You'll Miss Me When I'm Gone

by Rachel Lynn Solomon

  “I didn’t know that.”

  My vision of Israel, and my mother’s home in Tel Aviv, is blurred. She rarely talks about growing up there, snatches of memories that sound distant as fairy tales. Her mother, who we now suspect had Huntington’s too, died when Ima was young. After she served her time in the military, Ima moved to the States for college and never returned. Another thing I cannot picture: my ima holding a gun.

  Her past terrifies and fascinates me, but she’s having one of her good days, and I don’t want to destroy it with a question that could leave a bruise. Huntington’s is okay to talk about, and yet my mother’s life in Israel is off-limits.

  “Why didn’t you do it?” I ask. “Become a tap dancer?”

  “I have no grace. Not like you, Adina’le.” In Hebrew, adding “le” to the end of a name turns it into a diminutive. Her mouth tips into a wicked grin. “I caught two kids passing love notes back and forth this week.”

  “Really? Who?”

  “Caleb and Annabel.”

  “Didn’t you send Caleb to the principal last week for putting gum in Annabel’s hair?”

  “Don’t you remember fifth grade? That was how you told someone you liked them.”

  Fifth grade: passing notes to Tovah, scribbled in Hebrew in case they were intercepted, tree tag at recess, giggling during sex ed, being sent out into the hall to calm down, not being allowed back inside until we were “mature enough” to handle talking about vaginas and penises. Fifth grade was, quite possibly, one of our best years.

  “I had so many boyfriends in fifth grade. I could barely keep track.”

  Ima laughs. She has the best laugh of anyone I know. It’s deep and throaty and makes me feel as though I’m truly funny. I’m only ever funny around her—and Arjun.

  “I need to ask you something.” I take a deep breath. There’s not enough time between me and our next doctor’s appointment. I want to pile weeks and months and years on top of each other until I’m confident I can be okay with either outcome. “Would anything have changed for you if you were diagnosed earlier? Or if you’d gotten tested and you knew you were going to develop it?”

  Ima purses her lips as she ponders this, loosening the knitted scarf around her neck. Years ago she declared she was going to knit all of us sweaters and scarves and blankets, but soon found she didn’t have the time. Now she has too much of it; her health has made her drop commitments at our synagogue and with her friends. During our movie nights, her needles clack as old Hollywood stars sing and dance onscreen. Half-finished projects hang across the back of the couch and kitchen chairs.

  “It might have. Maybe I would have gotten my teaching certification sooner, or I wouldn’t have wasted my time on jobs I didn’t care about.” Ima changed majors three times in college, then bounced from job to job before going back to school to become a teacher. It’s strange how aimless she was, considering both Tovah and I have known our paths for so long. We didn’t inherit the wandering gene from her. “But if you’re asking if it would have changed my decision to have children, I can’t answer that. I can’t imagine a life without you and Tovah in it.”

  I don’t want the machala arura, the damn disease, to sneak up on me, but I am also not sure I want to plan my own funeral. If I don’t find out, though, perhaps I’d wonder every day if I might soon start losing control over parts of my body.

  “Knock-knock.” Another teacher pokes her head inside the classroom. Mrs. Augustine, who I had for fourth grade, has red spiral curls streaked with gray. “Do you need help with anything, Simcha?”

  “Thanks, Jill, but my daughter’s helping me today.”

  Mrs. Augustine squints at me through huge purple glasses. “Is that Adina?”

  I hold up my hand. “Present.”

  She laughs as though I have made a hilarious joke. I haven’t. “How’s high school treating you?”

  “All right. Only eight more months of it.”

  “Your mom says you’re keeping busy with the violin, and of course we’re all so proud to hear about your sister. I heard she was a National Merit Scholar!”

  “She was,” I say through gritted teeth. I don’t bother correcting her about the violin.

  Everyone always talks about how noble Tovah’s pursuits are, how brilliant her mind is. We need more women in STEM, after all, and apparently Tovah is going to singlehandedly solve the imbalance. She is going to save lives—but I am going to enrich them.

  “Well. I’ll leave you two. Simcha, we’re still on for the faculty breakfast next week?”

  “I never pass up pancakes,” Ima says with a big smile, which doesn’t leave her face until Mrs. Augustine’s heels click-clack out of earshot. Then she turns back to me. “I brag about both of you,” she says, as though she can tell from my stiff posture that Mrs. Augustine’s words have hit a nerve. “You know how much I treasure your music.”

  Logically, I know my parents don’t play favorites. But I have always believed my mother understands me better than she will ever understand my sister.

  “I’m no National Merit Scholar, but thank you.”

  “You are at least a hundred other good things. Don’t let what she said bother you, okay?”

  I shrug. Ima returns to grading her assignments, and I start cleaning the classroom. As I push the vacuum across the carpet, I force my thoughts somewhere happier. I can still feel the warmth of Arjun’s hand beneath mine. Wouldn’t he have moved away faster if he didn’t like me? The thought builds me back up, restores my confidence.

  As far as I know, Arjun doesn’t have a girlfriend, though last year he hinted at it. Occasionally, he used the pronoun “we,” which sent shivers of envy through me. We are going to the farmers’ market Saturday. We are going to the symphony next week. I was only a me.

  Once when I used the bathroom, I found a tube of wild rose–scented moisturizer in the medicine cabinet. Did she simply leave it there one day, or did she regularly spend the night? Was she moving in? I squeezed a dime-size amount onto my palm. I wondered if Arjun liked when she wore it. If it made her skin soft when he touched her with his long, beautiful fingers. Then I panicked. Arjun might notice it when I got back to the studio, so I turned on the water and scraped my hands until they no longer smelled sweet like Arjun’s girlfriend.

  When I checked a few weeks later, the lotion was gone, and when Arjun talked about his weekend plans, his “we” turned back into an “I.”

  “Adina?” Ima’s yell penetrates my eardrums over the vacuum’s roar. I switch it off. “I’ve been calling you!”

  “Sorry,” I say. “The vacuum—”

  She interrupts, waving me over. “Come here for a second.” Before Huntington’s, she was even-tempered, but now her moods shift quickly. It’s jarring when she raises her voice.

  Above her desk is a window with a view of the playground. “Do you hear that?” she says.

  Whatever it is, I probably couldn’t hear it over the wail of the vacuum. “Hear what?”

  “The barking.” She sounds exasperated. “I’ve been listening to it all day. I think there are some dogs on the playground.”

  There probably are. Too many people in Seattle let their dogs go off-leash. Last week at the bus stop, a collarless mutt yapped at me for a full fifteen minutes before the 44 bus arrived.

  I’ve always had excellent hearing, able to pick up nuances in songs, detect when a single string is slightly out of tune. But right now I only hear the wheels of the janitor’s cart squeaking down the hallway.

  “They have to be somewhere out there. Under the slide maybe? It could be dangerous with so many kids around, especially if the dogs are strays.”

  “Ima, I don’t hear them.”

  “Oh! There they go again.” She pushes open the window, letting in a cool breeze. “Get out of here!”

  Then I realize it: The barking isn’t real. The dogs aren’t real.

  I’ve never been alone with her when she’s—hallucinating. The word itself is terrifying.
It has too many syllables; there is no simple word to explain how complicated and scary it is. Aba’s always been around, and Aba, who takes notes during Ima’s doctor’s appointments, always knows what to do. Whenever this happens at home, I flee the room as fast as I can.

  She’s sticking her head out the window, flapping her arms wildly. I rack my brain, trying to remember how Ima’s specialist told us to handle her hallucinations. We’re supposed to tell her that we believe she’s really hearing this, but I can’t go along with it. I have to snap her out of this somehow.

  “They’re not real. They’re not real, okay? You’re imagining it.” I want her to believe me, not whatever’s going on inside her head.

  “Go back where you came from!” She climbs on top of her chair to fit more of herself out the window. “That barking! I can’t stand it, Adina. It’s dreadful.”

  “Please,” I implore her, steadying the wobbly chair with my hands. “Be careful.”

  Her head whips around. “Don’t just stand there. Help me! Azor li!” Continuing to mutter under her breath, she stumbles off the chair and tears out of the classroom.

  “Ima!” I chase after her, punching open the metal doors to the playground. A few kids on swings stare at the strange teacher crouching on the woodchips, peering underneath the slide.

  “I can’t find them,” Ima says, “but I can still hear them!”

  This could be you someday, a voice at the back of my mind warns.

  I swallow around a knot in my throat. It’ll be okay soon We’ll get through this and we’ll go home and have dinner and I’ll practice for my audition Aba will take her to the doctor and they’ll change her medication and everything will be fine.

  “We’ll find them.” Cold air bites at my cheeks and nose. “I’ll help you, okay?”

  Then, certain I’m doing this all wrong, I yell and wave my arms along with her. Together, we shoo the imaginary dogs.

  Four

  Tovah

  THE HUMAN BODY IS MADE up of millions of microscopic puzzle pieces, and in med school I’ll have to memorize them all. Understanding what makes us work has always brought me comfort. I seek out the why, and I learn the answer.

  It’s why AP Bio is my favorite class. Today I snip the hinges of a frog’s mouth and open it up, spelling out words to Lindsay so she can label our diagram. Esophagus, pharynx, vomerine and maxillary teeth. She half covers her face as she scribbles on the worksheet.

  “I can’t watch,” she says.

  With latex-gloved hands, I open the frog’s body cavity. “Look, you can see its stomach and pancreas! And that curled-up thing is its small intestine.”

  I try to sound enthusiastic, but with the test results more than a week away, each day brings me closer to solving my own unknown, and this lab isn’t distracting me the way I’d hoped it would. Nothing can. At synagogue over the weekend, I sat on a hard bench in the sanctuary with the rest of my family while Rabbi Levine spoke. I love weekly services; I love the way Hebrew sounds when the entire congregation recites it together. But when I left the synagogue, I couldn’t remember what the Torah portion had been about. I never space out like that.

  At the lab station next to ours, Henry Zukowski and Evan Nakayama are pretending to make the frogs talk.

  “I feel funny,” Henry says in a high-pitched voice as he puppeteers a frog’s mouth.

  “Do I have something on my face?” Evan says in the same tone, and both of them cackle. I roll my eyes.

  “Please be mature and respectful, or I’m taking the sharp objects away!” Ms. Anaya calls. She stops by our station. “Tovah, careful with your incisions! You nicked that little guy’s left atrium! Why don’t you give Lindsay a turn?”

  Heat flares on my cheeks, and I clench my teeth. Ms. Anaya’s my favorite teacher; she loves biology so much that all her sentences seem to be punctuated with exclamation points. She’s never criticized me before. I can’t even be good at what I’m supposed to be good at, and I have a feeling I won’t be back to my old self until we get our results.

  Well. Depending on what those results are.

  “Sorry,” I mumble. I try to pass the scalpel to Lindsay, but she shakes her head and clings to her pencil.

  “You okay?”

  “I need some air.” I peel off my gloves, toss them on the table, and snatch my backpack. In my rush, my backpack knocks something hanging off the edge of a lab table. Someone gasps, maybe me, as a metal tray flies off the table and a frog plummets to the floor.

  The classroom goes silent for a split second before erupting into noise. “Oh my God!” and “Did Tovah Siegel seriously just do that?” and “I’m gonna throw up.”

  Ms. Anaya tells us to have respect for everything we work with in the lab, especially anything that used to be alive. I’ve taken away whatever dignity that frog had left.

  “Tovah,” Ms. Anaya says gently, “I’ll take care of this. Why don’t you go get cleaned up?”

  Cleaned up? I have no idea what she’s talking about until I notice the frog’s not just on the floor—some of it is on my sweater, too.

  “Lindsay, could you help her?”

  Lindsay springs to her feet and steers me outside. I’m still speechless, but I love her for not laughing. I love her for not complaining about how vile she must find this. I love her for helping me scrub the sweater as best we can with generic pink soap and school bathroom water that has two temperatures, cold and ice-cold.

  “Thanks for helping,” I say.

  “Always.”

  Lindsay has some spare clean clothes in her gym locker, though her long-sleeved shirt stretches too tight across my too-big breasts.

  “You look fine,” Lindsay says as I tug at the shirt in the locker room mirror. “I know you hate them, but I wish I had your boobs.”

  “Take them. Please.” My curves aren’t something I’ve ever been comfortable with—and sometimes I think it’s because my body looks so much better on Adina.

  Lindsay’s phone buzzes with a text as the bell rings. “Troy’s heading to the parking lot. Lunch at Mario’s?” All seniors with at least a B average can get off-campus passes.

  “Oh.” I’m not feeling supersocial at the moment, so I lie: “I have some work to finish up before fifth period.”

  She’s giggling at something on her phone, no longer paying attention. “Sure. Okay.”

  Lindsay’s mine until her boyfriend comes along, and then I’m microscopic.

  I bundle myself in a peacoat so the shirt looks a little less obscene. I’m not hungry, and I don’t feel like facing the cafeteria. The table of student council reps, where Lindsay and I usually sit when we don’t go off campus, is always the loudest. This year I’m a senior rep, which means I have to go to a couple scintillating faculty meetings a month and report back to the rest of the council. It isn’t glamorous, but I needed a leadership role on my résumé.

  I roam the school. Near the math wing, I scoop up a discarded copy of our student newspaper, the Roar. I pause before pitching it into the recycling bin. Next to Troy’s article about our football team’s “devastating loss” last week is a photo of Adina.

  It’s part of a series the paper does highlighting student achievements. She never told me she was being interviewed, but that doesn’t surprise me. The piece calls her a “prodigy,” which isn’t news. In the photo, she’s wearing her usual Adina smirk, this look plenty of guys reading the paper have likely said lewd things about. Though I’m sure few of them give a shit about classical music.

  She gets all this praise because she has this innate talent, this natural musical ability. I know, because I don’t have it. I’ve had to work for every bit of my success in high school: studied for hours for the PSAT and SAT and ACT, campaigned for a seat on student council, fought for a volunteer position at the hospital.

  Not for the first time lately, I wonder if waiting for the test results would be easier if we could talk. But there’s no way I’d initiate that conversation after everything that
’s happened between us.

  I ball up the newspaper and toss it in the bin.

  Eventually I wind up in the art hallway. Most of the student work on the walls is pretty good, though I don’t know anything about composition or color theory.

  “Admiring my work?”

  The voice makes me jump, and I spin around to face Zack Baker-Horowitz. He’s wearing my favorite jacket of his, a tweed blazer with elbow patches, over a faded green T-shirt that makes his hazel eyes more jade than brown. He’s holding a cardboard plate and a slice of cafeteria pizza.

  “Which one’s yours?” I ask.

  “These three.” All of them are mixed media with various random objects that go off the edges. They’re imperfect but interesting. He props an elbow on the wall next to his work, his body less than a foot from me.

  I examine each piece, aware he’s watching me, waiting for my verdict. It makes me wonder if he craves a compliment from me, though he’s the one applying to art school. An agonizingly logical part of my mind wonders, How will he make any money doing that?

  “I don’t get it,” I say finally.

  A little wrinkle appears between his brows as he frowns. “There’s nothing to get.”

  “Isn’t art supposed to have some deep meaning?”

  “I don’t think it always needs to.” With his free hand, he points at one of the pieces. “I like to draw connections between ordinary things. I’m experimenting with different ways of telling stories using paint and found objects I’ve been collecting. Receipts, grocery lists, stuff like that. It’s an exploration of the mundane.”

  “So your art is mundane?”

  He cracks a smile, exposing a small gap between his two front teeth that I find adorable, and moves his elbow off the wall to nudge my arm. Though my jacket is so thick I can barely feel it, my stomach does backflips. I wonder what it would feel like to touch him longer than a split second. “Exactly.”

  Really, my crush on him is more of an admiration. In the spring when we both run track, he pushes back his hair with neon sweatbands and strikes dorky, flashy poses at the finish line that make me laugh. I can’t date him, so I’m resigned to appreciating him: his confidence and his jokes and his long eyelashes. And his vintage jacket, of course, because he has his own style and I can appreciate that, too.