Certain things I could tell she liked. The food, for instance. She was constantly in rapture with the food. “They have good pickles here!” she said, delighted. Once, in a café, she ordered a hot chocolate and was astounded to discover that it was not a drink like in America but a dessert, a little demitasse of molten chocolate served with a tiny golden spoon. She split it with me as we sat in the hot sun, sweating. A pair of wasps had gotten inside the sugar dispenser on our table and were rolling in the sticky white grains in ecstasy. We were trying to waste the afternoon. We were always trying to waste the afternoon. After the switch to her new medication and the lack of any psychosis, we assumed Vera would be released fairly quickly, but her doctors seemed reluctant. “Let’s see how she is tomorrow,” they kept saying. And we let them. Vera was still completely zombified. If they had released her, we would have been terrified. It did not seem advisable to take her on a plane. I couldn’t even imagine her managing the cacophony of being on a busy street or sitting in a café. She was an indoor creature now, a quiet being of blankets and showers. We were content to wait. We would see how she was tomorrow.
“What do you want to do next?” Katya asked me, scraping up the last of the chocolate with the tiny golden spoon.
“I kind of want to go to the Holocaust museum,” I said. “I skipped out on it when we were on the tour. I feel like — I feel like I should go before we leave.”
“Okay,” she said.
“You would go with me?”
“Of course I will go with you,” she said.
And she did. She held my hand as we wandered through the tiny museum, more like a house than an official type of building. The exhibits were plain and rather homemade-looking. There were maps of the various work and death camps in Lithuania and in Poland. There were lists of names: of victims, of survivors, of those who had tried to help. There were pictures of the bodies in the pits. I had not been expecting that. I did not know there were photographs. I let myself look and look and look. And I let myself understand that it was real. That it had all actually happened. I could see children among the naked bodies in the pits. I cried, and Katya held my hand and didn’t try to stop me or comfort me or force me to be presentable. She seemed to know that this was what I had come here to do and that it was better to just let me do it.
—
And then one day, they said that Vera could be released. It was like coming up to the surface of the water when you have almost drowned. I think we both literally sputtered in the doctor’s office as she told us, breathless with our own reanimation. There was so much to do. We had to call the airline. We had to pay the woman for the apartment. We had to pack.
All afternoon, Katya and I worked in a frenzy. At the apartment, she called the airlines on her phone, fuck the charges; I called my mother on my phone, fuck the charges. I sat, hunched on my bed, listening to Katya’s strident Russian through the wall, as the line rang.
I had let my mother know what was going on in the flurry of phone calls and canceled plane flights right after Vera’s episode, but because talking on the phone was so expensive, I hadn’t talked to her since, and in all the upset over the Vera situation, I still hadn’t managed to tell her about Agata or Herkus, or the red farmhouse outside of Vilnius with grass on the roof. When she picked up, I explained we were finally coming home and gave her all the latest on Vera’s condition. I told her I would e-mail her our flight information as soon as Katya had it pinned down.
“And there’s more I have to tell you,” I said. Because it was beginning to be awkward and monstrous to have not told her about her own sister. So I told her. But something happened when I confessed about Herkus and Agata, a weird kind of logorrhea that I couldn’t stop. I just went on and on.
“And it was really beautiful. A little girl put a pink sash on her and everyone sang, and there were all these little kids everywhere. It was such a beautiful day and I just wished you could have been there, but then Vera told me that Herkus had left his wife and three kids for this other, younger woman, the genealogist actually, and I just — I feel gross about it. He even called me because I guess he got word about Vera from the program, through Justine or whatever, but I never returned his call. He was just so drunk and I felt like — of course, of course, he’s a drunk loser just like me!”
“Oh, Lucas,” she said, and her voice was filled with tenderness. My mother was not always tender. She could be abrasive and cold and arch. She could be anything at all, anything the moment called for. But when she was tender, there was no one more tender in the world.
“And I never told you this,” I said, “but when I was living in New York, I found my father.” The whole story spilled out of me. Our first meeting. Our mutual love of The Tempest. The nasty things he had said about her. Everything, even the tape of himself as Iago that he had given me as a Christmas present.
“You poor boy,” my mother said. “I’m so sorry you had to find out like that. I should have told you he was a real shit. I just didn’t want to talk bad about him to you. I wanted you to imagine any kind of father you wanted for yourself, you know? You used to say so proudly to the other kids in school that your father was a famous actor. And I was always like, what am I? Chopped liver? But still. I wanted you to get to keep that.”
I laughed a little, not because this was funny but because I was relieved that I wasn’t going to cry.
“I just hate that I’m related to him,” I said.
“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t bother being upset with things you can’t change.”
“But all the really upsetting things are things you can’t change!” I said, almost shouting in a kind of play anger.
She laughed. “Well, that’s certainly true.”
We didn’t say anything, and then she made a little noise in her throat. “Lucas, Lucas, Lucas, my boy. I love you so much. I wish I could take all the hurt in the universe and swallow it so that there was nothing left for you to find, no single crumb of evil in the whole universe, and you could wander around just happy.”
“Yeah, but I’m a grown-ass man, Mom. I’m supposed to deal with shit.”
“I know,” she said, “but every mother feels that way.”
—
After Vera was discharged, and her bills were all paid, a minor nightmare in itself since we did not have Lithuanian insurance, everything returned suddenly to normal, or to some slow dreamlike facsimile of normal. She spent that night at the apartment, sharing a bed with Kat, and the next day we took a cab to the airport after ceremoniously placing the cat on the roof outside the window and shutting it one last time. At the airport before our flight, we were all three exhausted but weirdly lighthearted. We were happy to be released, just to be in an airport. Vera asked if she could buy a Russian Vogue from the newsstand, and I was overjoyed to say yes, happy to see the greedy way she read it, devouring the images of strange-looking women in bizarre clothing. Katya ate a little packet of sunflower seeds in a way that was hilariously disgusting. The flight to Helsinki was uneventful.
On the flight back to America, I had been sleeping when something, I didn’t know what, woke me up. Vera was beside me, her black eyes open in the dim light of the cabin, though she sat still and seemed to be looking at nothing in particular. On the other side of her, Katya was asleep, her head pressed against the shuttered window.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
“Am I going to have a life?” Vera asked. “Those people in my group therapy — they’re — they can’t even hold jobs. No one will marry them. Am I going to be like that?”