Chapter Text
"your homecoming will be my homecoming-
my selves go with you,only i remain;
a shadow phantom effigy or seeming
(an almost someone always who's noone)
a noone who,till their dying and your returning,
spends the forever of his loneliness
dreaming their eyes have opened to your morning
feeling their stars have risen through your skies:
so,in how merciful love's own name,linger
no more than selves i can quite endure
the absence of that moment when a stranger
takes in his arms my very life who's your
-when all fears hopes beliefs doubts disappear.
Everywhere and joy's perfect wholeness we're."
No. 10 of "Love and its Mysteries," by e.e. cummings
Her remission, they say, is a medical miracle. They only call it remission because, with no way of knowing the precise cause of her rather obscure illness, there’s no way to tell when it is fully gone either. But no one cared about that small detail. Certainly not her nurses, who began to greet Mary with more genuine smiles than she had ever seen on her faces, and not the doctors. Good lord, certainly not the doctors.
Were James here (the reminder that he isn't here sobers her mood just slightly) she was sure he would have gone full-scowl ages ago, standing by her bedside with his arms crossed tight and glowering like he could evaporate everyone who walked in with a stare alone. Part of her—and who was she kidding? Every part of her was in agreement here—wished desperately for him to be in the hospital with her now, doing just that. He would glare at the doctors who came to shake her hand, the medical students who came to stare in awe…and she would tell him not to, and he would say, “If you insist,” with a voice that betrayed none of the mischief in his eyes—
“Mrs. Shepherd.”
Whatever man spoke from behind the door did not wait for her to call them in. He swings open the door with a look of ease about him, a familiarity in the gesture that Mary does not fully comprehend until she sees the clearance of the badge he’s wearing around his neck.
“Doctor,” she greets. With a bolt of clarity that keeps coming to her easier with each day of recovery, her memory snaps back to the moment he greeted her first. “And it’s Sunderland.”
The man, through his thick-rimmed glasses, blinks in surprise. He glances down at his clipboard (undoubtedly with her papers) and then back up, and down again. The way he cocks his head reminds her of the junco birds James started up a bird feeder for back home.
(She wonders, vaguely, if he’s kept it up in the months since she has been in hospital. The last time she had been well enough to go home for leave was over a year ago now, and James still had to take nearly a month off from work to be her full-time caregiver.)
“I was told you kept your maiden name,” the doctor says haltingly.
His social clumsiness reminds her of James, not that Mary would ever tell a stranger such things. All she says to the man now is, “I chose to keep them both, doctor. My name is Mary Shepherd-Sunderland.”
What a mouthful , a younger doctor once said in her presence, when Mary insisted they say both of her family names. Mrs. Shepherd-Sunderland. Yes, she thought to herself, that’s who I am . Even without James by her side so often as he was in the early days of her sickness, she couldn’t bring herself to be spiteful about it. Was she not the one who told him so many times to go away? Of course, he would keep his distance—James was too kind by half, too easily wounded. She loved that about him and she went and abused that knowledge in her fits of anger.
"Mrs. Shepherd-Sunderland.”
Reality comes back with a snap: the hum of the hospital lights, the smell of antisceptic she thought she would have gone nose blind to ages ago, the doctor blinking down at her with a perpetually stunned stare.
It takes very little time for Mary to understand what she must have looked like, then, mind wandering as it was. Emaciated, sickly despite being in full remission, with her thinning hair, pale skin…. She didn’t look like someone in a miraculous recovery, which frustrated her to no end because of the exact expression the doctor wore now.
"I'm fine, Doctor,” she insists. “I’m sorry. I was letting my mind wander.”
“Very well,” he says. He tries to speak and act and appear as pleasant as possible, Mary notices, but for all the effort he makes everything about him begins to come off and completely unpleasant. Of all the doctors she’s met, this man is perhaps her least favorite. “I’ve been wanting to meet you for a very long time.”
“How forward of you to say,” Mary says quickly, with a biting edge in her tone.
The doctor’s eyes go wide as saucers as he goes to hold up his hands. He looks like the people in the movies when they get caught by the police— it’s not me, officer! I’m not the one who did it? But what did the doctor do? There’s a niggling feeling in the back of Mary’s head insisting that yes, he did something, though she can’t pinpoint exactly what.
“I am so sorry, Mrs. Shepherd—” she sees him catch himself again for forgetting her name “—Mrs. Shepherd Sunderland, I think I’ve been going about this all wrong. I was so eager to see you I didn’t give you a proper explanation for my presence.”
A beat passes, then two, and three. Mary had never wished more than now that James would be here with her. He’d give the doctor one of his looks and say, get on with it, then , and that would be that. None of this anxious waiting.
The doctor clears his throat and pushes up his glasses. It looks like a nervous gesture, but Mary can’t say anything about it for sure. She’s only observed James fiddling with his glasses like that before now, in that way, he only does it when the two of them are together at home. She doesn’t understand why he’s so embarrassed about needing to wear reading glasses, but that way he cradles the corner of it when he pushes them up, just like that—it’s almost a mirror image of the doctor now, a sort of deja vu that makes Mary both very homesick and very confused at the same time.
“I'm Dr. Jay Howell. The experimental treatment you received—”
Her heart just about stops. “James?”
What kind of sick coincidence is this? she asks herself. Karma, perhaps, for the way she’s mistreated him before. It would be sick and twisted, for sure, and very much deserved for what she said.
This time, the doctor laughs. “No, Jay—J-A-Y—like the bird.”
“Oh.” Embarrassment makes Mary’s face turn a hot and ugly red, and pressing the back of her hand to her face does nothing to cool it down.
“It happens quite often,” Dr. Howell tries to say kindly. For a mortifying moment, he looks like he is about to step forward and try to offer Mary some words of encouragement. Don’t be embarrassed, or, your face looks fine, it’s alright.
The thought makes her sick to her stomach and—very wisely—the doctor retracts his hand and takes a very professional stance by the foot of her bed. He clears his throat yet again. Another nervous habit, she remarks, this one peculiar to him and him alone. James always hated the thought of drawing any attention at all to himself, let alone intentionally doing so.
Wondering when she began this mental game of check and compare, Mary notes the difference and takes a point away for the doctor’s uncanny similarity to her husband. Three points for his glasses, his name, and his lack of social grace, minus one point for his odd habit of pretending to clear his throat to gather someone’s attention before speaking. Still quite safely in the realm of coincidence.
“As I was saying,” Dr. Howell says, “I was the head of the research team that created the experimental treatment you completed two weeks ago.”
The miracle treatment that somehow worked. How could Mary forget? The nurses had been so hopeful when they said it was approved for her potential treatment, and Mary had been so tired, but this one had so few side effects, so much potential, she thought, why not? Worst case, she dies as she’s already doomed. The best case, which she did not let herself think on long, is what is happening to her now.
“The one that it appears led to your incredibly quick remission now.”
Not humble, Mary thinks, taking a point away in her mental tally.
“I wanted to see you with my own eyes,” he says quietly, “At least once, before they let you go. Your recovery is unbelievable—unprecedented, really. The treatment you took was still in clinical trials, and with so few people ever having your illness, it was difficult to find an actual variable to measure its efficacy against. All we could do was monitor its side effects on the average individual and those in immunocompromised states similar to yours.”
Mary didn’t know what to say—the man’s monologue had left her no viable response, and the doctor was smiling at her as if he knew it, too.
“Do you know why I chose to dedicate my research towards finding a cure for your disease?” he asked unprompted.
It took Mary some time to formulate a response; the arrogance she’d seen before had convinced her the question was nothing more than a rhetorical transition into his next speech, and by the time she realized he wanted a genuine response, so much time had passed that she could merely shake her head.
“It was my wife,” he said. A misty, far-off look crept into his eyes from some distant memory, and the doctor looked away to some indeterminate point beyond the hospital window as he spoke now. “We were just a handful of years older than you and your husband—our first child was close to turning three, and we had recently decided to try for another. She fell ill, and I do not think I need to tell you what illness she had. And—” he laughed, though it was a shaky, breathless thing“—if you believe the treatments we have available for your disease now are archaic and needlessly painful, you should have seen the state of medicine in ‘77. I threw myself into the efforts to find a cure, and she similarly volunteered herself at every opportunity for us to discover what worked or not.”
The doctor blinked slowly, without looking away from the window. “She died, of course. Miserably. Her final moments were agony, and as much as I miss her every moment… in the days following her death, I could only feel relief that she was now in some distant, painless place where her sickness could not plague her any longer. I threw myself into my work after that, somehow managed to juggle my self-imposed schedule with raising our daughter on my own…I was revolted by the suffering I had seen my wife endure, and the painful death she had to face.
“I’m rambling, now,” he said amicably, with a glance and a smile Mary’s way. “Sorry. Her death had thrown me into an early mid-life crisis, I think. I was re-evaluating my faith, my very beliefs…. What I mean to say is perhaps one of the most concrete things to come out of her death was my motivation to do something with the medical education I had. To find a treatment. A cure, if possible one day, but at the very least any kind of workable treatment to ease the suffering people like her and you had to endure. As many different products as I have created and tested in my research, the fact remains that your illness is of an unpredictable kind. What saves one patient’s life in clinical trials does nothing for the next. Many times it feels—horribly—like nothing more than chemical gambling.
“I know you probably don’t want to hear this, having such a miraculous recovery now. I don’t mean to imply your remission is worthless, not at all—the opposite, even. What’s important here, I suppose, is…”
He turned toward her now, eyes wide and earnest and shining with far too much emotion appropriate for someone talking to a veritable stranger, and to Mary’s surprise, she found herself choking up in turn.
“I am so grateful to have the chance to speak with you now,” Dr. Howell said earnestly. “That one of our treatments has worked this well, has provided such relief—you have no idea how much hope your resilience gives me. It’s when I meet people like you I am reminded of my wife, of why I’ve dedicated nearly two decades now to researching any potential cure. Thank you, Mrs. Shepherd-Sunderland. A million times over. You give me hope.”
He took her hands together in both of his own and for a moment Mary was struck dumb by the gravity of the situation. Clarity was knocking against the hardened stuff of hatred and anger in her soul, dismantling dozens of the mistaken beliefs she had fallen into during her descent into illness. How self-absorbed had she been all this time, fixated on nothing but what she lost, what she was going to lose? And how lovely it is now, she thought to herself, to see this doctor herself, to see the genuine goodness in his shining smile. How he managed to turn such a dire situation as his wife’s death into the source of seemingly endless kindness and ambition was beyond Mary. Lord knew she had fallen far in the months following her diagnosis.
“Thank you,” she said quietly, unable to bring herself to say much else. “The world needs more people like you, Doctor.”
The doctor squeezed her papery hands one more time with a smile before leaving the room and closing the door behind him.
My dearest Laura, she began. I have wonderful news…
I’m going home. The doctors said I appear to be making a near-complete recovery. There’s still the risk of my symptoms relapsing, of course, but compared to how much worse it had been getting, I feel like I’m on top of the world! I hope you’ll forgive me for leaving all this in a letter instead of telling you myself. As eager as I am to leave this place, if I had to say goodbye to you myself, I don’t think I could find the will to leave.
Two days ago, the doctors made their arrangements and decided that James and his father were going to pick me up in three days. Three days is such a short time, and two of them have already passed! How can I possibly be prepared? At night, the excitement is so much that I can’t even sleep.
I’ll be staying in Ashfield for a time so I can keep close to a larger hospital for checkups. It’s no Silent Hill there, but James’s old apartment has its charms All of it is very much like him—cozy and quiet, a very comfortable place. You should come to visit us there.
And Laura, about James…
I know you hate him because you think he isn’t nice to me, but please give him a chance. It’s true he may be a little surly sometimes, and he doesn’t laugh much, but underneath he’s a really sweet person. I think the two of you would get along well if you took the time to try and get to know him.
I love you so much, Laura, more than there are words for. I love you like you are my very own. Happy early birthday—and don’t give the sisters too much trouble! I hope we can arrange something with them so you can visit me soon.
Your friend forever,
Mary
Later occurred to Mary after neatly folding up Laura’s letter that she might also write one for James. The idea was a silly one, given that Mary would see him herself in less than twenty-four hours now, but something about writing Laura’s had been oddly cathartic. The act of writing the words out in ink instead of having to say them released no small amount of Mary’s inhibitions. She didn’t worry much about how her face might’ve looked, or if the bright hospital lights were making the bald spots on her head all the more apparent. There were no one’s eyes that she had to look into, no one’spitying smile she had to bear….
With the guilt that riddled her for the things she said to James, part of Mary worried that she might not be able to look him in the eyes when he came. She owed him an apology, more than that, really, for all the wretched things she said—she knew that fact in her bones, and yet when she thought of looking him in the eyes to say so… something in her just froze. James wasn’t like most people, in that you could judge his mood by a multitude of things—posture and expression and behavior and such. He always carried a stillness about him, a solemnity and quietness that brought along its unique charm. The difficulty became that because of that ever-present stillness, a false calm in his loose hands, and straight posture, it became very difficult to gauge his mood at any point in time.
Perhaps to balance it out, Mary supposed to herself, that’s why he showed so much of his emotion in his eyes. There were times when everything he needed to say shone through them so that Mary felt like she could carry on an entire conversation with him without having to say a word. The intrigue of trying to figure out exactly who James Sunderland is had kept Mary hooked when they first started going out, and each discovery she made into his character—like the fact he was deathly afraid of spiders and cried easily when watching tragic romantic movies—only had her sinking deeper into her affection.
She told him once his eyes were her most favorite thing about him, that he could singlehandedly prove that old proverb right, that eyes were a window to the soul. He was living proof of it.
…and why was she thinking of this now? Mary’s thoughts had wandered restlessly, and though she remembered her earlier thoughts being colored by the sensation of her profound guilt, now there was a levity to her memory that didn’texist before.
The thought of writing a letter to give James when she saw him suddenly seemed childish. This wasn’t a stranger she was going to be seeing, nor a little girl Mary knew should not have to see the physical deterioration she had gone through. It was James, James who she loved, who she married, who she was finally going to see again after so many terrible weeks of waiting. It didn’t matter whether they stayed in Ashfield with his father or if they relocated her to another hospital; merely seeing him again was homecoming in every sense of the word.