PART 2: The Brother I Buried
Victor Ward. The name hit me harder than any bullet ever had. Nine years earlier I had caught him skimming cash from my shipments, and I had made sure that he served every day of a long sentence at Stateville, because that was the law of the world I lived in. Elena had never completely forgiven me for it, though she had stayed, and she had loved me anyway. Now the one man who had every reason to hate me held the right to speak for my wife and my unborn children, and I could not make my mind understand how that had happened.
“Where is he?” I asked, and the words came out low and dangerous. “He is the man who brought her in tonight,” Dr. Brooks said, closing the folder with a sharp snap. “He carried her through the doors himself and has not left the family waiting room since. Mr. Cross, I must ask you not to do anything that will upset my patient’s family while she is fighting for her life.” “I am her family,” I said. “So is he,” Dr. Brooks replied evenly. “That is the reason I am telling you in the hallway, and not in front of him.”
I walked down the corridor with Rocco a few steps behind me, and the hospital noises seemed to fade into a dull roar. Nurses stepped aside as I passed, and a man in a wheelchair pulled his blanket tighter over his knees. Rocco murmured that he could break Victor’s legs in thirty seconds if I gave the word, and I told him to stay where he was. I had spent my life settling problems with fists and favors, and tonight, for the first time, I had no idea which of the two would help.
The family waiting room was small and lit by a single yellow lamp, and a muted television flickered silently in the corner. A broad man sat hunched on a vinyl chair with his elbows on his knees, his brown leather jacket stained dark at the sleeve and a thin white scar cutting through his left eyebrow. His hair had gone gray at the temples since I had last seen him, and his hands, scarred and thick with labor, were folded as if in prayer. He looked up slowly, and his eyes were Elena’s eyes, pale gray and tired. “Hello, Damian,” he said.
“You put your hands on my wife,” I said, stepping inside and letting the door close behind me. “I carried her,” Victor answered, rising to his full height, which was nearly equal to mine. “She was seizing on the ice, and there was blood on the pavement, and I carried her four blocks because the ambulance could not get through the sleet. Say what you came to say.” Something in his calm voice made my temper flare, because it was the calm of a man who had spent nine years learning to wait. “Nine years,” I said. “You waited nine years to take her from me.”
“I did not take her from you,” Victor said. “You pushed her out of that house with your own mouth.” I crossed the room in two strides and seized the front of his jacket, driving him back against the wall hard enough to rattle the pictures hanging beside the coffee machine. Rocco appeared in the doorway, hand moving under his coat, and I raised my other arm without looking at him. “Stay out,” I said. Victor did not lift a hand to defend himself. He only looked at the ring on my finger, and then at my face, and something like pity crossed his scarred brow.
“Hit me if it makes you feel better,” he said quietly. “She told me you would. She told me you would grab me, and she told me to let you, because she knew you needed to hurt someone tonight.” My fingers loosened on his collar in spite of myself. “She said that?” I asked. “She said a lot of things when she came to my door,” Victor answered. “She stood on my porch in October with one suitcase and a folder full of scans, and she said, Vic, I need help, and I do not know who else to ask.”
I let go of him and stepped back, and my hands fell uselessly to my sides. Victor straightened his jacket, and the weariness in his face grew heavier. “The doctors told her in August,” he said. “A tumor the size of a walnut, pressing on the part of her brain that controls speech and movement. They wanted to start radiation and chemotherapy immediately, and Elena asked one question: what would it do to the babies? When the doctors said it would likely end the pregnancy, she refused. She said she would take whatever time the babies needed, even if it cost her everything.”
“She should have told me,” I said, and my voice broke on the last word. “I would have found the best surgeons in the world. I would have bought the hospital if I had to.” “That is exactly why she did not tell you,” Victor said. “She knew you would turn the whole city upside down, and she knew you would try to force her to choose treatment over the children. She also said she could not stand to watch you look at her the way people look at someone who is dying. So she let you think she was leaving because of your work, and she gave you the one thing you could survive, which was your pride.”
I sank into the vinyl chair, and the room swam. I remembered the night she left, her eyes rimmed with red, asking me one last time to give up the docks, and how I had answered with cold sarcasm because I was afraid to say what I really felt. She had been standing at the edge of death, and I had been worried about my reputation. Victor sat across from me, and for a long moment neither of us spoke. The television light moved across his scar, and I saw how many years of loneliness it had carved into him.
“Why were you on Wacker Drive?” I finally asked. “That is my building, two blocks from where you found her.” “She was walking to see you,” Victor said. “Tonight she told me the tumor was growing faster than the doctors expected, and that she could not wait any longer to tell you about the twins. I begged her to let me drive her. She wanted to walk, to feel the cold air on her face one last time before surgery. Halfway there, she grabbed my arm and said her tongue felt strange, and then she fell.”
“She never stopped talking about you,” Victor added after a moment, and his voice softened. “She said you were not a monster, only a man who had never been taught that asking for help was not a weakness. I told her that was a generous thing to say about the man who put me away. She said generosity was the only thing she had left to give.” I covered my face with both hands, because I had no defense against a mercy I had never earned.
“There is something else,” Victor continued, and his voice dropped lower. “Over the past two weeks there has been a gray sedan parked outside my house, and again outside her clinic. Tonight it followed us down Michigan Avenue until the sleet got heavy. I do not know who is in it, but I know a man who is watching someone when I see one, because I spent nine years being watched.” A cold feeling spread across my shoulders, because I knew exactly how many men in this city drove gray sedans and wanted something from me.
The door opened before I could answer, and Dr. Brooks stood there, her glasses pushed up into her gray hair and her face tight with urgency. “Mr. Cross, Mr. Ward, I need you both,” she said. “Elena woke up four minutes ago, and she is asking for both of you by name.” I was on my feet before she finished, and Victor was right beside me. “Is she all right?” I asked. “She is conscious, but her scans have changed,” Dr. Brooks said, turning down the corridor at a near run. “The swelling has increased, and unless we operate within the next two hours, the next seizure could take her life and the babies’ lives together. She says she has something to tell you before she lets us touch her.”
