Seven
Adina
“ADINA, I’M SO SORRY. . . . YOU tested positive.”
The room tilts. Sunsets and mountaintops burst from their frames and slide off the walls. Computers crash to the floor and lightbulbs explode and everything lands in a heap of broken pieces.
I blink, and the room repairs itself.
“Adina?”
My mother begins to sob, pianissimo at first. Her arms wrap around me, but I cannot get mine to do anything. Positive. The word has turned me to cement.
A masochistic laugh bubbles out of me. It’s a quick noise, a ha! that almost sounds like I’m choking. Because it is funny, almost, that “positive” usually means something good.
“Adina,” Dr. Simon says again, “do you understand what that means?”
Slowly I nod. Somehow I find my voice. “I—I have HD.”
“You don’t have it yet,” Dr. Simon is quick to correct. “You won’t have symptoms for a long, long time. You’re only eighteen. You can still have a long, full, normal life ahead of you.”
Only eighteen. I am as young as I often fear I am. I shake that thought away.
“Not exactly normal.” The laugh returns. This time it sounds like a bark.
“We’ll do all we can for you to make it as normal as possible,” Maureen says.
Ima hugs me tighter. “Adi, I am so sorry.”
It takes several more minutes for me to attach any real meaning to the words spilling out of the doctor’s mouth. The room is thick with those words, consonants and vowels stacked to the ceiling. Entire sentences collapse on top of me.
You can still live a normal life.
Many people do.
You’re so young.
Machala arura—the damn disease belongs to me now, too.
“We’ll give you some time to process this as a family,” Dr. Simon says.
As a family—oh God, how is Tovah handling this? My frustrations toward my sister vanish for a moment. If she tested positive too, she will surely develop some coping mechanism so it won’t wreck her own meticulously planned future, and she’ll share it with me and we’ll get through it together the way she promised all those years ago. She broke that promise, but she can still make it up to me.
But when Tovah enters the room with Aba, her eyes are not red, and she hasn’t been crying. Her shoulders are straight, relaxed, and she looks entirely unchanged by her result.
“You tested negative,” I say, and a brief nod from her confirms it.
Opposite results.
It takes a split second for the reality to dawn on her. “Oh my God, Adi.” My nickname sounds strange on her tongue. She hasn’t used it in a while. “I can’t believe it. Oh—oh my God.” Her voice is soft, crackly. My usually articulate sister has no intelligent words.
Tovah sinks into the chair next to mine, bites her lip as she tries to think of something else to say. She is the one who is going to live a long and healthy and normal life. I am the one doomed like Ima, and perhaps it fits, since Ima and I are so close, for she and I to be eternally bonded in this way.
Tovah shifts toward me, apparently deciding to attempt a hug. It has been years since we touched like this, years since I have hugged the sister I spent nine months with in utero. She says my name again, this time into my hair, as I stiffen at the shock of her arms around me.
When she pulls back, pity has knit her brows together, and her eyes won’t leave mine. I wonder if that’s how people will look at me from now on, with sad eyes that say I feel so bad for you and at the same time I’m glad what happened to you didn’t happen to me.
The conversation ping-pongs between our parents.
Ima: We’re here for you.
Aba: We’ll get through this.
Ima: Can we get you anything?
Aba: We can call the doctors back in. Or we can talk more about this at home. Or we can wait to talk about it. Do you want to talk to Rabbi Levine?
Ima: Rabbi Levine would be more than happy to sit down with you.
Aba: We can do whatever you want.
Tovah (whispered): Adi. Are you okay?
Tovah: Adina. Say something.
Aba: Maybe we shouldn’t have let them do this so young.
Ima: They aren’t young. They’re adults. They deserve to know.
Aba: We thought about this possibility, of course, but we never thought . . .
Tovah: Please.
Too many people are talking. They are sucking the last of the air out of the room, leaving none for me. For once in my life, all I want is silence.
I never wanted to know.
After Ima’s diagnosis, Tovah and I talked about HD occasionally, but whenever she tried to convince me to take the test with her, I told her no. Over and over and over. Once we started high school, we pursued our passions with renewed vigor. I started private lessons and Tovah joined student council and track and buried herself under mountains of homework. Distance grew between us, of course, but that was natural. We were busy.
Spring of sophomore year, Tovah applied to a half-dozen summer programs, including a study abroad with a STEM focus that would last an entire year. Her Johns Hopkins application had to stand out, which apparently meant abandoning our family. I wondered why she couldn’t start a charity or invent something, the way people who get into prestigious schools always seem to do. This was what she wanted, though: to spend several weeks or months or an entire year away from our family. Away from me. When I asked her to stay, I only sounded selfish.
One evening when she was out for a run, her bedroom door open, her computer beckoned me closer. Her applications weren’t difficult to find. The essays talked about how science helped her make sense of the world. What I couldn’t get out of my head was that no one could make sense of what had happened to us.
She was the only one who knew what it was like to have a mother suffering from something you might suffer from too, and I had to keep her here any way possible—even if it made her angry. Anger, I could deal with. A missing sister, I could not. And she couldn’t leave if she never actually sent in her applications.
Deleting the applications was the easy part. My engineer father ensured we knew our way around a computer better than our naturally tech-savvy peers. I erased every version she’d saved, made sure she couldn’t recover them.
The hard part was what came after: the yelling and the slammed doors and the disapproving looks from my parents, especially Ima. Aba threatened to take away my viola, but I cried so hard he eventually reneged. I was grounded for an entire month.
Tovah retaliated. The night before my audition for the youth symphony, she shredded my sheet music. But it didn’t matter—of course I’d memorized my pieces and easily made it in. Then it became war and we became children: locking the bathroom when we knew the other needed it, taking a long time to get ready and making us both late for school, eating all the leftovers when Ima made shakshuka.
A couple months after I deleted everything, she barged into my room and, in a venomous whisper, she said, “You’re taking the test with me when we turn eighteen.”
Quickly I shut my laptop, where I’d been watching old videos of Arjun’s performances with the New Delhi symphony. “No. I’m not.”
“You want me to keep speaking to you? Do this with me, and I will. I can’t promise that we’ll be close again, but one day I’m sure I’ll forgive you. But if you don’t take the test, Adina, you are dead to me.”
“You can’t be serious.”
But she was. Then came the three words that would characterize our relationship from that point forward: “You owe me.”
Sister guilt runs deep. I gave in, and for the next two years we stayed out of each other’s way. We were polite but brusque. No more late-night talks or inside jokes or entire conversations communicated only with our eyes. By trying to keep her here, I’d pushed her further away.
I have been holding out for that one day when she might forgive me, and it has been the loneliest time of my life.