Lara Vapnyar - Still Here

“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.