Damage Undone

Chapter 7. Who Have You Been?





The house was quiet.

He let the door shut loudly behind him, and the sound brought no answer. It wasn’t unexpected – Gretel was almost as quiet as Ma these days.

Romano looked around his living room. There she was – sleeping in front of the TV, which he’d left on. He ruffled the shaggy hair on her head and left food for later.

The answering machine was blinking – six messages. (But what had he expected? That the administrative bullshit would be kind enough to remove itself from existence while he helped his mother?)

The first message, though, almost made him smile. A deep voice, bearing the scratchy, phlegmy traces of hundreds of cigars. “Bob Romano, it’s your lucky day,” he rumbled. “Our chief of surgery retired – and you’re first on my list for his replacement. Come on, buddy, you’re too old to work for a place that can’t afford its own patients.”

—You wish, Vic, Romano thought as he skipped to the next message. Vic was director of personnel at Northwestern, and he insisted on calling every time there was an opening in surgery.

Vic had always had quixotic leanings.

The rest of his messages bored him, so he left his replies until later and went upstairs to take a shower. He had been sitting for so long in the ICU, waiting, that he felt he hadn’t been clean in years. And she still didn’t wake, despite neuro coming around every day and amiably disagreeing on their diagnoses.

And – meanwhile – there was Elizabeth, or maybe he should say there wasn’t Elizabeth. Her visits to his mother yesterday magically seemed to coincide with the brief minutes that he was out of the room.

No matter how much he tried not to think about it, his mind kept returning to the question of what exactly he’d done in that pub to produce something so unexpected. He’d intended nothing by touching her hand, nothing like that; he had been innocent and straightforward for once in his life. Yet her fingers shook slightly under his and her eyes darted quickly, reflexively to his lips.

It must be inevitable, he thought, that he’d have to admit it to himself at some point: she was under his skin. (More than that, although he didn’t know what to call it.) It would have been better for her if he had backed away from her instead of kissing her – but his reserves of generosity just weren’t that deep.

Besides, it was worth it.

Romano smirked as he walked downstairs, calling a tongue-in-cheek farewell to his unconscious dog and slamming the door behind him. Time for work. He’d see her.

It felt like a high-school crush all over again.

His smiling face was assaulted by a gust of spring-tainted air too strong to be a breeze. Chicago had only wind to offer, even today.

And one moment on a darkened street corner was still only a moment. His mother was dying and Elizabeth Corday had kissed him, and still his life was achingly, tauntingly the same.

*

“I’m not surprised you ended it,” Abby said with a shake of her head. “After that little performance, I’d rethink my relationship, too.”

They’d run into each other outside of the El station and conversation on the way to the hospital had run, inevitably, to gossip. Susan was surprised as hell yesterday to find herself liking Abby – the Carter issue and the constant gloom aside, that last night at Susan’s house hadn’t endeared Abby to anyone. But there was something to be said for the bonding power in being stuck in the middle of the same dreary romantic entanglement, Luka to Abby to Carter to Susan, on the day that outlasted all days. Something, too, for the enjoyment of Abby’s particular pure, dry, dour wit – in small doses.

“Even with Carter?” Susan jabbed. “Carter, who gets you?”

Abby winced. “If we’re really going to be friends, you’re going to throw that night back at me for the rest of our lives, I suppose.”

“Maybe I can get you drunk again and find some new material.”

“Please. Anyway I shouldn’t be –”

“What?” Susan said.

“Nothing.” Abby shook her head as they entered the hospital. “So was he sad?”

“Heartbroken. He even blinked, once.”

“Oh, come on,” Abby said, laughing. “He didn’t mind at all? The guy has a massively fragile ego.”

“It was the most amicable breakup I’ve ever had. You know, it’s odd, he’d had a crush on me seven years ago – but it wore off as soon as we were together.”

“He has a thing for the unattainable.” Abby checked her watch and grimaced. “Weaver’s going to kill us.”

“Maybe we’ll be sent back to detention,” Susan suggested.

They grinned at each other, but Kerry Weaver showed up with her customary peremptory orders and redirected them to trauma one, where Mark was working a chest pain.

He looked up when the door opened and smiled. “Susan, good.”

“Need help?” she said, hurrying into gloves and a mask.

“Sudden onslaught chest pain,” Mark said. “Could be angina.”

Susan hurried to the patient’s side as Lily filled her in. Water hammer pulse. “Mark –” she said in a low voice. “This is an aortic dissection.” Then, louder – “Someone page me a surgical consult!”

He snapped his head up to look at her. She couldn’t conceal her surprise that he’d missed what seemed terribly obvious. He seemed about to say something, opening his mouth, but Susan cut him off before anyone else in the room could pick up on what she was seeing. “Get them quickly,” she directed Abby in a low voice.

Mark closed his mouth, defeated.

It wasn’t thirty seconds before Romano was barging in, shoving Mark aside to examine the patient. “They said it was emergent; what is this?”

“Possible…” Mark started.

After a second, Romano swiveled his head to look at Mark, startled at the pause.

Susan could see panic seeping into Mark’s expression as he struggled to remember what she had just diagnosed. “Possible – uh – possible… aortic dissection,” he finished, as Susan was preparing to jump in.

“Thanks, that was … fast,” Romano said, narrowing his eyes slightly in contemplation of Mark before turning back to his work. “All right, page surgery and tell them we’re coming up, this is cut and dry.”

Mark backed away, looking nauseated. As the patient and Romano disappeared out the door, Mark’s eyes met Susan’s across the room in what seemed a plea – for what, she didn’t know.

The nurses dispersed, and he didn’t move. Finally Susan said in a low voice, “Mark, you need to talk to—”

Suddenly a drawer slammed shut behind her. Susan turned to look– Abby had been rummaging around behind her, unnoticed. She stopped, disconcerted, as Abby gave her an odd look.

“So did you two have fun yesterday?” Mark asked, changing the subject.

Susan laughed ruefully. “Carter and Luka had a swordfight.”

“It was really thrilling,” Abby added dryly.

Mark laughed obligingly, but his eyes were still burning into Susan’s, almost feverishly. “A swordfight, huh? That’s, uh… that’s funny.”

“Yeah, that pretty much decided me on the Carter issue,” Susan said.

“You broke up with Carter?” Mark said.

“Long overdue, I think.” Susan smiled and, wary of saying anything else in front of Abby, left the room after brushing her hand against his, reassuringly.

Outside the room she set her teeth, resisting the impulse to go back inside and pull him close and hold him so he wouldn’t look like that. It seemed monstrous somehow – to follow the normal rules when he had so little time left – but she’d have to let him go through this alone.

*

“She’s awake,” the nurse had said when Elizabeth entered Maria Tucci’s room in the ICU.

Not really, Elizabeth wanted to say as she met the old woman’s vacant stare.

Someone from neuro was already there, looking solemn and important: Elizabeth’s job would be over soon.

She wasn’t sorry to hand off this one. She’d always pictured Romano’s mother, when she bothered to think about it, as some witty old lady who would give him insult for insult, and preside like a matriarch over raucous, conflictive family dinners.

Instead, this was the familial love they’d all speculated about that time he told the nurses about his Mother’s Day plans.

“Has someone paged Romano?” she asked.

“He’s in surgery.”

“No, I’m here,” said the voice from the doorway.

He approached and stood slightly behind Elizabeth, close enough for her to feel the warmth of his body but still, tauntingly, out of her eyesight unless she turned her head. This she staunchly refused to do.

But she heard his sharp intake of breath when he got a good look at his mother, at her open eyes.

“I see you’re already moving in for the kill,” he said to the others. “What’s the verdict?”

“We need more tests.”

“Do you have any left to give her?”

“Why don’t you cure the problem, then, Robert?” snapped one of the doctors, with the weariness born of familiarity with his chief.

“I’ll give you the honor,” Romano said. “Keep me posted on every single test you do.”

“This is really a case for—”

“Dr. Martin, you have ears, don’t you? I think I just said to keep me posted. I didn’t say I was going to take over the case and evaluate her brain function by myself.”

“Wouldn’t be unlike you,” Martin muttered.

“I hope your courtesy serves you better when you’re negotiating severance pay,” Romano said mildly, “because it seems foreseeable the way you’re going.” He touched Elizabeth’s arm, and she felt a flicker of awareness in her skin. “Dr. Corday, you have a minute?”

“Not right now.”

“Thirty seconds then.”

Elizabeth turned without looking at him and walked coolly outside.

In the hallway, once he’d joined her, with amusement and a hint of nervousness on his face, she said, “I thought you were in surgery.” Her arms were crossed, as if for protection.

“Bled out.”

“Well? What did you want?”

“Firstly, I need you to cover a meeting for me tomorrow at ten, Edson’s first-year just failed his rotation and he’s getting litigious. Let him know it’s really not worth the money it’ll take to lose, and send him on his way. I’d do it, but something’s come up, so—”

“Fine,” she said.

“Wait,” he interrupted as Elizabeth took the opportunity to make her escape.

She knew what that tone meant, and she wasn’t ready to discuss this yet, but she made herself stay still and face him. His eyes swept her posture – leaning back against the window, waiting, sullen – and their path felt branded into her.

As she’d half feared, none of her attraction to him had faded, even in the harshly honest, sterilized brightness of the hospital corridors.

“Before you run away again, can I say something?” he said, the smirk erased from his expression.

She swallowed. “Of course.”

“This morning, Mark was–”

Romano paused, running his tongue over his lip, and stared past her, as if he were distracted.

“Mark, what?”

He frowned slightly, then looked down at the floor and shook his head. “Uh – I did a consult for him. And it reminded me we haven’t talked.”

As if either of them had needed a reminder. Elizabeth waited.

“Look, you’re a big girl, so let’s be mature about it,” he said.

Condescending bastard.

She gave him a fiercer glare than she’d ever given Mark. Big girl, indeed. She felt as furious as a thwarted three-year-old. And rightly so.

“I know you’ve been trying to avoid having this out, but… I get it, okay? You’re still married, you made a mistake, and it’s over.”

It sounded easy, when he said it like that.

“We can write everything off to your loneliness and my… opportunism, and move on. I don’t need a slap in the face to back off. I’m going on my own.”

Winded by the sudden reduction of her responsibility, Elizabeth felt her mouth fall slightly open. “Thank you?” she managed after a moment.

“That sounded like a question,” he said, his eyes burning with questions of their own.

“It wasn’t.”

He nodded, both an answer and a leavetaking, and walked down the hall.

Elizabeth’s eyes followed the sweeping of his long coat for a moment. Then she felt her pager go off in her pocket.

Downstairs she ruled out an MI (an obvious one, Kovac should’ve known it himself – but Robert was right, they really were helpless down here) and, on her way back up, was caught by the mention of Mark’s name.

Slowing to a stop, Elizabeth turned quietly, instinctively. Caught a glimpse of John Carter and Abby Lockhart at the admit desk. Abby was tracing circles on the desktop with her fingers, Carter leaning over her with a shyly aggressive air about him.

She listened, wondering what they were saying about Mark.

“So we broke up,” Carter concluded importantly.

Abby lifted her eyes. “I heard,” she said coolly. “Susan told me.”

“I’m glad she did it before I had to.”

She pursed her lips in a dry smile. “Oh, I’m sure you are, John.”

“Look, maybe they are just friends, but there’s always the question…” He leaned closer, predatory, and Elizabeth resisted smirking when Abby leaned slightly away from him in passive resistance. “It’s one of those things where you work with each other every day and there’s just … something … between you.”

Abby deadpanned, “Like friendship?”

Carter shrugged. “Even if they haven’t admitted it, something else is there, and I don’t want to deal with that. They never had any closure, and now that Mark’s sort of single, I just think it’s better for me if –”

Elizabeth suddenly felt ashamed for listening to this. She slipped away, wishing she’d had the sense to keep moving instead of listening to some resident’s adolescent flirtation.

But Carter’s words – spoken in that smugly certain voice – had some strange staying power in her mind. Mark had been, not quite reticent, but vague about Susan when the latter’s existence first came to Elizabeth’s attention. An old colleague, he’d said as they put together their wedding invitation list. It seemed odd, that she had never heard that name spoken before.

(--Projecting, Elizabeth? she asked herself wearily. –It’s you kissing coworkers in pubs, remember?)

Mark was not like her, she knew. He was careful, not impulsive – she’d realized that in the first days of their tentative relationship, he would never let himself get drawn into something until he knew his footing, until he’d thought it through. And he was better than she was, in some ways: steadfast. Not given to these aching, all-encompassing second thoughts.

She found it easier to think of Mark and Susan than to think about what had happened Friday night.

But when Susan herself appeared at her cafeteria table at lunchtime with a bagel, a Styrofoam coffee cup and a tentative smile, her image in the flesh seemed much warmer, more human, than the shadowy figure of the past that Elizabeth had been considering in her own head.

“Go ahead,” Elizabeth nodded, and Susan sat down.

“Hi,” she said, unwrapping the plastic from around her bagel and spreading butter lavishly over it. Elizabeth watched her, trying not to be too obviously disconcerted. “You’re having a late lunch too, I see.”

“I had another unnecessary consult,” Elizabeth explained briefly.

“I’m sorry, I know we do that to you guys a lot,” Susan said. “Sometimes the residents just get nervous, or – over-thorough, I guess.”

Elizabeth nodded and was silent, her natural hostility overtaking her for a moment.

After a short silence, Susan took a sip of coffee and winced. “Every time I eat up here, I resolve to stop complaining about the coffee in the lounge.”

“I stopped drinking it here a long time ago,” Elizabeth said, smiling in spite of herself.

Susan laughed. “I knew there was a reason I wanted to work at Northwestern instead. Bet they have better coffee there.”

“Northwestern?” Elizabeth said, momentarily confused.

“I applied for a job there.”

“Didn’t get it?” Elizabeth said, before she realized how rude that sounded. If she spent any more time with Robert – or thinking about him – she would probably lose all her hair as well.

Susan exhaled disbelievingly. “No, I – changed my mind.”

“Right,” Elizabeth remembered, “my husband convinced you.”

Another awkward pause ensued, and Elizabeth took a deep breath. She wished she could ask Susan directly who she was in Mark’s life, and who she had been. But what could she say? “Were you ever in love with my husband? Are you now?” Even better, “Is it just me, or has everything started to seem irrevocably mucked up?”

Before she could think of a way to broach the subject, her sense of common propriety took over, and she retreated into polite vacuity and asked Susan if she’d seen the Bulls game last night.





Chapter 8: Stranger Than Ever