Page 58 of Babies for the Boss
21
MOLLY
The light is toobright to go to it.
Instead, I shut my eyes tighter. Doesn’t matter, though. It comes through my eyelids before I’m fully conscious. I’m aware of it for what feels like a long time before I’m aware of anything else—before the sounds, the low, persistent hum of equipment, and the distant murmur of voices and the acoustic texture of a large institutional space doing its quiet, ceaseless work.
Before the feeling, which arrives in increments, a full-body inventory of sensations that are not pleasant and range from a dull generalized ache to a sharper insistence across my chest and shoulders that sharpens further when I try to take a deeper breath.
Before the memory.
Pieces arrive without regard for narrative order. Flowers. I wanted flowers. I needed something new and living, and I went with Vet to get it.
The babies.
I try to sit up, and my body registers a formal objection in the form of a pain that starts at my sternum and radiates outward in a way that makes sitting up both difficult and inadvisable, and I make a sound I didn’t intend to make, and then there are hands. They’re careful, immediate, the hands of someone who has been waiting for exactly this moment.
“Easy.” Igor’s voice. Low and controlled, the voice of a man who has been keeping a great many things in order through sheer application of will. “Don’t sit up yet. Give yourself a moment.”
I open my eyes the rest of the way and find him—Igor Tabakov, my husband’s sovetnik, a man I have spent months learning to read, standing here with his hands on my shoulders until he’s satisfied I won’t budge much. He looks tired, like a man running on something other than sleep, but his eyes are alert and fixed on my face.
“The babies,” I say. My voice comes out rougher than I expect, abraded at the edges because my throat hurts. “Igor. The babies?—”
“Are fine.” He says it immediately, before I can finish or spiral. “Both of them. The doctors confirmed it. You were not shot—the airbag deployed on impact, and you lost consciousness from the force of it, but there was no penetrating injury. You have bruising across your chest and shoulders, a mild concussion, and you were knocked out. But the babies are fine, Molly.” He pages the doctor.
The relief that moves through me is so complete and so physical that it takes my breath, which hurts, which I don’t care about at all. I press one hand to my abdomen—carefully, over the thin hospital blanket—and breathe through it and feel the relief settle into something that is not quite calm but is the shape of calm,is what calm looks like from the outside when the inside is still trembling.
“Okay,” I say. A fog rolls into my brain from the relaxation that hits.
The doctor enters my room. “It’s good to see you awake, Mrs. Drakov.”
“Drakov? I?—”
Igor gives a subtle head shake, like I’m supposed to play along.
But I don’t know what I’m playing. “Um, my friend tells me everything is okay with the pregnancy.”
He smiles, and damn, he looks too young for this work. “Everything is great, actually. The fetuses are strong and healthy.”
“I believed you,” I tell Igor. “It’s just… it’s?—”
“Better when someone in a lab coat says it?”
I nod, and abruptly, something else hits all at once. “Is Vet okay? You said I wasn’t shot, but… Is she—how bad?—”
Igor’s face does something I have not seen it do before. He is a man of immense and practiced self-control. But not today. A tightening around the eyes, a shift at the jaw, the face of a man holding something that is heavier than his usual composure can fully account for.
He doesn’t say anything for a moment. He doesn’t have to.
“No. Please no.” My chest threatens to crumple from the inside.
“She didn’t survive the shooting,” Igor says, and his voice is even with an effort I can hear. “She was hit twice before the vehicle was rammed. She maintained consciousness long enough to call for emergency services and to call Pavel. She—” He stops. Starts again. “She was professional until the end. She always was.”
Suddenly, everything is wrong. This bed. The sheets I hadn’t noticed. The monitors and their incessant beeping. The light in the room is too white and too steady, and the equipment hums its low, indifferent hum, and I lie in the hospital bed with the bruising across my chest and my hands pressed flat against the blanket, and nothing is okay. Tears well in my vision, and I don’t pretend otherwise.
Vet was black coffee and the deli on Forty-Third and the one-second almost-smile and the pink donut box and the way she said “da” when she was agreeing with something she found obvious. She was the gun she aimed at Carrie Ann’s head on my wedding day, without hesitation, to protect me. She was the things she told me over sandwiches—the wetwork, the operations, the careful sentences that covered a great deal of territory without mapping it explicitly—and the way she sat beside me in the exam room when Dr. Okafor said the wordtwins, and said “ah” in the tone of someone for whom one word was sufficient.
Vet was my friend. And she died because of me.
