Still Here, page 30
Eric could sense his father’s sincere interest and was getting more and more animated. He even stood up so that he could face Sergey.
“In Pokemon, if you faint in the battle, you just have to go to a Pokemon center to restore your health. Are you getting this, Dad?”
Sergey nodded.
Eric smiled and continued. “And in Destiny respawns are weirder. Basically when you die, your Ghost, which is this alien robot pal, gathers up all your particles and slowly brings you back to life, while you’re watching everything from a deathcam, which is like a pair of floating eyes.”
“You’re dead, but you’re watching everything. You know, I’ve actually been working on something very similar,” Sergey said.
“Virtual Grave, I know,” Eric said. “An app that would allow dead people to keep talking. Mom told me about it.”
“She did?”
“Yeah. It sounds a little weird. Could be kind of cool though.”
Sergey smiled and squeezed Eric’s shoulder.
It was starting to get dark. The clouds above the ocean took on a dirty pink color.
“Let’s head back,” Sergey said.
They were just a hundred feet from the car when they saw a deer. She was standing on the clearing between two birch trees looking at them with calm attention.
“Too bad we don’t have any food,” Sergey said.
Eric reached into his pockets and pulled out a bunch of baby carrots in various stages of decay.
“I wonder if they are still chock-full of A and C,” Sergey said.
Eric threw a few toward the deer.
The deer jolted back.
“Don’t throw them! Offer her some,” Sergey said.
Eric took a few steps forward and extended his hand as far as he could.
The deer looked away and headed back into the woods.
“She doesn’t understand the concept of the carrot,” Eric said.
Sergey’s heart tightened with an overwhelming mix of tenderness, worry, and guilt. But then wasn’t this what parental love was supposed to feel like?
“Will you have time to come into the house?” Eric asked when they got into the car. “I could show you how deathcams work and other stuff.”
“Sure,” Sergey said.
He would play with Eric, then he would go home and send out his résumé to all those banks he had marked and answer all his LinkedIn inquiries. And tonight, after they watched that stupid movie, he would finally man up and make love with Helen.
It was almost dark by the time they made it back to the house. The first thing he saw was Vica’s car, parked a mere inch away from the garage door. Vica never slowed down when she drove into the driveway. She took pride in making her turns sharp and precise.
“I’m sorry, Eric,” Sergey said, “I think we’d better look at your games some other time.”
Eric tried to hide his disappointment under a mask of male camaraderie. “Sure, Dad,” he said, “or if you install a console at your place, we could play each other.”
“I’ll think about it,” Sergey said.
He waited until Eric entered the house and started to pull away. Just then the front door opened with a bang and Vica came running toward the car, barefoot.
Sergey stopped the car and rolled down the window. “What is it?” he asked, hoping that his voice wouldn’t tremble.
“Could you come out for a second?” she said.
Sergey got out of the car, bracing himself for a very unpleasant conversation.
But Vica wasn’t saying anything. She just stood in the driveway, in her ridiculous too-tight yoga pants, her bare feet pressing into the gravel. There was that hungry, pleading look on her face that he hadn’t seen in such a long time that it took him a while to recognize it.
“Do you want me to come in?” he asked.
She nodded and started to cry.
Sergey winced at Vica’s stupid emoji and checked the time before putting the phone back into the pocket of his jeans. He still had about four hours before he had to head to Williamsburg for Vadik’s going-away party. He had called Sergey two weeks ago to tell him that he was leaving for Singapore. Sergey’s heart leaped with joy when he first heard Vadik’s voice, then he thought about him and Vica, and the joy got mired in anger and pain. They met for a drink and talked about what was happening with Virtual Grave, and Regina’s decision to adopt a child (Can you believe it!), and Vadik’s plans. They were both careful not to mention Vica. It turned out that Vadik didn’t really have plans. His headhunter had offered him a two-year contract overseas, and he had jumped at the opportunity. Singapore!
“Perhaps this was for the better,” Sergey said to Vica when he got home that night. Better for Vadik and for their friendship too. Perhaps what they needed was some distance in order to salvage what they had. Vica just nodded in agreement.
A bicycle bell made Sergey jump. He was walking down the narrow East Ninth Street on his way to Goebbels’s place. Even though he was officially back together with Vica, Sergey still had to feed Goebbels and spend some nights with him. He wondered if he was going to miss the cat. His owner was coming back in two weeks. Sergey would definitely miss this apartment, having a room of his own, getting to spend some time by himself. The idea of having a room of his own had supported him all through the turbulent process of reconciliation. He and Vica would be in the midst of yet another screaming fight and he would remind himself that there was a dark, quiet, cat-smelling retreat just thirty minutes away.
“But it’s getting better, isn’t it?” his mother asked. It was. He had to admit that it was.
The moment of clarity came after the call from Cleo. Bank of America had just offered him a junior financial analyst position. He had given up on Virtual Grave and was ready to accept it. He went ahead and took the drug test and filled out all the forms for the background check.
Then the call came just as he, Vica, and Eric were walking along the beach in Great Kills. Eric was crouching nearby trying to revive a horseshoe crab. The number was unfamiliar and Sergey hesitated before picking up.
“Sergey? This is Cleo Triantafyllides.” Sweet female voice. He had no idea who that was. He walked away from the surf to hear her better.
“We met a few weeks ago,” Cleo said. “I used to work as James Kisco’s assistant.”
Cleo! The doll-faced, slightly frightening girl.
“Yes, I remember,” Sergey said. He was pacing back and forth, barefoot, on the cold lumpy sand, while Vica sat down on a driftwood log.
Cleo told him that she had decided to branch out and set up her own start-up with her friend Mischa, another Wharton grad who was “amazingly savvy.” They were looking to develop a project that would truly stand out. And they thought that Virtual Grave would be an ideal start. Both she and Mischa loved how dark and edgy it was. They didn’t have a lot of money, so they couldn’t offer him much, but they were willing to pay him a modest salary while the project was in development stage. And a share of the profits later on. They had a wonderful team of very hot young programmers and designers. She knew that they could build something truly beautiful together. She hoped to meet and discuss the details in the next few days.
Sergey’s first thought was No, let me be. He was so tired of that roller coaster. Bob, Kisco, Kotov. Hopes up, hopes down. It was so much easier to give up. Sergey was almost hoping that Vica would tell him to do just that when he told her about Cleo’s call.
He walked over and sat down next to her on that driftwood log. He described Cleo’s offer, expecting her to say: “Forget about it! You have a nice offer from Bank of America.”
But instead Vica hopped off the log and started to jump up and down. “I knew it! I knew it!” she was screaming. “I always thought that Virtual Grave was a brilliant idea! Brilliant!”
Then she leaped at him, making him fall off the log, and fell on top of him. They toppled and tumbled around on the sand, laughing like crazy, until the worried Eric left his crab alone and ran up to them.
“What happened?” he asked.
“Eric! We just sold our app!” Vica screamed. “It’s gonna work. People are gonna use it!”
“Yeah!” Eric yelled and hurled himself down onto the sand too.
“There is no way of knowing if it will be successful,” Sergey said when they got up and were cleaning the sand off themselves.
“It doesn’t matter,” Vica said. “We need to see it through, up until the very end.”
“Is that the one where you’re respawning people?” Eric asked.
“Yep,” Sergey said.
“That’s seriously cool!”
Afterward, the three of them sat down at a picnic table and had a celebratory picnic of My Europe offerings. They kept talking and laughing, eating like pigs, protecting the food from the seagulls, protecting their napkins from the wind, smearing the sauces around. And all Sergey could think of was Vica. Here she was with her wild hair in the wind, sand all over her clothes, smiling at him, smiling at Eric, smiling at that stupid salami sandwich in her hand. Buoyant, victorious, half delirious with happiness.
I love her, he thought then. I really do.
He did love her, that much was clear. Whether they would be able to be happy together was a different question.
The staircase was dark as always and Sergey had trouble finding the keys to Goebbels’s door.
“Hey, there, Sergio,” Teena said, sticking her head out of her apartment. “Where’s my pal Enrico?”
“Eric,” Sergey said. “I promise to bring him next time.”
Eric loved feeding Goebbels, and Sergey would bring the boy with him from time to time. Teena had struck up a surprising friendship with Eric. They would play videogames in her room, building castles together, burning bridges, killing their enemies, and respawning their friends.
“Where’s your mom?” Sergey asked.
“On a date,” Teena said smugly.
“Oh.”
“Yeah, good for her. I made her sign up for Hello, Love! It’s not like she cares that you went back to your wife or anything.”
Goebbels meowed from behind the door and Sergey said good-bye to Teena and walked in. There he was, lying in the middle of the kitchen floor, flapping his tail against the tiles.
Sergey opened a can of minced duck delight, shaped the meat into tiny meatballs, and hid the anti-inflammatory pill inside one of them. That was Eric’s idea. He said that he did it all the time when he had to give medicine to Gavin’s cats. Then he confided to Sergey that his dream was to be a vet someday.
“But that’s so—” Sergey started to say “unambitious.” He stopped himself just in time. Let Eric figure out what he wants, he thought.
“Yeah, it’s tough, I know,” Eric said. “You have to have all As in biology, and Ms. Zeh keeps giving me Bs.”
Sergey put the meatballs into the bowl. Goebbels limped over to his food with great fervor. The medicinal piece was down (thank God) and now Goebbels was working on the remaining meatballs. He always turned his head sideways when he ate and that gave him a vicious expression, as if he was eating a live bird rather than the thoroughly processed minced duck delight.
Sergey’s phone beeped. There was a text message from Regina: “Is Vica with you?”
“No, why? Aren’t you meeting her at IKEA?” he typed.
“She’s not here and she’s not answering.”
“Must be on the subway,” Sergey texted back.
Regina sighed. She’d been waiting for Vica for twenty minutes on the crowded first floor of Brooklyn’s IKEA and she was getting restless. The place was awful, unbearable, loud, inspiring both agoraphobia because of its size and claustrophobia because of its crowded little pretend rooms. There were all these families moving in all directions half hidden behind the enormous boxes sticking out of their shopping carts. Angry, screaming, exhausted.
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!”
