Rufi Thorpe: Dear Fang, with Love

I thought of the way reality must have thinned for Grandma Sylvia, the way it must have frayed as she carried that baby through the woods, as she wandered amid the swamps without a map. I thought of Darius talking about the way people in the woods around Vilnius had worshipped fat, black lizards, the way Vilnius was known for all its blind, their eyes poisoned by wood smoke in shacks without ventilation. The beauty of irregular pearls. The beauty of ruined things. Those children climbing out of the pits at Ponary, struggling under the weight of the dead bodies on top of them, and then wandering back to their houses like ghosts. The lullaby the tenor sang for us that very first night: a mother and child chased out into the abyss, the world itself melting into nothingness, birdsong at the end of the world.

I thought of Darius saying that everyone who visits Vilnius is destined to return, and I prayed to God he was wrong. I did not want us to ever have to go back there, to go back to that place.

I had romanticized Grandma Sylvia, failing to understand what that story was about, failing to grasp that what she had lived through was horror itself, not something I should have ever wished upon myself. And I had wished it for myself, had courted it. I had seen the flicker of the irrational in Katya and I had followed it, followed it across the country and to a farm and straight into the thin brown arms of Chloe. That was my sin: romanticizing the past, romanticizing women, romanticizing madness.

But it hadn’t even been a choice. It was a seed planted in me from birth, a seed fostered and watered by my mother who was maybe only ever pretending to be a real person, who was at all times simply acting, saying her lines and praying she’d gotten them right. Me, my mother, Katya, Vera, Grandma Sylvia: We were just dominoes, touching each other, a chain of being tipped over by war, not in an orderly way, the way I’d wished: lit off by one SS officer. Maybe that would have been understandable, containable, a story. But our family had been jumbled by history, by war, by falling and rising regimes, by escapes across the world, by drives through orange groves and trips to Disneyland and the slow poison of sugary flowers on supermarket cakes.

America was not safe. We would never be safe. The danger was within us and we would take it wherever we went. There was no such thing as the line between the real and the unreal. The only line was the present moment. There was nothing but this, holding my daughter’s hand on an airplane in the middle of the night, not knowing what to say.

—

Something of this mood passed by the time we finally landed in Los Angeles.

It is a minor miracle that it is possible to move past such moments. It seems that you are on a cliff and about to fall off, that everything is portentous and meaningful and terrifying. But the secret is that if you just wait a few hours and eat something, it passes. I couldn’t run away from Vera. I couldn’t leave her the way I could leave Vilnius. I couldn’t leave her the way Grandma Sylvia had left her baby with her brother, or the way I had left Vera with Katya when she was a baby, or the way my own father had left me. It didn’t matter how terrified I was. It didn’t matter that there was no solution to the problem we faced. We would simply have to face it anyway. We didn’t have to be brave or heroic, we merely had to persist. And I found that I could do that.

When we got off the plane, we were returned to normalcy, sleepy, disoriented, stiff. There was a giddiness to coming home, to being on American soil, to going through customs and being told “Welcome back.” After we had gotten our passports stamped, we headed down an escalator to baggage claim, a family.

When it came time to say goodbye, Vera was still chatting away. I was waiting with her by the curb with the luggage while Kat got her car so that they wouldn’t have to lug two big bags to the parking garage. Kat had left her car in short-term parking, claiming she had not known how long she would be gone, which was patently absurd since the flight itself was almost two days. I knew the truth was that Katya had not understood how the long-term parking worked at LAX and had decided childishly to avoid it. It made me smile. I could only imagine what her bill was going to be. After I helped them get loaded up, I would make my way to long-term parking on the shuttle bus and go home.

I would be going home by myself. And there was something sad about that but also something natural. I thought about what it would be like to get in my car, to turn the key in the ignition, to hear the last radio station I had listened to flicker back to life. I would be alone in the comforting way it is possible to be alone in one’s own car. I would drive the arching freeways in their beautiful loops all the way back to my small apartment that would smell stale but also wonderfully of home.

“I can’t believe it’s over,” Vera said. “It just seems so weird that it’s over. It’s so weird that we don’t live there. Travel is a really weird idea if you think about it. I mean, what is the point of it?”

I was too tired to come up with an amusing rejoinder. “Vera,” I said, “I have to tell you something.”

“You’re not really my father?” Vera guessed, then laughed uproariously at her own joke. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she said. “What is it?”

“It’s just…I wanted to tell you I love you,” I said.

“Ugh,” she said, “you’re getting cheesy, I can already tell. I could spread you on a cracker.”

“No, really,” I said, and I took her by the shoulders and looked into her face, which was still puffy and swollen. “I love you the way you are,” I said. “I love you any way you are.”

She hugged me and said into my shoulder, “You’re like one of those horrible cheese-stuffed pizza crusts.”

When she pulled away, the shoulder of my shirt was wet from where she had been crying, and Katya drove up and popped the trunk. I loaded in Vera’s Hello Kitty luggage, and opened the door for her to climb in back because Katya had a hideous amount of garbage in the front seat: fast-food bags and water bottles and discarded sweatshirts all tangled in a pile. What a mess! It endeared her to me, endeared both of them to me somehow.

“See you soon, Papa,” Vera said, and I swung her door shut, and away they went into the night.

A thank you as big as the Ritz goes to my friends and family. Thanks to Simone Gorrindo for being my best friend, but also for being clear-sighted when I was snow-blind from so many drafts. Thank you to David Isaak for pretty much exactly the same reasons. Thank you to my mother, who literally read this entire book to me on the telephone so that I could hear how it sounded in her voice, and who discussed the characters with me as though they were real people that we knew. Generous and patient don’t come close. Boon, blessing, gift — all are inadequate.

Thank you to my husband, Sam. For all the evenings you read my words out loud to me as I played blocks with the boy, for all the car rides in which you listened to me explore and plan and worry, for all the lunches at our secret hotel where I confessed my most half-baked ambitions — for all these hours I cannot pay you back. I cannot hope to pay any of you back. My debt is solid and gloriously heavy, and I feel bound to each of you in a way that I would not trade for all the world because I feel certain now that, having already invested so much, you are going to have to keep me for good.

As always, thank you to Molly Friedrich, who is honest and terrifying, brilliant and breathtaking, a dragon in the form of a smallish woman. Thank you to Jennifer Jackson, who somehow knew what this book needed before I did and who gently nudged me in that direction, allowing me always the illusion that it was entirely my own idea. You are my best and only and favorite sheep-crab. And thank you to Nichole LeFebvre who is an amazing reader and an amazing writer and who spends far too much time helping me. Thank you to all the people at Knopf who are so fantastic and excellent at everything they do.