Kseniya Melnik - Snow in May - Stories

I knew I had no history of sleep-onset hallucinations, yet I had to be dreaming.

Dr. Pasha was hunched over, his head in his hands. First, I thought he might be sleeping; then he began to tap his foot. I came up to him and touched his curly hair. It was much coarser than I’d imagined.

“Sonya?” He looked at me with irritation, but he didn’t seem surprised to see me. I started to back away.

“Are those marker stains?” Amusement loosened his face.

“Pavel Dmitrievch, please come with me. A girl in my room is bleeding. At the other end of the hospital. There’s nobody there. No doctors, no nurses. We have to call someone. She’s having gastritis. Or ulcers.” I thought for a moment, then added, “Or gallbladder stones.”

“Cover yourself or you’ll catch a cold. A real cold.” He picked up his jacket from the next chair and threw it at me.

“We must run, please. There was blood on her sheets, lots and lots of blood!”

“That does sound serious, Sophia Anatolyevna.” Dr. Pasha grabbed my arm and twisted it back and forth to get a better look at the red marker contusions. “What are you doing here anyway?”

“Oh, well, I’m here for some diagnostic tests, for my stomach, but Liza—”

“I know that part.”

“What part?”

“Your grandma told us — your mushroom recipe was very original, I must say — but drawing the cross and the rash is overdoing it a bit, baby.”

So everybody knew … And everybody had played along. I could never go back to the Polyclinika now. I wiped my eyes with the backs of my hands.

“The things we do to get attention. The stupid things I did as a boy, still do.”

“Dr. Pasha, you don’t understand,” I said in a shaky voice. I wished for instant death or at least humiliation-induced coma. “You have to help me find someone for Liza. We don’t have time to lose. She’ll bleed to death!”

“I’m too busy to play your and your friends’ idiot games.”

“This is not a game!” I hollered and tried to pull him off the chair.

“Sonya, are you insane? Don’t scream here. This is a maternity ward. My son was just born.”

A son. Blood beat against my eardrums.

“Congratulations,” I said.

“Well, a big thank-you.”

What if he was right, I thought, and Liza was trying to fool me. Maybe it wasn’t blood but tomato juice — something I would have probably used for blood. No, a good doctor couldn’t think like that.

“Do you know about the get-up test?” Dr. Pasha said.

The what?

“I think so,” I lied.

“A pregnant woman sits down on the floor and, depending on which arm she instinctively uses first to help herself up, that’s how you know the gender of the baby,” he said with a dead-serious expression. “Right arm — girl, left arm — boy.”

“Really?” I hadn’t spent much time in the gynecology office. Almost anything was possible in medicine.

“Really. The test is ninety percent accurate, as long as the pregnant woman doesn’t eat any mushrooms beforehand.”

“I didn’t eat the mushrooms to—” I burst out sobbing. I let it all go. I fell on my knees in front of Dr. Pasha. “Pavel Dmitrievich, please help me find a doctor. Please. I am not lying, I am not pretending this time.”

He snapped me on my forehead cross and smelled his fingers. “ Raspberry — berry, you beckoned us ,” he sang out in a surprisingly squeaky voice. “Promise me you’ll never grow up, Sonya.”

I got up from my knees and yanked Dr. Pasha’s hand with all my might.

“What are you doing? I told you, I’m waiting for the baby.” He looked terrified. And terrifying, too. I knew that he wouldn’t help. I tried to free my hand, but now he wouldn’t let go.

“There’s your baby!” I pointed toward the double doors with my free hand. As he slackened his clammy grip, I ran out of the reception room. The darkness swallowed me back like a swamp.

Again I stumbled through empty hallways, up and down stairs, looking for somebody, anybody. I was so tired. The hospital was endless, sprouting and shedding new hallways and stairs. Maybe I was going psychotic. Maybe I had hallucinated them all — Natasha, Liza, and this Dr. Pasha. I wished I could talk to Alina; she knew all about hallucinations.

At last, I arrived in a hallway that wasn’t so dark. I looked into one of the rooms: six patients with dark faces snored sonorously. They were alive — that was a good sign. I lay down on a cold faux-leather bench in the hallway and pulled Dr. Pasha’s jacket over my head. I closed my eyes. It was all over now. My medical career was ruined. Liza was probably dead. Baba Olya had betrayed me. I wanted to be sick with something curable only in America, then Papa would have no choice but to take me with him right away, and everyone would be helpless and sorry. I lay there, in tears, not knowing which plague to wish upon myself. I scoured my body for pain — after all I had gone through today, it had to be somewhere … I couldn’t be the same. Something was pressing against my stomach, I think. I think I was already sleeping.

Five nights before her scheduled return flight from Fairbanks, Alaska, to Magadan, Masha stood by the door of her granddaughter’s bedroom. She checked one more time to make sure no one was around and then she knocked.

“What?” Katya yelled in English. Masha knew that word well.

She came in and closed the door. The overheated room was half the size of Masha’s entire apartment in Magadan. Katya, heartbreakingly scrawny in her blue parachutelike nightgown, was lying on her bed in a jumble of thick math books, crumpled pieces of paper, and candy wrappers. She raised her head and looked at Masha through the curtain of her sparse brown bangs, annoyed.

“Katen’ka, I need your help,” Masha said. Katya stuck a yellow pencil into her mouth and chewed. “Please, sing one song with me at the green card party. For your mama.” Masha sat down on the side of the bed, and Katya’s trash and books slid toward her.

“Baba, you’re ruining everything,” Katya yelled.

“Shhh.” Masha picked up the candy wrappers and stuffed them into the pocket of the apron she wore over her flower-patterned housedress. “Please.”

“I can’t.”

“Katya, please speak Russian. You know I don’t understand.” Masha could read the English alphabet and look up words in a dictionary, but when listening she couldn’t catch much beyond “hello,” “good-bye,” “please,” and “thank you.” And “what.”

“I hate singing. I’m only good at math.” Katya took Masha’s hot, plump hand and massaged it with her icicle fingers. It was in these private, transient moments that Katya shed the mask of American coolness, which she worked so hard to maintain in front of her stepsister, Brittny. She smiled archly. “Maybe if Brittny sang with us, too?”

“Katya, don’t joke. She’s Americanka, how can she sing with us? She doesn’t speak Russian.”

“I’m Americanka, too.” Katya dropped Masha’s hand and pulled out a lollipop from the pillowy recess. Masha could never understand why Americans had to have so many pillows on their beds and couches. Katya unwrapped the lollipop and looked impatiently at her opened math books.

“You’re a different kind, Katya. You live in two worlds. Imagine, each foot standing on a globe beach ball. Remember, like we had in Yalta?”

“I’m not five years old, Ba.”

“One day, Katya, you’ll realize that there is no bigger blessing in life than an opportunity to help someone, especially someone whose blood runs through your own veins.”

“Gross,” Katya said in English and rolled her eyes.