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Emery is hoping she will be the last person to arrive at grief group. If she shoves her way in through the double door at nine on the dot and busies herself parking Charlie’s pram in the corner (a thankfully sleeping baby still inside) she will almost certainly avoid the pointless and perpetually irritating small talk that always seems to preface the actual meeting.
She gets her wish, everyone else is already settling down into the circle of chairs by the time she gets there, and she barely has time to fill herself a mug from the urn of horrifyingly weak tea in the corner, before the facilitator is calling the session to order.
She gets her wish, but had entirely failed to take account of her surroundings in the process. Operational security failing in the face of distraction and the interminable weight of putting one foot in front of the other. Sits herself down, it’s a hot summer’s day and the back of her legs stick to the sweating plastic of her seat. She grimaces, looks up. And there, directly across from her, in his usual cargo pants and a t-shirt that’s verging on too tight, is Jack Abbot.
“Hi,” he mouths at her, his lips folded into something that’s half a smile, half a frown. Hair a mess of curls and looking all to at ease for someone who’s just bumped into their colleague (or arch nemesis, depending on the day, and how dramatic Emery is feeling) at what is essentially a therapy session.
This, she thinks, arranging her hands in front of her so she can subtly flip him off, is what she gets for choosing the group that meets closest to the Pitt
*
“I’m sorry.” He tells her, making a beeline to where she’s standing as soon as the session pauses for a biscuit break. He means that he’s sorry for her loss. She’d still been on maternity leave when it happened, so the news (and inevitable wave of meaningless condolences) hasn’t done the rounds of the hospital in the way it normally might have.
Charlie, the traitor, is still asleep in his pram, a tiny stuffed giraffe clutched in his hand, so she has no choice but to turn round and face Abbot. To meet his eyes, and sigh and say, “I wish people would stop telling me that.” It’s perhaps unfair. For the first time in their entire acquaintance, it sounds like Jack Abbot is attempting to be nice to her.
But Abbot is, at his core, a bit of an asshole, so her doesn’t miss a beat. “You’re right, “he says, the smile still locked onto his face like the wind changed and he got stuck that way, “I’m not sorry.”
It takes her half a second to realise that he’s joking, and then another to shoot him a look that could best be described as filthy. Every ounce of vitriol she usually saves for drug reps and Eileen Shamsi’s lectures on raising children to succeed, pointed directly at Jack Abbot like a spotlight.
He has the audacity to laugh.
Abbot has never been able to read the cues that tell all the other ER doctors to get the fuck out of her way. Sees green where everyone else is hitting up against stop signs. She’d never admit it, of course, but deep down she has always enjoyed that about him. Is never quite so professionally fulfilled as when they are arguing about patient care and she gets to be right. Has even gone as far as to re-enact it at her dinner table, putting in a decent impression of Abbot’s voice getting higher and higher in frustration, until she has Kate falling over laughing.
Had Kate falling over laughing.
She feels her eyes sting. Kate is dead. It’s been three months of paperwork and trying to raise a baby who’s growing up without the person who’d wanted him more than anything. And nothing, not even calling Jack Abbot an insensitive prick, feels quite the same any more.
Abbot, irritatingly, doesn’t rise to the bait, just moves his body slightly so he’s blocking her from the view of the rest of the room and offers her a packet of Kleenex.
“First rule of grief group, Walsh,” he tells her gruffly, “always carry tissues.”
She knows he has more than just those in that rucksack of his. Between the two of them, they could probably run a triage centre out of this church hall. The product of two very different military careers and half a lifetime of watching terrible things happen to other people.
She turns away from him to dab at her eyes. God forbid he realises she has feelings.
To her left, Charlie, as if sensing the potential for an awkward moment, starts to squawk in his pram. His little face screwing up in frustration, hands waving as if to register his displeasure.
She reaches for him, but Abbot gets there first, unclipping the straps and pulling her wiggling son against his chest. There is very little, even medical malpractice, that Abbot does without a truly alarming level of confidence.
“Charlie, right?” he asks the baby, like a five month old is going to answer him with any degree of authority. Charlie squeals in response, mashing his face against Abbot’s t-shirt. Emery hopes he’s drooling.
“I have three sisters,” Abbot tells her, when he sees her raised eyebrow. “More nieces and nephews than I know what to do with.”
Every fact she has ever learned about Jack Abbot has been against her will. Stored only for the purposes of questioning the validity of his medical degree, the combined wisdom of the United States Medical Corps, or if the explosion that had cost him his right foot had caused some kind of brain damage. In response to the last one, he’d delighted in showing her the x-ray of the metal plate fixed to his skull, which, for some unknown reason, he had saved in the favourites folder of his phone. She’d almost felt bad about that one, really. Almost.
She watches him hold Charlie and thinks, like the world’s shittiest reflex, that Kate will never get to do that again. Blinks, once then twice. What was once instinct now feels mechanical.
“Tell me it gets easier.”
Abbot tilts his head from side to side. “Here,” he says, instead of giving her an answer he knows she doesn’t want, instead of saying let me know if you ever find out. “Give me your phone.”
It is perhaps testament to how exhausted Emery is feeling, that she hand it over without question. Abbot shifts Charlie slightly, balancing him between his elbow and his chest, so that he can type something into her mobile. On his left hand, the wedding ring he’s worn every single day that she’s known him, glints in the glow of the backlit screen.
“There you go,” he says after a moment, handing it back over, still open on the contacts page. “Now you can call me if you want to talk or, I don’t know, “ he smiles wryly, “yell at me outside of work.”
She blinks, looks down. Under his name, written out in full, and phone number, he’s listed his organisation as ‘PTMC dead wives club’. The sound she lets out in response isn’t quite a laugh, but it’s not a sob either.
He seems to count it as win either way, because he smiles at her.
“Thank you, Jack” she says, after a moment. Clutching at her phone like the lifeline it has just become.
His voice is steady as he responds, her son in his arms and the reassurance that someone has been where she is before. That the hole is deep, but she’s not down it alone. “You’re very welcome, Emery.”