Chapter 4 #2
“I don’t know. My husband works all the time, I never see him. I’d rather stay here in our home than join the hordes of people crossing the border, carrying their lives in garbage bags.”
“It’s dangerous here now,” Sasha warned her. Her arm was proof of it, but the woman didn’t seem inclined to leave.
“They said it would be over soon, but it doesn’t look that way.
Several buildings near ours have been bombed and burned to the ground,” she said, and Sasha could guess that she lived in an expensive neighborhood but didn’t ask.
It didn’t matter, rich or poor, her patients were all the same to her.
She felt the same way about the babies she delivered.
She glanced up to check on her patient. Sasha was wearing magnifying glasses with thick lenses for the delicate work of stitching up the woman’s arm, and she noticed that the woman was crying again.
“Am I hurting you?” Sasha stopped and looked instantly worried. She had given her a shot to numb the area, which obviously wasn’t working, but the woman shook her head, and tears continued to roll down her cheeks. She brushed them away with her good hand.
“No, it’s fine. It’s just sad seeing all these people, so devastated and so frightened.
I’ve been going to the bomb shelter near us late at night, and it’s such a mess.
There’s nowhere for people to go. My husband works late so I’ve been going alone.
Sometimes he doesn’t come home at all,” she said, as Sasha continued to stitch her.
“I think he has a girlfriend,” she said, and Sasha was startled that the woman was confiding in her.
“It’s all right, I don’t care if he does,” she said.
“Our marriage has been dead for a long time. We’ve been disappointed in each other.
We have nothing in common but our son. I’ve wanted a divorce for years but maybe I’m too old to meet someone else now, so I stay, and sometimes I hate him for it.
I should have left him years ago,” she said.
“Maybe I should leave and start a new life somewhere else, but things are such a mess now.” She seemed confused and unhappy and depressed, and angry at her husband.
Her feelings were a luxury right now, in the middle of a war, with people dying, but Sasha felt sorry for her anyway.
She obviously needed someone to talk to, and Sasha was a compassionate person.
And all of a sudden, the woman looked at Sasha strangely, as though she’d seen a ghost. “My husband works here, he’s a doctor. Maybe you know him.”
“Even if I do, everything you’ve just said to me is confidential, and I’m sorry this is a hard time for you.
Maybe when the war is over, you can sort things out.
” Sasha thought the woman seemed lonely, and disappointed in life.
She was about to say something else to her when she saw Anton hurrying toward them from far down the hall, and she had a strange thought.
Her patient was staring at her, with an odd expression.
“I’ve heard that he’s been seeing someone.
It’s not the first time. I think she’s a doctor and works here too.
” Sasha and the woman with the cut arm stared at each other, as Anton arrived where they were, the woman on the gurney and Sasha standing beside her.
There had been no free exam rooms to sew up her arm.
Anton looked extremely uncomfortable when he saw them together and Sasha suddenly suspected the woman was right.
It was entirely a quirk of fate, an oddity of war that had brought them together.
“I see you’ve met my wife,” he said through clenched teeth, and Sasha looked shocked.
“What happened to your arm?” he asked the woman, with very little visible sympathy.
He had been dealing with patients with horrendous shrapnel wounds from the bombs that had exploded, and half of them had died.
They were too severely damaged to survive their injuries.
“It got cut by a big piece of falling glass when one of the windows broke,” the woman said, still glancing at Sasha, certain of who she was now. She could just feel the intimate vibe between them, without their saying a word to each other. She knew Anton well.
He looked at Sasha then with a dismissive nod.
“Thank you, Doctor. I’ll take over from here.
You did a nice job.” He turned to his wife then.
“You’re lucky, Iryna, you won’t have a scar, thanks to her.
” Or a husband, Iryna was thinking, but she didn’t dare say it, and she doubted that it was the young doctor’s fault if she was right.
Anton had been philandering for years, but this woman didn’t look like his usual type.
She wasn’t glamorous or sexy. She looked like a normal person and a nice woman who cared about people and her patients.
Iryna couldn’t tell if she cared about Anton.
They were being very professional, but she could still feel that telltale intimacy between them, no matter how formally they spoke to each other.
Something in Anton’s eyes told her the truth.
Sasha gently put a hand on Iryna’s knee and looked her directly in the eye.
“Please don’t be concerned about the matter you spoke to me about.
” And then she turned to Anton. “Thank you, Doctor.” Then she left and picked up another chart at the front desk.
A little boy had cut the sole of his foot.
She was busy with him for the next half hour, and Anton came to find her when Iryna was ready to leave.
She had grilled him about Sasha, but he hadn’t admitted anything.
He never did. In his opinion, it was none of her business.
They hadn’t had sex in ten years, and what he did with his private life was none of her concern.
There was no love left between them, long before now.
“Oh my God, Sasha, why didn’t you turn her over to someone else?”
“There was no one else, that’s why I came down here to help with the small stuff. I didn’t know there was a problem. I didn’t pay attention to the name on her chart.”
“Well, next time, look,” he said, his voice tense. It had been an awkward moment between the three of them, although Sasha didn’t give it away.
“Oh, do you have other wives?” she asked him. “I’ll recognize this one if she comes back.”
“She likes you. I didn’t admit anything, but she has some kind of sixth sense.”
“That’s nice of her,” Sasha said, rattled by the experience.
Anton was her first married lover, and his wife would have been justified being furious at Sasha, she was right, Sasha was the girlfriend, and they were a good pair and a comfortable fit, better than he was with Iryna.
Iryna looked like an unhappy woman, a demanding one, and a snob.
She didn’t like being stuck in the emergency room with what she considered the lower classes.
But the war mixed them all in together, and the rich got as injured as the poor.
The difference was that the rich could find a new home or buy one, while the poor had nowhere else to live, had no access to money now, and wouldn’t be able to buy a new home when the war was over.
Iryna could do all of those things, thanks to her successful husband.
Iryna loved luxuries, and Anton suspected she was staying with him because she loved their big apartment, not because of him.
Whatever Sasha did, it was for him. She was only in the ER to help him.
She had no material agenda or social ambitions.
The idea of Anton’s wife and his girlfriend standing a foot away from each other, talking, was way too dicey for Sasha.
She thought Iryna was a very attractive woman.
She wasn’t warm but she must have been beautiful when she was younger.
Her unhappy expression now canceled out her good looks.
She had been unhappy for so long that her face had set in a look of bitter misery. She looked as unhappy as she was.
Iryna got off the gurney in her high heels.
They were French and cost a fortune. Everything she wore did.
Sasha was wearing running shoes and scrubs with her hair in a big clip.
They were both blond but looked nothing alike, and had entirely different dispositions.
Sasha always sunny, and Iryna stormy, always spoiling for a fight, and she got one if Anton was tired and not in the mood to deal with her.
He told her to take ibuprofen when she got home. He couldn’t waste painkillers on her, they needed them for severely injured patients, and she wasn’t one, although the cut on her arm was deep.
He drove his wife home and dropped her off.
“Will you be late?” she asked him pointedly, and he nodded. He was planning to see Sasha after work.
“Yes, I will,” he said, almost jutting his chin out in defiance and guilt, signs Iryna recognized immediately. They weren’t new to her.
“And now I know why,” she said superciliously, feeling clever for having guessed. Neither he nor Sasha had admitted anything, nor denied it.
“There must be a hundred doctors in this hospital, Iryna. I could be involved with any of them, if I had the time and the energy after working twenty hours a day right now.”
Iryna trusted her instincts. “I think I’m right. She seems like a very sweet girl and a kind person. She did a good job on my arm,” she said generously. She had actually liked Sasha and could easily see why Anton did. Sasha was gentle and compassionate.
“You should have called me. She has other patients to see, war injuries.”
“You have more important things to do than sew up my arm,” she said bluntly, looking him in the eye. “Does your whole department know?”
“No one knows, and that’s not an admission of guilt. It’s no one’s business what I do, and with whom. Not even yours. We haven’t had an intimate relationship in years.”
“I’m still your wife,” she said haughtily.