Chapter 27 Aftermath
Aftermath
The door swung open without a knock, and Misha burst through.
“Blyad!” He dashed, falling on his knees beside me. “Fuck! God—fuck!”
He didn’t touch my face, but his hands hovered like he thought about it. Then, he settled on lifting the gun out of my hands. Careful-like, with his pinkie out, like someone fancy drinking tea.
“Katya, you there?” he asked. I nodded. “You can hear and see me?”
Nod, nod.
He scrambled to his feet, the motion comical for a man his size, and disappeared into the kitchen, where he immediately swore. The hiss of water from the faucet turning to steam over hot metal brought about another wave of something burnt.
“Katya—listen,” Misha stammered as he sprinted back. “Vitali can’t know I told you to make soup.”
“Right,” I agreed agreeably. “He hates soup.”
“Fuck!” Misha hissed. “Oh, they got you good. Fuck. Alright, just hang on.” He ran off again, returning with a plastic-wrapped frozen slab of meat, and helped me hold it to my face. “Can you stand?”
“Where is…” I started, but someone else appeared in the door, and I got the sense that everything would be alright now.
Vitali didn’t say a word, but he moved fast, and his warm hand took mine.
“How bad is it?” he asked, so calmly I wasn’t sure he saw I was in the room.
“There’s a lot of blood, but she was talking,” Misha said. “Not completely coherent, though.”
“Get me a wet towel.”
“I’m fine,” I said. “It’s nice to see you.”
“Katya, I need you to stay conscious,” Vitali said, then snapped his head at Misha. “Who did this?”
“I said I’m fine,” I insisted, and tried to shift the frozen meat, but it wasn’t in my hand anymore. Where did it go?
“Which hospital?” Misha’s voice.
“Can someone tell Mama she can come home? She was worried,” I asked politely. “She doesn’t know the neighbors, and it might be awkward.”
“…Get in the car, she needs someone to support her head,” Vitali said…
“—Medical Center is closer…”
…
“—blyad is in my way—”
“…Kotik, you need to stay awake. Please… please stay awake…”
“I don’t need to go to the hospital,” I insisted, but the lights were very bright, and it made it hard to speak.
“What’s your name?” said a strange woman, and I didn’t like that very much.
“…can you spell her name?”
…
…..
And then something was beeping. A chill vibrated through me, and I reached to pull up the blankets, but there was only a thin sheet.
When I tried to sit up and find something warmer, a sharp pain tugged at my arm, and I turned my lead-filled head to see Vitali’s handsome face with the background of pale blue and white plaster walls.
An unbelievable amount of pain drummed through me as I tried to smile.
A thick blanket was draped over the back of his chair, and a dinky pillow hid underneath it at his back. The gray tinge of his skin said he hadn’t slept—and if he did, it was here.
“Kotik,” he said hoarsely, and squeezed my hand. I blinked, and it hurt. When I tried to touch my face, he guided my arm back down. “Just relax. You’re alright.” He looked past me and said, “Did you tell them she’s awake?”
“Yeah,” Misha said and circled the hospital bed. He scanned my face with a frown, as if he were a looker and had room to talk.
Just past him, two more men I didn’t recognize waited on the inside of the door. Big men. Scary men.
“Would you like something to eat?” Vitali asked, gently rubbing the sensitive skin between my thumb and index finger.
“Is Mama home?” The words whispered like wind through my parched throat.
“She’s safe. Maxim is safe,” he assured me. “She’ll be by to see you later. Kotik, I want you to eat something.”
“Tea… and cheese…” I mumbled.
“Cheese,” Vitali repeated. “How about something substantial?”
“Sometimes you get up in the middle of the night and just want something specific, you know?” I said, smiling weakly.
“It’s morning,” he told me, grinning, then nodded at a guy by the door. “Room temperature tea, no sugar. Soft cheeses only.”
The man nodded and slipped out.
Vitali helped me sip some water. I kept the glass clasped, comforted by its shape if not its temperature. He and Misha met at the foot of the bed and spoke in tones too low to hear, then both redirected their attention to me.
“Kotik,” Vitali said, “do you remember the men who came to the apartment?”
I shrugged half-heartedly. “I know one of them was a policeman. Baranov, I think. The other didn’t introduce himself, so I called him Clipboard.”
Misha scratched his head.
Vitali’s face was stone-still and unreadable. He took the cellphone out of his pocket and stared at it for a few seconds. “I have to make a call. Misha, stay with her.”
“Did I say something wrong?” I asked as he disappeared out the door.
“No.” Misha sighed and rubbed his neck. He was watching the doorway with an increasingly worried expression. “Listen, Katya—”
“I won’t tell him about the soup,” I said. “But you have to tell me why I’m not telling him about the soup.”
“Ah. Well.”
“Misha.”
“I forgot something,” he muttered in a very not-Misha tone. “There’s a space behind the stove. It slipped my mind. Had to be hot, so they couldn’t get back there… it might have been why they came.”
My mouth fell open. “I’m here because you…”
Wild eyes found me, and I gulped. But they weren’t angry.
“Katya,” he said slowly, driving his point home. “If you tell Vitali, he will kill me. I don’t care if you believe what I said about him—I don’t give a shit if you think I’m the one who’s nuts. But if you tell him, he will kill me.”
“I won’t tell him,” I repeated, fingering my water glass. “My head really hurts.”
“Yeah, I imagine it does,” he said, and perched on the far corner of the mattress—if one could ever say Misha ‘perched’ anywhere. My end of it lifted by at least six centimeters. “None of us liked seeing you that way.”
I snorted, much like a horse would if it were in a hospital bed with a concussion. “How ugly am I?”
“That’s not what I meant,” he grumbled, then appraised me, “but fairly ugly.”
Of all the things to be worried about, Vitali seeing me at my worst shouldn’t have been one of them. But it was. I groaned. And then, I asked something I didn’t want answered, but asked anyway, “Is this what life is going to be like, Mish? Is this the life you told me to flee from?”
Exhaustion slumped his shoulders, and he said nothing for too long. In that time, the man aged a dozen years.
“No. The life I told you to flee from is worse.”
* * *
My injuries weren’t as bad as I initially believed.
The only real concern was the laceration on my face and what they deemed to be a mild concussion. No broken bones, although the bruising said otherwise.
Vitali insisted I stay at the hospital for two days, which I thought to be ridiculous, but much like every other area of my life, there was no arguing with Mr. Konstantinov.
Mama saw me, but she didn’t bring Maxim.
Things had changed; I expected that. What I didn’t expect was how quiet she would be about it.
Mama usually yelled about everything, or at the very least gave her excessively loud opinion, but now she hardly said anything on the subject.
We talked about Maxim and his schooling, and how he ran wild in the streets with the other boys and got into petty trouble.
He was nearing the age where it would become a problem.
Something Misha said about the company young boys keep when getting mixed up in this stuff settled badly in my stomach, and that was all I could think of now every time she mentioned my brother.
We discussed my birthday and what I wanted her to cook. Honey cake had always been my favorite, so she agreed to make that. She asked what Vitali liked.
She hadn’t spoken about him much. He had been right, the ‘real’ person I saw in my mama was more complicated and experienced than she ever let on in front of her children. Her eyes said she knew, and that was an ice pick to my heart. It was naive of me to think the good would last forever.
And, she understood something else, too. I chose Vitali. It would never be another man. Whatever dreams she had for me, the future she’d worked so hard to provide, they all included him. And the reality of that choice lay shredded at her feet amid the glass, couch stuffing, and ripped photographs.
My bloody bandages were her broken heart.