“Promise you’ll be okay?” I ask. My voice breaking a little, surprising me.
“I’ll be f–”
“Fine,” I say, cutting him off. “So you keep saying.”
Then he's under, truly under, and I am alone in a stone house on an island whose name I learned three hours ago, with a lamp, a wounded man's even breathing, and my own hands, which have apparently been capable of this my whole life without anyone telling me.
I don't fall apart. I keep waiting for it, the way you wait for a sneeze, and it keeps not coming. Instead I get practical, because practical is the only language my body will speak today.
I wash his blood off my hands in water so cold it burns, and I watch it swirl away and feel exactly nothing about it. There's a shelf of supplies in the kitchen that confirms what he told me. Weeks of it. Rice, tins, coffee, salt. A house stocked for a man who might need to disappear from the world entirely, for a while. Somewhere to just stay hidden away while he needs to be gone from the world. A basic, simple bid for survival.
I wonder how many more of these places he has access to through hiscontacts. How many countries does he have a little house in where he can lay low between jobs.
Because that’s what I am. I’m not stupid. He didn’t randomly find me. My brothers hired him.
I find a small camping stove and a gas canister, and wonder if I’ll blow us up if I try to use it. I grab the matches and get it lit on my second try, before putting a pan of water on it and tossing in a rag that doesn’t smell of anything terribly foul. Then I strip off his jacket and my blood-soaked clothes, right down to my skin.
The sour adrenaline smell that’s been following me around, turns out to be me. I cringe at the thought of how Yakob must have been smelling me the entire time I was pressed under his shoulder and the memory of the first time I did that in the vineyard comes back to me. He hadn’t smelled of anything, no cologne or soap. No body odor or anything offensive. Like he wasn’t even real.
The water starts to bubble and I fish the rag out with a fork. The small, white bar of soap that looks older than I am is all I have available to wash myself with, but a hunt around the bathroom revealed a small wash bag with shampoo and toothpaste.
In the drawers in the bedroom I find a T-shirt and boxer shorts in plastic packets, newly bought and deposited byS, no doubt.
“Do you always walk around naked?”
I let out a short scream and jump, turning in midair and covering myself with my newly acquired T-shirt.
“No, but I thought you’d sleep for a little longer and I can’t bring myself to put my old clothes back on now I’ve managed to wash all your blood off.
Now he grins. “I’m not complaining, Orlova.”
“Ha ha,” I mutter. “Go back to sleep.”
I shimmy out of the room and pull the door closed behind me, returning my finds to the bathroom and fetching the hot water from the camping stove.
It might not be a full-on shower, or a luxurious bath with fancy bath milks and salts, but I feel a thousand times lighter once I’ve finished scrubbing a week's worth of grime and sweat off my body and slid into the boxer shorts. I have to boil the pan twice more to do a thorough enough job, and that’s before I even start on my hair.
I consider cutting it off. It would make cleaning it a whole lot easier. Especially considering the lack of conditioner and the way the salt has made the knots tighten into impossible, matted chunks. Instead, I lean forward, and pour an entire bucket of freezing water on it. It takes my breath but I keep going until it’s soaked through. The shampoo is cheap, and I only use a small amount since it’s not even mine. I work it into a lather as muchas I can using a bit of warm water left in the pan. The suds finally form, turning from white to gray as I massage it through the lengths. I leave it in while I fill another bucket, hoping the fresh mountain water will condition it as well as possible under the circumstances.
By the time my hair is fully rinsed and I’ve begun to fill a larger bowl with pan after pan of hot water to clean my clothes in, it’s already afternoon.
My stomach rumbles.
I prepare plain rice and eat a small amount before checking if Yakob is awake. He isn’t. I check his pulse, the dressing, ignoring the way his abs look because now is not the time for those thoughts, and feel for his temperature with the back of my hand on his forehead.
I continue with the simple chores that my brain knows how to do. Hang my jeans over the back of a chair and place them outside in the warm sun. I accept that there’s no coming back for my T-shirt, so I make a small fire in what looks like an old fire pit and burn it. Then I clean the drops of blood from the stone inside the house, and the path leading up to it.
He barely stirs each time I check him, lift a wet cloth over his mouth and drip cold water over his lips. By the time the sun is setting I’ve carried a chair into the bedroom and set it beside the cot.
The fever comes up sometime in the deepest part of the night, the hours that don't have a name. His skin goes hot and dry, and he starts to move, small restless jerks that pull against the dressing, and words start coming out of him, low and slurred, in Russian.
I don't speak much Russian. A childhood of Ma's English and Dad's absence, and five brothers who saved their Russian forbusiness saw to that. But I catch the edge of it. It's not the voice he uses when he’s awake, clipped and rationed. It runs. It pleads. Somewhere in it there's a word that repeats, soft, worn down like a stone that's been in a river for years, and I don't need a translator for that one either. It's a name. It's someone small, and it's someone gone, and he's calling it into the dark.
I wring out the cloth in cold water and lay it across his forehead, and I do the only other thing I know how to do at a bedside at three in the morning.
I sing.
Quietly. Ma's song, the one about the girl waiting by the water for the sailor who never learned to swim. The one I sang to myself in a stone cell to keep from coming apart.
