I said I'd finish it eventually, so here it is.
I should say up front that ER was never an easy show and I felt obligated to write this ending in this way. I wanted to do justice to what the show was, and the show was a reflection of the real world, good and bad.
"Heroes"
When COVID hits, I have this fleeting notion that this is what we—me and Luka, the people we've worked with and been in the trenches with—have been training for our whole lives. That thought fades as soon as it becomes blatantly obvious that absolutely nothing could have prepared any of us for this.
Joe doesn't even have that brief illusion of being okay, which on one hand breaks my heart, and on the other, I kind of consider a triumph, since god knows the shit we could have exposed him to that would have made him jaded enough to think otherwise. A thirteen-year-old boy isn't exactly a ball of sunshine to begin with, and that situation doesn't improve during a pandemic that traps him inside with two parents who have to build a decontamination station in their garage so they can avoid exposing their kids to a deadly virus.
Yeah, kids. Plural.
Not long after our second anniversary, Luka and I finally have the talk. It's not fun, and there's a whole lot of guilt and self-doubt that gets vomited up in the process, but we agree: if we could do it the old-fashioned way, we probably would, but neither of us feels right about surrogacy and adoption is kind of out of the question. Agencies don't look kindly on alcoholics, particularly ones with not that many years of sobriety under their belts, and Luka isn't a citizen, and honestly, neither of us are all that confident that a background check would go well. Once it's all out there, it really does feel okay—we agree that with our work schedules, time is sort of a precious commodity, and Joe isn't starved for companionship.
And it really is fine, until I get a call one night.
I haven't heard from Caroline in almost three years at that point—she manages to keep her head above water for a stretch until she has to have knee surgery and prescribing painkillers to somebody who's already in a bad place is a recipe for disaster. She stops calling after a few months and I try to reach out but never get a call back. I keep an eye out for her name in patient records and have this constant fear of her showing up on a gurney, but it's an absolute shock when her number flashes on my cell one night and she tells me she needs my help.
It's an even bigger shock to show up to a parking lot an hour away and find her holding a kid and a couple of duffel bags and have her hand all of it to me—including the kid—and tell me she has to leave town. I mean, I've had some bombs dropped on me before, but this is right up there. All I manage to get from her is that she doesn't want her parents to know and that the "legal stuff" isn't a problem. She just tells me this is the right thing and she trusts me and drives off.
Everything after that is sort of a blurry mess, and I just remember calling Luka because I didn't have a carseat and him showing up with Joe in the back seat and trying to explain. And then a complete shitstorm of paperwork and court dates—not all that surprisingly, the "legal stuff" was just a note from Caroline saying she wanted me to have custody of her daughter—and this total made-for-TV situation turning out to be messy as hell.
Except that for all the anxiety and drama and home inspections, two years later we have legal custody of Shea and Joe is absolutely crazy about his little sister, right up until the moment they both stop being able to leave the house.
Trying to work out a home school schedule and be a doctor when hospitals are completely overwhelmed is a nightmare, and forces us into a position that I would swear up and down I'd never let happen—having my mother move in with us. Fifteen or so years of being medicated and being in her seventies only mellows Maggie so much and there are days, at least at first, when it's a real toss-up whether it's more anxiety-producing to be at home or in the emergency room.
We—okay, Luka mostly—build a makeshift shower in the garage and that becomes our sort of biohazard area, which is not much fun in spring in Massachusetts. The stress of everything doesn't bring out our best, and we go back and forth between arguing and having really ill-advised sex in the garage until it all comes to a breaking point. Fast, stupid as hell sex in a freezing cold garage and petty, spiteful arguments aren't mutually exclusive during COVID, and the line that exists between okay and very much not okay gets pretty fuzzy and to his credit, Luka knows the moment he crosses it.
And I'm finally capable of drawing that line.
It's taken a long time and a lot of other people being vulnerable and brave as hell, but by now I've sort of come to terms with the fact that what happened when Luka was in Croatia wasn't my fault. It's my sponsor, Jill, that finally gets me to say the actual words, which is that what happened with Moretti that night was rape.
It's a Tuesday afternoon—it sticks with me because the attendings meetings are on Tuesdays and we rotate who misses it to supervise and it's Axelrod's turn, so it's strange when the door to the conference room opens and I see Magda stick her head in and gesture for me to follow her.
"I've got a girl in Exam Two having a panic attack and there are bruises on her arms," Magda tells me as we head back towards the ER. "Lunchtime rush isn't letting up and the other options are DiCecco, Ramos, and Doctor Dumbfuck, none of whom I'd let near her if that was my daughter."
"Got it." I don't have to ask who "Doctor Dumbfuck" is. Her names for Axelrod vary, but she sticks to a theme. "Tox screen?"
"Sent it off, but it'll probably be clean."
The girl is maybe twenty-five—technically an adult but she's about half my age at this point—and I've been doing my job long enough to have a pretty good idea what happened. Still, it takes some time to get the whole story, and in the middle of her telling me that she woke up in her boss's bed with no underwear the morning after the company holiday party, I realize that it's really, really familiar. "I don't know if...I mean, we were drinking. And I remember parts of it and I didn't say no."
"Did you say 'yes'?"
"No. I don't…I don't remember, but I wouldn't have. He—I mean...he's not like one of those guys who goes around calling the women in the office 'baby' or putting his hand on your back when he walks by you. He's nice, I thought. But...I never would have slept with him if I'd been sober. I never would have initiated it. I just, I told my roommate and she looked so horrified and it just...the more I think about it, the less it feels like it was okay."
"It wasn't okay. He's your boss. And if you were drunk, you couldn't consent, even if you had said 'yes.'" It feels surprisingly easy to say that. Probably because I've said some version of it so many times. But it hits me in that moment that I've been thinking of it as okay when it was me waking up naked and confused, and spent years telling myself it was my fault because I got blackout drunk.
I call Jill on my way home and pull off into a strip mall parking lot, where she finds me about twenty minutes later still gripping the steering wheel like I'm driving through a snowstorm even though the car isn't on.
It takes me an hour to get the words out that night and almost a year before I bring it up with Luka and realize that I never actually told him the details, and I don't know if it's because I wasn't ready to face it myself or because I wasn't sure if he'd still blame me.
So when I have to say "stop" a second time as we're both trying to fuck out the exhaustion and absolute terror of everything happening in the world, he freezes like a deer in the headlights and backs off immediately.
"Abby, I—"
"It's fine."
"It's not."
"No, you're right. It's not. Did you not hear the first time I said it?"
He pauses in the middle of pulling on his pants and looks absolutely lost. "I honestly don't know. I think it just..."
"Is a hazard of a really bad plan to have angry, clandestine sex on the hood of a car while we're trying not to bump into a bicycle? What the hell are we doing, Luka?"
"I don't know. I don't know." He hands me my sweater from the pile of clean clothes.
"Yeah well, we should probably go ahead and call this a sign that this isn't the answer."
"I..." He rubs his hand over his face. "I'm sorry. I would never...I thought I wouldn't..."
"You were a little bit out of your mind, same as I was. I don't feel violated, Luka. You didn't hurt me."
"Still."
"Yeah, well, I have a feeling it was either going to be that or one of us breaking a leg or amputating a hand. I mean, holy shit, Luka. Sex in the garage might be the worst idea in history."
"I'd rather lose my hand."
"I know. And I love you for that but it would really start pissing me off if you did because I am not learning to cook now. And I'm not going to help you put on your socks every morning."
He cups my cheek. "I'm so sorry, Abby." He rests his forehead on mine. And for a second, everything else going on doesn't feel quite as bad. "I shouldn't have...I should have stopped. I don't want...Jesus, with everything right now, I don't want to lose this."
A couple days later, I come home to a treadmill in the garage, and somehow as much as I hate running, it feels good after a bad day. It's a few weeks before either of us are in the mood to have sex again, or have the time and energy for that matter, but when we finally do, he's deliberate about asking if I'm okay with what we're doing and it's a lot sexier than I'd thought it would be.
In a perfect world, that would be the lowest point. On some level, I know it's inevitable that we're going to get hit close to home but it still feels like a gut punch when we get the call from County about Wendy, who was of the nurses in the ER from way back when who'd returned to help out when things got bad. Frank comes close—he's on a ventilator for a week—but pulls through. Malik doesn't.
Magda, who's still the nurse manager at Mass General, goes into the ICU in June; she dies in August. We put a framed picture of her at the nurse's station. No one can even think about the idea of her not being there, so it feels like all we can do to keep her at her post in some way.
Luka gets sick in the summer and stays in a hotel the whole time, and thankfully it's a mild case. I think for awhile that I've managed to avoid it until September, when Maggie and I both test positive. There's a fight over who should stay or go: Luka insists that he should take the kids to a hotel and Maggie and I are both adamant that they need to stay at home.
Joe's always been on the quiet side and not prone to a temper—whereas Shea doesn't know the meaning of "inside voice"—so it's a big deal when he sort of explodes and screams at us all that he's tired of things not being normal and says he's not going anywhere and neither is anyone else. Shea marches across the kitchen like it's a battlefield and stands next to him with her arms crossed and declares that she's with him, and Joe adds that anyway, kids are at very low risk and Luka probably has immunity. Luka and I trade looks, trying to figure out when the hell they turned into adults who could cite medical advice, and that's that. We set a bunch of ground rules about what parts of the house are off limits and about keeping windows open, and when it gets to the point that neither Maggie or I can really get out of bed—and holy shit did I not envision a day when I'd be quarantined in a guest room with her watching game shows—they stand in the yard waving and yelling at us about their day.
I get hit a lot worse than Luka, but after four days of being knocked flat on my ass I start to feel better.
Maggie doesn't, and gets admitted a few floors up from the ER at Mass General. She goes downhill fast—I'm still quarantined in the guest room when they want put her on the vent, but Luka is there with her and knows the conversation we've had. He stays with her and lets me talk to her on FaceTime and that's the last time I see her. He calls at one in the morning to tell me she's gone, and finds me standing in the driveway waiting when he gets home and lets me cry until I can't anymore.
I can't even be in the same room when he tells the kids the next morning. And for all the people I've had to tell they've lost a loved one, telling Eric makes me seriously want to drink for the first time in a decade. I'm honestly not sure if I could actually go out and buy a bottle of vodka if I'd manage to resist the temptation.
Eventually I leave the guest room and vodka is less of a draw when two kids come barreling at me and hug me tight enough to crush me and I don't have to sleep alone in a bed that my mother slept in for five months to keep us from completely falling apart.
Still, I end up attending virtual AA meetings more than I have been in years.
I actually hear from my half-stepsisters when they call to say how sorry they are about Maggie. It's not particularly warm, at least with Annabeth and Deliah, but Rosemary and I have a kind of nice conversation—we've had a couple of them in between Eddie and Maggie—and she calls again a few weeks later to check how I'm doing, which is surreal. Kerry and Neela both call, too—a lot of people from County do, actually, even ones I haven't talked to in years, and even Richard calls and we're both polite, like we've finally turned into adults. Carter writes, and it's very touching and I call him to say thanks for finally learning how to write a good letter and we laugh. We don't talk all that often, but we exchange holiday cards and occasionally he calls to say hello and catch up, and we even had him over for dinner when he was in Boston a few years ago. I think it was a pretty serious trip for him to see this completely different life Luka and I have now, to meet Joe and Shea. He was sort of shocked to have a little kid he's never met share more or less all the details of her life and that it's an open adoption and her birth mom is an addict and so are lots of people and that it's not something to be ashamed of and also, they were learning about the different countries in school and did he really go to all the ones we told her about? As he was leaving he quietly told me that if he'd imagined a kid who could use me as a mom, it would be Shea, and it might have been the nicest thing I could have heard from him. When I talk to him after Maggie dies, he asks about the kids and I ask about the Carter Center, and he says they're working on getting funding for addiction services. I promise that we'll make it to the opening this time.
I talk to Morris, and it's been a while and I find out that he has a son now—well, a son who isn't part of a sperm donor program—and it's not a surprise to hear that his name is Greg, since I think losing Pratt shook him more than it did the rest of us. He tells me that working with Doctors Without Borders helped him feel like he was doing something to honor his friend, although his his wife, who's a paramedic, wanted to strangle him when he first mentioned going to Sierra Leone to treat ebola patients. He says after the last six months, she gets it. Apparently they've made a deal now that every year or so, one of them will stay home and one of them will volunteer for a few months, and he's freaking out at the thought of being a single dad for a while next year. I tell him I'd pay money to see that.
In November, Luka votes in his first election. He hadn't had any intention of applying for citizenship until a few years ago and then suddenly, his green card didn't seem like a guarantee. We'd been visiting Croatia once or twice a year since that first New Year's and for almost a year there was this completely plausible scenario where we'd go to visit his family and he wouldn't be allowed to come back, or that green cards might be harder to renew or wouldn't be renewed at all. Even if it wasn't all that likely, just the possibility was scary enough that he decided he'd apply, although even then, we weren't sure if he'd be approved. He's not thrilled about it, but when he takes the kids to vote (on Election Day, because some kid in Shea's class puts the idea in her head that it won't count if they do it early and she bursts into tears and won't stop until Luka promises we can all go on the day of the election) he's almost as excited as they are. Shea announces very loudly that it's his first time voting because he's "not from here" and immediately starts bickering with Joe when he tries to tell her that's not polite to say, and Luka looks completely embarrassed, and for the first time since losing Maggie I feel almost normal.
Christmas and New Year's don't feel much like holidays, but we do the best we can to make it fun for the kids. We let them stay up until midnight, and Joe has to wake us all up to watch the clock go from 11:59 to 12:00.
Before we go to bed, I put fresh sheets on the bed in the guest room for the first time since Maggie died.
Even when we both get the vaccine, it doesn't seem like things have really changed. I tell Luka that one night and he gives me a little half-shrug. "We aren't wearing trash bags at work anymore."
"Bet you never thought you'd be counting that as a victory."
"And we don't worry as much about running out of toilet paper."
I roll my eyes. "That's bleak."
"Yeah. I know." He hands me a cup of tea, in a mug that says "County General" on it in faded letters. "We'll get there."
"Will we?"
He sits down beside me at the kitchen table and reaches for my hand. "I think so. I mean, twenty years ago when you kissed me in the ambulance bay in Chicago, did you think we'd get here?"
"In the middle of a pandemic trying to keep two kids from killing each other while they fight over the volume of their online math classes? Uh, no, I definitely didn't."
"Abby."
"I know." I turn my hand over and let my fingers lace with his. "I'm just so fucking tired, Luka."
"I know." He reaches out and brushes his thumb over the County logo on my mug. "Never thought those days would seem like the easy part."
I lean my head over to rest on his arm and reach up to brush my fingers through his hair. It's going grey now, and I'm not even a little bit bothered because of course it looks good on him. "God, sometimes I think I should have been a sales clerk."
"You'd still have to go into work every day."
"Good point. Telemarketer, then. They can do their jobs from home."
He snorts softly. "Somehow I can't see you enjoying that. Besides, we wouldn't have met."
"You don't know that. I could have called to sell you a cable subscription and then heard that accent and fallen madly in love. We could have had a torrid affair over the phone under the guise of technical support. And you'd find a way to track me down and declare your love for me and buy a premium sports package. We always find each other, right?"
"Right. And that sounds very believable."
"Oh, please." I slide my arm through his, partly because I like touching him and partly to brace myself better so I can use his arm as a pillow. "Like any of the shit we've gone through has been realistic."
"What, you mean the naïve young med student falling for the handsome, mysterious doctor with the great accent? Happens all the time." He finishes his tea and jostles me as he stands. "Come on. You've got a perfectly good pillow upstairs."
I manage to stand up, even though it feels like my whole body is made of lead. It's felt like that for a year, now, and I'm still waiting for things to let up, even just a little. "Excuse me. Naïve?"
"Sorry." He puts the mugs in the dishwasher. "The stunning young med student, who turned into a beautiful and brilliant doctor."
"You're such a fucking suck up. I'm not sleeping with you just because you flattered me."
"Well, except that you are."
"You know what I mean. Come on. I'm bringing Shea to have breakfast with Caroline tomorrow and apparently being a morning person is a biological trait."
He peeks his head in Shea's door while I try to nudge open Joe's without waking him. Unsuccessfully. "Mom, I'm finishing my paper," he huffs. "I'll go to bed when I'm done. And you're supposed to knock." I swear, he sounds exactly like Luka when he's exasperated, minus the accent.
"I was just…checking to see if you needed help."
"Did you read 1984?"
"I lived through it, doesn't that count?"
"Good night, mom." Okay, so maybe he sounds like me a little bit, too.
Luka peers his head in. "Laku noć." He tugs me along with him.
"I'm blaming you when I fail Spanish," Joe mutters, clearly intending for us both to hear.
"I'll be up before both of you," Luka reminds me as we close the door to our bedroom. "And yes, I'll have coffee."
"Please do not let her have any. I don't know what her new obsession is, but she keeps trying to sneak sips."
He grins and pulls his shirt over his head before throwing it into the laundry bin. "Yeah, because not everything is biology."
"Oh, shut up." I throw my jeans over the bed, not aiming for the laundry basket at all. He catches them and cocks an eyebrow. "I'm not starting anything. Cheap shot for a cheap shot."
"I see." He sits on the bed to pull off his socks. As I walk by to toss the rest of my clothes in the hamper, he catches my hand and gives it a gentle tug. "Hey. We'll get through this, too."
"Yeah." I lean down and give him a quick kiss, and he makes a little sound of disappointment when I pull back. Which, okay, I love that he still wants me and wants to touch me. But right now, all I want is sleep. "Hey Luka?"
"Mm?" He pulls on a beaten-up t-shirt that he's had since we first started dating twenty years ago, and I always feel a little rush of nostalgia when I see it.
"I really, really love you."
"I know." He pulls me back in, and I let him wrap his arms around my waist and let my head rest on top of his. "I love you, too."
"Thank you," I murmur into his hair. "I mean, not for loving me. Although I guess that, too." I pull back to look at him, and sometimes it doesn't feel like it's been twenty years. It feels like I'm still a terrified nurse who's just gotten bounced out of med school with absolutely no idea what to do with her life, and the only thing I'm even remotely certain of is that I really, really want to kiss this guy who's looking at me like I might actually not be a complete mess. "Thank you for doing this with me. All of it."
He reaches up for my face and pulls me down to meet him and I kind of let myself just fall into him. "Always, Abby."