Exorcising Old Demons

Elizabeth stood before the antique Cheval mirror which had once belonged to her mother and to her mother before that. It was one of the few such possessions Elizabeth had inherited and she treasured it. As she stared pensively at her reflection, Elizabeth often wondered if there could possibly be some mystic bond between two women, so tightly bound by blood and yet, so completely separated by her mother's own selfish choice to live unencumbered by the needs of her children. If it were somehow possible that this shared heirloom might transcend the dictates of destiny and allow them to each be simultaneously present, one but a mere ghost image of the other. Yet, tonight, for once, Elizabeth wasn't focused on the past, on what might have been but wasn't, on missing mothers and dead sons. Instead tonight was something so unique in her current life that she still hadn't quite processed the sensation. Tonight was all about Elizabeth Webber and no one else. Tonight she had a date.

It wasn't a simple road to get to this evening. Elizabeth and Ewen had danced around one another for months but their increasing attraction was masked both by Ewen's professionalism, as her sometimes psychiatrist, and Elizabeth's ongoing grief over Jake's death. Yet, everything between them started to alter when Kate Howard, in the guise of her alter ego, Connie Falconeri, hit Ewen over the head with a paperweight, bringing their impromptu session to an abrupt close. After anxiously awaiting news of the outcome of Ewen's surgery, Elizabeth felt an ineffable surge of relief when she was informed that Ewen had finally regained consciousness. That much anticipated happy announcement was almost immediately followed by an unexpected quicksilver sensation of joy upon hearing that Ewen particularly wanted to see her.

"Stat," head nurse, Epiphany Johnson, had appended to her half-communiqué, half-order, all Epiphany method of not so gently nudging those she cared about (and supervised) in the direction they needed to be moving but were usually too pigheaded to see for themselves. "Honestly," she sighed to herself while watching the younger nurse dash down the hallway to the intensive care room where the wounded psychiatrist wanly lay in his hospital bed. With his tousled hair and white bandage, Ewen resembled an eighteenth century poet awaiting his lady fair, a role which Epiphany was pretty damned sure Elizabeth was more than willing to play. "I swear, they get younger and more addle-pated every year." Or maybe it was just that Epiphany herself was getting older and more cynical. Yet, since she preferred the first characterization to the second, that was the one in which she was choosing to believe. "You there!" Recalled to her managerial duties, and seeing an opportunity to vent her spleen, Epiphany yelled at a hapless custodian mopping the floor by the elevator doors, "Didn't your mother ever show you the proper way to use a mop?"

"You're awake," Elizabeth burbled happily as she unceremoniously burst into Ewen's room, where she was not in the least startled to find Patrick standing by the bed checking his patient's vitals and pupillary reflexes.

"That I am," Ewen responded with a weak smile which was only a pale imitation of his usual wide open grin whenever he caught sight of Elizabeth. "I can assure you, Dr. Drake, that my vision is perfect." He added, looking up at the neurosurgeon with a mischievous glint in his green eyes, "It would appear that Nurse Webber has grown even lovelier since my unfortunate encounter with a paperweight."

Patrick gave a dry chuckle of agreement, the closest he could come to mimicking humor these days. He looked across the room at Elizabeth, who stood uncertainly by the door, her face flushed with a pink tinge of embarrassment. "I can't argue with you about that, Dr. Keenan," he answered equably, "You're doing very well and, assuming you follow my instructions and don't overdo things, you ought to be out of the ICU in a day or so and well on your way to a full recovery." Patrick glanced down at the handheld digital device upon which he had been recording notes about Ewen's condition and gave a satisfied nod of his head before saying, "I need to complete my rounds. So, I shall leave you in the more than capable hands of Nurse Webber."

Elizabeth stared intently up at Patrick as he passed her by. She carefully scrutinized his face in an attempt to read his mood, to try and bore even deeper past the brittle outward shell of medical competency to his inner self, to the fragile and damaged heart and soul contained within. "How are you?" She asked him with quiet compassion.

"I'm good," Patrick said, his lips moving upward in a brief smile, a facial construct that appeared to be more a result of muscle memory rather than actual feeling.

Elizabeth sighed, her worried eyes followed the plodding progress of his lanky, stork-like figure as it moved away from her down the hall. She, better than anyone, knew there really was no remedy for Patrick's broken spirit beyond the impartial effects of time, but it didn't keep her from wanting to try.

"Hey, I thought you came to visit me, not moon over my neurosurgeon," the familiar Australian accent broke through her morose thoughts.

"I don't moon over anyone," Elizabeth shot back as she moved briskly over to Ewen's bedside and occupied herself with the redundant business of checking all the vital signs which Patrick had recorded mere moments ago.

Ewen reached up and captured her wrist as she was starting to place a thermometer probe into his mouth. His grip wasn't especially strong but Elizabeth stilled her hand and patiently waited to hear what he might say. "He's getting through it now because of Emma and people like you who show him how much he matters to them." Ewen's eyes met hers and again, despite the intensity of his words, Elizabeth felt a fluttery sensation deep in her stomach, a sensation which only ever seemed to occur around the curly-haired psychiatrist. "That's a more valuable way of helping than you can even know. It bridges the gap between his wanting to live for others and his wanting to live for himself."

Gently, without acknowledging his observation, Elizabeth pulled her hand free from Ewen's grasp and completed her aborted mission of getting the thermometer into his mouth. He lay quietly, staring up at Elizabeth while she averted her eyes and busied herself pushing buttons on the vital signs monitor next to his bed. When a quick electronic beep indicated to her that Ewen's temperature had registered, Elizabeth reached over and removed the thermometer from his mouth.

"Normal," Elizabeth said brightly, "Patrick's right, everything looks good and you are definitely on the road to recovery."

Ewen just continued to stare at her steadily, his gaze fixed on Elizabeth's face causing her to blush once more. "What?" She erupted, her eyes flashing as she finally matched him stare for stare, "Why do you keep looking at me like that?"

"You can admit the truth you know," was the psychiatrist's cryptic answer.

Elizabeth was clearly becoming even more upset as she stood over the hospital bed. Her fists were planted on her hips as she attempted to make herself appear a formidable figure, someone like Epiphany, who had even tamed the infamous Jason Morgan when he was a patient under her less than tender care.

"What do you mean the truth?" She indignantly demanded, "What on earth do you think I am lying to you about?"

For a brief moment, Elizabeth paused and considered the fact that Ewen was just recovering from a brain injury and possibly wasn't actually as normal as he appeared to be. Maybe he was suffering from some sort of delusion or hallucination or paranoia, she couldn't say which but perhaps she shouldn't upset him any further. Yet, before Elizabeth could change her tack and began to utter some soothing and consoling phrases which would manage to calm Ewen down long enough for her to find him some psychiatric help, notwithstanding the irony inherent in that concept, Ewen forestalled her by speaking first.

"I mean hiding the truth from yourself," Ewen shot back, "The truth being that everything Patrick is going through right now reminds you of Jake."

Elizabeth gave a sharp indrawn whoosh of breath as Ewen's harsh words washed over her creating familiar shards of glass-edged pain to pierce her scarred heart and causing it to weep fresh blood. "How dare you!" She said, suddenly panting as though she had just run a race, "How dare you talk about him…about how I feel…" Elizabeth couldn't say a single word more because suddenly she was nothing internally but a fully consuming wail of sorrow tuned to a one syllable note which resonated within every fiber of her body, echoing over and over again to a solitary word-Jake.

Ewen struggled to reach for her, to offer her comfort but Elizabeth stepped back from the bed. She closed her eyes in a vain attempt to reclaim some shred of her professional self and to not cry in front of Ewen, in front of a patient, but failed miserably as tears streamed down her cheeks.

"Jake…" the word was wrenched out of her as an agonized moan representing all the grief she had so carefully buried under her need to be strong for Cameron and Aidan, to be the only parent they could rely upon, while her own guilt, her own mourning, her own need for expiation went unmet and unacknowledged for over a year.

Strong arms wrapped around Elizabeth and shepherded her unresisting body through unmindful space. She neither knew nor cared where she was being led. She was shaking and weeping uncontrollably. Her whole body vibrated with unexpressed anguish for a little blonde-haired boy, with sparkling blue eyes and a fearless nature, who would never have the chance to go to kindergarten or graduate from high school or get married or have his own son.

"I ki…ll…ed h…im." The words were wrenched out of Elizabeth in a disjointed stutter as she bluntly said what she had thought within the first instance the accusing panel of empty black space, where there should have been the wooden solidity of a closed door, gaped widely in censorious accusation at her. "I didn't watch out for him and he died…because of me." The words were spoken in gasped breaths between ragged sobs but they rang with a faith based conviction.

Ewen held her tightly, stroking Elizabeth's hair and rocking her as they sat side by side on his hospital bed. Elizabeth had no sense of her surroundings, she was too caught up in the torrent of self-abasement and loathing erupting from her like noxious fumes from an erupting volcano. Ewen didn't speak, neither to draw forth more of her inner turmoil nor to try and console her. Instead, he simply comforted with his solid presence and complete lack of judgment.

Unmarked by either, time passed until finally Elizabeth lacked the strength to continue crying. Her eyes were red from the passage of tears and her throat sore from grief-stricken weeping. Slowly, Elizabeth's body stopped shuddering and eventually she lay quiescent in the shelter of Ewen's protective embrace. Still, he didn't speak but simply continued to wordlessly hold her. Ewen's chin rested on the crown of Elizabeth's head as she instinctively snuggled into him. Her face was buried against his left shoulder while her arms slowly moved of their own volition to wrap around his back and anchor herself more securely against his reassuring warmth.

More time stretched out and the hospital room was silent beyond the intermittent hisses, chirps and beeps exuded by the medical machinery as it conducted its impersonal survey of the designated health parameters belonging to whichever patient it was currently monitoring. Eventually, it was Ewen who broke the fragile quiet. Gently, he pushed away from a resisting Elizabeth who attempted to stay stubbornly nestled within the sanctuary of his chest, safely tucked away from the ongoing problems of life which would beset her once again when she as much as raised her head or opened her eyes.

Ewen was having none of it, he tilted up her recalcitrant chin and said sharply, "Elizabeth, look at me!"

Elizabeth tried to drag her head away from his firm grip but it wasn't possible and so, she resentfully opened her eyes and looked up at him. Though her face was pale and her cheeks tear stained, her eyes somehow remained an amazing luminous blue which Ewen had never been able to descriptively qualify beyond assigning the color as belonging uniquely to Elizabeth.

"That's better," Ewen said compassionately, "I need to ask you a question and you must answer it honestly, all right?"

Elizabeth stared uncertainly at Ewen and unconsciously bit her lip as she considered his request, "All right," she said, her voice sounding small and lost, "I'll try."

Ewen nodded and released Elizabeth's chin, satisfied that he now had her cooperation. "When you were growing up did you or Steven ever do something silly or dangerous which occurred when either of your parents was home with you?"

The question was innocuous, asked in a simple conversational tone, and Elizabeth responded easily, "Sure, one time, when Steven was about ten and I was about seven, we were playing out on the street. Steven was riding his bike and I begged him to give me a ride on the handlebars which was something that we were expressly forbidden to do and I fell off and there was a car coming and oh…" Elizabeth stopped speaking and sent Ewen a furious glare, "You tricked me!" She said hotly, "That wasn't fair!"

Ewen responded to her accusation with a sharp shake of his bandaged head and then winced as a pained expression crossed his features, "Ow," he said, "That hurts!" Ewen extended a tentative hand toward the back of his skull as though to feel the injury and then, thinking the better of his decision, let it drop limply by his side.

"You just had brain surgery," Elizabeth chided Ewen. She reached for the chart and scanned the medication orders, "You need to be careful not to exert yourself or you run the risk of aggravating your condition. I'll get you some medicine for the pain."

Ewen fell back upon his pillows too exhausted to argue. When Elizabeth returned a few moments later, he managed to sit shakily up with her help and take the pills she offered him without demur. When he was once more recumbent upon the bed, Ewen reached up for Elizabeth's hand. Recognizing that Ewen simply desired the solace of another human's touch, Elizabeth tenderly clasped his hand in her own.

"Get some sleep," she said softly, "You'll feel better when you wake up."

"Go out to dinner with me," Ewen mumbled sleepily, his eyes closed and his hand lax in hers.

Elizabeth smiled, her eyes expressing a dark elation that she was glad no one else could see, "Ask me sometime when you're not talking in your sleep."

For several days after their emotionally charged encounter, Elizabeth didn't see Ewen because she wasn't on the shift roster. She was busy spending her all too rare days off with Cameron and Aidan since Cameron's school was out for the summer. So, Elizabeth took both boys on a series of day trips to the zoo, the natural history museum and a visiting carnival. Even though she loved every precious minute spent with her sons, she couldn't help but think about Ewen in the infrequent spaces where she wasn't being someone's mommy, where she was just purely Elizabeth.

Elizabeth turned Ewen's brief parable over and over in her mind, examining it from every angle as she tried to determine if it truly applied to her situation. The insinuations of the idea were so earthshaking that her very thoughts shied away from the fundamental implication that what had happened to Jake was a straightforward accident. Such an uncomplicated conclusion simultaneously tempted and repulsed Elizabeth because it offered the undeniable allure of a possibility of an end to her self-abnegation by potentially enabling her to forgive herself.

Yet, the other side of the acceptance of such a belief was the almost insupportable realization that all occurrences, all life, merely depend upon the slenderest threads of fate. For instance, if Elizabeth had fallen beneath that long-ago car's tires then she would most likely have died, have, in that moment, like Jake, ceased to exist. Then it would have been her parents and Steven who would have suffered from the intolerable combination of grief and guilt which Elizabeth now daily endured. An even worse outcome, to such a scenario, was the startling awareness that Cameron, Aidan, and even Jake himself, would never have been born which unfathomable conceit was the most intolerable of all to Elizabeth.

The night before she was scheduled to return to work, Elizabeth sat on the cushioned window seat of her upstairs bedroom and stared with blind eyes upon the late night quietude of the suburban street. She wasn't seeing the street as it was now, dark and empty, but as it was that night more than a year ago when Jake had darted out in front of Luke's car.

If Elizabeth had come home earlier or later, if she had not checked the mail, if she had ascertained where all her sons were-an endless arrays of ifs flashed across her mind's eye in rapid succession. No matter how hard she tried to grasp the events of that evening, tried to twist them into some other shape, some other formula that would mean Jake would emerge unscathed, with his spiky blonde hair and irrepressible grin intact, Elizabeth found she was incapable of conjuring up such an outcome, no matter how desirable. Layered over every hopeful picture was a competing vision of a young Elizabeth Webber falling from the handlebars of her older brother's bicycle and almost instantly being crushed into oblivion.

Finally, after an indeterminate time sitting lost in her fruitless trance of trying to rewrite and recreate history, Elizabeth fiercely shook her head. "Enough," she whispered into the sleep-quiet of the house, "I'm stopping this now. I owe it to Cam and Aidan to not make Jake an accusing ghost who sits down with us at every meal." Silence slowly trickled back into the room, its absoluteness only marginally indented by the almost imperceptible ticking of a carriage clock sitting on the mantelpiece. Elizabeth's voice issued forth once more, a harsh sound, strained and tear-choked, "I forgive myself," she said, "I'm sorry Jakey but I have to let you go. I'll always love you, but not like this, it isn't right…for either of us."

When Elizabeth finally dried her tears and crept into bed, succumbing to an all too brief slumber before waking up to the incessant demands of motherhood and a career, she slept without dreaming.