“No,” I said, “of course not.”
“But Papa,” Vera said, “I’m really mentally ill. I really have that. I’m one of them.”
“I don’t know,” I said, rubbing my forehead. There was something creepy about the way Vera was talking, looking straight ahead of her in the darkness.
“I just keep thinking, why would God make me and then make me be ruined like that? What’s the point of making something that’s ruined?”
“I don’t know,” I said. The engines of the plane created such huge, engulfing white noise that I felt like I was going deaf, even though I could hear her perfectly. We were flying through space at five hundred miles per hour. It seemed impossible, but that was what was happening. I might throw up. I held my hand over my mouth and tried to breathe. It was the word ruined.
“Am I ruined?” Vera asked, turning to look at me. “I’m ruined!”
“No, you aren’t ruined,” I said. “You’re not.”
“The medicine makes my hair fall out,” she said. “It makes me fat. It makes my skin break out in these huge, goose-egg pimples that hurt. I’m going to be fat and bald and zitty.”
I just stared at her frantic face. I didn’t understand why these things bothered her so much more than the fact that she was delusional. But then she said, “People will know, just by looking at me. They’ll know that something is wrong.”
“We will find you the best doctor,” I said. “We’ll find medicine that doesn’t do that.”
“There is no medicine that doesn’t do that,” Vera said. We both knew this was true. It was the constant complaint in her group therapy, on every message board online: the endless attempts to lose weight, the endless attempts to switch medications. Nothing worked. What aided the mind made the body suffer. They could choose mental health or physical health, but they could not have both. Even their mental lives were often dim and awful. They felt sleepy all the time. Their mouths were constantly dry or else tasted of metal. They couldn’t hold jobs or even really maintain friendships. They were sedated, kept from madness, but not really able to live, either.
I did not know how I would keep her from that fate. But doing without the medication was no longer an option. There was a part of me now that was afraid of her. Afraid of how easily she held the knife, as though she had known all along how to unzip herself from the rules of everyday life. That line that kept people from deviating from the norm, that kept them from killing or stealing, it wasn’t there for her. She wasn’t even aware when she was crossing it.
I wanted to take her to America where she would be safe. That was what I kept thinking: “You’ll be safe. If we can just get home, you’ll be safe.” The regularity of the planned streets, the laid-out neighborhoods, the new-construction houses, the strip malls, the perfectly paved massive freeways with eight lanes in each direction. All of it seemed like salvation. I kept thinking of the darkness of our stairwell in Vilnius when the waitresses would turn off the un-findable light switch, that darkness so complete you couldn’t tell if your eyes were open or closed. It was a darkness that made my heart pound. I thought of Kenneth in the candlelight, of all our faces looking like the faces of animals. The world before electric light must have been a very different place. A place where reality was much looser, and where maybe you could fall off of it without noticing and suddenly find yourself holding another person at knife point, or stabbing a Nazi in the neck, or giving away your baby in the woods. Had it even been truly possible to say who was mad and who was not in such a world?
I thought of the way reality must have thinned for Grandma Sylvia, the way it must have frayed as she carried that baby through the woods, as she wandered amid the swamps without a map. I thought of Darius talking about the way people in the woods around Vilnius had worshipped fat, black lizards, the way Vilnius was known for all its blind, their eyes poisoned by wood smoke in shacks without ventilation. The beauty of irregular pearls. The beauty of ruined things. Those children climbing out of the pits at Ponary, struggling under the weight of the dead bodies on top of them, and then wandering back to their houses like ghosts. The lullaby the tenor sang for us that very first night: a mother and child chased out into the abyss, the world itself melting into nothingness, birdsong at the end of the world.
I thought of Darius saying that everyone who visits Vilnius is destined to return, and I prayed to God he was wrong. I did not want us to ever have to go back there, to go back to that place.
I had romanticized Grandma Sylvia, failing to understand what that story was about, failing to grasp that what she had lived through was horror itself, not something I should have ever wished upon myself. And I had wished it for myself, had courted it. I had seen the flicker of the irrational in Katya and I had followed it, followed it across the country and to a farm and straight into the thin brown arms of Chloe. That was my sin: romanticizing the past, romanticizing women, romanticizing madness.
But it hadn’t even been a choice. It was a seed planted in me from birth, a seed fostered and watered by my mother who was maybe only ever pretending to be a real person, who was at all times simply acting, saying her lines and praying she’d gotten them right. Me, my mother, Katya, Vera, Grandma Sylvia: We were just dominoes, touching each other, a chain of being tipped over by war, not in an orderly way, the way I’d wished: lit off by one SS officer. Maybe that would have been understandable, containable, a story. But our family had been jumbled by history, by war, by falling and rising regimes, by escapes across the world, by drives through orange groves and trips to Disneyland and the slow poison of sugary flowers on supermarket cakes.
America was not safe. We would never be safe. The danger was within us and we would take it wherever we went. There was no such thing as the line between the real and the unreal. The only line was the present moment. There was nothing but this, holding my daughter’s hand on an airplane in the middle of the night, not knowing what to say.
—
Something of this mood passed by the time we finally landed in Los Angeles.
It is a minor miracle that it is possible to move past such moments. It seems that you are on a cliff and about to fall off, that everything is portentous and meaningful and terrifying. But the secret is that if you just wait a few hours and eat something, it passes. I couldn’t run away from Vera. I couldn’t leave her the way I could leave Vilnius. I couldn’t leave her the way Grandma Sylvia had left her baby with her brother, or the way I had left Vera with Katya when she was a baby, or the way my own father had left me. It didn’t matter how terrified I was. It didn’t matter that there was no solution to the problem we faced. We would simply have to face it anyway. We didn’t have to be brave or heroic, we merely had to persist. And I found that I could do that.
When we got off the plane, we were returned to normalcy, sleepy, disoriented, stiff. There was a giddiness to coming home, to being on American soil, to going through customs and being told “Welcome back.” After we had gotten our passports stamped, we headed down an escalator to baggage claim, a family.
When it came time to say goodbye, Vera was still chatting away. I was waiting with her by the curb with the luggage while Kat got her car so that they wouldn’t have to lug two big bags to the parking garage. Kat had left her car in short-term parking, claiming she had not known how long she would be gone, which was patently absurd since the flight itself was almost two days. I knew the truth was that Katya had not understood how the long-term parking worked at LAX and had decided childishly to avoid it. It made me smile. I could only imagine what her bill was going to be. After I helped them get loaded up, I would make my way to long-term parking on the shuttle bus and go home.