Chapter 78

I hate visitingmy mother these days.

It takes me about two hours to make the drive from DeWitt, Connecticut, to Brooklyn—two hours I can't spare—but I still go. I do it more out of a sense of obligation than anything else. Dad would want me to check up on her, to see how she's doing. She's not so young anymore, after all. So that's why I do it.

But I'll never stop being angry at her for the way Dad died.

Fine, he was on life support after that bout of pneumonia that spread into his bloodstream. Yes, he had a chronic, degenerative disease. But I still can't help but feel his life got cut short. If she'd just waited a little longer, he might have pulled through. She didn't even ask me if I was okay with it. She just decided to take him off the ventilator, and that was it. Dad wouldn't have wanted to die.

As far as I'm concerned, she killed him.

When I visit my mother about a month into the semester, I notice the apartment hasn't changed much since my father died. Mom preserved it in roughly the state it's been in since I was in high school. The furniture is scuffed and secondhand and just hanging together by a thread. The walls are desperately in need of a paint job, but we can't afford it, and I don't have time to do it myself. The refrigerator is still making that loud whirring noise.

I immediately start cleaning the tiny apartment. Ever since Dad died, Mom has let housekeeping fall to the wayside, and my sisters are too busy with their own families to help her out. I do three loads of laundry in the basement, wash the dishes by hand (we've never been able to afford a dishwasher), and vacuum the carpet.

"You don't have to do all this, Sasha," Mom says as she watches me fold her clothes.

She speaks to me in Russian, even though my parents were pretty strict about always speaking English around the house when I was growing up. It's like since Dad died, she just gave up on everything, even English.

"It's fine," I mumble.

She watches me for another minute in silence. My mother and I have never had much to say to one another. I was always more of a daddy's girl.

"Are there any nice boys in your class?" Mom finally asks as I sort through the socks.

"No," I say curtly.

Why am I not surprised this is my mother's first question? I'm twenty-six years old and practically an old maid in her eyes. She came to this country from Russia when she was just a girl, and I gather that back there, they get married pretty young.

"None?" Mom raises an eyebrow. "Now how could that be, Sasha? Isn't the class mostly boys?"

I don't bother to point out that these days, medical school classes are at least half female. My mother would never believe it.

Finally, my mother says what she's been waiting to say since the moment I walked in: "Sasha, why don't you come back home?"

"Daddy wouldn't want me to quit," I say through my teeth.

"Daddy didn't know everything," Mom says quietly. "I think you'd be happier at home. Maybe that nice family will hire you back to watch their kids until you find a husband."

I look down at the sock ball in my hand. I want to hurl it at my mother.

"I don't want to have this conversation again, Mom," I say. "Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to use the bathroom…"

I don't need the bathroom. Really, I just need to get away from my mother. Instead of going to the bathroom, I brush past the small bedroom I used to share with my two sisters and end up in my parents' bedroom. Just like the rest of the house, it hasn't changed a bit since my father's death, but something is comforting about this fact. I open the closet and see rows of my father's shirts, all neatly pressed. I can still vaguely smell his aftershave.

"I'm trying my best, Papa," I whisper as I run my hand along the sleeve of my father's old blue shirt.

Then I really do go to the bathroom, which has also remained untouched since my father's death. His razor and shaving lotion are still on the sink counter, and a large lump forms in my throat that makes it difficult to swallow. I guess my mother misses him too. Maybe it comforts her to see Dad's stuff still around the bathroom and in the closets.

I open the medicine cabinet and see the pill bottles that contain all my father's medications. Before his death, he was taking several kinds of pills that attempted to increase the amount of dopamine in his brain and decrease the symptoms of the disease. The medications decreased his symptoms somewhat, but the dopamine had an undesired side effect: hallucinations.

I remember how my father was haunted by voices he started hearing in his head and visions of things that weren't there. It tortured him to the point that he chose to live with the symptoms of Parkinson's disease rather than continue the medications. He preferred shaking hands, poor balance, and shuffling feet to the voices in his head.

I pick up a large bottle of a medication called carbidopa-levodopa. Levodopa is converted by the body into dopamine. But that dopamine also caused the worst of my father's hallucinations—he couldn't tolerate these pills for more than a few weeks. I shake the bottle and discover that it's still almost full.

There's only a seedling of an idea in my head as I shove the bottle into my pocket.