I spent two weeks on the surgical floor at St. Elizabeth's after an emergency appendectomy. My husband Dale came every evening after his shift, bringing a thermos of chicken soup, yogurt cups, sometimes a slice of pie from the bakery on Maple Street. I felt a little uneasy about it, because the girl in the next bed over—maybe nineteen—never had a single visitor. The first few days I figured she was just quiet by nature, but then I noticed there was never a grocery bag by her bed, never a juice bottle, not even a cup of the watery tea from the hallway cart.
One afternoon I told Dale to pick up two blueberry muffins instead of one.
"Here, please, help yourself," I said, holding out the paper bag.
"Oh, no, thank you, you really don't have to—" she started, but her voice cracked halfway through.
"Take it. My husband brings something every day anyway. If you need anything, just say so, don't be shy."
She took one muffin but didn't eat it right away. She wrapped it in a napkin and set it on the nightstand, like she was saving it for later. Then, looking out the window, she said:
"There's just nobody left to come see me."
Her name was Natalia. She was from Mykolaiv, from a family that spoke both Ukrainian and a little Polish at home. When the full-scale war started, she was sixteen. Her mother, grandfather, and grandmother were killed in a shelling while they were out getting water. Her father, after the funeral, said he couldn't just sit still. He enlisted. He talked Natalia into leaving for the States with her boyfriend.
"We came to Cleveland, the three of us—me, Serhii, and his cousin. The cousin moved on to Chicago. And three weeks later Serhii got his draft notice back home and went back to serve too. I stayed here alone."
She lay flat on her back, staring at the ceiling, and I gripped the edge of my blanket. An appendix was nothing—I'd be out in two days—but she was in for some kind of infection the doctors only half-explained. They suspected it wasn't only physical.
After I got discharged, I got her phone number. Dale grumbled at first that I was getting too involved, but within a week he himself was asking if I'd called "that girl."
I called. We started meeting at the little park downtown, since she was renting a room on Fulton Avenue from an older woman who kept raising the rent. Natalia told me the landlady walked into her room without knocking, complained about how much water she used, once threw out a jar of borscht from the shared fridge because it "stunk up the whole kitchen."
"I pay on time," she said. "I'm not complaining. I just wish, sometimes, I could lock my own door."
Lock her own door, I thought. She was nineteen. She should've been arguing over nothing with roommates at some dorm, not counting pennies for a bus pass. That night I went home and couldn't sleep. I didn't say anything to Dale, just lay there staring at the dark, while outside the streetlight flickered the same way it had for three years, its glow sneaking through the gap in the curtains.
A few weeks later, on a Saturday morning, someone knocked on our door. I opened it. Standing on the mat was a man in uniform. His arm was in a sling, his face somewhere far away, a duffel bag at his feet. He looked past me, like he was searching the wall behind me for something that wasn't there.
"Good morning. I'm Taras Hrytsenko, Natalia's father. May I come in?"
I let him in. He sat down at the table and asked for a glass of water first. He drank it slowly, like every swallow cost him something. Dale stood by the window with his hands in his pockets.
"Thank you both for what you've done for my daughter," he finally said. "Your neighbor, Mrs. Carol, the one who does the mail route—she wrote to me. Natalia wouldn't. She kept saying I should stay and serve, that she'd manage on her own. But I'm done serving."
He showed us paperwork. A medical discharge, a disability rating, a referral for treatment. He said after the field hospital he'd come to the States for shoulder surgery, and had a few more weeks until his follow-up appointment. After that, he wanted to stay with his daughter here, at least for now, on a temporary status.
"The problem is I have nowhere to live with her," he added. "And she's paying that woman six hundred a month for a closet with no lease. I heard from the neighbor. I want to get her out of there before that woman slaps her with three months up front."
Dale turned from the window.
"Do you have work lined up?"
"I had my own auto shop back home. It got bombed. My hands still work, I'm an engineer by training, but my English isn't much yet. I'll manage."
We sat in silence. God, I thought, my husband was about that age when we met doing internships in Columbus. Except Dale's road had been a straight one, and this man was walking across rubble. That evening I couldn't hold it in and called Natalia.
"Your dad's here. In town. He knows everything. He came by our place today."
There was quiet on the line, then I heard her breathing, fast and uneven.
"I didn't want him to come. His heart isn't good. And now look what's happened."
"What's happened is your father came looking for you. And he needs help. Don't you two have anywhere to stay?"
A week later he came for dinner. Natalia sat next to him, and he ate so slowly it looked like he was afraid the food would disappear. Dale pulled a bottle of bourbon from the cabinet, but Taras waved it off.
"I haven't had a drink in eleven months. Not since the day I saw our house on a drone photo."
Then, I don't even know why, I offered him something I hadn't planned on at all.
"We've got a basement apartment. Separate entrance from the backyard, its own kitchenette and bathroom. We've just been using it for storage for years. It needs clearing out, a coat of paint, some ventilation work. We'll rent it to you for a hundred a month plus utilities, until you and Natalia get back on your feet."
Dale looked at me like I'd lost my mind. I hadn't said a word to him beforehand. But after a moment he just nodded, because he could see it was already decided.
Taras moved into our basement. He cleaned it himself, brought only one box of belongings from back home. Inside were his tools, a photo album, and a blue work apron. He started looking for jobs through a local employment agency. And he never talked about what he'd seen at the front.
Natalia moved out from her landlady's place. The woman flew into a rage, demanded the key back, and when Natalia was packing, tacked on another hundred and fifty dollars for a "broken lock." Natalia paid it out of her last scholarship check. I picked her up that evening; she rode in the car holding a grocery bag full of shoes. The landlady didn't say goodbye. She just stood at her front window and watched us carry out the boxes.
Two months later, father and daughter rented a small apartment on Grant Street. He got work at a body shop, she started a nursing assistant program. As a going-away gift, Dale gave them the induction cooktop someone had left behind in the basement. The two of them hauled it out together, while Natalia carried the kettle and a yellow folding chair.
That evening I sat in the kitchen and jotted numbers on a notepad: a hundred dollars for the basement, times two months. A hundred fifty that the other landlady tried to squeeze out of her. Six hundred a month in rent that stopped being someone else's burden. It came to about eighteen hundred dollars. I slipped the paper into a shoebox where Natalia used to keep odds and ends, and closed the lid.
Dale asked what I was doing.
"Adding it up," I said.
But I didn't add anything more, because just then Natalia's laugh drifted in from the backyard. For the first time in a long while, it sounded like she really was nineteen, not just nineteen on paper.
