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It's hard to know what to think
When I don't know if this is even real.
You're not here, you're not there
But you are everywhere
I love you, this much I know is true
But you've gone now, it's so unfair
4FT Fingers, "Gone But Not Forgotten"
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Meddling – Robin 5
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I put the cordless phone down on the dining table and pace around the couch to the door of my new apartment and back again. I have sick feeling in my stomach and I want to get into my car and just drive. Or hop a plane for anywhere and nowhere all at once. I don't know whether to laugh or cry that my former constant companion chaos is back after all those years of tranquility. Or my social coma as Brenda calls it.
I rub my hands over my face, which has long been naked of the make up that I wore to the hospital today. Well, yesterday. It was a really long night. I was treating a patient with my drug protocol when she went critical and needed immediate surgery. It had been a foregone conclusion that once the drug had repaired what it needed to repair she would still require surgery, a surgery that would have most likely failed without the treatment, it just wasn't supposed to happen that quickly. Patrick himself was coming off two complicated surgeries that day, but he refused to leave the surgery of our patient to someone else. Since it was a mutual patient I stayed to observe. Observe his brilliance in action as he said, and I had to agree. Patrick is a brilliant surgeon and he has only gotten better as doctor in the weeks since the quarantine. He is beginning to connect with his patients more. I know it's not easy for him, he has such a senstive and empathetic soul hidden under that hard shell, but he's trying and I'm so proud of him.
He's also become a dear friend as well. Well, more than a friend if you go by all the kissing. I would be calling him right now if I didn't know he was getting much needed and deserved sleep. Which is what I should be doing as well, what I was trying to do when my mother called and I had to tell her that my father was alive.
What was I supposed to say to say to her? How was I supposed to explain why he was here and gone; why he never contacted either one of us; why he hasn't called her even now? Even in the moment I was telling her it still didn't seem real to me. It's still not real.
I stop my pacing to light the cinnamon scented pillar candles that Felicia gave me as a house warming present. I breathe deeply and suck in a ragged breath at the same time.
My father is alive. See. They're just words. Words I think of at the oddest moment, but just words. That's not so odd really, because the man I knew as my father doesn't seem to exist anymore. My Robbie was not the cold man that inhabited that body and spoke with that voice. He told me so himself that this was the case, and that more than anything is what makes me want to cower down and sob. If I had any tears left.
I open a drawer and pull out a photo that I found when I was unpacking. It's a photo of the three of us, my mother, my father and me. It was taken right after they got married and we became this scarily normal nuclear family, well, in the photo at least. The love in the photo is palpable and breathtaking. Fast forward to now and none of us are the same. All of us have gone through our own form of hell and come out the other side in our own way.
My mother being lost and along all those years with no memory and the recent loss of her baby daughter, my sister Leora.
Me with Stone, Jason and HIV.
Then there's Robert Scorpio. World-saving WSB agent turned entrapped killer. I wish I couldn't understand what has turned him into who he's become. I wish I could still hate him for never finding me. It was actually less heart aching than realizing that what I was seeing was this great man with his heart and soul systematically sucked out his body as the body count he racked up grew.
How could I not understand? I made the parallel in the split second after he told me what he had been doing – the parallel between him and Jason Morgan. Because, really, Jason is not the same man that I once loved and who once loved me. He too is a shadow of his former self.
The question that haunts me now is whether it's within my power to save him, Robert Scorpio. Could my forgiveness and letting him back into my life bring him back? Or is it too late?
The phone rings and I put the picture back into the drawer.