27. Cali
CALI
I wouldn't have noticed the phone ringing if I hadn't happened to walk past the kitchen counter in search of the butcher's knife I keep moving around. It's not a contact number I have saved, so the spam filter kept it from vibrating. It's just the lit-up screen that catches my attention.
I frown. "Hello?"
"Mrs. Akov," booms a dark, deeply accented voice. "My name is Grigor; I work with your husband. I am calling to inform you that there has been a shooting. Navi is hurt. We are taking him to the hospital. Ronan wants you to know he is fine. Do not worry."
Do not worry.
The stupidest three words in the English language.
Of course I'm going to fucking worry.
"What hospital?"
"Methodist. In Park Slope. But you should not—Ronan said you should stay home, it is not safe—"
"I'm coming."
"Mrs. Akov—"
"I'm coming, Grigor. Send me a car or I'll drive myself, but I am coming, and if you argue with me, you're going to make it worse."
There's a pause. A sigh. Then: "A car will be at your door in six minutes."
I call my mom. She's chirping something about a knitting pattern as she answers, but I cut right over her. "Mom. I need you to come get the kids. Right now. Something happened and I have to go. I don't know how long I'll be."
God bless her, she doesn't bombard me with questions. "I'm getting my coat," is all she says. "Go. I'll let myself in. Go, baby."
The kids are upstairs. Hayden's got a documentary on.
Isabella's got Doctor Fuzz on the windowsill in his little box.
She hasn't taken her eyes off him since he went into his cocoon.
I go up and, in the lightest, happiest voice I can muster, I tell them Grandma's coming and Mommy has a work thing and I love them, I love them so much, be good.
Isabella asks, "Is Mr. Ronan coming home for dinner?"
"I hope so, baby. I hope so."
The car ride is a blur.
I look out the window in amazement as we go. How can people keep living their normal lives in a time like this? Walking dogs, carrying groceries? Don't they know that this is only the first shot? That more are coming? That Lev made a threat, and now, he's starting to make good on that threat?
Don't they know all the horrible things that could happen next?
They don't. And truthfully, neither do I. All I know is that Navi getting shot feels like the beginning of what might be the end.
The emergency entrance is chaos and fluorescent light.
I don't know where to go, so I charge toward the loud part.
They stick out like a sore thumb: a knot of men in dark coats clustered in a waiting area near a set of double doors marked SURGICAL.
One of them detaches from the bunch when he sees me coming and comes to greet me.
"Mrs. Akov," he says in the same voice that spoke to me on the phone. This must be Grigor, then. I don't bother correcting him on the use of the wrong last name. It kind of feels good right now, to be honest.
"What's going on? What happened? Where's—"
"Navi is in surgery," he explains. "Two hours or so left, they tell us. Maybe more. Ronan is—" He tips his head toward the corner.
And there he is.
Ronan is sitting in a molded plastic chair against the wall. He's not sitting like himself. The whole Prince of Darkness thing is gone. He's folded forward with his elbows on his knees and his head down. He's still in his shirt from this morning, and the shirt—
The shirt is soaked.
Not spattered. Not stained. Soaked. From the chest down to the waist, dark and stiffening, brown at the edges where it's started to dry, and his hands, resting loose between his knees, are the same.
Rust-colored to the wrist. Dried into the creases.
There's a smear of it across his jaw where he must have touched his own face without knowing.
He looks up when I'm halfway across the room, like he felt me coming.
His eyes are gone. Red-rimmed and hollow and lost, the eyes of a man who has seen death.
I don't say his name. I don't say anything. I just cross the last of the distance, grab two fistfuls of that ruined shirt, right at the front, right in the worst of it, and I hold on.
The blood is tacky against my palms. It's still faintly warm in the deepest folds, or maybe I'm imagining that. One thing is beyond doubt: My hands are full of another man's blood and I don't let go.
"You're okay," I say. It comes out more like a question than I wanted it to. "Grigor said you're okay. Are you okay? Tell me you're okay."
"It's not mine," Ronan rasps. "It's his."
That's the relief I needed, but I don't feel at ease yet. And I don't let go of the shirt. I can't. "But you—look at me—are you hurt? Anywhere. Tell me."
"No." He shakes his head slowly. "Not a scratch. He—" His throat works. "He pushed me out of the way. He took both of them. For me. He—"
And then this enormous man, this man who shot someone dead on my stairs and never so much as flinched, this man who made a grown criminal wet himself with a whisper, this man just comes apart in a hospital chair.
It's like I'm the one getting shot.
I get down on my knees in front of the chair. I don't care about the blood on the floor or the men watching. I get down so I can see his face, and so he has to see mine.
"Hey," I say. "Look at me. Navi's tough. He's an idiot, but he's tough. You told me that yourself. He's going to be okay."
"You didn't see it, Cali. You didn't see how much—"
"I know. But he's in there right now, and there are doctors working on him. He's stubborn, right? He's not going to let a couple of bullets take him out. Not after everything. Okay? He's going to be okay. You'd never get rid of him that easily, right? Right?"
I don't actually know that. Nobody does, not even the doctors. But I say it like it's a fact, because right now he needs a pretty lie to hold onto more than he needs the truth.
I take his bloody hands in mine and press them between us.
"And you… You have to stay with me. Do you hear me? Whatever happens next, whatever Lev does, you stay. I can't lose you, too, Ronan. I can't."
Ronan's breath catches. His bloody hand comes up and covers one of my fists, the one knotted in his shirt, and he presses it there against his heart, which is pounding, which is alive, right there under my knuckles going thud, thud, thud.
"You won't," he says. "You won't, kotyonok. I'm right here."
Behind him, through the double doors marked SURGICAL, two rooms down a corridor I can't see, Navi is fighting for his life on a table.
So we sit.
And we wait.
There's nothing else to do. That's the terrible reality of a hospital. You can have all the money in the world, all the power, and these places will still reduce you down to two people in ugly plastic chairs waiting for a stranger in scrubs to walk through a door and give you a thumbs up or down.
The men clear out, most of them, on Grigor's quiet orders. It isn't safe for them to cluster. Grigor stays, and two others by the entrance, watchful. The rest melt away into the evening.
I make Ronan wash his hands. I take him by the wrist and lead him to the family bathroom off the waiting room.
I run the water warm and put the little pump of pink hospital soap into his palm myself.
He stands there and lets me hold his hands under the tap and scrub the rust out of the creases, watching the water run pink and then clear.
There's nothing I can do about the shirt.
Somebody eventually brings him a set of scrubs, gray-blue and too small in the shoulders.
He changes in the bathroom and comes out looking like a stranger.
I fold the ruined shirt up small. I don't know why I keep it, but I do, tucked into my bag the way he once kept a cheap, damp napkin from a bar.
Then we sit back down.
Somewhere in there, the sitting becomes leaning. My shoulder finds his arm and stays there. His hand finds mine on the armrest between us, and our fingers lace together, and we just hold on.
In public. Under the flat white fluorescent light, in a row of chairs bolted to the floor, with Grigor twenty feet away and a nurse walking past with a clipboard and a television bolted to the wall playing the local news on mute.
No rules are left between us. No lies. No receipts. No night stuff, in the dark, gone by morning. No separate rooms. No creaky floorboard to step over. No little contract I wrote to keep this from being real.
It's just his hand in mine, in the light, where anyone can see.
Around nine, my phone lights up in my bag.
I dig it out one-handed, keeping the other laced through his, to see that the screen says DO NOT ANSWER.
Todd.
I barely glance at it before I reject the call.
Whatever he wants—another warning, another apology—it can wait. He's not important right now. He can wait forever, honestly, but tonight in particular, he can wait.
I decline the call without a flicker of thought. A little envelope badge blooms in the corner a minute later. Voicemail. I don't check it. I turn the phone all the way off and put it back in my bag.
"Who was that?" Ronan asks. His voice is hollowed out but he's still watching everything, even now, even here.
"Nobody," I say. "It doesn't matter."
He frowns. "Are you sure?"
"Yeah, it was just—"
"Are you two waiting for Navi Akov?"
We both look up to see who spoke. It's a doctor. He's young and tired, with a mask hanging loose around his neck. He looks from Ronan to me. As I feel Ronan turn to stone, I grip his arm.
"Yes," Ronan says. "Yes. I'm— He's my cousin. Tell me."
"He made it through surgery," the doctor begins.
I feel Ronan's arm go loose under my hand, just for a second, like something in him unlocked.
"He's not out of the woods yet, though," the doctor goes on quickly, before we can get anywhere near relief.
"I want to be very clear about that. He lost a tremendous amount of blood.
One round nicked the lung. The other, we got out clean, but there was a lot of damage.
He's in critical condition. The next twenty-four to forty-eight hours are going to tell us a great deal.
But he's holding. His vitals are stable, for now.
He's a strong man, and he's stubborn, and both of those things are working for him right now. "
"He's stubborn," Ronan repeats with a harsh laugh. "Yes. Yes, he is. He's the most stubborn man I've ever met."
"That's good in situations like this," the doctor says kindly.
"Keep that. He's not conscious, and he won't be for a while.
You can't see him yet—he's going into the ICU, so it'll be a couple hours before he's settled and family can go back, one at a time.
But he made it through. I wanted you to hear that from me. "
"Thank you," I say, because Ronan can't. Ronan has his hand pressed over his mouth and his eyes shut and his shoulders shaking. "Thank you. Thank you so much."
The doctor nods and tells us a nurse will come find us when we can go back, and then he goes. Ronan just stands there with his hand over his mouth, undone.
I put my arms around him. In the middle of the waiting room. Under the lights. And he folds down over me the way he did on my landing, the way a much smaller man would, and I hold as much of him as I can hold, which isn't nearly all of him, but it's enough.
"He's holding," I tell him. "He made it. He's holding on."
"He said it wasn't him," Ronan says into my hair, ragged. "The last thing—before he went under—he told me it wasn't him. The mole. I doubted him, Cali. He took two bullets for me and used his last breath to tell me I was wrong."
"Then you tell him you're sorry when he wakes up," I say firmly. "You tell him to his face. He's going to wake up, and you're going to tell him, and he's going to give you hell about it for the rest of your lives. Okay? That's what's going to happen."
He doesn't answer. But he holds on tighter.
Together, we settle back into the chairs to wait for what comes next.
In search of some kind of comfort in these awful chairs, I let my head fall back against the wall. Pinned in the corner overhead is a small black security camera, one little red light blinking. It's pointed right at us.
I look at it for a long time. I wonder what it sees. Two people in ugly chairs. A woman holding a man's hand. A man who cried into her hair in the middle of a waiting room.
Does it look real? Does it look like love?
Or does it look like two people who lied their way here?
A man who stole my company and a woman who married him to keep him out of prison? A cheating husband, a fake marriage, a paper deal that turned into whatever this is?
I can't tell anymore. Maybe the camera can't, either.
Maybe it just sees a hand in a hand and doesn't know if it's a beautiful lie or a cruel truth.
Maybe the difference no longer matters.