Kali, Zach and Marko spent whole days with Lydia at the mansion in Lincoln, swimming in the pool, lounging in lawn chairs in the family’s acres-big backyard. After the parents divorced, the man promptly remarried a much younger Russian woman who didn’t like Lydia. With the kids grown and off to college, Lydia soon found herself out of the mansion and back on her own in a country that still didn’t feel like home.
Marko was six at the time and Lydia came to live with them. Kali, having become integrated into the yoga community, connected Lydia with people she knew at the ashram—a spiritual yoga retreat in the suburbs. Lydia was able to get a small apartment there and a job cooking as well as another part-time job at the local Montessori school. This way, Kali was able to visit her at the Ashram and sometimes leave Marko there with her for a few days so she could get away. To Kali’s mind, it was the perfect solution; Lydia could also come to the city to visit Kali and Marko, but they didn’t have to be on top of each other. She loved her mother, but too much time together often led them down a path of buried resentments from older, deeper wounds.
And now Kali was headed back to Bulgaria for the first time in fifteen years. She opened the door to the little airplane lavatory, disposed of the catheter bag, and washed her hands. She thought of her son. Marko would see Sofia for the first time and meet his grandfather, Todor, who Kali thought might actually, finally, be dying for real. When Lydia had told Kali she was going back to stay with him because he was sick, she had known it must have been serious. Faced with the reality of his death after having been estranged from her father for nearly two decades, she decided, somewhat spontaneously, to return and see him one last time and let him meet his grandson.
When Kali walked up the aisle to return to her seat, she squeezed past the woman who had been sitting next to her headed in the opposite direction, looking uncomfortable. Marko must have over-shared something with her, Kali thought, then laughed to herself. She returned to her seat to find her son, face upturned and illuminated by the sunlight streaming in through the window, hands carving elegant arches and angles in the space before his face.
3. December 13, 2014: Cambridge, MA
Marko sat in his room and stared at the wall to think. It had been a year since his dad moved out and went to California. Marko didn’t mind that his dad was gone. In fact, he preferred it to when they had all lived together. His mom and dad had fought a lot. And Marko didn’t get as much one-on-one attention from his mom when they all lived together. Sometimes he acted like he did mind because that would get him more attention, but he only did that a very few times when he was feeling extra lonely (number eleven) or extra uncomfortable (number fourteen). In fact, he didn’t even want as much one-on-one attention from his mom anymore. What he wanted was to know her—to know her 100 percent, or at least 80 percent. He knew her only 17 percent. His mom never talked to him about what she felt for anyone but him. She never talked about what made her afraid or lonely or what she wanted out of life. Marko knew that wasn’t malicious. She was doing it to protect him. She wanted him to feel safe, and if he knew she was fallible (which he knew she was), she worried he would not trust her.
Because he wanted to know her more, he started asking her questions. He would ask about her friends and if she was dating anyone, but she would answer with short, meaningless phrases like “so and so is a good person” or “I’m not interested in dating.” When his questioning didn’t lead anywhere, he decided he would have to be a detective and find out for himself.
One practice his mom had started since he turned fourteen was leaving him home alone sometimes. He could create this alone time if he asked her to go and get him something.
“Mom, can you please get me a smoothie from that health food store? I really have been craving one,” he said that second Saturday afternoon in January when it all started.
“When was the last time you had one, honey?”
“It’s been weeks,” he said. He felt a little bad because he knew that they were expensive and that his mom never had a lot of money. She never told him she couldn’t afford something, but he knew.
“I’ll pay you back,” he said, knowing he could not. Still, he liked to think that eventually he would find a way to earn money and be able to not only pay his parents back for taking such good care of him, but also help to take care of them.
“It’s not about the money, babe,” she said, “I just don’t know about going out in this weather.”
“You go without me. I’ll wait here,” Marko said and smiled. His mom smiled, too. She knew he was proud to be trusted on his own for a little while.
“Okay, I’ll go get you a Green Goddess, how about that?”
“Yes! Yay!” Marko pumped the air with his fist, which she loved and which always made her laugh and hug him.
As soon as she closed and locked the door, Marko wheeled himself into her bedroom. He looked inside her drawers and opened the various small containers on her dresser, but all he found were earrings and hair barrettes and clothes and underwear. He went to the small bookcase just behind the wall inside her room and scanned the spines. He was familiar with the books his mom kept next to her bed. He’d read most of the English ones, but not the ones in Russian, Bulgarian, and French. His mother’s fluency in four languages was something he admired and envied, but he’d never had the patience to learn other languages. There was too much to learn and to think about in English. He recognized a new book on the shelf and he picked it up. It was a hardback book with a gray cover and the words:
THE
UNBEARABLE
LIGHTNESS
OF BEING
A NOVEL BY
MILAN KUNDERA
He opened it and flipped through it. There was some writing that was highlighted on a page: What does this mad math signify?
This was how Marko first read the line, and he was so excited to find his own latent, burning question in print in a book under his eyes that he nearly threw the book to the floor. Was this author writing about the mad math in his head? Did he have the mad math, too? Marko had never considered this phrase before exactly, but he thought it was an excellent name for the numbers and shapes that operated in his mind: the mad math.
But when he reread the line, he saw that he’d misread it.
“To think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that this recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum! What does this mad myth signify?”
Myth. A much different word than math.
Still, she had highlighted it, so it must mean something to her. Or had someone else highlighted it?
He turned back to the front of the book and saw an inscription on the title page. It read: “To Kalina, my firstborn: this will help you perfect your English and heighten your thinking. Let it make you smarter, and more interesting! All my love, Papa.”
Marko’s heartbeat quickened. His mom never talked about her father and Marko had never met him. All he knew was that he lived alone in Bulgaria and was a sad man. Marko’s mom had a brother who died, also named Marko, and she talked all about him, but never their father. The inscription in the book was dated January of 1985. A quick calculation. His mom would have been eleven years old. If she could read it when she was eleven, then Marko, being fourteen, could certainly read it.
Marko replaced the book on the shelf and picked up another book, a journal. Its cover was blank yellow fabric, worn and a little dirty. Was this her diary? Even handling it made him feel guilty. He knew that diaries were for secrets, and not for anyone else to read. Still, he needed to know her better. It was important, more so than he could explain. It was like there was a deep well inside of him and he was stuck at the bottom. Knowledge about his mother was a rope that he could