Chapter 32
NORA
The oxygen tube has been in my nose for a week and I have started to hate the sound of my own breathing.
It's a wet rasp on the way in, a whistle on the way out.
The machine beside the bed counts it for me in green numbers that drop every time I doze off, drop low enough that a nurse comes in, turns me on my side, tells me to breathe like I mean it.
March light comes through the blinds in flat gray bars.
My chest feels like somebody parked a truck on it and walked away.
"Ninety-three," the nurse says, reading the green number, frowning at it. "We'd like ninety-five, Mrs. Radulov. You're working too hard for it."
"I'm trying."
"Try slower."
I try slower. The cough comes anyway, deep, black-tasting, and I bring up something I don't look at into the basin she holds. She rubs my back like Vera does and tells me that's good, that's the stuff we want out of you.
Smoke does this. They told me on night one. The lungs swell shut hours after the fire's gone, so the barn didn't quite kill me in the barn. It came for me the next morning, and the morning after that, my own body deciding too late that it had taken in something it couldn't handle.
I keep one hand on the curve of me the whole time. Twenty-one weeks. I haven't let go of it since they wheeled me in.
Dr. Anand comes with the portable ultrasound and a resident I've never met, a kid with a clipboard who looks at my chart instead of at me.
"How's the breathing?" she says. She's already reading the green number, so the question's for the chart more than for me, but I answer anyway.
"Like a wet straw."
"Accurate." She pulls the rolling stool over with her foot and sits.
"Lungs are clearing slower than I'd like and faster than they could be.
You did a stupid thing, running back into a fire at twenty weeks pregnant, and you're alive, so we'll fight about the stupid part later.
" She lifts my gown over the bump without ceremony. "Let's look at your tenants."
The gel is cold. It's always cold. She runs the wand low across me. The screen lights up gray and grainy. The room fills with that fast wet gallop, the one I've heard four times now, and my whole chest unclenches a notch even with the tube in my nose.
"There's a heartbeat," I say.
"There's a heartbeat." She moves the wand. Finds another rhythm, slower against the first, then layers a third under it, three gaits going at once, out of step, loud. "And there. And the one that hides."
The resident leans in toward the screen. "Doctor, is that."
"Give me a second."
She goes quiet. She works the wand back and forth across the gel, slow, her face doing the unbothered nothing it always does, except her hand stops being casual.
She measures. She freezes the picture and counts something with the cursor, twice.
The second time she sets the wand down in her lap and looks at me instead of the screen.
A cold finger goes down the back of my neck because Dr. Anand doesn't stop looking at the screen.
"Okay," she says. "I need you to stay very calm for me. Your oxygen drops when you don't, so I need calm, and I need you to hear me." She waits until I nod. "There are three."
The machine beeps. My green number falls.
"Three what?" I say. It's the stupidest thing a person has ever said. I know what. I've known since she first found three heartbeats on the doppler weeks ago, except she said heartbeats then, and a heartbeat is a sound. This is a number with a body attached to each one.
"Three babies, Nora." She says it plain, no softening on it.
"Triplets. There are three of them in there.
I've had a count of three on the dopplers since week eighteen and I wanted eyes on it before I said the word.
Now I've got eyes on it. A, B, and the one tucked behind A who's been making me work since the start.
" She turns the screen toward me and points with the cursor.
"That's a spine. That's a spine. That, behind, is a spine. "
I look at the gray. I can't read it. I've never been able to read these, it's all murk to me.
Then she traces it with the cursor and I see the third curl of bone behind the other two.
The floor of my stomach goes out from under me, and the machine beeps again because I've stopped breathing entirely.
"Breathe," she says.
I breathe. It comes out as a sound I don't recognize, half laugh, all water.
"Three," I say.
"Three."
"There's three of them."
The corner of her mouth moves, the closest she comes. "There's three of them," she says. "Congratulations. You're going to be very tired for the rest of your life."
I put both hands over my face. The tube pulls and I don't care.
I laugh into my palms until it turns into the cough.
The nurse comes in fast, and the resident backs up against the counter looking like he wants his mother.
The whole time under the cough I'm thinking three, three, there are three of them.
Isaak is forty miles south behind glass.
I can't call him. I can't get up, run down a hall, find him.
I can't do the one thing every cell in me is screaming to do, put my mouth next to his ear and say the word.
Dr. Anand waits the cough out. She hands me water. Then her face changes, the warm half-second gone, and she pulls the stool closer.
"Now the part you won't like," she says.
"Three at once is high risk. The textbook word is grand multiple, and it means your body is doing three jobs it was built to do one of.
With triplets you almost never go to term.
Most of these babies come early. Thirty-two weeks is a good outcome and a number I'd shake your hand over. Thirty-four would be a gift."
She doesn't blink. "I'm telling you now, at twenty-one weeks, because I would rather you be ready than surprised.
You're going to spend a lot of time being checked.
You're going to get tired in a way that scares you.
The smoke didn't help, so we watch you closer than I'd watch anyone else carrying three. "
"They're okay though." My voice cracks on it. "Right now, all three, they're."
"All three are measuring where they should." She caps her pen. "Right now you have three healthy tenants and two bad lungs. We fix the lungs. We keep the tenants cooking as long as we can. That's the whole job."
She writes it all down. Every measurement, A, B, the hidden one, in a doctor's careful hand on a sheet I can fold and carry. She tears it off and puts it in my hand. She knows exactly why. She's the one who said it weeks ago. You take it to him.
"Thursday's still Thursday," she says, standing. "You go when they spring you from here. He hears it from your mouth."
She leaves. I hold the sheet of paper with three on it. I look at the ceiling and I count, because there's nothing else to do with my hands. I get to three. I start again.
They let the visitors up. No force on this earth keeps my people in a waiting room past visiting hour.
I hear them before I see them. Hollis first, his boots, sixty years old and walking like every floor he's ever stood on was dirt.
Then a voice that is unmistakably Vera saying something in Russian that the front desk isn't equipped for.
Then the whole tangle of them comes through my door at once and stops dead.
The room is small and there are nine of them.
My ranch and my husband's household, in one doorway, looking at each other.
Hollis has his hat in both hands. Cruz and Dewey are behind him in clean shirts they don't own, which means somebody made them buy shirts to come see me.
Dewey's holding flowers from a gas station with the sticker still on them.
Maggie's there from Halo with her reading glasses pushed up in her hair, Marisol next to her with her eyes already wet.
And on the other side of my bed, like there's a line painted down the middle of the floor, my husband's people.
Vera with a covered pot she wasn't supposed to bring into a hospital.
Yuri white-faced and too young for this.
Dima with his hands in his pockets trying to look like he isn't scared.
And behind all of them, by the door, where he can see the hall, Lev.
Nobody says anything for a second. My ranch hands have never been in a room with men who do what Lev does. They can smell it on him. Hollis's eyes go to Lev and back to me, slow, working it out.
"Well," Hollis says finally, to me, turning his hat. "You look like hell, boss."
"I feel worse than I look."
"That's a comfort, because you look real bad." He comes to the bed, careful around the tube, and puts one dry old hand over mine. "We'd've come sooner. They wouldn't let but two of us up at a time and we couldn't agree which two, so we waited till the rule wore off."
"You bought shirts."
"Dewey bought a shirt. Cruz already had one." Hollis squints. "Don't make it a thing."
"I'm making it a thing."
Behind him Dewey thrusts the flowers at me, sticker and all. "They didn't have nothing good," he says, miserable. "It's a hospital gift shop in a gas station, basically. I got you the least dead ones."
"They're perfect, Dewey."
"They're half dead."
"Half alive," Marisol says, pushing past him. She's crying now, trying not to, losing. She gets her arms around my neck careful of the tube and says into my hair, "I hate you, I hate you, you ran into a fire, I'm going to kill you myself." I hold the back of her head and let her.
Over her shoulder I watch my two worlds stand on their own sides and not know what to do with each other.
It's Vera who moves first. She sets the pot down on the rolling tray like she owns it, peels back the lid.
The room fills up with onions, dill, and broth, real food in a place that smells like bleach.
She looks dead at Hollis, the foreman, the only other person in the room old enough to have buried people.