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But they didn’t. They clung, as if she could protect them somehow. And she couldn’t bring herself to be cold and push them away.
She wished she could think of a way to rescue them all. Find parents for everyone. Parents like hers. Wonderful parents.
God, how she wanted her mother.
Yuri came out, holding Mikhail under his arm. The boy dangled, head down, unconscious. “Smelly little shithead. He fainted.” Yuri grunted and tossed the child on the nearest cot. Mikhail shivered and moaned.
“She’s next,” he said, gesturing at Rachel, who was sucking her thumb, eyes huge in her little face.
He grabbed Rachel and tried to pull her off Sveti’s lap, but Rachel clutched Sveti’s T-shirt and a handful of her hair, mouth opening to emit a sound so shrill and loud, Yuri jerked back, and tried to slap her. Sveti flinched to cover Rachel’s body with her own and took the blow on the side of her head. For a moment, she could hardly even hear Rachel’s ear-splitting shrieks.
When her vision and hearing cleared, Yuri was shouting at her.
“…brat calmed down, and bring her in with you! The doctor bitch can do the two of you together. What the fuck do I care?”
It took frantic minutes of soothing and crooning and jiggling and cuddling, until Rachel’s shrieks damped down to hiccupping sobs. Her hot, thin little body shook in Sveti’s arms. Both of them were shaking. Rachel’s screaming jarred her badly. Sveti had grown numb to many things, but the toddler’s desperation sliced through her numbness and got to her. Probably because it was so much like her own.
The American lady doctor didn’t look like a doctor at all. Sveti was momentarily dazzled. The woman was the first beautiful thing she’d seen in months. She looked like a magazine model or a Hollywood actress, with perfect white skin and made-up eyes. Glossy dark hair that bobbed and swung like hair on TV ads.
She wasn’t smiling like a TV ad, though. She looked scared and tense. Sveti was skilled at gauging the emotional states of the people around her. Advance warning could save a pinch, or slap, or kick in the leg that left a bruise as big as a saucer.
But the American lady doctor didn’t look like she would be violent or cruel. She was sweating, and it was fear sweat. Sveti could smell her as she examined Rachel. Heart, lungs, throat, temperature. She murmured in a low, musical voice into a shiny rod, recording numbers.
She pawed through Rachel’s urine bags, and frowned at Sveti as if it were her fault Rachel had not peed. She wore a silver-gray silk shirt that had iridescent highlights. It looked so soft Sveti longed to touch it. There were dark, crumpled sweat crescents under the doctor’s arms. Her forehead was shiny. And her red painted lips shook with tension.
Then she began preparing the needle and vials for the blood drawing. Rachel, unfortunately, knew exactly what was coming, and began to flop and shriek. Rachel was incredibly strong for such a tiny person. It took all Sveti had to hold the baby still. By the time the doctor finally got some blood out of her, Sveti was sobbing too.
The doctor looked shaken. She had to lean over, put her head down. She looked pale, sick. Maybe she was a nicer person than the guards, Sveti thought. Maybe this was a chance. For help.
Sveti struggled to remember the English she had learned from Arkady, her father’s handsome friend. Arkady had lived so many years in America, he was practically American himself. She’d learned many words from him, but a lot of what she knew had slipped away.
She thought to ask the doctor for help with Rachel’s rashes, her ear infections. The blood that Sveti sometimes found in her diaper when she changed her. And there was more that she was forgetting. Always more. She thrashed her tired, foggy brain, trying to remember it all.
“Baby, ear. Hurt,” she tried.
The woman looked at her blankly and her gaze slid quickly away.
Sveti tried again, tapping Rachel’s ear. “Baby, ear,” she repeated. She tapped Rachel’s forehead. “Hot. Night. Cries, cries, cries.”
The woman still would not meet her eyes. She was pretending she didn’t understand. She resumed muttering into her recorder.
Sveti lifted Rachel’s grubby little shirt to show her the angry rash on the child’s belly and chest, and spoke more loudly. “Hurts,” she said. “Medicine? Baby, medicine?” Her voice was starting to quiver.
The lady doctor shook her head, made an irritated gesture. She said something that sounded final into the shiny rod, and made an impatient come-here gesture to Sveti, patting the examining table.
Her turn. Sveti sighed and swallowed back her frustration, and placed the whimpering Rachel gently on the floor. She climbed up onto the examining table and stared straight into the doctor’s face, waiting for a chance to catch her eye again, but the lady was careful to keep her gaze averted. She tugged gingerly at the stained, grayish T-shirt Sveti wore and Sveti reluctantly pulled it off, revealing the grubby strip of ragged T-shirt wrapped around her chest.
The doctor went around the table, brushed aside Sveti’s long, tangled dark hair, and started picking at the knots.
Back before she was taken, she hadn’t had breasts at all, Sveti thought. Months ago, she could hardly wait to get them. Breasts would mean that she was finally starting to grow up, and if she could do that fast enough, she might be able to catch up with Arkady, and he could marry her. Take her to America to live with him, where she would be happy forever. What a stupid little girl she’d been. Stupid little girl daydreams. Hah.
Now she had breasts, and she wished they would go away. They were big enough to jiggle under her shirt. She had begged Sasha for a strip of his T-shirt, which was so large it hung halfway down his legs.
Sasha had understood perfectly, even though he would not speak. He’d torn off a strip from the bottom, and helped her tie it around her ribs as tight as they could pull it, even though it itched and chafed.
And still, Yuri’s eyes followed her everywhere.
The doctor had noticed the port wine birthmark on her neck. She lifted Sveti’s hair to examine it, mouth pursed, eyes squinted, and murmured again into the recorder, speaking louder over Rachel’s incessant whimpering. Sveti tried one of the words Arkady had taught her.
