Chapter 21
DANIIL
The memories have been coming back the way a tide does.
Not all at once. In pieces. Yesterday it was the smell of black bread my mother used to slice on a wooden board, the crust torn off and handed to me because I liked it best. The day before, a winter when I was maybe six and Alek was thirteen and we crossed a frozen lot in boots two sizes too big, his hand keeping mine warm inside his coat pocket because I had lost a glove.
Small things. The kind of memory that does not change the world but reminds me that the world existed before I broke it.
This morning a new one surfaced while I was shaving.
The exact pitch of my father's laugh when something genuinely caught him off guard.
Not the political one he used at table. The real laugh.
Low, three short bursts, then a sigh. I stood at the sink a long time with the razor in my hand and listened to it inside my head until the water went cold.
A knock comes at the door, sharper and more measured than the small set of taps I am hoping for. I know that rhythm. It belongs to the family doctor, a man my father kept on retainer since I was a boy and who I have known almost as long as I have known my own brothers.
"Come."
He lets himself in with the same black leather bag I remember from when I was twelve and had broken two fingers refusing to admit I had broken anything.
His hair has gone fully white at the temples since I last saw him in clean light.
He nods once at Chloe in the chair by the bed, then turns his attention to me.
"Sit up if you can."
I sit up. He takes my wrist, presses two fingers to the inside of it, watches his own watch.
He looks at my eyes. He checks the inside of my mouth.
He touches the cut at my brow and runs a thumb along the line of healing without pressing, just measuring.
He slides a thermometer under my tongue and waits.
"You are healing well," he says when he reads it. "The fever is your body finishing the work. Stay in bed two more days."
"Understood."
"Fluids. Sleep. No stairs for forty-eight hours."
I will.
He nods, snaps his bag shut, gives Chloe a small professional smile that holds more warmth in it than he would ever admit to, and shows himself out.
The latch clicks. Chloe gets up and pushes the door the rest of the way closed with her hip, and when she turns around her shoulders drop a little, and I see how long she has been sitting in that chair without a word of complaint.
Now I am in bed under a heavy gray blanket with a low fever and a clean bill on everything else. The bruises along my ribs are the color of weak tea. The cut at my brow has faded to a thin pale line near the older scar at my temple. Everything stitched. Everything closing.
What is not closed is the way Chloe returns to the edge of the mattress with a folded cloth in her hand and a small white bowl of something steaming on the nightstand.
She presses the cloth to my forehead. It is cool enough to make me close my eyes for a second. Then the back of her hand goes against my cheek and stays there.
"I’m supposed to be taking care of a baby," she says, dry as toast. "Not nursing a grown man through the sniffles."
"Then wait until I am healed," I tell her, low, eyes still half closed, "and I will give you one to take care of."
She makes a sound that is half laugh and half scandalized squeak. "You're so nasty."
"Always. You have not complained yet."
A beat. Her mouth softens. The cloth pauses against my temple.
"Yeah, well." Her voice goes warm in that way that undoes me. "I like it more than I should."
I open my eyes. Gray-green meets brown. I get a hand around the back of her neck, careful, because she is precious and because my arm is not at full strength yet, and I draw her down to me.
Her dark hair falls around my face. The kiss is slow.
Fever or no fever, my mouth knows what it wants.
I taste the tea she has been drinking. Honey.
Something floral. She makes a small noise against my lips and I file that sound away for later, when she is not on duty as my nurse.
When she sits up her cheeks are a shade pinker than they were a minute ago.
"You are flushed," I observe.
"That’s the fever."
"Mine, perhaps. Not yours."
She swats me with the cloth.
The door bangs open without a knock first. Or rather, there is a knock and then immediately the door, no waiting between them, which in this house is the universal signal of one specific small person.
Rhea stands in the doorway with Beom-Beom dangling by one paw at her hip, the bear's damaged ear flopping. Her braids are a little crooked on one side. She wears the expression of a kid who has come to deliver a verdict.
"You two are doing cringe things again," she says, deadpan.
Chloe loses it. Full laugh, head back, the kind of laugh that lights a room and is half the reason I want to be in any room she is in. She holds both arms out.
"Get in here, you."
Rhea pretends to resist for exactly one second before launching across the rug, Beom-Beom flung onto the blanket ahead of her like an advance scout.
Chloe catches her around the middle, rolls her sideways onto the bed and digs fingers into her ribs.
Rhea shrieks, kicks, laughs until her face goes red, grabs for a pillow as a shield and fails.
Beom-Beom catches a stray elbow into my chest. I rescue him and prop him up against my hip like a small witness.
"Mercy," Rhea gasps. "Mercy, I take it back, the cringe things were fine, they were normal."
"Too late," Chloe says, but she stops tickling and just holds her, one arm slung across the kid's chest, her chin on the top of Rhea's head.
The room settles. Breathing slows. Beom-Beom keeps watch from my hip.
Then Rhea's face changes. The laughter thins out of it. She is still tucked into Chloe's arm but her eyes have moved to me, and they are serious in a way a seven year old's eyes should not have to be.
"How are you, brother?"
I do not rush the answer. I want her to feel it land.
"I am more than ok."
She nods like she is weighing whether to believe me. Then she does.
"I am glad." A pause. "You are getting your life back, piece by piece."
Chloe tilts her head. "Why do you sound a little sad?"
"Nothing." Rhea picks at a loose thread on the blanket. Her shoulders go up and then down. Her voice goes smaller. "Sometimes I feel like I don’t belong here. Like I’m not supposed to be part of any of this."
The room goes still.
Something in my chest does a slow turn I have not felt in a very long time. Not since I was a boy myself, and someone I loved looked at me with that exact small expression, and I had no power to fix it. I have power now. I have very little else worth anything, but I have that.
I reach for her hand. My left one, the one with the old scar across the index knuckle wrapping around her smaller fingers. Her hand inside mine looks like nothing, like a sparrow inside a glove. I make sure my grip is gentle. I make sure she can pull away if she wants to. She does not pull away.
"Rhea." My voice comes out lower than I planned.
I do not fight it. "I took two of the people you loved most away from you.
I know I did. I know you suffered a lot.
And the men who came after our family came after yours too.
I am sorry for that. I am sorry if you have felt left out in this house.
I am trying. I am trying to fill what was taken from you because of me and because of this house. "
She looks at me. Her eyes narrow the way a kid's do when they are doing math the adults did not expect them to do.
"So you’re saying you’re doing all of this out of guilt?"
It hits like a tap on a bruise. Clean. Accurate. She is too quick.
"No, Rhea." It comes out before I have time to soften it, and I do not want to soften it. "That is not what I meant. I love you as my sister. I loved you before any of this happened. I am your brother. I will do everything I can to be worthy of that name with you."
She is quiet a moment. She looks down at her own hand inside mine. She moves her thumb a little, testing the weight of my fingers. The pulse in her wrist is faster than mine. I can feel it.
When she speaks again her voice starts very soft and grows as the words find their feet.
"Sometimes I think about it at night and I get mad." The thread on the blanket gets a small tug. "Sometimes I have bad thoughts I’m not allowed to say out loud. But whenever I remember how you treated me even when you didn’t know who you were, I’m reminded of who you really are.
You didn’t choose any of this. I’m proud of you, brother. "
My eyes fill.
I do not stop them. I have stopped them in a hundred rooms in front of a hundred men who would have used the tears against me. This is not one of those rooms. This is a small girl with crooked braids holding my hand on my own bed, telling me she is proud of me. I let it happen.
Chloe is crying too. I catch her in my side vision. Her hand has come up to her mouth and her shoulders are shaking in that quiet contained way of a woman who refuses to make the moment about her own tears. She does not look away from Rhea.
She reaches across the blanket and pulls Rhea into a hug from the other side, so the kid is sandwiched between us, her hand still in mine, her shoulder against Chloe's collarbone.
"You’re too grown for your age, you know that?" Chloe’s voice is thick. "I’m proud of you. We’re proud of you."
Rhea tucks her face into Chloe's shoulder for the smallest second.
I feel her breath catch and let go. My free hand has moved to her back on its own and is resting there, wide and steady, the way I have wanted it to know how to rest since the first time I saw her.
I do not say anything else. I do not need to.
Then she sits up like a kid who has remembered she is supposed to be tough, and she wipes her face with the back of her wrist in one fast aggressive swipe.
"Okay." She sniffs hard. "That was a lot. Let's do something not sad."
Chloe huffs a wet laugh. "What did you have in mind?"
"Movie." Rhea is already crawling toward the foot of the bed for Beom-Beom, who has slid down near my knee. "Something with talking animals. Or a fish. Or somebody with magic powers. I'll know it when I see it."
"That’s a strong product brief," Chloe says, and goes to fetch her laptop.
We rearrange ourselves. I end up propped against the headboard in the middle of the bed with two pillows behind my back.
Rhea curls up on my left, her head against my ribs, Beom-Beom under her chin, one sock foot poking against my shin through the blanket and refusing to settle.
Chloe comes back with the laptop balanced on a tray and slides in on my right, tucked under my arm, her shoulder fitting against mine the way it has fit since the first night she stayed.
Her hair brushes the line of my jaw when she leans her head against me.
She picks something animated. Bright color palette.
A coastal town somewhere warm, a small hero with too much courage and a sidekick that says smart things, a soundtrack guaranteed to live in my head for a week whether I want it there or not.
Family-friendly. The kind of movie that knows children are smarter than adults give them credit for and writes for them anyway.
Rhea narrates inside of three minutes.
"He’s gonna lose his hat. Watch. Watch. There it goes. Told you."
"Shhh," Chloe says, warm, her hand finding Rhea's foot through the blanket and squeezing.
"That guy is the bad guy. The voice is too friendly. Real friends don’t sound that friendly."
"Spoilers, gremlin."
"It’s not a spoiler if I’m right." A pause. "Oh no. Oh no, the small one, I love the small one, if anything happens to the small one I’m gonna be so upset."
I do not say much. I do not need to. I am running a low fever and I have a small girl breathing against my ribs and a woman who agreed last week to call herself mine tucked under my arm, and the laptop fan is humming a tired warm note against my chest and Beom-Beom keeps falling sideways onto my knee and being righted.
The room smells like the cold tea on the nightstand and the faint lemon of whatever cloth Chloe was using on my forehead.
The late autumn light through the window has gone gold at the edges.
The compound is quiet. Somewhere down the hall a door closes softly and a guard's boot taps once on the stair. None of it touches us.
Halfway through the movie, while the small character Rhea loves is doing something brave with bad odds, Chloe turns her head against my shoulder and looks up at me. I feel her look before I see it. I turn my face down to her.
She mouths two words, no sound.
Good job.
I do not have words for what that does to me.
I pull her closer. My hand at her waist tightens.
My other hand, without me telling it to, has settled on the top of Rhea's head, on the part where her two braids start, and my thumb is moving slow over her hair like I have been doing it her whole life.
My breath goes out long and steady. Chloe's hand finds mine at her waist and her fingers slide between my fingers and do not let go.
I keep my eyes forward. I watch the bright movie. I do not trust my face.
I had thought being a brother meant standing between her and the world.
I had thought being a man meant feeding and protecting and never showing what it cost. I did not know until this afternoon how much of either job was just this.
Sitting in a warm bed with two people who loved me.
Letting them see me. Not flinching while they did.