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The first time I saw her she was bleeding out over my OR table. Her lips were blue from near exsanguination, and both her wrists and inner thighs yawned open like the death sentence they were.
The rush of hopelessness took over every OR nurse, scrub technician, and physician inside.
To this day I don't know how she made it off there alive.
When she graduated from the ICU, I would hear her dark screams of pain. But it wasn't the agony of sown skin. But the desire to leave here, unfulfilled, that haunted the clawing shrills from her throat.
When she could walk, she'd do it at night. She'd watch the languishing patients, the recovering ones, and their companions.
I breathed medicine, for the sake of others that needed me, for whom I could actually do anything for at all.
Many times, her figure, broken and sickly, would drift past PT where I would steal equipment for a time, burning off the flashes of blood from my head and the adrenaline that would sometimes refuse to leave my body. But she would never stop. The squeaking of the IV pole's wheels meshing with the sound of the bench weights dangling over my head.
Not until she caught me using in the janitor's closet one late night shift.
I was sure my heart had arrested right then and there, gone tacky as she'd left without a word.
But I'd somehow kept my job. Her silence had snared my attention. I handled her drugs, how could she not care? But of course she didn't.
her name was Julia, I later learned. not when my hands had been deep inside her near-corpse— stitching tendon and skin, but when she had said absolutely nothing.
I never saw her again after she was shipped to the psych ward. Not until the summer I blew my life up. Just a year later.
Her body was different, and I don't say this as the jerk of a man I know I am, but as her former physician. She'd been a step away from death, her food refusal another of her chart notes. The naso-gastric tube she'd violently ripped out another of a messy list.
She had muscle tone and flushed, tan skin. Her hair shone and bounced healthily. Most of all, her eyes no longer sunken in, nose no longer too big for her emaciated face, but plump and proportional to her soft, full features.
And when she saw me, the empty gaze was gone. Only recognition sparked, along with a smile as she bounded my way.
I nearly flinched. Now I wasn't the hot-shot resident that had saved her life. I was a guy with a hoodie in the middle of a scorching summer day. I twitched my sleeves down. They were already down, but I did it anyway. Trying to think of any excuse to run away, but my head was all murky and slow.
She stopped before me, and the crisp smell of citrus hit my nose. I wanted to vomit.
"I never thanked you. Thank you, for saving my sorry life." she said. Even her voice was different. The raspiness of disuse gone from it.
"your life is not sorry." I said without really thinking about it.
She didn't respond right away and that made me nervous. My eyes flicked away and back, trying to think of any excuse to steer past her. She only looked. The park's expensive sprinklers shuttered on, jerkily spraying water into the air, misting pleasantly on his fevered skin as it blew their way.
"No, not anymore. But yours seems to be, now." she said. There wasn't really cruelty, or derision in it. But it stung like acid on my tongue, behind my throat. It might've just been the crystal meth, honestly.
I pushed past her and didn't look back. having no answer to that truth.
I was glad she was alright, something of what I'd done had helped someone, and that was at least a small consolation.
A hand jerked him back. And hot temper rose in him just as he turned.
"I'm getting you home. You look like you'd walk right into the river." her tone matter of fact, already walking the way he had been headed.
He pulled back, picking a fight. picking at anything inside him that would stir. "I helped you, big deal. That was then. This is now, and I don't know you." he didn't, not really.
She only smiled. "You know me intimately. More than anybody in the world, if that helps." she turned her inner wrists to the sky, offering them to him. But the sharp, ridged scar over each of them meant nothing to him. She was another patient and now she wasn't.
Still, he eyed his suturing, and was sorry he couldn't have been more careful— the sharp, alarmed beeping of the OR monitors blared in his ears— come and gone in a second. "Butt out." he tried to push past her, but she got up in his face. Errant strands of her hair blowing over his skin, reddish brown in the sun, straight as a pin and long, so much longer than the jagged haircut she had had back then.
"Please let me sooth my conscious and let me take you home. I'll leave after that." All the easy demeanor gone from her face.
A dog barked in the distance, red flying behind her tall head. A frisbee.
He must've looked like shit because she wasn't gonna let this go. "If you don't leave after, I'm calling the cops." As if he'd do that.
She grinned. "Thank you."
His crappy apartment complex shot up into the air like a spoiled tooth. One upon a time coated with white paint, now black with mold and dilapidated stairs hanging on by a proverbial thread.
"Please leave." he almost-whispered.
"If I said I'll shoot us a pizza, would you take me up on the offer?" she didn't look at him, but the lightness never left her voice.
Honestly, the only thing he'd eaten in the last two days had been a boiled egg he'd forced whole down his throat, and a ramen noodles cup he'd found at the back of his cupboard.
And although he wanted her gone, his stomach simultaneously rumbled and tightened at the thought of a slice of pineapple Domino's. The Tito's restaurant hadn't called for a shift and he was running low on funds. Running low as in dirt-broke.
His current withdrawal symptoms didn't score him much in the way of tips lately, either. "I'm not kidding about the scram part after pizza. I'm serious." he ground out.
"I know." she said, lifting her chin playfully. He sneered and led the way to floor 4, apartment 4-9.
The keys stuck to the tarry keyhole, and the door stuttered over the entrance linoleum. His shoulder pushing it all the way open. It smelled like cigarettes and booze, but at least the window door was open.
"Make yourself at home." he didn't look at her, but at his couch. The old thing he'd dug out of the pile of eviction-crap from the duplex around the corner.
He slid a hand over the dingy coffee table to clear out the discarded Taco Bell and McDonald's, but he was sure she'd already seen the needles.
"Is it easier, to get the drugs as a doctor?" she asked plainly.
His jaw worked but he had no real resentment for the question. "Not a doctor anymore." he said. It still sounded weird, all these months later. That'd been his whole life.
"You were a good one." she responded.
He almost snickered. "Your siblings did most of the saving. They'd had to have gotten to you immediately for them to staunch three arteries in time. It's almost like you were in the room with them while you did it." he regretted the words as soon as he'd said them.
But her expression didn't change at all. Not a little bit. "Hhm. Wouldn't you like to know. Didn't it used to bother you? Saving so many lives and knowing nearly none of their stories? That's what I've heard of ER docs, get into the nitty gritty and leave the talk to the poor GP's."
He nearly laughed, it was kind of true. He'd slept so little those days that getting his patients out of the operating room with a pulse had been a win for him.
"Nurses are great, though. I don't know how they put up with me." she said.
He was silent. It didn't sit right, the way she brushed that off. "Just because I saved your life doesn't mean I get a pass to be an asshole to you."
"Why stop?" she asked. completely disregarding his statement.
"Would you want a junkie doctor? I know I sure as hell wouldn't." he said. The morgue, that cold room of his last day as a physician chilled his chest. As it always fucking did. He wanted to punch through his sternum.
"I did." she answered. Right.
"What are you hoping to get at with me? It's not a lay, way less messy people out there for that." he was feeling a bit vindictive at her interest.
She guffawed at that. "Pshh, don't need it. But thanks for offering."
He scowled, "I didn't offer—"
A rap at the door. "Pizza." she declared with a flash of her teeth.
A half-and-half later and a bit of chewing silence, he was mustering the level-headedness to ask her to leave. His limbs felt like they wanted to seize with discomfort, his skin itchy to the point of overstimulation. Silently begging his insides not to make him sick all over his carpet floor.
"Hey—" he started, but he hadn't needed to.
"I'm heading off, give you your place back. But i want to visit. I live on the other side of the park, on campus. There's a no-smoking rule and here there isn't so, see you around." she left then, after pre-inviting herself over and he sat there in a sort of stunned silence for a couple of minutes.
He did end up ruining his mangy carpet even further.