AN: This chapter has been killing me! I've written it and rewritten and rewritten it. Now I hate it and want it out of my life. It's blocking me. I can't see past the stupid thing. Hopefully I will be able to now. Reviews would help. Questions, suggestions, anything.
It was a bad day. It had been a bad week. If you didn't know better you wouldn't think much of one of the best hospitals in New York City. How would you know not to? The chairman of the board, who referred to the bible as four thousand years of the telephone game, was in the chapel. The dean of medicine was a wreck. He attended all his meetings and performed all his tasks but it was all far from his best work. The various department heads under him took the brunt of the fallout and their jobs were already hard enough. The head of Cardio was hiding in an empty conference room because he wanted to close his eyes for five minutes and and not see the walls crumble.
Anthony and Eli were playing hookey. Eli was in his room. The volume on his seldom used home theatre system was turned up as far as it would go. His ears hurt, his core vibrated uncomfortably with the bass. Every blind was drawn and the lights were off but the darkness was not comforting. He would go to the hospital later, when his mother wouldn't get worked up about it. Every once in a while he picked up his phone and scrolled to his brother's number but never dialled. He knew there was nothing he could offer, outside of annoyance.
Anthony was in his father's hotel in an empty bathtub. Liquor bottles, cigarette boxes and joints littered the tiles. There were bar floors that smelled better than him. He still carried around the dark, raw ache of Audrey's death. None of the others had thought about Isabella's predicament more than he had. They were all avoiding it, hoping for the best. Anthony's hope was spent. He was the one to hide her car, the one full of secrets. He was worried for her. The pneumonic plague attacked the lungs. Isabella's were lined with tar and had been through a few rounds of waterboarding. If the injuries to her ribcage were anything to go by, they had probably been punctured at some point. The death rate, even with early detection and treatment, was fifty to ninety percent, not to mention general health. The outlook was not good, and that was the generous view.
Isabella was itching to pull her chest tube out. She didn't want it there and it wasn't the first time this week that she thought of just ripping it out and the rest of it be damned. She couldn't give in to that though. You gave up your right to check out when you became a parent. No matter how hard it got... and right now it was really hard.
The words 'post traumatic stress disorder' made Isabella roll her eyes. A bad dream was a bad dream. She truly did not understand how a conscious mind replayed a miserable event... until she was locked in a plexiglass box, being watched every hour of every day. Fortunately for her bunkmate her fear was like a perfume she wore everyday. It was more concentrated in their current location but she was skilled in the art of making it background noise. Unfortunately skills go to sleep when you do.
The Irishman was sad. He didn't know how to help his friend and every scream she uttered at night before he could wake her was a cut on his soul. By the end of the first week he remembered the names she screamed: Cain and Raphael, the ones she whispered: Charles, Anthony and Eli, and the ones that made her cry: Sarah, Billy and Bastian.
Quinn Shaughnessy wasn't the soundest sleeper either. He was also haunted. He just didn't talk in his sleep.
There were visitors. You didn't need all the fingers on one hands to count Isabella's. Irish had more but it didn't really matter. The ones he was looking to see were not coming. He knew it but he hoped. "Let's talk," he suggested. The more silence there was during the day, the more noise there was at night, and by noise he meant screaming. They were trapped with themselves and all the things they tried so very hard to run away from.
"I wonder what the weather's like," Isabella made idle conversation. She knew full well that this was not what he was suggesting.
"I keep hoping that my parents will come," he bypassed her deflection, "I know they won't but I hope."
"What did you do Irish?" she gave in, "Parents will cut you off for using to the point of falsifying prescriptions but they'll welcome you back with open arms at even the promise of cleaning yourself up. Yours gave you a severance package and didn't even blink when you became a doctor."
Shaughnessy opened his mouth and closed it. Whatever he wanted to talk about, he had trouble saying. Then again he probably didn't expect much of a response, let alone an in depth probe.
"That skin graft covering eighty percent of your back? A better job could have been done," she pointed out, "And you could have the scars removed but you don't. I recognise that. You're hanging on to pain. People call it punishing yourself."
"I had a brother," Shaughnessy said after a long silence, "He was the good one, the one who was going to become a surgeon. I was the junkie who burned the house down. He died in that fire. I killed him."
It was silent for another long stretch of time. Isabella wanted to tell him she was sorry, that he should forgive himself but she didn't. She knew it would just be putting sandpaper to a wound that was never going to heal anyway.
"There's a moment, after you've saved someone's life, when the world becomes quiet," Isabella said, "It doesn't last but for a few seconds you can justify your presence here. For a few seconds, you have peace."
"I know. What did you do that's so unforgivable?" Shaughnessy asked. He wasn't asking with the intention to argue, like everyone else does. He knows there are unforgivable things and he can recognise someone who's beating herself up.
"I ran away from home when I was eighteen," Isabella started, "I got mixed up with some people I shouldn't have and in my absence my mother and step father were killed. Their house was burned to the ground. By the time I had sense enough to go home my father had died of a heart attack. He was forty four," her nails bit into her palm. "I fell in love with Billy, he died for it. I had a baby girl, she didn't live long enough to sit up on her own. You've been friends with me for five minutes, you've been shot and you have the plague. People shouldn't die for caring. It's unforgivable."
There was silence. Shaughnessy recognised this guilt so he knew there was nothing he could say. They just lay in their beds either coughing or quiet as the misery of the day's confessions hung in the air. Crawford came by to check on Isabella. She looked worse than Shaughnessy. Her skin was ashen, her eyes sunken, puffy and red rimmed. She was sleeping and he didn't want to wake her. Shaughnessy had taken the opportunity to catch up on some shut-eye.
He left a message that Isabella be told he came by. She didn't want them hovering but he wanted her to know he was thinking of her, always. His mother was being a pain in the ass, coming over and cooking like he was the sick one. She was a sweet, overbearing woman who sometimes forgot her son wasn't sixteen. Charles came around too. He watched Isabella, aching to touch her cheek, to put her head on his chest and wrap his arms around her. Upstairs his ex, ex, ex wife was provoking his new wife. It was Rosemary's way of passing the time, ruining Charles' marriages.
"Where's your husband?" she asked Kindle.
"Visiting the mother of his children," Kindle answered casually, "She contracted the plague while playing Good Samaritan. Sadly the kid she brought in didn't make it. Pre-teen Jane Doe," she shook her head.
"My heart bleeds," Rose said, "For you. I bet you hope the little slut bites it."
"Why would I want that?" Kindle smiled. She knew how much this woman liked to torment people.
"Play it cool all you like," Rose was undeterred, "She's got Charles wrapped around her little finger and she's not even trying. She's kicking your ass."
"You're short sited," Kindle picked up a patient's chart, "It's draining to love someone like Isabella. He can't do it forever, unless she dies. Then she really kicks my ass."
"You're conniving," Rosemary laughed.
"Charles has never been known for his taste in women," Kindle looked up at Rosemary.
"Take me down to the kindergartener," Rose was getting bored with Kindle. She'd accepted the fact that her husband was in love with another woman. Thus she had no entertainment value.
"The kindergartener has tubes and needles in some not so fun places," she snapped the chart she wasn't reading shut, "Leave her alone."
"Now that's just stupid," Rose's smile returned, "You think he'll love you more if you're nice to her."
"I think he'll respect me more if I don't let you manipulate me," Kindle responded. Rose walked past the nurses desk, "I'll call security," Kindle warned, "The CDC has a stick up its ass about this quarantine thing."
"You grew balls," Rose smiled admiringly.
"No, I just grew," Kindle sighed, "I'm too old for your games, Charles is too distraught and Isabella is in pain. She's too young to know how to deal with it so she gets to be a bitch. You need to get on your broomstick and back to the Hamptons. Now."
"What she said," Charles came up behind Kindle and kissed her hair.
"Hey cherry pie," Rose smiled at her former husband. He just rolled his eyes and turned his back on her. "Thank you," he caressed Kindle's cheek, "For being so supportive," he gave her a slow deep kiss, "I'm heading home. Do you need a ride?"
"Let's spend the night here," Kindle brushed his hair, "I'll get you a change of clothes in the morning."
"You're too good for me," he kissed her again and went to find an empty On Call Room.
"And to think you had to get married to become an evil mistress," Rosemary watched the exchange.
"Oh Rose," Kindle tucked her hair behind her ear, "I wouldn't have lasted over a decade with Charles if I were all sugar."
No one could disagree with that. All the women he'd spent more than one night with were screwed up and destructive on some level. "The keyword was mistress," Rose turned on her heel and walked away.
"Bitch," Kindle spat when Rose was out of earshot. She wouldn't give the bitch the satisfaction. Kindle then cut out on her shift and joined her husband in the hospital bedroom. "I hate Mrs Bass 2.0," she said as she stripped.
"How about you make me forget Mrs Bass one to four?" Charles pulled her into his lap and kissed her roughly. She'd barely gotten her arms around his neck when the clasp of her bra was undone. This was the kind of sex Kindle had been missing. Charles being his primal self. He laid her on the floor and pulled her pants and underwear off, lifting her legs to his shoulder.
"Oh God I've missed this," she pulled her hair as she watched him push his pants down.
"Good," he pulled one of her legs to the other side of his body, "I don't feel particularly giving right now," he slid on his forearm and guided his member into her.
"Yeah," she wasn't really listening to him any more. She whined as she squeezed his biceps, arched her back and dug her heels into his calves. "Kiss me," she pulled him closer by the collar of his shirt. Charles kissed her neck, her shoulder, her cheek, her ear. He nipped her sensitive skin with every thrust, eliciting sounds that could be heard from the other side of the door. He was rough, almost brutal. She's tired of waiting for him to do it so she put a hand on either side of his face and kissed him on the lips.
She harder she kissed him the more flaccid he became. He stopped and laid his head on her shoulder when his rod turned into rubber. "Fuck!" he slammed his fist into the floor.
"Get off me," Kindle was horny, frustrated and out of patience. Charles ignored her order, penetrated her with two fingers and rubbed her clit with his palm until she came. He removed his hand and lay on top of her, seeking comfort or, at the very least, sleep. He found it, on the ample bosom of his supportive wife. Anthony found it in the bathtub he'd been sitting in all day. Eli hadn't gotten out of bed. Aaron couldn't sleep. He watched Maria sleeping. She did this cute little pout that made him smile. It had been a hard week but for few hours it was peaceful.