Victor didn’t understand right away what had happened. He just kept walking, and a few seconds later it hit him. A small hand in his.
Warm, bare, because Artyom had his gloves stuffed in his pockets. Victor didn’t pull away. Neither did the boy.
They walked like that all the way to the apartment building. The apartment was small. One room, a kitchen, a combined bath, a window facing the yard.
Victor had already set up a second bed. Bought it a week before the hearing on the chance things worked out, so he wouldn’t lose time later. He had made it up with a blue blanket.
On the nightstand beside it he had placed the same horseshoe magnet he had given Artyom at the hospital, the one the boy had carried in his pocket ever since. Artyom walked in, looked around, stopped by the bed, saw the magnet, and looked at Victor. “Did you know it would work out?”
Victor took off his jacket and hung it on the hook. “No.” “Then why’d you set up the bed ahead of time?”
He was quiet for a second. “Because I needed to do something besides wait.” Artyom sat on the bed and picked up the magnet.
He looked around again. Not anxiously, just the way people look around a new place when they’re trying to figure out whether it’s theirs. Then he lay back without taking off his shoes and stared at the ceiling.
Victor went into the kitchen and put the kettle on. Opened the cabinet. There was buckwheat, bread, butter, a can of stew. Nina Stepanovna had brought it all over the day before, without warning, just left the bag by the door.
There was no note, just groceries. While the kettle heated, Artyom’s voice came from the other room. “Victor Nikolaevich.”
“Yes.” “Are you my dad now?” Victor stood by the stove, looking at the blue flame under the kettle.
He answered evenly. “Yes.” A long silence.
“Then can I just call you Dad?” The kettle started to rumble, softly at first, just the first bubbles.
Victor looked at the flame and for a few seconds didn’t answer. Not because he was thinking. Because the word hit him in the chest unexpectedly, warm, like something he had never expected and that now sat in his throat like a lump. “You can,” he said.
The kettle boiled. Victor poured two glasses of tea, set them on a tray with bread and butter, and carried it into the room. Artyom was lying on the bed, magnet in hand, staring at the ceiling. He saw the tray and sat up.
They ate bread and butter and drank tea while it got dark outside and the yard light came on and the room stayed warm from the radiator, quiet in the way a room is quiet when there is nowhere else to go and nothing left to prove. Then Victor cleared the tray, came back, took Folk Tales from Around the World off the shelf, the now-worn book he had brought from the children’s home along with the rest of Artyom’s things, sat down beside him, opened it, and began to read.
The first months they got used to each other quietly, not because things were bad, just because neither of them knew another way. Victor didn’t know how to be a father because he had never been one. Artyom didn’t know how to be a son because he had never had the chance.
They lived side by side, ate at the same table, took walks along the river on Sundays, and little by little, without speeches or agreements, found their way toward something that had no name but felt real. By March one thing was already clear: hospitals were not going away. Victor had known that from the start and prepared the way he prepared for any hard job.
Every three months, a cardiologist in the regional center. Sometimes urgently, no appointment. When Artyom turned pale in the middle of the night and said quietly, “My heart again.”
Then Victor got dressed in two minutes, picked up his son, at first literally when he was still small, later just under the arm, and took a cab to the ER. There were many nights in hospital hallways. Victor learned how to sleep on plastic chairs without taking off his shoes, with his jacket rolled up for a pillow.
He learned how to talk to doctors in a way that got straight answers instead of vague ones. He learned how to read EKGs. Not professionally, but enough to tell whether things were better or worse.
In 2009 Artyom was referred for a consultation in a nearby major city. There was a pediatric cardiac surgery center there with newer equipment. Victor took vacation time and bought two train tickets…
