Still Here, page 15
Regina said that she did.
Nobody talked much over breakfast. Masha looked tired and Nastya was still sulking, and Regina kept adding spoonful after spoonful of cherry jam into her bland kasha.
Regina was about to say that she was leaving when Aunt Masha asked if she could watch Nastya for an hour or so, while Masha went to a doctor’s appointment. Regina had a quick paranoid thought that this was a setup, that Masha would just disappear and Regina would be stuck with taking care of the girl forever. But that would be ridiculous, wouldn’t it? And so far Aunt Masha hadn’t even mentioned the subject of adoption. She must have finally accepted Regina’s objections.
“There is a suitcase with a few of Olga’s things under my bed,” Aunt Masha said before she left. “Look through them. You might want to take something.”
Aunt Masha’s room was long and narrow, with a door opening onto the small glassed-in balcony, filled with some old boxes, burlap sacks, and dusty jars. All the furniture was put in two rows lining the walls. Bookcases on the right side. Masha’s rickety desk, her narrow brass bed, and a small couch that must have served as a bed for Nastya on the left. In the little corner by the door, there were a kid-size table and chair, a toy piano, a tiny makeshift dollhouse, and a few easy-to-reach bookshelves. Most of the books there used to belong to Regina, but she knew better than to comment on it, especially since Nastya was crouched by the shelves with a defiant expression. She seemed to be prepared to guard her belongings. Regina noticed that she had moved her little table so that it now blocked access to her corner.
“Nastya,” Regina called, but she turned away from her.
Fine, Regina thought.
She reached under Masha’s bed and dragged the large leather suitcase out. When she opened it, the smell of mothballs was so strong that her head started to hurt.
“It smells like rats,” Nastya said.
There was her mother’s old fur hat on top. Faded to gray now, but still fluffy. Regina pressed it to her face, trying to ignore the smell.
It was really soft, achingly soft.
She buried her face into the fur and moaned. “Mama.”
“Is that your mama’s hat?” Nastya said. She was standing right next to her.
“Yes, it used to be my mom’s hat,” Regina said. “She died.”
Nastya furrowed her forehead and looked at Regina intently.
Was she not supposed to say that to a child? She wasn’t! Clearly she wasn’t. Perhaps Nastya didn’t know what “died” meant. How could she possibly know that? But it turned out that she did.
“I know,” Nastya said, “Masha told me. She is in the grave. My mama is in the grave too.”
Regina reached out her beret-clad hand to Nastya. “Do you want to pet it? It’s soft like a kitten.”
Nastya edged over, touched the beret with the tips of her fingers.
“No, like a bunny,” she said. “We had a bunny, where I lived before. It got sick and then it got dead.”
“Do you want to see what else is in there?” Regina asked, pointing to the suitcase.
Nastya nodded and knelt on the floor next to Regina. “What is that?” she asked, pointing at the round tin box buried between two sweaters.
“Let’s look,” Regina said.
Nastya took the box and tugged on the lid. It wouldn’t budge. This was an old blue and white tin box with the golden letters BELUGA CAVIAR. Something jingled inside.
“Pirate coins!” Nastya said.
Regina couldn’t open it either. She got a knife from the kitchen and hooked it under the edge of the lid. The lid gave in and jumped off the box and onto the floor.
“Ah!” Nastya cried as if she had discovered a much better treasure than either diamonds or gold coins. “Buttons!!!”
Nastya climbed off her chair, took the box from Regina, and set it on the floor. She then sat cross-legged down next to the box with her back very straight. Her thin greasy hair was done in a braid, so short that it stuck out on the back of her head. Her neck was long and skinny and not very clean, with a hollow in the middle that made her look especially fragile.
Was that how I had looked to my mother when I sat and played with those same buttons? Regina wondered. She sat down next to Nastya and stroked her thin shoulders.
That was what Aunt Masha saw when she came back from her appointment. The two of them sitting on the floor together playing with buttons. She couldn’t have been more pleased.
“Let’s go for a walk, girls,” she said.
Regina looked at her watch. “Twenty minutes, and then I’m leaving.”
“Suit yourself,” Aunt Masha said.
Nastya had a virtuoso way of dressing. She sat down in the middle of the floor, pulled on her boots, stood up, and stomped on each foot to make them fit tighter. Then she put her knitted hat on, tied the strings, and made a neat bow, centrally located under her chin. The next step was to put on her coat, which had a system to it too. She pulled on the ends of her sweater sleeves, squeezed them in her fists, and only then started pushing her arms through the sleeves of her coat.
“Good, Nastya, good,” Aunt Masha said. “You don’t want your sleeves all bunched up inside your coat.”
In a few seconds Nastya was all buttoned up and standing by the door, holding her sand pail, her slightly battered Barbie, and an assortment of sand tools.
In the daylight, the neighborhood looked even worse. The entrance of the building was half blocked by the overflowing garbage bin, and there were three stray dogs picking at the garbage without much hope in their eyes. One of the dogs growled at them. Nastya grabbed onto Regina’s thigh, hurting her.
“Regina, take her hand!” Aunt Masha ordered.
Regina was amazed at how light Nastya’s hand turned out to be. Warm, weightless fingers, so thin that Regina was afraid that she’d accidentally squeeze them too hard. She realized that she had never led anyone by the hand before. She marveled at how much intuitive precision was required to make this simple action work. You had to communicate direction by the tiniest pressure of your fingers, and you were entirely responsible for the person you led.
They crossed the street and walked to the neglected playground, with a couple of rusty swings, a broken seesaw, a sandbox, and a strange contraption that looked like a huge rotating birdcage. There were two small children in it, and another older child was pushing the thing counterclockwise, producing a horrible screech. Nastya let go of Regina’s hand and ran toward the sandbox.
Aunt Masha went to sit down on the bench; Regina joined her. It was strange how she could still feel the warmth of Nastya’s fingers in her palm. One of the stray dogs ran up to them, and Aunt Masha reached into her purse, took out a piece of bread with cheese, and fed it to the dog. Then she stroked its grateful muzzle, and the dog lay down and curled at her feet.
“Are you sure you have to leave tonight?” Aunt Masha asked.
“Yes, I have my ticket.”
“I really hoped you’d spend more time with us.”
“Well, I need to get back,” Regina said.
Aunt Masha took a large handkerchief out of her pocket, blew her nose, and folded it back into her pocket.
“Then we will have to talk now,” she announced. There was an ominous note in her voice and Regina didn’t like it one bit.
She turned to Regina and took her hand. “Regina, I want you to adopt Nastya.”
Yes, up until that day Regina had been expecting something like this. But as her time in Moscow was coming to an end, she’d stupidly allowed herself to relax. She’d allowed herself to think that the danger was past and Aunt Masha wouldn’t bring up the subject of adoption.
Regina was shocked and she reacted as she always did when shocked. She started to laugh. Right there on that stupid old rusty playground she was shaking with an idiotic, sputtering, unstoppable laughter.
Aunt Masha chose to ignore the laughter and proceeded with Nastya’s story.
“She was sent to our orphanage about a year ago. Her mom died in a car crash. No dad. No relatives. Apparently her mom was an orphan too. A young girl, she was only twenty-two when she died. And Nastya was in a bad shape. Sobbing all the time. Refusing to eat, refusing to talk. Then there were these fights with other kids. Nastya didn’t get along with them. The teachers complained that she would bite other children. They nicknamed her Mad Dog.”
There was that indecent sputtering laughter again. And again Aunt Masha chose to ignore it.
“There was talk of transferring her to an institution for mentally challenged children. You can imagine what happens to kids there. And I just knew that she was a perfectly normal kid, and a smart wonderful kid at that. I could see it in her eyes.”
Regina still wasn’t registering what any of this had to do with her. She sat there nodding, shaking her head from time to time, as if she were listening to a radio play.
“Look, I’m digging a grave for my Barbie,” Nastya yelled from her sandbox.
“Good girl,” Aunt Masha yelled back. “Dig her a big one.
“So I would take her aside,” she continued, “and try to comfort her, play with her, read to her, and she started to respond to me. She got better. But then every time my shift would end, she would break down crying, and sometimes I would just bring her home with me. Our director didn’t mind. Tatyana Ivanovna, you must have seen her at your mom’s funeral. A nice woman. Not very bright, far from it, but with a heart. So I would just bring Nastya home, and then I would let her stay during vacations, and then gradually she just started to live with me unofficially.”
“That sounds like an ideal situation for both of you,” Regina said.
“No, Regina,” Aunt Masha said, her voice turning low and grave. “The situation is not ideal. They won’t let me legally adopt her, because I’m too old, so this whole arrangement is hanging on Tatyana Ivanovna’s goodwill. What if she leaves? What if they take Nastya away from me? And then what if I drop dead tomorrow? Look what happened to Olga, and she was healthy as a horse her whole life! While I have high blood pressure, diabetes, kidney problems. Regina, you have to take her!”
Aunt Masha took Regina’s hand and squeezed it so tightly that Regina cried out in pain because her wedding ring cut into the flesh of her little finger.
No, she wanted to scream. No! No! No!
It took enormous effort for her to answer in a normal voice. “No, Masha, I can’t do this.”
“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.
