Chapter One - TIPTOES

The latex gloves she'd worn all day had left her skin feeling parched, there was no resistance as she peeled the rubber away from her hands and dropped them in the trash. Slipping out of her blood stained scrubs, Abby scrunched the top and trousers together into a ball and lobbed them at the laundry chute with a 'hazardous waste' symbol above it. She sighed as she caught a sneak peek of herself in the mirror, blood had soaked through the top layer of scrubs and she was now wearing a reddish white undershirt, pulling this over her head, that too ended up in the hazardous waste bin ready for the hot wash and press before the start of her next shift in roughly... she glanced at her watch.. six hours and 48 minutes to be precise. Standing in her lingerie shivering against the coolness in the room and the lack of sleep she'd had in the last two weeks of continual nights/days shift patterns, Abby pulled a fresh set of mauve scrubs from her locker. Slipping the cold fabric up and over her butt she fastened the drawstrings at her bellybutton and shrugged the v-necked shirt over her flowery bra. Fingers plunging through her hair, ragging it back into a messy ponytail, she pocketed her phone and car keys, grabbed her bag, pulled her jacket over her shoulders and exited through the back door straight into the stairwell.

Nine flights of stairs, a few mumbled farewells and hand gestures later, she swept through the revolving doors out onto the snow scattered streets of Chicago on one of the coldest nights on record that year, her breath clung in little clusters of wispy smoke around her face as she pulled the ruffled neck of her coat up higher against her chin in a poor attempt to hide from the freezing wind. She'd moved here nearing five years ago now, after the breakdown of her marriage and subsequent death of her husband at the unfortunate hands of her daughter, Clarke, who had been the driver of the vehicle that fateful day in the middle of her final year at Brown. They'd been on a father daughter day to see the Rhode Island Rams in the playoffs, they'd won and the atmosphere was alive with the electricity of the day, the smiles and the a damn good time well spent. It wasn't Clarke's fault, an elderly man with a heart condition had rolled a stop sign, run the red light and hit the passenger side of their 1970 Dodge Challenger at 55 mph, the force had broken Jake's back, six of his lumbar vertebrae had shattered upon impact and as the car rolled over and over and over down a steep embankment off the 195 interstate, his cervical vertebrae snapped breaking his neck. There was no suffering, it was quick. That was a blessing. The emergency services had focused on the elderly gentleman, his heart attack had awarded him a trip to the hospital in the back of a super fast ambulance. Their car lay undiscovered for nearly 12 hours, the emergency personnel had not realised there was another car involved until early the next morning, and an unsuspecting Abby was the doctor called out to assist the paramedics with two casualties, one DOA the other a walking wounded. Jake was dead and had been for some time, Clarke was traumatised and Abby got to work in the only way she knew how with all efforts to hide what she was really feeling.

Clarke had just walked away, despite being thrown around like a rag doll, the cuts and bruises she sported were superficial, it was the scars on the inside that would wreak their damage later on, she would row with Abby frequently. Her most venomous spiteful words would come out when she was blaming Abby for the death of her dad and accuse her of having no heart and so, when failing in medicine a couple of years later, she would take a year out that ended up being four and she was off in some far flung country on the other side of the world nursing a broken heart from her latest lost love. Abby didn't speak to her often, their relationship was strained, forced and misshapen. Abby's bonus points were waning this year as she had also forgotten her birthday and neglected to send even a card overseas. She was a bad mother. She was also a bad person, but she was a good doctor, and that's what got her through even the toughest of times.

Today had been the toughest of them all since she had joined the hospital surgical team, she had had a girl not far from Clarke's age, same hair colour, seafoam green eyes on her table that evening, convinced that she was not good enough to live, the beautiful creature had slit her wrists from the heel of her palm vertically down to the midway point on her forearm. The six inch gash was deep, severing tendons and slicing through the radial artery. The amount of blood was etched in Abby's mind, staining her scrubs and seeping through onto her undergarments. She couldn't save her, the damage was too severe and just as she had fought so viciously to stem the flow, she had fought back the tears when it was clear she was already gone. She'd spent a long time in the pre-prep room sobbing her heart out after they had cleared the theatre. It had been a veritable struggle to dry her eyes, wash off her face and break the news to her worried next of kin in the waiting room. It wasn't the first patient Abby had lost since being in Chicago, and it most certainly wouldn't be her last, but it was a memory that would not leave her for a long long time to come. It was haunting and made the pang of her missing Clarke just that much more noticeable.

The empty space hurt.

Her car was a way aways in the back corner of the car park, hospital parking in the city was generous, but free didn't necessarily mean easily accessible. Abby had been walking for about 25 minutes now, her scrub material was thin around her thighs and the cold air pricked through making her wonder if it wasn't easier to just sleep in an on call room till her next shift. She rationalised the walk back with the continued walk to her car and didn't turn around to shrink back into the hospital's accommodating warmth. She fished around in her pocket for the keys to her TrailBlazer, she'd justified the size of the car back when she bought it because of the size of their family and the camping trips they took up to Allegheny National Forest... back when she had a family. When she sold the family home in Providence to help pay for Clarke's medical school fees, the truck was one of the last things she vowed to sell, hoping that it would one day be a graduation present for her daughter when the time came. But of course it never did, and here she was now with an aging beast of a truck that was larger than she needed and yet too much of 'home' to exchange for something smaller. She gripped the key between numb fingers and approaching the gun metal grey SUV made motions to press the key into the lock. It wasn't easy, it never had been, and the lock (like her life) had frozen up in the dropping temperatures. Abby bent down till her lips were inches from the door handle, cupping her mouth in a circular tube over the entrance to the lock, she breathed out warm condensation and couple of times till she was sure that that had done the trick.

She jimmied the lock another couple of times before it clicked and a couple of moments later she was sitting on the cold leather seat that had an old quilted blanket draped over it in an attempt to make it seem a little warmer than it actually was. Slipping the key into the ignition, she turned it and nothing happened, it wasn't uncommon, so she switched it back towards her and forwards again to the windshield, it chugged, chugg, chugg.. chugg, chugg, spluttered and died. Head came to a slow stop back against the headrest, a small comical sobbing cry emitted from her exhausted person. Popping the hood, she left her phone on the dash, keys in the non igniting ignition and shimmied out into the cold again to inspect what may or may not be going on in the inner workings of her automobile. Besides the basics she wouldn't be any the wiser, and she wasn't even sure she knew why she was looking now to be quite frank, but it was nearing 2:30am and the ridiculousness of this was beginning to make her think she was imagining it all. She couldn't make head nor tail of what was going on beneath the hood, and so climbing back into the comfort of the old Chevy she grasped her phone and scrolled purposely through a list of 'useful numbers' that she kept just in case of emergencies like this. She stopped at the name O'Grady's, on recommendation of a friend she had added this number only last week in the hopes that she might use them to test her vehicle emissions next month.

She glanced at her watch; 2:35am, what were the chances of getting someone out at this time of the morning, she wondered if they had a night service, would they be able to fix it on the spot for her, or would she have to make a trip to the garage with them in order to give the all clear for them to take the damn thing apart and sell it for parts. She made the call; a gruff voice answered and details were exchanged, there was no time frame given and so it was as sit and wait jobbie, but she was assured that someone would be with her shortly, Abby hoped that they wouldn't have to call her, her cell was running out of juice, it's little percentage of battery was dangerously close to single digits. Pulling the quilt out from under her butt she draped it over her torso, it was old and moth-eaten but it was something that she and Clarke had made back in the Summer of Clarke's 16th birthday, a project that Clarke had wanted her mother to partake in too. Abby held it close to her nose and breathed in deeply, it was musty but had a small tingling smell of home and the memories that followed made her well up. She wished she wasn't stuck in her truck in the hospital car park waiting for a mechanic and that perhaps if she was at the airport picking Clarke up from her travels things would be different to how they were now. Very different. She closed her eyes for two beats to blink the tears away.

The headlights woke her, bright and furious against the heaviness of sleep, squinting she held up her hand struggling to see passed rude awakening, she could make out a Dodge Ram with giant floodlights attached to the roof in an arch over the banner that read "O'Grady's Mechanics" - her sigh of relief was audible, thankful and pushing the quilt off her knees, she left the comfort of the car just as the occupant of the Ram left their warmth. Before her, the fluorescent colour of the headlights framed a figure and was not the person Abby had expected. A woman stood in front of her SUV, marking down numbers on a clipboard, deep chocolate brown hair pulled back into a tight ponytail, her features giving her a subtle beauty, that Abby found hard to take her eyes off of, Her red bomber jacket had the O'Grady's emblem splashes across the front and back; Abby wondered if there was someone else in the truck, she found herself wondering how someone so slight could be a mechanic for the beefed up trucks of America. Abby still in her lack of sleep, bewildered wake-up phase hadn't realised she'd not acknowledged this person's presence and when she finally came to her senses, all she could manage was a warming; "Hey" which, over the rumbling engine of the Ram, it was clear the girl didn't hear. Her phone beeped as it died at 3:02am - Clearing her throat, Abby tried again; "Hey.. thanks for coming out so late, I feel awful for dragging you out here for something so simple..." she trailed off as the girl looked up, her eyes mirrored her hair in colour, their liquid brown tint was kind and when a smile washed over her face, she stood up straight and took a few strides towards Abby; it was confidence that Abby admired. The girl shook her hand firmly and smiled that incredibly inviting grin again; "Hey! I'm Raven" she didn't miss a beat and whilst Abby was a bit taken aback by it all, Raven continued on with her job, "I understand, it's not often that you see a lady mechanic, but I work the graveyard shift and it's usually pretty quick something like this, so do you wanna show me what's the issue that you're having here?" She pointed to the hood and smiled at Abby.

It was contagious, she was contagious – because for the first time in a long time, Abby smiled too and it didn't seem forced, it seemed natural.