Chapter 75 Lukas
LUKAS
EIGHTEEN YEARS AGO
MEMORIAL SLOAN KETTERING
ONCOLOGY DEPT.
PATIENT: Lazareva, Elena
DIAGNOSIS: Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML), refractory
PROGNOSIS: Grim.
It’s quieter in here than it once was. It used to be that Elena was in the kitchen all the time, and whenever Elena was in the kitchen, that meant music was playing—and if music was playing, that meant Elena was dancing.
It’s how I met her. Two decades ago, she was dancing all by herself in front of a record store in Astoria, lost in bliss and music.
Her red dress flared wide as she pirouetted, tripped, and fell right into my arms. I wasn’t waiting for her, but I might as well have been.
It was as if my whole life had grown up around an empty space, and it wasn’t until I met Elena that I realized she was the thing that space needed to be filled with.
It’s quiet right now, though. Elena doesn’t have the strength even to put a record on the turntable anymore. She sure as hell can’t dance.
The kitchen table between us is covered in papers. Medical reports, prognosis updates, test results, each worse than the last. It’s shit I never wanted to learn to decipher.
But fate has left me no choice.
I could recite them all from memory now. I know all the ways her body is failing her. Failing both of us, really.
Acute myeloid leukemia.
Refractory to treatment.
Terminal prognosis.
Elena sits across from me. Her dirty blonde hair hangs limp against her shoulders. It’s dull where it used to shine. Her brown eyes are sunken into cavernous hollows, but they’re still fierce, and still burning with that stubborn fire that made me fall in love with her twenty years ago.
She’s lost so much weight that her wedding ring wobbles around her finger when she reaches across the table to cover my hand.
“I’m done, Lukas,” she says.
I don’t look up from the papers. If I look at her, I’ll break. And I can’t break. Not now. She needs me to be strong.
“One more,” I growl. “There’s a new specialist in Switzerland running a study. It’s experimental, but promising. I’ve already made the calls—”
“No.” Her hand tightens on mine. The bones feel fragile as bird wings beneath her papery skin. “No more treatments. No more specialists. It’s over.”
I close my eyes. It hurts too fucking badly to do anything else.
“The cancer isn’t going anywhere,” Elena says. “So I’d like to make a choice myself, while I still have some dignity left.”
“You’re asking me to…” I can’t finish the sentence. Can’t even form the shape of it in my mouth.
“I’m asking you to love me enough to let me go.”
I finally look up at her. I’ve built a life on defying the odds. No one thought a boy from Russia could do the things I’ve done, reach the heights I’ve reached.
Now, though, she’s wasting away in front of me, and there’s nothing, not one fucking thing, I can do to stop it.
I can’t allow that.
I shove back from the table hard enough that my chair crashes to the floor behind me. “No,” I snarl. “Fuck no. We’ll find something else. Another doctor. One of these has to fucking work.”
Elena just looks at me with that maddening calm.
I know that face better than I know my own.
It’s the same expression she wore when she told me she was pregnant with Kirill.
When she accepted my proposal in that dingy little apartment in Brighton Beach.
When she stood beside me at our wedding and promised me forever.
Forever was supposed to be a lot fucking longer than this.
“I’ve made my decision, Lu,” she says quietly. “I need you to respect it.”
“Fuck your decision.” I’m pacing now, hands fisted in my hair. “We’ll do the radiation again. The venetoclax trial, the allo transplant… All of it. Together.”
Nothing I say moves her.
But I don’t let that stop me.
Over the weeks that follow, I fly in specialists from across the globe—oncologists from Berlin, researchers from Singapore, a fucking witch doctor from Zurich who claims he can cure anything that ails with mistletoe extract and séances.
They all fail and I fire each one mercilessly.
Then I find new ones and start the cycle again.
Elena is too weak to fight me. She just closes her eyes and lets me drag her through it.
“You’re torturing me,” she whispers once, after a particularly brutal examination leaves her shaking and gray-faced on the table.
The oncologist had palpated her abdomen so thoroughly that she’d vomited bile into a plastic basin I held for her.
I wipe her mouth with a cloth. My hands are steady. My heart is anything but.
“I know,” I say. “I don’t care.”
When one of the doctors suggests stem cell donation as a possibility, I sign the forms without bothering to read them. I rip off my shirt and lie face-down on the operating table while they carve into me.
The pain is excruciating. Each procedure leaves fresh wounds across my back, scars layering over scars. I lose count of how many times they open me up. Four harvests. Seven. Nine. The anesthesia stops working properly, but I tell them to keep going anyway.
When Elena sees what I’ve done, she weeps.
“You selfish bastard!” she sobs, her thin fingers tracing the bandages across my spine.
I’m lying on my stomach because sitting up is impossible, and she’s perched on the edge of the bed, her IV pole rattling as she shakes with rage.
“You’re carving yourself apart and it won’t change anything. ”
We argue about it, and she gets so angry that she won’t let me feed her her dinners anymore.
But she’s right: The stem cells don’t take.
Her body rejects them the way it’s rejected every other intervention I’ve thrown at it.
The cancer keeps spreading, devouring her from the inside out, and all my money, all my power, all the violence I’ve inflicted on the world—none of it matters here.
We haven’t told Kirill how badly things are going. It’s best that way. The less he sees of this nightmare, the better.
The end comes without warning.
It’s a cold night in March. I’m adjusting her pillows, trying to find an angle that doesn’t make her wince, when her hand closes around my wrist.
“Lu. Help me get dressed.”
I know right away what this is. I want to argue. There’s a fucking miracle out there, but we can’t give up looking for it. But I look at her face, and I know.
I’ve known for a while, really. I just couldn’t bear to admit it.
My hands tremble as I help her sit up. She’s so light now. Hollow. I could snap her in half without trying.
“The red one,” she says. “In the closet. You know the one.”
I do. It’s the sundress she was wearing when we met. Well, not quite the sundress. I bought her a new one years ago, identical to the original, because the first had worn too thin from washing. She’s kept this replacement hanging in the back of the closet, pristine. Waiting.
I pull it over her head as gently as I can. The fabric swallows her now. It hangs loose where it used to cling. But when I step back, I see her, and my heart cracks clean in two.
She’s beautiful. Still so fucking beautiful.
I go to the kitchen and crush the pills we planned for this. I mix them into a jar of applesauce, because her throat is too weak to swallow anything else properly now.
She’s waiting where I left her, propped against the headboard. When she sees me, she smiles. It’s the first true smile I’ve seen from her in a long time.
I sit beside her on the bed. My hands are shaking so badly now that the spoon rattles against the jar’s edge. I nearly drop it, until Elena reaches up and takes my wrist. She steadies it and guides the spoon to her own mouth.
We don’t speak of the things that matter most. We’ve already said them, over and over, in the twenty years we’ve had together. She asks me to make her a promise, and I swear to her I’ll see it through.
“Thank you,” she whispers once I’ve made my reluctant vow.
When she finishes eating, I set the bowl aside. She settles back against my chest, and I wrap my arms around her—so careful of her fragile bones, terrified I’ll hurt her even now—and I feel her heart beat against my palm.
Slower.
Slower.
Then still.
The night is moonless. There is no light left in the world.
I carry her wrapped in a wool blanket, cradled against my chest like a sleeping child. She weighs nothing. Less than nothing. The cancer hollowed her out long before the pills finished the job.
The record store is gone. Has been for years. What’s left is a vacant lot choked with weeds and broken beer bottles, surrounded by a chain-link fence. I carve through it with bolt cutters and slip inside.
I remember this place so differently. I remember sunlight and music spilling out through a propped-open door. I remember a woman in a red dress spinning like she didn’t know anyone was watching, like the whole world had melted away and left behind only her and the song.
I remember her tripping, how she stumbled right into my arms, looked up at me with those brown eyes, and laughed, as if falling into a stranger was the most natural thing that could be.
God help me, I never stood a fucking chance.
The ground tonight is hard from the early spring frost. My shovel bites into it with a sound like grinding bones. I dig in the darkness. Warm blood soaks through my shirt as the stem cell extraction sites tear open and leak.
As I dig, I hold her promise in my head.
“Kirill can never know I chose to leave him.”
Clank. Crunch. Skritch. Shff. The pile of dirt grows. The hole deepens.
I’d wanted to refuse. The boy deserves the truth: that his mother loved him enough to spare him the slow decay, the hospital vigils, the watching her disappear piece by piece. He ought to know she was brave, not broken.
But Elena had gripped my hand and made me swear I’d do as she asked.
So I swore.
The hole is deep enough now. I lower her into it carefully, arranging her limbs, smoothing the blanket around her shoulders. I want her to be comfortable in her final sleep.
Her journal goes in last. The leather-bound book where she wrote everything down, her final gift to me. I don’t want to read it. I can’t.
Neither can Kirill. Never Kirill.
I swore he’d never know.
The dirt goes back easier than it came out. I pack it down, scatter dead leaves over the surface, and drag a piece of rusted corrugated metal across to hide the fresh-turned earth.
When I’m finished, I stand there in the darkness where Elena and I first met, covered in blood and soil, and I feel something I haven’t felt in months.
Relief.
It feels so fucking good to know she isn’t hurting anymore.
The sun is almost coming up by the time I make it home. The kitchen still smells like the applesauce I mixed the pills into. I can’t bring myself to throw the empty jar away. I can’t bring myself to do much of anything except climb the stairs.
The bedroom door is open. The sheets are still tangled from where I lifted her out of them. Her pillow still holds the indent of her head, the faint impression of her cheek.
I strip off my bloody shirt and let it fall to the floor. My back screams in protest as I lower myself onto the mattress—not my side, but hers. The depression her body carved into the foam over months of wasting away.
It’s cold now. Everything is cold.
I press my face into her pillow and breathe in what’s left of her.
And I make a second vow:
Never again.
I will never give another person this kind of power over me. I will never open myself up to this devastation, this complete and total annihilation of everything I thought I was.
Never again.
Never, never again.
I keep that promise for eighteen years.
Until Rae.