Daily Show on DVD Countdown: 51 days

Moment of Zen

Jon Stewart: Both candidates also tried to shore up their support amongst male votes and female voters. Let's see if you can guess which group they're trying for here…
John Kerry: And if we have to get tough with Iran, we will get tough…
George W. Bush: …We must never waver in the face of this threat…
John Kerry: ...I'm a hunting, I'm a gun owner…
George W. Bush: …this is a global conflict, that requires firm resolve!...
John Kerry: …I will hunt them down, and we'll kill them.
Jon Stewart: Hm….I…I think they're going for dudes.

"Next stop, Cicero Station. Next stop…" the intercom droned on in the morning air. Susan sat on the EL considering her options. Cicero was four blocks from Mark's house.

Now was when she felt her senses slowly returning to her. Normally she'd have gone home, stumbled through that ridiculously messy hole towards her couch and just crashed until the start of another wonderful shift that evening. But this last shift had been anything but normal. They all knew it. And now she was…she wasn't sure.

And then the train doors were open and she was walking out and down the platform, still figuring out what she was doing and where she was going and what she would do when she got there.

All of sudden, without a real clue about how or far more importantly why, she was knocking on the door of Mark's house…no answer. She knocked again…and nothing.

Against her better judgment, she reached for the doorknob, and it clicked over. Sticking her head over the threshold but staying out on the front step, she called out, "Mark?"

The brewing hum of a coffee maker could be heard in the kitchen. Susan slowly and methodically opened the door and began walking towards it.

Mark was there, sitting at the table turning pages in a photo album. He was oblivious to the world, lost in his thoughts of self-punishment. How could he have let this happen? What sort of deranged crime had he committed to provoke these last 48 hours?

He came home after another less-than-perfect shift, hopeful that maybe his dilemma had been solved only to hear Jen say she was leaving him. Then he was back on the next morning at 6 A.M. to have a junkie thrown at him from a moving car…and then this. This awful, awful, awful thing.

He could not stop seeing Mr. O'Brien's face in his head. He saw it staring back at him when he had finished cleaning Jodi shortly after. He even had seen it while Carter tried to tell him he was a hero. Heroes generally don't kill innocent mothers, he had wanted to say.

Most of all, he had seen in the whole train ride home. And he was staring at the pictures now, pictures of happier times, him and Jen and Rachel, on her first day home from the hospital, the Christening, the Brookfield Zoo, the Shedd…happier times.

Then he looked up and saw Susan's face, standing in his kitchen.

"Are you OK, Mark?" It seemed like only semi-appropriate question.

Mark exhaled and looked down, then collected himself, "Really, Susan, I'm fine."

She knew he was lying. He knew he was lying. What can you possibly say in a situation like this?

"You don't look OK."

"It was a long day at the office", Mark deadpanned.

"I'll bet…" Susan's mind wandered. She still hadn't quite grasped in her own mind what she was hoping to accomplish here, but she had to think on her feet. "OK, you won't come out to breakfast, I'll make you breakfast."

She tried to say it as cheerfully and forcefully as possible, like her mom used to do when she would force her and Chloe to swallow her cooking in the mornings before school.

Mark chuckled instantly at Susan's joking, but then he saw her pulling off her scarf and setting down her quote and squeezing past him into the kitchen area. What was she…hey, Mark thought, those are my pots and pans!

Susan was rummaging, finally pulling out a large black skillet and setting it on the stove. Mark literally could not speak. This was too…bizarre. Susan was actually in his kitchen, heating up his stove and now…opening his fridge and preparing his food.

Mark couldn't really decide what was weirder – the fact that this was happening or the fact that he didn't mind at all. He liked the image, actually.

That's when he had to catch himself and all of a sudden make the ring of his left finger seem very, very heavy.

Fifteen minutes later Susan was fast and work scrambling eggs and was waiting on the toaster when Mark finally said something.

"That smells really good." He managed weakly.

Susan had her back to him but smiled and replied, "I just hope it tastes good. I haven't really cooked in a long time."

"I don't think I have the good kind of eggs like the cafeteria does."

"That's where we should have gone, that way you could be doing the cooking for me!" Susan joked.

Finally seeming to sense a diffusion of the awkwardness, Mark got up out of his chair.

"Aw, come on Susan, the whole housewife thing, you'll be a natural."

That made the hair stand up on Susan's back. She closed her eyes for a second and then forced a happy face before turning to meet him – "Excuse me?"

"Well"…Mark was beginning to feel very sheepish. "Ya know, on those….rare occasions when you decide to cook breakfast for you and your husband."

"Oh, and since when does a doctor have time to find a husband?" Susan teased. Mark just stared off into space for a second and then met her level in the eyes. "You're gonna have to beat them away with a stick. Just don't settle for the first one who wants to run away, be selective."

He was so earnest, so unassuming, it was making her heart melt. She turned her head back to the table and deflected his attention.

"What are you looking at here?" She walked over and sat down as Mark stood. "Oh, ya know, photo album of Rachel…first day home, things like that."

Susan began leafing through the plastic sheeted pages. She had actually never seen some of the earliest Rachel baby photos, other than what Mark kept in his wallet. They were adorable – Mark holding Rachel in those little baby back-packs, the two of them playing with dolls, Rachel about one-year old holding a stethoscope and playing doctor to Mark in bed. A picture of Mark, Jen, and little Rachel on a beach…the perfect family. It seemed to good to be true and Susan knew in reality it was.

"This is too much…oh God, you have a full head of hair in this one!" Susan was laughing while Mark tried hard not to smile. "What, were you look 17 when you started losing it?"

"Ha ha ha, it's a proven fact that what men lack in hair they make up for in style. Some of the smoothest men alive have been bald. In fact, name one guy with so-called 'perfect hair' who you would want to date."

Susan playfully "thought" for a second before gushing in a falsetto teenage voice, "Tom Cruise." Mark sighed and looked back down at the album.

"That's me on her first day of preschool…and that's her showing her class what I do", as he pointed out a photo of Mark, sitting on a tiny chair in front of a dozen children while Rachel smacked his knee with the rubber hammer. The page turned and Mark slowed again.

It was Jen, holding their newborn daughter, glowing and being flanked by her mother and father, who had come dressed for the occasion in full clerical garb. He was seeing her now, stretched on that gurney. It had seemed so simple, so correctable, and he wanted so desperately to be in control that he had done something terrible. He just stared, stared into space for a long time.

Susan could tell what was wrong, could see him burning a hole in the page with his eyes. She seized the opportunity: "It was not your fault Mark. You know that, right?"

Silence, and finally a muted. "Yeah".

"Do you believe it?"

Quickly and scornfully, Mark said, "No." Now Susan got up to look at him face to face.

"Mark, don't you see, if it weren't for you that man would be preparing for two funerals. You saved his son! We all lose patients we think should've been saved. It's not your fault." She wondered if he was hearing any of this, if she should even be saying it in the first place. Maybe arriving here unannounced was a mistake. He was certainly acting like a man who wanted his space.

"Ya know," Mark thumbed the picture of Jen in the album again, tracing a circle around tiny Rachel, "when she was born, and I held her in my hands for the first time…I realized how true it was. Kids. They change everything. How you think, how you dress, your sense of right and wrong and worthy and unworthy. You realize you're not capable of loving anything as much as your own child..." His lip was quivering now.

"And that mother should be holding her son right now. Her husband should be calling their parents with the greatest joy of life. Instead they'll get the news they want AND the news they most fear. And it's because of me. I took away…I took away parenthood."

Susan did not want to see him cry, because she knew she wanted to and if she saw tears in his eyes she'd be powerless to hold them out of her own.

"It was a mistake," she tried to annunciate the words, make him see what they all saw. "You did the best you could. And you have to let that be enough."

"That's not gonna be enough for her husband. Little boy gets older, starts asking why he never has a mom like all the other kids, Dad's supposed to say, "The doctor did the best he could?"

Susan was starting to sense that something else was eating away at him, not distracting him from Mrs. O'Brien but actually making her more present. She had a good idea what it was.

"Where's Jen?"

Mark bitterly spat out, without pause, "She left……for Milwaukee. Coming back in a few weeks." It was an awkward recovery, Mark thought.

Susan was angry at Jen for making him feel like he deserved to punished, angry at the world for exerting a horrific chain of events on him and him alone. Istinctively, she reached her hand out and brushed it against his cheek, trying to let him know somebody cared.

"You are the best man I've ever worked with…" She wanted to continue, but her eyes simply drifted into his eyes and they stared at each other, for an instant and onward, like they had hours before in the ER.

Susan leaned her head in ever so slightly, to take the next step in her mind, and then SMACK. The reality, of where she was and what she was doing and who she was with slammed into her, and she never felt more embarrassed in all her life.

Mark was floating, still half in the past, still sitting on that rocking chair in the Nursery as he tried to explain to a sobbing Mr. O'Brien what had gone wrong. And then he realized he was with Susan and she was…and then everything snapped back for him too.

Now it felt really awkward and Susan's face was flush with red as she hurriedly reached for her coat and bag.

"Oh, God, Mark…I, I really have to go. I'm sorry to leave you in a…" She clumsily tried to properly dress as she bolted for the door, Mark a three steps behind.

"I'll just….ya know…I'll see ya at work. Sometime…this week!" She zipped through the barely open door and slammed it shut on the other side, cursing herself for trying to do something like that at a time like this.

Mark, meanwhile, stood stunned in the hallway staring towards the door. Did what he think just happened happen? And if it had…

"Oh boy, Oh boy…Oh boy." He mumbled to himself.

To Be Contined…