You will never know how much I love you, Mama.
Yours,
V
~ ~ ~
IT WASN’T UNTIL VERA WAS STABLE and I was beginning to go slightly stir-crazy, about six days after Katya arrived in Vilnius, that it occurred to me to wonder whether Vera had been deleting documents as well as e-mails. Already feeling slightly ill, I logged on to her laptop again. Sure enough, her trash bin was full, full of strange poetry, full of rants, full of letters she had been drafting but never sent. I read some of it, then decided not to continue. These letters were not mine to be reading.
I don’t know why, but I think part of me hoped that Katya and I would sleep together when she came to Vilnius. It was by no means a conscious desire. But that first night, when I showed her to our apartment and we each retired to our separate rooms, me in mine, she in Vera’s, I couldn’t sleep for fantasizing that she would softly knock at my door.
But there was no knock.
In the morning, I woke before her and made coffee and when she finally emerged, she had big creases in her cheek from the pillow and she smelled distinctly of sleep, an intimate smell, not a bad one by any means but also one I was not familiar with, that felt foreign to me and made me understand in a new way that I had been mistaken. Katya did not belong to me. I did not know how she smelled. Her body was not mine to explore or to clasp in the night. She was her own sleepy, pink-cheeked animal, sitting there at the table, waiting for coffee.
“Would you like to take a shower?” I asked. “Or we could go to a café?” It was difficult not to go into hospitality mode. It was difficult not to want to show off the city. Without quite realizing it, I had fallen in love with Vilnius. I wanted to take her to the Belgian restaurant that was the first floor of our building. I wanted to take her on a walk down to Gedimino prospektas and show her the store with the good amber and the Soviet war trinkets, and wooden kitchen implements, and paintings set out on blankets. I wanted to show her Užupis and explain about the empty plinths and about Frank Zappa and see if she thought that was funny. But she wasn’t here to see the city, she was here to see our daughter.
The visit to the hospital with her the previous day had been surreal. We had just missed visiting hours, but the word mother seemed to be some kind of secret pass code, and we were taken up to see Vera directly. Maybe it was just because they were anxious about not having noticed the hives. Or maybe it was because Katya made all of her demands in a Russian that I could hear in an instant was more fluent and authoritative than Vera’s. But the nurses and orderlies and doctors all bowed and scraped to Kat in a way that seemed both baffling and unfair.
Vera was in her room, and the hives were gone now. She did not seem to be having another bout of psychosis, if anything she seemed much more heavily sedated than I had ever seen her. She didn’t say a word when Katya entered the room, and evidently Kat didn’t need her to. She simply went over to the bed and sat on the edge of it, looking into Vera’s face for a long time, holding her hand. Finally, she turned to me and said, “I need you to go out and buy some expensive luxury shampoo and conditioner. Lotion. Body wash. Things that smell really nice. And a new nightgown. And some sweatpants or yoga pants and a top. Something like loungewear. And a brush. Her hair is tangled.”
I went and bought everything she told me. When I returned with it, she already had Vera in a hot shower, and I handed her the bag of bath products in the steamy bathroom, feeling awkward that I would accidentally catch a glimpse of Vera naked. After the shower, Vera emerged wrapped in a fleece robe I had bought from the same store I bought the nightgown. She sat obediently on the bed as Katya got behind her and began to brush and comb out her hair. They did not speak while they did this. For most of it, Vera kept her eyes closed. But I could almost see the love seeping into her. It was a shimmer, like heat rising off a road, between Katya and Vera, that mother love.
I didn’t feel jealous or left out. Somehow, I felt that I was necessary, too. A kind of sentinel or guard, watching over them. Keeping the room safe and quiet so that this ritual could be carried out.
When Vera’s hair was completely detangled and then pulled back in a long, ornate-looking braid that glistened like a wet, black snake, Katya got off the bed, kissed Vera on the forehead, and told her we would be back tomorrow.
It wasn’t until we got out on the sidewalk that Kat started crying. I tried to take her in my arms, to hold her, but she swatted me away and crouched, bent over her thighs, tears streaming down her face, gasping for breath. Eventually she got herself under control, straightened, and we walked back to the apartment.
In our strange way, we made a good team.
As the days passed, we fell into a routine. In the morning, we would go out for breakfast and drink coffee at a café that had Wi-Fi. I would read the news on my phone, she would read a book on her Kindle. Then we would decide on some new delicacy to bring Vera in the hospital. Shopping for this was the main event of the morning. One day we brought chocolates, another day we brought preserved artichoke hearts. When Vera asked for cigarettes, Katya started bringing her those too.
“She’s in a mental hospital in Eastern Europe,” she said, when I voiced my tenuous objection. “If there is one time in her life when it is appropriate to take up smoking, this is it.”
Then we would visit her during visiting hours. On the new medication, the hives had subsided, but her face was still very swollen. She was almost unrecognizable and it hurt to look at her. We chatted about lots of things. The other patients. The nurses. One girl in the ward thought she was a vampire and had bit off the tip of her finger and spit it at Vera, whose only droll commentary was that to her knowledge real vampires didn’t try to feed off their own hands. We avoided talking about the future, about when she would be released and when we would get home and what would happen then.
College would probably have to be delayed, but I tried to reassure myself that the delay would be only temporary. She was so smart. Her mind was so supple and wicked and quick. She would have been a delight to teach. Vera deserved to go to university. She deserved to be put through her paces and challenged and changed.
But it was impossible to know how functional she would ever be. There was no road map. The other people with bipolar in her group therapy back home had been almost universally unmarried, still living with their parents and making do with government assistance. None of them had jobs of even the most trivial sort. Surely there were people with bipolar who were higher functioning, but they were harder to find. There was enough stigma against mental illness that they kept their diagnosis a secret and just went on with their lives. I knew they existed because occasionally one of them would write an inspiring blog post or article online, but it was still hard to believe in them. Had they ever really had bipolar to begin with? What if they had only been misdiagnosed and their “recovery” was no recovery at all? And just because people could write a cogent blog post and claim they were employed didn’t necessarily mean they were well.
I thought about all of this constantly, and I am guessing Vera and Kat did too, but we didn’t talk about it. After visiting hours were over, Katya and I would get lunch somewhere and then take a walk through the city. Sometimes I would take her to a place Darius had shown us. Sometimes we wandered into parts of the city I had never seen before. To my knowledge, Katya had never been to Europe, had never even left the States, at least not since she had first come to America when she was seven. But if she was impressed by Vilnius, if she found it soothing or stimulating to hear Russian on the streets, she didn’t say. She played things much closer to the vest, now that she was older.