Sorry for the delay in updating this story! I got the muse-foot kick in the pants I needed and now I am a lot more certain what needs to happen next. So here we go. It's Derek's turn now, if you've lost track ...
There's a feeling he gets sometimes when he's compelled to spend time with Addison's family. Maybe it comes from how closely he feels like he has to watch her.
Somehow, he's an intern again, on rounds, presenting a patient.
38-year-old female presenting with unresolved childhood trauma and co-morbid marital distress. Allergies include sensible shoes, airplane coffee, and fidelity.
"Addison." He reaches for her blackberry, but she pulls back before he can touch it. "Can you just – take a break for a minute?"
She ignores him, sipping her coffee again and making a face. "This is swill."
Also allergic to hospital coffee.
"I'm sorry it's not gourmet. It's a hospital cafeteria."
"Really? I hadn't noticed."
Definitely not allergic to sarcasm.
He doesn't rise. He's been married to Addison for eleven years; he's no stranger to the way she provokes him when she's under stress.
Particularly Montgomery stress.
He used to be better at handling it.
He used to be a lot of things.
"Will you eat something?" he asks quietly.
"In the cafeteria? What do you suggest, a bag of Cheez-Its?"
Frankly, he'd suggest anything that would occupy her mouth sufficiently to keep her from bitching at him.
"What do you want to eat?" he asks patiently.
"Nothing," she says.
Okay, he walked into that one.
He slumps down in the padded chair, watching Addison with her rigid posture and sharp movements across the table. It smells ... wet in here, the warmth of the large room not entirely unpleasant. People move in and out, fluorescent lights highlight the shadows under their eyes. She's still staring at her blackberry.
"What are you doing?" he asks finally.
"Reading."
"Reading what?"
"Articles my fellow sent," she says.
She doesn't have to tell him what kind of articles, and he shouldn't be surprised.
Naturally, she's reading up on the Captain's condition, on the surgery he's undergoing. She's analyzing procedure and prognosis and coming up with her own complaints and critiques, no doubt.
Ordinarily he'd expect her to go straight to the head of cardio.
But of course she can't do that now.
Which just reminds him of everything they left behind in Seattle. There was something foreboding about the prom. Something more than just the tragedy that preceded it or the administrative chaos surrounding Denny Duquette. Something was … building, that night, and he has the sensation that they left before it could come to fruition.
Three thousand miles away, Seattle seems tiny. Foreign.
Or maybe it's how big and cold the air feels when he's required to spend time with Addison's family. No matter how much kindling the butler threw on the grand fireplaces, it was always chilly.
As if she feels it too, she shivers a little.
"Cold?" he asks.
"No."
Of course not.
"What did you find out?" he asks, nodding toward her blackberry.
She makes a face that serves as a shrug, for her. "The odds aren't on his side," she says after a moment.
Addison is a surgeon – an extraordinary one – and odds aren't usually her term of choice. But he nods, taking her point.
He's holding his own cup of coffee halfway to his lips when she speaks again.
"There's nothing we can do."
The words are words they use to describe a terminal patient; he realizes Addison is using it only to illustrate their helplessness. The way they are just family here, not doctors, and have no role in the Captain's care.
..
..
The day of his engagement party, the Captain invited him to have a cigar. Naïve and wanting to please his almost-father-in-law, Derek accepted.
There was something off-putting about Addison's father, and magnetic at the same time. Attraction and revulsion, all at once.
His hair was perfect. Perfectly windblown on a sailboat, perfectly not windblown at a cocktail party, but always perfect. The same went for his clothing. His shoes. His tennis racket, the time he challenged Derek to a match.
The cigar made his throat burn. It was nothing like the pilfered cigarettes he and Mark would sneak behind Bartlett's Grocer after school.
But he smoked it anyway, out of what – loyalty to Addison, whose big pleading eyes begged him not to judge her family too hard, not to judge her? His own schoolboy desire to fit in?
Because there was a time before he knew the Captain and the damage he'd wrought where he wondered what it would be like to get to know someone else's father.
Maybe whoever raised Addison, his brilliant girlfriend who made him laugh, who made him crazy, would accept Derek too.
All that disappeared once he learned a little more.
You're nothing like my father, he thought that the first time he met the Captain. The Captain's swagger was brash. His eye was roving.
Such is life: loyal, humble Christopher Shepherd was dead with his Sunday leaf piles and evenings on the shag rug teaching his children how to play chess, and fickle, arrogant Charles Montgomery was alive with his barely-hidden peccadilloes and months-long jaunts to Europe.
It just wasn't fair.
He was old enough to know that's not how it worked.
But he was young enough for the unfairness to sting.
When he joined the crowd for the engagement party and Addison winced a little at the cigar on his breath and he apologized into her long fragrant hair he was reminded of something else, something he wished he had the courage to say to the Captain:
You're nothing like your daughter.
..
..
"They should have an update by now."
"Do you want to go back to his room?"
She looks at him for a moment. "No," she admits.
This is their dance: every time the mask falls, just a little, he's drawn back in, and then boom, the door slams again. She's a siren and he's a hapless sailor and then he remembers her father is the Captain and it's all a little too Greek for him.
In the maze of Montgomery dysfunction, Addison is still Addison.
And he has to remember that.
So he has to remind himself.
He reaches for her hand anyway.
"I don't want to be here," she whispers.
"I know." He rubs his thumb over her the back of her hand. What he is noticing and would never tell her is the prominence of veins he couldn't see when he first noticed her hands, holding a scalpel and standing over a cadaver. She was so young that day. They both were.
He would never tell her because she would be offended, angry, maybe hurt. For the same reason he pretends not to notice that she gives her hair the occasional touch-up or that although she's still Addison, she can't drink quite as much as she used to be able to.
For someone who statedly loathed her childhood and adolescence, his wife has never exactly prized the process of aging either.
Maybe the answer is in Bizzy, who is as immaculately styled and dressed as she always has been, according to Addison and as far as he can see. Her hair is the same shimmering blonde he sees in old photographs.
That wasn't what he grew up with.
Why should I dye my hair, his mother used to ask rhetorically, when I've earned every one of these greys? She'd name them as they grew in: there was the patch when Lizzie had appendicitis, the strands when Kathleen learned to drive, a whole swath for Derek and Mark's brief foray into motorcycles.
"Addie," he says.
She's looking down at their joined hands.
"Abdominal aneurysms can result in sexual dysfunction," she recites without inflection. She glances up at him. "The Captain will wish he were dead if that's the case, don't you think?"
Derek doesn't say anything.
"Although sexual dysfunction is kind of his hallmark, but not in that particular way."
"Addison…"
"I don't think Bizzy is prepared for the possibility that he won't make it through surgery," she says.
I don't think you are either, he doesn't say.
"She's still in love with him. After everything he's put her through, she loves him." Addison isn't looking at him, she's focused on the rings on her left hand, turning them in a deliberate circle.
"It's sort of touching, isn't it?" she asks after a long silence. "I mean pathetic, yes. But also sort of touching too?"
He's not really sure what to say. Touching isn't exactly a term he associates with either of the senior Montgomeries.
..
..
When Derek was a third-year medical student, he watched his girlfriend's brother, who he knew to be dating a woman named Phoebe, successfully hit on – and then leave a bar with – a different girl. A girl with a nose ring and, in Archer's ever-tasteful parlance, one of those really hard aerobics bodies, you know what I mean, right, Shepherd?
"I know, it's not ideal," Addison said at the time, once they'd left.
Her tone was all brush-off.
Breezy.
"It's just how Archie is."
Derek blinked. He was young, yes, but he had his own ideas about fidelity, his own admittedly rather rigid moral code. He spent a weekend in Nantucket with Phoebe, and he was fairly certain Phoebe wouldn't be too happy with just how Archie is.
"Does Phoebe know?" he asked.
Addison stared at him like he had an extra head. "Of course not."
"Someone should tell her. You should tell her."
"I should – are you serious?" Addison's eyes widened even further. If possible. "I would never do that."
"Don't you think she should know?"
"That's a different question." Addison played with the stirrer in her drink. "It's none of my business, Derek."
"So you're just going to … look the other way?"
"Yes. I am. But hey … listen to you, Derek." Addison downed the rest of her drink and grinned at him, though the smile didn't really reach her eyes. "Two years with me and you already know the Montgomery family motto."
There's a mean part of him now that thinks he should have taken that as a warning.
Except for years – and years and years – the idea of using Addison's family against her was anathema. He was the one who picked up the pieces when she couldn't avoid them.
..
..
There's so much time in hospitals.
There's not enough time.
But still there's so much of it.
It takes different shapes for doctors and patients and the families who wait for news.
Great swaths of time, fluorescent lit and scented with bleach.
Everything is daytime.
Everyone is tired.
..
There's a game he started playing in Seattle.
He looks at his wife, across a table or the flat miles of their shared bed or the back of her when she steps into the shower unaware of his gaze.
He focuses and tries to summon what they used to have. How he used to feel.
He decided long ago he could control his feelings. Control is necessary, for a surgeon. Precision. Calm. Emotions have no purpose.
So he looks at her.
38-year-old female presenting with passive aggression and far too much pride considering her affair. Treatment so far includes snubbing her in hospital hallways and ignoring her attempts to curry favor she doesn't deserve.
She's been driving him crazy in Seattle – not the way she used to drive him crazy, when he couldn't keep her off his mind or his hands off her body. She would fill up his senses so his lips tasted like her for hours, days, and it was the pounding of her heartbeat he heard when he closed his eyes in the shower.
In Seattle it's different.
In Seattle he's angry.
He looks at her, and he no longer hears the steady beep of more than a decade of marriage. Vitals. The way they must have sounded in New York. Steady and unremarkable, but without harm.
Now he hears the shrill call of a stopped heart.
He hears Code Blue.
Sometimes he hears hurry!
But at least they haven't called time of death.
Not yet, anyway.
..
"I should call my brother," Addison says, breaking another long period of silence.
Derek nods.
"Susan probably called him already, though." She's playing with the plastic rim of her paper coffee cup. She doesn't want to call him, apparently.
He doesn't ask why.
"I'm sure Susan called him," he says.
He just gives her the out.
At least that's something he can do.
..
They sit there like this, Addison resolutely scrolling through her blackberry, reading articles on her father's prognosis, avoiding his gaze.
He can see a lot more when she looks at him.
She can hide a lot more when she doesn't.
Showing the Montgomery family anything is a mistake. This is what he's learned from Addison. And this is what he's easily supported through his own experiences.
Showing weakness, showing vulnerability. It's just another way to arm them.
He can pinpoint pretty much every dysfunction in his adult wife to the child she was – map the the perimeter of the hole they left in her, the one it sometimes seems nothing can fill. Does that make it better when he wants to walk away? Worse when he wants to stay?
..
He's leaning back in the padded cafeteria chair, scrolling through emails. He can see from the way she's holding the paper cup of coffee, the weight of it, that she's almost ready for a refill.
Even if it's swill.
He gets up to get her another cup without asking; she takes it without speaking.
His watch says the Captain is still in surgery.
His watch says their day is just beginning.
"There should be news by now," Addison says abruptly, a few minutes later. If something triggered her to speak he didn't notice it.
"Susan would reach out, if there were news," he says tentatively.
Addison nods at this, and he's relieved.
Privately, he thinks it would be just like the Captain to die on the table without any chance for his daughter to get something that resembles closure.
He'd wait, of course, for Addie to fly across the country first. The Captain is used to snapping his fingers and getting what he wants.
It used to work on Addison.
Until six years ago, anyway.
..
"Did Bizzy seem worried to you?"
He's letting Addison lead the conversation, or lack thereof. She's sitting down and even chasing some of her coffee with water so he can't complain too much.
Sometimes she talks.
Sometimes she's quiet.
He rubs at a crick in his neck while he decides how to answer. Sitting like this is leaving him stiff.
He feels old.
He feels unsure, because yes might please Addison – to think her mother was showing feeling, and yes might upset her because it means her father is worse off than she thought.
No might seem callous.
No could be comforting.
"I don't know," he says finally.
"Yeah. I don't know either." She leans back in her chair, lifting her eyebrows. "At least Susan's here so she has someone to support her."
Derek doesn't say anything. He doesn't have anything nice to say to that. It could only be something about Bizzy having to pay people to support her, or pointing out the severe unlikelihood that, wherever she is, Bizzy is concerned with whether someone is supporting her daughter.
So he just nods.
"Maybe I should check on her," Addison says after a moment.
This strikes him as a terrible idea. But he's been married to Addison for eleven years. If he says it's a terrible idea, she'll turn on him. Blame him for his honesty, for not participating in the traditional Montgomery glossing over of anything ugly.
If he pretends it's not a terrible idea, though, and then she does it – and then gets hurt – he'll have to pick up the pieces.
He doesn't know which way is worse for him.
The odd thing is, Addison gets hurt either way.
"I'm sure Susan is looking out for her," he says.
..
He's offered more than once to go back – somewhere. Somewhere more comfortable. Surely in the ridiculous VIP area there's a lounge or a spa or something with softer lighting and less of a lingering smell of the boiling water that keeps cafeteria food semi-warm.
But he gets the sense they're in détente of a battle he never agreed to fight. Addison is in the cafeteria with nothing but her posture and her shoes to separate her from everyone else. She thinks he doesn't want to be anywhere more comfortable.
What she would say, if she joined in this conversation, is this: Oh, Derek? You know he prefers martyrdom as long as he can still enjoy the finer things in life.
They'd banter. He'd say, you don't know me that well.
She'd say: what'll you bet?
It would be the kind of bet where neither won and neither lost and they ended up out of breath and deeply satisfied.
He misses those kinds of bets, sometimes.
..
Addison isn't crying. Of course she isn't. They're in public, and people are watching.
He stretches his cramped fingers and remembers that Addison has seen him cry.
She has cradled his head and absorbed his tears and it's this vulnerability she's witnessed that makes him the angry now when he thinks of what's happened to their marriage. Empty.
He has seen her cry.
He has made her cry.
He knows exactly what she looks like when she's trying not to cry and the flicker in her eyes – one that means she's going to win the battle and one that means she's going to lose.
Her fingers are so tight on her blackberry now that her knuckles have lost their color.
"Addie."
She looks at him, and there's a sheen of moisture covering the indefinable color of her eyes.
He could say, it's okay.
He could ask, is there anything I can do?
She'd snap at either.
"McKay wrote that paper for me last year on cerebral ischemia resulting from aortic arch aneurysms," he says. "You want me to email and see if he'll send a copy?"
Slowly she nods. "That would be nice."
..
He buys a sandwich when his own stomach's growling becomes audible. He doesn't make the mistake of offering her some, just leaves the second half untouched on the shudder-inducing Styrofoam plate, millimeters past what could fairly be called his side of the table.
She eats a few bites, eventually, without comment. She's engrossed in something else on her blackberry.
"We could take a walk," he suggests finally. Truthfully, he wasn't expecting when he suggested coffee that they'd be camping out in the cafeteria indefinitely.
"Actually, I want my laptop," she says quietly.
"Your laptop?"
"My article." She looks distracted. "The one I told you about last week, remember?"
He nods. He doesn't remember.
"I haven't had time, at – in Seattle. But I have time now, so I might as well work on it. I want to work on it, but I don't have my laptop."
Right. It's in the Captain's hospital room, in the anteroom where they left their luggage. There's a silent moment where she tells him she doesn't want to go back to her father's hospital room, without words.
"Okay." He touches her arm, relieved at least that she doesn't flinch away. "I'll get your laptop."
She nods, and he leaves her sitting at the little round table decorated with the sad half sandwich and its little half-moon missing pieces.
He finds his way back to the VIP wing, with a brief black joke only he shares where he wonders if the doors will refuse to let him in.
Sorry, Shepherd, you're not Very Important. Maybe you could qualify as Marginally Important, but that's not VIP. It's right there in the name.
The doors open for him, though. Maybe they're fooled by the clothes Addison requested he wear. Maybe she's rubbed off on him after all these years.
Either way, he passes the elaborate coffee and tea setup, which now seems to include actual finger sandwiches; suppressing an eyeroll, he makes his way down the hall.
He knocks on the door to the Captain's room. No response; he's not back yet, but it seemed polite to knock anyway. God forbid the Montgomeries not stand on ceremony, and knowing them they'd just blame Addison for his etiquette failings anyway.
He pushes open the door, headed for the small anteroom where they left their luggage.
Derek has been an observant outsider to this family for more than sixteen years. What's remarkable is how little has changed, over time. He's seen photographs – and more than one portrait they've commissioned, as one does, with Addison and Archer moving from round-faced children to harder-looking teenagers but the Captain and Bizzy looking more or less the same from year to year.
That's the thing with the Montgomery family. There are no surprises.
There are difficulties.
There's a chill in the air.
There's tension.
Toxicity.
A lifetime of hurts large and small, explosions of the kind that are sometimes but silent but leave little bits of damage everywhere.
And there's alcohol.
A lot of alcohol.
Paragraphs of close-lipped, WASPy silence.
But there are no surprises.
It's with silent confidence in this constant predictability that he pushes open the door to the anteroom.
… where he finds Bizzy and Susan wrapped around each other in a passionate embrace, lips locked together in a way that leaves absolutely no question of their intent.
Surprise.
To be continued, of course. I love reading what you think, so I hope you'll review! (Also, I have a lot of works in progress, so I count on you guys to let me know which stories need attention!) Thank you for reading!
