CHAPTER FIVE.
Is this damn plane ever going to get to Phoenix?
That was the thought occupying Mark's mind. It had seemed like forever waiting for it, in the chilly pre-dawn hours at O'Hare, then it had seemed like eternity on the runway, and now it seemed like time stood still in the air. The flight had departed Chicago at 5:50, so it was set to land in Phoenix just after 8:00 Phoenix time.
His nerves were running wild inside. He felt like Caesar crossing the Rubicon, Washington over the Delaware, and Odysseus traversing the Styx, all wrapped in one. He was leaving safety and comfort behind for the good of an unknown: Susan Lewis, his best friend, a woman he'd come to be in love with. He was absolutely certain of it now, and he had to know once and for all whether she felt the same.
That was one thing consistently gnawing at him about their last meeting: she had told him she loved him, but that didn't necessarily mean she felt for him as he did for her. But he had asked her to simply tell him that she didn't feel the same, and she hadn't. For whatever reason, she couldn't plainly reject him. Honestly, he would've felt OK after that, knowing he'd done all he could and that she simply needed something else. But she'd left the issue unsettled.
He fidgeted in his seat. He downed a couple of cocktails and zoned out NBC InFlight. His mind drifted towards how he could possibly transform thought to action once he was on the ground, if he ever got there. One chance, he reminded himself. Don't blow it.
> > >All he had to go on was the forwarding address she'd left at County, and all it did was point him to Good Samaritan Community Hospital in Scottsdale. He flagged a taxi and started rehearsing for what seemed like the 10,000th time what he was going to say.
Gliding through the doors, what struck him at first was how fresh the place was: it looked more like a fancy hotel than a hospital, with rich upholstery in the waiting room and fine marble countertops. His thoughts wandered back to Dr. Harris' office, why he'd decided not to trade up into private medicine – it didn't feel like real medicine. He wondered if Susan was really happy in a place like this.
One of the desk clerks seemed to notice a man with only a half-head of hair, looking a bit frazzled like he hadn't slept in ages, standing near the entrance.
"Can I help you?" she called out to him. Greene thought for the briefest of moments it had been Susan, but it was some frumpy clerk in her 60s from the desk. He asked for the ER, and she directed him to the lower floor of the hospital.
Nervously, he moved towards the admit desk in the ER. Greene felt like he was at some upscale medical clinic rather than an emergency ward – the sun was shining brilliantly trough the windows and a large mural decorated one wall. He felt intimidated, but maybe it was his reason for being there which nauseated him more than the place itself. In any case, he moved towards the admit desk where a desk clerk was reading a copy of "Spider-Man".
"Is Susan Lewis working today?" It seemed like he had to speak in slow motion, each word out of his mouth requiring it's own separate annunciation. He didn't want anything he said sounding ambiguous, not this day.
He turned at what sounded like a porcelain vase smashing into the floor.
> > >Susan Lewis woke up in Exam Ten at the end of the long exam hallway of Good Samaritan Community Hospital. Glancing over at her watch, she saw it was 9:28. I've been asleep for nearly five hours. Five hours, and not a single case comes in. Already she found life in a private hospital excruciatingly slow. Her cases were mainly snake bites and sun poisoning, with an elderly heart attack victim or a slow-moving MVA thrown in. She thought back to her early residency days, when her and Doug and Mark would relax on the roof at County with a couple of beers, imagining what it would be like to be at Northwestern, or a UC hospital, or maybe Loyola. They would joke about how easy it seemed to them, how better armed they were by being in a casualty collection point of a major city. Sometimes Benton would join them, but never to drink and to always trade barbs with the "pill pushers".
But she always knew Benton was joking, that he held all the ER docs in high esteem. But this hospital, her co-workers out here, this was a place for pill-pushers. It seemed like she'd written more prescriptions for painkillers and antibiotics in two months at Good Sam then in four years at County. The biggest enemy here was boredom.
She trudged off the gurney and walked across the hall to the Doctor's Lounge, pouring herself a cup of fresh coffee. This had to be the highlight of the new job – freshly brewed coffee, every day. But beyond that, it was a barren wasteland, and not just because they were in the desert. The hospital was a new operation, with little history and its private status always lent itself to interesting surgical research but not many challenging emergency cases – those were few and far between and often got diverted into the downtown districts. And the fellow doctors were...different.
Who am I kidding? She silently interrogated herself as she began walking towards admitting. There was nobody here who had really welcomed her, in fact it seemed like some of them viewed her suspiciously, as if she had run away from something to join their upstart community program. And there was nobody who she could talk to at the end of the day, nobody who was simply willing to offer her their company, nobody...nobody like Mark Greene.
As she neared the admit desk, her steps slowed as she pulled in a long sip of coffee and thought about the best friendship she'd ever thrown away. Silently she hated herself for walking away from him that day at the train station, and if Carol could be trusted he hated her for doing it now too. The suddenness of it all had shocked her, she literally couldn't believe he was actually there, saying those words and begging her to stay.
She turned the corner and was shocked again.
> > >The coffee mug slid out of her hands and dropped to the floor, smashing into several porcelain pieces and creating a brown pool of liquid that ran in several directions. Mark looked down at the broken cup, and then up, and made eye contact with Susan. They both stood their, eyes wide and mouths open, words an impossibility, each convinced that the other surely was just a mirage of their overacting brains, another trick of the desert sun.
"Su---Susan?" Mark finally sussed out her name, with nowhere near the clarity of their last meeting.
Hearing him speak helped convince her she wasn't hallucinating.
"Mark, are yo---it's...wow, I can't believe you're here." It was the first truthful thing she'd said to him in a long time.
A few more moments lingered in the air, with all the unfulfilled promise and secret ambitions the two of them had about each other, and then reality came crashing in – in the form of a gurney and two paramedics.
"Clear the way here!" as they wheeled a patient practically thorough Susan, who dashed out of the way at the last second. As a result, she was now only a step away from Mark, who seemed to be awakened to the fact that they were in fact in a hospital.
"That looked like a pretty brutal compound fracture to the tib-fib." He figured turning on his Doctor Mode was the only way he'd sound normal.
Susan was stunned and happy and confused and a thousand other things, but he somehow had roped her back into the reality of her job and was hinting that she should get back to doing it. Here, with what must have been equally rampaging emotions, he was immediately understanding what she needed to do, before even she understood it.
"Please, please don't go anywhere," she said, backing up to the second exam room where the fracture had been taken.
"I'll be right here," he said, praying he wouldn't come in contact with anything out of fear that it would wake him up from a dream, as she disappeared around the corner.
The fracture had turned out to be the result of a nasty rollerblading incident, but it was nothing the orthopedics couldn't fix. Susan held with the man to make sure he was on morphine and waited until the specialist arrived. As soon as the bone-crusher made his appearance, she headed for the hallway, and for what seemed like the first time since she woke up, she took a breath.
He was still standing by the admit desk, having barely moved. She walked up and said the only words appropriate for the situation, "Hi." He turned and smiled and it was almost as if nothing had changed. "Hi...is there somewhere we can go talk?" And then it slammed back in her face that everything had changed.
> > >Just be cool, Mark was reminding himself, though it felt like his heart was beating at a pace too insane for any monitor. She had led him to the lounge at Good Sam and he sat down at a very nice mahogany table, far fancier than anything back at home.
"You want some coffee? It's fresh." She's even got fresh coffee, he noted. This must be a dream. "That sounds fantastic", Mark replied.
He could see her hand trembling ever so slightly as she poured the cups, and wondered if maybe his appearance out of nowhere was making her uncomfortable. Then he actually thought and the answer came back that of course it was. How was she supposed to react? He silently reprimanded himself for expecting that she'd jump for joy at the sight of him as the coffee was brought over.
"So" he grappled for a conversation starter, "how's it been going so far?" He instantly wondered what exactly he meant by "it".
She pursed her lips as she finished a sip of coffee and looked at him. "Things have been alright. This place isn't exactly a trade up from County, but it has its perks." At exactly the same time, Mark was taking his first sip of coffee and his face brightened.
"You're gonna have to send us a couple of packets of whatever this is – damn!" He tried not to sound corny, but did anyway. Susan giggled but the moment of ease again passed quickly as they were both very aware of the direction of their conversation.
"I guess you probably want to know why I'm here." Mark's voice straightened out, and he was preparing himself mentally for what would either be euphoria or despondency.
> > >I know why you're here, Susan told herself. He wanted her to explain something she had no explanation for. He wanted to know why she could say that to him and then exit his life forever. Her mind was scrambling now, grasping at straws for what could pass a real reason why she'd hurt him so much. He opened his mouth to address her, as her mind continued its scrambling patterns:
"I just - Susan, I...I keep thinking about the last time we spoke and I don't want our friendship to end that way. I don't think you do either." Of course not.
"...I know I really put you on the spot like that and I wanted to say I'm sorry. I was so afraid of losing you, losing our...I don't even know what to call it." "Us"...that's what it is now. There's an "us", Mark.
"After I did that, I wouldn't blame you for not keeping touch. You had perfect reasons for coming out here and I got selfish right at the end and tried to guilt you into staying. I wasn't being fair." Don't say that Mark; you were the only one of us actually thinking.
"But in two months...God, Susan, in the past two months I have never been so lonely. I don't know what that means, what it should mean, but I miss you. I miss us being able to go to Doc's after work, or hang out and drink a few margaritas. I miss my best friend." I miss mine too.
"I just wan...no," He's fumbling with his words now. C'mon Mark, ask me. "I...there's something else I needed to say to you, I know it might throw you for a loop." We already did the "Casablanca"-style train departure, so how bad can it be?
"I'm in love with you, Susan. I'm absolutely certain of it. I just – I close my eyes and I imagine what we can be together and I like what I see." So do I...God, don't break down in front of him, not now. Just stay strong. Ask me the question, Mark. Just ask me if I'm in love with you and I'll say it.
"That's it. That's..last time we spoke we both left things unsaid. I just -- I wanted you to know that, know how I feel. And to...to find out if you felt the same.
And then dead silence hung in the air, and for some reason Susan could hear the sound of train whistle blowing and a conductor saying, "Ma'am, we're leaving". Forget being asked!! Say something right now or you'll get pulled away from him forever!
> > >She was looking down at her coffee, not even trying to make eye-contact, and Mark felt his heart crumble all over again. There's your answer, he thought bitterly. She could tell she was on the verge of crying, but so was he. There was something wrong about asking her to do this, asking her to flat out reject him. They were, or at least had been, best friends, so to ask a friend to hurt another...something about it didn't feel right. Mentally, Mark considered the dots connected and pushed his chair back and stood up.
"I...I guess I'll be seeing you. Call us, if you ever visit." He tried so hard to sound sincere, but he was sure it came across as angry and it killed him inside that he had done this to her. Now he felt like no idea of his had ever been so selfish and stupid. He turned, certain now that he had seen her for the last time, when he heard a voice choking through tears
"I'm in love with you, Mark...Pl—" she couldn't seem to work her way to the end of a sentence, "Please don't walk away from me."
Tears were flowing freely down her cheeks, but she was standing and she'd said it and now it froze him in his tracks. As if the world stood still, he turned to see her, looking radiant despite the crying, and he moved towards her again, his heart jumping into his throat and his mind full of fireworks.
He bent down and gave her a gentle kiss, which very quickly developed into something more as she pulled him in tightly. Nothing in the world mattered now, except for the two of them and the fact that for the first time in a long time, no words were necessary.
It seemed to last an eternity, one of those really smooth, long kisses that Crash Davis said would last for three days. Mark's eyes were closed, and so were Susan's, and being that close to each other was enough for the moment.
> > >
When Mark's eyes opened, however, there was a light shining in his face...
...Susan fluttered her eyes open into a dull light...
...and he felt something tough at the base of his neck...
...and Susan seemed to sink back into something soft...
...Mark leaned his neck up and oriented himself – he was on the couch in the lounge at County...
....Susan rolled over to see that she was on a gurney in the pale darkness of Exam Ten...
...and though the two of them couldn't know it, being separated by almost 2000 miles, the same thought popped into their heads: FUCK!
It was all a dream.
C'mon, it wouldn't be good if there weren't a twist. Besides, this way you know that there'll be more!