CHAPTER 19
Siena
It was a Tuesday. I had a list. Two hours at the hospital to sign out the last three patients still technically mine. Then the pharmacy on Court Street. Then home before dark, because that was the rule, and I had stopped arguing about the rule somewhere in the second week.
Oleg drove me. He had started talking to me about food, in the careful way of a man who has been laughed at. I had started asking questions to keep him going. He had opinions about lamb. He had opinions about restaurants I would never be able to eat in.
The hospital took ninety minutes. Renata hugged me at the board, which she has never done in nine years. She asked no questions at all, which frightened me more than the hug.
Then the pharmacy.
It sat on a corner with a bus stop outside it and a hardware place opposite and no reason on earth to be dangerous. Oleg pulled up on the near side. He got out first. He always gets out first.
I was four steps from the door when the van came up on the curb.
IThe van came from the right, fast, and it did not brake. It mounted the curb about eight feet from me. The side door was open before it stopped moving. A man half out of it. Dark coat. Both hands empty, which is worse, because empty hands mean they have come to carry a person.
I did not run.
I’d run toward a gunshot in a hallway. I’d knelt in a boy's blood. When a van came up on a curb at me on Court Street on a Tuesday afternoon, I stood there like a woman waiting for a bus.
Oleg hit me. He came across the pavement and took me off my feet, shoulder into my chest. He put me down behind a parked car with his whole weight on top of me. My head went into the wheel arch hard enough to white everything out.
Then a car horn laid on and held. Oleg shouted in Russian, and a woman shouted in English further off.
And then the van was gone.
Eleven seconds. Ivan timed it afterward from the hardware store's camera. Eleven seconds from the curb to the corner.
Oleg got me up. He had my arm above the elbow and he was talking the whole time and I couldn’t follow any of it. There was blood on my temple from the wheel arch, a stupid amount, the way scalps do.
"Doctor. Doctor."
"I'm fine. Oleg. I'm fine."
"You are bleeding."
"It's a scalp. It looks worse than it is." My voice came out completely level. "Get me in the car. Don't take the bridge, they'll have a second one on the bridge if they have any sense at all."
He looked at me for one second like I had grown another head.
Then he got me in the car.
I gave directions the whole way back. I did it in a flat, clear voice. I was right about the bridge. I was right about the second car. None of it was courage. It was the only thing left running.
We got in at ten past four. Kolya was in the courtyard before the car stopped, and the hall clock sat over his shoulder.
He came to the door of the car and stood there with his hand on the roof. After a full three seconds, he opened the door and got me out. He put both hands on my face and turned my head toward the light to look at the cut.
"It's a scalp," I said. "It's nothing. Kolya."
"Be quiet," he said in a voice I’d never heard from him, stripped back to the frame.
He carried me in. I told him not to and he did it anyway and I let him. Nine men in that hall watched their pakhan carry his wife past them with her blood on his collar. I did not care about a single one of them.
That afternoon was the house doctor and four stitches I could have done better myself. And Kolya against the wall of that room with his arms folded, silent, for forty minutes.
The next morning, I came down and there were two men at the front door instead of one. There was a man in the courtyard who had not been in there before. The car had been moved to the garage and a second car had appeared beside it, heavier, with the wrong kind of glass.
Koyla was in the kitchen with a cup he wasn’t drinking.
"No hospital," he said. "No pharmacy. Nothing on Court Street. Nothing in this borough. You go where I can put six men and I would rather you went nowhere."
"For how long?"
"Until it is finished."
"That's threeweeks."
"Da."
I was not angry.
I looked at that man across a kitchen where I once put him on his knees. He took my whole world down to about nine rooms. And every part of me that had fought for one inch of ground since I was sixteen sat down quietly. It let him do it.
I told myself it was tactics. It was true as far as it went. Somebody had come at me on a public street in daylight and the correct clinical response to that is to reduce exposure.
But I knew the difference between a reason and a permission.
The truth was that I had stood on a pavement with a van coming and not moved. And in that second a part of me understood that I had been holding a line with two hands and nothing behind them. And when he took the weight, I let him.
I never in my life let anybody take the weight.
"Say something," he said.
"All right."
He looked up. "All right?"
"All right." I picked up my coffee. "Nine rooms. Three weeks. I'll work from the council room. You'll bring me everything I ask for. And you will not decide on my behalf which parts of it I can handle." I met his eyes. "Kolya, I'm not doing this because I'm frightened."
"No?"
"I'm doing it because you're right." I drank some of it. "You should know how rare that is going to be."
The tension went out of his shoulders by about a degree, which on him is a man sitting down after a long time standing.
He came round the table and put his mouth against my hair, above the stitches, and stayed there. "Milaya."
"Mm."
"Thank you."
He did not say good, or sensible. Those are the words a man used when a woman he was protecting finally agrees to be protected.
He thanked me.