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You thought you’d long forgotten what it felt like to be loved—to be in love.
That intangible feeling of knowing that the nervousness of devotion meant something further omitted itself, taking residence in catacombs of empty recollections. It was amassing eons of ashes without realizing how quickly time had passed because sorrow strikes with a heavy hand.
The simplistic goodness of love became harder to grasp when the abandonment grief stole from it. Love. To be loved, or love, sounded so… childish. Or the need for it, rather, that boiled inside of you like the most warranted reward you could not catch in the palm of your hand. It slipped through, time and again, at the sake of someone or something else you’d never saddle up to. Perhaps love was of importance and priority rather than devotion and emotion. It all hung the same way in the end.
It’s the ghosts that manifest when the whiplash fades away who spur periodic devastation.
When you met with ghosts, it was hard to recall what they had looked like before. Time was a cruel fiend. It masked the memories that had once been placed upon pedestals and marred them with a grisly sheen. Yet when moments of great pain cement themselves to torture you for years, it’s far too easy to remember the lasts compared to the firsts.
But time struck you with a thunderous arrow.
Cracking across the sky for your ears only, it lodged itself in your chest and forced laborious breaths to steady a foundation unearthed by fate. Today had just been “one of those days.”
The kind where you forget that love cocooned around you. Where against devastation, a healer sat in the mist.
The department riddled itself with the calling of a executioner. Perhaps at your hands, according to some of the distraught families that passed through the halls of the ED. But you knew deep down it wasn’t any fault of your own. You tried. You tried so hard to save them. However, when a MVA comes crashing through with three carloads of victims and little hope for recovery, the grim reaper sits in the shadows waiting for the right time of emergence.
And then his scythe cuts the sound of a monitor going flat. The sound never escapes you.
The sound, and the words of the families consumed by grief, also linger far longer when the shift doesn’t seem to end. One turns into two, then three, and so forth until the relief of the day shift greets desolation with a kind smile and knowing statement of “rough night?”
But it’s not enough to make the horror disappear completely. You hear it when you transfer your charts to Collins, in the turn of your lock against your locker. You see their empty eyes behind your lids as they closed at the first sight of sun after twelve long hours. And you feel their hand going lax in yours when Jack’s crosses the center console to try and say “I’m here.”
Yet it doesn’t ground you in the way he had hoped it would. The silence calcifies at a stop light seven blocks from home.
If the radio hadn’t been lowly playing a pop tune, you would have heard the sounds of your blood pumping through your veins. The shallow breathing of chaos; a tense worry growing in your chest that the world was unraveling too quickly.
Jack’s thumb grazed the back of your hand.
“What are you thinking for breakfast?”
You didn’t hear him. Lost in that endless swirl. His voice was gone into an abyss.
“Hey.” Jack moved your hand gently. He said your name as you blinked, clearing away the fog.
“Sorry,” you said sheepishly. “I was… what did you say?”
Jack dismissed your apology. “It was bad day. You don’t need to apologize.”
His hand in yours filled an empty cavern. It filled up like liquid in a jar and made your heart ache at your ignorance. Jack didn’t do anything. He was here. He was trying to comfort you. The bad days didn’t cancel out the good ones and Jack too carried with him the scars of a past he would much rather forget.
But the sun rose again on another day and no matter what, you just had to keep going.
“Do you want to talk about it?” The light still hadn’t changed.
“Not really,” you admitted. “But I’ll probably make an appointment to talk to someone about it.”
Jack nodded knowingly, thumb drawing comforting lines along the back of your hand. The light changed to green and for a moment, you were appreciative that his focus transitioned back to the road.
“That’s good.” Was all he said.
You wet your lips in anticipation of speaking more but the words halted in your throat. Breathing in shakily, your free hand ran fingers over your forehead. Jack squeezed the one he held.
“It’s ok,” he said so softly you could barely hear him over the spin of the tires against asphalt.
It’s ok. Not “you’re going to be ok” or the “situation that is completely not normal is ok” but the “it’s ok” not to be whole. That the cracks under your skin were natural after trauma. Your chin trembled as you became overwhelmed by the agony stored inside of you.
Jack hated that he couldn’t do anything more to soothe the hurt. Because when you loved someone with every fiber of your existence, the pain they carried fused with your own.
Love encompassed something larger, abstruse. It was a feeling buried deep inside of you that only awakened at the moment of greatest necessity and Jack always seemed to let that emotion bloom. It unfurled in the palm of his hand and he held tight on to it knowing what time could do if he was not careful. Jack was cautious. He walked a fine line between giving too much and never giving enough but he tried—and that’s all he was asking of you now. Try. Breathe. Breathe.
And when the tears fell four blocks from home, he let you cry in the car. He forgot about breakfast, about how nice sleep would be in a few hours.
Jack didn’t shush you. He didn’t push you to wrap up your emotional plea for the sake of the car parking in the garage. He turned off the engine and pressed the garage door closed with the remote which further shut away the world beyond.
It was just you and him and your sorrow.
You weren’t sure how much time had passed. Five minutes, ten… but the tears did end like they always did. They dried up and left you empty again.
“I just don’t know,” you started when you felt sturdy enough to talk, “how many more kids I can see die on my table.”
Suddenly, you hated being a pediatric physician. You hated that all of the kids that came into the ED found themselves in a room with painted animals and some of them saw their joyous faces and others never had the chance. You hated that parents blamed you for ending a life that had barely begun and you couldn’t fathom understanding an ounce of why they always seemed to place the blame on you.
You tried. You tried and wasn’t that enough?
“It’s their little fucking hands. Their little fingers and toes and eyes that have the life sucked out of them and I’m the last one they see.”
Jack listened. He didn’t push.
“And the parents today,” you groaned at the thought; sucking in a wet, unattractive noise to clear your senses. He loved you enough not to care.
“God… I’ve never wanted to quit until today.”
“Today was a bad day,” he repeated.
“Today was an awful day,” you corrected.
“You’re going to carry it with you forever.” You knew his intrusive stare was targeting your face but ignored it. “You’ll never forget the ones who don’t get to see tomorrow.”
“I keep thinking,” you shook your head a little with a self-deprecating laugh, “about how I, we, get to go home after a family’s world is changed so drastically. And I pretend that nothing happened and that it’s normal to see this every other day and pretend that when I close my eyes, I don’t see them every time.”
“No one’s asking you to pretend,” Jack reminded you. He didn’t. He just coped differently.
“But I don’t know how to function otherwise, Jack. I can’t separate them anymore and I don’t know how to get back on track.”
“You said you were going to talk to someone, yeah?” He moved his head to catch your attention and those dark, hazel eyes bore into you deeply. He needed that confirmation—that you were listening and understanding him.
“Yeah,” you nodded.
“Then it’s not your job yet. Okay?” He looked at you expectantly. “It’s not your job yet. It’s not going to change without help but until you get that help, talk to someone who knows how to help you, then what more can you do than breathe? I am here, baby. I will always be here.”
You had stacked the tasks. Heal, heal, heal. Find a solution, be “normal”, and find something else to hide your time with while the struggle remained.
Jack brought you back to earth. Back from the endless orbit and to the ground where he could be the one to help for what little hours of peace you were granted.
He brought your hand to his lips and kissed your knuckles, then the dorsal and your wrist before turning it over and pressing into your palm repeatedly. Back and forth, back and fort, soothingly.
“Just breathe for me, alright?” He mimicked a slow intake of air before exhaling. Jack nodded at you to copy and you did. Once, then twice, and another.
“That’s it,” he encouraged.
You breathed in, then out. Over and over until that tremble of your hands ceased enough that it wasn’t the only thing he felt. Jack pressed the pressure points until your hand was pliable and unfurled with tension.
Focusing your attention, you looked out into the garage through the windshield and looked at the streaking wet remnants of water lingering behind. You hadn’t even noticed it on the way home.
“It rained?”
“Snowed,” Jack said.
“Badly?”
“Don’t worry,” Jack’s voice gained levity. You saw a flicker of a twinkle pass by his gaze when you looked toward him now. “You have the precipitation levels beat today.”
“I’m basically a prune at this point, I suppose.”
“Eh.” He let go of your hand and unbuckled his seat. “You’re a pretty prune then. The most beautiful prune I’ve ever seen.”
You shook your head at him, letting your seatbelt come undone too. “You don’t have to flatter me because you feel bad.”
“I will flatter as I please,” Jack scoffed. “You’re mine and I will compliment even if you’ve pruned the most prune-y you’ve ever pruned.”
Like routine and an attempt to lessen the burden of grief, both of you exited the vehicle and opened the doors to the back seats where your bags stored themselves on the way home. As you met Jack’s eyes across the space, he had both bags gripped in his hands.
“Jack,” you lamented.
“Go inside,” he nearly ordered. “Go change and I’ll meet you in a second.”
You sighed, holding onto the door as if it supported all of your weight.
“I can carry my own bag.”
“I know.”
“Then let me?”
He pondered it for a brief second before disagreeing. “I’ve got it.”
“J—“
“Are we really going to argue over a bag?” He asked. “Go,” he motioned to the entrance to the house via the garage. “I’ll put these away and then I’ll come find you.”
Jack wasn’t going to take the objections stored like ammunition. His stubbornness had faults but good intentions in the moment.
“Fine,” you faltered. “Alright.”
“Good.”
As you lingered a moment longer, the tiredness of it all washed over you quickly. You shut the door and felt a relief take hold upon crossing the threshold into your house. It smelled like the two of you, it felt like the both of you. It calmed when endless cycle of catatonic winters brought forth a dome of doom.
The car door closed with a beep not long after. Jack deposited the bags in the mud room along with his badge that lay in a tray beside the door. He place it atop yours and paused at the pink tint that faded into the white letters of your “doctor” plate.
It carried home. It always did.
The echos of home held sounds of you. And while his hearing wasn’t what it was twenty years ago because of the lingering legacy of service, he still knew what was you and what the ringing was. The sound of the lights going on in the bathroom that left a small hum burn through the room—you. The sounds of shoes clattering to the floor and a drawer opening in the dresser of the bedroom—you.
His life was filled with the symphony of you and even on the darkest of days, he listened to nothing but.
You felt the water run over your fingertips from the faucet. Warm and greeting, it was a luxury of the morning.
The house you had learned to love was a concession made of you both. A sanctuary of space; somewhere to heal and to love and to rest that met the untraditional needs of a unconventional household. The bathroom was one of those places. The vanity stretched across one wall with a golden, warm lighting cascading across its speckled white marble and a Spanish cedar wood beneath it.
It was spacious and accommodating. But as you looked up into the mirror and at your reflection marred from the day, your eyes caught the tub, seldom used, in the background. The porcelain often sat dry—an inconvenience because of its deep edges and lack of grip. Even in your own pampering you avoided it as habit from Jack’s own difficulties using it.
But he had insisted on it years ago. He said that you’d use it one day and yet, still, the days were far and few between.
It caught your eye now, however.
You thought about what it would be like to fill it up and see the steam roll off the top of the water in swirls. The tendrils reaching and floating to the ceiling quietly while your back would rest upon the smooth, cold ceramic.
“The pipes might be rusty.”
Jack’s voice bit through the stream of water coming from the faucet and your eyes darted to the doorway.
He stood leaning against the frame with his arms crossed at his chest. Peering at you with knowing eyes, you half-figured he knew every thought that passed through your mind at any given moment. You turned off the sink.
“I’ll just take a shower.”
“Why?” His brow furrowed. “We have a tub for a reason.”
“Yeah but it’s—“
“A really nice, expensive, tub.”
“And really excessively tall.”
“It’s a soaker.” Jack walked into the bathroom and pulled a towel from a cabinet adjacent to the shower. “They’re supposed to be big.”
You watched him moved about. “If this was another day, I would have made a joke about that.”
“I can’t wait to hear it when a better day comes.”
It was his turn to turn on a faucet—the tub. He knew you liked the water “boiling” so he turned it hot enough to warrant a longer bath. He opened up the shower door and pulled out the stool from inside of it and place it beside the tub and sat down.
“What are you doing?” You pivoted to rest against the vanity while he sat there in his dirty scrubs.
“I’m waiting for you,” he said frankly. “Come on, take off your clothes.”
He saw the way your shoulder’s sagged as your body began to take the brunt of mental pain. You challenged him to change his mind with one look but he wasn’t going to budge. The stubbornness of Abbot men ran deep within his blood.
This is what love was.
He held out his hand from his place on the stool and beckoned. You breathed in, and then out, just as you had in the car. And his hand enveloped yours once more.
“You know,” Jack started lowly, “it’s not a bad thing when someone wants to take care of you.”
His hands traveled to your hips and lifted your scrub top slowly. His touch melted warmly into the skin of your stomach and around the sides of your waist while his legs parted and brought you to stand closer. You loved the feel of his hands on your body. Not now for pleasure, but to know that he was there. He’d always be there if you let him.
“And somedays, all I want to do is make sure you’re ok. So when you’re not, I want to take care of you.”
Therapy was doing wonders for his communication.
“It’s a pity this doesn’t have a door,” you motioned down to the tub as it began to fill near the halfway line.
“Like those old fuckers have?” He looked at you with a joking offense. “I’m gray, not a hundred.”
“You know what I mean.” You knocked his shoulder with your fist. He rocked back then toward you in return. His hands pulled at your top and you helped usher it over your head.
“I would rather not be alone.”
“I’ll be right here,” his eyes laid heavy into yours.
“What if I help you?” You proposition as his grip moved to your pants. He slid them down slowly. “I can help you too. We’ve never tried it.”
“Because I’d rather not end up a patient with a description of ‘one-footed man who ate shit trying to get into a tub not made for him.’ It just doesn’t seem… right.”
You unclipped your bra and handed it to him. He put it on top the pile growing in his lap of your clothes. Instead of ogling you further, as you removed your panties and then your socks, he turned to the edge of the tub and poured soap in. Jack stirred it with his hand as the warm water radiated up his arm and the bubbles began to form around it.
Your hand found his shoulder as you tried to carefully maneuver into the tub without incident. Jack’s other hand shot out, guiding the small of your back into the water.
“Are you sure?”
The softness in your sad eyes poured into his heart. He sighed, admiring the way the bubbles hid you from view as you pulled your knees to your chest and rested your head on them.
“It’s kind of lonely in here.”
“Baby,” he let out a small chuckle. “You really want me in there?”
You nodded. The hand he had left in the water retreated and crumpled your clothes into a ball. While he was still preparing his protest, he caught the back of his shirts behind his neck and slipped them off gracefully.
“I might die for real this time.” Only people who faced actual death could joke about that.
“Well then I really don’t know what I’d do with myself,” you turned and watched as he stood to remove his pants.
“Waiting for a show?” His hands paused at the scrub ties.
“I like looking at my husband. Can’t a woman admire a handsome man?”
His lips curved into a smirk. There was a way you always distracted yourself from the flood and it was through him. Jack knew it, because he had been guilty of it too. But there was nothing telling him that when he reached the edge of the tub and you rose with your body dripping with soapy water and helping him the best you could into it, that you were trying to have sex to forget about it all.
It wasn’t healthy, for either of you, to fall into that habit.
Without incident, he slipped into the position behind you and you settled back down between his legs and for the first time, Jack was appreciative of the purchase. It was relaxing and it was peaceful.
You moved the soap bubbles between your hands in front of you as his arms rested on the sides. As he relaxed, he knew that if his eyes were to close for an extended period of time, he’d be out like a light. But you kept the water moving. Mildly lapping with every listless sway of your hand and the cupping of bubbles to be brought back down to the water.
After a few minutes the sounds ceased and though he had closed his eyes, he sensed the way you shuffled back against him and carefully, as if not to spook him, leaned backwards against his chest.
And suddenly, you were at peace.
Love floated into the spaces left cracked from the day. It caressed your arms and folded over your shoulders to hold you tightly together and feel each other in a moment of quiet reflection. A tidal wave breeched your shores again. Jack felt your body trying to ignore it. Tears slipping through your closed eyes as he nudged his head to an angle that now rested against yours.
“Just because we can’t save everyone doesn’t mean we are any less deserving of a good life,” he whispered into your ear.
Your hand cleared itself of soap underneath the water and drew back up to the side of his face, gliding across his features to leave a trail of wet and back to his hair where the strands were still damp.
“I love you so much.”
A beat.
“I love you,” you breathed.
“You are a good doctor, a great doctor,” Jack affirmed. “One day or twenty of them don’t decide you’re not.”
You thought you’d long forgotten what it felt like to be loved—to be in love.
Yet that thought was easily forgettable now.