Fortune (22 page)

She swallowed, bit her lip. He thought he saw her throat work a little. Was she going to cry? His hands stilled on the rope.

“Please talk to me,” he said. “For once, just say what’s on your mind.”

“I was just talking to Sophie…yesterday…” Again her lips trembled.

“About what?”

“She said you loved me. She said she knew it.”

He smiled softly. Any other girl would have been gooey over it. Kat looked about ready to spit. “Of course I love you,” he said. “Surely you knew that. I’ve never said it because…because of how you are. Because I knew it would upset you. But you had to know.”

“I don’t know what I know.”

He touched her cheek softly and her eyes closed. “You always say that. But I think you do know.”

She started to struggle then. Her hips twisted and her arms pulled in their weblike rope bonds. “Please untie me.”

“No.”

“If we were like them, with a baby, all married and stuff,” she said angrily, “then you couldn’t do this anymore. This stuff you love so much. You couldn’t get naked and tie me in knots—”

“It wouldn’t matter.”

“And fuck me whenever you want and…and have your friends come over and—”

“Kat. It wouldn’t matter. I would be happy just to be with you, just to love you. I love you.” He leaned over her where she twisted on the floor. “What’s really wrong? What are you really upset about?”

“It’s just…I’m just…” She came to rest from her struggles, her chest heaving in her exertions. The rope slid across her taut nipples. “I’m afraid I’ll die without ever really knowing what I want. Without knowing who I am.”

“Who are you then? Someone different than the girl I know? Tell me then, if you’re someone else. Who are you? What are you like?”

“I don’t know. That’s the problem. I’m just like my father. I’ve been pretending to be someone else for so long, I’ve completely lost who I am. I’ve played all these roles that aren’t really me for so long,” she wailed, looking up at him.

“What do you mean? What kind of roles?”

“I don’t know. Wayward daughter. Mean sister. Club girl. Submissive. Slut.”

“You mean you aren’t really a slut?”

She responded to his joke with a gaze like poison. “Untie me.”

“I’m kidding, Kat.”

“Let me go. I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to talk about this.”

“I know. Believe me, I know. But we’re going to talk.” He held the edge of the rope hard in his fist, mid-tie, not letting her unravel the progress he’d made so far, not letting her get away. “Why do you play all those roles if it makes you unhappy?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Think about it. To fulfill people’s expectations? To hide?”

“I don’t know! Untie me. Please!”

“Okay, answer me one thing first. Are you playing a role right now? Drama queen?” His voice sounded harder, angrier than he wanted it to. She looked up at him and burst into tears.

“Please untie me.”

Ryan relented, starting to untie the knots with shaking fingers. “You know,” he said in a harsh tone. “Kat…you know…”

“I just don’t know how to love you,” she cried out. “I’m scared.”

“I’m scared too,” he snapped. “I don’t know if the love I feel for you will ever be returned. Because you overthink everything and you expect the worst in everything. And I’ve folded eight hundred and seventy eight cranes in the hopes that you might change, that you might get brave enough to love me anyway.” He unraveled the rope from her, feeling numb and defeated. He didn’t look at her face, at the tears that devastated him, the tears he didn’t know how to stop. “I thought if I just loved you enough, everything would work out for us. I wish I knew the answers, Kat. I wish I knew—” He undid the last knot with a jerky movement and pulled the rope away from her.

“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 best-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.