His name grew heavy in the air until the doctor cleared his throat and said something I couldn’t translate.
“What day of the week is it, Mila?” Ronan asked.
“I, uh . . . Fri—?” I cut myself off when he shook his head with a hint of a smile. I tried again. “Saturday?”
The doctor made a hmm noise, apparently not impressed with this man helping me. No surprise. Doctors were no fun.
“How many fingers am I holding up?” Ronan translated.
I stared at his other hand resting on his knee, at the tattoos on his fingers in between the first and second knuckles. One was a cross, another a raven. The third, a king of hearts playing card.
Ink and déjà vu.
I didn’t know what was wrong with me, but I couldn’t stop myself from touching him, from drawing an index finger down the tattooed raven. The whispered words were pushed from my depths by an irresistible force.
“Darkness there, and nothing more . . .”
The quote condensed the space between us, dipped in something as thick and dark as tar.
I was sucked back into a tunnel, reading Edgar Allan Poe under my papa’s desk, with dirt on my face and uneven bangs I’d cut myself. Papa was speaking to Ms. Marta, my childhood tutor, unaware I was near. He was concerned about my imaginary friends and lack of real ones, my introversion, and my disinterest in schoolwork.
He thought something was wrong with me.
I thought so too.
Those whispered words in the hall coiled inside me like a snake sinking its fangs in and slowly spreading poison as the years passed by. Poison that sent me on a warpath to acceptance.
Sometimes, it was the little things that made us who we were.
The heavy, empathetic look in Ronan’s eyes tightened my stomach like the click of a trigger. I didn’t expect him to understand what I said, but he did. I knew he did.
“Sleduyushchiy vopros,” Ronan said. Next question.
The doctor frowned. “U tebya yest’ sem’ya, s kotoroy ya mogu svyazat’sya?”
“How old are you, moy kotyonok?”
From the way the doctor’s eyes flared in disapproval, I realized he understood that English phrase, and it wasn’t what he’d said.
I answered, “Nineteen,” before remembering I turned twenty yesterday.
The doctor released a tense breath. “Devyatnadtsat’. Yey devyatnadtsat’.” Nineteen. She is nineteen.
Ronan didn’t look away from me. “Ya slyshal.” I heard.
I hardly listened to the exchange because I was trying to remember what “moy kotyonok” meant. My, what?
“Have you been . . . violated, Mila?” I watched the dark blue of his eyes grow black.
For a moment, his question confused me. A cloud obscured the entire scene in the alley as if it happened to someone else and I’d merely watched it unfold. It didn’t seem real, and when I thought of it, I felt nothing but mild annoyance, which probably put me in the same crazy category as my papa’s tenants.
I shook my head.
“Good.”
Just a single four-letter word, but it ballooned in the air like the most important thing in the room. His voice was so rough and soft. So composed and accented. So lenient in its delivery it slipped beneath my skin, melting the tension in my body like butter. I bet people went out of their way to listen to this man talk.
“Do you have any pain besides your head?”