Page 100 of Aftertaste

“In what possible reality”—he dripped venom—“do you think I’d ever want your help? After what you did?”

“What, Kostya!” she shouted back, hurt. “What I do? I care about you! I love you! I try and try to talk!”

“You abandoned me.” He let himself go off. “In a lunatic asylum! I didn’t even think they made those in the modern world, but let me tell you, that shit hasn’t changed since the fifties. Sedatives. Restraints. No fucking socks! I trusted you, Mama. And you gave me up.You.You did that.”

In all those years, he’d never let it out, a kettle boiling away, exploding now, under pressure. It hurt to tell her; it hurt to remember.

“And when I came home? When I finally managed to lie my way out of that fucking monstrosity? Papa was dead and it was like I didn’t have a mother anymore either. I wasten, Mama! I couldn’t even fry an egg! And I had to take care of meandyou. My whole childhood, I had to beyourparent. Figure out keeping food in the fridge, and the rent paid, and the heat on. Figure out how to make you happy—or at least make you not sad all the time. I had to be the adult because you were too fucking selfish to pull yourself out of your own grief and realize I was hurting, too.”

The aftermath of the room was so still. She pressed her lips together.

“Kostya—I—”

“Save it.” He swallowed the lump in his throat, tried to blink away the tears that had begun to form. He shoved his keys back into his pocket, turning to go. If she wouldn’t leave, then he would. “I’m done. I don’t need your help. And I don’t need to tell you anything, okay? You don’t get to be in my life. You never wanted me in yours.”

“Kostya—stop!” His mother looked so small now. So much older. Grey salting her hair, her eyes pruning at the edges. It had been a long time since he’d looked at her, really looked, and time had not been kind. “You know where I was, when you staying with Natasha?”

“Who cares? You dumped me with her for a month! Every day, I thought Valerik was just going to leave me at the boardwalk pool and never come back. You weren’t with me, Mama. Didn’t even call once. I was a little kid! A baby! You left me to rot. To watch all the kids and their dads, all summer long. And right after Papa died.”

“I—” she sobbed, burying her face in her hands, “I try dying, too, Kostya! I left you with Nata, and I try. Tamara find me, full of pills.”

Something in him stopped. Her words weren’t rendering. He didn’t understand.

“Tamara? The neighbor?”

His mother nodded. “She take me to clinic where her son work.”

“You didn’t go to a hospital?”

She shook her head. “Tamara say they take you away, if I go.”

“Who? Who’s they?”

She shrugged. “America.”

Kostya could feel pins coming into his fingers.

“So, what? You were suicidal and that makes it okay to institutionalize me? You wanted another couple weeks to yourself?”

She shook her head, no fight in her. “You tell me you taste Sergei, and I think that he trying to call you, too. That”—her voice broke—“you have same sickness I have. And you deserve real help, not dark Russian clinic without license.”

“You—you thought I was suicidal?”

She nodded, tears rolling down her face.

“Wait,” he said slowly. “What do you mean,too? Did you—could you taste something?”

She looked at him, stricken, her eyes asking if maybe they were both crazy. “In weeks after he die, when I think of him, I tastepechonka.”

“Oh my God.Mom.”

“The pills I take—while you with Natasha—I take to make it stop.”

Kostya’s eyes burned. He blinked and felt hot tears fall. Of all the people in the world who could actually understand what he’d gone through, who might relate to how it felt to have your most painful moments synesthetically, magically, impossibly punctuated, inescapable in their strangeness—his mother had known. But unlike him, she hadn’t thought the tastes had come from his father; she’d been sure it was the distress of her own mind, the deterioration of her psyche, a nervous break at the loss she couldn’t handle.

“Oh, Mama.” He hugged her, a real hug, the kind he hadn’t given her since before his dad died, no withdraw to it, no itch to move away. “Do you—can you still taste him?”

“No,” she whispered. “Not since pills.”

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