It would have been easier if she had died with him. Not better, necessarily, just…easier. If she was in the car, too. She had imagined it so many times.
Back at the triage desk, she thought of that. His car, the road, the icy dark before dawn that day. Their wedding, his arms around her, the little boy they could have had, the little girl. February 27. Even when Revmira was awake, she was dreaming.
Her cell phone vibrated. The screen showed the name of the wife of another man in Artyom’s crew. Revmira ducked her head to take the call. “Yes, Inna?”
There was a second of silence on the other end of the line. Inna said, “Something’s happened.”
Around Revmira, the people in the waiting room muttered and sighed and moaned. Under her forehead, the desk was smooth. Cold. Revmira kept her face down. She waited.
“They radioed in. They’ve been trying to reach us. Reach you. Artyom was hurt,” Inna said. “I’m sorry, Reva. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” Her voice continued.
Inna said a rock. She said his head. She said knocked out. She said no pain. The team medic tried to revive him. He was already gone. It happened too fast, Inna said.
Folded in her chair, Revmira looked down at her scrubs. Her cotton-covered knees. “I don’t understand,” she said.
Inna said a rock. There had been a rescue, a lost skier. She said they found the skier. And then a rock fell. She said his head. No pain. An accident. His skull. The curve of his neck, his jaw, his face looking at her this morning with the window soft and white behind.
“I see. I see,” said Revmira.
She hung up. Someone came to the desk and she waved him away. She had forgotten to ask where Artyom was now. Should she call back? She unlocked the phone and looked at Inna’s name in her call list. This was crazy. She opened up a text to her husband. Her fingers moved slowly over the letters. She had to tell Artyom what this woman had said.
Artyom was hurt. Inna told her that. But Revmira would take him as an invalid. She would take him weak. Diminished. As long as he was living.
She looked up and Inna was in front of the desk. Revmira looked at the clock on her computer. Time had passed.
“I came to take you home,” Inna said. Her eyes were red. “They’re still in the mountains.”
“Okay,” said Revmira. “I understand.”
Inna went away. Someone touched Revmira’s shoulder. It was the trainee, saying she would take over. Inna was there again. Revmira made sure not to forget her coat. They went outside. Artyom was dead.
Revmira concentrated on buckling herself into Inna’s car. It was hard to do. Her hands were strange. She focused on her fingers, her bending knuckles. The parchment color of her nails against the seat belt.
Since Gleb’s accident, Revmira had hated cars. Now she had to hate rocks, too. Rocks. Snow. The sound of her cell phone ringing. Sugar stirred into her coffee. The smell of breakfast filling their kitchen. She had thought she was strong, but she was not. She was not. Not anymore, not without him.
In the driver’s seat, Inna started the engine and wiped her cheeks. She looked up through the windshield. Her jacket whispered as she moved. “It’s this weather,” Inna said. “Loose ice. Avalanche weather.”
Revmira folded her hands in her lap. She could not get control of them. Cold air blew on her from the vents. It was February 27.
“This is fate,” she said out loud.
Inna sniffed back tears at the steering wheel. “What?”
Revmira looked out the window at the heaps of blackened snow bordering the parking lot. Water trickled out onto the asphalt. The sun was high above them. She thought of the rock. His head. No pain. Last weekend napping on the couch in the afternoon, her legs pinned between his, their faces close together. His breath on her cheek. Once he woke up, he asked her if she was comfortable. They had talked about headlines, currency devaluations, parliamentary decisions, the Golosovskaya sisters. “If I were their kidnapper,” she told him, “I’d bring them north. No one watches the villages. You could bury bodies right on your property in daylight hours without anyone noticing.”
Artyom had kissed the creased skin below her eye. “My morbid, brilliant woman.”
She carried death into their marriage, brought death with her up to this day. Quietly, into the glass of the window, she said, “Our suffering is fated.” She should have expected this from the very beginning. She had met Artyom, that excellent man, and condemned him.
The parking lot rolled away, other cars gathered around them, city buses pulled over, traffic lights turned green. Inna took the long way home, past the cinema, and Revmira did not correct her. Snow piles rose and fell beside them like ocean waves. In front of her and Artyom’s building, Revmira took out her keys. Inna plucked them away to unlock the doors. I can do that, Revmira wanted to say. I know how to do all of this. I’ve done it before. Instead she followed Inna into her own apartment.
The younger woman went straight to put on the kettle. Inna had decided to be capable. It was easy for Inna; the man she loved was alive.
“Excuse me,” Revmira said. Her voice sounded so polite. She took her phone into the bathroom and called Artyom’s sister.
“Oh,” his sister said and started to weep. The sound of it, rhythmic, desperate, hurt. Revmira pressed the phone harder to her ear. She had not cried yet. She had to listen. “Have you seen him?” his sister asked.
“No,” Revmira said. She knew how searches worked. “No, they’re coming back from the mountains. It’s quite— It’s difficult. They bring the one they rescued first. It’ll be a few hours.”
“Maybe it’s not true.”
The bathroom sink was flecked with Artyom’s hair. He had shaved this morning after Revmira left. This world was built for people to suffer. “It’s true,” Revmira said, and the sister wept harder.
Inna waited in the kitchen, so Revmira, after getting off the phone, went into the bedroom and shut the door. At the top of their tugged-up blanket was Artyom’s pillow. Revmira touched it. Soft. On the bedside table, there was his book. His glass of water—she picked that up and drank it.
She put the empty glass on his side of the blanket, and the book there, too. They made little dents in the wool. Then she opened up the bedside drawer to find a pocketknife, his spare sunglasses, a bottle of vitamin D supplements. She put those on the bed. It was nice to see his things laid out. She could do that. She had nothing else to do. She went to their dresser and pulled out his sweaters, his pants, the white undershirts, the worn briefs. Artyom was in his house clothes when she last saw him. Navy athletic pants and an old T-shirt. She fetched those from the laundry basket. She did not know what he wore to work today, but she would find out soon enough.
She wanted to see his body.
The pile on the bed looked small. She went to the closet for more.
She should gather his things. She should stockpile memories. She met Artyom when she was twenty-nine, when her former classmates had already made themselves mothers and she, still young, had nothing but her job and her buried history. She frightened people. But Artyom was not disturbed. He was a friend of a friend; they were introduced at a party. He had trained as a biathlete outside Moscow and returned to Kamchatka after too many years of fruitless competition left him thin, fair-minded, strong.