My father-in-law was sitting in the armchair by the radiator, the blanket slipped from his knees, and on the small table beside him were pills, drops, and syringes arranged in the precise order the oncologist had written on the card I\u2019d laminated and taped to the refrigerator. After another round of chemotherapy, it was hard for him to breathe. The cold made it worse. His lungs, already diminished by what was growing inside them, contracted in drafts the way a fist closes around something it\u2019s afraid to drop.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s cold in here,\u201d he said quietly. \u201cClose the window.\u201d<\/p>\n
My husband stood by the door, grimacing. Not at his father\u2014at the room itself, at what the room had become. The guest bedroom that used to smell like linen and the lavender sachets I kept in the dresser now smelled like antiseptic and the faintly metallic undertone of medication that had seeped into the curtains, the carpet, the wallpaper. You could wash the sheets every day and the smell would still be there by evening, because it wasn\u2019t coming from the fabric. It was coming from the man in the chair, from the chemicals keeping him alive, and no amount of open windows would change that.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt smells like a hospital,\u201d my husband said. \u201cI can\u2019t stand it. The smell of medicine has soaked into everything.\u201d
\nViktor had never been good with illness. Not his own\u2014he pushed through colds and fevers with the stubbornness of someone who believed weakness was a choice\u2014but other people\u2019s. When his mother had been dying, years before I knew him, he\u2019d visited the hospice exactly twice. His father told me that once, late at night, when Viktor was already asleep and the house was quiet enough for truths that didn\u2019t survive daylight. \u201cHe came twice,\u201d Grigori said, staring at the ceiling. \u201cOnce to say goodbye. Once to confirm she was gone.\u201d He said it without judgment. That was the thing about Grigori\u2014he observed his son the way you observe weather. Not with approval or disapproval, but with the steady attention of someone who has learned that some forces simply are what they are.\u201cHe\u2019s your father,\u201d I said quietly.Viktor looked at me the way he looked at things that were in his way.\u201cHe\u2019s lived his life. Now it\u2019s my turn.\u201d<\/p>\n
That sentence hung in the air like smoke. Grigori turned toward the wall. Not dramatically\u2014he didn\u2019t have the energy for drama. He simply rotated his head a few degrees, the way you turn away from a sound you\u2019ve heard before and no longer need to identify. I watched his profile against the window light: the hollowed cheeks, the skin that had gone translucent over his temples, the hands that used to rebuild clock mechanisms with tweezers now resting motionless on a blanket they couldn\u2019t grip.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My father-in-law was sitting in the armchair by the radiator, the blanket slipped from his knees, and on the small table beside him were pills, drops, and… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":968,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-967","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n