Still Here by Lara Vapnyar

away to hide her tears. She tried to feel maternal as she stroked the warm fluff on her mother’s head; as she held her hand, shriveled and cold like an autumn leaf; as she whispered “It’s okay.” She couldn’t. She didn’t feel like a mother; she felt like a child instead, a frightened, abandoned child.
    On the day of her death, her mother’s eyes lost focus and filmed over. Then her feet and hands became a mottled bluish-purple. Then she died.
    She hit all the marks described in that book.
    There was something insulting, something demeaning, about the universality of death. Regina’s mother, who had always refused to follow the rules and live her life like everybody else, couldn’t escape dying exactly like everybody else. Regina plunged into depression and anger. Or, rather, she wallowed in anger while she had the strength and sank into depression when the anger exhausted her.
    Her mother’s old friends took care of the funeral and tried to take care of Regina as well, but she couldn’t bear their attention. Aunt Masha was especially persistent. Regina had to tell her she was going to visit her father in Canada and she said the same thing to her editor Inga, to avoid their visits and calls. The truth was that she didn’t even tell her father. She didn’t tell her friends either. She had mentioned that her mother was sick, but she didn’t tell them how serious it was. And when her mother died, Regina simply couldn’t bear making that phone call. “Vadik, my mom died.” “Sergey, my mom died.” “Vica, my mom died.” The mere thought of dialing a number and saying those words out loud made her shudder with revulsion. How could you possibly express the horror of what had happened in those three ordinary words? Regina abandoned her work, ignored her e-mails, didn’t answer the phone, and just stayed on the sofa crying until she fell asleep. She barely ate. She’d lost eighteen pounds by the time Vadik knocked on her door about six weeks after the funeral. He had a connection in Moscow on his way back to New York from Minsk, where he was interviewing some Belarusian programmers, and he had tried to contact Regina, but since she wasn’t answering her phone or e-mails, he’d come to her place. She was so weak from hunger and exhaustion that she could barely make it to the door. “Vadik,” Regina said when she opened the door, “my mom died,” and folded over sobbing. Vadik canceled his plans, changed his return ticket, and stayed in her apartment for about a week, and then he insisted that she visit all of them in New York. He even offered to pay for her ticket and help with the visa.
    Regina told all of this to Bob during the period of insatiable intimacy they had in the first couple of months of their relationship. They were cuddled against each other on the huge sofa in Bob’s apartment. They had been talking for hours; it had gotten late and the room had gone dark, but they didn’t bother to get up and turn on the lights.
    “I still don’t know what it was,” Regina said. “Did she subconsciously want to punish me for trying to get away? Or was this a gift of freedom? She knew how much I needed freedom, but she understood that she wouldn’t be able to give it to me while she was alive. So she had to die.”
    “Or maybe it was neither,” Bob said, stroking her hair. “She could’ve died because it was her time. People die. They don’t do it on purpose, and they don’t do it for somebody else.”
    The
swoosh
that Bob’s fingers made when they went over her ears reminded her of the sound of the sea. It was amazingly soothing.
    Bob said that Regina’s mother was actually very lucky to have died like that, at home, in her own bed, in the presence of her daughter. Most people he knew died in hospitals, hooked to machines, surrounded by strangers, rendered speechless by trach tubes—no last words there. When his father was dying, Bob’s older brother, Chuck, kept screaming at the