My father's room is at the end of the second-floor hallway. The door is open a crack. I can hear the oxygen machine before I reach it, the soft rhythmic hiss, and under the hiss I can hear a voice, low and even, speaking Russian. Not my father's voice. My father has not had that much voice in him for the last month.
I push open the door.
My father is in the hospital bed they brought in two weeks ago, raised at the head, a cannula at his nose, an IV in the back of hishand. His eyes are closed. His mouth is open a fraction. His skin is the color of old paper and his breath comes in a slow, uneven pattern.
Viktor is sitting in the chair beside the bed.
He stands up when I walk in.
"Plemyannik," he says.
Nephew.
His face arranges itself into an expression of warm family concern that never quite reaches the eyes. He is sixty-two. My father's younger brother by four years. He has the same nose and the same jaw, and none of the same gravity. Viktor walks toward me across the room now with his hand out.
I take his hand out of formality rather than any sort of desire.
He clasps mine in both of his. He holds it a beat longer than is necessary. Trying to show power where he holds none.
"I came as soon as I heard," he says. "The accident. Kolya, are you alright? I told them, I said, send me a car, I will go to the scene, but Dmitri said an ambulance had already collected you."
"I'm fine, Uncle."
"Your arm." His eyes drop to my left bicep and he doesn’t mask the grimace before I see it.
"It's nothing."
"You are bleeding through the sleeve," he whispers it, like my father would be offended if he knew. I almost laugh.
I look down. I am. A small dark spot on the white. I shrug my jacket closed over it and I step past him to the bed.
"How long has he been like this?" I ask.
"Since this morning." Viktor speaks quietly behind me. "His nurse called me when she could not reach you. She called me because she knew I would come. She is a good woman, Lucia."
I don’t say anything. Instead, I let his words settle around me, unveiling themselves as the jibe he intended.
"I have been here since noon,” he continues, never able to allow silence to breathe. “I wanted him to have family with him, should the worst happen."
"Yes, Uncle. Thank you."
I sit down in the chair Viktor has vacated and take my father's hand in mine. He has lost a considerable amount of weight in the last six months, the bones of his hand now prominent beneath the almost translucent skin.
His eyes open.
He looks at me. It takes him a second to find me, and when he does, his mouth moves into something that wants to be a smile.
"Kolya," he says.
"Papa."
"You came." His voice is raspy and dry. I reach for the cup of water and straw.
"Of course I came," I say, gently easing the straw against his lips.
He takes an age to suck the water through the paper tube and swallow. "I heard there was an accident."
"I'm fine,2 I quickly say. “Mikhail stitched me up. Yuri is in surgery."
