by Dianne Drake
“More like a hole in the wall,” Maggie commented as she sipped her hot tea. “Barely big enough for the two of us.”
“But I kept telling her my Aleksandra would figure it out. She would remember the cave.”
“And your Aleksandra has a good mind to throw that buzhenina away,” Alek said, smiling.
“Then I’ll have to go get another.” Dimitri reached over and took Alek’s hand and gave it a squeeze. “Or send you over by airplane since I don’t think I’m going to wander away too far for a while.” Letting go of her hand, he rubbed his broken arm, the only injury to either of them. It had happened when the snowmobile had tipped and the transmitter had broken. “And I don’t mind telling you, I think I’m getting too old for this. Maybe it’s time to settle down with a good woman and think about retiring in another ten or fifteen years.”
“Well, I think it’s time to go over and do rounds at the clinic,” Alek said, pushing herself off the floor. “As much as I hate to leave good company…” She looked down at Michael, smiling. “Duty does call.”
“Mind if I tag along?” he asked, following her out the door.
“Are you sure? I thought maybe you’d rather stay closer to your mother tonight.”
“She’s got Dimitri, and I’d rather stay close to you,” he said, taking her hand. “Tonight, tomorrow night, and the night after that…”
Alek didn’t say anything for another minute. Instead, she listened to the crunch of the snow underfoot, a sound she’d always loved, and loved even more now that her crunch was amplified by Michael’s. “I was so scared,” she said. “You always know it can happen, but I never…”
“One day at a time,” he said, stopping next to his rental Jeep, which was still sitting in the front yard of the clinic, with the light pole still crushed underneath it. “That’s the best any of us can do, Alek.”
“And even then, it’s not enough, is it?” She skimmed her hands along the side of his Jeep, and at the passenger’s door she stopped and turned to face him. “Will you stay, Michael? I know I don’t have the right to ask you, especially after the way I’ve been, but this is one day and I don’t want to face the next one without you. And you know I come with a whole set of problems…”
“Not so many as you think,” he said, cupping her face in his gloved hands. “Not so many that we can’t work through them together.”
“I’m always going to have a temper,” she warned. “And be stubborn and opinionated.”
“And I’m always going to be much better at charming people,” he countered, smiling. “And an occasional moose when it’s necessary,” he said, then pointed to one that was standing in the middle of the road, simply staring at them.
“As long as she doesn’t have love in her eyes, that’s fine with me.”
“But do you, Alek?’ he asked seriously. “Do you have love in your eyes?”
“I did, the first day you walked across the lecture stage in Seattle. You just took my breath away, Michael. I mean, you had the same passion I did for wilderness medicine, and even from the back row I could hear it, see it. Everything I felt for you got tarnished a bit, but it never went away, because I think I probably loved you then, or at least had a crush big enough to turn into love, and I do love you now. I’m a little afraid of it, and I’m not very good at it, but, no matter what, I’ll always love you.” Saying the words wasn’t so tough as she’d thought it might be. No fear of rejection, no fear of anything except spending a life without him.
He pulled her roughly into his arms. “And the past is the past, Alek? No going back there?”
“As far as I’m concerned, there’s only future, which is going to start…” She wiggled out of his embrace, pulled up her coat sleeve and looked at her watch. “In about ten minutes.”
“What happens in ten minutes?” he asked.
“It’s going to take me ten minutes to do my rounds then after that, Doctor, I do have one issue left to resolve. It’s a dreary little condition called…” She pulled him down to whisper in his ear. “Virginity. Is there something in your little bag of wilderness medicine that will cure it?”
Michael chuckled as he pulled her back into his arms. “Not in an igloo, I hope!”
Six months later
“I can’t believe all the space!” Alek exclaimed, stepping into the brand-new surgery. “It’s incredible. And the new patient wards…What you’ve done here, Maggie! It’s amazing!”
“Four doctors practicing in one hospital needed more space,” Maggie said. “I told Dimitri from the start that I was going to expand the place if he intended keeping me here, and that’s when there were three of us. Of course, I hoped that once you and Michael met—”
“To which I told her absolutely no,” Dimitri interrupted, then chuckled. “No to the extension, not to Michael and Alek. I thought that sounded like a pretty good idea. But when Maggie talked about all these additions and I refused, she sent me that damned check for the contractor anyway.”
“And when he refused, I knew he meant business,” Maggie supplied. “But I told him that was the only way he was going to get me to Alaska permanently. He had to take the offer. And I kept it a secret because I knew a certain very possessive member of my family would be totally opposed to having me start a new life and I really was trying to be quiet about working it out, which, apparently didn’t work out. But that turned out to be a very good thing.”
“She’s a mean one when it comes to negotiations,” Dimitri added, scowling. “Wants her own way, gets grumpy when she doesn’t get it. And opinionated…Dear lord, the woman is full of opinions.”
“And my opinion now is that we should get on with the party,” Maggie said, blowing a kiss to Michael. “Now that we are officially four instead of three, and Michael is here for good, instead of flying up whenever he could get away, or Alek flying down whenever she could. So it’s time to celebrate.”
“Five,” Alek said quietly.
“Five what?” Dimitri asked, arching his bushy eyebrows.
Michael leaned to give Alek a kiss, then straightened up and said, “My mother said now that we’re officially four instead of three, but it’s actually five instead of three.”
“At last!” Dimitri boomed. “My daughter is giving me that grandchild at last.” He chuckled. “Of course, I knew that. What good father doesn’t know when his daughter is pregnant? She glows, like my Aleksandra has for the past weeks. Glows, looks happy, smiles.” He pulled a piece of paper from his pocket and handed it to Alek. “A little gift for the celebration,” he said.
Alek opened the paper and read the words. At first they didn’t sink in, but then… “You’ve adopted me?”
“Much too late,” he said seriously. “I should have done it when you first came to live with us, but I…I never got around to it.” He would never speak a word against his wife, which was the way it should have been. “It would have made your life better, I think. And after Olga was gone, I thought you were too old for such a thing. Then Michael and I had a little father to future son-in-law talk the day you were married and, well, it’s only a token, but you are my daughter, Aleksandra, in every way that a man could have a daughter. And I hope this doesn’t seem like a silly gesture from a foolish old man to finally make it official.”
“Not silly.” Alek sniffled back a tear, and smiled first at Michael, then Dimitri. “And if I have a son, I suppose you want me to name him Dimitri?”
“Dimitri Michael, Michael Dimitri. Either way is good.”
Maggie gave Dimitri’s arm a meaningful shove. “We’ve got people waiting for gouryevskaya kasha,” she said, heading toward the door. “And buzhenina.”
Dimitri turned to Alek. “You fixed buzhenina?”
She shook her head and pointed to Michael.
“You fixed buzhenina?” he asked Michael.
“And pelmeni with draniki,” Michael said, giving his wife a wink.
Dimitri opened wide his arms. “Son!” he boomed. “It’s
good to have you home.”
Michael wrapped his arm around Alek’s waist and pulled her close to him. “And it’s good to be home.”
“It’s good to be home,” Alek whispered, placing her hand over Michael’s as he laid it on her belly. “So very good.”
ISBN: 978-1-4603-5873-3
EMERGENCY IN ALASKA
First North American Publication 2006
Copyright © 2006 by Dianne Despain
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