“You wish you knew what?” she asked in a tremulous voice.
He looked at her, twisting the useless rope in his hand. “How to not lose you. How to keep you from getting away.”
She reached out for him, an abrupt desperate movement and he drew her close. He felt her tears fall against his cheek and drip down onto his shoulder. “I don’t want you to go away, Kat,” he whispered hoarsely. “Not ever. Don’t worry about love, marriage, ever after. All those words. Just please, please try to understand how I feel about you.”
“I do.” Her fingers stroked the hair above his ears. “I feel it in my heart. My father told me once—”
The phone rang. Ryan kissed her, squeezed her tightly and they let it ring. He felt her relax, felt her open to him. Her tears ceased and transformed to soft sighs of pleasure.
A moment later, the phone rang again.
* * * * *
Ryan hadn’t been able to make much of Elena’s hysterical ramblings about Dmitri. It was part-Russian, part-English and part-gibberish. What he did understand was the gravity of the situation and the abject terror in her voice. He and Kat dressed and drove to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital where the Argounovs had taken over the waiting room. He left Kat with her sobbing sisters and went with Elena to talk to Dmitri’s doctor.
Kat’s father had been admitted to the hospital with a splitting headache. Brain scans revealed a glioblastoma multiforme, a cluster of aggressive tumor cells. It wasn’t an uncommon form of brain cancer but it was a serious one.
Ryan felt the doctor exaggerated Dmitri’s chances of survival. He knew the prognosis was actually very grim. Ryan struggled with his own dread and sadness privately, letting Elena and her children believe, just for a while, that Dmitri had a chance. And he did have a chance at a few more months, with radiation and chemotherapy. Or surgery, if the tumor was operable.
In the waiting room, Ryan explained the medical terms and procedures to the whole family as well as he was able. Like the hospital doctor, he found himself glossing over the hard realities, obscuring the true depth of Dmitri’s peril. They hung on every word, searching for hope and reassurance. Elena hugged him and sobbed against him. “Dr. Ryan, you give us so much comfort. You are very smart man, smart doctor. Brain doctor.”
Ryan tensed, waiting. It was Kat who suggested it first, with her big green eyes full of tears. “You have to do the surgery, Ryan. You’re the only one who can do it. I know you could save him. You’re so good at what you do.”
Ryan was already shaking his head but Elena grasped him with a new surge of hope.
“Yes, why do I not realize this? You can do his surgery. You are family. You must do it.”
“I can’t,” he said gently. “I don’t have privileges here.”
“We can have him moved to another hospital,” blurted Kat. “One of the ones where you do have privileges. I mean, this is your field, isn’t it? Brain tumors and stuff?”
“Yes, it is, Kat. But it’s not that simple.” His gaze pleaded with her, begged her to understand. Surgery may not even be an option, and if it is, it will be a highly risky procedure. Don’t you see? I don’t want to be the one who kills him. Don’t make me be that person. “Let’s wait and get more information,” he hedged. “They’ll need to do some more tests and nail down exactly what treatment he’s going to need going forward.”
But the tests and hurried consultations revealed that surgery was necessary, and Ryan knew it would be best to have it done at his hospital, Boston General. Even worse, he knew he was the most qualified surgeon on staff to do it.
At home that night, Kat was racked by fears and worries. “We should have known,” she sobbed against his shoulder. “His headaches. His strange moods. We should have made him go to the doctor sooner.”
“No, Kat. It’s not your fault. These types of tumors appear and grow rapidly. They’re very aggressive—” He clamped his mouth shut but she’d already heard the truth in his voice. After all his careful efforts to preserve hope, she heard the truth of it. She stared at him.
“He’s going to die, isn’t he? He doesn’t have a chance.”
“There’s always a chance, Kat,” Ryan insisted through the tightness in his throat.
“No. Oh, no.” She didn’t believe his backpedaling. He wouldn’t have believed it himself. She bolted away from him, into the other bedroom where she kept her things. He thought she would slam the door, lock him out and grieve in there, but she didn’t. She returned a moment later holding out two rumpled cranes in her hands. One was the crane he’d folded from the paper placemat at the diner. The other was the one from her hospital room, the one he’d made from newspaper after she fell down the stairs.
“Here’s two more,” she said. “Show me how. Show me how to make them. I’ll help you make a thousand. Please, I need your wish.” She was pleading, as abject and desperate as he’d ever seen her. “I’ll give it back. I’ll return your wish and all that work you did, I promise, but I need it for my father. Please, Ryan!”
He looked at the worn cranes she clutched in her palm. What could he say to that?
He showed her how to fold them and in her panic she learned quickly. They weren’t as accurate and precisely folded as his, but he didn’t say a word. They bent over the small squares of paper until the wee hours of the morning, and with each completed figure Kat seemed to believe more strongly that the magic of the cranes would work. That the paper symbols might really have the power to bring fortune and grant a wish. Senbazuru. A desperate wish for a beloved father’s life. Before they were done, she’d extracted his promise to do the surgery.
When they finally went to bed she slept the sleep of the dead, but he lay awake a long time looking at the strings of one thousand cranes. At the placemat and newspaper ones at the very top of the very last string. Moments crowded his memory. Kat frowning up at him from a hospital bed. Kat fidgeting across from him at the diner, choking down the fat-free cream cheese. The look in her eyes the first time he’d tied her, when she gazed up at him with a crane in her mouth. The times he’d teased her, the times he’d comforted her. Moments of submission and moments of rebellion, moments of ecstasy. He thought of her laughter, thought of her life-filled family. Finally he succumbed to the grief and helplessness strangling him, and he wept.
* * * * *
Dmitri was moved to Boston General and his surgery was scheduled for Thursday. Ryan consulted with his team of doctors, trying not to let his personal feelings for the patient cloud his professional opinions. He still did his other work and went home in the evening feeling wrung-out and fragile, only to turn around and accompany Kat to Elena’s to sit and comfort her mother. Elena—bold, vibrant Elena—was struggling. Her natural ability to comfort everyone else was sorely needed now. She could not seem to comfort herself.
They all prayed. The house vibrated with endless, fervent prayers in Russian. Even the youngest children were subdued, not really understanding why the adults were so sad, but still affected by it. Ryan prayed too, in will if not in guttural Russian exhortations.
Elena prayed hardest of all. She seemed almost in a trance. The daughters questioned her, asking why she couldn’t tell them Dmitri’s outcome. That was her job, after all. But in this, she could not—or would not—see. She was too afraid to look, she explained on a sob. Ryan suspected she knew, but that like him, she chose not to tell. Just in case she didn’t know, he guarded his gaze from her. If she looked in his eyes she would see the future written there clearly enough.
Not that he gave up completely. It was his job as a doctor to expect miracles, to continue to press forward even if success was unlikely. He couldn’t operate on Dmitri as if the end was inevitable, because that would be a betrayal. But Ryan knew, even if Dmitri survived the invasive surgery, he would not be himself anymore. Even if he survived he would have to endure chemo, radiation… None of which would stave off the insidious astrocyte cells for long. Dmitri would not be giving Kat away at her wedding. Even in a b
est-case scenario, Dmitri would not see the leaves start to change in the fall. Ryan wanted to tell them all, warn them to say what they needed to say before Thursday, but their stolid Russian hope was too formidable. He couldn’t say the words.
Even with Kat he kept the secret. He let her believe there was hope because to do otherwise would hurt her too much. Afterward he would hold her and comfort her. If she didn’t blame him.
If they all blamed him he couldn’t live with himself. It was hard enough to do what he did, deal in procedures and prognoses that were, more often than not, based on a tilting fulcrum of chance and luck. The fortunate survived and the unfortunate didn’t. He lived with it every day. There was really no bargaining with errant human cells and he’d long ago stopped trying. But this was the first time in his career that he truly wished he could bargain something away.
But not her. He wouldn’t have given her up even for this. He let her have the cranes because he had to, but in his heart they were still all for her. For her soul, her heart, her happiness. And his happiness, which he truly believed was somehow tethered to hers.
All too soon Thursday arrived. He went into the surgery determined to do his very best work. If there was a way to save Kat’s father he would find it. He was prepared. He was stone. His hands didn’t shake as he patted Dmitri’s shoulder and murmured words he didn’t even remember to a man who wasn’t totally there. For a while the surgery went well and Ryan started to feel guardedly hopeful. But then things began to go not-so-well. He knew the moment he started to lose him and then his hands began to shake.
Again the sickening slide of helplessness. But I’m trying. I’m trying my very best. Why won’t this work? Dmitri began to seize on the table. The machines shrieked and beeped their inhuman warnings, as if Ryan wouldn’t know there was trouble without their prompting. He knew he was losing him. He knew.
The trauma team jumped in and Ryan was pushed to the side, to the outskirts of the drama. His role was done now. If it had been a normal surgery he would have left the room, gone back to his office and made notes. Unsuccessful. He would have enumerated the steps he took to excise the tumor, the advent of the seizures, the quadrant and locus of the fatal bleed. The wheres and whys. But not this time, not yet. This time he stayed and watched as if in a dream as they worked on his lover’s father. He watched Dmitri code, come back and code again. He watched until the team desisted, removed their gloves and called it. And still he stayed and watched as they sewed him back up. He wanted to apologize. He wished he had said goodbye to Dmitri before they put him under. He wished he had told him how much he respected him, that he was a good man with a treasure of a family. He wondered how he could go back in the waiting room and face them all.
He had to change into clean scrubs before he went to give them the news.
* * * * *
Kat sat hunched among her sisters and her mother. The husbands minded the children, shuttling them back and forth to the bathrooms and vending machines as needed. None of them spoke. The time for prayers and panic was over. For now, it was out of their hands. Based on the location of the tumors and the insidious nature of the particular type of cells, Ryan had put the likelihood of success—survival—at fifty-fifty. Kat knew with some sixth sense that he was inflating the actual chances. But she tried not to think of that. She tried to think of a thousand cranes, good fortune, a wish.
I wish, I wish. I wish for my father to smile at me again, to call me princess just one more time.
As soon as the door opened, as soon as she saw Ryan’s drawn, blank affect, her wishes disintegrated into dust. Elena’s soft, choked sob was somehow worse than her sisters’ howls of mourning.
“I’m so sorry,” he said, spreading his hands. “I’m so sorry I couldn’t… We lost him. The tumor was too…”
His voice was tight. He shuddered a little, so slightly, but Kat saw it.
“He’s gone. I’m sorry. There was always a risk. The tumor was—” His hands fell at his sides, helpless. “I’m so sorry.”
Her sisters fell on Elena and wept. The husbands cried silently in that stolid manner men have, still tending the children with the robotic efficiency of necessity. A searing pain crippled Kat so that she couldn’t move. Gone. How could he be gone just like that?
Ryan still stood across the room, the deliverer of doom. The interloper. She knew she should go to him and tell him it was okay, that it wasn’t his fault. That he shouldn’t be sorry for trying to help them. Some impulsive realization reached her through all the pain and shock. Just as he turned to go, she flew across the room and caught his arm.
He looked down at her. There was a tension in the arm she held, a fathomless cast to his dark gaze. He cupped her face. “I’m sorry, doll. I tried.” His hand dropped away and he moved again to the door. “I can’t stay. I have to finish his chart.”
After he left, after they completed the excruciating exercise of saying goodbye to Dmitri’s body, Kat went home with her family. The house had a feeling of quiet unreality. As she walked through the rooms it felt as if she were trespassing in another family’s home. And Dmitri’s small TV room, with his worn recliner… No one could bear to go near it. His absence haunted them like a ghost.
Ryan’s absence haunted her too. He didn’t come, not even when it neared midnight. At last, Kat left to go find him. She found him sitting up on the side of his bed in darkness, in silence. She went to him, uncertain of his mood, but he turned and pulled her into a gentle, enveloping embrace.
He’d been drinking. She could smell it on him. “Are you mad at me?” she whispered.
“No. Of course not. Why would I be mad at you?” His words slurred a little. He frightened her this way because it was so unlike him to drink. She shrank away but he held her.
Kat’s head hurt and her eyes ached from crying. His somber misery dragged her down even deeper into sadness, like a weight on her heart. Bleak grief was choking her, drowning her, and Ryan, her buoy, was dark in the night. “I’m sorry I asked you to…” She couldn’t say it. “I—I shouldn’t have. I shouldn’t have asked you to—”
“You were right, Kat. It’s all bullshit.” His gruff, toneless voice startled her.
“What…what’s bullshit?”
“All of it. Love. Hope. Wishes.” He made a sibilant sound of frustration and then he laughed. “You know what it comes down to, Kat? Blood and physiology. Cells. Reality.” He groped her between the legs, an awkward aggressive pressure. She pushed away from him and he stood, dumping her from his lap. His arms rose at his sides and he stood over her like a furious dark angel. “This is it, Kat. This is what we have. And this stupid shit—”
He lurched for the cranes in the corner, the mass of strings alive with wings and delicate beaks. “Cranes. Luck. Good fortune. Bullshit!” His hands tore at the paper chains, stripping the glossy creations from their anchor, pulling them down, shredding them, crushing them. He spun on her. “You believed! When it suited you, you believed. What do you think now?”
Kat shook her head, speechless. She watched his fists close on the broken cranes in his hand and something inside her felt crushed and broken too. She backed away from the man she didn’t know, this man she didn’t recognize, and she ran.
* * * * *
Kat fled down the streets of Cambridge until she ran out of breath, until her lungs ached and then she walked, blowing convulsive breaths of condensation into the cold night air. She didn’t have her coat but she barely felt the weather. She welcomed the numbness. Her walk slowed to an amble. She stopped, finding herself in a familiar place.
She gazed up at the marquee of Masquerade. An effusive group of college-aged partygoers nudged past her and pushed her forward toward the ropes. One of the bouncers smiled at her. “Hey. Long time no see. You coming in?”
Kat looked down at herself, her jeans and tee, her hospital waiting room clothes. She didn’t even have her purse with her. “I don’t have ID,” she said, holding up her hands. Her voice sounded s
trange and robotic.
The other bouncer shrugged. “We know who you are. Come in out of the cold.”
They led Kat under the rope, comped her in. Their kindness resonated in the emptiness of her mood, made her want to cry some more. The darkness, the smoke and music crawled over her, coating her in a familiar film. How long had it been since she’d been here? Several months by now. It seemed like a lifetime. She felt out of place as she crossed to the stairs and climbed up to the balcony. She remembered the first time they’d talked there.
You’re monitoring my vices?
Should I be?
She remembered falling down the stairs and looking up to find him leaning over her. That was the first time she’d noticed that intensity in his eyes, the intensity he’d just turned on her in his bedroom, ripping down cranes and raging over… What? The helplessness of life. So many wishes unanswered. Even if you knew the future, like her mother, it didn’t make it any easier to cope with when it arrived.
The view from the balcony was different, so different now. Kat went to the restroom just before one but Marla wasn’t there. It was some other woman Kat didn’t know. Kat slunk out the door, having no money to leave a tip anyway, thinking of what may have befallen Marla. Car accident? Aneurysm? A particularly aggressive brain tumor like her father? The dance floor was crowded now, the music almost painfully loud. Kat pushed her way through the undulating throng, then looked up into the eyes of a guy she remembered, although she couldn’t recall his name. She ducked her head, changing direction, avoiding his grasping fingers, only to see another guy she’d been with once upon a time. She forced her way to the stairs, climbed to the balcony and huddled in the back corner, shaking with something like fear.
Fortune Page 17
