Still Here (35 page)

It was Vica's idea to meet there. Regina had asked her if she knew a good place where she could look at children's furniture and Vica said: “Are you kidding me? IKEA!” She offered to take Regina there and help her shop.

“Where are you?” Regina texted her again. Still no reply.

Ever since she returned to New York after three months in Moscow, Regina had been plagued by bouts of panic. She realized that during her time in Russia she was simply too busy—taking care of Nastya, handling the grueling adoption process—to feel anxious. Back home, between meetings with immigration lawyers, she had more free time to doubt the wisdom of her decision.

Regina had to rent an apartment in Moscow so that she could spend time with Nastya free of Aunt Masha's supervision, but, of course, Aunt Masha dropped in for tea almost every day. Bob had spent the first three weeks with them. He was so good with Nastya that it intimidated Regina. Even though Nastya and he didn't speak a common language, they seemed to communicate with ease, or at least with more ease than Nastya and Regina. Bob would play silly games with Nastya, take her on piggyback rides, or just run around a room on all fours and make animal sounds, making Nastya laugh and charming Aunt Masha. It got to the point where Regina was jealous. “She likes me better,” Bob said, “but I bet she'll love you more.”

Still, she would have preferred it if Bob was as terrified as she was.

Then Bob went back to New York and Regina was left to figure out parenting on her own.

The amount of things she didn't know about children was overwhelming. She had always been a serious reader, so in this situation too she turned to various self-help books on parenting and adoption. None of them helped; if anything, the books managed to intimidate her even further. There was only one book Regina could tolerate, and that was the Canadian novel
Humdrum,
the one she had just finished translating. Regina had reread it and was now hungrily waiting for the second one, which was supposed to come out later in the year. She found solace in the descriptions of the humdrum routine of caring for a child. There were so many urgent tasks described in the book that the reader didn't have time to ponder the philosophy of mother's love. Perhaps that was the philosophy of mother's love—being so busy and concerned the whole time that you couldn't possibly analyze it. Regina shared this thought with Inga, when Inga came over to meet Nastya, and Inga seemed to agree. She supported Regina's decision to adopt, but Regina couldn't help but notice that Inga thought there was something whimsical in it. As if Regina, who had always had such a charmed life, managed to find a fun and easy way to have a child too. Unlike Inga, who had her son in her sophomore year while in the university and had to work and study and care for the baby all at the same time!

As soon as Regina got back to the United States, she was attacked by swarms of people congratulating her on her “noble deed” or pushing their vague child-rearing ideas on her.

There was Becky, Bob's daughter, hugging Regina and saying, “You can't imagine how much I admire you for this.”

There was Regina's dad, who said exactly the same thing and then started to cry.

There was Bob's family, who insisted that she should baptize Nastya right away.

There were Laszlo and his wife, the proud parents of four children, who thought that she should model her parenting on their style.

There were Bob's friends, who kept sending her links to books and articles on adoption and child-rearing.

There were distant acquaintances, who wouldn't answer her very specific questions but would say instead that she had to listen to her heart and that her heart held all the answers. Well, guess what, her heart didn't hold the answer to the question of whether American schools accepted Russian immunization records.

Sergey would just tell her an occasional useless fact like: “Eric used to drink from the bottle until he was four.”

And Vadik preferred to keep mum on the subject altogether.

Even Bob scared her! Regina couldn't help but feel that he was expecting too much. “You're gonna be a spectacular mother,” he would say, and she would panic and think: What if I fall short of spectacular?

Vica turned out to be the only one with whom it was easy to talk about motherhood. She was eager to share her parenting experience, but she never made Regina feel like an idiot. Her best advice came in the form of this sentence: “No matter what you do, you can be sure that you're doing something wrong.” That actually made Regina feel relieved. Every parent was bound to screw up in one way or another. She would screw up too. But it would be okay.

Yet another shopping cart bumped into Regina. Where the hell was Vica?

“This place is awful!” Regina texted her. “I don't think I can wait here for much longer.”

“Five more minutes. I'm on the boat,” Vica texted back, shaking her head in disbelief. She was no more than fifteen minutes late. There had been this amazing sale at Century 21 downtown that Vica couldn't miss. And IKEA was awful? IKEA! She couldn't believe how spoiled Regina had become. IKEA was Vica's favorite store! The store that let the customers ride these beautiful yellow boats! Free on weekends! Free on this warm and beautiful Saturday in May.

Vica was standing on the upper deck clutching the railing, swinging back and forth on her toes, listening to the slosh of the waves, letting the wind pummel her face. Thinking how unimaginable it was that if she died everything around her would have to stop. There would be no sounds, no images, no sensations. Nothing. Nothing at all. It was strange, but ever since she got back with Sergey, Vica had started to think about death more often and more intensely. It wasn't that she was scared, she just really, really didn't want to die. Not ever. She took so much pleasure in her life right now that it felt like it would be incredibly unfair if it would have to end.

Even though things with Sergey weren't exactly smooth. Far from it. She'd told him about Vadik. She felt that she had to—she wasn't sure why.

“You're crazy!” Vica's mother had screamed at her via Skype. “He will never forgive you!”

And so far he hadn't. “Vica, please, try to understand, it's not that I can't forgive you. I don't exactly have the right to forgive or not forgive you. We were separated. But I can't forgive the fact that it happened.”

Vica felt a strange satisfaction when he told her that. Perhaps she'd been compelled to confess to him because she wanted to test his love in some perverse way. If her confession hurt that badly, it must mean he really loved her, didn't it?

When the ferry finally docked, there was Regina, tall, stooped, and so stricken with panic that Vica felt sorry for her.

“Don't worry,” Vica said to her. “I invented a very efficient way of shopping here, so we'll be done in no time.”

She dragged Regina onto the escalator and headed straight to the kids' department. “We'll only look for what you need and then you'll just scan the barcode with your phone and you can take another look at each piece online.”

“I like the castle bed over there. And the tent bed,” Regina said to Vica. “Wouldn't it be cool to wake up as if you were in the woods?”

Vica shook her head. “No, Regina, no! Don't look for ‘cool' things. Look for comfortable and familiar. That's what this girl needs. You don't want to make her life even weirder.”

Regina nodded. She looked very intimidated, the poor thing.

“Look at this storage system,” Vica said. “Now this is superconvenient.”

She wished she had the money to buy all this stuff for Eric. Perhaps one day she would. There was no guarantee that Virtual Grave would make any money at all, but she was hopeful. They were hopeful.

“You definitely want this desk! Look, there's so much space for random crap underneath,” she said to Regina.

Regina went ahead and scanned the barcodes.

Later when they were drinking excellent Swedish coffee in the IKEA café, Vica asked Regina about Nastya.

“You know,” Regina said, taking a hesitant sip, “I think I miss her.”

“Already?” Vica asked. “That's a good sign!”

“We had two couches close together in that rental apartment. And she would jump from one to the other and scream ‘Egina, look!' She calls me Egina; she has this little problem with her
r
's. Her jumping used to annoy me, because she wouldn't let me read in peace, but now I miss that.”

“Egina?” Vica asked. “That's funny! Does she listen to you?”

Regina blushed as if Vica had caught her on some parental incompetence.

“Not always, no. And she often lies.”

“Oh, that's normal. Kids lie all the time. I would find all these candy wrappers in Eric's schoolbag and he would insist that they weren't his. ‘They're Gavin's. Gavin put them there.' And I would say: ‘What about that fat on your stomach? Huh? Did Gavin put it there too?'

They both laughed, then Regina asked how things were going with Sergey.

Vica tensed. She had never trusted Regina and she suspected that she was secretly happy when she and Sergey had split up. Her first impulse was to lie, to say that yes, they were back together and happier than ever.

“Good,” she said, forcing a bright smile. “Really good. Especially since he sold Virtual Grave. He promised that if everything goes as planned I can quit my job and go to graduate school within a year.”

“Medical school?” Regina asked.

“Probably not. I'm fed up with medicine. I was thinking about a degree in marketing or business. You know that girl Cleo, the one who is developing our app, she says that I have some terrific business ideas. She actually likes my ideas better than Sergey's.”

Regina nodded thoughtfully. She didn't appear haughty or patronizing. On the contrary, she seemed as lost and insecure as a person could be. She was looking at Vica with kind attention, urging her to tell the truth. “Regina knows how to listen,” Vadik had told Vica once. “She has pulled me through a lot of shit by just listening to my rants. I've never met anybody as capable of empathy as her.”

Vica was hungry for empathy. She decided to be honest.

“Actually, it's been really hard with Sergey,” she said. “We're back together, yes, but he's still struggling to forgive me.”

“Forgive you for what?” Regina asked.

Vica took a long sip of coffee and cleared her throat.

“I slept with Vadik and I told Sergey about it,” she said.

Regina put her mug down and stared at Vica.

“We were separated and I thought that Sergey was sleeping with somebody else.” She tensed, expecting something like incredulous judgment from Regina. What she got instead was a strained silence followed by hysterical laughter.

“I'm sorry, I'm sorry,” Regina kept saying, choking with laughter, which turned out to be rather contagious.

Honestly, Vica couldn't think of a more fitting reaction to the story of her love troubles.

“So how did it happen?” Regina asked.

“Do you want to hear the whole story?” Vica said.

“Of course!”

“Let's go out for drinks sometime soon. I know this perfect little place in the East Village with the best happy hour. Twenty bucks for two tapas and a glass of sangria!”

“I'd love to!” Regina said. “Let's do it soon, before I leave for Moscow.”

And they got up and went to the exit.

“Listen,” Vica said when they got on that little IKEA ferry that would carry them back to Manhattan, “you can't let Vadik and Sergey know that I told you, okay?”

“Of course not!” Regina said with a new spurt of laughter.

“And don't you giggle!”

“I'll mask it with a cough.”

Vica rolled her eyes in a joking way and took out her phone. “Reg and I are on our way,” she texted to Vadik.

“Cool,” he texted back.

Vadik thought that it was Regina he would miss the most. She was the only one who ever offered him true friendship. Vica and Sergey hadn't. They were so eager to pull him into that vile complicated mess of their marriage only to spew him back out when he wasn't needed anymore. Regina was different. She did care about him. Fuck, he had been such an asshole when he said to her that the only way she could take care of a child was to eat it. How could he possibly have known that she was actually considering becoming a mother? But even if he stayed in the U.S., he doubted that they could remain true friends now that she had a child. It was already clear that the child dominated most of her faculties. Well, he could understand that. There were so many ways to screw up a kid, you had to be in a state of constant alert. Vadik had always wondered why people even wanted kids. He didn't. He had passed on his good sturdy genes, but no kid in the world needed him to pass on his doubts, restlessness, and insecurity as well.

He walked into the living room and surveyed the place. Most of his furniture was already gone. There were just a few pieces left along with a few items of his sports equipment. There was a sense of bareness and open space to the apartment that Vadik hadn't had a chance to enjoy before. In two days, he would be gone to start his life anew in another foreign, unlived, perfectly clean space. He had never been to Singapore and he knew very little about it, which would make his fresh start even fresher. He had made the mistake of trying so hard to fit in, first in Moscow, then in Istanbul, then in New York. He would make no such claim on Singapore. He would just try to enjoy the foreignness of the place for as long as it was enjoyable.

Vadik counted his bottles of booze again. One, two, three, the fourth, the fifth, the minor fall, the major lift.

He went to the kitchen, defrosted the dumplings and the edamame, put them on a tray, and carried the tray back into the living room. He put it right in the middle of the rug.