Still Here

Chapter 7: Gifted and Talented

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.

But this time there’d been an unexpected obstacle. The wipes got stuck in their cylindrical container. She yanked at the top one but only managed to tear off a tiny piece. Now she had to unscrew the lid of the container, and for that task she needed both hands. She had to let go of Eric’s legs and, since she couldn’t really hold her breath any longer, exhale and inhale. By the time she finally got the wipes out, this was what she saw: Eric’s perfectly round face. His hand over his face. Shit squeezed in his tiny fist. Shit dripping through his fingers onto his pointy chin. Shit smeared over his mouth. Lips making smacking movements. The pensive expression on his face communicating his uncertainty as to whether he liked the taste or not.

The picture was wrong, disgusting, vile. Too wrong. Not just momentarily wrong, but monumentally wrong. It could be a reflection of everything that was wrong with her life. How they had moved from Moscow into this cold, dark, ugly, disgusting apartment in Brooklyn. How she couldn’t finish medical school. How bad her back hurt. How she was rapidly losing her looks — at twenty-four! How Sergey didn’t want her anymore. How it was a mistake to leave Russia and come here. How it was a huge, huge, enormous mistake! All of that came to her clearly in a split second. She didn’t think — she reacted. She raised her hand and smacked it across Eric’s face. The sensation of how small and soft his face was against her hand, soft and still and smeared with shit, told her that it had happened. She had just hit her six-month-old baby. And then the stunned and puzzled expression on his face, as if he couldn’t believe where the pain had come from. Vica grabbed Eric, pressed him to her chest, and stayed like that, trembling. Only then did he start to cry. She pressed him harder and harder to her chest. She stroked his downy hair, she stroked the tiny hollow on his neck, she stroked his bare back and his bare butt — still dirty. She carried him to the sink and washed his face, his mouth, his bottom. She dried him off, carried him back to the sofa, put a clean diaper on, pulled his overalls down. And then he raised his arms up, reaching for her, asking that she take him. She cradled him in her arms and started to rock him, marveling at how quickly his distress changed to contentment, peace, and then sleep. He’d reached to her for comfort even though she’d been the one to hurt him. He didn’t have a choice, he didn’t have anybody except for her. She put him gently into his crib, then went to lock herself in the bathroom so that she could sob and wail as loudly as she needed to.

Even now, eleven years later, the memory of that incident made Vica wince in pain.

They were standing in line to get to the Castle, which loomed above them, leaning toward them from the horizon line. The school was actually called Sebastian Levy High School, but everybody called it the Castle. Vica wrapped her coat tighter and urged Eric to do the same. They moved slowly — a couple of steps, a pause, a couple of steps, a pause — in a long chain that stretched around the Castle’s perimeter.

It seemed that the presence of the Castle made them even colder because it blocked the sun. Although to be perfectly honest, the sun wouldn’t be much help either at eight twenty in the morning on a frigid November day. Anyway, it was hard to believe that this building was right in the middle of the Upper East Side, where endless streets stretched in all four directions, yellow cabs rushed by, and dog walkers walked whole packs of dogs.

“Are you cold?” she asked Eric. He shook his head. But he looked cold; he looked tired and a little morose. But then all the children in line looked a little morose. They all looked very young — younger than eleven. They had thin necks and funny ears: large, tiny, hairy, bent, stuck out, misshapen, glowing, red, dented by eyeglasses. About a fifth of these children would pass the test, be accepted into this school, and officially be regarded as “gifted and talented.” The strangeness of their ears would be redeemed by their genius. The rest of them would just be regular children with funny ears. Vica hugged Eric and pulled his hat lower over his ears.

Vica had to take a day off for this. Sergey had offered to take Eric to the test, but she couldn’t trust him with something that important. He might have been late, or he could have started saying stupid shit like “A good education is what matters, chum, but a good school doesn’t necessarily mean a good education.” How she hated it when Sergey called Eric “chum”!

Thinking of Sergey made her momentarily nauseous. Ever since they had separated Vica developed a disturbing habit of seeing strangers on the street and mistaking them for Sergey. She would feel a fleeting joy, followed by disappointment and then relief. She wasn’t sure if she missed him though. She missed the Sergey who loved her. But that Sergey no longer existed. He wouldn’t have behaved like he had if he loved her, wouldn’t have made fun of her at Vadik’s party, wouldn’t have left without a fight. Hadn’t he actually look relieved as he was leaving? So, no, she didn’t miss him. It’s just that there was this space in her body that her love for Sergey used to occupy. She imagined it as a concrete physical space, shaped like a mushroom. A huge mushroom, with the stem originating in the pit of her stomach and the cap swelling over her heart and pushing toward her throat. That space was now unoccupied, but not clean, not entirely empty. It was filled with random junk, like hurt, shame, and fear. Fear that she had made a terrible mistake.

Vica wished she could talk to somebody about it. Vadik had proved to be useless. He had neither confirmed nor disproved that she had been right to throw Sergey out. Regina? Vadik kept singing her praises about how wise she was, how full of empathy, how much she had helped him with his love problems throughout the years. But to ask Regina about Sergey? Regina, who must be gloating?

She talked to her mother.

“You’re such a pathetic idiot!” Vica’s mother yelled into the phone. Vica mumbled the same explanation she had attempted to give to Vadik: how it was getting unbearable, how both of them were on the verge of hating each other.

“Just tell me, how can this possibly be good for you?” her mother asked. “You’ll be worse off financially, you’ll have to work even more, and you’ll be all alone. Any husband is better than no husband!”

Vica’s father was that “any husband”: a quiet alcoholic who liked to sing and weep when drunk; he would sing and weep himself into oblivion until he fell asleep right at the table.

“I might meet somebody else,” Vica said.

“Good luck with that!” her mother retorted before slamming down the receiver.

Still, Vica’s worst fear was that the separation would affect Eric in some irreparable way. He seemed fine, but who knew what went on inside his head?

“Are you sure you’re not cold?” she asked Eric again. He shook his head.

“Hey, look!” Vica said. “Those dogs are funny.” A skinny girl of about sixteen was walking a pack of four dogs: a rottweiler, two golden retrievers, and a small furry dog of unknown breed. The small one must have been intimidated by its peers, so it was doing everything possible to keep apart from them, stretching the rope, making the walker stumble.

Eric looked at the dogs, then up at her with surprise, because this was something that his dad would say, not his mom. Sergey had a special bond with Eric over funny animals. He would always point them out to Eric, and Eric to him. He would send Sergey links to various photos: “Dad, look at that furry pig!” or YouTube videos: “That’s a real live killer rabbit!” And Sergey would take him to countless zoos, natural history museums, and aquariums to look at dinosaur bones, Galápagos turtles, and thousand-year-old fish. Eric had developed this passion for weird animals when he was four or five. He didn’t have many friends then. (Well, he hardly had any friends now. Just that fat freak Gavin.) It would break Vica’s heart when she watched Eric approach a kid on a playground to show him his toy dinosaur and explain how it used to be the most dangerous predator some millions of years ago, and the kid would laugh at him and run off, or kick the toy out of his hands and then run off. She always encouraged him to do sports, to play with other kids, to be more sociable, more normal. And it would break her heart to watch Eric run up to Sergey after work and tell him about the amazing discovery he had made — that dinosaurs looked just like chickens or some such — and Sergey would listen to him, as if it was okay to be interested in all that shit!

“Yeah, funny,” Eric said and turned away. He was clearly not in the mood for talking.

Vica decided to study the parents in the line. You could easily divide them into two categories: Susan Sontag types and Outer Borough types. Vica knew who Susan Sontag was from Vadik’s Tumblr. He once posted her photograph with a quote: “ ‘The truth is balance, but the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.’ ”

Here, in the Castle line, the Sontag types were all about fifty years old, wore no makeup, had various amounts of gray in their hair, and had roughly the same amount of intellectual flair. Their clothes looked elegant yet comfortable, a sure sign that they were very, very expensive. Some of the Sontags were beautiful, others were not; a lot of them were Asian; a few of them were men. The Outer Borough types wore puffy jackets and knitted hats. There were a few more men among them: the non-white men were wearing suits under their jackets and dressy shoes, while the white men were wearing jeans and work boots, unless they were Russian — then they were wearing the same clothes as the non-white Outer Borough men. The phrase “deep social divide” darted through Vica’s mind, but she was too tired and sleepy to think it through or even to use it in a complete sentence. Vica herself wore a fuchsia-colored puffy jacket, but that didn’t mean that she belonged with the Outer Borough types, and the fact that she lived on Staten Island didn’t mean anything either. It wasn’t her fault that she lived on Staten Island. Vica’s personality was pure Manhattan. It’s just that her financial situation wasn’t.

Although to be perfectly honest, Vica didn’t belong with the Sontag types either, not because she lacked the intellectual flair but because she was only thirty-five years old and didn’t have any gray in her hair.

None of that mattered though. What mattered was that this was one of the best schools in the city — and possibly in the entire country — and the only truly democratic one. All you had to do was pass the test, and if you were smart enough to pass it, you were guaranteed a spectacular free education that led to Ivy League colleges, Ivy League graduate schools, and then unfailingly to superior lives. The problem was that admission wasn’t as democratic as it seemed. Some parents could afford tutors who’d been shoving intelligence down their children’s throats for years and other parents couldn’t. Eden, Vica’s boss at Bing Ruskin, had a son in this school. Vica had heard Eden bragging to her friend Dr. Jewell that they had spent fifteen thousand dollars for tutoring so that their son would pass the exam. “But just think how much we saved in private school tuition!” she’d said. The maddening thing was that Eden and her husband could afford the tuition. So by paying for a tutor they had robbed some equally smart poor kid of the opportunity to attend this school. That was unfair! That was so unfair! And Eden wasn’t even aware of it.

Of course, if she and Sergey had enough money, she wouldn’t hesitate to hire a tutor too. This would have put Eric at that same unfair advantage. It’s just that Vica didn’t find unfairness toward others quite as painful as unfairness toward herself.

Several years ago Eden threw a Memorial Day barbecue for all of the diagnostic radiology employees at her beautiful farm near Princeton (she had the farm in addition to her huge Manhattan apartment). Real farm — goats and all. Vica had been really looking forward to that picnic. She liked Eden. Eden was fairly young, beautiful, and worldly, and Vica really wanted to see her in a social setting; she even hoped that they could become friends. Why couldn’t they? Eden was a doctor, just as Vica would have been, if she’d had the chance to finish medical school. And maybe Eric could become friends with Eden’s sons.

Vica decided to create the most elegant hostess gift for Eden. She bought a beautiful wicker basket at Pier 1, fitted it with a blue and white linen towel, and filled it with the most perfect strawberries she could find in Staten Island’s Stop & Shop.

She thought she looked amazing when she parked her car and stepped onto Eden’s lawn. She was wearing a tight low-cut tank top, a jeans miniskirt, pink high-heeled sandals, and a straw hat with a wide pink band. The outfit, combined with her basket of strawberries, was the very picture of country chic. Then the first thing that Vica noticed was strawberry patches all over the place, thousands, millions of strawberries. Eden was very polite about it: “Strawberries — how lovely!” she said. “Ours are not ripe yet.” The second thing that Vica noticed were the beige shorts and loose white T-shirts that everybody, including Eden, was wearing. Oh, yes, and baseball hats. “Nice hat!” Santiago, who operated their C-scan machine, said with a smirk. Vica took her straw hat off and put it on a bench by the house, next to her basket.

Eden took her mostly immigrant employees on a tour of the house, a beautiful house, decorated with all the antique country stuff — there was even a collection of old irons — abstract photographs done by Eden’s husband, and abstract sculptures done by Eden’s sons. The boys ran in after a soccer game, sweaty, out of breath, flushed, confident, happy — and Vica had thought that Eric could make friends with them! When the tour was almost over, Vica decided to make up for her faux pas with the clothes and the strawberries and pay some amazing compliment to the house. “Eden,” she said, “your house looks just like Howards End.” Eden answered her with a blank stare. “Howards End,” Vica explained, “the house in Forster’s novel.” Blank stare again, followed by a kind smile. Vica knew that before switching to premed at Harvard Eden had been an English major. There was no way that she didn’t know who Forster was. Vica had read the novel in Regina’s translation, perhaps the novel had a different title in English. And then Vica got it. Eden didn’t expect Vica to know Forster (Vica — a simple immigrant ultrasound technician), just like she didn’t expect one of her goats to bleat “Fors-ter.” Eden gave Vica a polite, uncomprehending, but approving, perfectly democratic smile specially designed for her immigrant employees — Russian, Jamaican, Filipino, or whatever else they happened to be.

To add insult to injury, by the time they emerged from the house, the largest goat had eaten all of Vica’s strawberries and about half of her hat. Vica picked up her bag and the remains of her hat and decided to go home without waiting for the food.

Vica’s other botched attempt to make a friend at work was with Christine, another radiology technician. Christine was older than Vica, but not by much. She was a tall woman with rolls of fat pushing against her scrubs in expected and unexpected places. Her skin was of a perfect chestnut color, and her hair, black with a touch of gray, was done in gleaming cornrows. It was Christine who made the first move, back when Vica started working at Bing Ruskin. She offered some friendly advice, which Vica gladly accepted. They started having lunch together and chatting whenever they had a chance. In addition to professional advice, Christine gave Vica a lot of pointers on child-rearing, pie baking, ordering swimsuits online (you had to order Speedo at least three sizes too large), and American ways in general. Christine’s manner had always been good-natured and caring, if a little patronizing. “Oh, so you have your cool black friend now?” Vadik would tease. “Shut up, Vadik,” Vica would answer. But then things changed. The problem was that Christine took Vica for a struggling immigrant single mother. There was a picture of Eric clipped to Vica’s locker, but she never talked about Sergey. Then one day somebody mentioned a cousin applying for a job at Gray Bank, and Vica said that her husband worked there too. “Oh, yeah?” Christine asked. “What does he do?” “He’s a financial analyst,” Vica said. “Oh, yeah?” Christine said again, and just like that, the friendship was over. Christine’s husband worked as a mechanic, Leslie’s husband was a bus driver, Sheena’s husband worked as a security guard there at Bing Ruskin, Rachel and John were divorced, Michael’s wife held the exact same position as he did but at Weil Cornell, and the youngest technician Liliana was single — she was all about dates and parties and fun. Having a husband at Gray Bank instantly turned Vica into this fanciful white lady who chose this job for some bizarre reason. Vica remembered what Bob’s daughter, Becky, said about about her job at McDonald’s. She worked there when she was a junior in high school. Bob thought it was important for her to experience a “real job.” She told them how the other employees hated her, how they all gathered to stare at her getting into Bob’s new Volvo after work, and how the nicer she was to them, the more they hated her. So that was how Christine saw Vica now? A spoiled rich brat who didn’t really have to earn her living, who took this job just for the experience? But who in her right mind would choose to work at a cancer hospital, at a job that was both physically and emotionally exhausting, while being exposed to continuous radiation? There were times when Vica felt the urge to explain to Christine how things really stood, to tell her about Sergey’s employment history, about how stupid they had been to buy that insane house that was just a big rotting piece of shit, and about how lonely she felt in the U.S. with no relatives and no real friends, just Regina and Vadik, both of whom preferred Sergey to her. But then she would remember how Regina had tried to explain to them that she wasn’t really that rich, and how ridiculous that had sounded. And then pride would get the better of her. Why did Vica have to justify herself to Christine? And so they were cordial but not friendly. Certainly not friendly enough to talk about something as personal as the separation.

“Mom,” Eric said, “Mom! I’m cold.”

Vica rubbed his back. While she was doing that she noticed that Eric’s glasses were dirty. She gasped and yanked them off, scratching his ear in the process. “Mom!” he protested.

“Hey! You should have cleaned them before we left,” Vica said.

She could just see how these stains on the lenses would jeopardize Eric’s chances at the test. Misread equation, misinterpreted sentence, blurry expression, fatal mistake. And there was nothing to clean the glasses with. Nothing. Nothing at all. Vica unbuttoned her coat, breathed on the lenses, then wiped them with the hem of her sweater. Eric turned away, embarrassed but resigned. “Here,” she said, setting the glasses back on his face. “Thanks,” Eric said, but she thought she caught a note of sarcasm. When they were just outside of the door, she opened his backpack and did a quick check: pencils, papers, all in place. Pink slip squeezed in his hand.

“Don’t drop the slip.”

“Mom, I won’t!”

Okay, he probably wouldn’t drop the slip. But then another horrible thought slashed through Vica’s mind. Last year, when she took him out of school on Staten Island to take a test for another school for the gifted and talented (although not quite as gifted and talented as children admitted to the Castle), Eric decided to venture to the bathroom in the middle of the exam. He couldn’t find it and then, once he found it, he couldn’t poop right away because he was too nervous, and by the time he got back, they were already collecting the tests. He left twenty answers blank. Twenty answers blank!

Vica reached out and tapped the Susan Sontag in front of her on the shoulder.

“Do you know if they let the kids go to the bathroom?”

“Excuse me?” Susan Sontag said.

Yes, Vica knew that she spoke with an accent, but it wasn’t that bad, it wasn’t like you couldn’t understand her. Susan Sontag’s daughter (her huge ears half hidden behind her pigtails) answered for her.

“They don’t! Once you hand in your pink slip, that’s it, you can’t go anywhere! And there are no windows in the school. Not a single one! Look, not a single one!”

Susan Sontag shushed her daughter and glared at Vica as if she had just said something completely inappropriate, had brought up a subject that should never be brought up in front of children, like sex, death, or financial troubles.

“Make sure you use the bathroom before they take your pink slip,” Vica said to Eric.

“Mom, please!”

He was already in, talking to a guard and showing her his pink slip, when Vica noticed that she’d forgotten to zip his backpack. It was too late for her to squeeze through the crowd of children and zip it, and even too late to yell her son’s name. There he went, with the backpack gaping like a hippo’s maw. Seeing Eric among strangers, separated from her, made Vica look at him through the eyes of a stranger, which never failed to overwhelm her with disappointment. He was not a lovely child. He was awkward. Slouchy. Pale skin sprinkled with large freckles, dull eyes, droopy cheeks. Fat. Not obese, no, and not exactly fat yet, but getting there. Soft, squashy. Helplessly soft.

Vica raised her hand to wave to her son, but he didn’t turn to look. He followed the guard and disappeared into the depths of the Castle.

“What are you feeding him? He looks awful!” Vica’s oldest sister had exclaimed after she saw Eric on Skype. Their mother often said the same thing. “Let him be,” Vica’s father said, but when did they ever listen to him.

Guilt mixed with anger balled up somewhere in Vica’s stomach. It was her own fault. It was the general unhappiness of their family, her constant fights with Sergey, the never-ending tension, and now the separation that made Eric fat, that made him slump in front of the TV with junk food instead of doing sports. It was his sick relationship with Sergey’s mother, who kept overfeeding and overpraising her grandson. Mira was a tiny, fussy, heavily made up, not very smart woman. They had arranged for her to move to the United States after Sergey’s father died. Vica was hoping that Mira would sell her apartment in Moscow, but she left it to her spinster sister instead. “Maechka is so sick, she wouldn’t have survived on her pension.” She herself came penniless. Sergey and Vica made sure she was getting benefits, found her state-sponsored housing in Brooklyn. But Mira wasn’t adjusting to her new life that well. She was a clingy mother and a clingier grandmother. She and Eric had some sort of crazy romance going. He badly needed to be admired and she badly needed to be needed. Once Vica overheard the following exchange:

“Now, who is the smartest? Who is the handsomest?”

“Okay, okay, Grandma. I guess I am.”

It was creepy, Vica thought, but they both looked so pleased with each other. They would spend hours talking. Mira would tell him all about her life in Russia, about his genius grandfather, and about Sergey as a little boy. Eric shared some of the facts with Vica. “Did you know that Dad used to be really good at picking berries? They would go into the woods and he would fill his little basket in minutes. Grandma says I would be really good too.”

What hurt Vica the most about this was that Eric didn’t have any connection with her side of the family. Her mother was very much involved in bringing up Vica’s sister’s kids; she considered them her real grandchildren, and Eric was nothing but a stranger whose first language was English and couldn’t speak her language very well. Vica would prep him and make him rehearse some Russian phrases before their monthly Skype calls, but Eric would invariably stutter and mix up his words. “I don’t understand what you’re saying!” Vica’s mother would say. “Better go play and put your mom back on.”

Other parents from the line were dispersing in all directions. Outer Boroughs were heading to nearby cafés, Susan Sontags were walking west, to their beautiful apartments just across the park. The time was now 8:35. She had to pick Eric up at 12:30. She’d taken the whole day off work, so she had all that time to herself. She was free to do what she wanted. Vica’s plan was to have breakfast at Café Sabarsky. She had heard Eden mention that they had “hands down the best coffee in the city.” Vadik said that it was a bit pricey but a truly elegant setting. She walked to Neue Galerie, entered the museum, and stopped at the door of Café Sabarsky and peeked in. The dark wood interior was both cozy and grand. Vica loved marble tabletops and chairs with a dent in it for your butt. She took the dent as a special sign of luxury. At this hour, the café was almost empty; an old man was sitting at a table by the window with a deliciously fresh newspaper spread above his coffee cup. She would take a table by the window too. She would just order a cup of coffee and a bread basket. She would butter one of the rolls, put it on her plate, take a selfie of herself enjoying “the best coffee in the city” in “a truly elegant setting,” and post it on Facebook. Let them see! Let them see that she was perfectly fine about her separation, happy, in a good place. She wasn’t sure who “they” were, however. Her sisters? They didn’t really use Facebook, preferring the Russian social media site VKontakte. Her coworkers? Yeah, why not? Regina and Vadik? Definitely! Sergey himself? Sergey had never been a fan of social media — what an irony that he was so obsessed with that app! — but if he ever happened to browse and see her photo, Vica wanted to make sure that it would send the right message. Vica was about to enter the café when her eyes fell on the menu clipped to the door. Seven dollars for coffee. Eight dollars for a bread basket with jam. That would be eighteen dollars with tax and more than twenty dollars with tip. She could afford it, but twenty dollars for bread and coffee! When she could buy a bagel from a breakfast cart for just a dollar! No, that was ridiculous. Vica turned to leave, then hesitated. What about her Facebook photo? Vica, smiling, relaxed, sipping her seven-dollar coffee as if it were perfectly natural? No, she decided, it wasn’t worth it. She wouldn’t be able to drink that coffee without constantly running the price through her head. So the picture would come out as anything but natural.

Vica walked back to Madison, went into a deli, and stood in line for a bagel and a sour-tasting coffee in a paper cup. There was a man a few feet away, standing with his back to Vica, perusing the yogurts on a shelf. Short, wiry, dark hair. Sergey! Vica thought for a second. Then the man turned, revealing that he was not.

It was only nine. Vica sat down at the one of the rickety plastic tables, reached into her bag, and pulled out a book she’d recently bought at Barnes & Noble. It was called Mobile Apps for Dummies.

She opened the book to the marked page:

Step 1. Define the Goal of Your App. Before you go into details, you must clearly define the purpose and mission of your app. What is it going to do? What is its core appeal? What concrete problem is it going to solve, or what part of life is it going to make better?

“To fight death” she wrote in her notepad. That was kind of a larger goal. She needed to make it more practical, more plausible.

Vica had never been that interested in Sergey’s idea of re-creating the virtual voice or even the virtual personality of the departed. What she wanted was an app that would allow people to keep some of their online presence after they died. She thought the app should be designed for people who were going to die (which was everybody!) rather than their relatives and friends. They would be able to preprogram the posts, messages, or tweets that would appear after they died. It was more like a virtual will. “Virtual Will”—now, there was a nice name, so much better than Virtual Grave. She had mentioned it to Sergey and he sounded interested. “But where would my algorithm come in, if people will be creating their own messages before they die?” he asked. “They can’t possibly prewrite everything. Some of them have to be automatic!” He took some time to think it over and told her that he loved her idea. He thought it was great that Virtual Grave could work both ways as posthumous restoration and as “prehumous” preparation. He did love it! Yet, he chose to pitch only his part to Bob. He must have thought that her idea was too banal, too practical. It was practical, and that was what was so great about it.

So what would be her app’s plausible goal?

To keep your social media alive after you die.

To keep your online presence after you die.

To control your online presence after you die.

To keep control over your social media after you die.

Vica liked the word control. One of the things that was so scary about dying, falling down, or even falling asleep was the loss of control.

Yes, control was a powerful word, and no, she wasn’t so naive that she thought you could actually keep it. But you could keep some semblance of it. Or at least die thinking that you did.

Now, how exactly would the app work? Would it only allow for the timed premade posts or tweets or photos to appear after you died, or would it also allow you to “react” to the posts of others?

“Posthumous feedback?” she wrote.

It shouldn’t be hard to program the app to give out random likes to the posts of loved ones. A “like” for every second thing posted by your child. Or for every third thing posted by your friends. People were always “liking” random things as it was. But that was easy enough. It would be far more interesting and challenging to program the app so that it made meaningful comments. Would it be possible for it to distinguish a post about something good from a post about something bad? So that it could comment either “Congratulations!” or “That sucks”? But what if it made a mistake? What if a son posted that he lost his job and got “Congratulations!” from his long-dead father? There had to be some neutral comments. “I’m with you,” for example. That would work for almost everything. iPhones already had ready-made quick text options that substituted for genuine emotions. You didn’t have to go to all that trouble and type in “I love you” or “I miss you”; all you had to do for the app was to make those quick responses automatic. So what you needed for Virtual Will was a robotlike program that would be activated after you died to post neutral comments to your loved ones’ posts. It should be compatible to any of your social media platforms. Vica thought about the most common expressions people used in their posts, tweets, and comments. She reached for her phone and opened her Twitter app. Her favorite social media was Facebook, so she never tweeted anything herself, but she enjoyed looking at other people’s tweets, even though she didn’t follow that many of them. Vadik’s tweet was at the top.

Zero retweets. Zero favorites. What did he expect with stupid shit like that? Still, Vica felt sorry for Vadik and marked his tweet as a favorite.

Then there were a couple of funny little tweets from Mindy Kaling, who she loved.

Vica soon forgot about her task and got carried away by the tweets themselves.

There was one from President Obama about climate change. Vica smiled. Not that she particularly cared about politics or the climate, but she got a kick out of the fact that you could follow the president on Twitter.

A tweet from Liliana in radiology. “Another busy day.” Well, yes, Vica thought, this was a weekday, and their job was hard. Why did Liliana feel the need to tweet about that?

Santiago from interventional radiology retweeted a picture of a Japanese dog with a square hairdo. Now that was really funny and cute!

Vica skipped through another ten or twelve tweets until she stumbled on this one from Ethan Grail.

Vica sighed. She felt a surge of pity that was so sharp it burned her throat the way hot coffee did.

Ethan Grail was her favorite patient. He was an actor, a quite famous one, even though Vica had never seen any of his movies. He was only thirty-two years old with a terminal lung cancer diagnosis. Ethan was the source of endless gossip at the hospital. Liliana would show Vica clips from his films on YouTube. Christine claimed that he had just broken up with his costar. Like right before his diagnosis. She’d read it in People magazine. “Poor fucker,” Santiago said.

Judging from the clips and the countless photos floating across the Internet, Ethan had been very handsome a mere six months ago. Now he was painfully thin and had the pallor of a dead man, with large eyes that seemed to retreat into his skull farther than would be bearable. No wonder people didn’t recognize him anymore. Ethan would always chat with Vica while she did his sonograms (his therapy made him prone to thromboses, so he needed frequent tests), and he would often sneak across the hall to see her when he came for his weekly radiation treatments.

Her male patients often tried to flirt with her. One man said that she had “the body of Marilyn and the soul of Chekhov.” A lot of men made the same joke that finally there was a woman who could see right through them. Vica usually just smiled back at them, but she couldn’t help but feel disgusted. It was as if she was kneading dough all day, and the dough suddenly decided to flirt with her.

But Ethan Grail was different. She actually enjoyed chatting with him. Not because he was a celebrity, but because there was something morbidly irresistible in the way he liked to flaunt his impending death. Usually, patients were encouraged to view death as if it were a mean but conquerable enemy, something they were expected to fight against rather than accept. Ethan said that Vica was the only one among the hospital’s personnel who didn’t discourage his quips about death, didn’t call his attitude defeatist. He said that he loved her accent. That there was some bluntness, some bitterness, some refreshing lack of optimism in the way she pronounced words.

Both Liliana and Christine thought that Ethan had a crush on Vica. “What if he dies and leaves Vica all his money in his will?” Liliana mused. Vica fantasized about that too. She hated herself for doing it, but she couldn’t help herself.

Vica clicked on Ethan’s name to read his recent tweets in succession.

Shit! Vica thought, pushing back tears. She couldn’t afford to get emotional over a patient. Everybody at work told her so. Some of her colleagues offered tips on fighting back emotions. Christine said that whenever she was about to feel weepy she would try to visualize her bank statement. Liliana thought of sex. Santiago of the recent soccer game’s score. But it was Sergey, who had never worked with dying people, who actually gave her the best advice. This was years ago, when she’d just started working at Bing Ruskin and would often come home sobbing. “Think of it as a movie or a TV show,” he said. “When I was little I used to get really upset over sad scenes in movies. And my dad once told me, ‘Serezha, listen, these are not real people. They will go home and change their clothes after this and go on with their lives. Lassie the dog is not really dead, she’s an actress. She will go home and gnaw on her favorite bone.’ It helped a lot, although it did ruin the magic of storytelling a little bit.”

For the most part Sergey’s protective strategy worked really well. This is not real, Vica would tell herself. This is just a TV series. ER, Grey’s Anatomy, House M.D. The doctors are not real. The patients are not real. That sweet kid who died last month didn’t really die; he was simply killed off by the writers, because some new show offered him a better role. It didn’t work with Ethan though. Possibly because he really was an actor, it was harder for her to imagine him as a pretend actor. Ethan was real and he was going to die for real. Fairly soon too. She had heard that the doctors were giving him only about a year.

The last time Vica had a chat with Ethan was about two weeks ago.

“I know what you want to ask me,” Ethan said.

He was staring at her intently, even aggressively. She had to look away. He couldn’t have guessed that I had been thinking about his money, could he? Vica thought, her spine tensing.

“Go on, ask me. Ask me if I’m scared of dying.”

“Are you scared?”

“Hell, yeah, I’m terrified. I’m not ready. It’s funny, isn’t it, how my docs devote so much effort to prolonging my life and none of it to preparing me for death. Which is coming no matter what! Couldn’t they think of something to make dying just a little bit easier, a little bit less scary?”

Vica had no idea what to say to him. Her heart was breaking, but she was rebelling against having to feel it. She wasn’t Ethan’s girlfriend or his friend. She wasn’t even his shrink or his doctor. She was a mere radiology technician, and she couldn’t afford to feel that strongly about a patient!

“There are excellent hospice programs; they take care of emotional issues as well as physical ones,” she said weakly.

Ethan looked stricken with disappointment. He must have expected something honest, crazy, Russian from her, but what he’d gotten was a generic reply à la Bing Ruskin.

She looked at his “FYI” tweet again and her eyes filled with tears. She had to tip her face up not to let them escape.

“Hi!” Somebody interrupted her thoughts.

Vica raised her eyes and saw that there was a smiling man sitting across from her.

“You were in that line at the Castle school, weren’t you?”

Vica nodded. The man was white, wearing a puffy coat, jeans, and working boots. Speaking with a slight Eastern European accent. Polish? Serbian? In other words, he was a typical Outer Borough.

“I heard the questions are even tougher than usual this year,” he said. “My Ginnie nearly had a panic attack this morning. And I told her, ‘Honey, no school is worth whipping yourself into a frenzy like this.’ ”

Except for this school, Vica thought. This school was worth it. She wondered if Eric had been whipped into enough of a frenzy.

“Listen,” the man said, “can I buy you another coffee or a pastry?”

He was nice-looking. In his forties. Probably divorced. Broad shoulders. Attractive crinkles around his blue eyes.

“I have an appointment,” Vica said with an apologetic smile and got up to leave. She had no desire to have a conversation with an Outer Borough.

As she walked toward the park, she wondered if she had been too curt with the man. And no, she hadn’t left because she was a snob and felt that she deserved better, or not only because of that, but mainly because she couldn’t help but see all Outer Borough men as variations of Sergey. Or just variations on the type of Husband. A Husband knew her the way she didn’t want to be known, at her worst, her ugliest, her most embarrassing. He had heard how she lied, and he had heard how she screamed in rage. He had seen her throw up, seen her with cracked nipples, seen her pick an uneaten sandwich from the garbage bin in his mother’s kitchen — she swore that she put the sandwich right back, but he didn’t see that. A Husband knew her and he didn’t want her. He didn’t even fight for her. This was definitely one of the reasons Vica didn’t want to date Vadik. She couldn’t be with another man who knew her well. She had been attracted to Vadik for such a long time, but now that she was actually free, the mere thought of dating him made her squirm.

What she needed was a Lover. A man who came from another world. A man who didn’t know her. A man who would take her for somebody good, and bright, and exciting. Special. Delicate.

The thought of such a man made Vica giddy with desire. Ever since Sergey left, she was plagued by these random bouts of desire, unwelcome and unexpected. Her recurrent fantasy was of a man throwing her onto a bed, spreading her legs, and greedily licking her, lapping her up as a cat would a bowl of milk.

The last time she felt like that was when she first went to Moscow for the medical school entrance exams. She was seventeen. The heated subway car smelled of old leather and sweat. Some of that sweat was her own. Vica was wearing a short cotton dress. She was holding her large backpack on her lap, and there were imprints of the bag’s buckles on her bare legs. She felt damp all over, and messy and disgusting. But still men looked at her. She couldn’t help but feel their gazes running through her body like electrical currents. It was exhilarating.

And then, when she was accepted to the best medical school in the country (the only one from her hometown!) and went to Moscow to live, she felt overwhelmed with the buzz of a sexual current all over the city. She would walk down a Moscow street or stand in a crowded subway car and catch somebody’s stare and her knees would grow weak. But she was a good girl, brought up by her strict mother, by all the books about great romantic love she had consumed while growing up, and so sex for the sake of sex was out of the question. She would only have sex for the sake of great love. Or, rather, she would have a great love for the sake of great sex.

Lovelovelove/sex/love/sex/love/sexsexsex was all she could think about, so it was surprising that she found a way to study and earn good grades. Vica did go out with a couple of guys, but she wouldn’t let them go all the way, because she was sure that what she felt for them wasn’t great love. Great love was supposed to make you crazy, set your world on fire, move the earth — all those clichés, though Vica didn’t know they were clichés back then. She refused to go to all those empty dachas with these guys, and their parents’ apartments, and their friends’ dorm rooms, so instead, they ended their dates on the dark staircase of some building close to her dorm that smelled of cats and rotten potato peels. She let the guy press her against the mailboxes, or the staircase railing, or the garbage chute, or the warm spines of the radiator, and they kissed until it hurt. She would try to stop and remind herself that she wasn’t supposed to have sex without love, and that love was nowhere near, but her will would fail her and she wouldn’t be able to stop. So she let the guy sneak his hand under her sweater, and his finger inside her panties, and his dick pressed to the damp skin of her upper thigh, and she moaned and wriggled and sometimes even came — when it happened, she tried her best to conceal it from the guy. Then Vica said good-bye, walked up the stairs to her dorm room, and wiped the semen off her thighs, crying from shame but wanting more.

One of these guys was Vadik. They met at her classmate’s party — Vadik was the classmate’s older brother’s friend. He was twenty-two, in grad school in the department of applied mathematics at the university. He was tall and handsome, smart and funny, and liked to recite poetry. He boasted that he knew Moscow better than anybody else, and he was eager to impress Vica by being a connoisseur of all the finer things the city could offer. He took her for walks along the little-known “secret” nooks like Kuskovo park or Simonov Monastery, he treated her to the best hot chocolate ever, he took her to see a double feature at a Truffaut retrospective. Then he took her back to her dorm and kissed her at the entrance. Vica tried very hard to will herself into falling in love with him. “I’m crazy about him, I’m crazy about him, I’m crazy about him,” she kept repeating in her mind as if trying to hypnotize herself. She enjoyed kissing him, but the craziness wouldn’t come.

On their sixth date, they had a fight. Vadik was from a small town too, but his attitude toward Moscow was startlingly different from Vica’s. Vica thought that the city was exciting and tough and strange, very strange, and it was pointless to try to fit in or even understand it, but that eventually she would conquer it (she didn’t know how — she had no idea what conquering the city even meant — she just knew that she had to do it). Vadik grew up thinking he didn’t belong in his dumb hometown, but in sparklingly cultural Moscow he would fit right in. He said that his father was dead, his mother was sleeping around, and his older brother was a drug addict (“he sniffs glue and other shit”), and that he hated them and had nothing in common with them and nothing in common with his hometown. He was a true Muscovite at heart. Vica said that she got it how you could hate your parents and your hometown, but that wasn’t enough to make anybody a real Muscovite. He was just fooling himself that he could fit in. To prove that Vica was wrong, Vadik took her to meet his “true Muscovite” friends, Sergey and Regina.

Vica’s first reaction on entering Regina’s apartment and meeting Regina and Sergey was that, yes, they were true Muscovites. She immediately grasped the vast difference between Vadik and them. Sergey and Regina didn’t have to work at being Muscovites, didn’t have to prove that to anybody, they just were. They were born into the world of privilege and they took it for granted. That was precisely what made them true Muscovites — the fact that they took it for granted! Vadik couldn’t see it. He was proud to be a Muscovite, and that pride betrayed the fact that he wasn’t. But while Regina with her forlorn gaze and sallow complexion didn’t interest Vica in the least (“a fish asleep,” she thought), she couldn’t take her eyes off Sergey. She didn’t think he was handsome, not at first. He was short, thin, with a head too big for his body and a nose too big for his face. But then she noticed that Sergey resembled that actor in Truffaut’s films she and Vadik had just seen (Jean-Jacques? Jean-Pierre something?) and saw what she initially perceived as flaws in a completely new light. Sergey was graceful, both his movements and his manner of talking were. Vica had never observed this quality in a man before, so she didn’t recognize it right away, but once she did she found it deeply attractive. He was graceful and passionate. He said that he was spending most of the time at the Lenin library doing research for an article about the concept of singularity applied to linguistics. He talked about the idea of singularity at length, and he would close his eyes for a moment or two as if overwhelmed by the intensity of his insights. Vadik liked to talk about scientific concepts too, but he wasn’t really passionate about them, he didn’t have the ability to get consumed by them the way Sergey did. He couldn’t possibly generate as much heat as Sergey did. She thought of the scientific fact that impressed her most when she was a child. “Inside the Earth, there is a hot glowing core,” their teacher said, “and if not for that core, life on Earth wouldn’t be possible.” Vica kept thinking about that for a long time, kept touching the ground to check if it was even a little bit hot. That’s what Sergey had, she thought that day at Regina’s place, a hot glowing core.

But he was taken, Sergey was. By this slovenly boring Regina, who obviously took him for granted, the way she took everything in her life for granted. Her beautiful old apartment, her paintings, her famous mother. Vica was sure that it was Regina’s mother who ensured her daughter’s acceptance to the most prestigious university in Russia, while Vica had to claw her way to medical school. Did Regina even love Sergey? Did she even want him? Was she even capable of wanting something or somebody with the same passion as Vica? How was it fair that Regina had Sergey?

They had to leave early, because Vadik had to go to work (he worked nights at a programming center). Back at her dorm, Vica couldn’t fall asleep for a very long time. She would get up and pace around the room, then go back to bed, then get up and pace around the room again, thinking and thinking and thinking about Sergey. She finally fell asleep, praying that the next day she would feel calmer and would be able to go on with her life undisturbed. But when she woke up, she felt lovesick, angry, and determined to act. She had a quick breakfast, took the subway to the Lenin library, and got a temporary pass to the collections. She spent the entire day there, just walking around, hoping to see Sergey. He wasn’t there. He wasn’t there the next day either. When she finally saw him on her fourth day at the library, by the bookshelves at the far corner of the reading room, she was so nervous that she wanted to hide.

“Vica!” he shouted from across the room, making the other library patrons frown and shush him.

Vica dumped Vadik the very next day, but it took the “supersensitive” Sergey another three weeks to break up with Regina.

It was then that Vica understood that you couldn’t will or force love. Love was all about surrendering her will to a force that was larger than anything she had encountered. A point of no return just like the singularity. How impatient she and Sergey were to take possession of each other, to penetrate each other as deeply and absolutely as they could. How greedily they listened to each other’s childhood stories, how greedily they studied each other’s peculiarities, as greedily as they made love. How eager they were to take that journey to the United States, to explore another country, to embark on a never-ending adventure together.

And what a crushing disappointment it turned out to be. Their disgusting apartment in Brooklyn, Vica’s surprise pregnancy, the botched delivery by an exhausted intern that resulted in a horrible infection for her. (Thank God the baby was okay!) Sergey’s losing interest in sex with her. There were times when he couldn’t even get it up for her. The boredom, the hopeless, bottomless boredom of their daily routine. At night, as Vica lay in bed alone (Sergey was studying) with a heat pack attached to her aching back, facing away from sleeping Eric in his crib and his stinky overflowing diaper pail, she began to fantasize about her former boyfriends and how she would be so much better off with any of them. Especially Vadik. He had large hands. Rough fingers. Large dick too. She didn’t get to see it, but she imagined it as large. Way larger than Sergey’s. It was such a mistake to leave Vadik for Sergey. If only she was granted a chance to fix that horrible mistake. When Vadik announced that he had found a job in New Jersey and was coming here to live, Vica thought she would go crazy with anticipation.

Then Vadik arrived, only to fall in love with somebody else on his very first day here. But still, Vica kept chasing him, up until they finally got their sick, stupid, embarrassing two hours on the couch.

Vadik, Vica thought. He’s been acting strange lately. He seemed tense when they had that dinner at Whole Foods. Reluctant to discuss either Sergey or Virtual Grave. Was it because of his sense of loyalty to Sergey? Ugh, what a mess.

Vica needed to pee. Her first thought was to go back to the deli on Madison, but she didn’t want to bump into that Outer Borough man again. The Met was right there. She decided to pay a dollar for a ticket and go look at the collections after she used their restroom.

She hadn’t been to the Met in ages. You couldn’t consider yourself a refined and cultured person if you hadn’t been to the Met in ages, could you? But then did New Yorkers even go there? Tourists and art students went there, yes, but what about regular New Yorkers? Vica tried to think of the most cultured New Yorker she knew. Regina? Regina wasn’t a real New Yorker. Eden? No, Eden never went there. Both Eden and her husband had graduated from Harvard, so they didn’t have to go to the Met because they didn’t need to prove they were cultured.

Well, screw Eden and her husband. Vica would go to the Met, not because she needed to prove that she was cultured, but because she truly enjoyed art.

She bought her ticket for a pay-what-you-wish dollar and asked the guard about the restrooms. He pointed to the Egyptian wing. Vica walked briskly past all those mummies and gravestones. She always hated the Egyptian wing, because it reminded her of a cemetery, which it essentially was. These people seemed to have devoted their entire lives to preparing for death. Such a waste. Such a stupid horrible waste, Vica thought as she peed and then washed her hands in the tomblike bathroom. But then weren’t modern people even more stupid when they chose to simply ignore death? Ethan was right. Death was inevitable, enormous, and terrifying. Wouldn’t it be wiser to make at least some effort to be prepared?

She proceeded to examine several mummies. It was hard to believe that all of them used to be real people. Thousands of years ago, but still. They ate, they slept, they peed. She tried to imagine herself as an Egyptian woman, caring for her child, pining for her husband, all the while wearing that interesting headdress and jewelry. That jade snake must have felt deliciously cold against the skin. Vica moved to look at a photo essay documenting the embalming process.

She read the caption. “Then the embalmers would turn the body facedown to allow the brain to ooze out through the nostrils.”

The image of her own brain oozing through her nostrils made her feel suddenly sick. She rushed through all the rooms toward the exit, then ran down the steps and stopped to take a deep breath. Vica didn’t know where to go; she just wanted to get away, away from the mass grave of the Egyptian wing, away from the museum.

She started to walk down the park’s East Drive. Usually crowded, in this weather the drive was practically deserted. There were no bikers and just a couple of joggers. A thin man in a blue jogging suit and a white knitted hat passed Vica. Sergey! was Vica’s ridiculous first thought. What is this white hat — I’ve never seen it before.

Then she took another look and saw that the man didn’t resemble Sergey at all. This was the second time today she’d made that mistake. Vica wondered how much longer it would take to free her mind from Sergey.

She swerved in the direction of the boathouse and started to walk along the lake toward the Bethesda Fountain. The cold now flapped around her in waves, hitting her on the legs and the shoulders.

The clearing by the fountain was mostly deserted as well. Vica walked right up to the statue and peered into the angel’s face. The expression was cold and strict rather than ethereal.

The last time they were here Sergey told Eric the story of the Angel of the Waters. How there was a fountain like this in Jerusalem and all the sick, blind, and crippled people were lying by the edge waiting for the angel. Every once in a while the angel would come and disturb the waters, and then the first person who got in would be cured.

“What do you mean ‘the first one’?” Eric asked. “Only the first one?”

“That’s how it worked. The person who got into the disturbed water first was cured.”

“But that’s so unfair! That means only the fastest and strongest could be cured.”

“That’s the whole point,” Sergey said. He tried to tell Eric about this one paralyzed man who could never get to the water in time, so Jesus performed a miracle and cured him himself, but Eric wouldn’t listen.

“Still unfair! The whole thing with the angel is a miracle, right? I don’t get what’s the point of a miracle if it’s so unfair!”

Sergey tried to explain that the term miracle used to have a completely different meaning, then he got really annoyed and gave up.

Eric was a strange boy. The girls thought he was ugly and the boys thought he was a geek. Vica wouldn’t have minded his being a geek, if he was a determined one, if he was reading a lot. He wasn’t. He hardly read at all. But he was smart. He was! He liked to think things through. “I want to know exactly what I will feel when I die, that way I won’t be that scared,” he’d said to her once. And he was kind. He was. He was capable of empathy in a way few people were.

Getting into that school would put him among other children like him, smart and weird and sensitive, and he would finally fit in. Being in that school would show him the point of learning. He’d learn how to read analytically, he’d learn how to look at art, he’d learn why people read, he’d learn why people looked at art. He’d learn how you could find something true, intimate, and personal, in the most unimaginable of places, in Egyptian art made a thousand years ago. No, Vica didn’t hope that this school would make him feel privileged and self-assured like Eden, like Eden’s husband, like Eden’s sons — nothing would. And she didn’t hope that this school would make him happy. She knew that people who went to good schools had their insecurities and their little miseries and their own ugliness, but still, she believed that even their unhappiness was far more interesting. A school like that opened the whole world for you. If you were bound to be miserable, you could have a whole variety of options, you could choose your own misery, not have one forced on you.

Just last week, when they were walking along the beach on Staten Island, Vica thought she would try to explain all this to Eric. But how do you talk about these things with a child? The day was surprisingly mild, and the wind was strong but not cold. They were heading toward their favorite picnic spot by the salt marsh, but it happened to be high tide, so there wasn’t as much dry land as usual. Vica started to walk down the mossy, crunchy path built by colonies of mussels. “Mom, you’re hurting the mussels, can’t you hear it?” Erik said. She stepped away, but then her feet started to get wet. Erik ran to the beach and hauled back a large log stuck in the bushes. He put it over the wet area so that Vica could use it as a little bridge. She smiled and bumped Erik on the shoulder. He bumped her back. She felt good, and she thought that she didn’t have to explain anything to Eric, that he understood. In his own way, he understood her better than anybody else.

—

Vica hit Eric for the second time just outside the Castle school.

The other parents were crowded by the entrance, looking anxiously at the door, Susan Sontags and Outer Boroughs alike. They started to let the children out around twelve forty. The children were walking out in trickles of ten or twelve. Eric walked out alone. He didn’t see her at first; he stood there turning his head to the right and to the left, scanning the faces of parents. She yelled out his name and waved. He waved back.

“I’m hot,” he said. She touched the top of his head. His hair was a little damp.

“How was it?” Vica asked. “Tough questions?”

He nodded. He looked a little shell-shocked, but not upset. She would even say that he looked relieved. Vica took that as a good sign.

“Did you answer them all?”

He said, “Yeah.”

“And what about the essay? What was the topic?”

He said, “It was okay, not too hard.”

“But what was the topic?”

He sighed.

She said, “Okay, fine, I won’t ask. Better not to ask, not to jinx it, right?”

He nodded. She smiled and kissed him on the top of his head. He thought that public kisses were embarrassing, but he made an exception for the ones on the top of his head.

“Okay, let’s get out of here,” she said.

They passed a hot dog cart. Eric looked at her. Normally, she wouldn’t have allowed hot dogs from a street cart, but these smelled so good and she was so hungry, and she knew that Eric must be hungry as hell.

She bought two. Both with mustard and ketchup.

Eric was about to bite into his when she noticed that he wasn’t wearing his hat.

“Where is your hat?”

He wrinkled his nose. “Oh, right!” he said. “I put it in my pocket.”

He reached into his pocket and yanked the hat out, and a pink square fell and landed on the pavement. She bent to pick it up.

“Admission slip? What’s it doing in your pocket? Admission slip? Didn’t you have to give it to the people in there? Admission slip? Why do you still have it?”

She would have preferred to keep asking these questions to delay the answer, which she knew, which she had guessed right away.

“You didn’t take the test, did you.”

He hunched his shoulders and started to cry, the hot dog still in his hand. He was saying something to her, quickly, quietly. How he had spent the entire time hiding in the bathroom. How he didn’t want to go to that school. How the Castle was creepy. How it had no windows. How these kids were weird. How they were geeks. How they had weird ears. How he didn’t want to go to school with weird geeks with weird ears.

It stunned her how loud the sound of the slap was. He dropped the hot dog. They both watched how it landed on the sidewalk, a smash of ketchup, the frank out. People were staring at them, but she didn’t care. She looked at Eric. There was a red mark on his cheek. She watched it brighten. She wanted to run away, to hide, to sob and wail as loudly as she could.

Vica gave Eric her hot dog. “Here,” she said, her voice trembling.

He took the hot dog and raised his eyes to hers. She couldn’t believe it, but there was pity in his eyes.

He broke off half and handed it to her.

She suddenly remembered something Eric had said to her when he was very young — five or six. She had walked into the bathroom as he stood by the sink brushing his teeth. They’d just had a big fight.

“Sometimes I don’t love you,” he’d said and spat into the sink — Vica remembered that — blue frothy spittle. “But even when I don’t love you, I still love you more than I don’t love you.” He said that and went on rinsing. He was very small. He barely reached the sink.

It was his kindness that hurt the most.