Lara Vapnyar - Still Here

Vica reached over to pour herself some coffee, but Liliana stopped her. “That one’s empty. They have fresh coffee in the treatment lounge.”

The adjacent lounge was reserved for the patients waiting for radiotherapy. Vica peeked in hoping to see Ethan. It was mostly empty too, save for a Pakistani family and a thin young woman in a blue cancer hat slumped in a corner chair.

Vica finally found coffee at the machine right outside of Eden’s beautiful office. She could see Eden at her desk going through some papers, taking tiny bites of something that looked like an almond croissant. Vica tried to pour her coffee as quickly as possible so Eden wouldn’t notice her. It was important not to let Eden see her, because she might have yet another interpreter’s job for Vica. They never had enough official interpreters, and the first place they looked for help was in radiology with its multi-ethnic, mostly immigrant staff. Vica was usually eager to be useful, always volunteered her services, but the last incident about five months ago was just too hard to bear.

Dr. MacEarchern from the fourth floor had been looking for a Russian speaker. A stately, patrician woman with the features and demeanor of a purebred horse, she was looming over her desk, casting shadows on the papers in front of her. She was also heavily pregnant. For some reason, Vica found this disturbing.

The two people sitting across from the doctor in the narrow armchairs moved very close together; they looked the very opposite of patrician. They were both in their late seventies, small, round-faced, dressed in clothes that seemed to be a mix of things they had brought with them from Russia and bought at discount stores here. The husband was squeezing a checked umbrella, the wife was holding a patent leather bag decorated with rhinestones — Vica’s grandmother used to have a bag just like that. Both looked tired and frail, so Vica couldn’t tell right away which one was the patient. Then she saw the purple chain of injection bruises on the wife’s arm.

“Please introduce yourself,” Dr. MacEarchern said.

Vica told the couple that she was Vica Morozova from the hospital’s staff and she would serve as the interpreter.

Both the husband and the wife seemed relieved to the point of tears to hear her accentless Russian. Here was a nice Russian girl. She was there to guide and protect them in this doubly foreign and incomprehensible world of America and medicine. The husband took Vica’s hand, squeezed her fingers, and called her “daughter.” And the wife simply smiled and smiled at her.

“Let’s start, then,” Dr. MacEarchern said and shuffled a thick heap of medical reports in front of her.

“Doesn’t she look like a horse?” the wife whispered, pointing to the doctor. Vica couldn’t help but snicker. “She speaks like a horse too. We know some English, but we don’t understand her at all,” the old man added.

“Don’t worry, I will translate every word,” Vica reassured him.

Dr. MacEarchern started to talk. She spoke in long but perfectly precise sentences, pausing at even intervals to let Vica translate. She looked directly at her patient while she spoke and only occasionally glanced at Vica to make sure she was following her. But the patient and her husband kept their intense gaze on Vica the whole time. Vica translated everything with diligence and precision, trying to copy Dr. MacEarchern’s empathetic but businesslike tone. She listed all the tests and procedures the woman had undergone and waited until Dr. MacEarchern finished describing the clinical picture. Stage IV. Inoperable. Distant lymph nodes. Metastasis in the lungs. Metastasis in the liver. Secondary tumors.

“In the doctor’s opinion,” Vica started to say when she suddenly stopped. She was about to deliver what was essentially a death verdict. She hadn’t expected this. She’d thought it would be a routine appointment. Nobody had warned her about this! She couldn’t. She couldn’t do this to these people who looked like her grandparents, who were counting on her to protect them. They clearly hadn’t expected anything like it or they wouldn’t have made that stupid joke about the horse. Vica stared at Dr. MacEarchern as if willing her to say something else. She didn’t.

Vica felt a painful constriction in her throat. She was afraid that if she opened her mouth she would start sobbing. And the old people were staring at her so intently. They must have noticed her shock. The old man put his arm over his wife’s shoulders. They exchanged a long look.

“I think we understood,” he said to Vica. His wife nodded. “Metastasis is the same in Russian,” she said.

“She didn’t say it was hopeless though,” Vica said. “They have very good chemo here.”

Good chemo? What was she saying? Quality carboplatin as opposed to subpar carboplatin around the corner?

“I know,” the old woman said. “I understand.”

Dr. MacEarchern saw that the verdict had been delivered. She put her hand on the box of tissues on her desk and gently moved it in the direction of her patient. The old woman’s lips quivered, but she squeezed them into a thin white line and shook her head. Her husband moved the box back. They were too proud to cry in Dr. MacEarchern’s presence.

There was more information that Vica was required to translate, but she saw that the couple had stopped paying attention. The wife was staring down, fondling the stupid rhinestones on her bag, and the husband was stroking her arm with one hand while continuing to squeeze his umbrella with the other.

They exited the office together. The old man shook Vica’s hand and the old woman said, “Thank you, daughter.” Vica gave them her card and said that they could call her anytime with questions.

She never heard from them again.

It was only later that day, on the bus back to Staten Island, that Vica realized that it was the old people who had protected her, not vice versa. They had protected her from having to deliver the verdict.

By the time Vica made it home, she was shaking with sobs. Sergey sent Eric to play in the basement, walked her to the bedroom, then went to fix her some tea. He brought it in on a tray with some salami sandwiches. When she told him how they had called her “daughter,” he started to cry too. They had been fighting for weeks before that, but in that moment Vica felt that she had never felt as close to anybody and she never would.

And now Sergey was gone.

Patients started to flock to radiology around ten o’clock. There were so many of them that Vica stopped making distinctions. She glided and glided and glided her magic stick over their body parts, as if they were the same endless body. By the lunch break it was especially hard. Vica was physically tired, and her back started to ache, and she couldn’t help but imagine herself trembling on that table while a cold slippery wand slid over her cancer-ridden stomach or chest.

As it always happened before lunch, some of the patients were getting hysterical.

“Don’t you have, like, a shred of a soul?” one woman asked after she had begged Vica to let her husband cut the line.

“We need to see the liver doctor at one thirty. If we miss the appointment, they will reschedule and we will have to come again. From Scranton. Do you know where Scranton is? Do you realize what it’s like for Peter to be in a car for two and a half hours?”

Peter was sitting right there, painfully thin, with a yellow tint to his skin and a permanent grimace of pain, ghostlike, and perfectly oblivious to the scene.

“I’m sorry, ma’am, but I don’t make the rules,” Vica said.

And then the woman broke down sobbing and she kept saying through her sniffles and hiccups: “I understand that he has to suffer chemo, radiation, but why does he have to suffer these endless lines? Couldn’t he be spared that at least? He has less than a year to live!”