Page 38 of Babies for the Boss
I lie on the table and look at the two small unmistakable shapes on the screen and feel something move through me that has no single name and no clean edges. It’s not only fear, though fear is present. There’s wonder too, and a hint of trepidation that threatens to swamp me as it grows.
As they grow. Twins.
From the chair beside me, Vet is quiet for a moment. Then, very quietly and with something that might, on a different face, be called reverence, she says, “Ah.”
Which covers it about as well as anything could.
Dr. Okafor walks me through everything that needs to be said with efficient kindness, and I listen and ask questions that seem to come from some calm, functional part of me operating independently of the rest of my nervous system, which is occupied elsewhere. She prints things. She schedules follow-up appointments. I receive all of it and will process it later, when my brain has finished whatever it’s currently doing, which I estimate will take some time.
On the way out through the waiting room, the receptionist doesn’t make eye contact with us.
Outside, the cold hits me immediately, and the city comes at me all at once the way it always does, indifferent and enormous and completely unchanged by what just happened in that exam room. I stand on the sidewalk for a moment and pull my coat tighter and think about the fact that somewhere on the eighth floor of a building in Midtown there is a man who is going to need to know about this. And I have no idea how to tell him.
“Vet.”
“Yes.”
“I need soup.”
She flags a cab with the economical precision she brings to all physical tasks. “Then we will get you soup.”
The cab pulls up. I get in. The city slides past the windows, cold and bright and carrying on exactly as before, and I keep thinkingof Pavel. Our future conversation comes in many versions in my head.
I don’t know which one is best. I’m not sure it matters.
No matter how I tell him, I’m still pregnant with his twins.
14
PAVEL
The callto Chicago takes longer to make than it should.
Delaying won’t change what must be done. I know that. But all the same, I sit with the phone in my hand for a full minute before I dial.
The decision is made. It has been made since I watched Snigir’s face twist with glee at the thought of threatening Molly.
My hesitation tastes like grief, bitter grit in my throat. Grieving the loss of her now—while she still lives—is futile. It doesn’t change what I must do.
Sister Mary Patrick answers on the fourth ring. She was busy, and knowing her, she was busy doing something charitable. Her voice is exactly as I remember it—unhurried, warm.
When I met her, I was jealous of her. The peace she exudes. How does one attain such a thing? It’s not something I can buy—I’ve tried. But she accepts all things and is therefore not rattled by anything. As much as I try to portray someone with that coolness, I must try at it. It is an effort for me.
For Sister Mary Patrick, it’s like breathing.
“Pavel Strakov,” she says, and I can hear the smile in it. “It has been too long.”
“It has. I’m sorry for that.”
“You’re forgiven. You always are.” A brief pause, the comfortable kind. “You’re calling because you need something. You never call just to call, which we have discussed on several occasions.”
If she were anyone else to call me out that way, I’d snap at them. Instead, I sigh. “I need a favor. A significant one.”
She’s quiet in the way she is when she’s listening fully, a quality I noticed the first time I sat across from her in a church in Chicago twenty years ago, as a younger and considerably less composed version of myself, and found that I could not stop talking. I had walked into that church because I didn’t know where else to go.
I had beaten the wrong man.
My target’s brother—identical in build, identical in coloring, standing outside the same building at the same hour with the same dark coat and the wrong face. I did not know until after the beating. My ignorance changed nothing about the damage I had done and everything about the way I carried it afterward.
