Still Here (17 page)

“And why the hell not?” Aunt Masha asked. She was getting flushed and angry again, and a little bit crazy. Regina remembered the violent fights she and her mother sometimes had. There was even that one time when Aunt Masha had slapped her mother across the face. She looked as if she was ready to slap Regina now.

“You're young, you're healthy,” she said, “you're happily married. Your husband sounds like a kind, responsible man. You have plenty of money. So why don't you do a single unselfish thing in your life and save this little girl?”

Now it was Regina who felt like hitting Aunt Masha. “I can't,” she said. “I simply can't.”

“Tell me why.”

Regina wanted to say that Bob wouldn't go for it. But that wasn't true. In fact, she was almost sure that Bob would welcome the idea. The problem was her and her alone, and Aunt Masha knew this. Then a thought of salvation occurred to her.

“Well, what about Dima Yakovlev's law? We are Americans so we can't adopt a Russian child.”

This law was named after an adopted Russian boy who died in a parked car, left there by his adoptive American parents. The law imposed by Putin's government in 2012 prohibited American citizens from adopting Russian children. It was an ugly hypocritical law. It was designed to hurt Americans, but it actually robbed Russian orphans of their chance to have a decent future. When she first heard about it, Regina was infuriated. Now she felt almost grateful.

“I've thought about Dima Yakovlev's law,” Masha said. “And there is a way to get around it. You're not an American citizen yet?”

“I have a green card.”

“Yes. But do you still have your Russian passport?”

“I do,” Regina said reluctantly.

“There you go. They can't refuse a Russian citizen, can they? Especially one like you, who can afford a really large bribe. I happen to know just the person to bribe. And nobody needs to know that you're planning to live in the United States with the child.”

Regina looked at Nastya squatting in the sandbox, building a sand mound with a focused expression on her face. She tried to imagine Nastya living in their Tribeca loft. They would have to outfit their guest bedroom as a room for a child. Buy the furniture, buy clothes, buy toys. She would have to learn how to care for a child. There were books on the subject. There were people to help her. Bob knew how to care for a child. Vica and Sergey knew. Nastya would go to school. She would go to doctors. She must have been deeply damaged—just look at her digging that grave—but there were child psychologists for that. All the little practicalities were doable. And yet there was something that made the whole thing impossible.

She could imagine taking care of Nastya and even doing it well, but she couldn't imagine loving her. A parental love was the craziest, the most incomprehensible of human emotions for her. You had to love somebody ferociously, absolutely, no matter what. Look at Vica and Sergey, who seemed to be competing for the worst parent award (both negligent, permissive, easily annoyed, preoccupied with themselves), and yet they were both crazy about their boy. And look at her mother, forcing her to wear a broom, with her fierce attempts to rule her love life, with her violent fight to keep Regina at her side. No matter how misguided, that was real love.

“I don't think I can love a child,” Regina said. “I've known this for a long time. I don't have the capacity for that. And a child deserves to be loved fully and absolutely.”

Aunt Masha's features seemed to soften. She reached out and stroked Regina's hand in the same way she'd stroked that stray dog.

“Look at it this way, Regina. Suppose you take Nastya and you can't love her the way a mother would. You would still take care of her, you just won't love her enough. She'd be fine, just slightly underloved. Now, compare this fate to the fate of somebody destined to spend a lifetime in a state-sponsored Russian orphanage.”

As if on cue, Nastya smiled and waved at them with her little shovel.

“Listen,” Aunt Masha said in the softest voice she was capable of. “You don't have to decide now. Think about it, talk to your husband. Spend some time with Nastya just to try it out. We won't tell her anything until you decide.”

Regina felt a numb horror. A well-planned trap. A horrible, sticky, suffocating trap. If she refused, she would be saddled with a horrible guilt for the rest of her life. She hadn't done anything wrong and yet she would have to carry that guilt. And if she agreed…But she couldn't agree! She couldn't! And since the only impulse of a trapped person was to try to escape, that was what Regina did.

“I can't! You can't do this to me. It's unfair!” she screamed and stood up with such force that the stray dog under the bench jumped up in fear.

“Masha, what is it?” asked a scared Nastya from the sandbox.

“Let's go,” Aunt Masha said. “Regina has to go to the airport.”

They walked back to the apartment. This time it was Aunt Masha who was holding Nastya's hand. Regina packed her things in a hurry and picked up the suitcase with her mother's things.

“Good-bye,” Nastya said, “come again.”

Regina leaned down to kiss her on the top of her head, and Nastya's little braid brushed against her cheek.

“Good-bye, Nastya,” she said. “Good-bye, Aunt Masha.”

Aunt Masha nodded silently.

“Wait,” Nastya said, “take your buttons.”

“You can have them. I want you to have them.”

Nastya smiled a happy, but slightly embarrassed smile, as if she had been given an undeserved treasure.

It took Regina forty minutes to find a cab, and when she did, she asked the driver to take her straight to Sheremetyevo. She thought she'd just wait the remaining few hours there in the airport. She had absolutely no desire to spend any more time in the city. She sat in a gleaming leather seat in the business-class lounge watching TV but not really seeing it. She dialed Bob's number, and when he answered it, his voice was so dear and so kind that she couldn't speak for a moment. She was gasping for breath.

“Baby, what is it? What's wrong? Baby, are you okay?” he kept asking her. It took her a few minutes to get ahold of herself and find her words.

“I'm fine,” she finally said. “I just can't wait to come home.”

When Eric was six months old, Vica hit him across the face with an open palm.

She did it while she was changing his diaper. Vica put Eric down on the sofa bed—she didn't have a changing table. They had come to America only two years before, and Sergey had been in school the entire time, so they definitely couldn't afford any of the wonderful baby things that taunted Vica in store windows, mail-order catalogs, magazines, and movies. Sometimes, as she stared at yet another Victorian-lace layette or at an amazingly high-tech baby swing that had seven different modes of rocking, sang songs, did animal voices, and had shimmering lights, she couldn't help but think how different the whole experience of motherhood must be for women who could afford everything that they wanted for their children. Or the experience of babyhood. Was her Eric doomed to unhappiness for the rest of his life because she had failed to provide a changing table or Victorian layette for him?

Vica slipped a plastic bag under Eric's butt, unbuttoned his overalls, pulled them up, so far up that the pant legs were sticking above his shoulders like angel's wings, and unfastened the diaper. She had developed back pain since childbirth, which made bending down torture, so she had mastered a way to change her baby with record speed and efficiency. Turn away, take a deep breath, hold it, unfasten the diaper, hold the baby's legs up with one hand (how wonderful that both ankles fit into one hand!), take dirty diaper off, put dirty diaper in the bin. Wipe, wipe, wipe. Wipes in the bin. Bin closed. Breathe! Breathe, but do not stop. Never stop between diapers, especially when changing a boy, or your face might be sprayed. Don't slow down until the new diaper is securely fastened. Sometimes, Vica actually got pleasure out of this process, a sense of pride and wonderment at how quickly and efficiently she could do it.

But this time there'd been an unexpected obstacle. The wipes got stuck in their cylindrical container. She yanked at the top one but only managed to tear off a tiny piece. Now she had to unscrew the lid of the container, and for that task she needed both hands. She had to let go of Eric's legs and, since she couldn't really hold her breath any longer, exhale and inhale. By the time she finally got the wipes out, this was what she saw: Eric's perfectly round face. His hand over his face. Shit squeezed in his tiny fist. Shit dripping through his fingers onto his pointy chin. Shit smeared over his mouth. Lips making smacking movements. The pensive expression on his face communicating his uncertainty as to whether he liked the taste or not.

The picture was wrong, disgusting, vile. Too wrong. Not just momentarily wrong, but monumentally wrong. It could be a reflection of everything that was wrong with her life. How they had moved from Moscow into this cold, dark, ugly, disgusting apartment in Brooklyn. How she couldn't finish medical school. How bad her back hurt. How she was rapidly losing her looks—at twenty-four! How Sergey didn't want her anymore. How it was a mistake to leave Russia and come here. How it was a huge, huge, enormous mistake! All of that came to her clearly in a split second. She didn't think—she reacted. She raised her hand and smacked it across Eric's face. The sensation of how small and soft his face was against her hand, soft and still and smeared with shit, told her that it had happened. She had just hit her six-month-old baby. And then the stunned and puzzled expression on his face, as if he couldn't believe where the pain had come from. Vica grabbed Eric, pressed him to her chest, and stayed like that, trembling. Only then did he start to cry. She pressed him harder and harder to her chest. She stroked his downy hair, she stroked the tiny hollow on his neck, she stroked his bare back and his bare butt—still dirty. She carried him to the sink and washed his face, his mouth, his bottom. She dried him off, carried him back to the sofa, put a clean diaper on, pulled his overalls down. And then he raised his arms up, reaching for her, asking that she take him. She cradled him in her arms and started to rock him, marveling at how quickly his distress changed to contentment, peace, and then sleep. He'd reached to her for comfort even though she'd been the one to hurt him. He didn't have a choice, he didn't have anybody except for her. She put him gently into his crib, then went to lock herself in the bathroom so that she could sob and wail as loudly as she needed to.

Even now, eleven years later, the memory of that incident made Vica wince in pain.

They were standing in line to get to the Castle, which loomed above them, leaning toward them from the horizon line. The school was actually called Sebastian Levy High School, but everybody called it the Castle. Vica wrapped her coat tighter and urged Eric to do the same. They moved slowly—a couple of steps, a pause, a couple of steps, a pause—in a long chain that stretched around the Castle's perimeter.

It seemed that the presence of the Castle made them even colder because it blocked the sun. Although to be perfectly honest, the sun wouldn't be much help either at eight twenty in the morning on a frigid November day. Anyway, it was hard to believe that this building was right in the middle of the Upper East Side, where endless streets stretched in all four directions, yellow cabs rushed by, and dog walkers walked whole packs of dogs.

“Are you cold?” she asked Eric. He shook his head. But he looked cold; he looked tired and a little morose. But then all the children in line looked a little morose. They all looked very young—younger than eleven. They had thin necks and funny ears: large, tiny, hairy, bent, stuck out, misshapen, glowing, red, dented by eyeglasses. About a fifth of these children would pass the test, be accepted into this school, and officially be regarded as “gifted and talented.” The strangeness of their ears would be redeemed by their genius. The rest of them would just be regular children with funny ears. Vica hugged Eric and pulled his hat lower over his ears.

Vica had to take a day off for this. Sergey had offered to take Eric to the test, but she couldn't trust him with something that important. He might have been late, or he could have started saying stupid shit like “A good education is what matters, chum, but a good school doesn't necessarily mean a good education.” How she hated it when Sergey called Eric “chum”!

Thinking of Sergey made her momentarily nauseous. Ever since they had separated Vica developed a disturbing habit of seeing strangers on the street and mistaking them for Sergey. She would feel a fleeting joy, followed by disappointment and then relief. She wasn't sure if she missed him though. She missed the Sergey who loved her. But that Sergey no longer existed. He wouldn't have behaved like he had if he loved her, wouldn't have made fun of her at Vadik's party, wouldn't have left without a fight. Hadn't he actually look relieved as he was leaving? So, no, she didn't miss him. It's just that there was this space in her body that her love for Sergey used to occupy. She imagined it as a concrete physical space, shaped like a mushroom. A huge mushroom, with the stem originating in the pit of her stomach and the cap swelling over her heart and pushing toward her throat. That space was now unoccupied, but not clean, not entirely empty. It was filled with random junk, like hurt, shame, and fear. Fear that she had made a terrible mistake.

Vica wished she could talk to somebody about it. Vadik had proved to be useless. He had neither confirmed nor disproved that she had been right to throw Sergey out. Regina? Vadik kept singing her praises about how wise she was, how full of empathy, how much she had helped him with his love problems throughout the years. But to ask Regina about Sergey? Regina, who must be gloating?

She talked to her mother.

“You're such a pathetic idiot!” Vica's mother yelled into the phone. Vica mumbled the same explanation she had attempted to give to Vadik: how it was getting unbearable, how both of them were on the verge of hating each other.

“Just tell me, how can this possibly be good for you?” her mother asked. “You'll be worse off financially, you'll have to work even more, and you'll be all alone. Any husband is better than no husband!”

Vica's father was that “any husband” : a quiet alcoholic who liked to sing and weep when drunk; he would sing and weep himself into oblivion until he fell asleep right at the table.

“I might meet somebody else,” Vica said.

“Good luck with that!” her mother retorted before slamming down the receiver.

Still, Vica's worst fear was that the separation would affect Eric in some irreparable way. He seemed fine, but who knew what went on inside his head?

“Are you sure you're not cold?” she asked Eric again. He shook his head.

“Hey, look!” Vica said. “Those dogs are funny.” A skinny girl of about sixteen was walking a pack of four dogs: a rottweiler, two golden retrievers, and a small furry dog of unknown breed. The small one must have been intimidated by its peers, so it was doing everything possible to keep apart from them, stretching the rope, making the walker stumble.

Eric looked at the dogs, then up at her with surprise, because this was something that his dad would say, not his mom. Sergey had a special bond with Eric over funny animals. He would always point them out to Eric, and Eric to him. He would send Sergey links to various photos: “Dad, look at that furry pig!” or YouTube videos: “That's a real live killer rabbit!” And Sergey would take him to countless zoos, natural history museums, and aquariums to look at dinosaur bones, Galápagos turtles, and thousand-year-old fish. Eric had developed this passion for weird animals when he was four or five. He didn't have many friends then. (Well, he hardly had any friends now. Just that fat freak Gavin.) It would break Vica's heart when she watched Eric approach a kid on a playground to show him his toy dinosaur and explain how it used to be the most dangerous predator some millions of years ago, and the kid would laugh at him and run off, or kick the toy out of his hands and then run off. She always encouraged him to do sports, to play with other kids, to be more sociable, more normal. And it would break her heart to watch Eric run up to Sergey after work and tell him about the amazing discovery he had made—that dinosaurs looked just like chickens or some such—and Sergey would listen to him, as if it was okay to be interested in all that shit!

“Yeah, funny,” Eric said and turned away. He was clearly not in the mood for talking.

Vica decided to study the parents in the line. You could easily divide them into two categories: Susan Sontag types and Outer Borough types. Vica knew who Susan Sontag was from Vadik's Tumblr. He once posted her photograph with a quote: “ ‘The truth is balance, but the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.' ”

Here, in the Castle line, the Sontag types were all about fifty years old, wore no makeup, had various amounts of gray in their hair, and had roughly the same amount of intellectual flair. Their clothes looked elegant yet comfortable, a sure sign that they were very, very expensive. Some of the Sontags were beautiful, others were not; a lot of them were Asian; a few of them were men. The Outer Borough types wore puffy jackets and knitted hats. There were a few more men among them: the non-white men were wearing suits under their jackets and dressy shoes, while the white men were wearing jeans and work boots, unless they were Russian—then they were wearing the same clothes as the non-white Outer Borough men. The phrase “deep social divide” darted through Vica's mind, but she was too tired and sleepy to think it through or even to use it in a complete sentence. Vica herself wore a fuchsia-colored puffy jacket, but that didn't mean that she belonged with the Outer Borough types, and the fact that she lived on Staten Island didn't mean anything either. It wasn't her fault that she lived on Staten Island. Vica's personality was pure Manhattan. It's just that her financial situation wasn't.

Although to be perfectly honest, Vica didn't belong with the Sontag types either, not because she lacked the intellectual flair but because she was only thirty-five years old and didn't have any gray in her hair.