An hour later after several beers and a good meal, James was a little more optimistic. "Damn, Blondie, I don't know how long it's been since I had a home cooked meal, but that might have been the best thing I ever tasted."
"Yeah, seriously," Miles said. "You are like, a food genius."
Juliet smiled. "It was just pancakes. But thank you."
"No seriously. You should open a restaurant on the island," Miles said. "Give it some cheesy name…"
Juliet shook her head. "Thanks, but I'm not staying here to open a restaurant."
"You want to stay here?" asked Jin.
"I really have no idea," she sighed.
"Well think about it," Miles said. "What is there for us back home? It's 1974. I'm not even born yet. You guys are probably toddlers and CDs haven't been invented."
"Sun is in the future," Jin said. "If I go home, it is not home."
"Jin-bo's right, Blondie, none of us have got anything to go back to," James said with a nod.
Juliet pictured herself, a five-year-old version of herself, chasing after seven-year-old Rachel in their backyard. Somewhere at home right now, she was with her sister. But if she went back, what would she do? Watch her sister grow up and get sick? The technology to research cancer hadn't been invented yet, it's not like she could go back and try to save the day. They hadn't even discovered AIDS yet.
"Maybe there's nothing for us at home," Juliet said, "but what is there for us here?"
"The thing that everybody wants," James answered. "A clean slate."
X
She decided after the first few days that she was staying. It was crazy and stupid, and she was going to have to join the Dharma Initiative, but somehow she was oddly at peace with the whole thing. She'd always believed in free will, in choosing her own adventure, in making her own life. And she'd made it, all right. She'd made it a mess. Maybe for once she was making the right choice.
"Don't look so down, today's the day," James drawled, pulling up a chair in the cafeteria.
"Yeah, the first day of the rest of our lives," Miles snorted.
"It'll be fine, Miles," Juliet assured him. "I'm sure you got a really great job."
"I'll kill myself if they make me work in this place," Miles grunted, pushing his oatmeal around in his bowl. "Cafeteria duty? No thanks."
"Those damn aptitude tests are just to mess with us, Enus, don't sweat it," James said.
"And besides, you just lied anyway, right?" Juliet asked.
"What? No, that's crazy."
She shrugged. "It's what I did. If you think I'm going back to working in that infirmary after I know what's going to happen to all those pregnant women, you're crazy. I'll stitch people up if they get cuts, bruises, but as far as the Dharma Initiative knows, I only have the medical skills of a first year nursing student."
"Hell, you gotta be kidding," James said in disbelief. "You know how to do that stuff, why are you gonna stand by and let other people—"
"I don't want to talk about it," Juliet interrupted.
"Okay then," James grumbled.
"Here comes Amy," Miles said, pointing.
"Morning!" Amy chirped with a smile. "You guys ready to officially join the Initiative?"
"Ready," Jin said.
Amy smiled. "Good. Come with me, I think you'll like what we've found for you. Our first stop is just over here." She led the four of them out of the cafeteria to a small building near the middle of the barracks.
"Security?" Miles asked, reading the sign outside.
"Yep, isn't it great?" Amy said. "It happened to be a really good fit for all three of you, and we thought you'd like to stay together, so… you lucked out."
"Well look who's coworkers," James laughed, and the guys exchanged grateful glances.
"They're waiting for you downstairs," Amy said. "I'll be back in a little bit to make sure everything's okay."
"See you later," James said to Juliet.
She shrugged. "Guess so."
"Everything okay with you two?" Amy asked after the guys had gone inside.
"He just doesn't know when to mind his own business," Juliet mumbled.
Amy seemed undeterred. "Well, I think you're really going to like your job, Juliet. We're going to put you as a nurse in the infirmary."
Juliet felt her heart hit her stomach. "What? No, I—I can't do that kind of stuff, Amy. I don't know that much about medicine." Her face was starting to flush and she knew her eyes were filling with tears. Damn it! "I would be—I'm awful at… saving people, I can't save lives, Amy. Look over my test again, there's no way I'm qualified, you've gotta—"
"It's okay, Juliet, calm down," Amy said, putting a hand on her friend's back. "Breathe. If you really don't want to work in the infirmary, I'm sure we can find something else for you to do."
"Please?" Juliet asked, her eyes wild and desperate.
"Okay, we can go talk to Horace," Amy said, gently taking her hand and leading her to the main building. "I thought you'd really enjoy the infirmary. You went to nursing school for a year, I thought."
"It didn't work out," Juliet said shakily.
They entered the main building and Amy approached Horace. Juliet hung back and watched, reading their lips and straining her ears to listen. Amy really seemed to be pulling for her but Horace looked skeptical. How had this happened? She'd made it clear on her aptitude test that she had very basic medical knowledge and no interest in the subject at all. What could have given her away? She hated feeling out of control like this. Was this what Ben had meant when he was always talking about the island choosing their paths for them?
Amy walked back over to Juliet and sighed. "Okay. Horace doesn't usually do this, but since you really seem to be upset and we happen to have an opening somewhere else, you're in luck."
Juliet heaved a sigh of relief. "Thank you so much. You're not going to regret this."
"I certainly hope not."
"Where's the other opening?" Juliet asked.
Amy got a mischievous look in her eyes. "Know anything about cars?"
X
She was sweaty. She smelled. The jumpsuits were starchy and hot and awful. She was pretty sure she had motor oil in her hair. But she wasn't a doctor, and that was all that mattered. Juliet was thanking her lucky stars that she'd dated a grease monkey in high school and knew the basics of car repair.
"We don't normally have chicks in the motor pool," a tall, lean guy admitted to Juliet from under one of the vans. "But we just had a guy go home to be with his wife while she had her baby, and I guess they wanted to fill the opening quick."
"I just didn't want to work in the infirmary," Juliet admitted. "They were gonna put me there, can you believe that?"
"I'm Mac," the guy said, ignoring her question and offering a hand. "Been here about six months."
They shook. "Juliet."
"As in Romeo and?" Mac teased.
"If I had a nickel…" She laughed.
"That's why they wanted to put you in the infirmary," he said, pointing with a wrench. "You've got the best laugh. People like to hear laughs like that when they're sick."
He smiled and slid back under the van, and Juliet was glad she'd found a job that made her laugh again.
X
"It couldn't have worked out better," James said that night at dinner. Dinner at Juliet's had become a regular thing for them the past few days. She kept joking that she was going to make them cook eventually, but between the four of them, they got the dishes done faster than she ever could have alone, so she brushed it off for now.
"They've got cameras all over the barracks, absolutely every outdoor inch of this place is under surveillance 24/7," Miles added. "The areas are divided into grids all rigged with cameras, and they all feed into the security room."
"One of us is bound to be there most of the time," James said. "As soon as Locke comes back to this island we're gonna know."
"He will come back soon?" Jin asked. "Or not?"
"I guess we're gonna find out," James sighed.
It was the truth, but it sounded pretty ominous when he put it like that. They ate in silence for a few minutes. Forks clanked on plates, half-full beer cans landed with dull thuds back on the table.
Finally, Miles said, "Um, Juliet, you've got something on your face." He pointed to his temple.
It jerked Juliet out of her reverie. "What? Oh. Must have missed it…" She reached up with her napkin and wiped some motor oil off her skin.
"They really got you fixing cars, Blondie?" James asked, chuckling.
"Yeah, they really do." She smirked.
"Guess your little white lie worked after all," he drawled. "Now you're stitching up cars instead of stitching up people."
Juliet didn't want to give him the satisfaction of knowing that she'd almost ended up working in the infirmary anyway, so she just shrugged and said, "Yeah, I guess it did work."
After dinner, she and Jin played a quick, distracted hand of cards while James and Miles cleaned up, but an unsettling silence had settled over the small yellow house since mentioning Locke, and soon they parted ways for the night.
On his way out the door, James stopped and asked her, "You okay?"
She looked up tiredly from the couch. "Yeah, why wouldn't I be?"
"I didn't mean to call you out before. About not wanting to be a doctor," he said, shuffling his feet. "You got your reasons and I sure as hell don't understand them but I ain't gonna mess with them either."
"Thank you James." Juliet smiled softly.
"See you in the morning then," James said, and slipped out the door after Jin and Miles.
Juliet stayed on the couch, hugging a pillow to her chest. Her heart pounded every time she thought about the fact that she'd almost been a doctor again. It wasn't the responsibility that deterred her. That had never been something she had a problem with. It wasn't even the fact that most medical procedures she was familiar with hadn't even been invented yet. It was the fact that if the Initiative was somehow able to overlook and accept her futuristic medical knowledge, they would use her talents for the same things Ben and Richard had tried to use them for—and she knew what would happen to those women. Knowing the fate of every pregnant woman on this island was scary enough as it was. She didn't want to have to live with the knowledge, again, that there was nothing she could do to help them.
Then there was the other part of her brain that kept thinking back to her talk on the beach with Miles. What if things were different now? What if mothers on this island did carry to term because whatever caused those other women to die hadn't happened yet? What if the island didn't have a cruel sense of humor just yet? (Although she highly doubted that.) And if she had taken the job, what if something she did here in 1974 caused the things she saw thirty years later? She still didn't fully understand the whole 'this is our reality' thing, she didn't think even Daniel did, but it was still a possibility that haunted her.
She was still a strong believer in free will—this was the choice she had made, and this was the choice she was going to live with.