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Adrian snorted. “Not afraid of anything, was he?”
I shook my head. “He’s always been strong.” Without warning, my eyes began to sting, like they did before a good cry. I blinked, trying to force the tears back. “I feel like I’ve made him more paranoid since all of this started because I didn’t want to lie to him about what was going on.”
Adrian’s hand touched my knee, and he squeezed softly. “That’s not a bad thing,” he said soothingly. “It would be scarier for him to not know what was happening around him, don’t you think?”
I shrugged. “Maybe.” Our eyes met and held. “Shouldn’t I be protecting him from this stuff?” I asked. “Isn’t that what a good mother would do?”
Adrian didn’t offer platitudes. Instead, he squeezed my knee again. “I think a good mother does what she can to prepare her child for the world, and I think that’s what you’ve done with Elias. You’ve been in a shitty situation since moving to the US, and he’s sick. If he didn’t know the realities he was faced with, I think he’d be lost. And there’s also a chance he could get really hurt because he didn’t understand how to be safe and careful.” He leaned forward and kissed me, soft and sweet. “You’re a terrific mother, Nataliya. I knew that the day I met you.”
Melt me into a puddle, I thought nonsensically. But it was accurate to how I felt, how I wanted to fall into him. “Are you full?” I asked, looking down at our impromptu picnic.
His lips curved into a smirk. “I could be,” he said. “Did you have something?—?”
The phone rang, and the mood changed abruptly. He reached for the cell on the bedside table and pressed Talk. “Pierce,” he said. Whoever was on the other line spoke for a moment, and then Adrian held out the phone to me. “It’s Sam.”
I practically snatched the phone from him. “Sam? What’s up?” It wasn’t time for my call with Elias, so something must be wrong.
“I have a little man who needs to talk to you.” Sam’s voice was soft and kind, but I could hear the tension beneath it. “We went to the hospital this morning for some tests, and it was a little rough for him.”
“Put him on the phone, please.”
There was a pause, and then I heard a watery “Mama.”
“Sakharok,” I soothed. “What’s wrong?”
The little boy burst into tears. “I hurt,” he whimpered, and I knew at once what was wrong. We had never been apart, so he had never been without me when he was hurting. I had always taken care of him, but at the moment, that comfort was gone. It didn’t matter that he knew where I was, or even that he’d told me to go. All that mattered was that I wasn’t there when he needed me.
“Badly, sakharok?”
He sniffled. “No,” he admitted, but he sounded so angry. “But I wish you were here.”
“I wish I was there too,” I said. “I miss you.”
“Then, why haven’t you done anything yet? Why are you waiting?”
It was a question from a child in pain who had no concept of what he was saying…but it struck me directly in the heart. Hadn’t I been thinking of this as some kind of vacation? What did I even need a vacation from? What kind of mother was I to abandon my child to shack up in some motel room with a man I barely knew?
Self-reproach bubbled in my stomach. “We’re waiting until it’s safe,” I said. “You made Adrian promise that we would both come home safe, right?”
More sniffles, but I could hear that Elias was calming down. “Right.”
“He’s trying to live up to that promise,” I explained. “We can’t do anything until his team gets here, and they got held up. As soon as it’s safe, we’ll do what we need to do, and then I’ll come right back.”
Elias didn’t say anything for a long time, just held the phone to his ear as he whimpered. I murmured soothing nonsense things to him, like I would have done if I had been there. “I’m tired, Mama,” he said, finally all cried out.
“Go lay down, sakharok. I’ll call you first thing in the morning.”
“Okay…I love you.”
My arms ached to hold him. “I love you too.” There was another pause, and then Sam came back to the phone. “How bad is he?”
“I think he’s exhausted,” Sam said. “We did initial testing today, so he had blood drawn and a physical exam done at the hospital. I tried my best to hold his hand through it, but he definitely missed you.” He must have been terrified, I thought.
“I appreciate you being there,” I said. “I’ll call in the morning and check on him again.”
“And I’ll call if anything changes here,” she promised.
We hung up, and for a split second I wanted to hurl the cell phone at the wall. The well of frustration in my gut was deep, and I didn’t know what to do with it all.
