Chapter 45
ISAAK
She says my name once, quiet, with her hand already on my arm.
It's twenty minutes to four in the morning. She's sitting up in the dark, palms pressed flat to both sides of her belly, her tell for when she's deciding whether to say something.
"I think it's happening," she says. "I'm pretty sure it's happening."
I'm out of bed and finding my shoes before she finishes. I call Lev from the car.
The drive is twenty-three minutes. She spends it with her hand flat on her belly, eyes forward. At some point she says "I'm not scared, I want you to know that," and I say I know. She says "are you scared?" I say yes. She makes a sound that isn't quite a laugh but is close to one.
"At least one of us is honest," she says.
"You're not scared. You said."
"I'm a little scared. I was managing you."
"I know."
"You knew?"
"You were managing Dima last Thursday. You've been managing the room for six months." I keep my eyes on the road. "You're very good at it. I notice."
She's quiet for a moment. "Good," she says. "Keep thinking that."
Dr. Anand is already at the hospital when we arrive. Someone called her before I did. She comes out to the intake area still pulling her coat on. She looks at Nora once, a fast assessment, then at me.
"Thirty-two weeks is early," she says. "It was also possible. We've been ready for it." She says it to both of us. Then she says it again, only at me, because she's worked out which of us needs to hear it twice. "The team is ready. We're going to be fine."
I believe her. That's not nothing.
They give me scrubs in a bag. Green, thin, the ties in the back that I get wrong twice before a nurse corrects them without being asked, tying them off with the clean practicality of someone who has folded a hundred of these.
She's gone before I can say anything. I stand in the corridor while the team moves around me, working out what to do with my hands. First time I've had to think about it.
Dima arrives thirty-nine minutes after my call.
He doesn't ask questions on the phone. He says "I'm on my way" and hangs up. He's here in thirty-nine minutes, which means he was in the car before I called. He drops into a waiting room chair and starts working his phone. When I say "I didn't call you here," he looks up briefly. "I know."
He starts calling people. Eight of them, at four in the morning.
Yuri is with him, sleep-rumpled in a gray sweatshirt, with a cut on his knuckle that belongs in a different conversation. He sits beside Dima with his hands on his knees and his eyes too wide for the hour. He doesn't say anything. That's what I need from him.
Lev arrives before five, which isn't possible from where he lives. He says nothing. He stands at the window in his coat, reading the parking structure with his eyes.
When Dima gets up for the third time, walks the corridor, comes back with a report that there is still a corridor, Lev says without turning, "Sit down."
"I need to move," Dima says.
"You need to be useful. You're not useful. Neither am I. The doctors are useful. We're furniture. Sit down."
"That's not comforting."
"I wasn't trying to comfort you." Lev looks at Dima's reflection in the glass. "East corridor. Better machine. Go."
Dima goes. He comes back eleven minutes later with four cups of coffee. He sets one in front of Lev. He sets one in front of me. He sits down, keeps one, and looks at the fourth.
"Four cups," I say.
"I know." He doesn't explain it. He reaches into his jacket and produces a protein bar wrapped in foil. Only Dima carries protein bars in a jacket like that. "When did you last eat?"
"I don't know."
"Eat." He puts it on my knee. "I keep them. For situations."
"For this specific situation?"
"For situations where there's nothing to do but wait and someone needs to do something useful." He looks at his hands. "I've been keeping them since 2019."
I eat the protein bar. It tastes like chocolate and cardboard. It's the right thing to do. I understand now why he brought four cups.
"When did you last see her?" Dima says.
"Just before they took me in."
"Was she scared?"
"She told me she was a little scared. She said it like a confession." I look at the wrapper in my hands. "Her version of scared is telling me the truth about it."
Dima is quiet for a moment. "She's going to be good at this."
"I know."
"I meant the next eighteen years. She's going to be good at all of it." He looks at his coffee. "Both of you."
"Don't make it weird, Dima."
"I'm not making it weird. I'm stating a fact." He picks up his cup. "It's what I do."
I don't say anything to that. Neither does he. That's the right call.
Yuri says, settling beside me, "You'll tell us right away? When you know?"
"Yes."
He nods and goes back to being quiet. He's twenty now. He came to me not knowing how to make an animal respect him and paid attention to every word I said. He still pays attention that way.
I sit beside him. We don't say a word, which is how I've talked to the people I trust for forty years. I'm grateful for it.
They bring me in when the OR is ready.
I stand on the right side of the curtain and hold her hand. That's the role. I've held guns, held ledgers, held the wrong end of conversations in rooms full of men who wanted me dead. I've never stood at a threshold less certain what to do with my body.
"Don't pass out," Nora says.
"I won't pass out."
"You look like you might."
"I won't." I get my grip on her hand. The OR is cold.
It smells like antiseptic, latex gloves, something metallic underneath both.
The lights are harsh. On the other side of the curtain there are five people doing their jobs, and on this side there is only me, useless for the first time at a threshold in my life. "How are you this calm?"
"Because someone has to be." She's flat on her back, eyes on the lights, voice level. "Talk to me. Say something."
"What do you want to hear?"
"The Russian thing." Her eyes are shut now. "In the barn you said it in English."
"You want Russian or English?"
"Russian. I want to hear what you actually memorized."
I say the Akhmatova poem.
I say the whole thing, in Russian, close to her ear.
The poem I memorized at fourteen to impress a girl who wanted my brother's allowance and nothing else, the poem that gave me nothing but a lesson in what I was worth in someone else's account.
I said it in English for the first time three weeks ago in a barn in Ardenhope, to the only person who ever got the real translation.
Now I say it in Russian, one more time, in a cold room, before three people arrive.
I say the whole thing.
The first one arrives.
I don't see it. I hear Dr. Anand's voice go specific and low.
Then a sound I've never heard before, which is a person I made announcing her unhappiness with the situation.
A girl, they tell me. They bring her past the curtain for one moment.
Dark-haired already, her face creased with the indignity of it, her hands making small fists.
Then they carry her to the team at the far end of the room.
Dr. Anand says it plainly. "She's fine. Lungs are clearing. She's fine."
I look at Nora. In a voice I've never heard from her, she says, "That's one."
The second one is a boy. He doesn't cry right away.
There are four seconds in which the room holds its breath.
I hold mine. Nora's hand tightens on mine until the bones shift.
Then he does cry, loud, putting everything he has into the announcement.
Somewhere outside the door I could swear I hear my brother through two walls.
The third one is the smallest.
She comes out silent. Dr. Anand says, calm, already moving, "She's transitioning, she's pink, give her a moment.
" Nothing wrong in her voice. A professional who has seen this and knows how it ends.
I know this. I hear it. The moment still stretches past what I can hold.
Then the sound comes. Everything in me that went rigid comes undone at once, all at once, not slowly.
I put my forehead against Nora's temple. I don't say anything because there is nothing adequate. The room is already saying it.
All three go to the NICU. That's what happens at thirty-two weeks. Dr. Anand told us in February with a plastic model on a conference table. I've known this. I'm still not ready for it.
Nora goes to recovery. I walk back to the waiting room.
Dima stands up before I'm through the door.
"All three?" he says.
"All three. Everybody's fine."
Dima sits back down and puts his face in his hands. His shoulders shake once. He lifts his head. His eyes are red. He says "good" in Russian, soft, the way our mother used to say it.
Yuri is on his feet with the face I first saw when he brought me a dog he couldn't manage and asked me, without asking, to teach him. He's taller than he was. He's grown into himself.
"Three?" he says.
"Three."
He nods once, slow, making a record of it. His eyes are wet. He doesn't do anything about it. A year ago he would have.
I put my hand on the back of his neck for one second, the way my father's brother did once when I was nineteen and the world had gotten larger than expected. Yuri stands up straighter. Nothing needs to be said.
Lev reaches into his coat.
He sets three small velvet bags on the chair between us, one at a time. The kind from a jeweler, the kind I've seen placed on tables when a settled matter needs a form.
"One ounce each," he says. "Yesterday's spot. Markup noted separately." He looks at the three bags, then at me. "A position. Not a gift."
Dima picks one up. He weighs it in his palm. He opens his mouth.
"Don't," Lev says, before a word comes out.
"I wasn't going to be sentimental."
"You were going to say seven sentimental things. I could hear you building up to them." Lev turns back to the window. "East corridor. The machine."
Dima goes.
Yuri watches him leave. He looks at the three bags on the chair, then at Lev's back.
"Is that because he loves them?" Yuri asks, quiet. "The gold."
Lev doesn't turn around. There's a pause that means yes. "It's a financial instrument," he says. "Don't read into it."
"Okay," Yuri says, in a voice that reads into it completely.
They let me see Nora for ten minutes before I go to the NICU.
Recovery is a quieter room, the lights softer, the smell of antiseptic cut with warmer air.
She's still in the gown, her hair loose on the pillow.
She looks like someone who has just done something enormous and is letting the fact of it arrive.
"How are they?" she says.
"Good. All three. They're in the NICU."
She closes her eyes. "Good. Did Dima cry?"
"Against his stated position."
"Lev?"
"He bought them gold. One ounce each."
She opens one eye. "Of course he did." She closes it again. "Go see them. Go be with the men in the waiting room. They'll be climbing the walls."
"I already handled the waiting room."
"Go back." She turns her head toward me but keeps her eyes shut. "I'll be here when you get back."
"I know."
"I know you know." A small exhale. "Go, Isaak."
I stop at the door.
"Isaak."
I turn around. She has one eye open.
"The poem. In the OR." She closes the eye again. "Tell me again sometime. In English."
"I will."
"Not the Russian." Her voice is going soft. "The version in the barn was better."
"You don't know Russian."
"Exactly." The eye stays shut. "Go."
An hour later they let me into the NICU.
The room has softer lights than the rest of the floor, warm filtered air, the small percussion of monitors. Three isolettes against the near wall. The labels have the name we chose, all three, same font, three small cards. I stand in front of them and don't do anything for a while.
The nurse who comes finds me there. She shows me how to sit, how to bend my arm. She lifts the first one, the girl, the dark-haired one, places her in the crook of my elbow with both hands, careful about the head. Then she steps back.
The baby opens her eyes. Not focused yet, not quite. Dark, like her mother's. Her whole head fits in my palm.
She's warm. She breathes. She weighs less than the pistol I carried for twenty years.
She needs to be warm. She needs someone to hold her. I'm doing both, which takes nothing I don't have.
The nurse checks a monitor, writes on the chart. She says, without looking up, "She was fussy earlier. You've got the weight right."
"Is there something I'm supposed to be doing?"
"You're doing it." She caps the pen. "Just stay."
I look at the baby. The baby goes on being warm.
The nurse leaves.
I sit alone in the NICU, the one in my arms and the other two three feet away behind their glass, everything going on the monitors. I think about the man I was two years ago, who stood at a fence line with a woman in the mud, worked out the cost, decided it was manageable.
I think about that man holding this. I think about what word he would have used for what this is.
There's no word. I've been running a wrong system my whole life.
Nora Calloway Radulov came to save a fence line and dismantled an accounting system I'd been building since I was fourteen.
She wasn't trying to. That's what I keep coming back to.
The baby turns her face toward my thumb.
Reflex. She doesn't know who I am. She just turns toward whatever is there.
I let her.
My phone goes off in my shirt pocket. I can't read it one-handed. I tilt it. Hollis. Sent at six in the morning. Gray mare foaled. Both doing good.
The gray mare was Nora's father's. The mare is the ranch now, the whole weight of it, the thing he built his life around. The mare whose foal, in a few weeks, will be the first thing these three learn to name in the language of horses, on the land her father left them, in the barn he built.
We'll take them to Ardenhope when Dr. Anand says we can.
They'll learn the ranch the way Nora knows it, from the ground, from the smell of it at dawn, from the light through the gap in the barn doors in the morning.
They'll know nothing of what it took to bring them there.
That's the point. That's the whole thing.
I look at the phone. I look at the baby.
Good, I write back to Hollis. Tell the horses. There's three.