Chapter 23
MOLLY
The morning shift nurse’s name is Patricia, according to her badge, and she has the efficient warmth of someone who has been doing this long enough that kindness has become reflex rather than effort.
She moves around me with the discharge paperwork and the camera and the briskness of a woman who has seventeen things to do before noon and is doing all of them without making anyone feel like one of seventeen things.
“Deep breath for me,” she says, positioning the camera.
I breathe. My ribs voice their objection in the sustained way they have been voicing it since yesterday.
“That’s good bruising,” she says, with the appreciative neutrality of a medical professional assessing a specimen. “Airbag did its job.”
“I feel very grateful to it.”
She almost smiles. “Any dizziness this morning? Nausea?”
“Headache. Behind my left eye.”
“That’ll hang around for a few more days. If it gets worse instead of better, you come back.” She hands me a clipboard. “Sign here, initial here, and here. The follow-up instructions are on the pink sheet—your OB needs to see you within the week.”
I sign where she points. “My OB’s going to have opinions about this week.”
“You doing okay? You’ve got someone picking you up?”
“I think my husband sent someone.” That’s what the text said an hour ago. Why he can’t bother to come get me himself, I don’t know, but I’m not happy about it.
Patricia hears what is said and what isn’t. “Mm,” she says, which is not a judgment and is also not not a judgment. She takes the clipboard back and checks my signatures. “Babies are strong. You did good.”
“They did the work.”
“You let them. Same thing.” She hands me the discharge papers with the brisk finality of someone completing a task. “Take care of yourself. That means actually resting, not whatever you’re already planning to do instead.”
I fold the papers into my bag. “I’ll rest.” It’s true in the sense that I intend to rest and uncertain in the sense that the next several days are not obviously restful.
Patricia looks at me with the expression of a woman who has heard this before. “Mm,” she says again. Then she moves on, because there are sixteen other things.
An orderly comes to wheel me out the front door, and before we get there, I find Andrei in the lobby.
The man is broad and contained, the careful courtesy of a man who understands what is owed and delivers it without elaboration.
He nods when he sees me. One of Pavel’s more reliable men. No wonder he sent him.
“How are you feeling?” he asks, which is more words than Andrei typically offers in a single transaction.
Can’t say I’m too surprised, though. I have a feeling a lot of Pavel’s guys will treat the injured, pregnant wife of their boss with kid gloves for a little while. “Functional, which is an improvement. Thank you for coming.”
He nods again and moves toward the exit, and I follow, waving off the orderly and the wheelchair. I don’t need it—it’s just hospital protocol. When we get outside, two men flank us with a professional comfortableness that is weird because I don’t know them.
“I don’t know these two,” I mutter to Andrei.
“You don’t remember them?” He pauses, tilts his head. “How bad was your head injury?”
“Mild concussion. At least, they said it was mild.”
He nods once. “Yacob and Bryce.”
They give a brief smile or a nod of acknowledgment as we continue to the SUV. I get into the middle row next to Yacob. Or maybe it’s Bryce. I’m not sure. If this is a mild concussion, I’d hate to see what a regular one does to me.
This is so embarrassing. “Sorry I forgot your names. That’s really terrible of me.”
“Forget it,” the one next to me says.
The other sits in front with Andrei. “Is no problem.” Both of them have heavy Russian accents.
Wish that made me feel better, but it doesn’t. What else have I forgotten? Will it come back?
I watch the city through the window, and I breathe carefully around my ribs, and I think about Vet, which I have been doing underneath everything since Igor told me. The grief runs like a current I’m not always attending to, but that’s always there. Always moments from washing me away.
I have to focus on the present. Get home, take the longest hot shower of my life, eat something made of food—not hospital food, and sleep in my own bed. And find out when Vet’s funeral is. I might call Carrie Ann to come with me, if Pavel’s too busy playing Bratva Batman to be there for me.
I have no idea what I’ll do about him. But if I keep thinking about him, I’ll get bogged down in a different kind of mess, and right now, thinking that hard is not an available option.
“Long drive?” I ask, to no one in particular. I have no clue how far this hospital is from the house. I’m still getting to know the town. Took a look at the map on my phone, but it’s hard for me to translate the map into knowledge.
The man beside me says nothing.
Andrei says, “Not long.”
The city moves past. I watch it, and I think about what I will tell Carrie Ann about all of this, and I breathe, and the two men I do not know are quiet, but that suits Andrei just fine, I’m sure of it.
Suits me too. If they were chatting, I’d have a hard time thinking.
Hell, I’m having a hard time right now. Stupid mild concussion.
Then we turn the wrong way.
At least, I think it’s the wrong way. The house is north of the hospital—it was on the map. But now, we’re heading east. “Detour?”
“Da.” Andrei doesn’t look at me in the rearview mirror.
The part of my brain that has been paying attention to everything for months goes very still, and I can’t tell if it’s the concussion or my instincts.
“Why this route? I don’t mean to be a bother, but I’m still trying to learn my way around here, so if this detour is better or faster or something, I’d like to know why. ”
Andrei is quiet for a moment. “Don’t make this harder than it already is.”
The cold starts at the base of my spine and moves upward. But my head is still foggy. “Make what…? What’s going on?”
The man in front with Andrei says something in Russian, and then I hear rustling beside me.
I turn, slowly, to look at the man next to me in the back seat, and I find that he has a gun. Pointed at me. At the center of my body, where two people who have survived everything this week are quietly and trustingly going about their business.
Everything goes very clear.
The car. The gun. The two men I do not know, and probably never knew. Andrei in the front. The wrong route. All of it assembles itself into a picture with hard edges and no ambiguity.
I breathe once. Carefully. “Point it lower.”
The man with the gun raises a brow at me, as if to say, You have no authority here.
My voice is steady. I don’t know how it is steady.
“If you shoot me there, you might hit the babies.” I keep my eyes on his, keep my voice even, keep the terror that is trying to claw its way up my throat exactly where it is.
“Aim it at my foot. If you shoot my foot, I can’t run, but the babies are fine.
And if you’re going to use me as leverage, you need the babies to be fine, because he won’t negotiate for a dead woman with dead babies. ”
The man considers this with the flat calculation of someone running a practical assessment. Then he shifts the gun downward.
I hit him in the balls with everything I have.
The sound he makes is not dignified and neither is what follows, which is him folding forward into the space between the seat and the door.
Before he or Andrei or the other man can process what has happened, I have the door handle in my hand, opening it.
I put my foot against the collapsed man, and I push.
He tumbles out of the moving car.
The door swings. The drainage ditches zip past the open frame, grass and trees behind them. Andrei snarls something in Russian, and Goon Two raises his gun and points it at me.
I have the door open and nowhere to go. We’re moving. The road is hard, and we’re moving, and jumping is not an option, which Goon Two knows and I know, and the calculus of the situation has shifted.
I didn’t have a plan beyond getting the first gun away from my babies.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” he says, smirking. Then his forehead blooms red.
The car swerves as Andrei reacts, the country tilting in the open door, and the screech of something mechanical deafens me. A massive black SUV pulls alongside us.
Pavel’s SUV.
Andrei pulls over. I don’t think he has decided to pull over—I think the decision is made for him by the SUV pressing into our lane with the implacable momentum of a man who does not offer alternatives.
The car stops.
My door flings open, and Pavel is there.
He pulls me out of the car and into him.
He holds me with both arms, fully, and I press my face against his chest. It’s only then that I feel myself shaking.
I might black out from relief. Sound bleeds in and out, and then smells—I smell Pavel.
That scent that is comfort and safety and love. And then I start to cry.
Behind us, Igor has Andrei. I don’t see what Igor does. But I hear it.
It goes on for longer than I expect, and the sounds that it makes are varied and wet and crunchy and deeply unpleasant in ways that my imagination is involuntarily helpful about. Interspersed with those sounds is the wailing.
Andrei was a quiet man in life. In torment, he has a lot to say. Most of it is not words.
I press closer to Pavel, and he cups his hand to the back of my head, and I breathe through it and think about the babies and think about Vet and think about flowers, which I never got, which seems like a very long time ago now.
When the sounds stop, the silence is significant.
“The car,” Pavel says, to someone who is not me.
Doors close. An engine moves away.
He pulls back to look at my face, and what is in his expression is relief and fury and love and the residue of the past several minutes all present simultaneously, making a landscape of his face that I have not seen before and which I understand, looking at it, is something he is not trying to contain right now.
“You pushed a man out of a moving car,” he says.
“He had a gun pointed at us.” I shrug. “I asked him to aim lower first. I was as safe as I could be about it, and… then I punched him in the groin and kicked him out.”
He looks at me for a moment. Then he closes his eyes briefly in the way he does when something has exceeded his available processing, and he requires a second to absorb it. “You asked him to aim lower.”
“So he’d hit my foot instead of the babies, if the gun went off. Tactically, it made sense.”
“Molly.”
“It worked,” I point out.
He laughs sharply once, then looks at me for another long moment, and he pulls me back in, and I go, happy he’s not lecturing me and also happy to be alive. Somewhere behind us, Igor is cleaning up the evidence of whatever he just did to Andrei.
I’m alive, and my babies are alive, and the man whose arms I’m standing in showed up for me. The sounds, the smells, the texture of the morning—I will deal with later. Much later.
After a very long shower and possibly an unreasonable amount of soup. I don’t think I can handle anything else.