Chapter Text
“Honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom.” — Thomas Jefferson.
The thing is, it was just all so terribly romantic.
The desperate confession, the race across town, the profundity of coincidence, the last minute change of heart. It’s something she’s read in the column of a magazine. Something she’s seen in a movie.
The prince disguised as a pauper. The midnight ball. A fairytale.
Honestly, she’s never been a romantic person. Growing up, her father called her piccolo cumpare or Gianburrasca. Every dress she’s ever owned has been second hand, and she can hardly envision a less seductive location than that old studio apartment right beside the L where her lights flickered every time a train went past. But for a moment one night, she looked at John Carter and thought, Well, if the shoe fits…
And one moment was enough to change everything that came after.
So she stayed in Chicago, and she switched upstairs to pedes. It was ironic because Doug Ross was out the year after. She was offered a fellowship in pediatric oncology, and John told her about Bobby.
“You know, I spent a lot of time in the pedes unit?”
“You did?”
“Yeah, growing up. My brother had cancer.” He shrugged, like it was incidental. “But I’ve got a lot of good memories of that place. I think you’ll like it.”
“You’d say anything to get me to stay at County.”
John laughed, the glint in his eye refracting, breaking from grief to mirth like light into a rainbow. “No, I’m smart enough to know by now that nothing I say will change your mind unless you want it to,” he said.
That struck her strangely, like sour candy at the back of her teeth. Still sweet, not unpleasant. Aching. “That’s not quite true.”
“You’ll be good at it,” he’d said.
“It’s a change from the ER,” she suggested.
“It’s definitely that.”
So she accepted the offer. She did it for the kids she could help who were sick, and the ones she could help who came walking at the heels of their parents. The ones who stood to the side, who were quiet, and cautious. Who grew up tiptoeing into rooms because they didn’t want to wake whoever was inside, whose eyes were wide, and whose arms and legs and chests were made of glass so clear that everyone else saw through them.
And for a while, it was wonderful. There was death, there was tragedy, but at the end of the day there was home. There was John.
Sweet. Aching. Her own cut-crystal boy.
But then, you know, you turn thirty, and it all just hits different. Something in your brain tumbles over like a pin in a lock and “romantic” very quickly becomes “what the hell, what on earth, what the actual fuck?”
What is she doing starting from scratch so far away from home? What is she thinking, sleeping with a first year intern? Who is she, now that she’s making career decisions based on the sad back-stories of poor little rich boys?
She was twenty-nine the year she arrived in Chicago.
John was twenty-seven the first time he asked her out in the dim light of a run-down Shangri lodge.
He was twenty-eight the first time he proposed.
He was twenty-eight the second time he proposed, too.
He didn’t propose again until he was twenty-nine , and when she turned him down that time she thinks he got the hint because he didn't bring it up after that.
John is still twenty-nine on the night he nearly dies.
Anna is thirty-two when Mark Greene calls to tell her.
“Anna,” he says on the phone, his voice slow and deliberate, full of warning. The tone is enough to make her sit and brace herself. “Anna, there’s been an incident in the ER. Carter was hurt. Now, I want you to know he’s up in the OR. Benton is with him. But I think you’d better come in.”
“In the OR?”
And then he pauses in a way he only does when he knows what comes next but doesn’t want to say. “I think you’d better come in.”
“Alright,” she says. She’s calm. “Mark?”
“Yeah?”
“John’s alive?”
“Yes, Anna. He’s still alive.”
Still. Still. Still.
Like a heartbeat. Still, still, still.
But still only means for now. Still is not a certainty. More than anything else Mark said, more than any other word, it’s the still that scares her.
She takes a cab. It costs $12.00. She gives the driver a twenty and doesn’t think to ask for change. Two years with a Carter and suddenly money doesn’t mean anything.
The entrance bay glows with the warm golden light that reminds her of fireplaces, and Christmas lights. There’s a line from an old movie that comes into her head, something said by a man in love to a woman made of steel. You’re lit from within, Tracy. You’ve got fires banked down in you, hearth-fires and holocausts.
Her eyes blur. The whole world is burning up.
There’s a woman just inside the door talking to Chuny. She’s young, and blonde. She has the haunted, hunted look that Anna imagines must be just like the one on her own face. It sits oddly, feels stiff and new and wide, wide open.
“I’m looking for my husband,” she says. “I got a call…”
The day after Anna decided to stay, she woke up on Carter’s couch thinking about her Nonna.
“Oh, Lord, mia dulce bambolotta!” she’d say. “You live with one boy for seven years, you bring him home to your mama, and you do not marry him? O Gesù! O Santa Maria! And your brothers all married. Anna, Anna, Anna! Have you lost your mind?”
She showered. She waited for him to get ready. She went into work with John, and even if he didn’t say anything specific, the lightness in his step, the exuberance spilling over into thoughtlessness and arrogance, the way she turned red the moment anyone made eye contact with her, well, the symptoms were obvious. And unfortunately, she was trapped in a room full of diagnosticians.
“Good morning, Anna!” said Chuny, her grin sharp and teasing, drawing out the greeting as if she meant something else by it entirely. “You’re early, aren’t you?”
“Couldn’t sleep?” asked Lily.
“More like didn’t,” Chuny said, her voice like glitter.
“Anna, tell Carter to get his ass in here,” snapped Carol, sweeping toward Trauma One, as if Anna had him on a leash.
“Finally got a leg over on that gravy train, huh?” said Doug, following along behind on a leash of his own. “All aboard!”
“Hey, Anna, I thought you had that boyfriend back in Philly?” Maggie. Always one to cut right to the chase. Always throwing down the gauntlet. Normally, Anna liked that. She appreciated the forthrightness, the clarity. Not today.
Max was not back in Philly. Max was standing at the admit desk looking at her as if she’d just skinned his dog in front of him.
“It’s not like that,” she’d said.
“It’s like something,” he said, later, when he could pull her away long enough to speak in the lounge. “Look, I know you might feel…beholden to him.”
“What?”
“You work in a high stakes environment, you spend a lot of time in close proximity, and you experience a lot of emotional –”
“It’s not like that,” she said. “I’m not trauma-bonded to him.”
“You feel bad about his cousin –”
“I felt bad about you but obviously that wasn’t enough to convince me to stay in Philly!”
Max stepped back, and shook his head. “What are you doing, Anna?”
But John smiled and smiled, and bought her lunch that day.
At night, on her own in the cramped little studio, her brother called.
“I thought the You and Max Thing was a done deal,” said Raffi over the phone. “You know, he called me up last week telling me he was sure he still had a chance.”
“Yeah, well,” she said. “Last week, he did.”
“But now he doesn’t? Jesus, Anna, this Carter kid must be some kind of rich.”
“Is that what Max told you?”
Her brother didn’t say no, but said, “Is the money really worth throwing away your whole life for?”
“Oh, fuck off, Raffi, it’s not like that either.”
John must have kind of thought it was, because a week later, after Max was gone and after he’d moved as many of his things as could fit into her apartment, he apologized again. Tense, like he was waiting for her to slide in the knife.
“I don’t want you to worry about it,” he said. “I don’t want you to be uncomfortable. I know how this thing - these things upset you.”
“I’m not upset, Carter.”
“Right,” he said. “Right.” He folded his hands together, squeezing, then chafing them as if to burn off some of the anxiety sparking beneath his easy facade. “Well, you don’t have to worry about it. I’ll figure out some place to live.”
“Have you asked about a paycheck?”
He looked at her, and his jaw shifted, the lie couched right there in his cheek.
“How did this happen?”
“I don’t know.”
“How long before you got them?”
“I don’t know. It could have been fifteen minutes.”
“God.”
“Less. Ten. It could have been less. I don’t know.”
“And no one saw?”
“The patient was on a psych hold. He was non-violent. John was supervising Lucy.”
Kerry explains things to her, but this time the rote language of medicine is not reassuring no matter how many times the words are repeated.
“How’s Lucy?”
Kerry presses her lips together.
“I told him he was being too hard on her. He wasn’t interested. He’d come home and tell me what stupid thing she’d done today, and every time it was a fight –”
“He was supervising her, Anna. That’s why they’re both upstairs.”
She spent her birthday in her own bed, lying naked beside John Truman Carter III. The next morning, she left him sleeping and caught a bus back to Philly. It was cheaper than a plane. It gave her a lot of time to think.
See, the thing is, education, medicine, independence, trauma, time, all these things can have an unfortunate side-effect. Life can have an unfortunate side-effect. It can make you self-aware. And on the day after her thirtieth birthday, Anna came to the conclusion that people who weren’t self-aware were, by her estimation, better off. They were likely longer-lived, were definitely wealthier, and were, in all probability, much happier.
But she was none of those things. She was absolutely nauseous with misery.
The bus was hot and dry. The heating was on full blast because it was December, but the sun shone in a clear sky, unrelentingly. The cheap polyester fabric of the seat chafed, burying its brutish little bristles into the exposed skin on the back of her hand that cushioned her cheek against the armrest. She looked out the window, watching the grey of Chicago turn into the grey of the suburbs, and the grey, grey fields left harrowed and empty in the melting snow.
They turned to the woodlands made grey with winter bark and birch, and then grey steel tracks, then the grey lake, and the grey stone buildings of another town.
Joe picked her up.
“Happy birthday,” he said. “Did you come alone?”
“Joe –”
“Don’t bite my head off. I’m only asking. I mean, I get that there’s obviously some appeal.”
“Great.”
“A little young, though. Don’t you think?”
“To be honest, I actually haven’t thought about it.”
It’s been almost two years, and she still hasn’t met John’s parents. She doesn’t know how to contact them, and she can only think to ask Kerry if she needs the night butler’s number.
Kerry’s already sent Amira up to Personnel, but Randi’s hovering at the admit desk, her ear pressed to a phone. She’s trembling, and Kerry is leaning on frustration to keep the horror at bay, which is only making it worse.
“I’m sorry, Dr. Weaver,” she says. “I thought I'd just page pedes. Maybe it'd be faster. But they put me through to switchboard because Anna had already left. I didn’t even think to –”
“I don’t care,” Kerry snaps. “Take down these decorations. How can we even pretend to be treating patients? It’s a damned mess in here.”
She’s pulled away even as another presence at Anna’s back has her turning around to meet them.
“Dr. Del Amico?” It’s someone new. A med student. Anna doesn’t know her, but there’s a weariness to her features despite the length of her coat that lends itself to the setting. “I just wanted to say, I’m so sorry. Dr. Carter seems like a really good man, and I -”
“What’s your name?”
“Abby. Abby Lockhart.”
“Abby,” she says. “Could you please call Carol Hathaway? I think she just got off. Do you know who that is?”
“Of course.”
“And then you come to find me.”
It’s instinctive. That delegation. Controlling a scene. Giving an order and putting a name to it. It’s emergency medicine. She is in control. This is her trauma.
She takes the file and slides onto the stool at the edge of the desk. The staff contact form has been filled out in blue ink in John’s broad and looping hand. The first name listed beside next of kin is “Millicent Carter,” but it’s been crossed out and “Anna Del Amico” has been squished in above it, block capitals making clear the certainty of the alteration. She feels guilty knowing that her own still has her mom’s name listed first.
Still, his Gamma’s number is barely legible underneath the criss-crossed lines, but she doesn't need to read it. It's the only number she knows to reach the Carter family by. She dials it from memory. It’s approaching midnight, and no one answers the phone. She dials again, and then once more just to be certain but the line clicks over to voicemail almost immediately each time.
She doesn’t know who else to call.
His cousin Chase, whose care John still oversees, who relies on John, who only John still goes to visit, is the only other family she can think of. There are other cousins she's met once or twice - A.J.? A.C.? Douglas? Family friends he’s acknowledged in passing. Staff members.
He has a sister, she thinks. She thinks? How can she not know?
Who else…?
Who else is there for her to call for him? Who else can she think of to come?
She picks up the phone and calls Elizabeth, who also doesn’t answer. Then Anna remembers something Mark had said. Benton is with him now.
And Elizabeth was with Mark.
And Mark is here.
And Lucy is upstairs.
And Benton is with him now.
And he is closing his eyes. He is bleeding out. He is screaming for help. He is calling for her. He is gasping, choking, falling down. He is alone. It is dark, and nobody sees him. He is glass, he is glass, he is glass.
Like his body is her own, and the knife is cold and clean against her own spine, she gasps and chokes, and drops the phone. The receiver clatters to the countertop, a brittle knell of plastic against laminate, a dull, and shallow exclamation of a grief suited to the indifferent sterility of modern medicine. Everyone moves around her. Patients in. Patients out. Someone crying in Exam 3. And laughing with their friends in Chairs. Dr. Kovac pushes his hair back from his eyes, his mouth open, and he looks shocked or stunned. Malucci has a vicious kind of scowl carved into his face, but the worried lines above his brow are dug even deeper. Haleh pulls a curtain across her, wiping her eyes. Lily keeps throwing frantic glances towards the bay, and the rooms, and the elevators as if she’s half-expecting another tragedy or else waiting for word of relief from this one. And Anna is sitting there, the knife sliding deeper, and no one sees, and no one came, and –
“Oh, my God, Anna! I came as soon as I heard.”
“I heard back from the review board today. ‘Gross negligence, demonstrating a concerning lack of judgement in a supervisorial capacity.’ What do you think they’d say if they saw half the stuff Lucy gets away with in the ER?”
“Gets away with? John, the whole reason you’re there is to make sure she’s not getting away with anything.”
He tossed his coat toward the row of pegs by the door, missed, and left it lying on a pile of discarded shoes.
“Call me crazy, but I thought I was there to be a doctor. To practice medicine.”
“Practice, yeah. It’s a teaching hospital.”
“I can’t hold her hand the whole time.”
“You could hold it a little.”
“Why are you taking her side on this?”
“I’m not taking her side! I just –”
“Forget it.” He loosened his tie, screwing his fingers up beneath his collar and pulling it away from his throat. His eyes dropped away from hers to the floor, and if it wasn’t quite agreement it was at least an admission of defeat.
“What else?” She asked.
“Nothing,” he said. “They, uh…I lost the RA job.”
“They fired you.”
“Right.” His gaze swept back up, and he lifted his chin, hearing the criticism right where she’d meant for him to find it. “So, there you go. No paycheck, no house. Again. I’m sure Gramps will be overjoyed to hear it.”
“Christ, John.” It was exhaustion before it was disappointment. Anna planted her feet, rigid in the centre of the room, her hand like a blade dissecting the body of his failure. “You have to take this seriously. How are you going to pay rent? How are you going to feed yourself? Fill up on gas –”
“I was kind of thinking I could live here.”
“Here?”
Her shock filled the space like a matchstick struck, eating up the oxygen, burning down the stem to his fingers. He shifted, as the flame came closer and the risk of burning grew.
“Yeah.”
She stared at him, and he stared back. Expectant. Waiting.
“John…” And the way she said it, that one syllable, with an open vowel falling down, it was enough for him to hear the answer without her ever saying.
“Never mind,” he said, turning away again. He grabbed his coat from its slouching rest, the hem at the sleeve dripping on one side from where it sat in the melt of snowy shoes. “Never mind. I shouldn’t have said anything. I shouldn’t have asked.”
“John –”
“I’ve got to go.”
He ran.
There’s a group heading over to Doc Magoo’s as the night shift turns over to the day, but Anna can’t bring herself to join them.
“It’s okay,” says Carol, rolling her out of the coat she’d forgotten she still had on. “I’ve cleared everyone out of the lounge, and told them I’ll report them to HR if they even think about coming in.”
“Thanks.”
She looks at her, her dark eyes deep with something touched by Death before. There’s something she knows that Anna doesn’t. And it makes her feel very young.
“You should get some sleep,” she says. “I’ll wake you when he’s out of surgery.”
“I don’t want to sleep.”
Carol shakes her head. “It’s better than staying up to wait. Come on. I’ll tuck you in.”
She should smile there, but she doesn’t. It’s perverse to even think about the act, and more perversely still she thinks of John, suddenly, all smiles, laughing, until the lines at the corners of his eyes bend all the way out to his hairline. The way he laughs when he’s truly joyful, not when he thinks someone is looking. Or someone is watching. Not when he’s laughing at himself, or laughing off hurt, or enjoying the horrible irony of something that stings.
Just…
Laughing.
“Do you think he’ll be okay?”
“Carter?” says Carol, guiding Anna through the swinging door, and pushing her down to the low and sagging couch. “Carter’s stubborn,” she says.
“Yes, but he’s…”
John was soft.
And she loved living with him.
The week after she hauled him out of Kerry Weaver’s basement, he surprised her by switching out all her thread-bare, cotton-blend sheets for brand new satin ones.
"Sateen," he corrected, like that made a difference.
Reflexively, her gut clenched with indignance – that someone would come into her space, would touch her things, would change them without her permission. The free-hand of entitlement that John so casually wielded rankled her. But she was trying hard these days to give him grace, afraid that her own prejudice was so closely stitched against her heart that it strangled any true feeling she might otherwise have had. Afraid that maybe all of this was compensation one way or another.
“Don’t worry,” he said, nosing the vertebrae at the top of her spine. “I didn’t throw them away. It’s just that these ones are for special occasions.”
“Oh, yeah?” she asked, leaning back against him, and turning so his lips brushed over the apex of her ear. “And what’s the occasion tonight?”
“I got to come home to you.”
She didn’t ask where he got the money for them.
Instead, she kissed him then. And turned into his embrace, and he smiled so softly at her she thought she might be sick.
It was different than it had been with Max. And why shouldn’t it be? They were not the same.
But she was. She thought she was.
“What did you think when I told you I was staying?”
“What did I think?”
“Yeah,” she says. The old couch groans as she moves, and then again as Carol sits down beside her. She’d shoved Anna’s coat into John’s own locker, and it’s all Anna can do to grip the cushions, white-knuckling against her desire to open the door to his clothes, and his things, and his smell. “Did you think I was crazy?”
Carol shrugs. “I don’t know. Maybe. But to be honest, I don’t think I’m the best judge of sanity when it comes to relationships.”
“I guess.”
“Hey!” Carol shoves her elbow against her side, and all of a sudden Anna’s breathing again, a gust of air escaping in something like a laugh.
“No, I…I just mean…I don’t know what I mean.”
She leans against the wall, the top of the couch hitting somewhere mid-back, awkward and uncomfortable but even that familiarity is somehow grounding. Carol lounges with her, tilting back her head and closing her eyes. They sit in silence together. Anna can hear the clock tick on, each minute rounding out into another.
“You know,” Carol says, drowsily, a few moments later. “The first day I met Carter he came in wearing a tailored white coat. Floppy hair. He looked about twelve years old. I don’t think any of us thought he was gonna make it. And Benton was merciless…I tried to kill myself that night.”
Anna flinches, alert again, and out of herself. Her eyes sweep over Carol looking for some evidence of injury even though she knows this was years ago. (Not that many years ago).
Carol stays loose-limbed and sleepy beside her.
“Didn’t work, obviously. But I always thought it was a funny parallel. First day. Last day. I told him as much when I came back. I think I scared him a bit.”
“Probably.”
“You did, too, you know?”
“I know.”
“God,” she says, her expression shifting instantly from determined rest into reflexive laughter. “I remember the first procedure you shared, he came staggering out of the trauma room like he was about to pass out, and when I asked him if he was okay, he said, ‘Yeah, but I think that new intern’s gonna murder me.’”
“What one was that? I don’t remember that.”
“Oh, it was nothing. Kid versus kitchen scissors, or something. But you’d yelled at him for getting in your light, and he’d been trying so hard to impress you.”
“I don’t even remember that.”
Carol shakes her head. “Well, it was probably funnier for me than it was for you. More memorable. Remember when he got his beard glued to that patient?”
“God, I hated that thing. Remember that snow day?”
“Remember when he dressed up as Santa and gave out gifts for guns?”
“Remember when he drove around Chicago looking for that girl’s dad?”
“I remember he missed his graduation because he was staying with a patient.”
“I remember he nearly drowned a patient in the cafeteria.”
“Remember the rapist?”
“Yeah,” Anna sighs, laughter turning melancholic once again. “Yeah. I thought I was gonna kill him that day, too.”
“Yeah,” she agrees, but it doesn't have any bite. “So why did you stay?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “I just changed my mind.”
When she first knows she loves him, he is fast asleep, half draped across her chest. He's heavy, and he's snoring, and he still smells like the hospital. The scent of industrial detergent mingled with the sterile, single-use plastic, cotton gauze, iodine, alcohol, and the mellow tang of blood is caught in his clothes and the fine hair of his body. His scrubs, made butter-soft with wear, are cool against her skin.
She stares at him. The shadows of the room pool in the half-moon indentations below his eyes where his zygomatic bone dips into the ocular cavity, and in the smaller crescent of an old and almost invisible scar on his right cheek, the skin there only a thin barrier of protection, hiding nothing of what lies beneath. His cheeks are more hollow than when she’d met him more than two years before. His shoulders broader. He’s lost the ranginess that gave away his youth even in gowns, and caps, and surgical masks.
He speaks a little slower, now. Confidence giving him patience giving him authority. But it doesn’t sit on him easily, and she wonders if he even sees it. She wonders if he knows he’s changed. And for a second, she's sad because she misses him as he was before. And in the next moment, she's glad to have him as he is. And in the next, she knows she loves him.
And she wonders if that means that she is changing, too.