“You know what’s unpleasant?” Natasha said. She eyed my backpack. “You. Where’d you get all those things anyway?”
“From my father. He lives in America,” I said and immediately regretted it. I was not allowed to tell anyone about America. Or that I was from Magadan. People could think we were rich and rob us.
“And he left you in some dumpy Polyclinika Number Twenty-six.”
“Twenty-five. When I finish—”
“Oh, sure—”
Our consultation was interrupted by Dr. Osip, who walked into the room with a young nurse.
“Hello, girls. Sonechka.” He brushed Liza and Natasha with a quick acknowledgment and concentrated his warm, grandfatherly smile on me. “This is Nurse Larissa. She’ll take care of you during your stay.”
The girls stared at Nurse Larissa. Nurse Larissa stared into space. Her features were exotic: wide-spaced, almost Asian eyes, a beaklike nose, a small mouth. A horseshoe pendant hung between her clavicles. When Dr. Osip left, she gave me a cotton gown.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” I said and ran out.
The gown was diaphanous, like dead skin peeling after a sunburn. How many truly sick children had worn it before me? I bunched up a piece of the fabric and pressed the knot to my chest, praying for the health of all the people on earth — especially Alina — and to become a good doctor. Then I yanked off my yellow sundress, folded it over the cracked sink, and changed into the gown.
Back in the room, Nurse Larissa lay on my bed, her pale legs dangling off the side, her face wedged into my pillow. I don’t know why, but seeing her like this made me paranoid that all the young medics in town were friends, including Nurse Larissa and Dr. Pasha. I imagined them laughing together about my snot attack during the dental exam, and about my spying on Dr. Pasha after. Yes, I had watched him, a little, but for a totally normal reason.
He often brought branches of lilacs to the receptionists. Hiding behind the shelves of medcartas, I listened to them talk about how lucky Dr. Pasha’s wife was, although, they said, she was “neither fish nor meat.” I wasn’t sure what that meant. Dr. Pasha often had lunch with the gynecologist, Anna Vasilievna. According to the receptionists’ gossip, she had left her husband for a younger lover and had two illegitimate children with him before kicking him out. Tall, with a long, black ponytail and green eyes underlined with green, she stood out among the other women like an Amazon warrior.
Doctor Pasha left the Polyclinika at five fifteen every day and caught bus number 67.
I watched him because I was waiting for the right moment to show him that I did know a lot about medicine. Whenever he walked by the reception, I pulled out a medcarta at random and stared at the pages — they were stained with yellow rings and smelled of iodine — pretending to understand the doctors’ jumbled notes. I walked underneath the dental office’s windows on my way to house calls with Dr. Borisovna and always carried with me one of Dr. Vera’s special sticks. I often helped her with eye exams by pointing at the letters on the chart. I am pretty sure he’d seen me at least once.
Nurse Larissa sat up and looked around. “Time to sail,” she said wearily, and we left.
The ceilings were three times higher in the Big Hospital than in the Polyclinika, and it smelled of laundry detergent. Cartoon murals covered the hallway walls. Goldfish, woven from old IV tubes, hung from window frames, afternoon sunlight streaming through their translucent fins. We passed several rooms, where older children watched TV and younger children drew and played with toys. So far, I noted with disappointment, the Big Hospital seemed like playtime at a kindergarten.
“So, why did you decide to become a nurse and not a doctor?” I said.
Nurse Larissa seemed not to hear me; she was biting the nails on her right hand, then left hand, then right again. She stopped abruptly in front of an office door. “First station: cardiology.”
While I lay on a cot, connected to the EKG machine, the cardiologist sat with Nurse Larissa and held her hands. They whispered, and again I became suspicious that they were discussing Dr. Pasha and me. Afterward, Nurse Larissa and I went to see the neurologist and the radiologist. All the doctors asked after Baba Olya, and no one showed serious concern about my stomach. Was swallowing a probe for gastric juice analysis on the schedule? It was unpleasant, I’d read, but essential for someone with my abdominal complaints.
I shivered in the hospital gown, regretting that I’d left my warm American sweatshirt back in the room. Nurse Larissa floated next to me in a daze. Several times she almost crashed into other doctors and children. When she tripped on the stairs, it occurred to me that I should’ve just broken my leg. At least then I would have been able to observe how they laid the cast instead of getting all these silly X-rays. Although, if the bones grew back crooked, like Papa’s after his skiing accident, it would ruin my ballroom dancing. And I was just starting to get good.
There was no sign of Alina anywhere.
“So, what’s wrong with you?” Nurse Larissa said as we entered yet another examination room. I couldn’t diagnose her tone.
“That’s what they’re trying to find out.”
I was about to start on the stomachache and the throwing up when she said, “I can tell it’s nothing serious. Just a mild case of inanemia curiosa.”
“What?” Iminoglycinuria? Anorexia nervosa? I’d never heard of that one.
“I said, you probably have a mild case of anemia. Happens with kids often enough,” she said.
There it was, “with kids” again. When will people learn to tell the difference? “How do you know?” I said.
“It’s in the eyes.”
My stomach went cold.
“Doctors can tell,” she said.
But she wasn’t a doctor. Though, if she was right, could Baba Olya and Dr. Osip tell I’d been faking?
On the other hand, mind reading would be an awesome power to have as a doctor, if it was true. It could be true. It would be particularly useful for the kind of specialty I wanted to do — trauma surgery or emergency medicine. Something dangerous and heroic. Which wasn’t my answer when Dr. Pasha had asked me after he was done with my teeth.
“A dentist,” I had said, wiping my drooling mouth. I guess I was startled he asked me at all, after he had spent the whole exam staring at my snotty nose and smirking.
“I will be waiting for you, Sophia Anatolyevna. I have no doubt you’ll make a fantastic dentist. With teeth like yours! We will work together at the Polyclinika, eh?”
“But I had a—”
“Ah, don’t even, Pavel Dmitrievich,” Baba Olya said. She’d been observing his work the entire time and possibly grading him. “Let me warn you, children grow up fast.”
“Children grow up, yet you stay young, Olga Nestorovna,” Dr. Pasha said and flashed her a smile. His teeth were as textbook as mine — or, as mine used to be.
“Okay, let’s take your blood,” Nurse Larissa said. “Sit down.” She wasn’t wearing rubber gloves.
She tied my upper arm with a rubber band, soaked a cotton ball in alcohol, and disinfected a spot on my anterior forearm. I closed my eyes and braced myself for the prick. After a short while, I heard sobbing and opened my eyes. The syringe was on the desk, its needle resting against a grimy red telephone.
For a long time I didn’t know what to say, so I stared at her face. Nurse Larissa had an honest, ugly cry, not like in the movies where the actress’s tears ran down expressive, curvy paths on the cheeks. The stay at the Big Hospital was turning into a real practicum. I searched her face for symptoms that would give me a clue to the root of her distress. Guttural wails broke so sharply out of her chest — as though someone were flicking her throat — I became nervous she would choke on her own sobs.