—

  Lina tried to tell Sacha about the artist. She heard herself; she didn’t sound very smart. She admitted she didn’t like the mermaids. “But the hanging wire pieces—” She made gestures that were the physical equivalent of stuttering.

  “Has she had shows in New York?”

  Lina didn’t know. Eventually, Walter sent a picture of the piece he’d bought.

  “Nice,” Sacha said, then put it down. Lina asked Walter how much he’d paid. He wouldn’t tell, so it must have been a lot. Lina had envied her brother for many things, but never as much as for this one possession.

  She took the picture with her to show Harry when she returned to Evergreen, but when she arrived he wasn’t there, and another young woman sat at the desk, wearing a skirt and black tights. She didn’t know about Lina. That night, when Harry called to put her back on the schedule, Lina recognized pity in his voice. She would’ve liked to quit, in a snap of pride, but didn’t want to give up the paycheck.

  * * *

  —

  Trish, Donnie’s caseworker, said that soon he would get a job. Most kids found work in local coffee shops, but he wanted the hospital, to be near his mother. They usually didn’t let patients from the youth wing intermingle with adults, but geriatrics was short-staffed, and Trish was filing for permission.

  Did she think Donnie could go back to college in fall? Lina asked.

  Trish thought fall sounded too soon. Maybe winter, if the college had sober living. If the testing was sound. With visuals.

  “Visuals meaning he pulls down his pants?”

  “Yes. He came in—when? March? It usually takes a year all told.”

  * * *

  —

  Sacha flung himself on the bed. How long, he asked, did Lina think Donnie would be in the place?

  “First they said three months. Now it’s already been four.” She didn’t tell him Trish had said a year.

  “You think it’s working?

  “Yeah. No. Definitely.”

  “So good.” Sacha looked like he had more to say. Lina was relieved. They heard rain outside. A small excitement built; now they would finally talk. He lay on his side, his head propped on an elbow. “Do you want to postpone? Your brother has to be there.”

  “He’ll be out by then, I’m pretty sure.” She wasn’t, though.

  “And he’ll be all right, you think, around alcohol?”

  Alcohol. She hadn’t thought of that. “Would we have to have alcohol?”

  “It’s a wedding, Lina.”

  “Walter will be there with him.” Was Walter enough? She needed time. To think.

  * * *

  —

  At the Cuban Chinese place, Lina told Troy about the philosophy of the rehab unit, which, come to think of it, ran through the whole hospital. Dr. Moss believed in education as cure. So in August Donnie was starting classes at the local community college. He could eventually become certified as an addiction counselor, Trish said. A nurse in her mother’s ward, Shirley, had begun in the hospital at sixteen. Her parents worked there, too. Later, the hospital paid for Shirley’s nursing school. That was well and good for Shirley, but Lina didn’t like the idea of Donnie becoming an “addiction professional,” as Trish called it. As if that were all he could do now.

  “Still, probably good to be on a campus,” Troy said. “Somebody’s apt to be talking about an idea. My cousin, the one that had trouble, he used to say, ‘Addicts, we dreamers.’ ”

  Trish had told Lina that Donnie was moving from the lockdown unit to a small cottage with three other young men.

  Lina thought of the twelve-step token the good-looking guy had given to Donnie on his thirtieth day of sobriety. Someone probably purchased those tokens by the bag.

  Troy laughed. “Could say that about our diplomas or any other damn award.”

  * * *

  —

  Lina walked to Sacha’s bedroom desk—a mid-century Mogensen they’d found in a Brooklyn warehouse—and he covered a handwritten letter with his sweatered arm, the word hereditary crawling out from beneath his cuff.

  “My mother,” he said.

  “What did you tell her?” It came out as an accusation.

  “She was going to find out, Lina. Your mother would be at the wedding.”

  The wedding, Lina thought. Then, would be.

  They fought until he handed her the letter, a carefully worded note about the heritability of mental illness. His mother hadn’t wanted her son to marry into insanity. She was thinking about grandchildren. Lina shouldn’t have blamed her. What if it’s in me? had been Lina’s own constant terror. She wanted a better life than the one her mother was living. Was that treachery? Betrayal? At the bottom of the page, Sacha’s mother had written Beauty won’t last forever.

  “That’s my mother, not me,” Sacha said. “You’re not marrying my parents.”

  Lina asked him his true opinion of Walter’s sculptor.

  “A little domestic, maybe. Craftsy.”

  Six months ago, he’d brought home an antique papier-mâché bride and groom fashioned to be on top of a cake and had played with them on the table, but his wedding planning had since slowed. Lina had been relieved. But now, she thought, maybe they could get married at city hall, with his parents, her brothers, her mother, and Julie, celebrate with just a cake and champagne. Lina decided to take some initiative. Visiting Troy at the East Side pottery studio, she’d walked past a bakery that made beautiful cakes, displayed on silver stands in the front window. Old men sat reading foreign newspapers. Lina had never before stepped inside.

  She waited her turn, then asked about wedding cakes. A baker came from the back and told her that they would make samples. The cakes looked exquisite, lacquered on their pedestals. Fondant orchids spilled over one smooth side. She liked yellow cake with lemon filling. He suggested marzipan and chestnut. Almond. Poppy seed. He would make six kinds.

  In a week, she picked up the pink boxes, each tied with string, and tried to pay, but the baker wouldn’t accept money. A courtesy, he said, for our customers.

  She stepped into the bedroom where Sacha sat at his desk. She stood gazing at his back, his narrow shoulders in the worn brown-green sweater, in front of bookshelves with a small stuffed owl. She didn’t want to disturb this tableau. Curls fell onto his collar. Sometimes when she saw him, the world contracted. What she loved about him wasn’t the two of them. It was him alone.

  They set the cakes on the round kitchen table, each on its own plate. “Like a Wayne Thiebaud,” she mumbled. There was just enough space for the table, next to the window. Most of the time they spent together in the apartment was there. They looked down at the small cakes, the dark pressing in from outside. Sacha cut a slice. She ate a bite. It tasted like dust. She tried another. They were terrible. She started laughing. Then he said, “I want to talk.” Standing.

  They both stilled.

  “What?” There was a clear moment, before the terror rushed in.

  She’d always known, if he left her, the sting would last. That was the danger of real love, she’d thought. It had the power to destroy you.

  70.

  For years, Lina had worried that her mother’s illness was inside her, biding its time. Now she knew that it was here. There was some relief in this. She didn’t have to try so hard. Tears ran down her face as she walked along the river, and she didn’t mind people seeing. Her mother had battled sadness for years to stay upright, until Walter was off to college. She’d been more herself around Lina and Donnie. Lina was finally with her. When she couldn’t get up one morning to dress, she left a message on the Evergreen’s machine, quitting over the phone.

  In five weeks, she would fly home. The first time Walter had booked her flight, she’d tried to pay him back, but he’d been awkward, refusing. Now he bought her tickets and they didn’t talk about it. He preferred his generosity unacknowledged.

  She couldn’t tell him yet what had happened. She would have to make adjustments to the blow. When she’d been rejected before, she’d settled into the stockroom and taken a night class. And Mrs. Anjani had been right: most of what was quietly thrilling about school was already there at the community college. Barnard students were younger and better dressed, but no more intellectually daunting. Now, again, she had to start over.

  She found a studio twice as expensive as her old university apartment, but it had a kitchen and a view of steeples and water tanks. She brought her canvases, easels, a box, the Morris chair, and a suitcase in two trips. She and Troy carried her sofa there.

  She called Jess long-distance on Sunday, when it was cheaper, to learn how to move through the days.

  “I just work,” Jess said. “I stay late, then walk home and go to sleep without thinking.”

  But Lina couldn’t paint.

  Sacha had once picked up a canvas from where it was leaning against a wall and gazed at it. How could he do that and then leave? Could both be true? She remembered him pushing her against a fence in the cold, kissing her before she was fully in love, when she’d still had a choice.

  Engagement off, she wrote in a PS to her brothers and Julie. Can’t talk about it yet.

  * * *

  —

  Lina had too much time. Without her hours at the gallery, afternoons felt long. Her colors looked muddy, her brushstrokes thin. She felt dull. She was supposed to teach in fall, not only her Saturday-morning tour of the armory but a painting class. How could she pretend to tell people how to do what she couldn’t? She didn’t see friends, except Troy. Two people they knew had shows up. The guy who painted spiders was taking the LSAT. She remembered the restrictions Donnie had accepted.

  Tomorrow, she would walk to the university’s job board. She would take a regular job, she decided, in a flower shop or a hospital.

  * * *

  —

  Lina made one concession to a future: an expensive every-other-week session with a woman named Dr. Jin. “My DNA is tainted,” she told her in a low-ceilinged room, the sound of taxis outside. Sacha’s mother hadn’t wanted them to marry. Beauty won’t last, she’d written. Of course, things like this had been said since the beginning of the world and ignored. But not by him.

  “Actually, some beauty does last,” Dr. Jin said. “Yours will. Because you’re dark. You’ll have the last laugh. There will be another love.”

  It had begun raining outside.

  When Lina had her heart set on a dress once, her mother told her that there would always be another beautiful dress. Lina didn’t doubt that there could be another kind of love. Walter’s kind. She wasn’t sure she wanted that.

  She stepped outside, wishing she hadn’t told the doctor about crying over a dress. If she’d been a less materialistic child, she thought, she might be a better artist now.

  * * *

  —

  Lina, Walter, and Julie attended a ceremony in a church-basement room where the tall leader gave Donnie a token for six months. Donnie wore a jacket over his cords. A small boombox played Bach’s solo cello concertos. Lina reached for Walter’s hand.

  The next day, they crowded into Trish’s small office and she delivered a progress report.

  “Better than any teacher conference I remember,” Julie said.

  Trish detailed the steps of re-integration. Donnie had moved off the hospital grounds into a sober house closer to the college, where he would eventually resume, with a light load. Not this fall, maybe spring. Eight young men lived with a facilitator. There were curfews. Urine testing. When he went back to school, they could set up testing there, once a week. Donnie drove to the hospital to work in the geri unit. He’d also volunteered with Buildings and Grounds to be with their mother in the garden.

  “But for how long?” Julie asked.

  “How long what?” Trish asked.

  “Well, that he’ll be living in halfway places. With supervision. And urine testing.”

  “You want sobriety to become his way of life. It takes a while. But I think by October or November he can move again.”

  “You say it’s all young men in there. What if, going back to college, he meets a girl he’d like to take out?”

  “Rehab romance is discouraged. We say nothing for the first year.”

  They were silent. A year seemed a very long time.

  “Think of this as his year of internal reconstruction.”

  “They keep moving the mark,” Walter said when they finally got out.

  “The same with Mom.”

  “I’d like to see him living back at the college,” Julie added.

  “But we want him to succeed.” Lina had never said the word so free of irony.

  Donnie shared a room with an emaciated guy from Portland who operated a vintage record business from underneath his bed. She and Donnie were alike, Lina thought. What little strength there’d been in the bungalow, Walter imbibed. She and Donnie lived with their mother as her illness gained majority, in that cathedral of chaos. Lina hadn’t thought they were permanently marked, but maybe only they couldn’t see. She and Donnie had inherited the gene.

  Driving back from Norwalk, Walter talked to Lina about his wedding. He wanted it to be at Ken’s walnut farm. He’d be married long before she was now. Lina had finally finished the book Carrie gave him. Every character she liked ended up with someone disappointing.

  That night, Lina took a walk in Walter’s new neighborhood, which smelled consoling with intermittent nutmeg lifts of jasmine and long dissolving scarves of woodsmoke. A man ambled down the road with a dog. Every few yards, he bent down to pat it. “Pretty dog,” Lina said, passing, and saw the man’s pride in his animal.

  She’d felt that pride in Sacha once, and, long ago, in her mother.

  As if guilty because she had something good.

  * * *

  —

  Donnie was meditating, he wrote. Early morning.

  * * *

  —

  Troy found Lina a gig with a sculptor in her nineties who was a friend of his boss. She worked in a loft that had once been a glove factory. On Lina’s first day, she and another assistant hauled a pallet of lumber up from the street.

  She’d liked the two guys she worked with fine.

  After a week, she had calluses on both hands.

  On the day that would have been her wedding, she learned how to weld.

  She arrived early and stayed every day until two, when the sculptor took her nap.

  * * *

  —

  After work, Lina stopped to buy a walnut cookie and then walked the sixty blocks to the library, arriving by three, as if it were a job. She set out to learn the history of treatment for mental illness. From what she could tell, humans began studying medicine in Mesopotamia. Most practitioners were priests. Something called the Edwin Smith Papyrus, written in the seventeenth century BCE, was a text on surgery for battle wounds. The first houses of healing were placed near rivers, so evil spirits would be washed away; Greeks and Romans built theirs near springs or the ocean.

  Lina read about bimaristans, dated to the lifetime of the Prophet Muhammad, who taught that God would not create a disease without creating a cure. They were mobile, transported by camels. The first was a tent set up by a female caretaker who treated soldiers wounded in the Battle of the Ditch. The earliest permanent bimaristan was in Baghdad, along the Tigris. The founder determined where to build it by hanging pieces of meat several places and picking the one where the meat became least infected.

  People could go to the bimaristans for physical or mental illness. They served all people regardless of citizenship, race, religion, age, or gender. Nobody was ever turned away. This discovery pleased her, though she wasn’t Muslim and had grown up without her father.

  * * *

  —

  In the morning, Lina helped her boss climb the wide plywood stairs to a seated perch, like a lifeguard’s box, where she shouted instructions to her assistants below as they fitted together the pieces, following her sketches. She would redraw what she wanted altered. Lina would run up, retrieve the paper, and they’d begin again. The piece was an enormous staircase that turned in five places and ended in air.

  Lina liked talking to the other assistants who knew nothing about Sacha.

  * * *

  —

  Walter called every few weeks. “Are you dating yet?”

  “No.”

  “Well, why not?”

  “I suppose Sacha was the one for me.”

  “Well, then there’ll just have to be another one.”

  “Don’t you still love Carrie?” she asked to subdue him.

  His voice changed. “I’ll always love Carrie. I think you keep loving the people you love, if they’re good people. But could I make a life with her? No. I have the one I need.”

  Sacha had once told her, We’ll find a way to change your life.

  But he hadn’t told her he was still deciding. These conundrums occupied her during the months she worked for the sculptor and asked little of herself. Of course Walter would urge her to go out. Walter didn’t believe in real love. He was marrying Susan.

  * * *

  —

  The sculptor had never been rich, but she’d managed to buy this factory in the sixties, when she was married, briefly, to a lawyer. Though not much acknowledged herself, she’d been friends with David Smith and Sol LeWitt. Once, finally, there was a retrospective of her work in the Brooklyn Museum, but the New York Times art critic reviewed it in one paragraph. Her own favorite artists were Brancusi and Piero della Francesca.