“Because?”
“Because she just spends all her time in bed, taking pills.”
“She getting help?”
“That is the help she’s getting. She sees doctors, and the best they can do is put her on a bunch of antidepressants. My sister just sits in front of the TV, doing her homework or drawing. Usually she makes dinner for them both. It’s not dangerous, I mean she can take care of herself, she has her act together enough to go to work, but it’s just depressing as fuck in there. It smells like death. I can’t stand it.”
“You must miss your sister.”
“Of course I fucking miss her. But I can’t see her in that house. It’s too much. My sister and I used to hang out at my place across the city, but that’s not an option anymore,” he says. I wait for him to elaborate, to explain why he moved out and what this mystery girl did to him, but I can see he wants to move on. He starts tapping his foot and running a hand through his hair.
He starts acting all agitated, so I feel like it’s my turn to talk. “My mom had her problems too,” I tell him, though I never talk about my mom.
“A depressed addict?”
“She barely drank—a glass of wine or two might have helped her to loosen the fuck up, actually. No, she was just a hardass. But I didn’t really even know who she was, up to the day she died. I thought she hated anything artistic. I didn’t know she wanted to sing. She only sang in front of me once.”
“Oh?” he says, raising his idiot eyebrow.
“One time I caught her singing, in the middle of the night, not long before she died. I had no idea she sang,” I say. And then I sing a few bars: “My heart bleeds and bleeds for you, darling, my heart bleeds rivers of the darkest blood….”
“Ah,” he says. “Heartsongs for the Drowned.”
“You know it?”
“Mishkin wasn’t exactly Viktor Tsoi, but he was pretty famous.”
“Were you even born when Tsoi died?”
“I didn’t say that,” he says, getting defensive. “I got into Soviet rock because of my dad. Or, at least, his rock CDs were some of the things he left behind when he left us, and I got this idea that I would get to know him just by listening. Anyway, it’s stupid.”
“That isn’t stupid. I wish my mom left behind something like that. I didn’t know her at all,” I say, and suddenly I feel too exposed, wondering how we got on this topic anyway. What the fuck is wrong with me?
“Why didn’t she sing in front of you?” he says, but I don’t want to talk about it anymore.
“She didn’t want me to know she had artistic tendencies, I guess.”
“Who could blame her?” he says, and I smack him across the chest.
I study his greasy blond hair and neck tattoo and tattered, oversized long-sleeved shirt, and think, She would have hated you. But then I feel it, just a little bit, that old stirring, maybe even because I thought Mama would have hated him. I didn’t even think I had a real body anymore, not one that wanted things, but here I am, feeling shy all of a sudden. And who could blame me, when I spend all my time either with a baby or this fuckboy? That’s it, I decide, I need some time with Yuri before I go crazy. As soon as Stas leaves, I’ll go to the bathroom, get myself off, and forget about it. And besides, I’m pretty sure the weirdness is just coming from me, that he doesn’t think of me like that, and shouldn’t.
He clears his throat and looks all serious and takes two steps toward me. I freak out until he picks up his phone to film me and I remember why he’s here. “Are you ready?” he says. “You’re gonna kill it, sis.”
But I’m not thinking of Sinister Sister right then. I stumble through the audition, but I’m thinking of Mama the whole time. Why did I tell Stas about her singing to begin with? I never even told Yuri about that strange night, or what I learned about her after that.
After Mama died, I celebrated the New Year at home with Papa in front of the TV, eating stale Russian chocolates and snacking on the blini and chicken cutlets some family friends put in our freezer after the funeral. Mama had been gone what, three weeks? A month? For the first year it felt like it had happened the day before, so it was hard to say, but it was fucking recent, our wounds were wide-open and gangrenous, and yet there we sat, Papa saying he was feeling hopeful about my college applications, though the look on his face, which was completely gray, his eyes just two swollen little mounds, did not exactly signify hope. And who was I to tell him that those apps were all for Mama, that I would turn them in just to delay the inevitable but that there was no fucking way I could make it through four years of school?
Though I had kind of been suppressing the memory of that night on the back patio, maybe because I had convinced myself I had dreamed it or because it felt so much like it didn’t belong to this world, that bringing it up would make it combust or something, I couldn’t think of anything else to say to my father. I needed to say something, because though he had been pretty depressed since I could remember, since Mama’s death, he had reached a new low. He had stopped taking care of himself and it was amazing he had managed to grade final papers, with my help. Maybe I thought asking him about it could distract him, in a good way.
“Hey, Papa? How come I never knew Mama was such a good singer?”
“Excuse me?”
“I heard Mama singing a few months ago. And it was so beautiful. But when I asked her about it, she acted like I was crazy. What was that about?”
Papa sighed and unwrapped another chocolate. “You must have been dreaming.”
“That’s what Mama said. But I’m not crazy. I know what I heard.”
“Your mother could sing,” he said slowly. “There was no doubt about that.” And then what he said next was so shocking that I would have been less surprised if he had revealed Mama had been a mermaid all along. “When I met your mother, she wanted to be a star,” he said. He even managed a thin little smile when he said it. “Can you believe it?” he said, and I just sat there with my mouth hanging open. “You should have seen her then—thick mascara, long flowing dresses, earrings with heavy fake jewels…” I had never seen such a photograph of my mother. All the ones I saw featured her looking stern and makeupless, her hair pulled back tightly, a matron by the time she and Papa married when they were twenty.
Papa told me that Mama had tried to make it as a singer, back in Kiev, but it never quite worked out. That maybe it was bad luck, maybe it was just a tough business, or maybe, as she suspected, she was just too Jewish for the job, that her big nose, while I thought it was the most striking thing about her, made her look too distinct, too un-Russian, so nobody wanted to hear her voice. “But then you were born, darling, and she went to school and became an accountant eventually, and that was that. Do not feel sorry—she loved you, you were the greatest joy of her life. But when she saw you trying your acting business, well, you can imagine, she did not want you to have your heart broken.”
“Why didn’t she just tell me that?”
“Because you and your mother are of a kind, darling. Too stubborn for your own good,” Papa said.
The ball had dropped while we were talking and we didn’t even notice. It was after midnight, and we both knew there would be a cold, long year ahead. I had so many questions for him, but I knew it was not the time to ask them, that there would never be a good time to ask. Maybe, even, I was better off not knowing the subtext of all my fights with Mama, who, with her stylish but conservative clothes, tamed hair, and sharp eyes, could not have seemed less like a former aspiring singer. Maybe because she had tried to seem as unartistic as possible to discourage me from trying to be anything but ordinary, to keep me from the onslaught of disappointment that would come when my big, bloated dreams fell flat.