SPN FIC - Random Chances (conclusion)
Okay, here's the rest of it. If you missed it, part 1 is here:
http://ficwriter1966.livejournal.com/8662.html#cutid1
Caution again: somebody dies. I'm not saying who. Either way, get the kleenex ready.
RANDOM CHANCES (part 2)
by Carol Davis
Seattle, Washington
“Mommy,” Tess says.
When that gets no response, because Carol is busy wiping mayonnaise off Kate’s chin with a napkin, Tess trumpets, “MOMMY. That man is STARING at you.”
If people are staring, it’s no damn wonder. People stare at them in restaurants all the time because Tess simply will not fall into line with that “indoor voice” concept. For Tess there are only two possible levels of volume: loud, and ear-splitting. It made both Carol and Doug suspect she was hearing-impaired, but no, there’s nothing wrong with her ears.
“Hush, Tess,” Carol hisses.
“But MOMMY.”
“Tess, be still.”
Kate, bless her, is quietly trailing a French fry through the glop of ketchup and mayonnaise on her plate.
“MOM -“
“HUSH!” Carol barks.
That works. Sullenly Tess begins to stare at her burger and fries, arms clamped across her chest. How it is that she can be well-behaved all day in school and turn into Rosie O’Donnell the moment the dismissal bell rings is a mystery. But at least she’s quiet now. Carol crumples the mayonnaise-smeared napkin into a ball, sets it aside beside the salt and pepper shakers, and slumps a little into the side of the booth she’s sharing with Kate.
“Mommy,” Tess whispers. “He’s still staring.”
“Never mind. Eat your lunch.”
“But it’s rude.”
“I know it’s rude. Eat your lunch.”
Tess’s head swivels a little and she fixes on someone behind Carol a death stare that would do Darth Vader proud.
Neither Carol nor Doug has ever raised a hand to either of the girls and never will - but Carol begins to wonder if a muzzle or maybe a single, small strip of duct tape would be considered child abuse. She realizes she’s sinking further and further into the booth, as if she’s hoping it will swallow her up. Whoever the man behind her is, she hopes he will finish his lunch and get out of here.
Soon.
Anytime in the next five seconds would be perfect.
She picks up her own burger and takes a bite, counting off seconds. What’s going on behind her, she doesn’t know, but at least Tess keeps still. The man must still be back there because Tess is watching. Tess, whose name Carol is going to have legally changed to Pot, because she’s got her nerve calling somebody else rude.
They’re like Jekyll and Hyde, Tess and Kate.
The burger’s good, fresh and juicy. A little of the juice dribbles onto Carol’s chin, and rather than grab a napkin she smudges it off with the knuckle of her index finger.
A shadow falls over their table and Tess’s eyes narrow.
Oh, hell, Carol thinks.
It’s got to be somebody from the hospital, but why anybody from the hospital would stare at her is a mystery. So, all right, the mystery guy wasn’t staring, he was simply trying to decide if she is who she is. Or maybe he was admiring the girls. They are cute.
She shifts her head and looks up.
And up.
Because dear God, this guy is tall.
It’s not somebody from the hospital. It’s…who? She knows him. Somehow. Young. Shaggy brown hair.
He smiles, shyly, and then she knows. Chicago. Barstow. It’s been years - years that evaporate suddenly, like they’ve been caught in time-lapse photography. She wants to say something, but she has half-chewed burger in her mouth and her hands are both full of burger. When she doesn’t say anything - maybe because she doesn’t say anything - Tess announces, “Staring is rude.”
“You’re right,” he says. “I’m sorry.”
Carol gulps down her mouthful. “Sam?”
“Ms. Hathaway.”
“Her name is Mrs. Ross,” Tess snipes.
“I’m sorry. Again.”
Sam’s gaze falls on something behind the booth and Carol shifts around to look. Sam’s brother. She has to grope for a moment for his name, finally comes up with Dean. He’s minding his own business, working on what looks like an enormous slab of blueberry pie. And he’s not hurt, or sick, which is a novelty.
“It’s weird, isn’t it?” Sam says quietly.
“What is?”
“Do you live here now?”
Carol nods. “For a while. Five years. Almost six. And you -?”
“We travel a lot.”
Then he looks at something that doesn’t seem to be in the room, something that saddens him. “We lost our dad a few months ago,” he says after a moment.
“I’m so sorry.”
“You really - we owe you for that night. For both times you helped us.”
He looks so utterly lost that she wants to hug him. He’s got to be in his twenties now, but he’s still very much the boy who came running up to her that evening in Chicago. Either way, hugging isn’t an option; Tess will tell everyone who crosses their path from now until doomsday that her mommy hugged a strange man at the Harbor Diner.
Carol settles for getting up from the booth. At least that way it’s easier to talk to him.
And it’s easier to see that he still wants help.
For Dean. Like before. Like both times before. But Dean is sitting in a booth by the window, eating his pie.
“Sam?” she asks.
“I should let you finish your lunch.”
“Sam,” she says.
The night is warm and a little muggy, and there’s a sluggish breeze blowing. They can see the Space Needle from where they’re standing.
“We went up there,” Sam says. “Couldn’t see much. It was too cloudy.”
He left Dean back at the motel, he said. Told him he needed to get out for a while, get some fresh air. If Dean didn’t like that idea, Sam isn’t saying. He’s quiet, and his gaze keeps drifting around. His shoulders are pulled in like he’s trying to protect himself from something. Maybe he’s just trying to be shorter.
“What happened to your father?” Carol asks, not sure whether that’s too intrusive or not.
“Car accident.” Sam stares at the Space Needle. “It was -“
She can hear Doug again, hear what he said as she and Doug and Mark stood out in the California desert watching ashes scatter in the wind. I hated the bastard…but I loved him. When she looks up at Sam, there are tears rolling down his face. Her eyes well up too, but it’s because she hasn’t thought of Mark in a long time. He’s been dead for four years. The night they found out about Mark, Doug punched a hole in the drywall in their bedroom, then stood out by the water crying for three hours.
Sam stands there in the humid breeze with tears dripping down his face like he’s leaking. “I don’t -“ he says. It takes him a while to put a whole sentence together. “You married the guy you were with in Barstow? The one who made fun of the Impala?”
“I did.”
“Your little girls are beautiful.”
“Thank you.”
And he’s still leaking. “God damn it,” he says after a minute. “God damn it.”
He’s a good foot taller than she is, so he has to lean way down. He holds her head between his hands and kisses her gently, softly on the mouth. When he backs away he doesn’t seem to be embarrassed or ashamed or apologetic. He simply swipes the tears off his face with the back of his hand and sniffles.
Then the dam overflows and tears begin to cascade down his face.
She sits with him on the ground and wraps her arms around him and lets him sob against her shoulder. His fingers knot into her shirt so tightly the wrinkles will never come out.
Chicago, Illinois
She is sixty years old.
This day. Today. Today is her birthday, and she is sixty. There are cards, and a cake, and balloons. Hugging, and smiles.
She looks around the ER and it comes to her that no one she worked with in the beginning is still here. They have all gone.
She is sixty years old, and Doug has been dead for two years.
It seems like a miracle, sometimes, that she’s made it this far and has nothing to complain about health-wise other than a bum knee that shifts out of place sometimes if she puts weight on it too quickly and aches when it rains. She feels fine, and could go on working for - what? Another ten years? Twenty? Idly shaking her head, she walks down the corridor, glancing right and left into the treatment rooms, taking stock of who’s in there and how they’re doing. After so many bad weeks the ER is quiet tonight.
The world has gone crazy, she thinks. Sometimes she thinks it started on 9/11. Or maybe after the assassination.
Maybe it was crazy to begin with and she was too young to notice.
A hand rests on her shoulder and she turns to see Tess smiling at her. Most of the hugs today have been from Tess, and that’s fine. After a lot of fractious years she and Tess are close, and it means the world to her that Tess came here to work when she could have chosen any of a dozen other hospitals, places that pay more, aren’t as strapped for equipment and supplies.
There was no way either of them could stay in Seattle. Tess had so many choices. Carol, only one.
“Love you,” Tess says.
“You too.”
“Did Katie call?”
“Not yet.”
Tess’s eyes roll and she grunts her displeasure. Carol shakes her head, shakes off the fleeting moment of disappointment. Kate, the quiet one, has her own life. Out of the corner of her eye she sees a lab coat moving toward them. It’s Dominic, slowing down enough to wink at Tess as he passes. “Heads up,” he says over his shoulder when he’s two steps past. “There was some kind of explosion. Took down two buildings. We’ve got multiple traumas coming in.”
So much for the peace and quiet. But that’s what they’re here for. She’s got one more week of this before the fog of retirement rolls in.
Retire and do what? She asked herself that before she chose the date, and asks it again now. She doesn’t want to travel alone, has no one to travel with. She doesn’t paint, or write, and reading makes her restless. She doesn’t garden.
“Call Gary Musso,” Tess says, as if she’s read Carol’s mind. “That job’s yours. Say yes.”
Job. In a private clinic.
About as exciting as moving to Coral Gables to play golf.
She doesn’t know how to play golf and can’t imagine trying to learn. All right, there’s one more physical problem: her hand/eye coordination stinks.
“Mom,” Tess says.
Carol gestures her off. “I’ll think about it.”
Ben at the desk flips on the TV and they move to look at it. There’s no footage of the explosion itself (but there will be later on, Carol guesses; there’s always someone around with a camera, and it doesn’t take them long to find a way to sell what they shot) but there are reporters and news vans clustered as close to the scene as the fire department and the cops will let them drift. The smoke must be rising three hundred feet and the flames are so intense she can almost feel heat roiling out of the TV. The blonde reporter is blabbering something about the blast being felt a mile away.
Come to think of it, there was a shudder maybe twenty minutes ago.
County doesn’t have a good burn unit, never really did, so the bad burn victims will go elsewhere. County will get the ones who were hit by debris or got startled into piling their car into something. Carol glances at Tess, who’s putting her game face on.
Kate is pregnant; in five months she’ll make Carol a grandmother. Tess, for her part, says no. Can’t do it. Not the way the world is. Carol tries to tell her that the world has always been good, and has always been bad; it’s a question of how you look at it, how you see the glass, half full or half empty. They had a home, had a life, had Doug in Seattle. Had the water close by, went sailing, had Christmas, had birthdays. They argued. Doug moved out, that one time, for almost a month. Tess moved out and spent a year wandering around Europe. Moved back after Doug’s first heart attack and was with him when he died.
Now they’re here, and County is what it always was. The faces change, but County stays the same.
She and Tess are in the ambulance bay when the first victims roll in. A woman with head trauma, a gray-haired man with a chunk of plate glass the size of a dinner plate embedded in his chest. They’re whisked inside, and Carol can see the sliding doors open and close out of the corner of her eye. She turns back away from the doors as a third stretcher is rolled up.
And her heart shatters.
There’s no doubt it’s him. His face is swollen and discolored, his eyes are shut. The mop of hair has thinned out over the years and there are scars she doesn’t recognize, one in a place that says he came within a breath of losing his left eye.
Something, something, has brought him back to her again when he needs help. That has never stopped being weird, but it is what it is.
The EMTs babble out his condition and she can only half-listen.
They’re inside, in the treatment room, when he opens his eyes. They won’t open much because of the swelling, but he’s lucid and he knows her the moment his gaze falls on her. He smiles a little, just a little, and wistfully. He’s not surprised any more than she is. “It’s all right, Sam,” she tells him. “It’ll be all right.”
And how much of a lie is that? His clothes are drenched with blood.
She has no idea why he’s in Chicago. She never has known why he is where he is. That night in Seattle he told her his last name, and that’s almost all she knows. She half-listens to Dominic issuing instructions and feels people moving around her, through her, almost, while she holds Sam’s gaze and clasps his hand in her own. His vitals are terrible and it’s a wonder he’s conscious. Why were you there? she wants to ask him. What did you do? But she doesn’t say anything. There’s really nothing to say. His fingers tighten around hers and it’s a wonder he can do that.
“Do you know him? Carol?” Dominic asks.
“Sam,” she murmurs.
One of the nurses - Libby? Is that her name? - says, “He doesn’t have any I.D. Do you know him, Carol?”
“Sam.”
They let that go by. There’ll be time later for that. Or not.
Pain rocks him then and he squeezes his eyes shut over a moan that seems to go on for days. He has to force his eyes back open. He’s gasping. Tension pneumo, someone says; his right lung is down and he’s not getting enough air. But he can focus, can make himself focus. His eyes lock on hers, and again, as always, since the first time, it’s not himself he wants help for. His eyes plead with her, beg her for the right answer, the one that will let him rest.
Dean?
She would stay here, wants to stay here, but he needs to know. She has to let go of his hand, go into the hallway, look into the treatment rooms. She has to ask at the desk, ask Ben to call, call again, keep asking.
When she finally has the answer she goes back to Sam. Her touch makes him open his eyes. She smiles at him, and nods.
That’s good enough.
It has to be good enough.
When they take him away she cannot follow. There is no strength left in her. Out in the hallway she sags against the wall and it’s a wonder she doesn’t slide down it into a heap on the floor. Tess finds her there and grabs a chair from nearby, holding onto her as she fumbles into its seat. Carol’s head drops into her hands and she sits there shuddering, half-hearing Tess say, “Mom? Mommy?”
She opens her eyes after what seems like forever. Tess is there. And so is a boy with brown hair and urgent eyes. He’s wearing jeans and sneakers and a gray t-shirt, all of which are dirty. There’s dirt in his hair and streaked on his skin.
He looks at her with Sam’s eyes. Where he came from, she has no idea.
“Ma’am?” he says.
“Sam?” she mumbles.
He shakes his head. He’s trying very hard to hold himself together. “My name is John.”
She smiles. A little. She knows how phony it looks.
“My dad? And my uncle?” he asks.
All she can do is sob.
http://ficwriter1966.livejournal.com/8662.html#cutid1
Caution again: somebody dies. I'm not saying who. Either way, get the kleenex ready.
RANDOM CHANCES (part 2)
by Carol Davis
Seattle, Washington
“Mommy,” Tess says.
When that gets no response, because Carol is busy wiping mayonnaise off Kate’s chin with a napkin, Tess trumpets, “MOMMY. That man is STARING at you.”
If people are staring, it’s no damn wonder. People stare at them in restaurants all the time because Tess simply will not fall into line with that “indoor voice” concept. For Tess there are only two possible levels of volume: loud, and ear-splitting. It made both Carol and Doug suspect she was hearing-impaired, but no, there’s nothing wrong with her ears.
“Hush, Tess,” Carol hisses.
“But MOMMY.”
“Tess, be still.”
Kate, bless her, is quietly trailing a French fry through the glop of ketchup and mayonnaise on her plate.
“MOM -“
“HUSH!” Carol barks.
That works. Sullenly Tess begins to stare at her burger and fries, arms clamped across her chest. How it is that she can be well-behaved all day in school and turn into Rosie O’Donnell the moment the dismissal bell rings is a mystery. But at least she’s quiet now. Carol crumples the mayonnaise-smeared napkin into a ball, sets it aside beside the salt and pepper shakers, and slumps a little into the side of the booth she’s sharing with Kate.
“Mommy,” Tess whispers. “He’s still staring.”
“Never mind. Eat your lunch.”
“But it’s rude.”
“I know it’s rude. Eat your lunch.”
Tess’s head swivels a little and she fixes on someone behind Carol a death stare that would do Darth Vader proud.
Neither Carol nor Doug has ever raised a hand to either of the girls and never will - but Carol begins to wonder if a muzzle or maybe a single, small strip of duct tape would be considered child abuse. She realizes she’s sinking further and further into the booth, as if she’s hoping it will swallow her up. Whoever the man behind her is, she hopes he will finish his lunch and get out of here.
Soon.
Anytime in the next five seconds would be perfect.
She picks up her own burger and takes a bite, counting off seconds. What’s going on behind her, she doesn’t know, but at least Tess keeps still. The man must still be back there because Tess is watching. Tess, whose name Carol is going to have legally changed to Pot, because she’s got her nerve calling somebody else rude.
They’re like Jekyll and Hyde, Tess and Kate.
The burger’s good, fresh and juicy. A little of the juice dribbles onto Carol’s chin, and rather than grab a napkin she smudges it off with the knuckle of her index finger.
A shadow falls over their table and Tess’s eyes narrow.
Oh, hell, Carol thinks.
It’s got to be somebody from the hospital, but why anybody from the hospital would stare at her is a mystery. So, all right, the mystery guy wasn’t staring, he was simply trying to decide if she is who she is. Or maybe he was admiring the girls. They are cute.
She shifts her head and looks up.
And up.
Because dear God, this guy is tall.
It’s not somebody from the hospital. It’s…who? She knows him. Somehow. Young. Shaggy brown hair.
He smiles, shyly, and then she knows. Chicago. Barstow. It’s been years - years that evaporate suddenly, like they’ve been caught in time-lapse photography. She wants to say something, but she has half-chewed burger in her mouth and her hands are both full of burger. When she doesn’t say anything - maybe because she doesn’t say anything - Tess announces, “Staring is rude.”
“You’re right,” he says. “I’m sorry.”
Carol gulps down her mouthful. “Sam?”
“Ms. Hathaway.”
“Her name is Mrs. Ross,” Tess snipes.
“I’m sorry. Again.”
Sam’s gaze falls on something behind the booth and Carol shifts around to look. Sam’s brother. She has to grope for a moment for his name, finally comes up with Dean. He’s minding his own business, working on what looks like an enormous slab of blueberry pie. And he’s not hurt, or sick, which is a novelty.
“It’s weird, isn’t it?” Sam says quietly.
“What is?”
“Do you live here now?”
Carol nods. “For a while. Five years. Almost six. And you -?”
“We travel a lot.”
Then he looks at something that doesn’t seem to be in the room, something that saddens him. “We lost our dad a few months ago,” he says after a moment.
“I’m so sorry.”
“You really - we owe you for that night. For both times you helped us.”
He looks so utterly lost that she wants to hug him. He’s got to be in his twenties now, but he’s still very much the boy who came running up to her that evening in Chicago. Either way, hugging isn’t an option; Tess will tell everyone who crosses their path from now until doomsday that her mommy hugged a strange man at the Harbor Diner.
Carol settles for getting up from the booth. At least that way it’s easier to talk to him.
And it’s easier to see that he still wants help.
For Dean. Like before. Like both times before. But Dean is sitting in a booth by the window, eating his pie.
“Sam?” she asks.
“I should let you finish your lunch.”
“Sam,” she says.
The night is warm and a little muggy, and there’s a sluggish breeze blowing. They can see the Space Needle from where they’re standing.
“We went up there,” Sam says. “Couldn’t see much. It was too cloudy.”
He left Dean back at the motel, he said. Told him he needed to get out for a while, get some fresh air. If Dean didn’t like that idea, Sam isn’t saying. He’s quiet, and his gaze keeps drifting around. His shoulders are pulled in like he’s trying to protect himself from something. Maybe he’s just trying to be shorter.
“What happened to your father?” Carol asks, not sure whether that’s too intrusive or not.
“Car accident.” Sam stares at the Space Needle. “It was -“
She can hear Doug again, hear what he said as she and Doug and Mark stood out in the California desert watching ashes scatter in the wind. I hated the bastard…but I loved him. When she looks up at Sam, there are tears rolling down his face. Her eyes well up too, but it’s because she hasn’t thought of Mark in a long time. He’s been dead for four years. The night they found out about Mark, Doug punched a hole in the drywall in their bedroom, then stood out by the water crying for three hours.
Sam stands there in the humid breeze with tears dripping down his face like he’s leaking. “I don’t -“ he says. It takes him a while to put a whole sentence together. “You married the guy you were with in Barstow? The one who made fun of the Impala?”
“I did.”
“Your little girls are beautiful.”
“Thank you.”
And he’s still leaking. “God damn it,” he says after a minute. “God damn it.”
He’s a good foot taller than she is, so he has to lean way down. He holds her head between his hands and kisses her gently, softly on the mouth. When he backs away he doesn’t seem to be embarrassed or ashamed or apologetic. He simply swipes the tears off his face with the back of his hand and sniffles.
Then the dam overflows and tears begin to cascade down his face.
She sits with him on the ground and wraps her arms around him and lets him sob against her shoulder. His fingers knot into her shirt so tightly the wrinkles will never come out.
Chicago, Illinois
She is sixty years old.
This day. Today. Today is her birthday, and she is sixty. There are cards, and a cake, and balloons. Hugging, and smiles.
She looks around the ER and it comes to her that no one she worked with in the beginning is still here. They have all gone.
She is sixty years old, and Doug has been dead for two years.
It seems like a miracle, sometimes, that she’s made it this far and has nothing to complain about health-wise other than a bum knee that shifts out of place sometimes if she puts weight on it too quickly and aches when it rains. She feels fine, and could go on working for - what? Another ten years? Twenty? Idly shaking her head, she walks down the corridor, glancing right and left into the treatment rooms, taking stock of who’s in there and how they’re doing. After so many bad weeks the ER is quiet tonight.
The world has gone crazy, she thinks. Sometimes she thinks it started on 9/11. Or maybe after the assassination.
Maybe it was crazy to begin with and she was too young to notice.
A hand rests on her shoulder and she turns to see Tess smiling at her. Most of the hugs today have been from Tess, and that’s fine. After a lot of fractious years she and Tess are close, and it means the world to her that Tess came here to work when she could have chosen any of a dozen other hospitals, places that pay more, aren’t as strapped for equipment and supplies.
There was no way either of them could stay in Seattle. Tess had so many choices. Carol, only one.
“Love you,” Tess says.
“You too.”
“Did Katie call?”
“Not yet.”
Tess’s eyes roll and she grunts her displeasure. Carol shakes her head, shakes off the fleeting moment of disappointment. Kate, the quiet one, has her own life. Out of the corner of her eye she sees a lab coat moving toward them. It’s Dominic, slowing down enough to wink at Tess as he passes. “Heads up,” he says over his shoulder when he’s two steps past. “There was some kind of explosion. Took down two buildings. We’ve got multiple traumas coming in.”
So much for the peace and quiet. But that’s what they’re here for. She’s got one more week of this before the fog of retirement rolls in.
Retire and do what? She asked herself that before she chose the date, and asks it again now. She doesn’t want to travel alone, has no one to travel with. She doesn’t paint, or write, and reading makes her restless. She doesn’t garden.
“Call Gary Musso,” Tess says, as if she’s read Carol’s mind. “That job’s yours. Say yes.”
Job. In a private clinic.
About as exciting as moving to Coral Gables to play golf.
She doesn’t know how to play golf and can’t imagine trying to learn. All right, there’s one more physical problem: her hand/eye coordination stinks.
“Mom,” Tess says.
Carol gestures her off. “I’ll think about it.”
Ben at the desk flips on the TV and they move to look at it. There’s no footage of the explosion itself (but there will be later on, Carol guesses; there’s always someone around with a camera, and it doesn’t take them long to find a way to sell what they shot) but there are reporters and news vans clustered as close to the scene as the fire department and the cops will let them drift. The smoke must be rising three hundred feet and the flames are so intense she can almost feel heat roiling out of the TV. The blonde reporter is blabbering something about the blast being felt a mile away.
Come to think of it, there was a shudder maybe twenty minutes ago.
County doesn’t have a good burn unit, never really did, so the bad burn victims will go elsewhere. County will get the ones who were hit by debris or got startled into piling their car into something. Carol glances at Tess, who’s putting her game face on.
Kate is pregnant; in five months she’ll make Carol a grandmother. Tess, for her part, says no. Can’t do it. Not the way the world is. Carol tries to tell her that the world has always been good, and has always been bad; it’s a question of how you look at it, how you see the glass, half full or half empty. They had a home, had a life, had Doug in Seattle. Had the water close by, went sailing, had Christmas, had birthdays. They argued. Doug moved out, that one time, for almost a month. Tess moved out and spent a year wandering around Europe. Moved back after Doug’s first heart attack and was with him when he died.
Now they’re here, and County is what it always was. The faces change, but County stays the same.
She and Tess are in the ambulance bay when the first victims roll in. A woman with head trauma, a gray-haired man with a chunk of plate glass the size of a dinner plate embedded in his chest. They’re whisked inside, and Carol can see the sliding doors open and close out of the corner of her eye. She turns back away from the doors as a third stretcher is rolled up.
And her heart shatters.
There’s no doubt it’s him. His face is swollen and discolored, his eyes are shut. The mop of hair has thinned out over the years and there are scars she doesn’t recognize, one in a place that says he came within a breath of losing his left eye.
Something, something, has brought him back to her again when he needs help. That has never stopped being weird, but it is what it is.
The EMTs babble out his condition and she can only half-listen.
They’re inside, in the treatment room, when he opens his eyes. They won’t open much because of the swelling, but he’s lucid and he knows her the moment his gaze falls on her. He smiles a little, just a little, and wistfully. He’s not surprised any more than she is. “It’s all right, Sam,” she tells him. “It’ll be all right.”
And how much of a lie is that? His clothes are drenched with blood.
She has no idea why he’s in Chicago. She never has known why he is where he is. That night in Seattle he told her his last name, and that’s almost all she knows. She half-listens to Dominic issuing instructions and feels people moving around her, through her, almost, while she holds Sam’s gaze and clasps his hand in her own. His vitals are terrible and it’s a wonder he’s conscious. Why were you there? she wants to ask him. What did you do? But she doesn’t say anything. There’s really nothing to say. His fingers tighten around hers and it’s a wonder he can do that.
“Do you know him? Carol?” Dominic asks.
“Sam,” she murmurs.
One of the nurses - Libby? Is that her name? - says, “He doesn’t have any I.D. Do you know him, Carol?”
“Sam.”
They let that go by. There’ll be time later for that. Or not.
Pain rocks him then and he squeezes his eyes shut over a moan that seems to go on for days. He has to force his eyes back open. He’s gasping. Tension pneumo, someone says; his right lung is down and he’s not getting enough air. But he can focus, can make himself focus. His eyes lock on hers, and again, as always, since the first time, it’s not himself he wants help for. His eyes plead with her, beg her for the right answer, the one that will let him rest.
Dean?
She would stay here, wants to stay here, but he needs to know. She has to let go of his hand, go into the hallway, look into the treatment rooms. She has to ask at the desk, ask Ben to call, call again, keep asking.
When she finally has the answer she goes back to Sam. Her touch makes him open his eyes. She smiles at him, and nods.
That’s good enough.
It has to be good enough.
When they take him away she cannot follow. There is no strength left in her. Out in the hallway she sags against the wall and it’s a wonder she doesn’t slide down it into a heap on the floor. Tess finds her there and grabs a chair from nearby, holding onto her as she fumbles into its seat. Carol’s head drops into her hands and she sits there shuddering, half-hearing Tess say, “Mom? Mommy?”
She opens her eyes after what seems like forever. Tess is there. And so is a boy with brown hair and urgent eyes. He’s wearing jeans and sneakers and a gray t-shirt, all of which are dirty. There’s dirt in his hair and streaked on his skin.
He looks at her with Sam’s eyes. Where he came from, she has no idea.
“Ma’am?” he says.
“Sam?” she mumbles.
He shakes his head. He’s trying very hard to hold himself together. “My name is John.”
She smiles. A little. She knows how phony it looks.
“My dad? And my uncle?” he asks.
All she can do is sob.