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“—is on vacation!” I say quickly. I don’t want to break Ima’s heart. I can’t fathom forgetting your own mother has died. “She, uh, doesn’t have reception where she is.”
“Right,” Aba says.
“Oh,” Ima says, her smile drooping for a moment. “Well, we’ll just have to phone her when she gets back!”
My eyes meet Adina’s, whose shoulders slump in relief. Part of me opens up and understands: she never wants to become this version of our mother. And I have no idea how to feel about that.
Ima’s memory lapses are beginning to scare me. She must know I’m avoiding her, because one night when I’m coming back from a late run, she calls me into the living room. A blanket is draped across her legs. She finally finished knitting it a couple weeks ago. It’s chocolate and caramel with some patches of bright blue, and it took her months because she’s been moving so slowly lately.
“I can’t sleep,” she says, sliding a biography of an old Hollywood movie star onto the coffee table.
I head into the kitchen. “Do you want some tea?” When Adina and I used to get sick, Ima made tea with a scoop of honey and a pinch of cayenne pepper. Sweet-and-spicy tea, she called it.
“Tea sounds nice.” When I return with two mugs, she says, “Todah.” We blow on the tea. Sip in silence for a while. “How was your run?”
“Fine.” I pull my knees up tight against my chest.
“We don’t do this very much. Talk, the two of us.”
“I know.” My fault. “I’m sorry.”
“You and Adi have so much going on. I understand that. But if you’re not too tired, and I can’t sleep . . . tell me what’s going on with you, Tovah’le,” she says, and it sounds like begging. “Something about school, or about your friends, or your boyfriend . . . You’re going to have to help me with his name.”
“Zack,” I say quietly. “Zack.”
“Right, Zack.”
There’s no Adina around. This is just my mother and me.
“Actually,” I start. “I’m not fine.” Suddenly I want to confide in a mother who’s been a mystery to me for so many years, but I’m not sure where to start. It’s not just
losing Johns Hopkins that’s thrown me completely off course. But I don’t want to—can’t—admit what’s been on the edge of my mind for weeks. That I don’t know who I am without a definitive path toward med school and residency and operating rooms.
That I don’t know if that’s the right path for me anymore.
What comes out is this: “I don’t want to make the wrong choice.”
“About college?”
My jaw is tight and I don’t know how many more words about this I can spare, so I nod. Pressure builds behind my eyes. No, I don’t want to do this here. Not in front of her when she has so many other troubles to deal with.
“I don’t know what to do once I get to college, wherever I end up going, and if I’m supposed to take bio classes for premed, and I’m . . . freaking out.” Finally saying this out loud feels good. “Everything’s different now, and I’m really freaking out.”
“Come here.” She wraps me in the blanket like a burrito. I’ve forgotten how comforting it is to be taken care of. If I’m too old for this, I don’t care.
My lungs fill, and I suck in big breaths. They come fast, like I’m starving for air. She kneads my back, whispering “hakol yihyeh beseder” over and over until I start to believe her and my breathing returns to normal.
“You think about the future so much,” she says softly.
“Is that a bad thing?”
“Not necessarily, but . . . I think sometimes you live more in the future than in the now. You’re so young. You should be thinking about the now.”
Right. My own mother’s now is so grim I can’t imagine how she could think about the future. As always, I’m acting so selfish.
“How are you feeling?” I ask gently.
“I’m all right. Some days are worse than others. I am struggling to remember more things than I used to, and this new medication is supposed to be helping with the hallucinations. It’s an adjustment, though. Not teaching. I have . . . a lot of time on my hands.”
