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There’s a brand new portrait hanging in the entryway of Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center.
If someone were to take the time to inspect it properly rather than giving it the pained gloss-over such memorials are usually spared, what they’d find is a man, roughly age fifty-nine, smiling so fully that the sharp point of his canines dig into his lower lip. It’s a genuine, eye-crinkling grin, the same one he always gave when someone told a good joke--or, perhaps even more frequently, when someone told a very bad one.
Were they so inclined to glance lower, they would see a Magen David strung around his neck, the pendant centered perfectly on the outside of his clothing. There’s a ring looped alongside it on the chain, a simple band that glares slightly in the camera flash. An onlooker probably wouldn’t pick up on the oddity of either of these things, but those who had the privilege of knowing the man in question, however, might lay eyes upon them and find them incongruent with the mental image they have of him inside their heads.
And if the observer had the wherewithal to finish their perusal, if they could set aside the suffering that brought them into the emergency room in the first place long enough to read the inscription at its base, they would arrive at last to its dedication: the Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch etched in silver plating, punctuated by the 2002–2037 representing all of the years he spent on the hospital floor saving lives, no matter how great the personal cost.
That stranger might then look upon his visage and experience a strange sense of comfort, or perhaps a deeply profound sadness--the same wide spectrum of emotions that the subject inspired in life.
Jack Abbot just feels grief.
Crushing, soul-wrenching, terrible grief; a heavy burden that’s his to bear for the next several hours.
It’ll follow him back to his apartment post-shift just as well, trailing him like a ghost, like a dog sinking its teeth in the back of his neck and refusing to let go, even though he’s already bled out a dozen times over. But at least in the comfort of his own home he can drown his sorrow with an Ambien and the mind-numbing hum of a police scanner. Here, under the fluorescent lights and the weight of a hundred people who expect him to have a perfect handle on his personal baggage, he can’t escape it.
Ignoring the portrait becomes a truly impossible feat when the chief of staff comes up with the brilliant idea of holding an impromptu unveiling ceremony for it, a small little get-together with catering brought in from the sandwich shop down the street. It’s a nice enough gesture, but when eleven o’clock rolls around, so many off-shift nurses and doctors and cleaning staff show that they end up having to order a dozen pizzas for delivery as well. Jack would be willing to bet there’s at least a dozen medical staff group chats buzzing, every participant eager to have their own part in the legend already beginning to form, the one that people will one day look back on and say, I can only hope that many people will show up to mourn me when I’m gone.
And mourn, they do. Hours pass and the halls stay lined with bodies. They reminisce over topics as dichotomous as house parties and REBOAs, and when one group leaves, another comes in shortly after to replace them, like clockwork.
It reminds Jack a bit of Robby’s service, the way the line had serpentined out of the door of the funeral home and spilled onto the sidewalk like fish overflowing from a barrel. Patients, friends, colleagues, ex-flings--a thousand people who knew Robby, but never really knew him. People who had admiration for his deeds in life, but had no real idea how to speak of him outside of them.
(There’d been a few standouts at the funeral, though. Most notably Heather Collins, fresh off a flight from the pacific northwest, her thirteen year old daughter in tow. She’d shared with the room a memory that brought Jack to tears right in the front row of seats, a mundane little snapshot of their time together as a couple, a recollection of how much he loved a good slow dance over an old vinyl record. Another man flew out from New Orleans, a friend from Robby’s residency days. He’d smiled through his own tears, recounting an anecdote about Robby’s grandmother that had the whole place erupting in laughter.
Jack had given his own words, of course. Everyone had expected him to, so he did, even though Robby knew better than anyone how much he hated speaking in public places.
He talked about how most people didn’t know--and how he sure as hell never told Robby--but Robby was the best fucking cook he’d ever met, bar goddamn none. Every dish he ever brought to a potluck was undoubtedly the best thing there. He was the only man Jack had ever known that could make asparagus edible without a pound of fat or sugar.
When it was all said done, he’d managed to fuck up a two-and-a-half minute speech three separate times.
He imagines Robby would have liked that. Knowing he got one over on Jack, even in death.)
But what Jack remembers more than anything about Robby’s funeral is how he felt on the drive home, forlorn and adrift, like he somehow still hadn’t said or done enough.
That same feeling eats at him now. The one that’s refused to let him get a good night’s sleep since that fateful night that Dana had called him and asked, her voice wobbling, Abbot, are you sittin’ down?
It all comes down to a single, harrowing question:
What does he know about Robby?
He knows that he preferred his whiskey neat. That, much like Jack, he couldn’t get to sleep without something making noise in the background. That, quite unlike Jack, he rarely fucked people for more than it took the other person to become attached, or to try and tack a myriad of different personality disorders onto him. He preferred cruisers to sport bikes, french toast to pancakes, and listening to albums the whole way through, in the order the artist intended.
But for all Jack was Robby’s closest friend, his perception of the man is a crudely formed mosaic, pieced together by the bits of information that Robby allowed through. The ones curated to be most palatable. Interrupted by a few jagged pieces, sure, like the moments of vulnerability that came after particularly rough nights, but ultimately about as fabricated as the facade Robby put on for everyone else.
And in the several years preceding his death, Robby had become even more withdrawn. Though it seemed to Jack then that it was less in line with his typical avoidant behavior and more in line with a contentedness previously unheard of in regards to Robby; he’d just seemed…happy. At peace for the first time in all of the years that Jack had known him. So Jack had backed off, allowing him space to continue with whatever was clearly working for him.
Now he really, really wishes he hadn’t.
Because now he’ll never know the significance of the necklace immortalized down the hall. If the ring attached to it had once belonged to one of his grandparents, maybe, or if it had another meaning to him entirely. He’ll never know if Robby died with regrets, if in the end he’d wished he’d had children of his own or gotten married, or if he was eternally grateful that he didn’t. There’s a hundred-thousand questions that will forever go without answers because Jack thought he had more time to learn them. Had mistakenly assumed they would spend their retirement years finally unpacking all of that baggage together, beers in hand, an old fixer-upper waiting to be worked on in Robby’s garage.
He copes with this in his own way by putting his heart and soul into the good fight. By waking up every morning and showing up, even though he really is getting far too old for it. He keeps a gentle-ish approach and a keen eye, running the emergency room like the navy but looking out for his peers and underlings like a shepherd caring for his flock.
Which is exactly what he’s doing when, right in the middle of a piss-poor attempt at charting the case in south twenty, a newcomer catches Jack’s attention.
The person does a good job of making himself look inconspicuous. He shoulders through the entryway door and weaves between the crowd gathered around it as smooth as anything. If Jack weren’t military-trained to sniff out familiar figures like a bloodhound, he might have looked over him without a second thought.
But, as things stand, he clocks Whitaker almost instantly.
There’s an oversized sweatshirt around his shoulders, the hood situated precisely so that it hides most of his features from the swarm of people that linger nearby. He keeps himself separate from them all, pulling his shoulders together to make himself look smaller than he is, which is really quite the feat, all things considered.
Jack's immediate first thought is: It’s odd to see him in plain clothes.
He almost makes his way over to tease the kid about needing to be here again to relieve him in a few hours, but something keeps him glued to his seat. Something about Whitaker’s body language, how he hardly seems to notice there’s another soul around him. Something in the way he tips his curled head back and gazes at the memorial wall, at the new portrait upon it, looking every bit like a Renaissance depiction of grief. It feels viscerally intimate, a moment that no one--let alone a bunch of colleagues and acquaintances--should be privy to.
The picture it makes is so poignantly emotional that it momentarily takes Jack’s breath away.
He knows he should walk over and say something. Offer a few words of comfort. Robby would want him to. Hell, Robby would do it himself if he were still here and able, and would do it far more eloquently than Jack ever could, even on his best day. But Jack needs to make an attempt. It’s the least he can do.
But then the charge nurse’s voice arrives in his ear, heralding the arrival of a crush injury heading towards trauma two with a GCS of five, and he loses the opportunity completely. There’s nothing to be done about it; at the end of the day, patient care takes precedence over everything else.
Later, mid-glidescope entry, Jack takes comfort in the knowledge that it’s the one thing for which Robby would indubitably forgive him.
⊱ ─── ⋅⋅ ─── ⊰
Jack pulls up at Allegheny Cemetery at approximately a quarter to seven the following evening, late enough that the roads winding through the tombstone-filled hills are devoid of any vehicular processions or big crowds, but not so late that sunlight isn’t still beaming through the leaves of the sycamore trees that line them. Autumn has finally arrived in the city, and the foliage catches in its breeze, all different shades of yellow and orange and umber.
He parks as close as he can to the gravesite. Uneven terrain is difficult for him to traverse these days, and so he brings the cane his ortho insists upon him using. He harbors a disproportionate amount of anger towards it. It makes him feel like an old man, even more so than the whole dead wife and best friend thing.
Although he hasn’t been back since the burial, Jack remembers the Robinavitch family plot with a strange sort of precision. He can picture with perfect recall the headstones that fill the space--not overly grand, but intricate enough to make it clear that Robby’s family didn’t struggle much for money, not for at least a few generations back--but particularly the dual one that belongs to Robby’s grandparents. He remembers being subsequently unable to find a marker that fit the right dates to be his parents’, and having the awful realization that it’s just another truth Robby has taken with him six feet under.
Jack’s so lost in the thought that he misses a very apparent piece of information until it’s right under his nose.
There’s somebody already at Robby’s grave.
He’s swapped yesterday’s hoodie out for a peacoat, but he’s still instantly recognizable by the flop of hair that he never bothers to tame properly, by the slightness of height but not precisely of build. His hands are clasped before him as though prayer might be wrung from the pressure.
Jack approaches Whitaker carefully, stopping at his side with a few feet separating their shoulders.
“Hey, kid,” Jack says, and perhaps it’s an odd thing to call someone who’s nearing forty, but there will probably never come a day that Jack doesn’t see his or Robby’s former residents as a responsibility that transcends age and titles.
Whitaker’s lips pull into a sad smile as he acknowledges Jack with a slight tip of his head. “Dr. Abbot,” he greets in return, soft and unguarded. Subtly, he makes a move to swipe at his eyes. “I wasn’t expecting company.”
He sounds so much like he did over a decade ago, back when he was still just a frazzled med student having the worst first day of a rotation in history, that it takes Jack a few moments to find his voice again.
“I wasn’t really planning on coming out, if I’m being honest.”
It’s true. Jack had plans with a scalding bath and a tube of Icy-Hot, but something possessed him to throw his prosthetic on, to drag himself out into the changing seasons instead.
Jack can see the synchronicity in that, now.
After a few moments of comfortable silence, Jack asks, “How are you holding up?”
Whitaker’s quiet for so long that Jack considers the very real possibility that he might not have heard the question. But, eventually he answers, “As well as one could expect, I suppose.”
“I’d tell you that it gets easier with time, but I’d be lying.”
At least Robby had passed away peacefully, in the comfort of his own home. At least Whitaker hadn’t had to see it. But the death of a good mentor isn’t easy to endure; God knows how hard Robby’d taken Adamson’s.
Whitaker sniffles. “Yeah. I figured as much.”
“When I lost Liz back in oh-four, I used to try and find comfort in telling myself that one day the hole she left behind would get smaller, that the gaping wound it left in my chest would eventually coalesce. Only it never did. Years went by and things just sort of kept growing around it, until I woke up one morning and found that I could breathe again without the wind whistling through my ribcage.” Jack flushes slightly when he realizes how much he’s overshared. Whitaker probably doesn’t need to know all that. He tries to save face by continuing, “Different circumstances losing a spouse, I suppose, but death is death. When you care about someone, it fucking sucks all the same.”
Whitaker makes an odd sound, caught somewhere between a laugh and a sob, but he doesn’t say anything more.
Side by side, they stand a silent vigil over Robby’s grave.
“Heard some chatter about you taking over the permanent chief position,” Jack says once a few minutes have passed. “Congratulations. Hell of a thing to even be considered for something like that at your age.”
What he doesn’t say is: I’ve known you were destined for something special from the first year of your residency. Since before then, really, when I scanned over Robby’s letter of recommendation for the program and considered the possibility that it might be radioactive, for how starkly it was glowing. The following years only made it more obvious. Never had an heir been so apparent, a line of succession so clear.
“I still reckon it should go to you. But thank you,” Whitaker says, still looking at Robby’s headstone. “That means a lot.”
Jack’s gotten too old to take over the gauntlet. Besides, standing next to him is the perfect candidate for the job. Kid’s got empathy in droves, a good set of instincts to boot. And he’s really come into his own over the last few years, leaving behind him the self-conscious cowl of youth.
Plus, his mannerisms and work ethics are so similar to Robby’s, the transition would be practically seamless.
“Can I ask you something?” When Whitaker nods his assent, Jack asks, “What are you doing out here? I mean, I know what your schedule looks like.” I know how few and far between your days off are.
“I could ask you the same thing.”
“If you did, I’d tell you the truth,” Jack responds plainly. “That I’m searching for some penance.”
“Penance?”
Whitaker turns away from the headstone to look Jack in the eyes, just enough that what’s left of the setting sun catches the silver chain around his neck--more specifically, the object strung onto it.
To Jack’s surprise, it’s not a crucifix after all.
It’s a ring.
Jack knows that ring. Not thirty-six hours ago he was staring at a photograph of one exactly identical to it, having a crisis over the nature of its existence. After the events of yesterday, half of the healthcare workers in the county ought to recognize it. Slowly, Whitaker follows Jack’s line of sight to it, his body tensing up as he does so. If Jack wasn’t already certain about it being important somehow, the way Whitaker’s eyes widen minutely would be a dead giveaway.
“What,” Jack asks, “is that?”
Whitaker shifts from one foot to the other, a tick that’s achingly familiar.
Already, Jack’s neurons are firing, drawing conclusions faster than the logical part of his brain can filter them.
“Why do you have that?” Jack continues.
“Because it’s mine.”
Jack flounders, his brain unwilling to catch up with the revelation trying to form. “I figured all of his stuff went to Janey and Jake.”
It’s why he hasn’t bothered asking Robby’s estate for any of his vinyls or old tools. Jake has always been a bit selfish--no matter how staunchly Robby defended him against such claims--and it wasn’t a trait he outgrew once he entered adulthood. Jack thought it would be a fruitless effort.
“Not…precisely,” Whitaker hedges.
“What do you mean, not precisely?”
“Well. This,” he takes the ring and holds it between his fingers, “is actually mine. But Robby died intestate, so,” the kid takes a deep breath, like he’s preparing for impact, “all of his things went to me. Legally.”
There’s an absurd moment where Jack actually thinks: did Robby fucking adopt this kid and not tell me about it?
But then reality descends.
It happens slowly, and then all at once. Jack blinks dumbly, leaning his weight onto his cane for support. There’s a buzzing in his ears. A tremble forming in his hands. Part of him wants to say that he doesn’t understand, but the worst part is, he thinks he does.
“You can’t possibly be saying what I think you’re saying.”
Quietly, Whitaker asks, “Is it really all that far-fetched?”
The funniest thing about it all is that it isn’t. Robby never seemed to him the marriage type, really, but if he ever bridged that gap, it’s fitting that it was with a former resident, one with a kind heart and an earnest soul, and that he’d kept it to himself all this time, taking it to the literal grave. In fact, it’s so Robby that it fucking hurts.
Jack doesn’t even bother giving an answer. He just asks how long.
“Nine years,” Whitaker says, so low that Jack has to strain to hear it. “We got nine long years together.”
Jesus fucking Christ. Nine whole years. Almost an entire goddamn decade of keeping something like that under wraps.
Jack thinks back to every time he’d offered Robby an invitation to go to the bar like they did back in the day just to find himself rebuffed. He thinks about all of the flimsy excuses he’d been given over the years, and how he’d eventually stopped asking altogether. He considers the last rumor he heard about Robby hooking up with someone in the Pitt, and the way they mysteriously seemed to stop at around the same time as their bar crawls. Then he thinks about the two weeks several years back that he worked about six doubles in a row because Robby and Whitaker were both going on vacations that just so happened to coincide, and how fucking insane it is that that was probably their fucking honeymoon. How had Jack not connected the dots then, when they both came back with sunburns so bad that the pinkened skin of their noses were peeling?
He stares at Robby’s headstone and feels so gob-smacked and stupid that he can hardly take it.
How could he have missed it?
Jack does some quick mental math, running his free hand over his mouth in disbelief. “You were still a resident?”
“I was in my third year when we first got together.” Dennis lifts his shoulders in a semblance of a shrug. “But we’ve only--" he starts, then takes a drawn-out, shaky breath. “We were only married for six.”
Almost as long as Jack was married to his wife before the cancer took her.
Suddenly, Jack is hit with the overwhelming urge to take a shovel to dirt. Shit, he wants to do it with his hands, get soil underneath his fingernails, dig until he can wring answers out of a body that can no longer give him any, that likely wouldn’t anyway, even if it could. He wants to wring Robby’s neck.
Instead, he questions Whitaker. “Why hide it?”
“For obvious reasons, at first. Then because we both thought it might undermine my career. And the prospect of having two attending physicians on the same floor named Dr. Robinavitch seemed more of a headache than what it was worth.” Tears well in Whitaker’s eyes proper, now, not spilling over but collecting at his waterline precariously. “But I’m not so sure about it, now. His funeral was the worst day of my life. Having to stand there and act like the world hadn’t split down the middle, like my heart wasn’t being interred in that casket--I wouldn’t wish it upon anyone.”
The frustration that’s come to a fever-pitch inside Jack is already beginning to subside, making way for something much more melancholic. “Christ, kid. I’m sorry.”
The words aren’t sufficient, but they’re all Jack has to offer. He is sorry. Sorry that Whitaker’s lost a mentor and a lover in one fell swoop, and that he’s had to bear the weight of it alone.
Grief is something that Jack knows a thing or two about. The weeks following his wife’s death were the worst of his entire life, worse than the most miserable days of his deployment, more terrifying than losing his leg and learning how to function while missing half a limb. He wouldn’t have eaten for weeks if Robby hadn’t shown up on his doorstep, stubborn as a mule, with casseroles and baked goods and plastic containers filled with homemade meals.
Emotion seizes Jack’s chest, makes him feel guilty in a way that he really shouldn't; it’s clear Robby didn’t want him to know a lick about any of this. It’s not his responsibility to deal with the fallout of a truth that’s been intentionally kept secret from him for a decade.
But, still.
“Whitaker,” he says, almost helplessly. “Have you been mourning this alone all this time?”
It’s not the question he’s expecting, clearly. Whitaker chews the inside of his cheek, contemplating his answer. “Not entirely. Dr. Santos from surgery knows. Some of the people in Human Resources as well, I guess. But none of them have a particularly soft shoulder to cry on.” He sighs. “We tried to keep it on a need-to-know basis.”
“I guess I just thought that I would’ve been part of that need-to-know,” Jack says, almost as if trying to convince himself. “You know, I was his best friend once.”
Whitaker smiles that sad smile again. “Yes. Yes, you were.”
“He could’ve fucking told me.”
The kid manages a huff of something that could almost pass as a laugh. “It’s Robby we’re talking about here,” he says, like that explains everything--and in a way, it does.
Jack drops his head and puts the most debauched sailors to shame. Damn Whitaker for seeming so nonchalant about it all, like it’s not a life-changing sort of revelation, attempting to make a joke about it as if it’s not the kind of thing that skews perception so drastically that it’ll never be the same again.
And damn Robby for not trusting Jack enough to confide in him, because now he’ll spend the rest of his days looking back and wondering why.
There’s nothing more to be said, so they don’t bother speaking. They simply stand there together for so long that twilight begins to take root, painting the sky a deep shade of blue. The swish of the leaves picks up as the wind does, bringing with it a chill that settles deep in his aching joints. It’s a welcome sort of pain. Grounding.
“We really ought to get going soon,” Whitaker says, like he already knows the effect the elements have on an aging body. “It gets cold out here at night.”
Jack nods. But as it turns out, there is still something for him to say first.
“You do remember how we get through this sort of thing, right?” he asks, turning to look at Whitaker head-on, catching his eyes to make sure his meaning gets through. “By leaning on family and friends?”
There’s a lifetime of sorrow in Whitaker’s gaze. Not just the anguish that comes with the loss of a spouse--though they both carry that burden, too, Jack supposes--but the weight of their profession, too, and the fact that it leaves no time or space to process things fully. They’ll be expected to show up tomorrow the exact same way they did a year ago, to uplift others when they themselves are so downcast that it’s almost impossible to get out of bed in the morning.
“I remember. But you don’t need to worry about me.”
“I’m not just saying it for your sake.”
Whitaker’s mouth falls open slightly. “Oh.”
Lights punctuate the lines of graves behind him like a sea of stars. A nearby stone sticks out to Jack in particular, the one marked Golda & Chaim Robinavitch.
“Yeah,” Jack says. “I still have so many questions.”
Whitaker gives him a look, the most vulnerable one he’s given all evening, and, at last, a single teardrop falls, running down his cheek onto the fabric wrapped tight around his neck. It’s Robby’s scarf, Jack recognizes, now that he knows to consider such possibilities. Adamson gifted it to him so long ago that Whitaker was probably still in grade school when it exchanged hands.
The truth strikes Jack, then, stark and sudden, that they’re still here, holding the memories.
And that perhaps Robby left them both behind some answers after all.