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Slava drives us into town, and my stomach drops as we approach the circular valet area of the hospital’s intake unit.
The day we brought my mother here, I remember feeling an intense, crippling sadness that followed me for weeks after she was gone. Seeing her escorted down the hallways when she was in the midst of withdrawals crushed my heart, and I was too young to know how to process it without self-destruction.
The memories flood back, but I’m able to push them to the side in order to potentially find some relief from the knowledge of my sickening future.
A nurse who is holding a phone to her ear motions toward a computer kiosk for me to sign in, clacking her pink acrylic nails together with authority.
After I’m signed in, I’m told to wait in the lobby until another nurse can come to retrieve us and guide us through the ward. My mom is on a ward for non-violent patients who aren’t in the middle of psychosis, so I feel relatively safe walking through, even though I’m stared at by a few of the men.
We approach a courtyard in the back of the facility, a beautifully landscaped garden with a sitting area and a fountain in the middle. It’s fenced in, of course, and the type of fencing used to contain the patients reminds me of cages at the zoo. When I think about it like that, my heart feels heavy.
My mother is sitting at a table near the fountain reading a book when she notices me walking towards her. Her eyes light up, and she rises from her seat to meet me.
She hasn’t really been herself since she was committed, and my father swears up and down that she had a psychotic break due to her drinking and undiagnosed bipolar depression. I always believed him, and I resented her for choosing the easy way out instead of facing her issues head-on. Now that I’ve seen what the Bratva life can do to a woman, I fear that I’ll end up in a place like this too.
“Mika! My baby!” she says as she hugs me tight. I don’t remember the last time I got a genuine hug from anybody, so I hold her tight against me for as long as I can.
“Hi mom, I’ve missed you,” I reply, fighting back tears. If I’m already struggling with my emotions, this visit is going to be brutal.
“Come sit with me, it sounds like you have a lot to talk about,” she chirps, taking my hand and leading me back to her table.
We sit down together, and she looks at me expectantly as I fail to find the words to describe my anguish.
“I don’t really know how to explain it, but I feel like a used car or a cow or something. I’m being sold to mediate a territory dispute. Did my dad ever really love me? Did he want me?” I ask, pinching the skin of my wrist under the table to distract myself from crying.
“Oh, honey, that’s only the beginning of the story for women in the Bratva. You’re either an ornament or a brood mare to be traded for whatever bits of power that a man can scrape up. They’d sell you for far less than a territory dispute, if you can believe it,” she replies, taking a sip of some sparkling water.
“What was it like for you? I mean, you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to,” I reply.
She clears her throat, and her gaze becomes distant as she recalls the fragmented memories from twenty years ago.
“I was charmed by the money and the glamour of a dangerous lifestyle, and I needed to escape from my own demons back in Sweden. It seemed like fate that I met your father at what felt like the perfect time. He knew exactly what to say, and it didn’t take much for me to pledge my whole life away,” she begins, exhaling heavily.
“Could Sweden have really been worse than the Bratva?” I ask, curious about these troubles of hers that I had never heard of once before.
“I was with a man before your father who was a violent drunk. He beat me, pulled my hair, threw me into walls when he was angry. It’s a very common story, unfortunately. When your father offered to take me to America to live in luxury, I was so smitten that I felt like it was fate. I was beingsavedby my dream man.”
“So, what changed?” I ask.
She sighs, resting her chin on her hand. “Well, I learned very quickly that the Bratva life was for men and men only. They were annoyed that I was present in my own house, and I was shut away for most of the day while your father smoked cigars and drank whiskey with his cohorts.”
“Sometimes, he would humiliate me in front of them just to show his power. I tried so hard not to take it personally, because I really wanted to believe that he loved me. I told myself that he was just acting out of insecurity, that things would get better when he gained more power.”
She motions over to one of the nurses, who promptly walks over to us. “Can I help you, Vivka?”
My mother pulls a pack of cigarettes from her pocket, picking one out of the pack and holding it between her slender fingers. “I need a light.”
The nurse lights the cigarette, and my mother nods towards her with approval.
Seeing my mother smoke is a rare comfort for me. Even though we all knew how unhealthy it was, I loved the smell of smoke on her clothes. It smelled earthy and real in a world where everything was a show.
“What happened when he gained power?” I ask, bracing myself for some uncomfortable truths about my father.
She takes a long drag, savoring it as she holds it in her lungs before blowing the smoke into the crisp autumn air.
“Things got so much worse. He was wealthier, sure, but the pressure of the new responsibility weighed on him more than he’d expected. He wasn’t always a great leader, and the men he commanded were well aware of it. When they made him feel small, he would beat me to regain some of his power.”
I had known that my father wasn’t a good man when I was young, but I had been spared the details until now. I’m not sure how I’ll ever be able to look him in the eyes without looking for the rage behind them.
