Iris
Yakob’s words slur, his voice fades out at the end like an old movie.
I'm on my knees beside him in the dusty house that belongs to nobody, my hands moving before my brain catches up, finding his jaw, his throat, the pulse underneath. It's there. Fast and thin, like something running out of road, but there.
"Yakob." I pat his cheek. Then harder, because gentle isn't getting me anything. "Hey. You need to tell me what to do."
His eyes drag open. Not all the way. Enough.
"Med kit," he says, and every word sounds like it's being carried uphill. "Kitchen. Sink. Green case."
The kitchen is three steps away, everything in this house is three steps away, and the green case is exactly where he said, heavy as a toolbox. There's an oil lamp on the table and a box of matches beside it, because this house is ancient and electricity doesn’t come this far up the mountain.
S, whoever that is, must have stocked up on the things he thought we would need.
I throw open the shutters as I pass them on my way back to Yakob, letting the morning light and fresh air into the small building before crouching down beside him and opening the case.
I stop breathing for a second, because it's not a first aid kit.
It's a field hospital in a box. Saline bags.
Iodine. Rolls of gauze in sealed sleeves.
Packets with words like hemostatic on them.
Sutures. Antibiotics in labeled bottles.
Two syringes of something I don't ask about.
"Okay," I say to myself. "Okay. We can work with this."
I cut his shirt off with the shears from the kit because pulling it over his head is not happening. The wound is low on his left side, an ugly puckered mouth gone crusty with dried blood. The skin around it is smeared dark to his hip. My T-shirt is soaked through and useless now.
"Turn," he says. "Check my back."
I get a shoulder under him and roll him enough to see, and there it is, a second wound just above his hip, wider, messier.
"There's another one," I say, and my voice comes out very calm, the way it does when the situation absolutely does not deserve calm.
"Good."
"I'm sorry. Good?"
"It went through." His eyes close briefly. "No bullet inside. Means you don't have to go looking for it."
"I was not going to go looking for it, Yakob. There are limits to what I picked up watching my brothers bleed on the kitchen table, and mining is one of them."
The corner of his mouth twitches. On a healthy man it might have grown up to be a smile. "Irrigate both sides. Saline, then the iodine. Then the granules from the silver packet, in the wound, both sides. Stitch it. Cover it."
"Cover it." I repeat it because saying it makes it real, and it needs to be real, because I'm the one who has to do it.
"It'll hurt me," he says. "You'll want to stop. Don't."
"I know."
"Iris."
I look up from the packet in my hands. His eyes are open and fixed on me, black in the shadows, and there's something in them I haven't seen before.
Not pain. He wears pain like other men wear watches, barely aware it's there.
This is the other thing. The thing underneath.
He is about to be helpless in front of another human being, entirely, completely helpless, and he would rather be back in that courtyard taking another bullet.
"I've got you," I tell him. "Everything’s going to be fine. Like it never even happened."
He holds my eyes for one more second. Then he reaches for the gauze in my hand, some last reflex, the drowning man trying one last time to swim to shore, and I watch his fingers shake against the packet.
"Look at your hand," I say quietly. "Now look at mine."
Mine are steady. I don't know when that happened. Somewhere between the cell and this room, some switch got thrown in me, and the girl who cried over sad movies and needed hugs after someone had been away longer than three days has steady hands.
He lets go of the gauze.
That’s the moment. Not the wound or the boat or the hand-holding. This. A man who has probably never once put his life in someone else's hands, opening his fingers and letting it happen.
Then I stop thinking about anything at all, because the work starts, and the work takes everything.
I won't keep the details. I already know my memory is going to fold this part up small and put it somewhere I don't go.
What I keep is fragments. The hiss of saline.
The iodine running off him in rust-colored ribbons and dripping onto the grey stone.
The sound he makes through his teeth when the needle goes in, and the way his fist closes on the empty packet instead of on me, deliberately, even now, even half gone, careful of me.
Me talking the whole time in a voice I've never used before, low and even, half instructions to myself and half nonsense, the verbal equivalent of a hand resting on the back of his neck.
"Almost. Almost. You're doing so well. I know. I know. I’m so sorry."
Aidan taught me the apology comes after the bleeding stops.
Nobody taught me that the after is when your own body sends you the bill.
When the last strip of tape goes down over the dressing and I finally sit back on my heels, my arms start shaking so hard I have to press my palms flat on the floor and just breathe.
Yakob's eyes are closed. His chest is moving. The dressing is white and staying white.
"Antibiotics," he murmurs, without opening his eyes. "Bottle marked A. Two now."
I get two down him with water from the kitchen sink, silently thanking the mysterious S, and lift his head with my hand cupped around the back of his skull like Ma does with the babies.
He swallows and drifts, and I sit there at his side wondering if it’s safe to leave him but not wanting to anyway.
An hour goes by. My legs are cramping. But I don’t move until his eyes flicker open again.
“It’s okay,” he says. His voice is rough like badly sawn wood. “You don’t have to sit with me.”
“Promise you’ll be okay?” I ask. My voice breaking a little, surprising me.
“I’ll be f–”
“Fine,” I say, cutting him off. “So you keep saying.”
Then he's under, truly under, and I am alone in a stone house on an island whose name I learned three hours ago, with a lamp, a wounded man's even breathing, and my own hands, which have apparently been capable of this my whole life without anyone telling me.
I don't fall apart. I keep waiting for it, the way you wait for a sneeze, and it keeps not coming. Instead I get practical, because practical is the only language my body will speak today.
I wash his blood off my hands in water so cold it burns, and I watch it swirl away and feel exactly nothing about it.
There's a shelf of supplies in the kitchen that confirms what he told me.
Weeks of it. Rice, tins, coffee, salt. A house stocked for a man who might need to disappear from the world entirely, for a while.
Somewhere to just stay hidden away while he needs to be gone from the world. A basic, simple bid for survival.
I wonder how many more of these places he has access to through his contacts. How many countries does he have a little house in where he can lay low between jobs.
Because that’s what I am. I’m not stupid. He didn’t randomly find me. My brothers hired him.
I find a small camping stove and a gas canister, and wonder if I’ll blow us up if I try to use it.
I grab the matches and get it lit on my second try, before putting a pan of water on it and tossing in a rag that doesn’t smell of anything terribly foul.
Then I strip off his jacket and my blood-soaked clothes, right down to my skin.
The sour adrenaline smell that’s been following me around, turns out to be me.
I cringe at the thought of how Yakob must have been smelling me the entire time I was pressed under his shoulder and the memory of the first time I did that in the vineyard comes back to me.
He hadn’t smelled of anything, no cologne or soap.
No body odor or anything offensive. Like he wasn’t even real.
The water starts to bubble and I fish the rag out with a fork. The small, white bar of soap that looks older than I am is all I have available to wash myself with, but a hunt around the bathroom revealed a small wash bag with shampoo and toothpaste.
In the drawers in the bedroom I find a T-shirt and boxer shorts in plastic packets, newly bought and deposited by S, no doubt.
“Do you always walk around naked?”
I let out a short scream and jump, turning in midair and covering myself with my newly acquired T-shirt.
“No, but I thought you’d sleep for a little longer and I can’t bring myself to put my old clothes back on now I’ve managed to wash all your blood off.
Now he grins. “I’m not complaining, Orlova.”
“Ha ha,” I mutter. “Go back to sleep.”
I shimmy out of the room and pull the door closed behind me, returning my finds to the bathroom and fetching the hot water from the camping stove.
It might not be a full-on shower, or a luxurious bath with fancy bath milks and salts, but I feel a thousand times lighter once I’ve finished scrubbing a week's worth of grime and sweat off my body and slid into the boxer shorts. I have to boil the pan twice more to do a thorough enough job, and that’s before I even start on my hair.
I consider cutting it off. It would make cleaning it a whole lot easier.
Especially considering the lack of conditioner and the way the salt has made the knots tighten into impossible, matted chunks.
Instead, I lean forward, and pour an entire bucket of freezing water on it.
It takes my breath but I keep going until it’s soaked through.
The shampoo is cheap, and I only use a small amount since it’s not even mine.
I work it into a lather as much as I can using a bit of warm water left in the pan.
The suds finally form, turning from white to gray as I massage it through the lengths.
I leave it in while I fill another bucket, hoping the fresh mountain water will condition it as well as possible under the circumstances.
By the time my hair is fully rinsed and I’ve begun to fill a larger bowl with pan after pan of hot water to clean my clothes in, it’s already afternoon.
My stomach rumbles.
I prepare plain rice and eat a small amount before checking if Yakob is awake. He isn’t. I check his pulse, the dressing, ignoring the way his abs look because now is not the time for those thoughts, and feel for his temperature with the back of my hand on his forehead.
I continue with the simple chores that my brain knows how to do.
Hang my jeans over the back of a chair and place them outside in the warm sun.
I accept that there’s no coming back for my T-shirt, so I make a small fire in what looks like an old fire pit and burn it.
Then I clean the drops of blood from the stone inside the house, and the path leading up to it.
He barely stirs each time I check him, lift a wet cloth over his mouth and drip cold water over his lips. By the time the sun is setting I’ve carried a chair into the bedroom and set it beside the cot.
The fever comes up sometime in the deepest part of the night, the hours that don't have a name. His skin goes hot and dry, and he starts to move, small restless jerks that pull against the dressing, and words start coming out of him, low and slurred, in Russian.
I don't speak much Russian. A childhood of Ma's English and Dad's absence, and five brothers who saved their Russian for business saw to that.
But I catch the edge of it. It's not the voice he uses when he’s awake, clipped and rationed.
It runs. It pleads. Somewhere in it there's a word that repeats, soft, worn down like a stone that's been in a river for years, and I don't need a translator for that one either.
It's a name. It's someone small, and it's someone gone, and he's calling it into the dark.
I wring out the cloth in cold water and lay it across his forehead, and I do the only other thing I know how to do at a bedside at three in the morning.
I sing.
Quietly. Ma's song, the one about the girl waiting by the water for the sailor who never learned to swim. The one I sang to myself in a stone cell to keep from coming apart.
He stills. Gradually, the way weather changes, the restlessness draining out of him verse by verse until his breathing goes long and even again, and his hand, which had been working against the sheet, opens and goes quiet.
I finish the song anyway. Both verses, and the sad little end where the tide comes in. Then I sit back and I watch him sleep, this stranger, this weapon, this man who took a bullet for a woman he'd never met, and I make him a promise to go with all the ones I made myself in that cell.
"I see you," I whisper. "Whoever you were then. Whoever you are now. I see you, Yakob, and I’ll keep you."
The window over the bed goes from black to gray to a thin, hard silver. Somewhere outside, a bird starts chirping, as if the world didn't nearly end in the last thirty-six hours, as if it's just another morning on an island where nothing ever happens.
His pulse under my two fingers is slower now. Stronger. I count it twice to be sure.
I should sleep. Every cell in my body is filing formal complaints. But someone has to be here when he surfaces. Someone has to be the first thing he sees, so that the first thing he learns about this new day is that he wasn't left alone in the night.
So I pull my knees up into the chair, and I keep my eyes on his face, and I stay.