By some miracle, he had revived my father and staunched the bleeding, but he told us that there was no guarantee he would recover. There had been much blood lost, he said, and he worried about sepsis as well as my father’s lung. The knife, he said, had slipped between two of my father’s ribs, and nicked both his liver and his lung.
“The weapon was thin, long, and freshly sharpened, chosen to do maximum damage,” the surgeon said.
A wave of rage blurred my thinking, but I forced myself to be still and deliberate. This was no time for hysterics, this was no time to lose my head with grief and anger. All that could come later, once I knew my father was safe.
“What do we do?” I asked the surgeon, with my arms wrapped around my mother.
“Pray,” he answered softly, and sadly, staring down at his fingers, every nail bed rimmed with blood.* * *Now my father lay in his own bed, looking ancient and weak. His breathing was shallow and he only came into consciousness occasionally, and then only long enough to have a sip of water. I had left his side only long enough to change out of my blood-soaked wedding dress.
Since then, I hadn’t moved. It felt like an eternity had passed, but also hardly a minute. The light had begun to change from day to dusk, and wind whistled through the loose windowpanes.
Without letting go of my father’s cold hand, I leaned back and yanked the velvet curtain shut to keep out the drafts. Taking my father’s hand in both of mine, I slid to my knees with my forehead pressed to the edge of the mattress.
Closing my eyes, my mind replayed the events of the day in strange dream-like flashes, disconnected and mismatched. Bells ringing, snow falling, those strange silent women who dressed me. Vasile, Petre, my mother. And my father. So many flashes of my father.
Once and again, I kept returning to the look on my father’s face when he stepped forward at the cathedral to try to stop the ceremony. My tears spilled down my cheeks as I tried to calm my breathing with a long out breath. It helped, a little, and I wiped my cheek on the shoulder of my dress as I raised my face. My father looked even worse than he had when I closed my eyes, a mere moment ago. We were losing him. I just knew it. And it was all my fault.
He was here, like this, because of me.
“I don’t know if you can hear me,” I said softly, “But thank you for trying to stop the ceremony. Thank you for trying to help.” My voice began to quaver desperately, stopping me from saying any more.
The sound of my mother’s wheelchair rolling on the floor made me turn toward the door. The look on her face as she stared at my father shifted from worry to mortification.
“I know,” I whispered, pressing my palm against my lips to stop myself from sobbing.
Her nurse wheeled her closer, and I scooted my chair aside to make room. Her own hands looked nearly as frail and translucent as my father’s. She reached out and took his hand in hers. A wave of tears overtook me and I forced myself to look away.
My eyes landed on the things that my father kept beside his bed—a stack of books, a chipped glass, and a silver-framed cameo portrait of me when I was a young girl.
Suppressing my sobs, I let my head rest softly in my mother’s lap, as tears slid down my cheeks onto the blue chenille blanket she always wore in the evenings. Her smell transported me back, as always, to my childhood. To those happy, barely remembered days, when we were all safe. And well. So very, very unlike what life had become.
My mother softly stroked my cheek with one hand, and did the same to my father’s palm. Even a quiet and uneventful day was likely to exhaust my mother, and I knew that a day like this was likely to make her dangerously weak. In my heart, I was desperate to hear her reassuring words, but I didn’t dare ask the dueling questions that were on the tip of my tongue.
What will happen if he dies? What will happen if he lives?
A knock at the door interrupted my body-shaking sobs. I pulled myself together, as best I could, and sat up in my chair, wiping tears from my cheeks and sniffling hard.
“Yes,” I said. “Come in.”
The door opened gently, revealing a man that I didn’t recognize. He had kind eyes and a warm smile, slightly older than my father wearing a sharp black suit and white shirt. As he entered, he removed his black satin top hat and secured it under the crook of his left arm. In his right hand, hanging low at his side he carried a black leather bag.