Nick
The doctor looks at me with something close to resignation. It’s not the first time I’ve been on his table, and it doubt it will be the last.
My suit is pretty much a loss. The shirt sleeve was entirely cut off at some point. My arm is wrapped in a pressure bandage that I've bled through in two places, and my left leg is stiff from where the seat pinned me.
"Leg first," he says. "You will probably need to get it X-rayed."
"The arm." I counter. I know my leg is fine. If it were broken it would be swollen, not just stiff and tender.
"Nikolai." He is older than me, and has known me since he cut me out of my mother’s womb. That’s the only reason he is getting away with calling me by my full name.
"The arm, Mikhail. Stitch it. I don't have time to fuck about with X-rays for a leg that’s perfectly fine."
He looks at me the way my mother used to look at me when I was small and being difficult about something she knew better about.
"Very well," he says. “But at least let me check it over once we’ve stitched your arm.”
“Fine,” I huff. The sooner I can get out of here the better, and arguing over treatment is only going to prolong everything.
He cuts the bandage off my arm with shears that are not unlike the ones Sadie used on my sleeve an hour ago. How has it only been an hour? It already feels like a lifetime. A lifetime I’ve not been able to get her out of my mind.
“It’s deeper than I’d like.” Mikhail cleans the gash on my arm with a wet cotton ball on the end of some tweezers. I hiss as a fresh round of pain shoots through me, a prickly heat radiating from the wound. The bleeding is much less, at least.
"Your leg was pinned," Mikhail says, injecting something into the skin of my bicep. “I really think at bare minimum you should let me x-ray it.” He pulls apart some plastic wrappers, revealing a sterilized suture kit that makes my insides shrivel.
"It isn't broken,” I grunt, turning my face away from what he is doing. Just the thought of stitches makes me feel physically sick, much less watching them being pulled through my skin.
"You don't know that.” He is working methodically, steadily stitching me back together.
“I can stand on it. I walked from the stretcher to your table without help. It’s fine."
"A hairline fracture will let you walk."
I turn back to face him. His head is tilted back slightly and he is peering through the lower part of his glasses, focused entirely on the job at hand.
"Mikhail."
He ties off the last stitch and drops his face, looking over the top frame of his glasses now and directly into my eyes.
"My father is dying," I say. "He was stable this morning, but he had deteriorated when his doctor called me in the ambulance forty minutes ago. I’m not going to waste time getting an X-ray of a leg I know isn't broken when I need to be with him. Once I know more, I’ll come back and you can X-ray every part of me, but until then; no.”
His mouth thins. “Fine, but at least let me do a short physical exam. Then you can go.”
He wraps my arm in a fresh bandage, neat and fast. He has done this kind of work in worse conditions than a well-lit clinic.
I sit very still with my eyes forward and I think about a woman in a once white t-shirt with a Sharpie, because thinking about her is easier than thinking about where I’m going next.
BP 130/85. P 96. Conscious. Laceration L upper arm. ? concussion. 2:54 PM.
My pulse has come down since then. Sadie would be pleased.
"Who wrote that on your arm?" Mikhail has finished bandaging and is now flashing a light in my eyes and asking me to follow his finger.
"A woman at the scene."
He nods slowly. “And the dressing?”
“Same.”
His eyes stretch slightly upward, his brows briefly rising in surprise. "She did good work. She was right to query concussion, because you have one. Mild, but you can expect the headache to last a few hours."
He steps back and looks at me over his glasses again, nods.
I roll my eyes as I stand and drop my trousers, revealing a very bruised lower leg.
“No swelling though,” I argue before he has the opportunity to berate me.
Mikhail just shakes his head solemnly and gestures for me to lie on the table. He watches my face as he pokes and squeezes parts of my leg, but I don’t so much as wince, even when his thumb presses into my shin and send a shooting pain right up to my groin.
He finishes with a sigh and a shake of his head.
“Dmitri is here; he has a change of clothes for you.”
“Thanks, Doc,” I say pulling my slacks back into place.
He doesn't laugh. He's not a laughing man. But something around his eyes softens for half a second. He claps me on the shoulder that isn't injured and he walks me to the door.
"Go see your father," he says. “And tell him Mikhail sends his respects.”
I nod, appreciation for his words tightening my chest momentarily. I leave without another word.
Dmitri has a car waiting and hands me a garment bag with a fresh change of clothes. I change awkwardly in the back seat as he drives me to my father’s house.
"How is he," I ask.
"Worse, but holding on."
"How much worse."
"It’s bad, Kol.”
Dmitri only calls me Kol when he is anxious, which is hardly ever, and tells me all I need to know.
“Doctor said something about reduced breaths and organs shutting down. He’s mostly been sleeping due to the meds and your Uncle has been making noises about hierarchy and traditional lines of succession.
He pulls into traffic and the clinic falls away behind us as we move through the city in the failing light.
“And Yuri,” I ask. All I know is he was taken to the emergency hospital on the other side of the city.
“In surgery. Bleed on the brain.”
Fuck.
How the fuck did today unfold like this?
I close my eyes for ten seconds and I let myself see her face one more time, the blond woman at the edge of the wreckage with the juice box and the foil blanket.
When I open my eyes again we are pulling up the drive to my father’s house and I realize I must have fallen asleep.
Three stories of brick and ivy greet us as we come to a stop on gravel that crunches under the tires.
The front door opens before we are out of the car.
Lucia, my father's nurse for the last six months, stands in the doorway in her white uniform with her hands folded in front of her, and the expression on her face is the expression I have been waiting for since last fall.
I walk past her into the house without speaking.
The downstairs is quiet. Too quiet. There should be men in the front room, in the library, in the kitchen eating whatever my father's cook has put together for them today, only there are none.
The house has been emptied. This has been done deliberately by someone, because a man should not have to hear his soldiers laughing and gambling in his house as he dies.
I know who has done it before I reach the stairs.
His coat is on the rack in the foyer. Black cashmere.
I climb the stairs.
My father's room is at the end of the second-floor hallway.
The door is open a crack. I can hear the oxygen machine before I reach it, the soft rhythmic hiss, and under the hiss I can hear a voice, low and even, speaking Russian.
Not my father's voice. My father has not had that much voice in him for the last month.
I push open the door.
My father is in the hospital bed they brought in two weeks ago, raised at the head, a cannula at his nose, an IV in the back of his hand. His eyes are closed. His mouth is open a fraction. His skin is the color of old paper and his breath comes in a slow, uneven pattern.
Viktor is sitting in the chair beside the bed.
He stands up when I walk in.
"Plemyannik," he says.
Nephew.
His face arranges itself into an expression of warm family concern that never quite reaches the eyes. He is sixty-two. My father's younger brother by four years. He has the same nose and the same jaw, and none of the same gravity. Viktor walks toward me across the room now with his hand out.
I take his hand out of formality rather than any sort of desire.
He clasps mine in both of his. He holds it a beat longer than is necessary. Trying to show power where he holds none.
"I came as soon as I heard," he says. "The accident. Kolya, are you alright? I told them, I said, send me a car, I will go to the scene, but Dmitri said an ambulance had already collected you."
"I'm fine, Uncle."
"Your arm." His eyes drop to my left bicep and he doesn’t mask the grimace before I see it.
"It's nothing."
"You are bleeding through the sleeve," he whispers it, like my father would be offended if he knew. I almost laugh.
I look down. I am. A small dark spot on the white. I shrug my jacket closed over it and I step past him to the bed.
"How long has he been like this?" I ask.
"Since this morning." Viktor speaks quietly behind me. "His nurse called me when she could not reach you. She called me because she knew I would come. She is a good woman, Lucia."
I don’t say anything. Instead, I let his words settle around me, unveiling themselves as the jibe he intended.
"I have been here since noon,” he continues, never able to allow silence to breathe. “I wanted him to have family with him, should the worst happen."
"Yes, Uncle. Thank you."
I sit down in the chair Viktor has vacated and take my father's hand in mine. He has lost a considerable amount of weight in the last six months, the bones of his hand now prominent beneath the almost translucent skin.
His eyes open.
He looks at me. It takes him a second to find me, and when he does, his mouth moves into something that wants to be a smile.
"Kolya," he says.
"Papa."
"You came." His voice is raspy and dry. I reach for the cup of water and straw.
"Of course I came," I say, gently easing the straw against his lips.
He takes an age to suck the water through the paper tube and swallow. "I heard there was an accident."
"I'm fine,2 I quickly say. “Mikhail stitched me up. Yuri is in surgery."
He nods, or at least, tries to nod. "Mikhail." He closes his eyes again. His hand is still in mine. "Mikhail owes me his whole life. He should stitch you for free."
"He did. And he sends his respects.”
My father laughs. It's a small sound that becomes a cough, and Lucia appears to read the monitors that surround my father.
Viktor is still in the room.
"Uncle," I say, once Lucia has finished making notes and adjusting my father’s bed so he is sitting a little more upright.
"Yes."
"I would like a moment with my father." The dismissal is clear in my tone.
"Of course." He doesn’t move. "Of course, Kolya. Family time. I will be in the library. Stepan." He looks at the bed. "Brother. I'm glad I saw your boy. I'm glad he came. I will be here as long as you need me."
"Viktor," my father says. His voice is thin, and yet still holding authority. "Nikolai hasn’t been a boy for more than twenty-five years."
Viktor comes around the bed slowly. He puts his hand on my father's shoulder for a long moment, and then he takes his hand off and walks past me on his way to the door. As he passes me, he pauses.
He bends. His mouth is at my ear.
"We will need to talk soon, Kolya," he says in Russian, very quietly, so my father cannot hear. "About how things will be arranged. My brother has not been clear-headed for weeks. There are men asking questions. Men who need answers. Family cannot have gaps in it. You understand."
He straightens and smiles at me, then leaves.
The door closes behind him.
I sit with my father's hand in mine and I don’t move until I hear Viktor's shoes on the stairs. My father’s fingers twitch in my hand, drawing my attention back to him. His eyes are open again, and they are clear in a way they haven’t been clear in two weeks.
"Kolya."
"Papa."
“He is a snake. Always was.” He coughs, but waves away the cup of water when I lift it towards him. “I hoped he would change.”
My father's hand tightens on mine. There is almost no strength in it, but there is some, and I feel it the way I felt Sadie's hand on my wrist when she wrote my vitals on it.
"The chair is mine, Papa. I have not forgotten." I say it to reassure him. That I know the way this is meant to be.
"He will come for you."
"Let him."
"Kolya. Listen to me. I have very little voice.
Listen. He will not come at you. He is not that kind of snake.
He will come at the thing you love. He will find the thing and he will go there first, and he will do it smiling, and you will not see it coming because he will make you think he is doing you a kindness. Do you hear me."
My heart is in my throat.
"I hear you, Papa."
"Is there a thing?"
I don’t answer, because my first thought was no, then Sadie’s face popped into my mind and I didn’t have time to question it, banish it, before he saw.
"Kolya,” he says with regret.
"It’s new,” I say. “It’s nothing.”
He closes his eyes. He is quiet for long enough that I think he has gone back to sleep, and then he speaks without opening them.
"Hide her, my son. Keep her far away until you’ve dealt with your uncle."
"Papa," I object, but I’m not sure what I’m objecting to. Hiding a grown woman who doesn’t even know she has become the sole reason my heart beats? Or the thought of dealing with my uncle, whatever that means?
"Hide her until I am gone. Hide her until you have the room and the men. Hide her, Nikolai, or bury her. Those are the only options he will leave you."
I sit with him until the room is dark and Lucia has come and gone twice. The oxygen machine has been adjusted and the IV has been changed. His breathing is slower now. Steadier than when I arrived. I don't know whether this is an improvement or the thing before the thing.
At some point, without opening his eyes, he squeezes my hand again.
"Mikhail," he says. "Tell him he did not stitch you for free because he owes me his life. Tell him he stitched you for free because you are my son."
"Yes, Papa."
"Go," he says. "You have work."
"I will stay."
"Go. Do the work. Come back tomorrow."
I kiss his forehead and leave the room.
Viktor is in the library. The light is on under the door, but I don’t go in.
I walk down the stairs passing Lucia in the hall, and I hand her a folded piece of paper with two numbers on it, mine and Dmitri's, and I tell her to call either of them the second anything changes.
She nods. She has been my father's nurse for six months and I know she is paid well and is loyal. I’m still going to triple her pay tomorrow in case anyone comes to her with a quieter offer.