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’d 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’s afraid to drop.
“It’s cold in here,” he said quietly. “Close the window.”
My husband stood by the door, grimacing. Not at his father—at 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’t 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.
“It smells like a hospital,” my husband said. “I can’t stand it. The smell of medicine has soaked into everything.”
Viktor had never been good with illness. Not his own—he pushed through colds and fevers with the stubbornness of someone who believed weakness was a choice—but other people’s. When his mother had been dying, years before I knew him, he’d 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’t survive daylight. “He came twice,” Grigori said, staring at the ceiling. “Once to say goodbye. Once to confirm she was gone.” He said it without judgment. That was the thing about Grigori—he 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.
