Page 91 of The Mad Don
I wipe my face, and the machine behind me starts to shriek.
I spin. “Nurse — nurse!”
They come fast and push me back out into the corridor, and the door swings shut, and I’m pacing again, my hands shaking, when Christov comes around the corner with a bag of fruit he’d gone out to buy.
“What’s wrong?” He drops the bag and pulls me into him. “Yana, what happened?”
“His machine — he started jerking; something’s wrong?—”
“It’s okay. Breathe. It’s okay.”
Even shaking, even with my heart in my throat, the habit holds. “This is Max,” I tell him. “My friend. Max, my brother, Christov.”
The doctor comes out.
“Good news,” he says, and I stop breathing. “His vitals have come up suddenly. His recovery may be much faster than we thought. It’s not as bleak as I told you.”
I wipe my face. “Really? You’re sure?”
“I’m sure. He should recover. We’ll be taking him off the ventilator soon.” He nods toward the door. “You can go in. But keep it calm. Don’t stimulate him.”
“Thank you. Thank you —” I turn and throw my arms around Max.
“Go on,” he says, smiling, nudging me toward the door.
I go to the door and stop with my hand on it. I want a future with Lucia and me well, and Christov safe, and no one left to take any of it from us.
I want it so badly it aches. I push the door open and go in to him.
* * *
I come to the hospital every morning to clean him. He is unconscious, but he doesn’t need all the wires anymore. I wipe his face, his hands, the places the bandages don’t cover. I’m careful around the dressings on his back. He’s thinner than he was. The hard, certain body I fought in a parking lot and a warehouse has gone lean under my hands.
Christov sits with me in the afternoons.
I watch him while he talks, and I keep waiting to find something changed in him, and I don’t. Fifteen years and he’s still the same. Loyal and soft-hearted under the hardness the world put on him. He laughs at his own jokes the way he did when he was ten.
“They were good to me,” he tells me. “The family that took me in. Italian. They trained me up. They were going to make me a son of the house eventually.” He turns an apple in his hands. “They were looking for you too, you know. I asked them to. But you didn’t exist anywhere. No papers, no name, nothing. You were impossible to find.”
“Kirill made sure of that.”
“I figured.” He sets the apple down. “Then Giovanni and Kirill came to the family and explained everything. The house was loyal to Giovanni, so they let me go. For a few favors.” He looks at the man in the bed.
I look at Giovanni’s face, and I don’t trust my voice, so I don’t use it. When I’ve finished cleaning him, I stand and stretch.
“Watch him,” I tell Christov. “I’m going to get groceries. I’ll make us all something and bring it back.”
“Go. I’ve got him.”
My phone rings on the way out. It’s Annika.
I step into the corridor to take it. I can hear them in the background: Lucia’s anxious voice, asking something, and Annika answering her low. Lucia comes on for a moment.
“Is he awake yet?” she asks. “Please, Yana, just tell me, is he —”
“He’s getting better,” I say. “Every day. He’ll wake up soon, I promise. Don’t worry.”
I don’t tell her he hasn’t opened his eyes since the courtyard. I won’t put that on her, not while she’s an ocean away and can’t do anything but turn it over in the dark.
