"So, how does this work?" Cristina asked, turning to Meredith.
"I... don't know," Meredith said. "Should I say a few words?"
"Do you have any nice ones?"
"Well, can you think of anything at all?" Meredith asked. "I can't think of anything."
It was sort of a lie. She could. She could think of a lot of words. But not a lot of them were happy ones. Or even kind. She stared at the urn in her hands, not really sure what to do, feeling lost, alone. Her mother was gone. She still didn't know quite how to feel about that. And Derek wasn't there, and she didn't know quite how to feel about that either.
It had been a week and a half since the night Mark had brought him home. A week and a half. He still wasn't sleeping well, though he never mentioned it to her. She'd wake up in the middle of the night, and he'd be muttering, tossing, turning. She'd shake him, he'd suck down long, halting breaths, blinking the nightmares away furiously, and then they'd resettle. In the morning, he wouldn't mention it, would pretend nothing had happened. The circles under his eyes were becoming a permanent fixture. He'd looked haggard lately. Haggard and careworn and overtired. He spent a lot of time at work. And he still wasn't talking to her about it.
He was eating, but only barely. After the war on toast, things had been a bit easier for him to get down, but only just. Sometimes she could get him to have a slice of fruit when they got home. She brought snacks to his office as often as she could. Sometimes he touched them. Sometimes he didn't. He skipped breakfast more often than not, opting instead for coffee or nothing at all. She found that worrisome. Every time she hugged him, she found herself surreptitiously running her hands along his torso under the guise of affection, trying to make sure he wasn't losing weight, that his skin was still supple and responsive to touch, that he wasn't dehydrated, or making himself sick...
She hadn't told him about this little outing with Cristina. He had enough to worry about. He didn't need to waste his energy on her, not when he had so little lately. That's what she'd told herself over and over for ten minutes that morning as they'd sat at the breakfast table in silence, her nibbling on cereal, him trying to wake up to the tune of coffee, copious dregs of coffee.
If only he would talk, one part of her moaned.
The other part was pining. She really, really missed having him there, at that moment, standing on the roof in the grayness.
"Meredith?" Cristina prodded.
Meredith glanced down at the urn, and then past it at the long, long drop, swallowing at the sudden vertigo the view brought. She backed up a step, startled, though she knew with the rail and the flowerbed there it would be very hard to fall. Even then, it made her nervous. Because she knew now, more than ever, that she didn't want it.
"Sorry," she said, reaching up to rub the bridge of her nose with her free hand. "Mind wandered. Is it bad that my mind wandered when I'm holding my mother's ashes in a jar?"
Cristina shrugged. "Why are we doing this here again?"
"Because it's my mother," Meredith explained. "And the only thing she ever loved was this stupid hospital. So, I figured she might enjoy eternity here. Or something."
And that made sense. It did. Chief Webber was here, the only person Alzheimer's hadn't stripped away from her mother. The only person who seemed to be indelible in a fragile web of memories. Memories that included Meredith, but only Meredith the mistake. Not the Meredith that she was now.
Meredith stared at her hands, and her brain was suddenly devoid of words, devoid of anything to say, anything at all, as if something had sucked them out of her like the last dregs of a precious daiquiri. An ambulance blared below somewhere. She heard distant voices, frantic as they tried to assess the patient being pulled out of the double doors amidst a flurry of activity. Doctors. Emergency medical technicians. Swarming like ants.
A brief flash seared her, and she saw a blurry image of Derek, panicking, crying, standing over her body, pushing his hands over her chest, muttering, a litany, "She's alive, she's alive, she's alive, she's all I have, she's alive..." His mouth came down onto hers, and she wanted to kiss him back, wanted it so badly, but she couldn't. She was dead. Dead, and cold, and gone. His breath filled her, only to release in a lifeless hiss. And then the picture faded, bled away like an impressionist watercolor, and she was back in herself again, staring at an old, unconscious man as they wheeled him out of the ambulance bay and into the emergency room.
She blinked, trying to focus. Projecting, she was just projecting. It hadn't happened.
"So, what should I say?" she asked. She shivered at the cold, wet air.
"I don't know, Meredith. She's your mother."
"Well, what would you say to your mother?"
"Meredith, we're not going to go there right now. I'm here for moral support. Not personal reflection."
Meredith shifted the urn in her hands. Okay. Okay, she could do this. She could think of last words that were worth a damn in the grand scheme of things. A strange sense of finality pounded on her shoulders. Last words. What on earth do you say to your dead mother if it's the last thing you're ever going to say?
"Hi, mom," she said.
Cristina gave her a thumbs-up. "That's a great start. Keep going."
"Cristina..."
"Sorry."
Meredith sighed and continued, trying not to feel ridiculous about talking to a bottle. It was just ashes. Just an object. This was more for her own closure than for anything else.
"We're on top of Seattle Grace. You can see all the helicopters flying in with traumas from here. And there's a good view of the entire ambulance bay, which is a veritable turnpike for bloody accident victims. I think you'd like it. Maybe. Well, I hope you would."
"I like the view."
"Cristina..."
"Right. Moral support."
She thought about all the memories her mother had created for herself here and the fact that the Alzheimer's had ripped them away from her. This seemed like the most appropriate place to put her mother, where she could look down on all the things she'd forgotten and what little she had remembered.
The world flashed as she looked down at the urn, flashed and disappeared, and then she was standing at the end of a hallway, a blurry, dark hallway with gurneys, and her mother was walking toward her in navy scrubs, looking determined. "You're anything but ordinary to me," Ellis Grey said, and then Meredith turned to run and run because she was desperate, desperate to get back. Snap, flash, and she was looking at Cristina looking down on her, and her friend's eyes watered with tears as Meredith struggled to say a word, any word. Ouch seemed the easiest. Meredith gasped, blinked, and the image vanished, leaving her standing on the roof, urn in her hand, best friend staring at her expectantly as the drizzle continued to dust them.
She brushed her hand across both cheeks. She was losing her mind. That was what.
"Are you okay, Mere?"
"It's nothing. Wishful thinking getting the better of me," Meredith said. Her hands ran along the grain of the urn. It was ridged, not smooth.
"I know I disappointed you, but-," she began with a sigh. She thought back to the lucid day her mother had had, to the disparaging litany of pain her mother had dished at her about how much of a disappointment she was. About how unfocused she was. How... mushy. And she snapped.
"You know what?" she said. "I do love Derek. And he doesn't make me wishy-washy. He completes me. My world is this huge, tumbling, morass of confusion, being an intern, being an adult, which both suck, by the way, not that you care, and when he's with me, the tumbling stops. That doesn't make me weak, or pathetic, or reliant, or unfocused... It makes me... Happy. Happy despite the crazy. I'm going to be an awesome surgeon, Mom. An awesome one. If it takes me some extra time to get there because I'm trying to figure out what I want, so be it. But it doesn't make me unfocused or crappy at what I do."
"You tell her, Meredith."
Meredith sighed. Just standing there, just thinking about all of this, it was exhausting. "I hate funerals."
"This isn't a funeral."
"It's close enough!"
"Mere, just say what you need to say. Tact is for wimps."
She sighed, frustrated that she couldn't say what she wanted to, couldn't find the words she wanted, but then she let the undertow of rage take her with it, and she couldn't stop. It was liberating.
"I hate that you never got to know me after I finally cleaned myself up and went to med school," she said. And then she was ranting, ranting, and the words tumbled from her lips in one long, babbling discourse.
"I hate it," she said as she began to pace. "I hate that the only thing you ever got to remember was Meredith the punk rebel, the one nobody ever talked about at family reunions, the one with the pink hair and black skirts and fishnet stockings and army boots, the Meredith that needed a curfew, yet never followed it. The Meredith that took off to Europe instead of to med school. I hate that you remembered the part of myself I least like to remember. I'm a surgeon now. A good one. I have a steady relationship with a really great, caring, successful guy. I have friends, wonderful friends. I have a life that doesn't usually suck, at least not these days. I'm happy to be alive, which, really, was the best thing about me dying, me figuring that out. And I'm pissed that you missed all of it. It's not fair! And it makes me angry." She found herself hoarse, hoarse from the shouting.
She looked at Cristina. "That's how I feel about my mother dying. I want to be remembered for who I am, not who I was, and she never will. That's it. In summary. That's it."
Meredith stood there panting as the words skittered to a stop, left her hollow and cold. The breeze whistled against the railing, ruffled her scrubs and her lab coat. She clenched her fingers around the urn, the cold, quiet urn. Her hair stuck in wet tendrils to her face. Drizzle flew everywhere, making it hard to see.
Her mother wouldn't remember. And she hated it.
After long moments, the flush of anger left her. The panting, overwhelming breaths calmed. And she was just a daughter, standing on top of a building, trying to say goodbye to her dead mother. The anger seeped out of her bones and slipped away into the misty gray.
"Okay," Cristina said.
"All right then," Meredith replied.
She opened the urn and dumped its contents into the flowerbed. As she worked at them with the small trowel Cristina had brought, they disappeared. Disappeared into the soil. She sighed. And sniffled. And then she was crying again and cursing herself for it. Damn it. Why was she crying so much lately?
"It's okay to be upset, Mere," Cristina said.
"But it still sucks."
"I know."
She worked with the trowel until she couldn't see anything anymore, couldn't identify any part of her mother separate from the soil. She handed the trowel back to Cristina. They stood in silence for a few moments. And then Meredith turned, looking blearily at the exit door.
She walked, walked, walked with Cristina following just behind, only to stop on the steps. She collapsed there on the first one. She sat and stared at her hands. The step was cold and uncomfortable, ridged at the tip to prevent tripping.
Cristina sat beside her without word.
After a long silence, Meredith turned to Cristina and asked, "Do you believe in near death experiences?"
Cristina's eyes widened, just a fraction, and then she narrowed them again. She stuttered on a syllable, just one, and then she was cool, collected Cristina. "I believe you could have had a very convincing dream..." she said.
"That's what I keep telling myself it was." Meredith picked at a suddenly interesting piece of lint on her scrubs. Amazing that after all this time, Doc's hair was still working its way through the dryer at home.
"Serotonin does some crazy stuff, Mere," Cristina said. "Maybe you saw things... But..." Her tone said it all to Meredith. That she thought it wasn't real. That she thought it was fake. That, while Cristina believed Meredith believed it, she didn't believe that Meredith had actually experienced anything. That every snippet of memory Meredith could grasp in her hand, what little she could replay, every blurry image -- all of it was conjured. Conjured by neurotransmitters released when the brain was dying. Her brain. When she'd been dead on the table. For over three hours.
She hadn't really seen her mother or anything else. It had been fake. The last desires of a dying surgical intern who'd been too stupid to swim.
"I just remember bits and pieces really," she said, feeling the need, the strange need, to tell someone, anyone about what she'd seen. And with what had been going on lately, Derek, as much as she wanted him to be the one she told, well... She didn't want to cause him more grief. That was the last thing she wanted, and she doubted he would deal well at all with even a mention of her death. "Just bits," she continued. "There's this flash of my mother, walking past me, hugging me as I run down a long, dark hallway. And I think I remember seeing Denny."
"Denny," Cristina said. "Izzie's Denny?"
"Yeah."
"You barely knew Denny..."
"I know." Meredith shrugged. "I don't pretend to understand it."
Cristina nodded, and they sat in companionable silence for a while. The stairwell to the roof was quiet. Activity only flooded it when a medevac helicopter was bringing somebody in for emergency treatment. And, that day, Seattle Grace was closed to medevac emergencies while they tested their broadcasting systems and response preparedness, or some such bureaucratic red tape like that. So, it was quiet and guaranteed to stay that way. That's why she'd chosen that day to dump the ashes.
Meredith took a breath. "Was Derek... really upset?" she asked.
She watched Cristina swallow and take a long, long moment to compose herself. "We all were," Cristina said, and the uncharacteristic way that her voice broke apart on the words sent a spear of guilt at Meredith.
Meredith tried to stop the sudden prick of tears. Again. "But you're not starving yourself. You're not having nightmares. I hope," she said.
"No."
She sighed, leaned over so that her torso rested on her knees and her arms stretched out to her toes. "I'm just trying to understand what's going on with him... I know he's upset. Upset that I died. But he won't talk with me."
"He was pretty shook up, Mere," Cristina said after a long pause. "What little I saw of him. It might be taking him time to... To cope."
Meredith gripped the soles and canvas of her Converse sneakers, squeezed them until her toes hurt. "I wish I knew how to help him."
"You could ask somebody in the psych department for ideas," Cristina suggested. "Dr. Prahbu, maybe. But I do know that sometimes the best thing for traumatic stress is to just let it run its course. Help him if he asks. But let him work it out on his own if he doesn't. You don't need to worry too much unless it continues for too long. And only it's been, what? Just less than a month, I think. Since you died."
"Do you think that's all it is? Traumatic stress?" Meredith asked.
"Well, as much as my opinion as a heart surgeon counts... Yes." Cristina nodded. "It happens, Mere. People experience things that they can't handle, and they wig a little. He's got some of the classic symptoms."
"I guess. I just hate seeing him suffer like this, knowing that it's my fault."
"It's not your fault, Mere."
Meredith reached up, covered her face with her hands. She hadn't told Cristina, hadn't told Cristina all of the details. Everyone at Seattle Grace knew she'd been knocked in the water by accident, which was true, but they also thought, except Derek, that she'd simply been overcome by hypothermia too quickly to struggle. It was a reasonable assumption. She hadn't corrected anyone. And Derek didn't speak of it, ever. It was as if the moment she'd confessed to him was gone, cut out of his mind, excised. But then, they didn't seem to talk about anything lately.
And she needed it. Needed to talk. She found herself needing it to the point that it hurt.
She rubbed her face, inhaled deeply, the aroma of her cinnamon-scented moisturizer pooling in the back of her throat. She swallowed. She pulled her hands away, sat up, and looked at Cristina, stared.
"It kind of is my fault," she confessed. "And Derek knows."
"Oh," Cristina said. And then her eyes widened, she swallowed, and her voice dropped an octave. "Oh..."
"It's not a moment I look back on fondly," Meredith found herself babbling, trying to explain. "I'm such an idiot. It's just that the water was cold. And I was so tired... And for just a second... Just one stupid second... I just... I just didn't want to swim. I didn't jump in on purpose, I fell. But I could have saved myself, maybe. I didn't even really try. And I can't believe I'm telling you. I didn't want to tell anyone." Babble, babble, babble.
"Mere..."
Meredith wilted. "I'm sorry. You didn't need to hear any of that."
"No," Cristina said. "No, Mere. I always need to hear that. You can always tell me this stuff. Always. Okay? Don't go jumping off bridges instead."
"Like I said, I have the enlightenment thing going for me now. I'm happy. To be here. I just wish Derek was happy about it."
Cristina raised a hand, awkward, hesitant. She held it there over Meredith's shoulder for a fraction of a moment before laying it to rest against Meredith's back. Warmth seeped through Meredith's scrubs. "I'm sure he's happy you're alive," she said. "The noisy sex Izzie keeps complaining about it should tell you that."
"Sometimes he has a funny way of showing it, aside from the sex, I mean," Meredith said, and then she was sniffling again, uncontrollably. Her eyes burned, and again, she was crying. "I hate crying," she said, her voice breaking.
"Want me to beat him up in the parking lot for you?" Cristina asked. "Because I could."
"Cristina..."
"Sorry, just trying to inject some humor. But I would beat him up if you asked me to."
"I know. Thanks. I think."
She stood, slowly, wobbly, she stood. Cristina followed suit. She looked at Meredith's empty urn and said, "Let's go drop your urn off at your locker. It'd be weird, you carrying that around."
"Okay," Meredith said.
And they walked down to the locker room without any more words.