Chapter 3 - The Broken Ward
Visiting hours in the semi-intensive unit were strictly regulated, but a crumpled twenty-euro note pressed into the palm of the night nurse gained me a folding plastic chair beside Maya’s bed.
The room held four patients, separated only by thin, yellowed privacy curtains that smelled faintly of damp linen and urine. The rhythmic, electronic chirp of heart monitors formed a jagged, unsynchronized orchestra. Across the room, an elderly Hungarian man wheezed through an oxygen mask, his chest rattling with every breath.
Maya was asleep.
Or rather, she was suspended in the chemical twilight of intravenous lorazepam and hydromorphone. A thin nasal cannula piped humidified oxygen into her nostrils. Her face was completely slack, her cheekbones jutting out like jagged rocks beneath paper-thin parchment. On her bare forearm, purple hematomas bloomed where nurses had repeatedly fished for viable veins.
I sat on the plastic chair, leaning my elbows on the edge of the metal mattress frame, and watched her chest rise and fall.
"Why, Maya?" I whispered into the dim shadows. "Why did you think you were so worthless that you had to disappear?"
My mind drifted back five years, to the little flat we rented when we first arrived in Budapest.
We had had nothing back then. We slept on a mattress on the floor, surrounded by cardboard boxes we used as tables. But every evening, Maya would light a lavender candle, play old jazz records on her phone, and cook whatever vegetables were on sale at the Great Market Hall. When rain lashed against the tall Victorian windows overlooking the street, she would curl against my side and say, *“As long as I have you in this room, Arjun, the rest of the world can burn down outside. I won't care.”*
Then came the pregnancies.
The first was in our third year. We had bought yellow booties, painted a small room mint green, and picked out names. At twelve weeks, during a routine ultrasound, the technician had turned off the monitor without a word and left the room to fetch a doctor. *“No cardiac activity,”* they had said.
Maya had cried for three days straight. I had held her, telling her we would try again.
Fourteen months later, the second one happened. This time at twenty-two weeks. It wasn't just a quiet cessation of a heartbeat; it was an emergency delivery of a stillborn daughter in the middle of a frozen January blizzard.
I remembered standing outside the operating theater, listening to Maya's screams—animalistic, shattering screams that ripped the soul straight out of my chest. When they finally let me in, she was cradling a tiny, gray bundle wrapped in hospital towels, refusing to let the nurses take it.
*“I killed her, Arjun,”* she had sobbed hysterically that night, her eyes wild with fever. *“My body is poisoned. It’s broken. I can’t even keep our child alive.”*
I had tried to comfort her then, but the truth was, I was drowning in my own grief. I couldn't bear to look at the mint-green room. I couldn't bear the smell of baby powder that lingered in our closets. Slowly, inexorably, I retreated behind the fortress of my computer screens, my spreadsheets, my late-night client calls.
I thought I was being strong by surviving.
In reality, I had abandoned her long before I asked for the divorce.
A sudden, sharp twitch from the bed shattered the memory.
Maya’s eyes fluttered open. For several seconds, her gaze wandered across the cracked plaster ceiling before sliding down to me. The heavy cloud of narcotics dulled her initial reaction, but then her jaw tightened with defensive anger.
"You're still here," she whispered, her voice dry as gravel.
"I'm not leaving," I said, leaning closer and offering her a plastic cup with a bendable straw. "Drink some water. Your lips are bleeding."
She turned her head away sharply, refusing the straw. "I don't want you here. Did you hear me? Call the nurse. Tell them I want my chart changed. You have no legal authority over me."
"I don't give a damn about legal authority, Maya," I said, keeping my tone dead level, refusing to match her hostility. "I know about the trial in Vienna."
She froze. The thin sheet over her chest stopped moving.
"Kovács had no right to tell you that," she hissed, her knuckles whitening as she gripped the rough blanket.
"She told me because she’s a doctor who gives a damn about keeping her patients alive," I countered. "Ninety thousand euros, Maya. That’s what stands between you and a shot at remission."
A bitter, humorless laugh sputtered from her chest, ending in a ragged cough that made her curl sideways. I reached out instinctively to support her shoulder, but she jerked away from my touch as if my hand were red-hot iron.
"Ninety thousand euros!" she mocked through her teeth, tears of sheer physical agony welling in her eyes. "Do you have ninety thousand euros, Arjun? Does your middle-management logistics salary pay that out in quarterly bonuses? Where are you going to get that kind of money? Are you going to rob a bank on Andrássy Avenue? Or are you going to sell your soul to the loan sharks in District VIII?"
"I will figure it out," I snarled, leaning over her until she was forced to look at the determination burning behind my eyes.
"No, you won't!" she screamed, the sound raw and tearing through the hush of the ward. The elderly patient across the room stirred, muttering in Hungarian. Maya lowered her voice to a vicious, venomous whisper. "You will go home. You will pack your things, you will go back to your spreadsheets, and you will let me die with some shred of dignity left! I am not your project, Arjun! I am not your second chance to play the hero because you couldn't save our babies!"
The words hit me like a sledgehammer to the sternum. The breath left my lungs in a sickening rush.
She turned her face to the wall, pulling the blanket up to her ears, her slender shoulders shaking silently with suppressed sobs.
"Leave," she whispered into the dark plaster. "Please. Just leave me alone."
I stood there in the flickering fluorescent gloom, the echo of her words ringing in my ears. I picked up my jacket from the back of the plastic chair.
May you like
"I'm leaving for tonight," I said quietly, my hand resting on the heavy privacy curtain. "Only because you need to rest. But I am coming back tomorrow morning. And if you think I’m walking away from you a second time, Maya... you don't know me at all."
***
