If one thing changed, would everything else change?

Crash Sites

He thinks they have been asking him questions from the moment he left the womb. Women, that is. All of them needing something from him: Information. Reassurance.

Now she is watching him expectantly and he realizes what her questions mean - that he has to talk to her, or he'll lose her. He lets bits of himself slip out: Colors. Music.

And he waits.

"I have three sisters," he says finally. He lets the number wash over him, breathes quietly. Things are still lost, when you stop looking. "Four. I had four sisters. I... lost one of them."

Watch her carefully, Derek! You know how she is. Don't let her get lost. He folds her small fingers into his so she won't hop off like a sparrow with a crumb - that's what Mom says - while they walk. He's her big brother and that means he's supposed to look out for her.

Meredith's eyes are wide, her expression gentle. There's something about her face; it's not that it's accepting, exactly, more that it's used to bad news. The curve of her cheek doesn't change, her jaw doesn't set. She just listens. He craves this, wants to grab the sleeve of her winter-white coat and pull her into him. Pull himself out.

Watch me, Derek! She tugs out of his grasp, giggling, to show him a little fingerprint in the new cement. Don't tell, she whispers.

"What happened?" she asks softly.

"We lost her." He thinks at first that they mean the chase, hot on her trail, the wheels still on his mind. Doesn't even catch on until he hears Nancy sob.

"Car accident." He stares numbly through the trees at the welcoming silver of the trailer.

She's silent.

He runs down the list, honesty only slightly easier than he'd thought: "It was my car. She stole it. After she stole my prescription pad."

It's a bitter discovery, pages ripped off, the inevitable call from the medical board. He'd be dragged somewhere to answer questions he couldn't. I'm finished with her, that's what he rages. He tries to rip the rest of the pad in half but "your hands!" His training-to-be-a-surgeon-hands. Addison frees the paper from his twisting fingers, two of his knuckles streaked with faint lines of blood. Like he's punched someone the way he wanted to but really it was paper cuts. Paper! She presses the back of his hand to her lips and he jerks away, annoyed, but he can't push her off when she wraps her arms around his neck and presses in close, humming in his ears. "Amy will be back, honey. They'll find her."

"She was an addict," and it's the first time he's said it out loud, to someone new. Someone old doesn't count, someone who was there and watched his little sister disappear into the ugliness that consumed her. It sounds bleaker than he thought it would, harsher. A condemnation, or maybe just an assignment. He can't hear himself say what she is without hearing her voice instead, feather-light while she jumped into leaf piles and stomped through mud puddles. The things kids say: I'm going to be an astronaut! I'm going to be a ballerina! I'm going to be president!

"Derek, watch me!" She wants him to watch, to look at her. Calling at him from the edge of the lake where she dips little toes, ankles, knees. "Look at me, Derek!" She swims with an awkward flailing that's somehow grace and he laughs in spite of himself. "Watch this!" He hears the splashing but doesn't turn to look at her. Won't do to spoil her. "Come on, Amy, we have to go to the store." He hears her paddling behind him. "I'm a mermaid! I can't go to the store!" She splashes around and he turns, she's pretending her legs are bound together in a tail. "No feet," she giggles. "I"m a mermaid, see?"

"She was an addict." He says it again like it's all she was, because in the end ... that's all she was. He pauses, still a doctor. "They said if she'd been leaning an inch to the left she could have survived." He's often wished they could've kept that detail to themselves. An inch is so little. One joint of one finger and she might have emerged from the twisted wreckage of smoking metal. The space between two perforations of his belt and he might have been yelling at her for smashing up his prized car. The length of one thorn and he might have been bringing roses to her hospital bed instead of her grave. An inch is nothing. Nothing but the measure of space between life and death, between finding someone and losing her.

Meredith's face is soft with compassion now. The sharp bite of honesty presses his tongue to his teeth.

So he won't say, I lost my father too.

I could have lost you too, his mother says, smothering him in her embrace. With his face pressed into her ample bosom he can't ask the question that forms: was it you too or you two? Amy's in a doctor's arms now, legs cycling away from him, calling out shrilly. Someone that loud could never be lost. Right?

It's something else he blurts:

"I have a wife."

Meredith's expression doesn't change, almost as if she's been expecting this.

It's not the first time in these months he's said the word. Wife. On its own it's meaningless, it's a patient whose husband he's updating. He doesn't say my wife.

She slips through his fingers like water, lighter than air when he shakes her, how could you do this? And then bigger arms grabbing him. I'm sorry, man, I'm sorry. All he could do was drive as far and fast as he knew how, leave their white shocked faces behind, pretend he didn't see them in every streetlight and blinking motel sign on the road. Drive like he had nothing to lose.

"Had," he corrects. "I ... I lost her too."

He doesn't know who's sitting on a plane at that instant, over the Rockies, heavy with child. Doesn't yet realize that things we lose sometimes have a way of finding us again.

"I understand," Meredith whispers. She takes it from him, everything he's said, swallows it. She covers her hand with his.

Derek, watch me! Amy splashes in the water, sleek and eager and big-eyed, reminding him of a seal, her wet dark hair streaked with copper-penny highlights from the summer light. "Look at me!" she calls and this time he does, staring right at her until the top of her sun-bright head disappears beneath the surface. The water ripples briefly before smoothing out again - as if nothing has ever disturbed it.