Rufi Thorpe: Dear Fang, with Love

“He’s lying,” I told her, grateful at least that I could be sure of that much, could, as her father, contribute sound advice about the scenarios in which young men masturbate. “He’s saying that to get attention.”

“You think?” Vera asked, seeming relieved. “He thinks he’s the next Messiah. He says he likes to come all over the Andromeda constellation. Which has a certain logic to it, I mean what else could cause God to feel desire?”

“Stop talking to this kid — who is this kid? He is not God. How is he telling you all this?”

“Just at breakfast,” she said. “The boys and girls eat meals together.”

“So what happened?” I asked her. I had a rough outline of events from Katya, but I wanted to hear it from Vera because none of the pieces I had made sense. It seemed that Vera, then only sixteen, had gone to a party she should never have been at in the first place, had stripped naked and begun reading from the book of Revelation. She had then chased several members of the cheerleading squad around the living room, trying to baptize them with sour apple liqueur. “Why baptize?” Katya had cried on the phone. “Is she Christian now? For what reason ?” Then, in front of everyone, Vera had tried to slit her wrists.

The night ended with Vera strapped to a gurney naked, bloody, raving, and put into an ambulance. Stitches at the emergency room, and then the transfer to the psych ward and the commencement of the bizarre laborious protocol: “a danger to herself or others,” 5150, three-day mandatory hold, social workers, and now some asshole who masturbated onto images of the cosmos.

But what had even happened? I wanted her to tell it to me so that it made sense. I wanted her to say it was a weird joke, or a dare, or that she had been shit-faced and didn’t remember any of it. Had she really wanted to kill herself? It didn’t seem possible, if only because Vera was usually excellent at whatever she did, and the bandage on her arm was high, almost halfway up her forearm. My daughter was not an idiot. She might not know which direction to cut, but surely she knew to cut the wrists.

“Were you”—I began—“were you trying to kill yourself?” I motioned at her bandage. She just stared at me, sighed as though I were annoying her. “They said you tried to kill yourself.”

“Of course I wasn’t trying to kill myself!”

“Thank God. I didn’t think so,” I said, “but, please, Vera, just tell me what happened.”

She stared into the pale fibers of the side of her banana. “It’s like it’s woven together,” she said.

“Vera?”

She blinked shut her eyes again and rubbed at them with a curled fist. “Papa,” she said, in the Russian way, with that long, soft first syllable like a pillow, “you aren’t good at this stuff, so why not just let Mama do it?”

“Let Mama do it?”

“Don’t make me spell it out for you,” she said.

“Spell out what?”

She set down her banana and looked at me. “We see each other on the weekends, and it’s fine. You rent whatever movie I want, we order whatever food I want, great, fine. But sometimes you are so desperate for me to like you that it makes me annoyed. You’re like a dog begging for attention. It disgusts me. You are honestly the last person in the world I want to talk to right now.”

It was like I had awoken to discover I was at the top of a Ferris wheel, the car bobbing over empty space. Vera could do that to me, pull the rug out from under me. It was always a struggle not to let her know how badly it hurt. “Your mother will be here soon,” I said. “I know this whole thing must have been scary. Did you sleep at all last night?”

Vera shrugged, raised her eyebrows in a tired way, and continued eating her banana. Every day, she looked more like Katya. Both of them had peculiarly round heads like Persian cats, wide mouths, and thick, shining dark hair. My blond genes had been swept away like nothing but recessive cobwebs. There was something about Katya and Vera that I recognized as biologically different from myself, some cellular Russianness that caused their necks to smell like raisins and made their eyeteeth a subtly different shape than other people’s.

Katya and I had only been together for our senior year at Exeter, a boarding high school with brick buildings and marble staircases at which neither of us felt we belonged. Our courtship was brief, only a single year, and we had been estranged most of Vera’s childhood. I had never changed one of Vera’s diapers, never put her in time-out for hitting the dog. What did I know? I had no clue how to father her.

I had assumed that if I gave it enough time and put in the years of consistently being there, being steadfast, being warm, some kind of authentic intimacy would grow between us. Now she was sixteen, and I was gradually coming to the conclusion that waiting for a teenage girl to want to be friends with her father was like waiting for a cat to want to take a swim. And for my part, I had never developed the set of paternal reflexes and instincts I assumed would assert themselves. I had been only eighteen when she was born. In fact, most people who saw us in public assumed we were dating, which I attempted to combat by loudly calling her “kiddo,” which she hated.

“Let Mama do it, ” she had said.

Though what we were supposed to be doing to her, whether this was bad behavior or a medical emergency, was still unclear to me. I wished I had stopped to get something to eat. My stomach kept making haunted-house sounds that were embarrassingly audible in the empty tiled room.

When Katya showed up, she came with dark brown bottles of vitamins, a thermos of some green, vile-smelling tea, sure that Vera had just had some kind of aberrant attack. “My daughter is not insane,” she said to the doctor, when we finally got to see one. Katya and Vera and I were all seated in the doctor’s small office. He was a thin, blond man with watery-looking eyes in his late thirties named Dr. Sneed. He told us he was diagnosing Vera with bipolar I with psychotic features.

I knew what bipolar was in a vague, strictly literary way, but I didn’t know the differences between I and II, didn’t know the treatment protocols. I didn’t know that they were telling me my daughter would never live a completely functional adult life, that she would always be on medication, that the medication would affect her health, that she might not be able to hold a job, that she might not be able to graduate college, that she might not be able to sustain long-term relationships, like a marriage or even close friendships, that she should not have children. I thought they were telling me my daughter was being rebellious and emotional, things I already knew. That was part of what was great about Vera, after all. She was a dervish of a girl, smart and a little mean and absolutely charming. It seemed possible this was just another of her high jinks, a kind of social experiment gone horribly wrong.

But the doctor did not think so. The doctor thought it was very clear. “Normally, I hesitate about diagnoses with adolescents,” he said, “but in this case, I think we are better served with a clear treatment protocol that we can move forward with as rapidly as possible.”

Vera sighed, annoyed, as though her diagnosis were detention being doled out, and it was difficult to tell what she really thought. But Katya, Katya actually tried to argue the doctor out of the diagnosis as though she were haggling at a swap meet. “She is very young, maybe this is just a phase?” Kat pleaded.

Maybe this, maybe that, Katya went on, describing an aunt of hers who had a vitamin D deficiency that made all the doctors think she had lupus.

Dr. Sneed nodded. “I know how difficult this is to hear,” he said.