The Best Possible Answer(6)

I shouldn’t have been left alone.

I close my eyes.

I fall into the waves.

I melt into the bed.

I’m alone.

*

The Episode lasts for what feels like hours. When it finally calms down, I move to the couch and fall asleep to old episodes of The Big Bang Theory until it’s time to pick up Mila.

She runs out of the gate toward me with a hand-drawn card made out of construction paper, and it’s taped shut with daisy and unicorn stickers. “Here’s your get-well card.” And then she places her hand on my forehead. “You still look sick. Can we play nurse today?”

We get home, and I climb into bed so she can bring me a glass of milk and toast. She pulls out a doctor kit from when she was in preschool and listens to my heart with her plastic stethoscope.

I open the get-well card she drew for me. It’s a picture of all of us—my mom, my dad, Mila, and me. We’re stick figures standing in front of a two-story house, smiling and holding hands.

My heart drops. Ever since she was in kindergarten, when her teacher gave her an assignment to find out what her parents did for work, she’s asked our dad the same question: “When will you build us a house?” He always laughs and tries to explain that he doesn’t build houses, that he works on large skyscrapers in foreign countries, but it never appeases her. “But you could if you wanted to,” she always says. “You know how.”

This house is nothing like where we live. It has a slanted roof, a picket fence, and a chimney. There’s a green yard with apple trees and purple flowers, and a rainbow arcs over our round and smiling heads. It’s nothing like Bennett Tower, where we actually live, with its cold white stone and black balconies, an ugly old skyscraper that just straight up out of the earth.

Mila leans over my shoulder. “Sorry it’s not perfect.”

“Mila, why do you say it’s not perfect?”

“I wanted to make it right for you. But I had trouble with the arms.”

“Mila, come on. I love it. And you know there’s no such thing as perfection.”

She pauses for a moment. “I think you’re perfect. I think Mommy’s perfect.” She doesn’t mention our dad.

My Academy teachers said that we’re asymmetrical beings seeking a perfect kind of symmetry that can never be attained. They showed us cracked vases as examples of the beauty of ordinary objects. No design is perfect, they said, but we still can’t help but try.

I look at Mila’s drawing. My arms have been drawn and erased so many times, I look like the ghost of a Hindu god. “How about this?” I say. “I think that your picture is perfect because you made it.”

“I guess,” she says.

I get out of bed so I can pin it to the bulletin board above my desk, but then she grabs it from me and rips it in two.

“What are you doing?”

“I’ll make you a new one tomorrow,” she says, crumpling the pieces as she runs.

“But I like that one!” I chase after her down the hallway and try to pull it from her grasp, but when I finally release it from her hands, it’s completely destroyed.

*

The next day is Saturday, which means I basically get a four-day weekend, if you include the fabulous ER visit. But it also means that my mom’s home and is on guard to make sure that I do nothing but rest. I have to watch Wild Kratts with Mila while my mom studies at the dining room table. There she is, stressing about her classes, all the while watching over me like the hawk that Mila’s obsessed with on her program.

At noon, I get a text from Sammie telling me to come upstairs, that she has news—“big, big news!”

My mom lets me go so long as I promise “no reading, no studying.”

It takes me thirty-eight seconds to reach Sammie’s apartment via the emergency stairwell. She’s standing at the door, jumping and smiling and clapping her hands.

“What’s up?”

“You’re going to work with me this summer!” She yells this, and her mom tells her to close the door, that she’s going to wake up the entire building.

“What are you talking about?”

“I got you a job.”

The building we live in is part of this microcosm of a neighborhood called Bennett Village, which isn’t really a village, not like the small town outside of Kiev where my mom grew up. Bennett Village is just a five-block stretch of land in the middle of Chicago where four identical high-rises are separated by overpriced town houses and courtyards that have more concrete than plant life. It was built fifty years ago and was part of this idyllic postwar desire to achieve the American dream, according to my dad, who knows these things. Our building towers over a private Olympic-size outdoor pool on the ground floor, where Sammie worked last summer. Even if you live in the village, you still have to pay a hefty fee to the condo association in order to use the pool.

As it turns out, Mrs. Salazar is in with Mr. Bautista, the head of Bennett Village maintenance. Sammie’s Filipina, and she has a huge family who live all over Chicago, including Mr. Bautista, who’s her dad’s second cousin through marriage. He trusts Sammie’s mom, so he agreed to hire me without even a pretend interview.

“My mom’s not going to approve,” I say. “She wants me to sit and do nothing.”

“You will be doing nothing, though. You’ll be sitting around, with me, getting paid to just hang out!”