what spring does

by a_bad_dream

Summary:

Samira and Jack, learning to blossom.

Notes:

I should've divided this into chapters but I'm impatient. Obligatory ‘I know close to nothing about being a doctor and working in a hospital’, I did read a few things here and there, but if I get anything wrong, please don't throw sticks at me, I suck at dodging :(

 

 

 

I will bring you happy flowers from the mountains,
bluebells, dark hazels, and rustic baskets of kisses.
I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.
― Pablo Neruda, Everyday You Play

 

 

 

 

 

 

i. autumn

—

 

 

Samira thinks she can fix everything. And if she can't, well, she'll learn.

When she moves into her new apartment, the door handle to her bedroom falls limp, the toilet leaks, the window blinds in the kitchen jam halfway up. For a week, Samira cohabits with a gaping door, a sodden rag tied around the gargling toilet cistern, and—worst offense of all—a half slice of stingy dawn sun for breakfast each morning.

After a week of this, she goes out, buys a screwdriver with adjustable heads, a wrench, a new float valve, a doorknob of shiny zinc and a set of pleated blinds that crinkle and rustle like paper fans. She watches videos, clicks around internet forums, screws, vises, hammers, sweats, stubs her pinkie and floods her bathroom twice.

While she works, she comes to the conclusion that houses are like people. With a cog out of place, a grain of sand under a broken joint, some hard sediment pasted onto plastic bones, everything starts to wobble and wince. Small things are essential. They keep the machine running.

She tests the door's mechanism each time she passes before it, like a child with a new toy, listening to the upbeat click that greets her faultlessly.

Great job, Mohan, she congratulates herself, her voice bouncing amongst the cardboard boxes stuffing the rooms.

It's not like anyone else would've helped her anyway.

 

 

 

On the night of the Pittfest shooting, they waddle out of the hospital into the park, under a crown of scheming trees, bloodstreams buzzing like the wires of old computers shutting down.

Samira is numb under the eyes. The night is a silken handkerchief, rubbing her cheeks, fresh and calm. Masterfully, it hides her tear-swollen face.

Her hair rushes down to her shoulders, smelling of sweat, scalp and fading artificial lemon zest. She bought that hair mist on a whim, enticed by the clean, waxy yellow and sage green label, colors that made her think summer in Provence, canola fields, singing cicadas (all of it wishful imagination, encouraged by the distorted lens of films and social media—she's never even set foot in Europe).

She's certain she'll never use that hair mist again. Memories carry a smell (or maybe it's the other way around?), and this day is forever drenched in the synthetic, cloying aroma of citrus and cashmeran. She won't throw the bottle away; she really doesn't like to waste things. It'll rot on a shelf in her bathroom instead, gathering dust and shower particles. She doesn't know anyone well enough to pass it off to. What kind of present is that anyway, a used can of hair product? It's the sort of thing you gift as a joke (“This stinks, it reminded me of you!”) to a sibling or a childhood best friend. Samira has neither.

Chirps of conversation bubble around her, exhausted, shivering. The tone is congenial, pulling her in. They shared something awful today. It makes a bond. She's never had a hard time participating; it's what comes after that's difficult. She can joke, she can be interesting. But permeating the membrane requires more effort, and shortening the denomination friendly colleagues to friends hasn't been on her list of priorities. Not that she doesn't think about it, sometimes, with a pinch of guilt, waylaid by procrastination.

On the bench, Jack Abbot sits and removes his leg. As in, his leg of carbon fiber and silicone and aluminum and foam. Gray and black, not red and pink. The only traces of color come from blood, splattered upon the toe of his shoe.

When she leans to him, her own awful lemony stench wafts to her nose. She can't wait to hop in the shower, scrub it off for good. Scrub this whole day off her, in fact.

“How are you feeling?” she asks him.

Abbot raises a perplexed glance in response. He's stubble-cheeked. A gaze that's tough to hold, even when he's being encouraging—particularly when he is. She looks down to his hands, searching for a tremor. They're still and poised as lake water. Not an ounce of trouble in him, except that slight aura of fatigue they all carry.

“You gave a lot of blood.”

His shoulders hitch up, like he's just remembering that detail.

“Not that much,” he mumbles back.

He means to say, not enough.

She wants to ask him why he does all this—not in some accusatory tone, but out of genuine curiosity. He was nice to her at the crest of the nightmare. He told her she did a good job in there, and it's made a warm glow that her weary, ashen mass is still bundled around. He did this for her, and she doesn't know him at all.

She's never asked that question to anybody in the ER before, but she's heard it tossed around in bated breaths, with a twinge of cynism too perhaps, like a beat up frisbee that simply must be thrown at some point. People have often compared the emergency department to a ship, but she's always seen it rather as the ocean itself. A boisterous, heaving expanse of bottomless water, of unkind current tossing them around. Samira clings onto the buoy of some enthusiastic (and possibly idiotic) certainty that she'll always refuse to drown in it, even if obstacles jab her like pieces of driftwood—hinted (and not so hinted) jokes about her pace, disagreements with residents or attendings, Dr. Robby's complicated moods, unpredictable patients lashing out, people she wants to help but who won't let themselves be helped.

Each day she stumbles onto the shores at the end of her shift, breathless, struck by the recognition that, yes, another tempest has tried to sink her down, but it's another tempest she's managed to paddle through.

Why do they do this?

In her case, she knows it stems somewhere from the memory of her father. She knows because when she asks herself the question, a door gapes in a corner of her heart, with angles that rake into her ability to breathe. She struggles to shut it close, to turn the key in the lock. Grief, as a feeling, is a perfect paradox. It is both an extra limb and a truncated piece, something that is carried and that hollows. If someone ever asks her why she does it, she'll respond it's to bring change in the standards of care. Which is true, in part.

Why does he do it?

Because it's their job, sure, that would be a quick answer. The real reasons as to why are innate to all of them, heterogeneous in nature, tied to past or future, viscerally personal. Maybe it's sentiment. Or duty. Or because there's nothing else better to do.

So Jack Abbot is sitting there, on the bench, in the orange-flecked dark. His face, just a little sallow. He uses quick, attuned strokes to clean his prosthetic. Samira sips on bitter ale and watches how he dips into the surrounding prattle, circling it, not really engaging, with the same gracious manner a dubitative swimmer tests out the waters at the beach and decides against diving in.

In the aftermath of the battle, the hum of others around them, click of beer cans being spilled open, Samira thinks: this is a man who doesn't like to talk unless he has something to say, and even then, he might not speak at all.

Why does he do it?

She'll ask him another time.

 

 

 

It's not an Indian summer, more like a deceptive final outburst that brings them dehydrated patients, heat-struck bodies, ruddy faces damp with sweat.

Seasons may change, everything stays the same. People get hurt and throng the room that's not built to hold them all in.

They crumple on uncomfortable chairs and hold hands, frame faces, murmur in a low voice. They tell inside jokes or settle debts or tease or make vacation plans. Sometimes they gossip. They pray together. Samira knows listening to the soundtrack of patients and their loved ones is a potent habit, but it's irresistible. They all do it.

One of her patients that day is a woman in her mid-forties, delicate and endearing, a helmet of red hair, real poppy in human form. Her husband clutches her fingers, rubs her knuckles energetically as if to smooth out whichever wrinkle plagues her health. He talks to his spouse like they're alone in their bedroom at home, shoulders curved forth, his voice soughing, familiar as a firewood scented breeze. With an intimate smile, he whispers to her. Not a prayer or a joke or gossip. It's composed and cadenced. A song without music.

“I will bring you happy flowers from the mountains, bluebells, dark hazels, and rustic baskets of kisses. I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.”

Samira feels like a burglar, intruding on a scene that's private, that she has no right to witness. She clears her throat, her fist against her mouth. It has the effect of a scalpel, cutting them apart.

With a sympathetic smile, she greets her patient by her name again. Grabs a stool before she speaks, eyes lowered to their level. She simplifies the intricacies of medical jargon, explains tachycardia, hypotension, details of the tests just conducted. She keeps her sentences short, her gaze steady.

Another lifetime ago, she came with her appā in the ER. The doctor that day fumbled with words as if they were ropes coiled onto the ground designed to make him trip. He'd either freeze with plodding sentences, or pelt terms her teenage self was not equipped to understand, stretched-out words weighted by syllables and aggressive consonants. She remembers pulling her dad's phone to Google the terms as he went on, her fingertips all raw from the teenage nail-gnawing, furiously clicking away on the screen. She hated the feeling of powerlessness raised by the barrier of language, the fact that he was purposely using a whole other dialect as if to mislead or get rid of them, cryptic and slightly pompous. But what she hated most was the tone—anyone would prefer a calm doctor to a panicking one, but they also want to feel like they care. There's a middle ground, and this one trudged across an entirely different field. The doctor she met that day taught her much about the kind of practitioner she'd like to be, before she even knew this was a turning point, the decisive moment that'd lead her into medicine. A cynic would say one learns more from the bad things than the good, but Samira isn't a cynic. And she doesn't want to think grief and anger were what pushed her into this lane of work.

“We'll get you started on antibiotics,” she tells her poppy-haired patient. “And I'd like to admit you into the ICU for further testing.”

When she comes out of the room, the husband catches her. Thanks her profusely. She smiles. She's available if they have more questions—she always is.

“That was lovely, what you were reciting to her,” she confesses.

His gaze lights up. “I wish I could take credit, but it's not mine. We both teach at the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences. Do you enjoy poetry, doctor?”

She gives a disappointed shake of the head. “I can't say I know much about the topic.”

There's a low rumble, wheels of a gurney screeching on the immaculate floors. It's six on the clock. One more hour and she'll sail away, leave this place to pulse like the tireless heart that it is.

“What's open?”

“Trauma two!”

She recognizes the first voice as belonging to Jack. He's an hour early, gliding in all swift and unanticipated. She wants to flock to that voice like a beetle to a sunflower, to lean over the person in the stretcher, work a miracle, earn another “Solid work, Mohan” uttered by his relieving tone. She could really use it now, some kind of verbal vitamin shot. She freezes mid-leap, startled by the selfishness of the thought.

Dr. Robby brushes by her.

“There's a very scared teenager with a dislocated shoulder waiting for a doctor,” he tells her.

“On it.”

Seven. She goes to check on her scarlet-haired patient before she takes off. There's a brand new face on the bed. Too bad. Samira forgot to ask who wrote the poem.

 

 

 

On one of those inconsequential days leading up to Halloween, Samira gets a nosebleed.

It hasn't happened to her since middle school. She remembers the last time really well—dodgeball Wednesday, the culprit not a rubber ball, but a lanky classmate's elbow, yanked straight up her snout when she tried to break up a fight in the locker room. It seems this is how most bad things happen to her, every time she puts effort into doing what she believes to be right.

Her first thought when it happens again is, why is there ink dripping on my form papers?

It blooms in hurried mottles—one, two, three dots of crimson on creamy white—and it takes Abbot's stern voice to lead her into realization.

“Mohan, you got a little something there.”

What a way to start her shift.

“Does it happen a lot?” he asks while she tilts her face forth, two fingers framing the slant of her nose.

“No,” she's quick to reply. It has to be skin irritation, dry air, maybe pollen (she isn't even allergic to pollen).

Abbot hands her tissues.

“Does it hurt anywhere?”

He doesn't use that sappy, well-meaning, slightly condescending tone people employ on children or people in crisis.

She's mumbling back, nasal and incomprehensible.

“I'll be fine.”

“Been feeling tired, lately?”

“As opposed to everyone here, all the time?” She's being sarcastic, but not abrasive. Even when she actively tries to be mean, people think she's just kidding around.

He cocks his head.

Yeah, I know, his eyes concur.

The thing with Dr. Abbot is, it's nicer when he's around. She wouldn't call it basking in his presence, but it's certainly a salve—like turning a faucet to wash your hands and the water hitting your fingers already warm instead of pipe cold. He's nonchalant, but not careless. Efficient, not overwhelming. He has a way of looking at people when they're talking, singeing them with hazel eyes. Some would call it a penetrating gaze, and it's not disruptive or uncanny but it's certainly noticeable. Whoever receives those eyes is suddenly made into the most important person in the world. She's seen the effect it has on some of the newbies: they stutter, they turn various shades warmer, they stare into another direction in a weak attempt to refocus. They're not used to being listened to with such attention—is anyone, really?

It's what he's doing with her now, even if it's just a nosebleed, that the flow is already dwindling—there, it's stopped. She says thank you and he stares from under his lashes. What are you talking about? he seems to say. I didn't do anything.

He tells her (it thwacks like an order, really) “Keep an eye on it”, and just like that, the current carries him away.

The second bad part of Samira's morning is announced while she still has cotton in one nostril. Public bus crashed on Bedford Avenue. They get swamped. She spots Abbot's hair amidst the chaos, silver curls glistening like pewter under harsh lights.

Sometime amidst the panic, they receive a postcard from Dana.

It's pinned in the break room and they take turns looking at it, making jokes, trying to read between the lines to see how she's faring. Officially, the trip is an anniversary gift from her husband. Officiously, it's an escape from the ED.

Santos chortles. “Does it really count as a gift if it's in Ohio?”

“I just can't picture Dana riding horses and… tree-spotting,” Whitaker chimes in, with an endearing air of amazement.

“She's with her husband, what do you think they're doing?”

The malicious implication makes everybody wince.

Dana and Benjy have been married well over twenty years. As Samira toys with the thick edges of the card, eyes glued to the glossy image of picturesque pines looming over a lake, she tries to imagine what being with the same person for over twenty years would feel like. The best she's ever done is two, and she's not sure whether it counts, since most of it has been poorly managed long-distance—barely coordinated phone calls, one visit culminating in an argument on the way to the airport—the whole affair cracked for good after a glib, seven-minute-long breakup over FaceTime during the pandemic.

Her parents had been together for twenty-three years before her father passed away. She knows what one version of a twenty-three-year-old relationship looks like—two people trapped under the same roof, barely speaking, not so secretly arguing when the kid is asleep, but barreling forth because what else is there to do? She's not close-minded enough to believe all couples end up at the same spot after that span of years. But maybe matrimony is an art rather than a science, and she's been surrounded by too many scientists.

Abbot walks into the room sometime during the Ohio jokes. His gaze drops to the card like he already knows what it contains.

“We could write something back,” Whitaker ventures, ever the considerate type. “Tell her we hope she's resting well?”

“Address it to tree stump number six, next to the woodpecker family,” Abbot mumbles. He's right, there's no return address—knowing Dana, it's on purpose.

His sturdy shadow looms over Samira's shoulder. She thinks he's trying to get a better look at the landscape, but his fingers pat the papers squeezed under her elbow.

“What's that?”

“Oh—just something Dr. Garcia gave me.”

“Racial Disparities in the Use of Surgical Procedures in the US,” he reads in a whisper. He doesn't ask, but the question is implied.

“It's for my research—I focus on the ER,” she corrects with haste, “—but I try to read everything I can.”

She can't tell if it interests him. His bag hangs loose on his shoulder. His scent prickles her; antiseptic, acid sweat. He drummed through the night shift and a chunk of the morning; if he's exhausted, he's exceedingly good at hiding it.

Outside the room, a commotion. Perlah scuttles by. A fight broke out in chairs—those happen minimum once a day. Someone got the lights knocked out of them.

“I'm out of here,” Abbot slips. “You guys better get moving before Robby spots you.”

It suffices to make them all start up.

 

 

 

Samira's on the couch that evening, a podcast gibbering in the background. She looted out a choice selection from her fridge—wheat tortilla, half a cucumber, ketchup, canned chickpeas, the damp remains of a packet of shredded cheese and blueberry yogurt. She improvised a wrap with everything (minus the yogurt) and it tastes exactly like it sounds.

She's doing her grocery list on her phone.

As a kid, she'd fill entire notebooks with lists. Places she'd travel to, gift ideas, random books she read at the public library, all her favorite songs that started with either of her initials.

She's a grown up now, and her lists are boring. Digitalized, coldly practical. Weekly objectives (go for a jog, read something that isn't work-related, call mom). Things to mend in the family home in New Jersey, organized like daunting sidequests in a video game—eradicate ants in the kitchen, investigate the suspicious mold flowering in the basement, listen to the woes of the rattling heater.

She goes to her emails now. Sorts through them mechanically. Spam, trash, spam, trash, spam, trash.

A ping from her work inbox interrupts the mindless flow. The trauma center's email domain sticks to Abbot's name. Attached is a paper by a medical anthropologist. There's no other comment with it, just his name in the sender's space and the neat square of the attached file. It'd read like a mistake, if it weren't for the content, tailor-made, personal. She opens the article, skims through it. Realizes it's good, interesting. Samira rouses up, fetches a glass of water, sits back down.

‘Thank you!’ she types. She goes back, wipes out the exclamation point, replaces it with a smiling emoji, removes it, puts the punctuation back before she hits send.

Abbot starts doing that. Once a week, like she's got a subscription of some kind. He sends her studies he finds and widens his fetch out of the hard medical field to sociology, psychology, all related to her research. He adds a few complimentary words from time to time, precisions, like he knows someone who knows someone that collects useful data for a nonprofit—if she's interested.

One evening, in the transient hours of the day squad yielding over to the night team, he asks what she thought of the latest he sent. At first, she speculates it's out of politeness. He doesn't comment on any of it himself, but then he asks her a question, so specific, so detailed, there's no way he hasn't at least read through the first paragraphs.

He doesn't assert his opinion. He listens to her talk. Not a lot of people do that. You have to move fast in the ED. If you don't dash quickly enough, someone else will squeeze you out, their voice will overlap yours, you'll get drowned. It's partially why she dislikes the nickname Slow-Mo so much. It smears her like tar, keeps her from playing the difficult partition on tempo. Brands her for inadequacy.

But Abbot is listening to her now, and he's not looking at his watch.

Samira thinks there exist different kinds of kindness. There's the one that comes naturally to her and that she's inherited from her appā, kindness that people have often described as nurturing and maternal (she secretly hates that). There's also the type that's tough and fanged, that shakes people around, that goes like a slap on a cheek to pull you out of slumber or paralysis, tough love, hard love, not suited to everyone but necessary at times. And there's whatever Abbot does, which is, kindness that doesn't look like it, kindness that he can reshape to call efficiency or I'm just doing my job. It's easy to imagine him recoiling and grimacing if anybody tries to call him that—kind. It's not an insult, but some people just don't like it. Maybe Dr. Abbot doesn't think he deserves it.

 

 

 

Cold disagrees with Jack's body. His nerves are molded into iron strands, stinging him from scalp to feet. November circles with its tiny fangs, a prelude to winter, biting its venom into him. His own blood struggles through his veins, sluggishly reaching the residual limb past his thigh.

In their department, the heater has gone on a strike. Jack wants to remove the prosthetic and warm his flesh, knead it, care for it. Numbness infuses under his hip, patient as frost.

The handoff goes smoothly. He'll be home soon, which is both daunting and a relief.

Someone suggests throwing Dr. Collins a farewell party, since she announced heading back to Portland and remaining there. When Jack asks Robby about this, he gets a half smirk. “It's good, I'm happy for her,” twined with indirect eye contact—Robby's version of I don't want to talk about it. It's enough to make Jack drop the matter.

Mohan walks up to them, rubbing her palms together, bracing up for the morning rush.

“Are we supposed to see our own breaths?”

“It's not as bad as outside,” Robby mumbles. He's in a dour mood—it's not her fault, but she doesn't know that. She strikes a sheepish grin, regretting her joke.

“Sun out yet?” Jack wonders, diverting her from the ill-tempered attending.

“Barely.”

She blinks, grabs something out of her pocket and slips it to him. It's a squared pouch, plump-shaped like a tiny pillow, its fabric dry and coarse against his palm.

Meeting his quizzical glance, she explains.

“They're Kairo heat packs. You rub one in your hand and it'll start to warm up. Here.”

She shows him, massages the thing like it's a sore shoulder before she gives it back. Her fingers brush his, long and slender, clean nails, no polish.

“Trust me, they work,” she adds.

Ten minutes later, the pack warmly hugs the muscle in his thigh. It weighs as dense as a cooked apple, warding off the winter fangs. He'll have to ask Samira where she got those.

 

 

 

Log in to read.

She glowers at her computer screen, suppressing a cuss word. Trying the old trick she keeps for paywalled websites: reload the page and click on stop just before it's done. It's no use here, of course. She needs an account.

Samira takes several minutes composing the message to Abbot. She doesn't like that she's emailing him to ask for something—but what else would she message him for?

Less than five minutes later, she gets a chime back. It's his phone number. He says she can access his account, but he doesn't like sharing passwords through written messages.

When she calls, he picks up on the fourth tone.

He says her last name as a greeting.

“Mohan.”

“Abbot,” she calls back mindlessly, even if it's out of character for her. It's something old people do. Well, not old, just older.

“Got a pen?”

The password is paranoid and long, bogged in dollar signs and asterisks in random places, capital letters popping up like scarecrows. She makes him repeat it slower. Stacked under his careful pronunciation, she hears running water.

“Are you doing the dishes?” she interrupts him.

There's a sudden rush of oddness. All at once, daily life intrudes into the phone call, the pall of work lifted, revealing a shape, furniture under a cloth. Existence outside the ED— his existence—because like every person, Abbot has a life, a home, perhaps someone to share it with, and groceries to do, bedsheets to change, cutlery and plates to rinse.

“Tried a recipe. I got a bunch of tomato sauce everywhere,” he garbles.

It's a mundane answer. Absolutely nothing to fuss about. But he could've just said yes, or no, and the fact that he gave her a bit of detail gladdens her. She feels like she's sitting on a bough outside his window, which he just opened to show her something. The faucet is silenced; he finishes giving her the password.

 “Do you ever take breaks, Mohan?” he scolds her after, playfully. “Work's over, turn the computer off. Go outside. See a movie.”

“There's nothing good on Netflix,” she grouches.

“I meant the movies. Cinema.”

“Alone?”

There's a tink, wood on metal. He grunts softly.

“What, you've never been on your own?”

“It's a little…”

Lonely, sad, pathetic?

“—Weird.”

“Nobody cares. Do you notice or remember people who go to the movies by themselves?”

She answers no. They have a short discussion about what's showing right now before he draws a conclusion.

“When you want to do something, you can't wait for someone else to do it with you, yeah?”

For some reason, that statement angers her. She knows that. Of course she does. He's not teaching her anything new.

 

 

 

 

ii. winter

—

 

 

His hours are bleeding into the morning again. But it's winter, meaning days are cut short. He can say he's just flowing with the natural course of light. Jack can't help himself. Sometimes, it's like he doesn't want to go home.

They just cared for a patient with Miller Fisher syndrome, and though Mohan's work was—per usual—irreproachable, he could tell she wasn't really in the same room as the rest of them. She's not the easily distracted type. Snarky mouths can call her Slow-Mo all they like, you can't blame her for lack of attention towards her patients.

“Someone has a long face,” he croaks to Robby after she's passed by, her mouth pinched tight, shoulders stiffer than a headboard.

“Yeah,” Robby scratches his stubble, all gauche, like a father whose child just fell off the playground swing. “Government cancelled funding on her research.”

“Shit.”

When Jack approaches her in the break room, she's hovering over the contents of the coffee pot with a grimace. It bugs him that this is mostly the only way they ever manage to talk: in transitions, no real, clear-cut, defined moments. She blinks when he approaches, setting the bitter brew down.

“Why are you still here?” she asks in that delicate voice of hers. Even at her worst, he can't imagine that voice ever sounding baleful or growling.

Jack's not the consolatory type. Not in the traditional, expected sense at least; no patting on shoulders, no sappy encouragements whispered in honeyed voices. Move forward; that's more his thing. Don't ignore it, but move forward. That's paradoxically why he opens up so well in therapy. There's a liberation that comes with talking about yourself and being met with uncamouflaged acceptance. He doesn't want gentle, nurturing lies, or ‘do you need a tissue?’ eyes. This is a thing that happened. This is how I feel about it. He likes that approach, the method, the pragmatism in the display of his psyche. It's cleaner, stripped bare of the false promises of comfort.

In that spirit, he doesn't tell her the generic I'm sorry, which seems to perk her attention. She's been getting those a lot today, and it's really grim. Nobody died—why do they have to say that?

“It's going to be strange just—giving everything up,” Samira admits when he asks how she's feeling. She's not used to it, to renouncing things.

She thinks of the books, the printed articles she's collected, support and sources, heaped in a corner of her desk, at home, untouched, purposeless. What to do with them?

Jack's not sure she's giving anything up. He talks to her in short sentences, silhouette bent forth. One of his hands flutters as if to wrap on her shoulder, but he doesn't touch her. It feels very simple, very familiar, listening to him speak. Everything she unveiled, what she learned, what she will keep learning—they didn't cut funding on that, did they?

“Maybe I can still write something with what I have,” she hums.

“Yeah,” he nods, repeating his approval a second time after. “You don't need the government's fucking permission.”

Her laughter is fresh and bright, ringing like brass bells suspended in the wind. He's glad he did that, made her laugh. It's the first time he hears her make that sound.

 

 

 

Samira has no desire to go to her mom's for Christmas, but she's already missed Thanksgiving, and she's been reminded of it every time she picks up the phone. She knows she won't slither her way out of her duties this time.

Those two days away from the trauma center are riddled with catastrophe. Commotions resulting in soul numbing traffic on the highway to New Jersey, the torture of last minute gift-purchases for relatives she doesn't care about and weren't even supposed to be there, swinging from wind-battered streets to swelteringly crammed shops, the chore of decorating, her mother's chatter, her mother's cooking, her mother's scent of fresh laundry and licorice, laughing with her in between exhausting comments about her posture, how she's dressed, who she sees and her carreer and does she eat enough in Pittsburgh? The guests then. Cramping cheeks from forced smiling, tongue blistered from repeating the same canticles over and over again. No, I don't have a boyfriend. No, I'm not married. No, there's no plan for me to get married.

She doesn't sleep at all those two days. She's afraid to fall asleep in her childhood bedroom. She's afraid to dream. She was happy to see her things still in the same place. Happy to notice small details in the house—her mom changed the framed pictures in the living room, chose one of her playing the piano at twelve (a very short-lived hobby), her at the Adventure Aquarium marveling at jellyfish, the rare picture of her appā laughing at the camera, holding a dog she doesn't recognize.

She's happy to be home. She cannot wait to get out of there.

A mean fever chomps her down before she climbs into the car for the ride back. When the last stretch of December pulls over her calendar, there simply isn't much joy or health left in her to celebrate.

New Year's Eve rolls around. She says yes to the hours that nobody wants, that wait on the planning like vegetable peels to be thrown out. They don't ask her why she agrees to them—either out of courtesy or embarrassment. She has nobody to celebrate with—better this than sitting at home, stunted by the mindless babble of television and chewing on latex-thick Kung Pao chicken. Here, at least, she makes herself useful. Double shifts, too much coffee. A Happy New Year to her.

At midnight, the fireworks singe the sky in detonating color. She scrambles up to the cool air on the roof for the show. Up there, amongst peers sipping on covertly concocted eggnog, she's overwhelmed, and she can't explain why. There's a tightness in her chest. Her lungs don't expand properly. She rationalizes it's the caffeine; she's had too much of it. Even the watered down, acidic monstrosity of the cafeteria is bound to have some impact on her nerves. She has a runny nose and is only coming off feeling ill. It's a little much, all at once. The charred scents, deflagrations that staccato in the sky, sheaves of sparks that lick at the unseen clouds, turning them from their chameleon shade of dark to an ominous gray. Her back is slick with cold sweat.

Her hand clamped around the banister, she climbs down the flight of stairs, returns to the familiar bright halls of the ER. The break room opens like a pocket of tranquility, a liminal slit in the busy fabric of the hospital. She sits on a chair, rests her elbows on the table. Her breath ripples through the calm before it molds around quiet.

Ten seconds or five minutes later, the door yawns on Abbot. He stops when he sees her, before making his way to the sink.

“You okay?” he asks. There's genuine concern in his voice. She wonders if he saw her up there, on the roof, arms tight around her body, her rigid spine. His cheekbones are barely singed pink from the cold. What's left of an apple is compressed in his hand. There's a springiness to his posture. Like he's just passing through, ready to head back out, into the tide, to their patients.

She gives a half-hearted grin.

“Not interested in the fireworks?” she asks, a little strangled and rushed, sounding like she doesn't want him here.

He tilts his head to the side, shakes it loosely with a grimace.

“Same thing every year.”

He says it with too much morosity to land as a joke. Samira isn't sure if it's because he's lost the patience for fires in the sky or because he doesn't enjoy the racket. Or both.

The room is quiet. It's quiet outside too, abnormally so. The clock on the wall ticks slower than usual.

Jack moves like a comma, like a hand never lifting from the page it draws on, one interminably lithe and stretched movement. He curves sideways toward the trashcan, swings the core of the apple dexterously. The hem of his shirt rises a bit, uncovering a square of firm skin that she shouldn't be staring at—or at least, not for as long as she does. He walks over to her then. It takes him four steps to get to her; she counts them. He leans down next. She smells him before he kisses her, and it's like she's being kissed before his lips have even touched her—the freshness of that scent, minty, rousing, day-old cologne that clings to his hair still. His mouth lands at the corner of hers.

“Happy new year,” he says.

She's looking at him and he's looking away, and she feels like she's stolen his gaze or borrowed it; that for once, she has the eyes that can make people writhe and burn up. She realizes she really wouldn't mind being able to do this on the regular. How fun it is to be in his shoes, to carry eyes with the ability to do that. And how nice of him to let her have a little of it, just this once, even for a short moment.

“Happy new year.”

 

 

 

One of Jack's problems is, he knows he isn't playing his role as he should. There's a script for those things, and he hasn't been keeping to it as expected. He's reminded of it each time he visits his in-laws (he meditates on that term a lot, in-laws, wondering if he still has a right to refer to them as such, if it's a denomination that expires after a while, if he should say former in-laws now, if there's a rule to those things that nobody has explained to him). The forlorn widower part doesn't fit him. It doesn't mean he doesn't care. It doesn't mean he grew past the memory. He's not sure that he ever will, truth be told.

Beth passed away not so many Januaries ago. She had told him once that when she died, she'd rather it be in spring or summer, in the yoke of full effervescent foliage, beneath a dais of lilac and bushes of jasmine weaving her a shroud in pollen. But she died in January and got a winter burial. Pale snowdrops in lieu of bursting lilac. Jack did his best. He couldn't get her the jasmine shroud.

She was so young. He heard that phrase a lot after it happened—like it somehow would've been less difficult if she had been old. That observation still lands in his lap sometimes, rank as carrion meat thrown by well-meaning spaniels. It repeats particularly when he ventures back into her family, staggering through those visits with half-closed eyes, freezing himself in autopilot mode while counting down the hours till his release back to Pittsburgh.

He still wears the wedding band. Sometimes he forgets it on the edge of the sink—just like he did when she was alive—and keeps circling the naked skin above the knuckle, remaking it, absentmindedly. He doesn't make a face when her name is mentioned (anymore). Doesn't crumble down into himself (anymore). He'll gladly talk about her. She was an extraordinary person. When he does, people treat the subject like a catastrophe. Like mentioning her will break something in him, and that'd be scary. They wouldn't know how to manage him breaking.

But grief is a hole you don't fill; you can only learn to exist around it. He's accepted it. He's at a point he wishes other people could get it too.

He thinks he's okay now, or at least a better, but the truth is, he probably isn't

In theory, he should be able to see other people. He does an alright job at the start of things. Flirt, banter, shoot a calibrated glance that seems more meaningful than it actually is. Robby makes fun of him for it, that effortless charm he exudes, his reputation because of it, but at least Jack doesn't get involved with people from the PTMC. He doesn't like drama.

Things get tricky on first dates with other women. Here's another part he doesn't play correctly; he refuses to indulge in small talk or the gentle, socially acceptable hypocrisy exhibited on those occasions. There's seldom a second date. He always hits a moment when his consciousness pulls out of his skull to evaluate the scene, as if from the cruel, incisive perspective of a film director, yelling, “This isn't working”, “Who wrote those dialogues?”, and “Why are you standing like that?” He'll think to himself, “Do I really want to do this?” the same way someone procrastinates on vacuuming or freeing up space on their phone. Is this an effort he is willing to conjure? Is this even something he wants? Tragically, the answer's always no.

His therapist thinks it's good that he's putting himself out there. He tells Jack he's ready for it. But Jack isn't sure that's the issue.

He's not the type to overthink things. Not usually. He might be overthinking this one.

 

 

 

The diner is close to the trauma center. Not Samira's usual haunt, though nurses and doctors and hospital administrators compose a timid portion of the local fauna. Morning wades through sheets of hissing rain, and her mind calls for coffee dark enough to descale the lining of her guts. Something to burn her awake.

In her pocket, her phone makes a noise.

She shakes her umbrella, drops it amongst colorful peers in the holder flanking the entrance. The place is busier than she thought. Charred scents of breakfast, vinyl flooring sticky under her shoes, the counter polished clean, adorned in various bottles of sauces and an exhibition of flaky danishes staring from under their glass dome. The glow of the pastries is tantalizing. She wants to sit next to a window, to have somewhere to stare off into, but most of the good tables are already claimed. On her tippy toes, she scans the surroundings and spots a familiar face in between booths. Jack is looking back at her. She hesitates, but he makes a swat with his hand that she isn't sure how to read.

Hello? Come over here? Both?

She smiles as she trots up. Glib greetings. Between two fingers, she smooths a dissident curl, her hair fretting from the humidity. Her phone chimes again; she ignores it.

“Isn't your shift over?” she asks.

“I had a craving for bad coffee.”

“Cafeteria's not bad enough?”

She can tell he's been here a while. The mug next to his wrist isn't exhaling anymore.

“Sit if you want, I'm almost done.”

“I can find another table.”

“The window's the best spot.”

He's not insisting, he's just stating a fact.

Gingerly, she drops herself onto the booth across, careful not to knock his knees with hers. She can feel his gaze on her, and Samira knows what he's looking at—it's not often they see each other out of austere physician scrubs. She glides a finger under the collar of her plum-tinged sweater, plucks out a lump in the wool. A waiter approaches. She asks for coffee, hesitates, orders a cherry danish too.

“Forgot to turn your alarm off?” Jack shoots when the employee leaves.

Samira doesn't stop to wonder how he knows today's supposed to be her day off.

“I had an interview for a fellowship.”

His shirt is short-sleeved, baring his arms. He has them folded over the table, and she wonders if they'd really be as tough as they look if she were to touch them, how far her fingers would sink before hitting muscle—if they'd sink at all.

“How'd it go?”

She shrugs.

“Everyone and their sister is applying. I'm honestly aiming for something else. Maybe closer to home.”

“And where's that?” he inquires. He brings his cup to his lips, remembers it's gone stone cold, sets it back down with a soured pout.

“New Jersey.”

She earns a soft nod in response. What is he thinking? He most probably doesn't care. But then, he reacted the same when she first told him about her research.

The waiter brings her order. Jack's not wrong: the coffee smells like boiled tree bark, which is still one grade better than the wet-sock juice macerating in the breakroom's pot.

Samira's pocket chirps. She ignores the sound for the third time.

In a corner, a scrawny college student watches a video without his earphones. A mother and her kids share a heap of syrup-laden pancakes, exchanging jokes at the expense of other customers. An elderly man sporting a bushy beard skips the economics section to read the comics at the end of his newspaper. The crowd in here isn't so different from the one in chairs, just two buildings away.

Jack picks her attention back to him. He does what's typically forbidden: he talks about work. He tells her about a case of myasthenic crisis that arrived during the night. Engages her through questions. Not a game, nor a challenge. It's just talk.

She listens to him and the patter of rain outside, and her body hums like a tuned instrument. The food is good—sugar dissolving on her tongue, tang of cherries, butter baked to golden solace. It's basic chemistry; the dams in her brain gape open, welcoming the flood of dopamine. Glucose and conversation, the simple joy from both.

A whirr against her thigh, coupled with the tinny, familiar chime she never bothered to personalize.

“I'm sorry,” she fumbles for her phone, “I think I really need to take this.”

He doesn't mind.

The plate holding half a danish scrapes the table on its way towards him. She expects him to refuse. People are so eager to recant when you offer them something, she's noticed. She's not even sure it's a pride thing, it's like nobody really wants to believe something can be done out of niceness and not sheer politeness. But he doesn't do that, and she's glad. He accepts what she gives.

Her mom is speaking in her right ear, spouting in the passive aggressive undertone she's dreaded since she was a kid. Something about the heater or a short circuit, she isn't sure. She watches him pick a flake of crust with the pad of his finger. Bringing it to his lips, the pink dash of his tongue. Sieving out the red, squished fruit next, nudging it to the side. Alright, she notes. You don't like cherries.

Jack listens to her on the phone with her mother. It takes him a moment to recognize they're speaking Tamil. He remembers one of those articles he shared with her before Christmas, about the barrier of language in emergency departments, how it can be an obstacle to patient care. He's seen it first hand, at the center and well before, during his time in Afghanistan—messy years woven into perplexingly clear memories, the ashy tint of the base walls, contrasting resplendent dawns, the smell of his bunk, of grease and engine oil, acrid limestone, cigarettes, and in the backdrop, sounds he'd never heard before, doctors working with the Red Cross humming in throat-deep French or German, locals who babbled in chirpy Dari and Pashto or one of the many regional dialects, allies bouncing jokes in their native tongues and their half-assed but valiant attempts at translating them, which never worked, because humor—like poetry—is one of those things that seldom infuse through another language. Using hands to communicate instead. Sketching with fingers into dirt, on amberish dust that coated their trucks. Only reaching a half of the path to understanding each other in spite of all the effort.

And it's an issue as old as time. People seek to be understood. Sometimes, speaking the same language isn't even enough.

He might not know Tamil, but the jitteriness in Mohan's voice is universal. She's tracing the cartilage of her ear with her forefinger. He knows a nervous tic when he sees one.

When she hangs up, her smile is lopsided, warps when she chews on the inside of her cheek. He doesn't pry, and she changes the subject.

Jack leaves not long after, and she watches him from the window, his image smudged by stripes of water, swallowing the imperceptible limp in his gait.

When she stands to go, Samira's told he already paid for her order. She's not sure how she feels about that.

 

 

 

Jack doesn't sleep. She can send him a text at any hour of the day, and he'll reply within the hour.

Samira imagines him a lot. Her brain likes to put him in situations, in quaint sceneries. It's a kind of mental exercise, otherwise she'll start picturing him as some unperturbed hospital-shrined spirit that she can pray to whenever her mood plummets, and that's never good, right? You shouldn't put anyone on a pedestal a little too high—the fall will hurt a lot more. So she imagines him stirring tomato sauce like he mentioned the first time they talked on the phone. Fluffing pillows, buying apples at the grocery store. How does he pick them, she wonders? What's his favorite kind of apple?

They meet in the diner sometimes, by accident, blessed by short overlaps in their asynchronous schedules.

Samira looks at him sipping on his drink—orange-flavored black tea or dark coffee with a dollop of cream depending on his mood. The careful way he circles the rim of the cup instead of catching its handle. His downcast gaze—shifty colored irises that blur from hazel to gray—fixed on his phone screen, sometimes on her hands, peering out to the park. He lays his phone down, texts with one finger, holds his chin in his other hand, unbothered. He abandons it on the table when he gets up to use the restroom, doesn't even click the screen dark. He has nothing to hide.

She tries to concile this image with the versions of him that she's seen, that's she's heard, that he has offered glimpses of. The witty attending with acute observation skills. The veteran playing with the tepid edge of his coffee mug. The man who gingerly leaned across to kiss her on New Year's night.

Jack pretends he doesn't listen or care for gossip, but he perks up when she mentions rumors of an ER nurse allegedly dating one of the surgeons.

“Who do you think it is?” she asks.

They spend fifteen minutes in a conspiratorial bubble, building theories and snickering about them. (After that, Jack respects the chain of gossip, the cardinal rule that you're supposed to pass it on, and each time, Robby blinks or puffs “I have no idea where you hear those news, man.”)

Sometimes they'll grab out papers or a computer and work in silence, unburdened by the necessity of superficial prattle.

At the trauma center, they cross paths like dandelion achenes, hurrying by, dangling impersonal and strictly professional things in the air between them. When the wind blows them into the same rooms, Jack pays attention. He always did, in some way—he pays attention to everyone. But he does it a little more now.

Dr. Mohan, collector of hair clips that break too easily (when they snap, it's one of the few times he hears her swear). Dr. Mohan, butterfly-gliding rather than walking through the department. Dr. Mohan who stretches her time with patients to the limits of Robby's own patience. But she's thorough, and therefore efficient. As the SEALs say, and what Jack often repeats, ‘slow is smooth, smooth is fast’.

So she's doing the work and she's not arrogant. She doesn't ask for a pat on the back or recognition, laurel crowns, fanfare. She's the most low-key in the ED, paradoxically brilliant and unnoticeable. She gives radiant, friendly grins when you tell her she really strikes up with the patients, not to mean ‘of course I do,’ more like ‘really, you think?’ She doesn't boast about what she knows, even if she could, because there isn't a question she can't answer.

“Left you a good one,” she sighs to him one evening—which is, of course, a figure of speech. Sitting behind the curtain is a teenage boy, his back tick-speckled from having played Tom Sawyer in the fields. She would've taken care of him herself, but she almost fell asleep in the breakroom and there's a dent on her forehead from where it rested on the table. Jack wants to rub it smooth with his thumb. She doesn't seem to realize it's there.

Samira checked with the stressed out mother that her son wasn't allergic to chlorhexidine, that the bites weren't over twelve to twenty four hours old, and promised a physician would be with him shortly.

She's draping Jack in the sheltering—and slightly apologetic—deep brown cloak of her gaze, and he tells her not to worry about it. Everything about her glows warm, even when she's rubbing her eyelids listlessly and breaking yawns behind her hand, even when she's so obviously exhausted he considers swaddling her in a blanket and carrying her home himself.

“Take a cab,” he slips as he fits his hands into latex gloves. She's shooting him an unworried smile that bares pearly teeth and a dip in her cheek.

“I can take care of myself, doctor.”

She's joking, but he wishes she'd call him Jack.

 

 

 

There's an unlocated drip in Samira's apartment. Plinking night after night after night and perturbing her sleep. She's tried cutting the water off, checked all the faucets, the kitchen, under the fridge, pasted her ear onto the walls, auditioning the pipes. She can't figure it out, and it's her own, personal limbo—that awful, monotonous, unrelenting drip.

That night, she puts on wired earbuds and flops on her stomach, dozing off to gentle piano music from centuries ago.

Her own groans wake her up, the music gone, her skin slick with sweat, hips rubbing down into the mattress. She rolls onto her back, kicking back the sheets. The air licks her body cool. The wires from the earbuds are wrapped around her throat, tight as an umbilical cord.

She hasn't had a wet dream in a while, but she feels exactly the same as she did as a teenager: a little ashamed, intrigued, lingeringly aroused, and utterly incapable of considering the object of her dream without her nerves liquifying into magma.

A few hours later, when the day shift relieves the night shift, she mumbles timidly back at Jack's greeting and bumps into a crash cart walking away.

He finds it all rather out of character for her.

 

 

 

Like many men born in the forties, Jack's father isn't particularly loquacious and struggles with what most experts would call emotional constipation. Whatever shrewdness and ability for softness Jack might possess, he hasn't acquired from his old man. They were never close. He was not a violent man, a severe one more so, set in his ways and rigid as a boat mast. After Beth's passing, Jack's mom and his brothers would talk and look at him with a special kind of caution, like he was the victim of some incurable, sinister disease that they could only sympathize with but not fully comprehend. Abbot senior alone kept on treating him exactly as he did before. When they meet (once a year, around Easter), his pale eyes lurk from behind thick glasses, a gruff voice injected with a slowness that'd almost pass for affection when he asks, “Are you good, son?”

It would, however, be most outrageous of Jack to answer anything other than yes.

Most of Jack's memories featuring his father are of him as he is now, a veteran too, well into his eighties, keenly fascinated with birdhouse architecture, mumbling to himself while prancing across the house, bawling his wife's name while he looks for the television remote or his wool sweater or whichever book about whichever dead president currently holds his interest. But Jack also remembers a lecture on friendship he received when he was fourteen (on a still night, sitting on the porch of their home at the time, the sort of evening that made adults prone to melancholia and kids scuttle by on tippy-toes so as not to get forcibly trawled in to witness said melancholia, which was exactly what happened to Jack that evening). His father told him, all stern and bushy browed, that the only way to assess the depth of one's relationship with another was to see whether they could comfortably talk about faith together.

It was, as often with Abbot senior, incomplete advice. What he meant—and what Jack understood later on once he experienced it himself—was that if he gets along with someone, he should be able to have deep conversations with them. Conversations about life and death and fear of death and what they believe comes after death, but also sometimes love and purpose and regrets and other subjects that grown-up people croon about like they're the first to ever breach the topic.

Jack doesn't talk about God because he has as much faith in God as he does in astrology or the healing power of crystals, but he's gone through a few of those conversations with comrades in arms, friends in medical school, with his wife. Now, he mostly discusses the big ponderous facts of life with Robby, up on the roof, in between shifts, out of work when they feel like it.

It happens one time with Samira. They're on the phone together. He doesn't even remember why he called; there was a reason, he's sure—maybe the reason was to hear her voice, her delicate inflections, the way she marks a clear, neat pause before she speaks.

She's telling a story about a patient and concludes with the slightly unoriginal observation that one really meets all kinds of people in the ED. It's a microcosm; that's the word she uses.

And, to her apparent surprise, Jack agrees. It's just one of those places that suck in bits and pieces out of the larger sample of what's outside. And therefore, existing in the ER gives the impression that you're actually part of that world, properly stitched into its fabric, that illusion woven from the fact that you engage with people plucked from communities you'd never get a chance to mix into otherwise.

But then once outside, who are they?

Who is she, she wonders, without the job? Someone without many friends, no relationship. No one to come back home to, except a potted philodendron she semi-regularly overwaters.

They don't talk about it like that. They keep to the surface matter, but the inwrought idea is reached nonetheless. Feeling of belonging and not belonging.

Jack says, it's important to remember not to let yourself get sucked in. The ED can be a lure. He mutters it like some sort of ill omen, a wise warning he would prefer not to dispense. But he can see she understands what he's talking about, and it really bothers him that she does.

He knows happy people don't think like that, especially at her age. She's supposed to belong in the world, not just dream through it.

 

 

 

It's almost eight in the morning, and Jack isn't here. She keeps peering towards the door each time they swoosh open, gurneys bustling through, paramedics, nurses and physicians walking in for their shift. None of them are Jack. Before she leaves, she asks Robby about it, tries to play it laid back, and has no idea if she succeeds or if she just sounds weird.

“He doesn't work today.”

And a shadow must cast itself across a side of her mouth because the attending puffs through his nose and wraps her in a look that feels paternal.

“Even superheroes need a day of rest.” As always with Robby, sarcasm holds him really far from sounding cheesy.

On the trip home, Samira feels a lack, a dissatisfaction that sours her stomach and wrings her muscles. She thinks she needs a shower, food, possibly nine hours of sleep.

Stepping out of the foggy bathroom, she wraps her wet hair in a towel, taps a finger on the dark surface of her phone. There's always the occasional message from her mother, wearing her down with questions, but the name that flashes on the display doesn't belong to her; it's someone else's, better-suited to how she feels.

Jack asks her where she got the Japanese heat pack she lent him once.

‘My cousin brought them from Japan.’

He reacts with a thumbs up. She's disappointed by her answer too.

She bites on one nail, types very quickly: ‘I have a few left and I never use them, if you're interested?’

Please say yes.

‘That's incredibly thoughtful.’

Samira sits cross-legged on her bed, crumpling the coverlet. She reads that line again. That's thoughtful. He thinks she's thoughtful.

‘I can bring them next time, or you can come here.’

She regrets her forwardness before she even hits send. His answer alleviates her.

‘Where's here?’

 

 

 

A collision in her living room, two distinct worlds coming together; the world of the ED falling into her own smaller, remote and cleanly sliced world. Jack in her home. Jack's weight on her couch, smelling like the night, and his unmistakable scent, minty and alluring.

She's wearing dark jeans and a tee shirt, her hair still wet, bundled on her nape in a shimmery green hair clip.

When he walked through her door—unhesitant, shoulders lax—she introduced him to her place like it was a living person. Led him from the door to her living room and tried to see through his eyes, what he'd think, the sorts of conclusions he'd draw about her, based on the anatomy of her home.

She offered something to drink and hoped she'd managed better at playing relaxed than when she had asked Robby where Jack was before. He'll have a glass of water, please. They sit on opposite ends of the sofa and sip from their respective glasses. The air sticks like treacle.

Samira wonders what Jack does on his day off. Probably what all of them do—clean the house, get groceries, take care of what needs taking care of, maybe he has family in town he visits, but he's been on the night shift for as long as she's been a resident, meaning he's awake at curious hours and must not see much of any hypothetical family.

He's never explicitly told her why the night shift. Maybe Jack just likes the darkness better. Maybe because it's the closest one can get to disappearing without fully committing to it.

He breaks the contemplative lull and compliments her home, which prompts her to tell him about all the issues that greeted her when she moved in. Leaking faucet, the broken window, the bathroom door that crouched off its hinges, ect.

“Want me to take a look?” he offers. And she can tell he really means it. He'd really take the time to help. He's not saying it because it's expected or a courteous thing to do. He's a problem-fixer too.

“Oh—no, I already took care of everything.”

“Everything?”

She nods back, scrapes a nail along the upholstery.

“Everything.”

Her confidence isn't haughty, but it's verbose in its own way. She's used to being on her own. Of taking care of these things herself. There's no lack in her that demands to be filled. That's what her tone is implying.

So she's fetching him what he came for, the orange package of crinkling pouches from some island in the Pacific she's only ever heard about, of a place with a name squeezed down into a list of places she decided she'd visit decades ago (but never did).

She waits for him to stand up first. She's afraid of the moment he'll tow back up the corridor, to the paint-chipped door, the click of the mechanism as it opens, as it shuts, then white noise, pure and jeering, back into her home, neighbors trampling behind paper-thin walls, cars slapping the air under her windows, her loneliness beating at the core of a space that's both safety and imprisonment.

“Have you ever been to Japan?” Jack inquires, instead of standing up. His voice is stripped down and intimate, devoid of the fearlessness he initially carried through the threshold of her home.

He's hefting the shiny package, making it sing and crackle between his fingers. The bell lamp on the console table infuses his eyes with flecks of amber, muddying their natural color. His expression is open as a window onto a camp fire.

Samira shares with him the secret of a notebook and travel projects hatched by a girl two times younger, a girl who still had a father and no idea who she'd be in the world (which meant she could be anything).

“Promises you make to yourself as a kid are the hardest to keep,” she observes, forcibly upbeat, bouncing the words like a joke before they flatten between them in resigned morosity.

Jack shakes his head.

“Don't say that. You still have plenty of time, Samira.”

He squeezes her wrist. The inside of his hand is coarse and dry. It's a thing they share, that identical scrubbed texture of palms and fingerpads, bullied by alcohol solution, excessive washing in-between patients, paring their skin of its softness.

Samira can name every bone inside Jack's body, but she can't put a name on what he is to her. Mentor or friend both sound lamentably inadequate. Whatever this is, however unfamiliar and ungraspable, she can see it spanning on for years, transfixed into some sort of silent yearning of the novels, a Jane Austen premise, conjured from a pining poet's brain. But she's never really gotten into Jane Austen, and she doesn't know anything about poetry.

And the other thing: Samira understands she's a creature of regret.

She regrets not doing more in her twenties. Not going out more, not behaving a little more reckless, biting into things instead of just nibbling at them. She regrets not putting more effort into finding and maintaining stable friendships. She regrets failing at understanding the formula of what binds human beings together.

And Jack is here in her home, a foreign entity of woven tissues and sinews and veins she has learned to distinguish and dissect, all the way to the non-organic matter fragmenting his right leg. She knows much about the clinical, physiological parts of him, but he has given more, and it's the more she cares about most: his distaste for cherries, his whip-fast repartee, the cadence of his limp at the end of the shift, kindness he distills as if a drug, safe only in reasonable quantities, which she looks forward to with a hunger befitting a kicked dog.

He still has one thumb on the point of her pulse. Perhaps it speaks to him like secret Morse code, a private vaulting, leading him to know what she'll do before she even thinks of it.

Samira kisses him like he did on New Year's Eve, at the corner of his mouth, her fingers grappling the lapel of his coat. She kisses him, and he doesn't push her away or make a sound or go alabaster-stiff, he lets her do as she pleases; he lets himself get kissed. So she shifts, and it's a real kiss now, heads tilting and breath crashing and taste and touch and so much of it that she doesn't notice Jack's kissing her back and moving just like her, with that same hunger inside, churning and distraught.

 

 

 

Her bedroom. The bed, double-sized. A monticule of plaids from which arises a wisp of laundry and the scent of her hair when he sinks her into it. That's most, if not all, Jack registers about the room.

Samira writhes under him, her skin all soft and elastic from her hot shower. He's gotten her shirt off, and he's working on her jeans now, the fabric chafing her thighs when he peels them down, clumping around her knees. He waits for her to push her legs up so he can finish up, kissing down her left ankle as he does, the hillock of her calf then, the faceted marble of her kneecap.

“I need to take this off,” he croaks at some point, like his lungs are hurting. She doesn't go ‘take what of?’ or bat her eyes cluelessly, or offer help he doesn't need.

She says okay and crooks her arms backward to unclasp her bra. He would've liked to do it himself, but he thinks as a consolation that he'll get it next time. He considers the thought as he props his prosthetic against her nightstand. Next time. Already supremely haughty, believing there'll be a next time.

He should focus on the first, for starters. Like many firsts, it doesn't go great. Her hair gets squeezed under his palm more than once, making her squeal out a timid ouch. Nervousness so thick it congeals their bodies into a sticky paralysis.

“Sorry. I'm out of practice,” Samira garbles.

“And I'm obviously not.”

They erupt in hiccupy laughter. The sound echoes on, resounding a while, already haunting her bedroom like well-tempered ghosts.

They give up trying for now. There's no shame in that. Pour under the covers, shielding half-naked bodies in the comfortable darkness. He asks why she has three pillows if she only has one head, and even in the dark, he can see her roll her eyes. Her answer, so I can read comfortably in bed, with a tone that's a little judgmental, a little “Are you kidding me, doesn't everybody do that?”. He glides his elbow under one of them. Warmth rises under the covers between them, setting their limbs into gentle somnolence. Her leg curls along his left one.

They talk a long time in half-breaths. Each time they reach a lull, a few drowsy seconds flutter by before one of them picks the dialogue up again.

Samira confides about growing up in New Jersey, about her dad. They both understand grief. She's never lost a spouse, but she's lost a father, which leads Jack to think about his own father, how he hasn't called him in a long time. She doesn't speak in a way that's expecting anything in return—a secret for another secret—but Jack opens up nonetheless, not about Afghanistan or Beth or anything related to old wounds, but rather waggish anecdotes, dredging up laughter from her.

Samira notices she isn't nervous anymore.

An hour later, they've given up on spoken words, converse in touch instead, in webbed limbs, hungry, quiet tongues, hands roving where they shouldn't.

It's very dark, and the blinds sieve the artificial streetlights, drawing parallel arrows across the ceiling.

He's pushed past her panties and made her wet on his fingers, took so much time there she started growing impatient, her breath splintered, featherbrained from the rush of blood.

“Can I turn the lights on?” he murmurs.

When he does, the bulb glow lazily lifts along the walls, joining the timid splash of outside lanterns, the same way his body joins hers. Darkness is ushered away by light. Now he can't disappear into it.

“I don't have a condom,” his voice cuts the air, hesitant but unyielding, expressing a condition.

“I might.”

She makes him check the drawer on his side of the bed, the expiration date printed on the box abandoned there. She almost threw it out entirely when she cleaned a week ago. She's glad she didn't.

“Do you know if lube can go bad?” Samira asks in a small, whistly voice that's trying to be funny but fails. She nibbles on her lower lip, thinking she's indirectly admitted to not having sex in a long time. At least long enough to prompt questions about something as unsexy as expiration dates on lube bottles and condoms.

But Jack doesn't care. He's the last person to care about those things.

He bends forth to the light, reading down the label, a serious line between his eyebrows. Samira's often seen him wear that face in the ED, never thinking it'd show up one day in her bed. The pale light colors outside the margins of his shoulders, bounces off taut muscles that edge into his shoulder blades and the harmonious river of his spine. She wants to wrap her arms around his chest, use him as an exercise, check if she remembers all of anatomy.

“This one's fine,” he declares.

The tearing of a wrapper. Shiny gel-like liquid spat onto his palm, and shared to hers when she extended her hand. She follows the wave of his movement, touches him with sticky, sudden fingers.

She gets jittery again.

He cups the side of her breast, ever the doctor, always searching for a heartbeat. Her nipple pebbles from the scuff of his thumb, and she makes a noise, a sort of strangled groan, spontaneous enough to spell that she really wants this. She falls on her back, squeezing his waist with her legs.

She hasn't had another body inside hers in a long time. Everything stills when he nests the tip of his cock, her nails going deep, deep into her palms, her whole organism slamming the brakes as it ponders on this thing that's happening to it.

He recedes quickly, leaving only the ghost of a pinch.

“This is a bad idea,” he goes.

The skin around his throat is pink.

She braces up on her elbows. “What? Why?”

Jack rests a palm over her stomach. She knows the answer just by his touch, her muscles clenched beneath, coiled tight as a knot.

“You're not comfortable. It's okay, we don't have to do anything.”

“No,” she protests, her voice dropping to a murmur. “I want to. It's just, I told you, it's been a while.”

His hand is still flat upon her abdomen, a prologue to a caress, but his gaze lingers on her, only half-convinced.

“Talk to me then. Tell me what to do.”

Tell Jack Abbot what to do. Guide him through the procedure, step by step, like he's done with her more than once, efficient and gentle. She feels a thrill at the inversion of roles.

“Touch me again.” Then, remembering her manners, “—please.”

He smirks at her. Don't be polite, his glare seems to say. Not in this context, there's no need. She realizes he must really want her.

The Pitt's a teaching hospital, and she's always been glad to hone her skills there as a mentor. She thinks she's good at that, good at calming the rheumy eyes of students, maybe good at calming an attending who's anxious about hurting her.

Jack's not a student, though; he's an old dog who knows all the tricks. He picks up on what she needs fast. Kisses her while her fingertips skip down his pelvis, wrapping around where he's hard, wincing at the cool texture of the latex. She seeks a friction and seeks his eyes as she does. Guides him at her pace, lashing their bodies together. The full length of him rubs into her again and meets no resistance, her body pliant and warm. He gives up a sigh in the crook of her neck.

He's so careful with her. His pace slow, like sinking in water. She worries he might see her as something cracked, difficultly mended back together—like those Japanese ceramics with edges and fissures filled in gold. She whispers if he can fuck her harder and realizes she's never said those words out loud to anybody before. She's so far, too far from her usual state to care about it. He doesn't seem unfazed by her request.

He does exactly as she asked, and everything is intensified into the head of a needle. Her fist clutches the hair at the back of his head, and Jack takes it as the clue to keep going.

Wetness pools and drip, stains the sheets he rubs her into. She's not thinking about how she'll have to change them after, which used to be how her thoughts strayed with her former partners. A whole other plague of inappropriate thoughts teems in her now, namely how it'd feel if she removed him from the clutch of the latex, had him at his most organic and crude.

Jack fucks like he moves in the ED, rocking into her all focused, thorough. Clean, shallow strokes that bump her nerves right, compressing her body into hard, quivering matter. She's voiceless when she comes, the column of her neck arched up for him to kiss. She's aware somewhere in the fog that he's calling her name, very softly, breathing it through her mind. The biceps she clings to like a buoy, all taut and rope-hard. His fingers pinch her waist. She forgets to yelp, to react as one does to pain, maybe because it's not really pain, only something that masquerades like it and is much easier, nicer to endure. And Jack tremors against her, reaching the crest she just tumbled down from.

 

 

 

When it's over, Samira runs to the bathroom on wobbly legs. Her organs are boiling. She half floats, half trips over her own feet.

“Don't go through my stuff,” she panic-stutters before she leaves, hoping to gather some poise along the way.

His military rigor might disagree with her meticulously crafted clutter. She uses mess the same way others decorate; she starts with order before she topples it: the clean sweater draped across a chair that's sat there for four weeks now, a squared heap of books and papers and Velcro folders that crumble like a sandcastle at the foot of her bed, a pair of peat-crusted running shoes she's been meaning to throw out.

In the bathroom, she berates herself. Avoids her reflection in the mirror and her own critical, sardonic stare. Don't go through my stuff; what a thing to say. And running off like that, like he just set her hair on fire.

“You okay?” Jack asks after she comes back in.

He's sitting at the edge of her bed, his skin still absurdly pink and biteable, doing exactly what she told him not to do—skipping through a dog-eared novel she got from one of those boxes posted in public places and in which people drop books they don't care for anymore. He's tugged his underwear back on, his tee-shirt creased and clinging at his chest as if he just stole it from someone bigger.

“Yeah,” she breathes, wondering what else to add in order to keep the silence from creeping in. “Do you want something? Water?”

He gestures no. The sheets rustle as she crawls back next to him. He places the book back on her nightstand. He touches her shoulder, hesitantly dragging his fingers to knead the nape of her neck.

“Are you sure you're okay?” he asks again. An apprehensive cloud spans in the depth of his gaze. Samira rakes her memory, trying to remember if she's ever seen him like this, vulnerable and softened. She leans across for a kiss and tugs on his shoulders, dropping them both into the mattress, into the burrow of quilts and pillows.

“That was really fun,” she murmurs.

She's not sure fun is the word she's looking for, but the alternatives are too intense or detached from what she earnestly feels.

She curls herself against his ribs. Falls asleep as quick as death, like a weary traveler under the shade of a tree.

 

 

 

 

iii. spring

—

 

 

Gossip in the break room. She knows it's gossip because Perlah and Princess switched to Filipino mid-sentence, and dove into a tone all giggly and conspiratorial.

Samira refills her water bottle, pretending she isn't listening, pretending anxiety isn't snaking down her spine. She wonders if anyone noticed for Jack and her. Not that there's anything to notice—which means she's being supremely self-centered.

He was at her place a week ago, and they haven't really spoken about it since. The morning after, he was up before her alarm rang. Walked out of the bathroom just as she was emerging from bed, hair sticking up, her cheek crisscrossed in the pattern of her wrinkled pillowcase. His neck smelled like her soap. He kissed her cheek, and it wasn't a paternal or friendly peck; it was wet and lingering, drew her in, made her want to take his shirt off again to check if she remembered the shade of his skin underneath.

She wonders how other people do this: get inside each other's bodies, alter a little of it in secret, put it back as it was, and not end up thinking about it all day, every day after. Or maybe they do, and everyone is just better than she is at pretending it isn't a big deal. A week, and she still remembers how it felt, carrying the imprint Jack left inside her, both an embarrassing and delightful mark. She's behaving exactly like either a virgin or someone who has never had good sex before, and it's mortifying either way.

He touched the inside of her wrist this morning during handover—possibly by accident. She thawed like a pile of leftover snow, met his gaze, undecipherable, sharp as ever, almost made her think she dreamt up tenderness. She doesn't think anybody noticed. It's nothing worth noticing.

In between caring for patients with kidney stones, meningitis, gashed body parts, and one unexpected case of botulism, Jack hasn't really been on her mind much. She thinks of him during breaks; allows herself to do so as a small, surreptitious treat.

She receives the news at the end of her shift. Good news really arrive like spring rain; you never know when it'll show up, it just does. The woman on the phone announces she got the physician partnership track job she was aiming for in New Jersey. Samira calls her mother straight from the ambulance bay.

“You must be relieved,” her mom babbles, the way one does while talking to themselves, distracted.

Samira blinks. Relieved? She's doing this for her too. She's doing this so they can be closer, so she doesn't have to worry and spiral down a maelstrom of guilt each time something happens and she isn't there to help.

They hang up thirty seconds after a bundle of inconsequential small talk. Samira gazes into the void, the crimson letters painted on the side of ambulances, nagging shrieks of sirens, cigarette stubs smashed onto granular tar. She sits here a while, in the rising breath of spring, as if waiting for something.

 

 

 

Spring now—the real deal, not the shy, after-winter kind—ladened over Pittsburgh without warning. Green pollen sugaring the streets, reminding Jack of the matcha powder his wife used to drink. He himself never really got used to the bitterness.

On his evening of rest, he's on the phone with his father when Samira texts him.

Jack tries to do that once a week now: call his father. The poor man was astonished the first time and answered with a bark, expecting shattering news—another pandemic, a tornado, machines taking over humanity, a continent sinking into the sea, the imminent end of the world as they know it. Why else would his son be calling him? Like all new habits, it takes some getting used to. Their conversations last five minutes top, but each time Abbot senior picks up, he's a little friendlier, a little less tense. Jack feels like he's talking to a former family doctor or a teacher rather than his father. Retirement has made him a little zany, less intimidating than when he was a kid. Jack thinks about the way Samira spoke of her own father. He's not sure whether that's what prompted this new habit of his or the impending fear of losing someone he's always felt almost close to, without ever having grasped the chance to get there for good.

So Jack's on the phone with him, and he hangs up before he opens her message. It's a long one, a paragraph building into an anthill of wobbly explanation.

Her printer broke. He does let out a puff reading this, because it sounds like a shaky excuse, but knowing Samira, it's most certainly the truth. Her printer broke, and she really needs to get and fill out forms, to send them out by tomorrow.

Jack doesn't tell her to send over the documents so he can print them for her. He tells her to come over because it's the only logical answer right now, the only correct path to take. Come over.

 

 

 

“Tell me those dried cranberries aren't the only thing you ate today.”

Samira's perched on a tall stool in his kitchen, legs crossed, hands folded over her lap. In his study a few doors over, the printer is wielding its lasers, domesticated and efficient.

“Cranberries—” she starts, feigning a structured explanation “—are filled with vitamins and minerals. Plus, they're fun to chew on.”

She stares at the dying begonias on his windowsill. They stand utterly out of place here, like they belong to someone else.

“Christ, Mohan,” Jack mumbles back, laconical.

The cold light of the fridge flashes on his face like a camera. He asks if there's anything she doesn't eat or like. He toasts pinenuts in a pan, uses that same pan to grill some chicken. Chops up carrots and lettuce, makes a salad, improvises a vinaigrette. She watches him with a pinch of fascination. He doesn't put any effort into the plating, but Samira receives it like he just painted her portrait. Jack sets a smaller portion in another plate, and she realizes it's so she won't be embarrassed about eating on her own.

She takes a bite and hides her mouth behind her fingers. “It's the best food I've had this week.”

He feeds her, then takes her to his room. In his study, the printer has gone to sleep. Papers dotted with fresh ink are layered on the plastic slab, forgotten.

Jack unbinds her from constricting clothes and doesn't expect anything from her other than that little shake in her inner thighs when she comes. His mouth is warm, and she feels like he's making her melt straight into it. She's a sweet thing heated by his tongue, her pleasure trickling down his gullet.

She lies there after, more mist than bones, cheeks flushed, rubbing her toes into his sheets. She has no time to wonder if she should reciprocate. “Be right back,” he swears, and leaves for a shower. Doesn't say a word about her needing to leave, so she stays.

In the middle of the night, he swivels in his sleep. His arm slips around her, tight but not compressing. He mutters words, foreign, straight from the realm of dreams into her neck. She wonders what he's dreaming about.

 

 

 

Jack doesn't know what time it is, but dawn has come and passed, and when he lugs his weight out of bed, he's almost certain Samira has escaped on tippy toes. His left foot lands in soft cotton. Her clothes are still strewn over the carpeting.

He finds her in his kitchen. The window is open, wafting a breeze that's overcharged with aromas from the garden below. Samira is watering the dead carcass occupying the ceramic pot, sparse dots of tired red crisped into bilious brown. He hasn't given his wife's begonias the time of day in a while. They're the last of her plants that he's kept, which haven't yet withered, even if their initial caretaker has been gone for years. He had the sudden thought over a month ago that he was pretty much nursing them for a ghost, which prompted him to plot a way to send them back to her, wherever she was.

“I always overwater mine,” Samira shares when she spots him by the door. “Seems like you have the opposite problem.”

“I thought you already left.”

“I'm not working today.”

She scratches her left calf with her right foot, shy all of a sudden, like she's not sure that she belongs here. She's wearing the clean shirt he left out for her last night.

Jack distracts her with an essential question.

“Want some breakfast?”

They get sidetracked, make a stop by his bed first to help her find her socks because her feet are cold. His palm curves on her forearm when he fishes them, two little nests under his bed, and that touch shifts into a pull, and she's slotted against his body, her mouth somewhere along his jugular, the room capsizing around them.

All he has to do is hitch up the hem of her shirt to unveil the soft spread of skin on her stomach. Her underwear is still somewhere on the floor, her legs bare. With a strength he wouldn't have suspected her to possess, she rocks his shoulders into the mattress, sprawls her gentle weight over him. She shudders when her ankle touches the cool metal of his prosthetic.

“I'll be careful,” she coos. “Stop me if I hurt you.”

He wants to reassure her with a bad joke (‘there's not much left to hurt’), but she's flipping the shirt over her head, and a fuse goes out in his brain.

Two thumbs on her nipples, he rolls them in tandem with the jerking of her hips. She's thrusting herself up, her stomach all tense from the effort, and his hand presses at her waist after a while, aiming to change her trajectory despite her querying gaze. He makes her undulate back and forth against him, grinding away from that vertical rhythm that made her muscles tight and her skin sweaty. Her mouth slips out a very tiny “Oh, okay,” flustered by the pressure between her legs, which makes him chuckle in a way that isn't pretentiously macho, rather galvanizing and honest, goading her into figuring this out, just a small correction, like the ones he dispenses at work.

After she comes, her body curving into his like a wind-bent willow, he wipes off the wetness at the corner of her eyelids, his thumb calloused but his touch gentle. Gives her a tender, hazy smile.

His body glistens under hers like morning dew. She cradles his hips again, but his fingers dig into the curves of flesh, halting her dead in her oceanic motion for a second time. She tilts forth like she'll lose balance, catches herself against his chest.

“You didn't come,” she says, with a pucker between her eyebrows.

“Male orgasms are boring.”

A short pause before she chortles.

“But it's true,” he argues. “It's over so quickly for us. You should see yourself.” He rakes his fingers up her thigh. “You look like you're everywhere and nowhere all at once.”

But she doesn't want to be everywhere and nowhere. She wants to be here with him.

“That's really stupid.”

She fists his hair before he has the time to zing back, tugs on it softly, delights in the groans he spills on her tongue when she lowers to his face, when she grabs his mouth with hers.

“Stupidest thing I've ever heard you say,” she goes, and resumes that swaying of her mass against his, pulling him further and further where she wants him.

She moves in quick jerks and he squeezes her hips.

And since she insists, since she's so kindly inviting him there, fine, that's fine, he'll follow.

 

 

 

When she walks up to the main desk, she spots his hair, his back, and his shoulders, encased in a dark shirt. Samira remembers she hasn't told Jack about the New Jersey fellowship—she remembers, but truth be told, she's been thinking about it a lot, because guilt has been stalking her and she's been putting it off. It's one of those situations that are definitely made awkward when you wait too long. And she's waited too long. They spent an entire day together, and she didn't tell him then. She could lie and pretend, but she will not, because that's not who she is.

“Do you have a minute?”

He looks stressed and vaguely annoyed, but he doesn't snap at her or open the dams of his impatience.

“Give me a moment.”

When he finally has that minute, Samira is busy with another patient. It runs like this in the vicious cycle of a pinwheel for a whole hour before they finally cloister in the echoing staircase.

She tells him about the fellowship. His eyebrows raise up. Head giving a small nod. A mixture of surprise on his face and what she wants to read as relief for her.

“That's good.” He's so composed. She's heard him say those words in the exact same tone once, upon receiving the results of a blood test on a patient. “Your mother must be glad.”

“Yes, she is,” she lies.

“You're headed back to New Jersey, then.”

It's not a question, but she feels the need to answer nonetheless, if only to keep the silence from sneaking over them.

“That's good,” he repeats and seems to realize he's said it one time too many.

He stands straight as a spear, balanced and tethered to some inwrought physical discipline that matches that current voice of his, about as personal as an answering machine.

 Somehow, she believes this went worse than when she announced it to her mom.

 

 

 

Three in the morning. The walls of her room close around her like the jaws of a whale.

Samira lies on her back like she used to as a girl whenever insomnia cursed her, the nape of her neck curved over the slanting edge of the mattress, her head dangling in the air, legs stretched. She waits for the blood-rush, the moment the pounding in her skull becomes intolerable, blessedly mottles all the thoughts that blight her brain.

She can't have everything. She can't have Jack and the fellowship in New Jersey. That's not how the world works, silly girl; you have to choose. Life isn't an ice cream shop that lets you pick all the flavors you want; you only get one, and you better make it fucking count.

She can't blow it all up and remain jobless in Pittsburgh for one person who she sort of has a nice relationship with. They're not together. They haven't properly spoken about the two times they've had sex. For all she knows, she's just a number Jack has saved for when he wants an easy fuck. This has barely crossed her mind, and already she scolds herself for the vulgarity of the thought; how demeaning for her and for him, how untrue to his character. The underlying truth remains nonetheless: they're not together. She's not giving anything up if she doesn't have it in the first place.

Things are weird between them now. She thought of texting him and couldn't come up with anything to say that wasn't related to work. That's how it started anyway, right? Because of work. Because of case studies and talk of patients and his interest in her research, and work, work, work. All of her life revolving around it.

The vein in her temple bounces like a living worm. She's uncomfortably aware of the shape of her eyeballs in their sockets, how they're ready to pop out and gallivant away. She sits up, and the room briskly tips upside down. She crawls back under the covers, and waits for all the skewed pieces to fall back into place. The queer sensation ebbs, but the weight around her throat remains. It's not the world that's upside down. Maybe it's just her.

 

 

 

Jack told his therapist about Samira. He didn't go into details—which should've been a personal warning sign, because Jack has a thing for facts and delivering them succinctly but efficiently. What he said was ‘someone I'm involved with,’ diplomatic and vague enough to elicit a few more inquiries he could manage, without diving too much into what he wanted to avoid.

Now, he's telling his therapist about her leaving. People come and go, that's life. That's precisely what he says, with a shrug that's almost elegant.

Jack is glad for her. She wanted that job. But a part of him is vexed by the prospect of her going away. He recognizes that. So which is it? Is he happy for her, or being selfish?

“Two things can be true at once,” his therapist placidly points out.

Great, that's real helpful.

“Have you shared your thoughts with her?”

“I told her it was a good thing she got the job.”

“And the other thing? The second half of the truth?”

Jack sees where this man with multiple degrees and years upon years of experience talking to unmoored people like him is trying to lead him, but he isn't sure he wants to get there today.

“It doesn't matter,” Jack dismisses it quickly, swats the matter the same way he would a blue fly. “It couldn't be anything serious.”

He touches his ring finger, fondling around the knuckle bone and the band of skin that used to be a little paler than the rest, that's slowly melting back into the dominant hue of his hand every day he forgets to put the ring on.

If she's leaving, what's the point in burdening her with any of this? Jack doesn't like drama, all existing kinds of it, melodrama included. He feels exhausted and blames it on the shift his body endured yesterday.

He drifts back home after the session. He should rest before his shift tonight, but he turns on the police scanner he keeps by his bedside, waiting for the crackles and disembodied voices carried by the machine to fill the room up like gas.

Middle of the afternoon, bouncy clouds smudging the sun away. He still isn't asleep when Samira calls. The phone buzzes with the fury of a swarm of bees, and he pettily considers not picking up. He clicks on the flashing green button right before the last ring.

She's polite—she's always so careful with manners—but she doesn't beat around the bush. It's something he likes about her.

“Did I do something wrong?”

With his free hand, Jack shuts the scanner up. He shuffles towards the sliding door to the balcony. If they're going to have this kind of conversation, he needs something other than the stale air of the bedroom.

“Of course not. You didn't do anything wrong.”

 She marks a long pause that he doesn't know how to break. Truth is, he doesn't know how to deal with any of this.

“Okay. I just wanted to check.”

Her gloom trickles off her voice and seems to gush down his own hand.

“Samira, you know you can do better.”

Jack's not sure what his aim was, saying those words. Maybe he was hoping to offer some comfort, transform her perspective, but he hears himself and hates how paternalizing he sounds.

On her side of the phone, Samira blinks.

“What?”

This is awful. He sounds like her mother.

Has she been so anxious about not becoming the girl with daddy issues that she hasn't realized she's been seeing her mom?

Jack snaps her out of her Oedipian frights. His advice is depressing, and he doesn't even try to be convincing.

“You're young. You're brilliant. You could be with anyone, someone at the same stage as you.”

It's funny that he says it like this—you could be with anyone. Like she could have her pick; she'd only need to throw her hand in a hat and poof, she'll dredge up a great person, the same way a magician would a rabbit. That's not how the world works.

“But I don't want to be with anyone,” she curtly retorts, which is the right, but also the wrong thing to say, because what she means is ‘anyone else’ and what he hears is ‘anyone at all’.

Wind soughs and tires screech into the speaker.

“I have to go,” she garbles in a blank voice.

She doesn't call again later.

 

 

 

When Samira was little, her parents brawled every few nights, and it went crescendo, from half-muffled whispers to crackling spurts before morphing into full-blown cries. They barked at each other, throats wide, vomiting resentment and accusations. Each of them had a pattern in anger. Anger, she found out, was like laughter: everyone sounded it differently. Her father would sometimes break things in his rage—it wasn't too bad, annoying, mostly, like that time he swung the bottle of olive oil off the counter, and she learned oil was the worst thing to clean up on cement tiles. Her mother didn't use her hands, but she yelled. She had a shrill voice, her words bullet-shaped in the furnace of her mouth, zeroing in on her targets and drilling at them in rapid fire.

Samira dreaded those fights. They were Sunday night staples in the Mohan household, the only conclusions to the weekend. Once she grew old enough, she'd run out of the house on her bike, ride around the block, and pretend she was on a trip around the world.

As an adult, she seldom—if ever—gets into fights. Always avoids them, the dread they induce in her stomach, memories surging of a distant fear that knotted her guts.

She's used to fights going loud and the words exchanged still lingering like land mines after, ready to explode back at the slightest mistep.

She's never had a fight that evolved in silence, a massive fish underwater, passive and waggly. She thinks that's what it is, what happened with Jack. He's vexed, and so is she, and she's not sure why in either case. She thinks she wants to talk to him about it again, yank the truth out of him, but she keeps putting the conversation off.

It's nine o'clock in the evening. A man fell asleep with a cigarette in his hand, woke up in a cot of flames, and now they're checking if his airways are damaged (they always are, in cases like this).

“He needs to be transferred to Major Burns,” Jack throws while they're wheeling him into a trauma room.

Samira prepares the intubation. She's done more than she can count, and she has a good hand. Robby told her so. Jack too. She's not nervous. Or, more accurately, the intubation is not the source of her nervousness.

“Samira.”

Her first name. He whispers it, quiet enough to flicker by unnoticed, but it rings in her ear like a gunshot. She freezes.

Her own first name doesn't sound right here, in his mouth, under the white lights, between white walls, everything so white, so austere, so impersonal, bleach-white, needle-white. She used to find a certain jubilance in standing here, in the noise, the bustle, thinking she'd always manage, doing her job, helping people, because that's who she is. Fix-it girl, smooth-is-fast girl, do-it-slow-but-right girl. She isn't so sure of it anymore.

He called her Samira, and it made her jolt.

She'd rather he say her name at his home, only at his home, like last time, amidst scents of breakfast and in the orange wedge of sunlight, while she was still sprawled naked on his bed, and he went, Samira, wondering from the kitchen if she wanted coffee or tea with her eggs. She remembers his gleeful “There you are” when she walked in, playful and easy-going, like they'd done it a thousand times before. How he dropped chamomile in the azure mug she used to water the dead flowers by his window, topped it with boiling water, and blew on it—two times total, two quick puffs, like it could make a difference—before his fingers pinched around the edge, turned the handle for her to take. This is how rituals are born, she thought, as soon as her knuckles hit the glazed ceramic.

He's looking at her. Machines clicking. The snap of soles on the sleek ground. Nurses fluttering around. Nobody heard him. Or maybe they did and are pretending it's nothing, a slip of his tongue.

She's still stuck on the memory of the dry fragrant pouch, the water simmering, his breath smoothing it over.

There's a patient here. Their patient, her patient. Charred skin, swollen lungs. She focuses on him. On the matter at hand. On her hand.

She realizes why Jack said her name. She picked the wrong size for the endotracheal tube. This one's too big; it'll injure the aerodigestive tract. This is humiliating. It's the kind of mistake a student makes, not someone on their fourth year of residency.

She rectifies wordlessly. Slips him a glance that's cool but not hostile. Thank you, and don't do that again.

She doesn't want him saying Samira here. It's Dr. Mohan.

For a little while, she had something that she felt existed outside of the microcosm of the emergency department, and she doesn't want this thing to spill into here. She wants to keep it on the outside, out of the chaos; she wants to guard it the same way a robin guards its last remaining egg, even if the egg is doomed and winter-chilled and will never hatch.

Her thoughts are jumbled. She holds her breath as she performs. She thinks she's tired, but she doesn't want to search for an excuse.

When it's done, she peels the glove off her hand. A whiff of rubber and powder smudges her nose. Snaps her properly into reality.

“Good,” Jack says, in that same wispy tone, right above her ear.

She's angry, and she's still not sure why. She doesn't think she's angry at him.

 

 

 

A week before Easter, Samira's schedule is expanded to 11PM. A piece of the evening like the cloying dessert on top of a copious, nauseating meal. They tell her it's exceptional, only for the next two weeks. She doesn't complain. It's not like it'd make a difference. She's happy she's not stuck on the night shift, though. The night shift is a miserable experience, unless you're on the extremes of the personality spectrum: mind-staggeringly upbeat, or depressed out of your life. Sometimes it's hard to tell who belongs where.

Working in such repeated proximity to Abbot is surprisingly not an issue. She works on her patients, and her charting, and she tries to pick up her pace a little—just a little—to see how she manages (it also has the benefit of keeping her awake). She doesn't let herself get distracted by Jack, which often looks like she doesn't care, and maybe it starts morphing into this after a while. She thinks she's growing very good at it, at the not caring too much about Abbot. She's even reverting to calling him Abbot. That's how good she is at not caring.

She's doing what she typically does when she's working outside her usual hours: drinking so much unsweetened coffee she might as well be injecting it intravenously. It makes her heartbeat pounce a little faster, but otherwise, the secondary effects are pretty mild. No wonder Dr. Shen's always shot up with that stuff. It's the only way to push through.

So she's in the break room, getting her fill again, when Jack walks in. She checks the clock. He outpaces her.

“Two more hours. You faring okay?”

His voice is a little raspy, like he left it outside in the park too long and it started rusting.

“With the right fuel, yeah.”

She takes a few gulps, conscious that he's watching her, watching the line of her throat, her lashes, the tendril of her hair that juts out of the bedraggled mass.

“What about you?”

A shrug.

“It's the middle of the day for me. I'm doing great.”

She nods, envious. She could never work the night shift like him. She's too attached to daylight, to the crowd then, kids with chipped teeth, students with panda eyes from studying too hard, gardeners and museum guides and teachers.

“I had to throw out that plant you were watering the other day.”

Her eyebrows knit together. Samira tries to read past the sentence, if he's just making conversation or trying to tell her something. The break room is empty, but she's picking at the hard seams of her cup between two nervous fingers.

“The… dead one?”

“The soil was stuffed with bugs,” he sniffs. “Made for a fun surprise when I came home last morning.” A wince at the memory.

“Shit,” she retorts, sympathetic, “but it was, like, really crisped up. I don't think it was salvageable.”

“I know,” he sighs.

“Why did you get that plant in the first place?”

“It was my wife's, not mine.”

“Oh.” A hard blank. “She, um, she was an agronomist, right?”

Samira thinks it might've been the wrong thing to ask because he startles, carves her a look like she just poked him in the ribs.

“How do you know that?” His tone is more curious than admonishing.

She eases a little, even if her hands are gripping her coffee mug with the strength of a stone statue.

“I don't know.” Samira really doesn't remember. “I think someone mentioned it here once.”

She didn't search it up online, if that's what he's wondering. The thought that he might believe this mortifies her, but she's not sure whether it'd be appropriate to clarify.

“She studied botany before agriculture. Making stuff grow, that was her thing.” Jack issues a resigned groan. “I shouldn't be trusted with anything that's green and has leaves.”

She smiles at him as they trot out of the room.

“Are people easier to deal with than plants?” she wonders, malicious.

“Not always.” He marks a pause. Offers one of those rare grins that make it easy to imagine what he looked like as a boy. “Some are worth the effort.”

 

 

 

They drink the dirt-brown coffee, and sometimes, they talk. It's odd to think anything ever happened between them outside of the ED. Almost like they've circled back to before January, to uncomplicated conversations about almost uncomplicated matters. It feels better, calmer, like an abscess has been pierced. He talks about his family sometimes. His wife, though not as often, in passing, when it's relevant to the topic. She knows he doesn't get along very well with his father, just like her own relationship with her mother is complicated. She knows he sees a therapist, and he's incapable of falling asleep without background noise.

Maybe he confides in her because he knows she'll leave, and it won't matter in the end, what she knows and doesn't know. All of it, vanished when she's back in New Jersey. They might text for a while, the occasional phone call. And then it'll start dwindling, taken by the natural spell of distance.

People come and go, he reminds himself everytime he looks at her. That's life.

 

 

 

Her days are long, and she sleeps like a baby at night. Like a stone that can't be moved. The enchantment of slumber breaks only with her alarm.

Samira seldom dreams of people anymore.

There was a time she dreaded falling asleep, particularly in her childhood bedroom. She was afraid she'd see her father and wake up crying, because that was the only way he could be reached now, as some ghost coughed out by her brain. Her father, not flesh, not bone, but a puny spark induced by a specific sequence of synaptic connections, viciously cobbled during deep stages of sleep.

She stopped dreaming of people in her late teens. Her dreams are quieter now. She dreams of the ED—empty. Snow pale walls. Polished floor.

This time, in one of the trauma rooms, a cherry tree unfurls in full bloom. Pearl pink petals shake and cover the roots, even if the branches don't seem to bald. Stammering through the dream, Samira has the vague recollection of a patient who spoke about cherry trees one time. Or perhaps this image is stolen from her youth, of specimens that mottled the landscape around her neighborhood in New Jersey. Or maybe this is an image taken by her cousin, a piece shared from his trip to Japan. It's what dreams do; they take pieces from everywhere. She won't be sure of anything until she wakes up.

She's looking up cherry blossom season on her phone at work, disappointed to read that it's over now because it's June. Tepid rain has brought forth sticky dampness into the ED, with bodies smelling brackish and stagnant. She feels gross and craves a shower.

When he stills next to her, Samira asks Jack if he knows whether there are cherry trees in Pittsburgh. He taps a pen on the desk.

“Well, it's not Washington DC,” he enigmatically replies, like she'd somehow understand the reference.

“I don't know what that means,” she retorts.

“You don't know DC has a national cherry blossom festival?”

“I do now. Have you ever been?”

“Beth took me once. It's certainly something,” he comments, diplomatic.

She likes when he talks about his spouse. It's an odd thought, right? She'll never admit to it, but she likes how he picks her name up in his mouth, precious and attentive, encapsulating her whole being just with the pronunciation of her name.

“There's a festival in New Jersey too,” he adds.

“Really? I never knew.”

“Give it a try when you head back,” he says casually, fixing his attention back on the board again.

She hasn't really been looking forward to the move, not because she doesn't want to, but because it doesn't seem like something that'll actually happen. She tries to picture it, her life back there, weekends with her mother, maybe calling up some of the high school friends who never went away, brunch with her family. But it's too abstract. Like a life that's not hers, that isn't real. Just a folly, a creation.

Samira glances sideways, towards Jack.

He's had a whole life she'll never touch or see. A life with chapters, each different from the last. She hopes she has as many as him someday.

 

 

 

 

iv. summer

—

 

 

 

Jack's just gotten used to her loping through the ED, fluttering like a bright goldfinch, steadfast and not as calm as usual, a day bird accidentally thrust into the wrong time zone. He's just gotten used to those few supplemental hours working at her side, and she's already telling him it's her last day (evening) of extra.

“Back to the sun you go.”

“Sure thing, Count Dracula,” she jests. She's on her phone by the lockers, still in scrubs, quickly typing away.

“What's up?” he slips, curious. She's seldom on her phone at work.

“Nothing.” She looks up, wearing the face of someone who's been caught stealing. Awkwardness, then hesitation, then a friendly but prudent compliance.

“It's stupid. I've just been thinking about things I've never gotten around to doing in Pittsburgh. I thought I'd make a bucket list and go through them before I move.”

“What do you have on there?”

“The Monongahela Incline.”

Jack drops his forehead, offers a quizzical stare, assessing whether it's a joke or not.

“Really, that old thing?”

“Hey, it's a historic landmark. Oldest funicular in the country.”

Her eyes fall back to the screen, the cursor winking at her.

“I just want to check out the view.”

“It's a very good view.” Jack offers a grin so she knows he isn't making fun of her. “When do you plan to go?”

“Maybe Tuesday, if the weather is nice.”

His fingers tip-tap on the locker.

“Want some company?”

The question makes her chortle, but there's a glint, star-bright in the dark pool of her eyes.

“I don't want to torture you.”

“I'm sure I'll live.”

 

 

 

Tuesday then, a late afternoon engulfed in sluggish June heat. On the way over, Jack thinks to himself this isn't a date, just a friendly outing. Those two concepts may wear the same garb, but the difference resides in expected outcome. There's no expectation here. It puts him at ease.

He's early, but Samira arrives earlier. She buys the tickets while she waits for him and waves them at him as a greeting.

It's a family thing, the funicular. Kitschy and just the correct, respectable amount of dull. Jack thinks, in the twenty-first century—age of fast pace and wonders available an internet click away—gazing at landscapes is falling out of style. But, fuck, what kind of thought is that? Something his father would say.

The cabin smells stuffy and acidic. Sweat and stale snacks, like a classroom at recess.

The funicular rumbles, clambering uphill with the determination of a brown, rotund caterpillar. Jack joins Samira near a set of windows. Three chatty Asian ladies wearing bob hats ride aboard with them, but they keep to a corner, their backs turned from them.

Samira's gaze ambles to the cityscape outlined beyond. The sky is pale and orange, the same tint as her nails—a glossy apricot shade that settles affably into her skin tone. He catches a whiff of her shampoo, clean and neutral, a fragrance so simple and so her.

“My mother is getting married,” she tells him. He seeks her underlying feeling about the news, but she's not giving much to grapple on.

“Congratulations to her.”

“They've only known each other a few months. She'll introduce him to me when I visit, but, honestly, how can you get married to someone you've met less than a year ago?”

“If it worries you, you should talk to her about it.”

“No.” She straightens up, nails digging into her sleeves. “I'm happy for her.”

She says it stonily, to a point Jack almost laughs, believing she's being ironic. He glances to his side, to her, leaned on her elbows, her nose just a few inches away from the glass. Her head pivots; she holds his gaze. Gives a closed-mouth smile that scoops her cheeks.

“So. Verdict?” he asks.

She hums.

“It's a very good view.”

 

 

 

The catastrophe of the 4th of July began, in Samira's existence, before the actual 4th of July.

It was a meticulous, gradual crash out. The whole process stretched the same way a forgotten banana in a bag starts to rot, insidious but unbothering, before the blackened peel contaminates everything else, leaving a behemoth of mush and pungence to deal with.

In this scenario, her mother is the spoiled fruit. It isn't a very nice way to talk about one's mother, but it's all Samira has been thinking about, in the secret of her heart, mixing the satisfaction of the cruel comparison with a self-hatred aimed at her own, petty behavior.

Her am'mā is getting remarried. Fine. Great. She's seen how miserable her mom was during her first marriage with her father. She deserves to try again, to get what people expect from marriage, to have what Dana has with her husband. Samira's grown used to the idea and even thought of driving over during the weekend to meet the suitor.

On the second day of the month, her mother calls again.

“I have news,” she announces, like the first round of news she bestowed upon her didn't really count.

She sounds both giddy and wary, a combo that makes Samira grit her teeth in uneasy anticipation.

“I wanted to tell you in person,” she continues, “but who knows how much longer it'll be before you're actually here.”

She says that part in Tamil. Samira ignores the gratuitous dig and starts clicking the nearest pen she can grab. She wants to screech, “Can we get this over with?”, but it's the sort of sentence that'd extend the process instead of abridging it.

“I'm going on a cruise.”

Vacation plans. Okay. That's not too bad, but Samira still can't relax. There's something else. She knows her mother. They share the same blood and possibly the same neurosis.

“And I'm selling the house.”

“What house?” Samira stupidly retorts, swallowing denial like cough syrup. “Our house?”

The family house. She's selling the whole of it. The stairs that creaked a song when she padded up them and the sagging kitchen cabinets, the bathtub with its broken bottom, the rose-patterned corridor that linked the bedrooms, and through which she took her first steps.

If Samira wants something from the pile of past, she's told, she'll need to come pick it up herself.

The rest of the conversation is something lifted off a contemporary play. Samira doesn't yell, but her voice reaches a shreek that distortly mimics her mother's. She throws the terms irresponsible and rash, and she might borrow some of her mother's tremolos, but those are her father's words. Her father's anger, a poltergeist treading up her throat.

After hanging up, she flees; she goes for a run. Circles the block until she loses count. The tempo of her soles bouncing off the asphalt succeeds in stunting her thoughts. She drags herself back home once her limbs are so cottony she can't stand up, or use her brain, or think about her mother, her father, and screaming matches in the house she grew up.

 

 

 

July 4th.

At the core of really awful days, there are always people. People who stand at the wrong place at the wrong time, who say things they don't mean, who bring their personal baggage where they shouldn't.

Her mom started the chain. Robby contributed a little. And there was her patient—the only innocent in the matter, because if anything, she's the one who failed Orlando Diaz. Failed him and his family. If she'd gone just a little faster, been a little more persuasive, brought everything he needed ten minutes before he took flight, maybe it would've made a difference. In those ten minutes lies the problem. She was too slow.

Before the hospital system goes offline, before she's told to look into geriatrics, before the panic attack, before it all gets really bad—irrevocably, might-disrupt-every-plan-she-ever-had-for-her-future bad—Jack erupts in, all camo-clad and bumped up by God knows what.

She bursts into the room where he sits with his shirt off, and it's the first time she's ever disappointed to see him half-naked. She fusses a little—not about him. Searching for what isn't in the room. Drops heavy as a sack on the chair when she realizes her patient has fled.

She fumbles with the plastic bag. Fuck.

“So Uber it to his house,” Jack shrugs after she's explained.

He'll pay for it. Says it all detached and not even looking at her, like it's not even a problem. Of course it isn't a problem. And he's doing all sorts of contortions trying to reach his back, letting her think he was hiding on purpose behind that curtain she forcibly pulled, didn't want anybody to find out. There's a grating nail somewhere around her heart, some ache she smoothes by nursing him, maybe as a means to say thank you. She allows herself those minutes of staring at the pattern of freckles on his shoulders and the neck she kissed not even that long ago.

A moment of calm before it all goes to shit.

 

 

 

Samira can't remember if she's ever had a panic attack before. She's had moments verging on it. She remembers how she felt, up on the roof on New Year's Eve. That sudden tightness of the core, a presence in her chest, squeezing. Today, in chairs, it was like something awful was about to happen, and she alone sensed its approach, ominous and shattering. Like she was standing on a sandy white beach, watching the ocean gurgle, sculpt itself upwards into a giant, sky-licking wave.

She survived, of course, but the wave crashed down anyway. And Samira doesn't have a hateful bone in her body, which is probably why she hates herself more than those who have caused her pain and anger today.

When she wishes courage and a safe trip to Robby, she means it. She's not certain forgiveness is the term. More like understanding.

 

 

 

The echoing stairs. Jack checks his watch. He can get away with three minutes. Five, if nobody has seen him traverse the swinging doors. Samira toys with a plastic bottle cap, oblivious to his cautious examination of her. She just walked down from the fireworks, a sheen of sweat on her forehead, her hair smelling of cigarette smoke. After she opens with a joke that doesn't really land (“Why do humans always celebrate by making things explode in the sky?”), Jack asks how she's doing. Her posture is wiggly, lurching forth, like she broke a few pieces in her backbone throughout the day.

“I can't believe she's telling me now,” she goes. She's still hung up on her mother. She hates how whiny she sounds. Complaining about her like a child, worst of all complaining like this to him. “I can't believe she's doing this after I've done my best to move closer to her. I'm awful. I'm supposed to be happy for her, she's been through so much, but—” she inhales, shakes her head, issues the rare profanity, “—fuck, I'm so angry at her.”

He tilts his head, closes the distance to set his bulk next to her.

“Two things can be true at once,” Jack recites, contemplative. “And you're not awful.”

She sighs. “I was moving to New Jersey for her, but she won't even be there.”

“What are you going to do, then?”

She rubs her chafed lip with her fingers.

“Doctors Robby and Al-Hashimi think I should go into geriatrics.”

Jack spontaneously snorts.

“Geriatrics? Why?”

“Old people like me.”

“Everyone likes you,” he mumbles back, matter-of-factly. The implication: that's not a good enough reason.

Her cutting sarcasm disturbs him.

“About your patient today…”

“Yeah,” her voice is blank, washed out of resolve for the day. “It just—I don't know. It hit a little close to home.”

“I get that. It happens.”

He doesn't push further. If she wants to talk about it, he trusts that she will.

“Go home and rest. Try not to think about what Robby said. I don't think he's being himself today.”

She doesn't reply, keeps screwing and unscrewing the bottle cap like an emotional support toy. When he starts up and her eyes climb up to his, he reads what she's thinking clear as day. She's not really herself today either.

 

 

 

On the morning of the fifth, when her alarm wails her out of sleep, Samira considers not coming in at all. It's the first time the thought actively passes her mind. The first time she really weighs it out. What if she played ghost? Erased herself for one day. She stays flopped in bed a little longer than usual. Eventually, she crawls out. She gets to the PTMC late, but she does get there, and maybe that's all that matters.

 

 

 

Samira contemplated apologizing to Jack for unloading on him the way she did on the 4th of July. She picked up her phone, scrolled down for his name (not that she needed to look very far), but was there something to apologize for, really? She was upset. He allowed her to be upset. There's no point in overthinking it.

She still calls him the afternoon of her day off. Instead of wallowing in the enclosure of her home—emptying her drawers, reorganizing them, throwing away papers and brochures, and writing emails and cover letters—she grabs a bus ticket and rides all the way to the Carnegie Museum of Art. Another place on her Pittsburgh bucket list. She hasn't told anyone about it, not even Jack, because it's like living in Paris for years and never visiting the Louvre.

While she waits for the bus, she calls him. He might be resting. She doesn't hold much hope he'll answer. He picks up with a croaky voice.

“Samira?”

Jack seems surprised, worried—something must've gone wrong for her to call him, maybe she broke something, or got mugged, or hit someone with a bicycle. She tells him she just wanted to see how he was faring.

“Not coming in?” he asks after a moment.

“I earned two days of freedom.”

“Oh, yeah? Lucky you. Spend them wisely.”

“Don't I always…”

“Are you going to see your mother?” he inquires next, speaking louder to cover the kettle in the background.

His question causes her to stutter.

“She's set on selling everything.” Samira trails a finger over the system map, tapping the neat lines that spread like veinlets. “I don't have the energy to get back there and just, argue with her about the logistics. I don't want to ask her for anything.”

“It's the house you grew up in, isn't it?” he goes.

Her hand drops, her forefinger ensnared in a seam that dangles from her skirt. She's not sure what she expected from him. Maybe some support, a beam elevating her further in her righteous anger. His question rings with an undertone she's not eager to grasp.

“Yeah,” she dully exhales. She wishes they were in the same room so she could read his face. She can only imagine him, the reflection of day in the eyes, the stubble on his cheeks.

He hums a pensive “Mmh.”

“Are you telling me I should keep something?”

“I'm not telling you anything, Samira.” He retorts softly, albeit with a certain distance. She hears him hold a breath. “It's your life.”

Samira hangs up with the excuse that the bus is rattling to her stop.

At the museum, she meditates in front of paintings by artists with names she'll never remember. Raking her brain over the meaning of blurry figures, thinking “This one is pear-shaped, like a hot air balloon” and “This one's a rabbit on the look-out.”

She doesn't own the tools to understand those abstract outlines, and just as the thought reaches her mind, she realizes that might be her problem. Thinking too much, being so keen on understanding, analyzing. Not experiencing enough.

She gives up on the gibberish of geometry and colors splashed upon the canvases. Sits on a bench like an old, tired woman and peers at other visitors, a bevy of children with their colorful backpacks flanked by teachers peeved from shushing them, students in art school, so distinguishable in their alternative, slightly extravagant apparel. Her thoughts stray then. She thinks about the 4th of July. She's doing it again, playing the what-if game. A sharp needle somewhere, poking the flesh encased under her breastbone.

Samira remembers something Jack told her one time. “Don't ignore it, but move forward.” He makes it sound so simple. She's not sure which way is forward.

In Pittsburgh, she feels exactly the same as she does when she's at home, struck with tenderness for a place she cannot wait to leave behind.

She won't go back to New Jersey; she's sure of it now. But she can't stay here either.

 

 

 

“Is it really something you want to go into, geriatrics?”

Jack struggles his watch around his wrist. The bracelet keeps escaping him because he's not looking at what he's doing—looking at her instead.

Samira presses her fingers forth. She pinches the edges of the plastic band and brings them together, fixing the latch for him. She answers after a sigh that scrapes her lungs deeply.

“Maybe it's better suited to my rhythm.”

“Alright, Samira,” he goes, shuffling his hand to let the watch fall into place, “but do you want to?”

Jack thinks he might've ruffled her feathers. She pinches her lips, offers a shake of the head, meaning she doesn't know.

“Are you okay?” she asks him.

Jack knows his appearance is frightening, his undereyes stained an arterial blue.

“Yeah,” he wants to swat her question away. He doesn't want her concern, but she won't let him off the hook, just like he hasn't let her off the hook before. “Haven't slept much lately, that's all.”

She doesn't add anything. Waits for his gaze to meet hers, allowing the blank to stretch so he can naturally fill it. That's how she insists, not by forcing, but by waiting it out.

“Robby,” he offers as the sole explanation.

She nods. Around them, the buzz, the current, perpetual movement of the ED. She wonders if anyone would notice if she hugged him now, if they'd think anything of it.

She pretends to reach for the pen on the desk beyond his shoulder and brushes his arm lightly. She doesn't have the guts for anything more.

 

 

 

The hunkering evening dulls everything down except the heat. Samira tries to find a seat on the light rail, gives up, crashes a shoulder against the finger-greased doors.

Her phone whirrs under her palm.

Jack's just shared an article with her. The title reads Tai chi or cognitive behavioural therapy for treating insomnia in middle aged and older adults.

It makes her chuckle. She's one of those people who, in public, will ordinarily only smile at their phone.

“Are you taking up tai chi as a hobby?’

Her phone chirps back immediately.

‘was thinking of your fture patients actually’

He must be typing quickly—hence the typo.

‘You're a few candles away from fitting the age bracket,’ she teases back.

‘Clever’, he writes, like it's not the lowest hanging fruit. Not offended. It takes more than a joke to rattle Jack.

Another pixelated bubble. He's typing something. It pops up and vanishes, pops up again.

Spit it out, she thinks.

Silence then, the white screen, the column of old messages.

Sure, whatever. He's in the middle of a shift. He shouldn't be texting her at all.

She considers his question from before. What does she want? It's never been a difficult thing to assess before. What she wants has always aligned with what was best for her and for those around her. Or so she thinks. Geriatrics. Yes, she has the patience and competence for it. Robby thinks she'd be good at it, and she trusts Robby's judgment. She could go into geriatrics. She would get the opportunity to make a difference there too. But is this what she wants? The answer drips over her, clear and easy as a sip of cold water on a scorching summer day.

 

 

 

Jack walked out of the last July night into the first August morning.

Phoned Robby outside the PTMC. It's another new habit, a weird habit that he hasn't really properly broken in yet. They call each other every few days since Robby left on what Jack persists to call his “spirit quest”—not on a motorcycle, to his great relief. No excess chatter, just the basics. Robby moves like a beetle on a map. They're lucky if he gets any signal. He was in Colorado last week. New Mexico now. He doesn't have a set itinerary—which Jack tries not to read too much into, but he imagines that's a good thing. The journey matters more than the destination, or whatever the saying is.

The ringtone fades to voicemail. Jack hangs up, counts the hours, the time difference. It's roughly seven here, which makes it five in the morning in Santa Fe. Jack tries a second time. Voicemail again.

He doesn't want to be worried, but, fuck, it seems that's all he does lately. A grass-snake coiled in his stomach. Worried about Robby. About Samira too, a little, still. He talks it out with his therapist; it's not enough to purge himself of worry.

He walks to evade those thoughts. August morning, first of the year. The air simmers before the big broil of the afternoon. The sun's still tucked away under a blanket of pale orange and washed out blue. There's a pain in his leg that he doesn't want to notice.

Twenty minutes later, Robby calls back. They exchange a dozen words over the broken signal, their voices garbled, wind howling, shuffle of a shoulder pressed against the receiver or God knows what, like Robby's tumbling down a hill in a barrel and trying to enunciate at the same time. He says something about a lake trail and the wilderness and waiting for sunset, then a name Jack doesn't properly grasp, either his friend or a guide, but it's clear from his tone that he isn't alone and he's happy with the company. Jack asks him to send a postcard from New Mexico, Robby yells “What?”, and the connection is severed for good.

Twenty more minutes later, Jack rings on Samira's doorbell. A shadow blurs the glint in the peephole, locks clatter raucously before she juts out a head, a shoulder, a bust, clasped in a gray tee-shirt the size of a dress. She's neither angry nor alarmed that he woke her up, though her eyelids are droopy, springy dark curls straggling her forehead.

“Did something happen?” she mutters.

No. Yes.

“Are you okay?”

“Yes. Why?” She rubs a fist to her left eye.

The cogs in her brain are struggling to move, to piece what he means. She opens the door a little wider, allowing him to slip in. In the apartment, all the windows are open. The air isn't moving. Dawn casts a gloomy filter over her home.

“I'm switching to evening shifts for the next weeks,” she informs him.

He feels stupid now.

Robby is on his spirit quest across the country, and Samira's just switched hours.

He glances back to the door.

“You were worried about me?”

She flashes him a stupid smile, drowsy and awfully endearing.

“So are you visiting or staying?” she slurs, through a yawn.

He hesitates for an answer.

Samira's thoughts are blurred like water, still stuck in the maze of dreams, her limbs yearning for the nest of her bed. She takes a look at him through this dim darkness, assessing him.

“Staying it is.”

She decides for him. Jack believes he likes that.

 

 

 

He showers in her bathroom and doesn't feel out of place or timid in the way most people are when they're naked in a place that's out of their territory. He puts it on the fact that it's his second time here, behind the whispering sky blue shower curtain, sampling her soap. His second time here, and it already feels absurdly casual.

Stepping out, he finds her back in the spot he trawled her from with his intrusion. She's prone with her legs slung beneath a sheet that folds like the gnarled roots of an olive tree. It's too hot to sleep with a duvet and her hundred layers of coverlets. An electric fan rotates in a corner, blades cutting smoothly, singing a baryton lullaby. He sets his prosthetic leg with care before lying next to her, trying to be silent, furtive, so as not to trouble her more than he already has. Her arm coils around him, her body warm and slack from sleep. She sniffles.

“What's that?”

“You're out of shampoo.”

“That's not shampoo.”

“Whatever. The bottle says lemons.”

She spurts an exaggerated and funny retch.

“I don't like it.”

“Then throw it out.” He hums a low chortle. Touches his fingers to her nape.

She doesn't reply. Her head stays nestled somewhere in the curve of his neck, her breath a tickle.

 

 

 

When Jack comes to, it's almost noon. He's alone in bed, smelling like lemons. The colors of the day have changed, the blinds in the bedroom slightly shifted up, spitting an oblique of sunlight that slashes the bed and his good leg. He props himself up on his elbow, trying to get his bearings. The room's not so different from when he first visited. Same monticule of books and papers in a corner. On the wall across the bed, an art print stares back, three birds perched in a tree, bellies paler than the blossoming flowers that frame them. He recognizes the logo of the Carnegie Museum, pasted at the lower right-hand corner.

Samira pads in, wearing jean shorts and a burgundy shirt. She startles when she notices him, like she forgot he was there. They say hey at the same time.

“I'm leaving in ten.”

She opens a drawer of the dresser, changes tops, and pulls up socks, wiggling her toes so the seams align correctly.

“You can stay here if you want,” Samira tells him while she ties her hair up. “Unless you have someplace to be. People waiting to… shoot at you—or something.”

He huffs at the insinuation.

“At what time do you finish?” he inquires.

“Eleven, but—” she winces “—honestly, it's probably going to be midnight.”

“I'll be here. Unless you worry I'll go through your stuff,” he jabs, referencing what she told him the first time he ever stayed over.

She shakes her head, amused. Snatches the book on her nightstand, shoves it in her bag. Before she leaves, she tells him he can eat what he wants, that there's a double of the keys if he needs to go out, and he can look where he likes but not change the order of things. “I have nothing to hide,” she shrugs, playful, which is typically what someone with a lot to hide would say.

What Jack does is go back to sleep. Fall into slumber, into the scents of her hair and her skin that's suffused the cotton.

He wakes again deep in the afternoon. Samira is gone and didn't shut the windows. The sun pelts in, hard hitting rays, mangling her furniture. She lives in a busy neighborhood, people shouting from balconies, fragments of songs suffusing through walls, children trampling on the levels up and below like it's a playground, shaking the building foundations. Jack would've gone mad in the quiet. This is good. A better kind of raucous than gunshots and the crackles of a police radio.

He doesn't clean anything, or change the places of her things, or touch what he isn't supposed to touch. He doesn't even throw out the bottle of lemon-scented hair mist, even if she said she didn't like it anymore. He does look at her books, and thoroughly criticizes the way she organizes her fridge. Stares at a world map pinned over her desk, names of cities sharpied in purple. He notes how the cups are stored in her kitchen, upside down.

Robby sends him a picture of boulders embedded with pale glyphs. No caption, no explanation, just the photo, which is still already rather eloquent coming from him. His way of telling him everything's good.

Jack turns the television on. Add more noise to the noise. He wonders what Samira's up to now, what her nimble little hands are doing, that soft voice of hers. Remembering her smile, how she puts on socks. How she bundled all the discarded clothing on a chair. Her weight next to his as he drifted into sleep.

How easy it feels to exist in her space, to rest in it, even when she isn't here.

 

 

 

She knocks on the door before she turns the key.

The windows are as she left them; a breeze sifted past the living room curtains, nocturnal and pacifying. One lamp glimmers next to the television. On the screen, a documentary touches on the rebuilding of the city of Mosul, images of gravel and ruins in hard contrast with the narrator's caressing, paternalistic tone.

Jack straightens up his spine and dims the volume.

When she spots him, she sighs a deflated hello.

“Someone had a great day.”

He brought the fan out of her bedroom, and it happily whirs to keep them company. With a profound sigh of relief, she collapses next to him on the couch. Jack points to her knee, to the band-aid that didn't exist when she left. It's one of those huge square ones, flesh-tinted (but not her flesh, of course, the default pale, something closer to Jack's), scary big, boat sail wide.

“I had a run-in with a crash cart,” she tells him. “The crash cart won, unfortunately.”

Samira nips at her thumbnail. She's looking at him, but also not quite, fixing the sleeve of his tee-shirt—same clothes as yesterday, he realizes; that's bad, he needs to go home and change, but he doesn't really want to do that tonight (go home).

“Did you get bored?” she asks.

God, that tone. What does she think? That he requires dashing across the city like the hero of some mid-tier nineties action flick in order to stay happy and entertained? To find a sense of purpose? (Alright, maybe she's a little bit right).

“No. You have interesting neighbors.”

Her mouth parts. Fear flares up in her eyes.

“I ran into that nice old lady a few doors over. She asked if I was your—how did she put it again? Ah, gentleman suitor…”

Oh, to have a camera and immortalize her expression as he speaks those words. Her hands frame her cheeks. She looks like Edvard Munch's The Scream.

“—But I told her no, I only came to burglarize the place.”

Samira chortles miserably. Her fingertips poke her forehead, digging through the remains of her bruised brain for a comeback.

“Took me a few minutes to get rid of her, but she's alright.”

Jack gets her a glass of water and changes the subject.

“Show me that knee.”

“It's just a scratch.”

He sits at her side, unfazed by her listless protest.

“Show me.”

She folds her leg up for him to receive, to bring over his lap, one hand hefting her calf. He strips the bandaid off the same way he'd peel a tangerine of its skin. Even in his rest time, he has the mannerism of a doctor, not crumpling his nose when he unveils the wound.

“I told you it's nothing,” she drawls.

They see worse every day, but he's had his fair share of hurt to know this is the dumb, benign, bothering kind of scuff that burns for no reason at all.

“Are you going to kiss it better?” she jokes.

She blinks quickly when he looks up at her. Like, he might actually do it.

“I'm just kidding.” The words clutter in her mouth.

Samira tugs on her leg to get it back, and his hand glides across her shin, around her ankle while she slithers away. She skitters up to her feet.

“I need a shower.”

“You don't want to eat something first?”

“Maybe later,” she throws.

The door to the bathroom claps shut. Water rustles behind it, echoes on tiled floor, the hiss of curtain rings.

The documentary on Mosul has ended, giving way to a series of ads: cars soaring over bad rock music, uncanny white teeth, immaculate interiors, the occasional AI nightmare that makes him cringe. Jack bids it all away, and the television zaps dark. Muffled calm descends upon the home like a pall of mist. Even the kids upstairs and downstairs have gone quiet.

He feels both upset and hollow. A tight clench around his guts that he fails to locate properly. He dozes off in a half state of lascivious anxiety, his forehead heavy in the cradle of his palm, even if it's usually the hour at which he's most alert, even if he hasn't done a thing all day.

Wet fingers on his bicep. He bolts up.

Samira leans over him, a willowy silhouette, hair still wrenched in a loose elastic over her nape. The bath towel is draped around her body, her fist securing it, clutching it tight. She whispers his name, like they're being listened to, invisible ears pressed at the door, pupils spying from the windows.

“Checking if I'm alive?” he quips.

“Something like that,” she breathes back, not quite matching his tone for humor.

He reads her eyes, a need to be held and the fear to ask for it. He takes her wrist in his hand, preciously, rubbing her pulse the way he always does. Leads her to sit, to melt by his side if she wants to. How it's not a chore at all, to touch her, kiss her parted mouth, and the droplets scattered along her throat like clues to a treasure hunt.

The towel opens and spreads under her, his body covering hers. She jerks at his own clothes angrily, agitated. When she moves, her skin exhales clean soap, textured in goosebumps that he's eager to lick. He sucks the skin around her neck, the dainty lace of bones composing her clavicles.

That night, they fuck without a condom.

It's irresponsible. They're adults who work in the medical field; they're supposed to know better. Worrying about such things doesn't even cross their minds in the moment. It's drowned out by other intercepting notions, consequences trapped outside a bubble they made in which none of those rules exist.

She makes him move into her slow and dilating, her thumb curved over his hipbone, forcing a plodding rhythm. Seeking eye contact more than his touch. He hisses his pleasure, says her name maybe a little too many times, whispers things to her that'd make her normal self flushed and confused. She enjoys it to an unveiled extent now, wriggles under him as if to let him know, loves that he calls her baby, honey, other sappy terms of endearment she'd flee from in broad daylight.

There's a glint in her eyes like lacquer on dark wood. She knows what he's up to. He always does that with her, unraveling her first, above all else. He can't get there himself without that. Jack slips a finger across her lip. Don't look at me like this, he thinks. He worries she'll fight him on this, for a moment. But her gaze softens, and she lets him take her there, to that edge, laying a thumb where she opens around him, hot and slick. Inevitable as gravity. Her neck stretches, eye contact snapping with a flutter of lashes. Jack moans into her skin when he feels her, that deep suction-like pulse around him, his sweat blending with hers. He squeezes her waist when he comes, hard, silent, a shock both familiar and ancient. She shudders longly, stares back at him after, relieved. Asking for a kiss to seal it all off. He's happy to give it.

 

 

 

Many hours later, in her kitchen, they have a serious talk, sitting in a pool of eye-stabbing daylight. Sounding each like doctor and patient wrapped up in one. Cautious talk about stuff that spreads, words calibrated so as not to alarm or wound the other, when was the last time you got tested?, asked slowly, slightly ungracefully, trying to deviate from the harsh clinical tone. The other issue next. Samira explains she's almost on her period, but still, they shouldn't have. She'll get a plan B, and Jack feels bad about it. It was hot though, right? she goes. Yes, it was really hot. And it would be nice to try again, but—

But?

But she's not going on the pill for this (which makes Jack wonder what this means). Sex once every few weeks, she concludes, and he responds with a feeble little oh. It's not worth it; hormones going berserk, the bloating, mood swings, libido drops… She tells him this, which Jack already knows (he's a physician, but he was a husband before that, and a mindful one, he hopes). Still, he doesn't interrupt her.

Jack isn't stupid. He gets what she's covertly asking, the timid implication behind the detached medical statement.

“Are we—is this—” Jack wrestles with the words and doesn't really go through with them.

Something serious, he means.

God, the timing kind of sucks. He still has no idea what she's doing. Staying, leaving. And he has no idea what he's doing either. Attending physician dating one of the residents: what does he make of it?

Samira picks up toast crumbs with her fingerpads.

Jack doesn't ask her what she wants, and it's ironic, because it seems he only asks her this when she doesn't have an answer.

She sort of has one now. She wants to sleep in the same bed as him, and for him to have a favorite cup when he visits. She wants to call him when she wants and not have to second guess whether it's acceptable for her to do so. She wants him exactly as he is now. His presence, a comfort. Wants to wrap herself around him, let herself get carried.

“I really like when you're around,” she admits, mumbling it in the heel of her hand, and as she speaks, it really rings to her as a form of understatement.

But it's not an understatement to him. And the way he grins back at her, bashful and tender, charming in his own boyish way, it might've been the correct thing to say after all. Close enough, at the very least.

 

 

 

A few days later, she slips him the second key to her apartment. Samira does it from the shadow of the ambulance bay, just as he's walking in for his shift. The evening summer dusk burns off the asphalt a few steps away, suffusing the hot air with a noxious stench. She's very adamant about what the key means. It stems from pragmatic reasons, strategic and organizational, that's all. So he can come and go as he pleases, and Samira doesn't have to worry about getting up to open for him, or the door remaining unlocked for long hours. Two days ago, she was at his place and made him laugh when she told him she liked to sleep in her own bed. She doesn't expect the same courtesy of a key in return.

Cassie's nose twitches like a terrier's when Samira walks back in. The both of them stand side by side while they check the patient board.

“Funny,” she sniffs, “you and Abbot use the same soap.”

Samira keeps her composure (she has no idea how). Cassie gives her an impish, knowing half-grin that lifts the apple of her cheek and makes Samira feel like an ant sitting under the magnifying glass of a particularly interested, geeky kid. She prays that all the lines on her face stay in place. Manages a smile, even. Maybe Cassie gets the message; she's more shrewd than most.

“So, are you doing okay?” she wonders, her tone shifting from malice to care.

“Yes. I—yes.” Samira can't remember the last time someone asked her that while she was in a position to answer without lying or sounding glib. She's not great, or fantastic, or good, but she's okay. It's nice to tell the truth for once.

“Still looking for a fellowship?”

Samira winces. She circles the cartilage of her ear.

“Yeah.”

“If I hear of anything, I'll relay it to you.”

“That's very nice. Thank you.”

Cassie offers an amicable stab of a smile. She doesn't have a big mouth; Samira knows that much. Whatever she's guessed, she'll keep it to herself.

 

 

 

It's a really nice thing, whatever is going on. Samira's home, alive, breathing when Jack inhabits it, his presence like a pacemaker. And when he's gone, the lingering traces of him—the dip where he sat on the couch, the crockery he used and washed and left to dry, his towel hanging in the bathroom.

She thought inviting this kind of closeness would set her off her marks, that it'd be an interference, but for reasons unexplained, he focuses her. She rationalizes the situation as a mutual necessity for comfort, for a presence, but admitting this means there was, in fact, something lacking in both of them that needed to be plugged.

She's still scrabbling for a position somewhere. Looked in Pittsburgh, half-heartedly. Wrote cover letter after cover letter to hospitals in other cities.

Jack spies over her shoulder one morning. He's supposed to sleep—she sing-songed to him to go back to bed; he doesn't listen, of course. He's such a light sleeper it's probably pathological. So he's roving behind her back, folding laundry while she sits, gnawing at a pencil. He reads the title of a browser tab on her laptop.

“Kansas City?”

Samira shrugs flabbily.

“My brother lives there,” Jack tells her.

“Oh? Which one?”

He has explained his family tree to her one time—drew a whole picture with a thrifty use of words. She could tell, from the way he said their names, the few epithets he used, which sibling he shared inside jokes with, which he felt the unhealthy urge to compete with, who had first introduced him to sports, and probably tried drowning him in a swimming pool as a kid.

“Have you visited?”

“Two or three times.”

“And?”

“It's fine. It's a fine place. It's… You know. Missouri.”

Whatever that means.

Sometimes, Samira braces for a reaction from him. A suggestion, a question, an insinuation that perhaps she should try and anchor properly in Pittsburgh, since she has already been living here for the past years. Or go for the New Jersey job after all—if they'll still have her. But Jack doesn't say anything to her about it. She feels like she's been lingering in a door frame for the last weeks, unsure which way to go, which direction to choose, and he's agreed in quiet to sit with her on that threshold until she figures it out.

“Maybe I should just go for it. Geriatrics.”

It's noon now, and they're in bed. Neither of them has to work until the next day. Jack is supposed to see his therapist in the afternoon, and Samira has scheduled a Zoom interview she hasn't yet told him about.

At her words, he lifts on one elbow, looks at her like she started growing feathers in her hair.

“But you don't want to stay in Pittsburgh,” he points out, sagacious.

She doesn't even remember telling him that. Not explicitly at least, certainly not in those terms. Samira spins over onto her stomach, resting her cheek on her flattened hands. He scoots closer to her, his warmth near unbearable in the stuffy heat of the room.

“Not like you to give up.”

“I'm just really tired.”

“So you're settling for easy because you're tired?”

He's always doing this with her. He never gives upfront advice. He doesn't tell her what to do. He asks her questions in ways that make her unable to lie to herself.

“Fuck you,” she mutters.

Jack snorts.

“Do it yourself.”

They have sex and whisper things that sound like what people in relationships tell each other. But they're stunned by the heat, by the heady fragrance of their bodies coming together. Samira decides it doesn't count.

 

 

 

She receives the news from Dr. Al-Hashimi's mouth. She's walking out after a run-of-the-mill stitching on a very drunk patient's forehead, and the attending physician is pulling her to the side with a hidden smile, a kind of joy by proxy, close-lipped grin, crowned with glittering eyes. Samira gets a call at the end of her shift to cement the announcement for good. Javadi's at her side when it rings, and after Samira explains, she goes, “Oh my God, that's so great!”, genuine elation spanning across her huge, fawn eyes (how could anyone not like this girl?).

Samira's heart throbs like she just crashed past the finish line of a marathon and is hobbling down the last few steps to reach the bottles of water. She's eager and relieved and exhausted at the thought of everything that comes after.

She knows she has to tell Jack today. News spread in the ED quicker than a virus, and if she doesn't get to him first, someone else will, rendering the announcement the equivalent of an automated voicemail—chilly, stoic, detached.

When he walks in, she intercepts him like a bullet, scrabbling up a mixture of I really need to talk, and stairs, now! He doesn't even get the chance to say hi to anyone else.

The stairs then. Jack's still gripping his bag, fresh and rested demeanor rivaling her battered posture, his gaze heavy and curious, conjecturing she must've bumped her head or drank antiseptic lotion by accident. Samira brings her hands forth, gently febrile.

“I found an ER fellowship,” she aligns the words in one smooth breath.

Rather, the fellowship found her. Via someone she met during her time at the Veterans Affairs hospital. Dr. Al-Hashimi wrote a recommendation letter. It was a neat little affair of knowing someone who knew someone and giving the perfect first impression—which was something Samira excelled in without too much effort.

“Where?” he asks. It's legitimate to wonder. His tone is inquisitive but not overbearing.

“Washington, DC.”

“Not geriatrics?”

She fiddles with a damp hair strand.

“Just regular emergency medicine.”

He seems relieved. She is too, honestly. It's nice to see she isn't alone with the feeling, which is a realization she's conflicted about. She shouldn't need any validation. She's fared well on her own all those years, made her own choices sensitively, as all adults do. But his thoughts really matter to her. Even now, while announcing it to him, the possibility that he could be disappointed, or vexed, or worse is weighing over her.

“Samira, that's great news.”

Jack carries a hand to her upper arm, gently presses his thumb to her skin, making the words sink into her. He's not upset. It's the second time the threat of her disappearance is introduced upon the nascent link that's established between them. The difference this time is he's ready for it. He knew the day would come; he has ceased to live in expectation for anything.

Samira has often wondered if he's talked about her with his therapist. She's often thought about what a professional would say regarding what they have, the lack of proper outline to it, the absence of a neat and definite denomination.

“We should celebrate. Well, not here.” He waves around. “Let me buy you dinner.”

He's ready to walk out but she grasps his elbow, yanks him back to her a little rougher than she would've liked.

“You know, DC is only a four-hour drive from here. And an hour on the plane.”

It is, perhaps, an inexcusably selfish thing to imply. She surprises herself saying it. It's so spontaneous. So unlike her, to lurch forth like that, lend herself to a certain flavor of hope, her voice infused with shimmery possibility.

“Good thing it isn't Japan then,” Jack responds in a half-breath.

She has rattled him. In a good or bad way, she cannot yet tell.

 

 

 

Samira used to think the ED was an ocean, but maybe she was wearing the blinkers of daily life, forgetting that maybe it's not just the ED, maybe that's just what life is, tempestuous waves lugging them, tugging people away, trawling them back in. DC and Pittsburgh, the distance isn't too big. But it's still a mighty ocean when you really like someone.

 

 

 

They're at the Heinz Memorial Chapel. It's the last stop on her Pittsburgh list. She thought seeing all those landmarks and pretty buildings would do something to her, give her a sense of friendship with the city, but that proximity has never really settled in. To be honest, cities are made of people, and she's seen so many at the ED, coworkers and patients both, got attached to them, cried because of them. The hospital, with its chlorine-slick floors, harsh LED lights, and its pell-mell of trolleys and carts, seems infinitely more special and important to her than the pretty heap of carved stone of the memorial. She isn't particularly fond of churches or cathedrals anyway; they're so foreign to her, overpowering, suffocating with the old burn of incense and musty limestone.

She stares over her shoulder.

The stained glass lights paint themselves across Jack's skin, red and blue and yellow, a happy kaleidoscope that maybe justifies their stop here.

He's balled his hand into his jean pockets. When his eyes meet hers, he gives a reassuring grin for her to take her time. His phone buzzes every now and then. She didn't notice outside, but in the echoing silence and muffled traipsing of visitors, the vibrations reach her like the first blinks of an earthquake.

He's hesitant telling her what it's about. They're sat at the end of a dry line of pews, thigh against thigh.

“My father. He's having some health issues.”

Health issues is not something you say to a medical doctor; they'll always start fishing for precisions, behaving worse and more exuberantly than birds huddled over a single crumb of bread. Samira refrains from this habit.

“I'm sorry.”

“He's an old bastard. He'll be fine.”

She squeezes his hand hard. Don't do that, don't hide.

His grin falters a little, wobbly all of a sudden.

She leaves him her hand. He doesn't let go of her fingers. At some point, before they unfurl to walk back home, she notices the space around his finger. He's not wearing his ring anymore.

 

 

 

August writes itself into an epilogue. Turmoil of schools starting again, autumn aficionados throwing countdowns on social media, on the lookout for the first dashes of auburn and gold in maple trees. Samira's feed is stuffed with Halloween decoration inspo and where to get the best fall-themed drinks.

She has taken a couple of days off to book a flight as a recognition mission.

Her plane takes off tonight at nine, and Jack starts work at seven. She's fussing around the apartment, checking for the gazillionth time she hasn't forgotten anything. Jack notices this and teases her mercilessly in a tone that's kittenish and bouncy.

“Did you bring dental floss? Your lucky underwear?”—she thoroughly regrets ever telling him about that—“A second suitcase in case you lose the first one? Oh, a Swiss Army knife if the plane goes down and you need to survive the ruthless wilds of Pennsylvania and Maryland. Airport security loves that stuff too.”

“Or tape, to shut certain mouths up?” He snaps his fingers and points to her.

They're a lot more serious once they reach the foot of the building.

“I hope DC is everything you hope for,” Jack says, a little too solemn, while they wait for her Uber to pull up.

“Don't say it like that. I'm coming back in three days.”

She squeezes his hand as if to quell his anxiety when, really, it's the other way around.

“You better, Mohan. I'm in no shape to run through an airport to keep you from boarding,” he quips.

He holds her face when he kisses her. It doesn't last as long as she'd like. The driver doesn't honk but she can feel the glare, the impatience. After the door shuts, she lowers the window to catch another look at Jack, but the car's already soaring away.

 

 

 

The airport stacks up like a modern cathedral, its nave a long wave, light bouncing down onto her. Incomprehensible announcements are spat out of invisible speakers, their speech melting into the thrum of the crowd. Screens align the names of locations she's spelled down on the list inside her phone. Tokyo, Prague, Milan. One day, for sure.

It's nice to be somewhere noisy and packed that doesn't require her vigilance or participation.

She leafs through random magazines at a kiosk, takes gulps from her water bottle, knowing it probably won't pass security. She doesn't want it to go to waste.

She pulls her phone out while in the waiting line for security checks. One message from her mother. They started talking normally again a week or so ago. Civil to each other, for the most part. Samira said she'd take a whole week off (miraculous!) to come home and help her sort things, clean up, metaphorically and literally. The house and the mess between mother and daughter. After that, her mom will be gone on a cruise with the acclaimed love of her life. Samira doesn't want to miss a chance to mend things between them.

She reaches the tightly watched gates of security, the tunnel of the X-ray scanner not so different from the ones they use at the hospital. She puts her laptop and her phone in a small plastic box. Holds her breath as she passes through, glad that the machines stay mute in her trail.

When she grabs her things back, she has a new message from Jack. He says he'll visit his father, after which he can take two more days off to help her move things around in the New Jersey house. Well, maybe not move things, but distract her. Emotional support, if she will.

Samira gazes out the windows that shine over the tarmac. She wonders if she should tell her mother about Jack. She knows she will, eventually, but maybe not now. She wants to keep him to herself just a few days longer. Washington spreads like a sea of spikes between them, and it's not growing less intimidating as time trickles on. They've agreed to take it one step at a time.

In real life, people don't run through airports for other people. They share a bed and shitty coffee. They discuss trees and ghosts of people once loved. And maybe they part ways, but maybe it doesn't really matter if they do.

But she thinks about where she was, in the fall, last year. Where she went, and where she is now.

Who knows where she'll be in another year?

 

 

 

 

Notes:

Oh my, you made it down here, thank you! This took an embarrassingly long time to write and I rewrote so much, I have no idea if it's any good at this point. I hope it was worth the read nonetheless. ♡

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