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Wrapped in a hospital bedsheet.
Dying.
Dying.
Dying.
I draw my hand away from Ima’s. She wasn’t holding on very tightly anyway. I press it against my chest, like it’ll help me breathe easier, but it doesn’t. This is my life. In twenty years or sixteen or twelve or eight or five. The timeline is indefinite, but the result is inevitable.
“I’ll be right—” The last word gets stuck behind my teeth. I push out of the hospital room, but it’s claustrophobic in the lobby, too. That hospital smell chokes me. I’m getting sicker breathing it in.
Elevator. I punch the button once, twice, three times, but then someone wheels an oxygen tank next to me and I can’t get inside that metal box with actual living death. Stairs. Click, click, clomp go my mother’s heels. I trip, twisting my ankle. Shit. I land on concrete, grabbing my ankle, massaging it with my fingertips. Have to keep going. Have to get out of here.
“Honey, are you okay?” a nurse at the main station asks as I limp through the first-floor lobby, but I don’t slow down to answer.
Finally, I make it outside. The air out here is morning-cold but fresh, and I get a few more blocks away from the hospital before I tear off my shoes and the sidewalk chews through my pantyhose.
Breathe. I’m breathing now.
My ankle will turn violet tomorrow.
I stop on a residential neighborhood street, dropping my hands to my knees. Has it really been only twelve hours since the show? In the distance, the hospital becomes a rectangle, then a dot. The sun is peeking up behind the trees, a sign that the world has continued to spin all the way into a new year. A year Ima has begun with staples in her head and needles in her veins.
It will only get worse from here, and that is something I am certain I cannot live with.
Shivering in my dress and ruined pantyhose, I start walking again, sidewalk square by sidewalk square, block by block. One by one I yank the remaining pins from my hair, waves stretching onto my shoulders and down my back. I left my clutch back at the hospital, but my phone’s surely dead now anyway. Useless. Don’t need it.
Slowly, I allow myself back into the dark place in the depths of my mind, unlocking what I hid there. Only today it doesn’t sound quite as dark. It sounds like relief. Like a solution.
Almost like a cure.
Robe-wrapped people open front doors to collect their morning papers and stare at the strange girl in a green dress limping purposefully down the block. I smile at them, wishing I could tell them I am okay. They don’t need to worry about me.
While I don’t know when my symptoms will begin, I cannot let the disease have power over me even now. I cannot mope through the remaining years of my life, waiting to become my mother. The waiting and the worrying will drive me mad. I’m sure of it.
Everything I’ve wanted—getting into conservatory, becoming a soloist, traveling to places I’ve only visited in my mind, a real relationship with Arjun, even growing close to my stranger-sister again—is still possible, even with my shortened timeline. It isn’t the trajectory I imagined weeks ago, months ago, years ago, but it is the best option I have. The only option, really. If I plan correctly, if my determination becomes an obsession, then I can fit everything in.
The alternative would be to allow the disease to gnaw away everything that makes me Adina. I am scared of HD; I’m not too proud to admit that. I am scared of what it will do to me. How it will warp me. Aba and Tovah will suffer from it too. They will watch Ima die, and then they will watch me.
A car honks and a dog barks and I make a vow to myself. The best solution would be to spare everyone the additional agony and do it on my terms: quickly, painlessly, peacefully, once I’ve accomplished everything I have ever dreamed of. So as soon as my symptoms appear, that is what I will do.
In the meantime, I can have my beautiful life.
And then, when it stops being beautiful, I will end it.
Twenty
Tovah
I’M TOO OLD FOR BALLOON animals, but that doesn’t stop me from asking the clown at our school carnival to make me a DNA double helix.
“A what?” he asks.
“A double helix. It looks like . . .” I slice my hand through the air to mimic the spiral shape, and the clown lifts his red-painted eyebrows in confusion. “Never mind, here.” I show him an image on my phone, and after several minutes of stretching and twisting and tying, he presents me with my slightly misshapen balloon double helix.
Joke’s on me, though, because now I have to carry it around the rest of the night.
The January carnival is a welcome distraction from Ima’s deteriorating health. She was released from the hospital when we went back to school earlier this week, and while her head wound will heal, she’s not returning to work.
