Still Here Read Free Page B

Sergey’s face.
    Finally he had shaken his head and said, “You immigrants think of apps as this new gold rush.”
    “Yes, we do,” Sergey had said. “What is so wrong about that?”
    “Oh, my poor friend.” Bob had smirked.
    The mere memory made Vica shudder. Now she grabbed Sergey by his sleeve and dragged him away.
    They all drank champagne on the terrace.
    The door to the terrace was in the bedroom, so they had to walk along the long hall and then through the bedroom past Vadik’s unmade bed. Vica found his crumpled mismatched sheets stirringly indecent.
    Outside, they leaned over the railing and pretended to admire the view. Vadik’s apartment was on the fourth floor, so there wasn’t much to see. It was still very hot, but now there was a warm breeze that felt more like a jet coming out of a hair dryer than a refreshing one.
    “Can I make a toast?” Bob asked.
    “Sure, man,” Vadik said.
    Look at him sucking up to his boss, Vica thought.
    “So you’re all what, thirty-eight, thirty-nine now, right?” Bob asked them.
    “Yep,” Vadik agreed.
    “Hey, I’m thirty-five!” Vica said, but Bob ignored her.
    “That’s a crazy age,” he continued with the hint of a smirk. “Kind of like puberty for adults. When you’re forty, you’re branded as what you really are, no wiggle room after that—you gotta accept the facts. People do a lot of crazy shit right before they turn forty.”
    But I still have a little wiggle room, right? Vica thought.
    “You know what I did between thirty-nine and forty?” Bob asked. “I divorced my wife, sold my house, quit my corporate job, started DigiSly, and ran for office.”
    “I didn’t know you ran for office,” Vadik said. “Which office?”
    “Doesn’t matter. It didn’t work out,” Bob said. “My point is, let’s drink to Vadik, and to all of you and to your pivotal time in life!”
    They cheered and drank.
    I’m younger. I must have at least some wiggle room! Vica thought. She took a sip of her champagne and the bubbles got into her nose. She snorted, then choked and started to cough.
    Vadik pounded her on the back.
    “Better?” he asked. She nodded.
    His expensive cologne had worn off and now he had his dear familiar smell of briny pickles. She remembered that smell ever since she and Vadik had dated in college, and also from the miserable day five years ago when they’d spent two hours kissing on the couch in her house on Staten Island. She’d reached for him, but he’d jerked away and the buckle of his belt scratched her right cheek. It had even drawn a little blood. Vadik acted as if he had long forgotten those two hours. One hour and forty minutes to be exact. He was right. It was wiser to forget. It was always wiser to forget, to let go, to not expect too much, to not demand too much from life.
    “Vicusha, you demand too much. That’s your problem,” her mother used to say to her all the time. She worked as a nurse in a small town on the Azov Sea. She had a quiet drunkard of a husband, a dog, and a crooked apple tree in her backyard. She didn’t demand more. Vica’s two sisters didn’t demand anything either. One was older than Vica by fourteen years and the other by twelve. She had always thought of them as her mean, dumb aunts rather than as sisters.
    But how could you help but want things, demand things? Especially if there were so many riches around you and life was so shockingly short? There was so little time to make the most of it! Vica spent her working hours performing sonograms, peering at the computer screen, where the signs of disease lurked in the gray mess of inner organs. “Relax, relax,” Vica would say while moving her slippery stick over somebody’s stomach or chest. Everything would seem to be fine on the outside and yet on the screen there would be a jagged dark spot, or a white speck, or a luminous stain. And then she would see a bunch of printouts on the desk. Like a bunch of postcards from Death.
    “That’s