AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Keith? Are you in pain?”
It was no use. Keith couldn’t ignore the truth any longer.
“It’s okay, I know.”
Yuri arched his eyebrows. “That’s an enigmatic statement. What do you know?”
“About you.” He forced himself to fall silent, waiting on Yuri.
Tell me the truth.
Yuri came around to the side of his bed and sat on the mattress. “And what do you know about me?” His voice was low, gentle.
“Yuri Komarov doesn’t exist. He isn’t a nurse. He wasn’t a student at Stillwater Area High School. He didn’t study at the University of Minnesota.” He looked Yuri in the eye. “My brain invented you. You’re not really here.”
Yuri said nothing for a moment, and with each passing second Keith’s pain multiplied. Then Yuri laid his hand on Keith’s arm, and warmth radiated through him, pushing back the pain, sending relief surging over him in a wave.
“Does that feel better?”
Keith managed a nod. “How... how are you doing that?”
He smiled. “I can dispense with the act of pretending to give you pain relief. This is my doing, not meds.”
It worked faster too. The pain was already beating a retreat.
“Does it feel better when you talk about Michael? When you share memories of the past?”
Another nod.
Yuri smiled. “I can’t explain my presence here, but I do know my purpose. I’m here to help you. If you want to think of me as a hallucination, that’s okay. It doesn’t matter. What does matter is the job I came here to do—to take care of you when you needed me most.”
In that moment, Keith didn’t care if Yuri was an illusion brought about by misfiring circuits in his brain. He wanted to forget the events of that horrible day and cling to the relief from suffering that occurred whenever Yuri was near. Perhaps some higher power had sent him. Because Yuri spoke the truth.
Keith needed him.
“Do you know how weird this makes our conversations?” he said in an attempt at humor.
“Forget everything I just said. Talk to me as you did before.” He smiled. “Tell me a funny story about you and Michael. You must have some of those, right?”
Funny stories were the farthest thing from Keith’s mind.
Then he smiled. “There was one time when we were both counselors at a summer camp.”
This had to be the most surreal conversation ever.
“When was this?”
“July, right after the wedding. Michael had said something earlier in the year about doing stuff that would look good on our resumés. So we did a little research, and found a camp in Wisconsin. It was only about an hour and a half’s drive from Stillwater. Thirty or forty kids, for four weeks.” He glanced at Yuri. “Except knowing what I do, I’m not going to ask if you ever did anything similar.”
Yuri’s lips twitched. “A wise decision. But I want to hear about that summer. What made it funny?”
“It wasn’t at the time.”
If anything, it had been scary as hell.
The summer of ’86
July, 1986
