AUTHOR'S NOTES: I recently rewatched ER seasons six through nine for the first time since they aired, courtesy of a couple rounds of COVID. Even after all these years I'm still mad at how Abby and Carter's story played out.
This story takes place after "The Letter" (8x22) and in an AU where "Lockdown" and the rest of it never happened, mostly (she says, in the middle of a monkeypox outbreak). Epigraph by Sufjan Stevens.
In the Wake
And I would say I love you
But saying it out loud
It's hard so I won't say it at all
And I won't stay very long
She's been here many times before. If not in life then in her imagination, or, if she's really unlucky, in her dreams, at the frontier of helplessness. It gets harder to tell the difference, the older she gets, between the drinking and the repression. Especially when they all share the same nightmarish qualities. Maggie, bottomed out. Maggie, vandalized by vomit and blood. Maggie, feral. Inconsolable. Irretrievable.
Dead.
At the last image she teeters on some kind of edge. She's been here many times before, but not even practice can prepare her for identifying her mother's body.
"Abby?"
Drinking is not an option, at least not at the moment, in the passenger seat of a rental car. That leaves repression. She wills herself back. It's almost reflexive by now, after a lifetime of practice.
"I'm okay," she says.
She can feel Carter glance at her from behind the wheel, hear the crackle of his scrutiny. It makes her tense, knowing how legible she's become to him, like an agile animal ready to flee. If only there were somewhere to run.
The sun is setting as their car pulls into a rest stop, the last outpost at the close of civilization: gas, motel, diner. They're on the first flight back to Chicago in the morning, and this is their somewhere in the miles of nowhere between the coroner's office and the airport. She finishes a cigarette in the time it takes for him to check them in and carry their bags to their adjoining rooms. He leaves her bag on the bed, then leaves her alone.
She lies down next to her bag, a pair of inert objects, and she begins to play a game. One she's played for some time now. The game is, what is Carter doing?
At first she played with professional interest, a med student diligently observing her teacher. What is Carter doing? Carter is intubating a patient. Carter is performing a spinal tap. Carter is losing blood faster than they can pump it in. Then Carter was injecting himself with fentanyl, and she agreed to be his sponsor and played with vigilance. Carter is having a good day. Carter is having a bad day. Carter is thrusting a pair of Vicodin at her, clammy with toilet water and panic. After she became his friend, his confidante, she was even having fun. Carter is lending her a pen and a getaway limo, her accomplice in black tie. Carter is dating a teenager with the upper hand. At least until Maggie put an end to her fun. So did Carter, once he made his intentions, then his displeasure, known to her, the wind agitating their hair and the water at their feet. She wasn't his med student or his sponsor or his friend anymore, and their easy camaraderie became just another loss for her to survive.
It had been a long time since anyone had penetrated her defenses - she and Luka had held each other at arm's length or in bed - and Carter had done it because he was an addict, too. The program gave them a grammar for articulating all the things that didn't come naturally - honesty, accountability, vulnerability, trust. The weeks leading up to her birthday were lonely ones, and it seemed fitting for her to toast the loss of their whatever they had by falling off the wagon. Drinking helped distract her from the game, especially when it became nonsensical. Carter is arriving in the ER with Susan, coffee in hand and hair wet. Carter is challenging Luka to a duel. Seriously, what is Carter doing?
But ever since he caught her with her hand wrapped around the throat of a bottle, she's become aware that she's not the only one who plays this game. Carter plays it, too. What is Abby doing? At work his watchfulness, his presence, registers with her like a physical touch. In bed she shuts her eyes and remembers their conversation behind the bar, soft and swimming with whisky, her hand on his face in the first small gesture of possession, and she lets the hum of attraction rise to a pitch and releases her body from the effort of resistance. Something of their old camaraderie returns, spiked now with something foreign, something dangerous.
So she returns to the game, reassured by the familiar territory. What is Carter doing? The motel is as quiet as a tomb, the wall between their rooms thin, and she can hear him trying switches, drawers, then running the water in the bathroom sink. She imagines him splashing water on his face and looking at himself in the mirror. She wonders whether he regrets coming with her. If not now, eventually. It's only a matter of time until he loses patience with her, her tragic excuse of a childhood, her crazy mother, her messy divorce, her failed ambition, her drinking, her brokenness, her bottomless pit of need. If he hasn't already. She lost patience with herself a long time ago and sees no reason to expect differently from anyone else. Unlike a normal person she doesn't expect to behave badly and be forgiven.
She wonders why he's here, what, exactly, is he trying to prove by accompanying her on another road trip. He walked into the lounge while she was on the phone trying - and failing - to make last-minute travel arrangements, yet again. The look on his face told her he recognized Oklahoma, even if it wasn't Oklahoma this time.
They think it's Maggie, she said, unable to keep her voice from breaking, they need a family member to identify the body.
I'm coming with you, he replied.
She didn't try to protest. She didn't want to. She was grateful. For the material relief - the convenience his money would buy, the wheelman to steer the car straight when all she wanted to do was plow it into a wall. But more than that, for the reprieve, from the relentless loneliness of her life.
"Abby?" A soft rap on the door. "Are you awake?"
She lies motionless, feeling cornered, exposed, as if he can read her mind. She debates whether to respond, whether to pretend to be asleep, what lie would make the most sense, her mind rapidly shuffling through the limited possibilities. It's a mark of her exhaustion that she doesn't go with any of them and instead she tells the truth.
"I'm awake. Come in."
He opens the door, his expression - well, he's never been able to hide anything from her for long. He closes the door behind him, and, after a moment of hesitation, sits on the bed. She steels herself against the slope of the mattress and the exhilaration of slipping toward his body with velocity.
"Want something to eat?" he asks. "The diner's open for another hour."
She thinks about asking him if they serve alcohol, then decides she doesn't have the fortitude to deal with his judgment on top of everything else today.
"I'm not hungry."
"You sure? Coffee and pie on me."
Her mouth turns upward in acknowledgment of the familiar refrain, but she shakes her head no. They lapse into silence so she returns to the game. What is Carter doing? He is rubbing his face, pale with tiredness. He is deciding what to do, with her, whether to stay or go, whether to bother. After he leaves she will lie here the rest of the night, recalling his proximity, the scent of his soap, imagining how things might have played out differently, counting the hours until she can reach for a different kind of anesthesia.
Then he does something that surprises her.
"Move over," he says, and he lies down next to her.
What is Carter doing?
They are staring at the ceiling, not looking at each other, not touching, another pair of inert objects. He is careful to keep his body at a neutral angle. The silence curdles with a solidity she finds reassuring, like something to lean on. She starts to pick out imaginary constellations in the dark. Maybe she can use them to navigate herself away from these unknown waters. Who knows what monsters lurk beneath the chop of these waves, who knows their hunger. She'll circumnavigate the globe and arrive back where she started. You are here, it says on the map. You will always be here.
"Do you want to talk about it?" he tries.
She thinks of the body in the morgue.
"Not really."
"Do you want to be alone?" he tries again.
She thinks of the body in the morgue, the coroner drawing the sheet back.
"Not really."
She thinks of the the body in the morgue, the coroner drawing the sheet back - her whole life turning on the next heartbeat. The short brown hair framing a face in stillness but not in peace. Bruised, nearly beyond recognition. Nearly, but not quite.
It wasn't Maggie.
The relief was so complete, so staggering, she almost blacked out. Somehow she came to and found her way back outside. She saw Carter standing where she told him to wait, wearing a stricken expression. It's not her, she said, dazed, it's not her, it's not her, she cried, her fists bunched into his back, over the thin cotton of his shirt, over his scars.
She thinks of that moment and the ridge line of his scars, sanded down by her fists and time. Before she can lose her nerve, she blurts out,
"Thank you, Carter. Thank you for being here."
He seems startled by her gratitude. It annoys her, a little. She's not a monster. Well, not that kind of monster. Then his surprise gives way to pleasure, rippling like a current through the bed they share. And, like a current, it gives her a sense of her own power, that her gratitude could be something he wants, something she could withhold. It makes her feel brave and maybe even a little reckless. Enough so that she adds a confession.
"I don't know if I could've faced this alone."
"You could've. You would've." His expression is remote. "You're the strongest person I know."
Now it's her turn to startle, that he sees her this way. It doesn't feel like strength. It just feels like survival.
"You know you don't have to do this alone," he says.
His unspoken promise hangs there, glittering with danger among the imaginary constellations. Imaginary Orion loads his imaginary bow from his imaginary quiver.
"I shouldn't have to do this at all," she says, dodging the arrow. "She's supposed to be on her meds. She's supposed to be in Minnesota."
"She's alive," he reminds her. "That's got to count for something."
"She's not confirmed dead," she corrects him.
"Alive, not dead, either way that's something. There's no coming back from death."
She thinks about Bobby, whose portrait she studied at the mansion after his grandfather's funeral, and Lucy, bleeding out all over the trauma room, and Mark, whose mantle he now wears, and how very alive Carter is in their wake, keeping his head above the waves.
"Do you ever think about it?" she asks.
"Think about what?"
"Death."
"When I was stabbed, or as a general matter?"
"Yes," she jokes.
"All the time. I was so young when Bobby died. It changed the rest of my life. I wouldn't be who I am if that had never happened. Getting stabbed, that also changed my life. As you know."
In the trauma room they rolled Carter onto his side to take the measure of his stab wounds. She blinks the memory away. It seems improbable that his shredded body should be lying here next to her now, warm and whole.
"Do you think about it?" he asks back.
"I did today."
"As a general matter."
"Not usually, no."
"Really? We see patients die every day. It doesn't makes you think?"
"Thinking about dying means thinking about the future." She shrugs. "That just feels like a luxury I can't afford."
Carter is quiet for a moment, then, deciding, rolls onto his side to face her. "So you don't think about what's going to happen next?"
What is Carter doing? He is looking at her, in his way, full of want and without ambivalence. His pupils, blown in the dark of the room, pin her in place, as good as if he had pressed her shoulders onto the bed.
"I make exceptions," she stalls, staring fixedly at the ceiling, its wheeling constellations, her pulse accelerating. "Where should Katie send us next?"
"Katie?"
"Your travel agent. First Oklahoma, now this. Maybe next time she can send us somewhere more fun. Like Hawaii."
"Us?" he says, his breath on the down of her cheek. "Is there an us?"
"You said you'd buy me another tiki mask," she reminds him.
"I owe you one," he agrees, and they both smile at their long running joke.
"But then again you did carry an aquarium for me."
"On a bad back," he points out. "You were my charity date."
"You went on a road trip with me and my mother."
"You saved my life," he says.
She sees their younger selves, practically strangers, as they agree that this woman can sponsor this man, they have nothing to worry about, and they seal their agreement with a shared cigarette and a sundae.
She feels oddly moved that he still sees her in this light, even after all this time.
"I think we're even," she says, and she turns to face him.
Addiction is a kind of gravity, she once read. A force that draws material bodies toward each other. She thinks of that now as she closes the narrow space between them and her eyes to the inevitable collision. The spike in pleasure is immediate, practically narcotic, as his mouth tilts open under hers and he peels off her clothes and wonders over the swerve of her body. Her body, slick with anticipation, can hardly contain the furious beating of her heart.
What is Abby doing? She will use him, deplete him, bend him and his love into a shape beyond recognition, maybe even break him, drive him halfway across the globe, as sick of himself as he is of her. When it's over, she knows she will feel the peculiar relief of being back where she started and getting exactly what she deserves. She should know. She's been here many times before.