by Toby Neal
Dolf heard water splashing in the kitchen. Good, but not enough. He needed to cool down, and that meant a bath.
He dragged himself to his feet, and, gripping the handrail, pulled himself to the second floor, down the hall, and into an upstairs bathroom.
Like many of the older farmhouses they had seen, this one was equipped with an old-fashioned clawfoot tub. He turned on the shower. Thank merciful God, icy and refreshing water gushed out.
“You should have let me give you a sponge bath on the couch,” Avital scolded from the doorway.
Dolf dropped his boxers, his back still turned to her, and grinned ruefully over his shoulder. “I’m not sick enough to be able to get a sponge bath from you and keep my hands to myself.” The fever may have removed his verbal filters, but it hadn’t removed the way his body responded to the very idea of being naked and touched by her. He kept his back to her to hide that response as he climbed carefully into the tub, and sat under the fall of icy well water that cascaded over him.
That took care of his arousal.
After half an hour under the cold water, his body trembling, Avital took his temperature again. Every breath felt like he was trying to drag it through a straw. She frowned at the thermometer. “It’s only down a few degrees. You can’t stay in there forever. Let me help you out.”
Dolf’s perception was shifting. Things became very close, then very far. His feet, for instance, were a very long way from his head, but his hand, holding the side of the tub, was so close that he could see the pores, the tiny hairs on the back of it.
Avital helped him out of the tub, getting soaked in the process. She’d brought some bedding into the bathroom, folded it to make a pad, and covered it with a sheet. After drying him, she helped him lie down on the pad.
“We’re going to have to keep you cool, which means you’re going to be in and out of that tub a lot. I’m going to fill it up and keep the water cold. We might as well camp out in here as anywhere in this house, because I have to keep you hydrated.”
She handed him a glass of water. It chattered against Dolf’s teeth as he tried to drink. He was shaking hard now, vibrating from deep within as he heated up. His eyes felt hot as pebbles on a desert road at noon. In spite of drinking, his throat was dry, but even so he could feel his lungs filling with fluid, a strangling sensation.
“I just need to rest a little while,” Dolf rasped. “I’ll be fine.”
He closed his burning eyes, and fell asleep immediately.
It could have been hours or minutes later when he sank to the bottom of some kind of pond. He was deep underwater. Looking all the way up to the surface, he could see the sun shimmering on the top of the water in hypnotic patterns.
Dolf. Nando’s voice was right in his ear. Dolf opened his hot, painful eyes, but he was still underwater, everything dim and fluctuating around him.
Nando stood right in front of him. His twin was dressed how he liked to be on weekends—a Phillies T-shirt, loose nylon basketball shorts, and his favorite old sauce-stained white chef apron.
Dolf, don’t you know I meant for you to be with Avital?
Dolf shook his head. “I got that. But no. It’s not right. I wouldn’t do that to you, Nando. Besides, she doesn’t love me.”
Nando put his hands on his hips. The water around them made him blur and sway. I tried to make it as clear as I could that I knew that you loved her and I was okay with it. She loves you too, she’s just having trouble admitting it. You need each other, and the baby needs you both. I can’t believe you wasted all this time, and here you are, about to break her heart again by staying down here.
Dolf reached toward Nando. His hand drifted slowly through the thick syrupy water and passed right through Nando’s face. “I’m sorry. I’ll try to get back. I don’t want to make anything harder for her.”
You better get to swimming, then, bro. Nando pointed toward the surface.
Dolf’s feet were heavy as lead weights, his arms made of cement as he tried to swim. His lungs flickered with painful heat as he struggled to even get off the bottom. He made it a few feet and finally sank back down, bubbles escaping his mouth and darkness closing over him.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Avital
Dolf lay naked on the bathroom floor on the pad of bedding. Avital stood and dipped a washcloth into the half-full tub. The water was getting warm again. She wet Dolf’s brow and stroked his chest and belly with the soaked cloth.
It reminded her of when she had been sick as a child, throwing up with some common stomach virus. Her mother had made a nest in the bathroom for her, cozy but horrible, the cold tile beneath the soft bedding a terrible contrast.
Dolf’s skin was flushed and glossy with sweat. His muscles trembled, and his eyes rolled behind closed lids. She had no weapon against this virus but care, keeping his fever down and his body hydrated, hoping he could fight it off. His lips—those hard, beautiful lips—moved, forming incoherent words as his head tossed from side to side. “No, Nando, no. I wouldn’t do that to you. Besides, she doesn’t love me.”
She? Was he talking about Avital? He thought she didn’t love him, damn it! She’d taken too long to tell him, and now it might be too late!
Avital cracked the window, and the dewy, earthy scent of dawn blew in and flushed away the sickroom smell. Avital sat cross-legged on the floor next to him, her hand resting on his.
Nando’s illness had been different—he hadn’t gone in the first flush of fever, he’d gone from the secondary pneumonia over a week’s period.
When Nando grew quiet and finally appeared to rest, Avital had thought the worst had passed, but that’s when he’d slipped away. She wasn’t with him. She and Dolf were together, talking in the hall, when Nando left.
Avital rested her other hand on her belly. She could feel the small, hard swelling there. Nothing big or noticeable to others, but she knew her body. It had been almost the same since high school, and now there was something more.
She wore gloves, the rubber a futile barrier against this virus. She tore them off—she needed to feel Dolf’s skin. She touched his burning hot face, rough with stubble. His jet-black hair, longer now, curled in the humid bathroom. He looked more like Nando with longer hair, softer—though the weeks on the road had honed his features.
If Dolf slipped away, how could she go on?
Slipped away? What horrible, stupid denial. He was dying. He was being ripped from her, before she’d ever had a chance to express her feelings for him. She had been torn to pieces by Nando’s death, and she’d managed to put herself back together—but it had been Dolf who’d saved her, physically and emotionally. Avital’s pregnancy, small size and her compulsion to help others all threatened her survival.
She needed Dolf. But not just to survive, she needed him to live.
She needed him the way she needed food, water, and shelter. She needed him the way she needed red wine and laughter. She needed him because she loved him.
“I’ll try to get back,” Dolf whispered, his voice hoarse. “I don’t want to make anything harder for her.” Dolf’s face grew strained as he grimaced, his throat working, skin flushed with fever and some sort of internal conflict.
“Shhh, it’s okay.” Avital pushed his hair back from his forehead with the cloth, stroked his face and neck, set her hand over his heart. It was beating fast and hard—she could feel it pounding right through his muscled chest.
Avital lifted his arm and curled up next to him, resting her head on his shoulder. She closed her eyes. She was so tired.
Ever since her conversation with Penny, Avital had tried to find the right moment to tell Dolf that she loved him. Her mind was made up, but every time she tried to tell him, he’d turned away, more distant than ever.
Her pregnancy, rather than making him want her, seemed to have reminded him of his brother and the loyalty that had kept his love for Avital buried for so long. He’d worked hard for the Stuckies, avoiding her by helping Fred fix the fe
nces and put up all the hay for the winter, sleeping out in the barn as Avital had helped care for the children in the house.
Penny was a wonderful mother, kind and loving to all the kids in her care. She invited each one in to sit with her and the new baby—making sure they all had a chance to meet this new person, to understand that Penny’s love encompassed them all. No one would be pushed aside because of this new daughter.
That’s what it was for Avital; she didn’t love Nando less, there was room in her heart for both Dolf and Nando. There always had been. It had taken Penny’s gentle, maternal love to show her how big her heart really was.
Even as exhausted as she was, fear kept Avital from sleeping. What if she lost Dolf before he knew? Before she got to tell him that she loved him?
The time they’d wasted getting to this point made her stomach cramp.
“I can’t get back!” Dolf screamed suddenly, his voice a ragged, hoarse thread. His hand flew up and hit her, and his other arm struck the side of the tub. Avital sat up, getting out of the way of his flailing arms.
He looked like he was trying to swim. Swim back to her from wherever he’d gone.
Dolf’s arms crashed down like trees falling, utterly limp. He went very still, the struggle to breathe settling in to tiny, shallow reflexes. Avital recognized the way death stole over a living thing, stealing all animation.
“No, no!” Avital jumped to her feet and turned on the shower. Icy spray hit the water in the half-full tub and splattered out, droplets landing on Dolf. She grabbed him under his arms and hauled him up against her body, trying to lift him into the tub. He was heavy and burning, his chest barely moving.
The cold water would bring him around. It had to!
She slipped as she tried to pull him into the tub, falling in herself, her back smashing into the faucet as he landed on top of her. She cried out in pain, right into his ear.
No response. He was deeply unconscious.
Icy spray rained down on both of them as she cradled his body in her arms.
She was carrying his child. Biologically, it didn’t matter, would never be known whose child it was—but the baby was his. This baby would know Dolf as its father. This baby would be raised by him. His ruthlessness and warmth and love would surround them for all the days to come. He would die old and in bed, his hair white and his family around him.
Adolfo Luciano would not die here in this stranger’s bathtub!
Avital struggled and shifted until he was off of her. She positioned him under the flow of water and climbed out of the tub, dripping onto the pile of bedding. The pain in her back was nothing compared to the searing ache in her heart as she stared at his inert body, water sluicing over it, gray stealing the color from his skin.
She took a pulse against his throat, and felt nothing but the heat of the fever that was killing him. His chest had gone still. He had no pulse.
Avital screamed, the sound ricocheting off the tile in the bathroom and coming back to her sounding like a banshee—some otherworldly creature.
She got back into the tub, straddling Dolf’s body, the freezing water pouring down on both of them, sloshing around her thighs. “You come back to me! You don’t get to die. Do you hear me Adolfo Luciano! You don’t get to die! I need you!”
She turned off the tap and leaned her head against his chest.
Nothing.
Tin Man. An empty chest, heartless.
But it wasn’t true. Never had been true.
She folded herself over him. He was so big, filling the tub. She pressed her cheek over his heart and her hands held his shoulders.
“I love you. I’ve always loved you, Dolf. I just couldn’t figure it out, couldn’t understand how it could be true and not betray Nando. Please. Please don’t leave me!”
Avital knew what death looked like. She knew the stillness and the goneness. Her instincts told her that he wasn’t dead yet. Her medical training wouldn’t be the answer though. There was some other way of bringing him back. “Nando, wherever you are, help me. Please don’t let him leave me. I never wanted to need anyone like this, but it happened. I need him.”
The dripping of the water and her ragged breathing were the only sounds. She gazed at Dolf’s face. He’d lost weight with the stress of their travel, his features painfully handsome—beautiful. And he was starting to turn blue.
She reached up and placed her lips on his, cupped his face with both her hands.
“I love you for your protectiveness. For your relentless drive. For your generosity. I love you for the way you know how to touch me, for the way you pleasured me that one time I’ll never forget. I love you for all the sweet, gentle, kind parts of yourself that you hide so well. I will always love you, Dolf.” His face was loose, peaceful. No, this couldn’t be happening! “You have to wake up and love me back!” She slapped him hard, and his head flew to the side. His lip split, blood trickling from his slack mouth.
“I’m so sorry,” she sobbed, flattening his wet hair to his skull as she stroked his head. “I should have told you sooner. I was scared. I was a fool. But now you have to wake up, and forgive me.”
She needed to get them out of the tub to perform CPR. Avital climbed out and grabbed his arm, adrenaline rushing through her system to give her the strength she needed as she pulled, leaning back and using all of her weight. She managed to haul him up and tip him back out into the nest of blankets. She rolled him flat on his back.
She would do CPR until she dropped.
Avital did chest compressions, leaning over to blow into his open mouth, counting, counting, her hair hanging down, wet and straggly, dripping water onto him as it swayed with her movements.
It wasn’t working. He was gone!
“No, no, no.” Avital counted out the beats. “No, no, no, no, no!” She leaned over him again, held his nose, breathed into his mouth. Nothing. Tears streamed down her face, catching in her wet hair and plastering it to her cheeks.
She pounded on his chest, useless pathetic punches.
He was gone.
“I need you, Dolf! No!” She reared back and screamed at the ceiling. She was alone…all alone except for the child inside of her. “Dolf! I love you! Don’t leave me!”
Avital collapsed onto Dolf’s chest, wrapping herself around him, and let the grief crash over her.
Her heart was broken, cleft through the center, crushed and lifeless as the blue-tinged body in her arms.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Dolf
He heard something off in the distance but getting closer—a sound of pain and loss, like an animal dying in a trap. One time when the family was camping, he’d found a raccoon caught in one. The creature had wailed and cried, biting at its own paw, thin and starved from its ordeal. Pops had shot it, putting it out of its misery, and they’d buried the raccoon in the woods.
This was like that. Only deeper, uglier, terrible sobs that hurt to hear. Whoever was crying was in mortal pain.
He had to help, stop it somehow. Shoot the poor thing and end its suffering…but everything hurt, and he couldn’t seem to move. He was weighed down, couldn’t move his arms, and even breathing felt awful, fire ripping through his lungs with every shallow inhalation.
Dolf cracked his eyelids open with tremendous effort. The ceiling of the room he was in was old-fashioned pressed tin and painted white, a frosted glass fixture with a ball chain hanging down at its center. The bulb wasn’t lit, and he was grateful because even the small amount of moonlight falling through the window tortured his eyes. He turned his gaze downward to see what was crushing his attempts to breathe.
Avital’s red head was on his chest. Her soaking wet body was curled up on his torso as she clutched his shoulders, making those terrible rending sounds. She was lying fully on him, smothering him, weeping.
His right arm lay alongside his body and he willed it to move, focusing all his effort on that one recalcitrant limb. It shuddered and came loose all of a sudden, flopping over Avital�
��s back. Oh, she was warm, and he was so very cold.
He’d gone somewhere far away. The journey had extinguished the fire that burned him up.
Avital shrieked in astonishment. She heaved herself up, making him groan.
“Dolf! Oh, my God!” Her voice was husky from her rasping cries, her face white and blotchy, her eyes almost swollen shut. Snot dripped down from her nose, and her hair clung to her skull like a drowning victim, trailing over his chest. “You’re alive!”
She was so beautiful.
He nodded, the effort of speaking too great. She had been grieving for him.
“Did you hear all the things I said?” she asked.
He shook his head.
Avital lifted up and spread her legs and straddled him, taking the weight off his chest, but she didn’t get off him. Her body warmed him.
She felt so good.
Avital leaned over and took his face in her hands. Warm and gentle, loving and tender—he’d always imagined her touching him like this, that soft but passionate look in her amber-brown eyes. Maybe he was actually dead, and in heaven right now.
“I love you, Adolfo Luciano. I love you, love you, love you.” She kissed him, full on the mouth.
Dolf shut his eyes to soak in the sensation, her warm mouth on his, her hands holding his face. He wished he could raise his arms to embrace her but they refused to move, so he let her stroke his hair, kiss his mouth, stroke his chest with little loving pats. “I’ve always loved you from the beginning, in some way I couldn’t let myself know. I’ve always known you loved me too. And when Nando died…I just didn’t understand how I could love you both, how I could love you now without betraying Nando. But I realized back at the farmhouse that I’d said good-bye to Nando, and you were my future. This baby’s future. You’re this baby’s father, Dolf. You. And we both need you. So, start getting better right now.” Avital held his face firmly, and he could feel her gazing down at him, so he lifted the tremendous weight of his eyelids and looked into her face just inches from his.
