Work Text:
1.
On one long wall of her parents' living room, there were dozens of photos of Joan. Her mother's camera had captured Joan as a newborn, swaddled in a green blanket on the ride home from the hospital; a six-year-old Joan, grinning gap-toothed, a jump rope held in one hand; a prom-bound Joan, wearing a taffeta dress and an ill-advised perm. Her whole life was there, laid out in neat rows which make it seem deliberate: valedictorian to Harvard to backpacking across Europe to med school. The photos stopped two years ago.
2.
"These things happen, Joanie," her dad had said. They were sitting in the coffee shop around the corner from Joan's apartment, their conversation swallowed up by the noise of February-chilled New Yorkers in search of caffeine. He added his customary three packets of Splenda to his coffee and continued, "It's not pleasant, but accidents happen, and you took responsibility for it. No one's going to think any less of you for it."
Joan met her mother after work three weeks later—"for some girl time," her mother said. They had overpriced cocktails at a bar with a great view of the city skyline, and her mom told her about the latest intrigues among the law faculty, and about some new drapes she'd just bought for the guest bedroom, and about how Jessica Rutherford, you remember from middle school, was going to have twins. In the pause between finishing their appletinis and starting in on the mojitos, her mom leaned in and covered Joan's hand with hers; said, "Sweetheart, it doesn't matter what other people think. I know it's going to be difficult, going back after the suspension, but it'll be tough for a couple of weeks and then they'll get over it."
3.
It got easier, not answering people's calls. For the first couple of weeks, Joan kept her pager with her at all times, even though she knew it wouldn't go off. Habits were hard things to break. But one Wednesday morning she switched it off and put it on a shelf in the living room, and somehow it made sense to leave her cell phone there with it when she went for her morning jog. She didn't pick up her phone to check it that evening, or the evening after. It vibrated occasionally for several more days—with texts inviting her out to the movies or to weekend brunch, with voicemails reminding her about Brian and Dawn's engagement party—before the battery ran out.
"You know what you're doing, right?" Su Yin said, pouring syrup over her pancakes with a liberal hand. Her cousin had shown up at Joan's apartment that morning and practically strong-armed her out the door to get some breakfast. "This is pretty classic, Joan. It's a cliché, that's how classic it is."
"I think I'm going to get some more bacon," Joan said, signalling for the waitress. "You want some more?"
Su Yin pursed her lips. "Okay, so I know I only took that one psychology gen-ed, but deflection is—"
"More bacon it is," Joan said firmly.
4.
She went to her closet in search of a sweater one evening and was confronted by rows of well-tailored suits and sensible pumps, neatly folded stacks of green surgical scrubs. Joan stood and looked at them for a long moment before pulling each item off its hanger with systematic and restrained violence.
The woman behind the counter at the 79th Street Goodwill was very grateful for such a large donation. "Oh," she said, pulling a charcoal wool skirt suit out of the black trash bag. "Cool, Elie Tahari! I love his work." She cocked a precisely-pencilled eyebrow at Joan, who was wearing a plaid shirt and jeans that were ripped at the knee, tone shifting a little as she said, "Are you dropping these off for someone else?"
"Yes," Joan said, and folded her arms. "My girlfriend's decided to leave the Log Cabin Republicans."
5.
There were no new photographs on the wall of her parents' living room because there were no more straight lines in Joan's life. There were days when Joan was terrified of that—scared by the fact that it was hard to look back over the last two years and see how she'd gotten here from there in large part because there seemed to be no difference between the two points. Some days she found it comforting, how she could mark off the weeks only by the cycle of Mondays through Sundays, not by this prestigious fellowship or that foreign trip or by the addition of a new publication to her CV.
"You should come with us," her mother said one day as they strolled through Central Park. "If we're going to rent out that big house, we might as well make sure it's full, don't you think? And it won't just be us old folks either, the Silversteins' kids are all coming, and Lisa and Jin might just make it their honeymoon trip, you know. It's so hard for her to get time off."
The crisp air of New York in late fall made Joan burrow down into her scarf, made her glad for the latte, but nothing sounded less enticing than Thanksgiving in Puerto Rico with fifteen others.
"I'll think about it," she said, and arranged to start work with a new client four days before they were supposed to fly out.
6.
Joan's tally as a sober companion was: three successes, one relapse, one agreement with the client's family that Joan would leave with double her usual fee in return for her signing a non-disclosure agreement.
"Wait, no clothes ever? It was all"—Su Yin waggled her pinky finger back and forth—"out there all the time?" She wrinkled her nose. "How're you going to put that one on your CV?"
"I think the whole point is that I don't," Joan said as she poured herself another cup of tea.
7.
Ty was persistent. At one time, Joan had found that a charming quality: perseverance had gotten her pretty far in life, after all. Being born into Upper East Side affluence may have helped her get into med school, but it had been no guarantee that she'd graduate, let alone stick it out through her internship. She and Ty had bonded over late nights on call and the cafeteria's blueberry muffins, and she'd liked his smiles and how focused he was on finding a solution for every case. But that persistence was different, Joan realised, when it was trained on you—when you were the problem he was trying to solve.
"If you're doing all this as some kind of penance…" he said.
"I'm doing this because I’m actually good at it," Joan said. "I don’t know why that’s so hard to understand," and in her head, she heard Carrie say all this self-flagellation is getting a bit old, Joan.
8.
She was good at her job, though it was getting harder to decide if her job title was still 'sober companion' or something new entirely. The first morning that she woke up before her alarms, looking up at the cracked plaster of her bedroom ceiling, Joan didn't know if she should laugh, or bury her face underneath her pillow, or go wake Holmes up by throwing something at him.
9.
She didn't delete the photos from her tablet because they were painful, but because they were artifacts of another woman's life; because there were things she wasn't interested in carrying with her any more.
10.
"Did you know," Holmes said, "that the noise made by queen bees is referred to as quacking or tooting?"
Joan eyed the cup of tea that he'd placed in front of her with suspicion. "Where did you get this honey from?"
"They hit a G sharp note," Holmes carried on as if she hadn't spoken. His attention seemed to be almost entirely absorbed by whatever he was typing into his cell phone. "An adult queen pipes for a two-second pulse followed by a series of quarter-second toots."
This was a conversational segue too far for seven thirty in the morning. "Is this the honey you collected from the heating vents?" she pressed. "Because I don't think actually consuming that is a good idea—"
"Nonsense, it's fortifying," Holmes said, over the sound of his phone beeping with a series of messages.
"The only reason I can't quote you statistics on probability of contracting a disease from HVAC honey," Joan said, stirring the oddly murky tea, "is that no one else has ever tried to eat—"
"If you could hurry up and drink, please," Holmes said, "we've got an issue to attend to in Greenwich Village."
"You know," Joan told him, "you could ask politely."
He instantly looked up from his phone and said, without a trace of sarcasm or irony in his voice, "Miss Watson, I would be delighted if you would accompany me to a pressing appointment with Inspector Gregson."
Joan smiled.