
Who are you, Mama? Will I ever know?
Maybe I am not permitted to truly know you. Maybe it is enough that I was born out of your body, that I suckled at your breasts, that I slept night after night in your bed. Even if I hardly know you, it is possible I know you better than anyone in the world. And that makes my heart absolutely break for you.