You'll Miss Me When I'm Gone

Impatience twists in my stomach. I am usually so gentle with my mother, but today her memory lapse makes me wince. “Substitute. And I’ll be fine on my own.” I tell myself the reason I don’t want her to stay with me is that she loves teaching, and I don’t want her to miss a single day of it. But the real reason is closer to this: every time she gropes for a word or jerks involuntarily, my ribs press together so tightly I worry they’ll snap like twigs. And the next time she hallucinates—

Tick, tick, tick . . .

Huntington’s turns my loving mother cold and monstrous and foreign. Crazy, some might say. You aren’t supposed to see your parents in that kind of agony—something I cannot forgive God for.

I wonder what it will do to me.

I fall back asleep and at ten thirty wake up groggier than I was at six thirty. My hair is tangled and my mouth is stained pink from yesterday’s Siren lipstick and mascara crumbs dot my cheeks, but I don’t feel like showering or changing out of my pajamas.

Music has always brought me comfort. When Papa, Aba’s father, passed away, I spent the entire month playing Prokofiev. After Ima was diagnosed, it was Bach. Now it is Debussy.

The prelude itself is not complex, but the challenge lies in its simplicity, how you convey the innocence of the pastoral girl. I will settle for nothing less than perfection. I practice for hours, until the pads of my fingers throb and my legs are stiff from standing, but I force myself to keep going.

Until it hits me: one day I won’t be able to do this anymore. My hands will act out, and my fingers will misbehave, and my mind will forget. I stagger backward, tucking my viola into its case before I collapse onto my bed, holding my head in my hands. I stay like that, counting measures, counting beats and breaths.

Then I close the music book and run my thumbnail along the crease so I don’t have to look at it, though I’m close to memorizing the prelude. Arjun would be pleased.

Arjun Bhakta, who prepares for snowstorms that never come, who knows my secret, who sent me away.

I lay my head back on my pillow, focusing on the way his hands gripped the arms of his chair, the way his back muscles flexed against his shirt, the way he growled my name. I slip my hand inside my underwear. In my mind he doesn’t pull away. He wraps me in his arms and kisses me back. I unbutton his shirt and reach inside his corduroy pants, feeling him everywhere.

I wonder if he’d be gentle, andante, the way a slow piece of music swells to a powerful, intense climax. Or if he’d be fierce, prestissimo, crashing into me like he can’t get close enough.

In this fantasy, he can be all those things.

Tovah said we’d deal with it together. The night we learned about Ima’s diagnosis, that’s what she promised. Here are the times I have needed someone to deal with it with me:

The morning after we found out about Ima.

The day after that.

A week later, when I broke down in the middle school girls’ bathroom and wiped my face with the too-rough toilet paper until it was red everywhere.

Two months after that when Ima screamed at Aba for burning a pot of rice.

A year after that when Ima hallucinated spiders crawling all over the kitchen floor and it scared me.

When Tovah decided she’d rather live abroad for a year instead of with our gloomy little family.

When I found the applications on her computer.

The moment I pressed delete.

The day we turned eighteen.

The morning we took the test.

A thousand times in between.

Tovah used to be in orchestra too. She played violin for a year in fourth grade before declaring all the music we played boring. To convince her to stick with it, I dragged my viola into her room and gave her an impromptu concert, though back then all I could play were “Hot Cross Buns” and “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”

Tovah made a face. “I’d rather play something you can actually sing along to. Like Aba’s music.” I detested Aba’s music. It was so loud. It grated.

“You can sing along to ‘Hot Cross Buns,’?” I insisted, and I started the song again. “Hot cross buns. Hot cross buns. Something-something, something-something . . . hot cross buns!”

Tovah snorted. “Please don’t sing, Adi,” she said, and I was thankful when we traded those little-kid songs for pieces by classical composers. But Tovah quit anyway.

You try out so many hobbies when you’re young, and you outgrow them the same way you outgrow overalls and sandboxes and baby teeth. Viola was something I could never outgrow. It was my power to create, to take risks, to be bold. I have never felt as natural as I do with my chin on my Primavera and a bow in my hand. The instrument and I, we fit.