Match

There is something about a commencement - even a quasi/pseudo-commencement - that makes even full-grown adult graduates seem like little kids again.

Even doctors. UVA had hired the Richmond city museum for Match Lunch, and the clustered students at their clustered tables were not subdued by the dark, oversized portraits of long dead white men in ruffled collars staring down at them. If anything, it almost added - to the generation raised on Hogwarts - a sense of the lunch hall, and there were actually large balloons being vaulted from one round table to the next, as the doctorlings finished lunch and waited on highest nerve alert for Match to begin.

Caroline Penvenen, at 32, was only some five years older than the med students - at most - but she felt immeasurably older, in consequence not only of age and experience - but also because she was waiting on someone with mother-like anxiety. Someone who was about to find out his future for the next four years, at minimum. Someone who was ridiculously late. Not that that was surprising. He was doing a ward rotation at the VA hospital and she would not put it past him to have gone beyond his shift, even if it meant missing his own Match.

She would sit here, at the table with his mother and Ross, his best friend in school - and Ross' girlfriend, whose name Caroline always forgot - and Ross' parents and his old babysitter. She would sit here, the envelopes would be passed around and Caroline would be left to smile and watch all the students freak out - either with joy or disappointment - and she would be none the wiser about the course her life was about to take for the next four years. And she would text him - check your Match results (they were available by email mere moments after the Match envelopes were opened, as he had reminded her last night). And he would be driving - he would voice-text her as much - and say he couldn't check his email until he got off the road, and he was on his way there so he might as well wait. She could picture the whole thing going down that way.

That was Dwight.

Well, with any luck she would be paged back to the hospital. She wasn't on-call, but they would let her know if one of her patients was going into labor and she'd make her apologies and go...

"They do know you're matching tomorrow, right?" she asked him as he hovered by the light switch in their bedroom. Her head was on the pillow, eyes blinking sleepily - he was dressed in his scrubs, finishing up a coffee, looking like a bleary, schlubby angel in the half-light.

"Of course," he said. "Everyone's matching tomorrow."

True enough. It was the eve of the third Friday of March. Everyone remembered Match day. Caroline remembered her own with that exact same feeling of dread and regret that she had felt on the day. A lower-tier student at a lower-tier med school, she'd had no high hopes for her residency placement. In fact - she could have done worse. She had landed a not-bad trainee program on the east coast, just south of DC. But that sick feeling - of having her fate in the "hands" of some computer program, of knowing she was about to watch the better students get better choices - it was a lasting trauma.

"Well, hopefully," added Dwight, winking cheerfully.

She almost threw a pillow at him. He was never smug, but it was impossible for him never to be superior, because, in this regard, he frequently was. If he was not at the very top of his class at UVA, she would be surprised by nothing anymore. He had accepted interviews at NYU, at Boston Medical, at Johns Hopkins - he had turned down interviews on the West Coast (too far from his family). He had aced his Step 2 Exams. He had hit Honors in every clerkship but Psych and had managed to do a prestige 4th year research project in Ophthalmology (something about vision and nutrition in the Appalachia's).

"Don't be ridiculous," she said, shaking her head.

"Just trying not to ill-wish myself," he replied.

"Is that why you won't tell me what your rank order is?"

His cheerful expression slipped just a tad. "Something like that," he said.

It was on the tip of her tongue to demand a real answer - he'd probably done something silly like ranked UVA first; not that it was a bad program, or anything, just he could do so much better … well, at least that would mean little disruption in their lives: no reason for her to look for an opening in Boston or worry about housing prices in New York. She had bit her tongue on her opinions about his NOT looking at the West Coast. She would bite it again, now. He had been right about other things; he so frequently was …

"Can I get you some more coffee?" Caroline asked Dwight's mother, who was sitting back serenely in her folding chair, face calm and content. Dwight didn't take after her much in looks - she was on the short side, with somewhat mousy brown hair - but in temperament they were markedly similar. She took in the excited surroundings with a kind of bemused enjoyment. Caroline could imagine the self-same look on her boyfriend's face.

Dwight, of course, was a little bit older than his fellow classmates; in fact, he was Caroline's age, having worked for five years as an EMT before getting into college. But it wasn't just that. He was a calm soul, down to the bottom of his being. She had tried - and tried again - to plumb the depths, to find out where on earth the sensitive or insecure or even angry center of him might be, but she always ended up revealing more than she discovered, and at times she had spent nights in his arms, weeping over the things in her past she really didn't think she cared about that much anymore - yes, she had lost her mother before she could even remember it; yes, her father had been demanding. Dwight had grown up poor - fatherless - lacking any of the privileges to which she had been born. But he had some boundless, inexhaustible resource of generosity. At times, irritatingly so.

Dwight's mother answered her in her soft drawl: "No, dear, I never have more than one cup a day. I get headaches."

"You must be excited for Dwight," said Caroline.

"Yes, though I do not really understand what is happening here."

Caroline grinned to herself. "Today all the med students are matching to their residency programs and - since really it's the day they all look forward to more than their own graduation - most med schools make a huge deal over it. At noon eastern time, the students will get an envelope with their match letter in it. At my school, the dean would come up right before time and give some speech no one listened to - and then the med school staff would get up and sing some song no one listened to. And everyone would rip open the envelopes and scream. One year, there was a crazy delay - some coffee spilled all over the envelopes and one girl actually fainted. But actually - the match results get emailed to you by the NRMP right at noon, anyway, so it's not like she would have missed it."

"I suppose that's how Dwight might be finding out today," sighed his mother.

"Indeed," Caroline replied shortly.

He had been right about so many other things.

It was just a little less than a year ago that he had come to her commencement. The residency commencement ceremonies were much more subdued, of course. Her department rented a banquet room at the Peking Gourmet and everyone dressed in their second-best formal wear and drank white wine while the division chiefs made speeches and the four senior residents were honored for their successful program completion. She was awarded for her leadership - she had been the unanimous selection for chief resident - someone else received an award for education - someone else received an award for research - someone else received an award for outreach. At the end of the evening, they would all get up and announce where they were heading next - just like Match, including Caroline's slight sick feeling, that she might be judged for her choice, though this time by her family, not her colleagues.

But Dwight had been at her side, then. It was just a couple of months since he had rotated on her OB/GYN service, and she had hesitated for so long on the call that it was at the last minute that she realized she did not have his phone number. So, she went back through the schedules until she found his pager number.

"This is Dwight Enys - you paged me?"

"Would you be my date for my commencement?" she had asked him abruptly.

In the very long silence that followed, Caroline prepared all of her arguments - to herself, as well as to him. They had met for coffee twice during his pediatrics rotation - just friendly-like, though they both knew there was some spark of something between them. But he was a med student and she a senior resident - and even in the modern world, there was something stratified, ranked, privileged between them - a gulf only she, as the ranking personage, could breach.

"When is it?" he had said, at last.

Once there - seated at a little round table with her father and aunt, an American cousin and a British cousin - he had melted into the situation with the ease he showed everywhere. All the other residents remembered him - of course - and the nurses, and the attendings. When they gave out the awards, he applauded enthusiastically at every one. He asked her father meaningful questions - her father was chief of thoracic surgery at Baltimore General - he vamped her aunt, deftly avoided the flirtatious questions of her cousins. She was flat-out impressed by him, as always, and all she could think was that she wanted to get him alone.

When it came time to announce her next job, she surprised half of the room with the announcement that she would be staying at NOVA W&C - the run-down, perpetually broke teaching hospital she had spent four years complaining about. Her father gaped at her, and in his face she could read the speech he was readying for her in his head. As he had helped talk her into a medical school in the first place, he could be there for her again - pull some strings, at Baltimore, or somewhere else he knew someone else….

"Surprised?" she smiled at Dwight, returning to her seat next to him.

"No," he said. "I knew deep down you loved it there - deep, deep down. I'm not surprised - but proud of you - truly."

"You should be truly sorry - you threw a wrench into all my careful plans." And he had looked at her with a curious expression.

There was a cocktail mixer after the ceremony, but Dwight had a shift the next morning, so she walked him out to his car. It put her in mind of an earlier parking lot.

He drove a dented Jeep Cherokee, at least twenty years old. But it had some character - dark blue, with tinted windows and some window stickers for Jeep-o-rama, Jamboree, Rubicon. She wondered if he had inherited these or if he really was into off-roading.

"Caroline," he said. "What happened - to Unwin? Out of town?"

She grinned. "I have no idea. Out of my house - out of my life."

"I'm sorry …." he replied, slowly. "I thought -."

"He had no understanding," she said, "of my sudden need to clean up my life. He thought I had just read Eat, Pray, Love, or something. I - well, my father blames me, but Unwin took off after a long and protracted fight, declaring he did not understand me or the decisions I was preparing to make."

"I see."

"So," she continued, airily - a defense mechanism, and she knew it. But she couldn't help it. "So, you can imagine my feeling of loss. All expectation of a fiancee, of a certain style of life, dissolved in a moment."

"I can imagine," he said, frowning at her, "you would have more time on your hands."

"I don't understand you. Do you dislike me? I thought -?"

"Dislike?" He shook his head, almost betraying frustration - she did not know it at the time, but it was the closest he would get. "Dislike? I know you feel that I threw a 'wrench,' as you put it, into your life. You have no idea what you have done to mine." He reached out to her vaguely, and suddenly they were kissing in the orange glow of the parking lot lights.

She found herself pressed against his jeep - her shawl falling off her shoulders - while his mouth, after an initial hesitation, made a deep and assured exploration of hers. In this moment, there were only a handful of things she was actually capable of understanding - but one of them was that deeply satisfied feeling you get when you take an incredible chance on something and discover yourself to be completely, utterly vindicated. Of course he is a good kisser … that was one of the other things.

But also: "What do you mean?" she asked him huskily, when their lips separated and he was breathing a little harder than normal, his chest moving against hers. "What have I done?"

"I am so drawn to you - but I just - don't you think - we really aren't much of a match. But sometimes - I guess that's the way it goes."

"I'll give you a ride back to your hotel," Caroline said.

She and Dwight's mother walked across the grass toward the museum parking lot, Caroline's heels wobbling in the soft ground. Caroline was disentangling her keys from the bracken at the bottom of her purse when her phone started to vibrate. She grabbed it eagerly, but it was just her father - probably wanting to know the Match results, himself. So do we all, Dad, she thought wryly, letting it go to voicemail.

"I hope nothing's wrong," replied the other woman, thoughtfully.

Caroline had been trying not to think the same. It was a two-hour drive - starting on the Beltway - after an overnight shift. But - she felt sure she would have received a call. Since she hadn't, he was fine - just probably performing emergency surgery, happily ploughing around bones and arteries and muscles to place a stent, or unblock a colon or something. "I'm sure nothing is," she said, since she was expected to. "It's so like him to just stay on when he is interested in a case. And - let's face it. He probably knows exactly where he matched. He gets into his top-ranked school - whatever that is - or I eat my phone."

His mother laughed. "So, he didn't tell you, either? What's the big surprise?"

Caroline pointed her key fob at the parking lot, pressed and listened for the beeps. "I don't know," she said. And there really was no guessing with him, she thought fitfully. Maybe he had decided on San Francisco, after all - just to please her - or LA. Maybe he had decided not to go into residency at all and planned to join the Peace Corps, instead (was that still a thing?). It could go either way.

Once she started the car - and the other woman made appropriate noises of delight at the comfortable black leather interior of the Audi - she directed her car to call Dwight. She was unsurprised when it rang to voicemail. "Honey, call your mother. Or me. Actually, both of us, in that order."

"He went so many different places for interviews," his mother said. "And he seemed so enthusiastic about all of them."

"He was enthusiastic on my rotation," said Caroline, "and I don't see him delivering babies for the rest of his life." Wouldn't that be a twist, she thought. "I don't think there is anything about medicine he doesn't embrace wholeheartedly."

"Thanks again," he told her - straightening up and smiling at her - she was perched on top of a small stack of plastic bins. The small apartment around them - a nondescript one-bedroom with single-pane windows and a carpet that smelled of the cats who had not lived there in years - was empty except for the bins and boxes clustered around them. "You're saving me quite a bit of money in storage."

Since he was about to embark on a string of back-to-back-to-back away rotations, he had decided to let go of his apartment, and she had offered to keep his things until he came back and found a new place.

"I missed out on this," she said, wrinkling her nose.

"What do you mean?"

"The nomadic life - a new apartment every six months or year - everything in boxes … the sound of someone dumpster-diving outside your window at 5 in the morning."

He laughed. "It bodes well for me that you see the romanticism in slumming it."

He bent down to kiss her and - as usual - the kisses kept going and going. Perhaps it was true - she would actually miss the smell of this place: the heavy perfumed carpet freshener smell over the old urine - the occasional smell of the garbage, when caught in an unfortunate updraft. The breezy smell of his deodorant masking the musky sweaty smell of his scrubs. The gritty, dirty, real smell of life - the way it smelled the first time they had fucked, when she had driven down from DC to surprise him and he had spent half of dinner taking a practice exam on his phone and she had wanted to hit him over the head. And had told him so.

But he was being silly. Slumming it? He was going to be an incredibly successful doctor; in a decade, he'd be richer than she was.

"Doesn't it, though?" she asked him, coyly, playing along.

"Where did you live - in college?" he asked, straightening up and holding out a hand to help her up. She sighed internally in disappointment, but then again - his bed had already been broken down and donated.

"For undergrad, I lived at home. I went to Maryland State. When I went to med school, I bought a condo - I used the sale of that for the down payment of my townhouse."

Med school = Missouri, a fact he knew by now, but which she still avoided saying out loud. As he was from rural Kentucky, anyway, he had no patience for her distaste for the flatlands.

"Well, then," he said. She couldn't read his expression - at times, she wondered if he struggled with the concept of being involved - heavily, deeply, breathlessly involved - with a woman of her upbringing. Which was ridiculous. They were both medical professionals: that decimated old socio-economic structures and founded new ones. He knew - almost - what she knew now, of long hours and difficult patients and the constant struggle against decay, entropy, death.

It was true, she would never have the empathy for the sick and struggling that he had - that was a mountainous position, which no one could achieve. In that regard, he would find himself alone a lot - the oracle in the Himalayas. But then again, he had always seen the potential in her, before she even knew she had it … so ….

"Then?" she prompted.

"That sounds like sound investing," he answered.

"It was. Nothing wrong in that."

"No - on the contrary."

Fretfully, she changed topics. "Don't forget, I need your cell phone number."

That was a double-edged joke. Once she had his pager number, she just kept using it to get in touch with him. And, more often than not, it was really the best means of doing so.

He laughed and pulled out his android. "I'll call you and this time - this time - associate my name with the phone number."

"OK."

"No, I'm going to watch you do it, right here and now," he said, grinning as he put the phone to his ear.

"Will you even have cell service where you are?" she asked.

"Jesus, Caroline - I'm just going to Tennessee, a region within the contiguous United States of America."

"You know what I mean! You're going to be in coal mines and up and down hills."

"I think the miners actually go to the pulm clinic, not the other way around."

"Well - sorry - but you are almost impossible to get a hold of even in the best circumstances."

He looked at her and she was surprised to see a rare expression of apology. "I know … I know. It's not much longer. I'm halfway through fourth year. Soon enough, I'll be matching and -."

"And - then what?" she asked breathlessly, after a long pause.

"And then - I hope -."

"What? That you'll suddenly chill out as a resident and take time to smell the roses and text your girlfriend?"

He reached out and touched her cheek with the back of his finger, the look of regret still strong on his face. "Something like that. I know that sounds ridiculous, but - once I'm in residency, I'm kind of set, right - one program, one goal. Until then, I get to explore everything. Pediatrics in Uganda, coal miners in Tennessee. I'm meeting up with Dr. Fessborn while I'm there - he's got some research on nutrition and vision loss in the Appalachians that I've been corresponding with him about. Pretty soon, I have to pick a single lane, and - shit, Caroline, it's almost too soon to say this, but - I fucking hope you get on that road with me, then. But - for now -."

She gaped at him and it felt like her heart exploded, the warm, mushy remnants filling her chest cavity. It was both the implication - the long-term implication - and that feeling he always induced in her, that she was constantly witnessing something coming to life in front of her eyes, as if he was a volcano making tropical island after tropical island in his mad and enthusiastic rush to experience - everything.

"I love - that about you," she said, halting over the words. Oh, she had thought them to herself, over and over; but she had never said them, nor had he. Not so directly.

He smiled. "Thank you," he said. "I love everything about you and I am so sorry - so sorry - that I'm such a lousy boyfriend right now."

"You are not."

It was a long eight weeks while he did the pulm rotation in Tennessee, conducted vision exams in West Virginia, did a family medicine rotation near his home town in east Kentucky. But when he came back, he stayed with her, and she listened with as much enthusiasm as she could muster when he talked enthusiastically about the places he had been and the people he had seen. At times, he was so animated that his accent - long suppressed - would pop out, making him sound both strange and strangely familiar. The profundity of the work had moved him - as if such a thing was possible - more deeply than anything he had done, so far. She was caught - as usual - between a sense that he had moved at an even further remove from her and the sensation that he was more lovable than ever.

She asked him to move in with her and he did. He had a long break from clinical rotations now, anyway, as it was interview season by then, and he - and she - started plotting out the future.

She was halfway back to DC when her phone rang and her car speakers boomed out his name. "Pick up … pick up … pick up!" she exclaimed to the Audi.

"Caroline!"

"Where on earth have you been?" she asked him.

"I think I just missed you. I got to the museum too late to pick up my envelope and then I missed your message somehow and drove to my mom's hotel, hoping you'd still be here."

She breathed deeply instead of explaining that she had, in fact, been planning to drive to Walter Reed and retrace his steps from there. But she just asked, casually, "Did you get stuck in the OR?"

"You know me too well," he said, a grin in his voice.

"Well?" she said, unable to contain herself. "Where did you match?"

"Don't know yet. How far away are you? Can you turn back and meet me at UVA? I thought I'd pick up my envelope and we could open it over lunch."

She groaned and scanned ahead for the nearest exit. "I've already had lunch. Anyway, why don't you just check your email?"

"Don't want to. I want the whole antique experience. With you. Please?"

"I'll be there in an hour."

She found him on a bench outside the Registrar's office, his shoulders a little slumped, the unopened envelope dangling loosely in one exhausted hand. She knew that look - that stance - she could feel his exhaustion as if it were in her own body. It will get better, she wanted to tell him. Residency will be tough, but the hours and the responsibilities will slowly narrow and focus so that, by the time he, too, was an attending, life would be nearly normal. But there was no point in telling him such things. He would always court exhaustion - always. It was the only thing that stopped him - the only way he would get rest, when his body could just take no more. Hopefully, he would learn how to stop - how to measure his work and treat himself better. She would work on it ….

"Cafeteria?" she asked him.

He shook his head. "Unless you're hungry. I just want to sit here for awhile."

She sat down and took his free hand in hers, stared down at the long and sensitive fingers. "You're shockingly unanxious to see your match results," she said, frowning.

"Hmm. Yeah. Two reasons. One - I think I said to you once before, how much joy I take from variety. Dr. Bell kept trying to get me to go this morning, but all I could think was - this might be my last surgery - ever. And I couldn't - I just couldn't go. There are times I wish I could just take these past two years and do them all over again."

"Only Dwight Enys could actually wish to do Third Year more than once," she replied, shaking her head.

"I know - I know - I'm a masochist."

"What's two?"

He looked at her - she saw again the apologetic look she had seen before and felt the sudden urge to brace herself, as if an earthquake was coming. "Two?" he said. "Two is - I'm afraid you will think I have been very selfish. I'm afraid you will think I am asking way too much from you."

"What have you done?" she choked.

"I couldn't see myself anywhere else - I just couldn't visualize it. So, I'm afraid - I'm so very afraid - that either I ask you to wait for me - a few years longer. Or to come with me - if that is not worse."

He weakly handed her the envelope and she stared at his name in the fancy printed font. Dwight Enys, Class of 2018. Trembling, she pulled open the flap, unfolded the letter. She almost laughed at what she read. Then she felt like crying. "It says you've matched at East Tennessee State University."

He nodded.

"What even is that?" she asked, trying to contain her anger.

"It's where I did the pulm rotation."

"You've matched in Appalachia," she said.

"Essentially."

"Because?"

"Because - I wanted to go back. They have a pulm fellowship there and a chance to do research and also real clinical work - specialized work, as well as general medicine - on the miners there and their families and everyone breathing that dust. When I was there, I felt like - this is what you do, when you become a doctor. When people help you - when they lift you up like they did for me. This is what you do."

She tried to visualize herself there - but there were no images in her head that could even help her fabricate a picture. She could hardly say, what about me? What about my work? There are babies being conceived and born everywhere. And it's not like she was pulling down an extravagant salary. Still - her house, her life, her connections in DC.

"You should have told me," she said, as rationally as she could.

"I know. I just … wanted everything, I guess, for as long as I could have it. A life with you - and a plan for the future that felt right to me. I was hoping for both, obviously. I understand if you say you won't go. I understand if you need to wait."

"Wait?" she said, standing up and pacing away from him. "You don't get it, do you?" she added, turning around. "Oh - I should have guessed. I should have guessed. I think I suspected, but I didn't really allow myself to think about it. You are the most noble of men, Dwight - I get it. We all get it. But when does any of you - any part of you - get set aside for me?" She frowned. "I can't believe I'm hearing myself say that. That I've been reduced to saying it. I'm a fucking doctor - a faculty member. I deliver low income babies and counsel opiate addicts and teach people to be doctors. What I do matters. But also - also - I want to live outside it all - to have a world outside of the scrubs and the machines and drugs. A nice place to live and a person to share it. God damn it! I know I'm right, but you - you always make me feel so self-centered and petty!"

"I don't mean to - I really don't."

"I suppose you thought - because you always do this, don't you - that I might object, at first, but once I knew there was no out - no other plan - that I would have this moment of illumination and say, he's right! I'll go down to Tennessee and deliver mountain babies and discover myself and my higher purpose in this world. Yes?"

"Something … like that?"

"I have to go."

"Caroline …."

"No. No, Dwight. Go - go back to your mom's hotel. Take her to dinner - tell her the good news. Not for nothing but I'm sure she'll appreciate it. Stay the night there and get some fucking sleep. We'll - we'll - I don't know what we'll do, but whatever it is, we'll do it tomorrow."

As she hurried back to her car, she couldn't tell - she really couldn't - which emotion was the dominant one. She took a moment before starting her car - to grip hard her steering wheel - and she felt, mainly, a leaden sense of disappointment. She tried to rationalize it away. This, of course, had always been a danger. While she had dreamed of New York and California - relying on his excellence as the key to getting there - he had merely been himself. The person she loved but for whom, she feared, as he had once said, she was no match. She had basked in the glow of his affection for her - allowing herself to forget all the many ways that her plans and his plans - her ideals and his ideals - her priorities and his priorities - were discordant.

It was a long and dismal drive home. She had now hit rush hour and it was way more than two hours before she finally reached Georgetown and her townhouse - so small but so chic and expensive. She would be on call this weekend, and next week the daytime OB attending - plenty of work to keep her busy. She could log in to EMR and see if any of her patients had been admitted today.

She pulled up google maps instead and scrolled over to stare at Tennessee on her computer screen. The only cities she knew of in Tennessee were Nashville and Knoxville, but neither of these were near the mountains. She remembered that, when he had gone there for his rotation last year, it had been somewhere just on the other side of the Georgian border, but she couldn't remember the name of the town, nor could she bring herself to type the words and search for them: East Tennessee State University. He was mad - mad! Nobody with his abilities - his accomplishments, intellect - would deliberately bury himself in such a place.

She zoomed out - then glanced at California - San Francisco sticking out into the water of the other coast, all alluring. She'd only been there once, but it had been a wonderful trip - the mild weather, the sense of "old" money - the money of the rascals and thieves that had built the city - juxtaposed against all the young people in tech jobs, walking around and indulging in their excellent taste in restaurants. Now - she might have to look elsewhere. East Bay, maybe, or south - Santa Clara or San Jose. But if that's what she really wanted to do … maybe, maybe - if she had to wait - she might take herself somewhere she really wanted to go, do something she really wanted to do.

She opened up an employment website and started typing.

... When she opened her eyes, the glow of the computer was the only light. She blinked at the darkness, then instinctively grabbed at her pager, wondering if it was what had awakened her. She had a headache - she had cried, then shaken herself out of it, then cried again; and finally went to sleep, determined to decide, first thing in the morning, exactly what she was going to do with her life.

The pager was blank, so she looked around for her phone, then remembered she had left it downstairs with her purse.

As she crept downstairs, her landline started to ring. This was such an unusual sound that she jumped, not recognizing it, at first. It was her backup phone, in case someone really had to reach her and the cell systems had all gone down. Shit - she wasn't even on call tonight.

"Miss Penvenen? Are you the emergency contact for Dwight Enys? There's been an accident …."

How strange, she thought, staring at the tube that snaked out of her arm, dark red with her blood. How strange for life to upend itself, in a split second. Twice in a day (or in two days, whatever).

She was both terrified - a frightened, human response to the unknown - and numb, so used to the checklist of emergency, the pace of trauma, the sound of machines, the smell of antiseptic soap. At a point, one gives oneself over to the process - the scans and exams, the hastily-assembled OR - knowing that it will all end, one way or another; you will get to the other side. You will get to the other side.

The door opened and she looked up, anxious and expectant, to see his mother in the doorway, looking pale and tired. She was not used to this process, to being devoured by the system at the moment that your emotions are eating you up from the other end. She smiled, wanly, at the tech who was sitting next to Caroline.

"He'll be in the OR soon - he's stabilized, they say. He'll be all right."

Caroline almost felt amusement - being told this by a patient's family member. It was so turned around, upside-down, swirled-about and bizarre. It was also merely comfort - not necessarily fact.

"It's such a relief, isn't it, to be able to donate blood? Did you know before tonight that you were a match?"

Caroline opened her mouth on the answer - but tears started flooding her eyes, and in the end, all she could do was shake her head.