Chapter Two: Could You Be My Reckoning?
3:15 p.m. December 15th
Abby never suspected today to be different than any other day. She only had twenty minutes left of her shift and then finally she could go home. That was what she thought. Then the EMTs came crashing through the doors with yet another critical patient. "Sorry to waste your time with this one" she vaguely heard somebody say. "He was a DOA." they finished off. Great, Abby thought. She walked over to where the EMTs were standing around the body. "Here I'll transfer him to the…" her voice trailed off as she got a good view of the face lying pale against the white sheets. John Carter.
I'll blow away these ashes
I'll clear his face, to look at it
He stole my name, while I wait lost and found
Abby never heard the choking sob escape her own throat, but it must have been loud because Susan turned to her. "What is it?" she asked concerned. She glared down at the body and dropped the charts she was holding. That drew in a lot of attention. Now everybody was staring, and realizing and crying. Abby closed her eyes in an attempt to block off reality. Carter. John Carter. John Carter, a man who she spent four years as friends with, the man who she spent a year of her life in love with, the man she was still not over. He wasn't moving, he wasn't breathing, he was as the EMTs had called him, dead on arrival.
"Transfer him where?" one of the EMTs asked tearing her out of her thoughts. They were clueless. They had no idea how much of a significant role the man on that gurney played in this hospital. He was the gravitational center of the ER. He was the heart of it. He had been there longer than anyone else and he had always been liked by everybody. "To the morgue" she answered the EMT weakly.
I found a place, where I'll keep you
Cause I won't live through you and beneath you
I'll walk away, where these winds won't bring me down
Abby felt the sudden need to get out of that room, out of the place filled with screaming and death and tears. "Neela" Abby called her fellow med student over. "Could you please escort this b…" Abby choked back a sob. "Could you please escort this body to the morgue?" She didn't even wait for Neela to answer before she ran outside to the ambulance bay. She knew Weaver was going to bitch at her later for leaving in the middle of a shift, but that didn't matter. None of it mattered. The only thing that mattered was that John was gone, and she never even got the chance to say goodbye.
She wondered how long it would take before everyone in the ER knew. Abby couldn't think about that right now. She was too focused on the millions of questions bouncing around in her head. How did this happen? Who would shoot Carter? What was he doing in the middle of the Projects at night? Why hadn't anybody seen him? Why did it take the paramedics until morning to find him? Why were they too late? Why did he leave me? That question soon dominated over all of the other questions. Their relationship had been rocky, if that was even the word that could be used for it. They were friends and then they were more and then it was good for awhile, until her family and her problems and her self pity got in the way.
Abby stopped running. She didn't even know where she had run to. All she saw was a bench and she collapsed onto it and started to sob. It wasn't until several minutes later that she realized that this was the bench that she and Carter used to go to to talk. She laid down on it, putting her face down in the area where he always used to sit, hoping to get a feeling that he was there, a sense, anything. All she felt was the wood pressing against her skin and the wind biting at the back of her neck. There was no presence of Carter left in the world at all.
Going the wrong way down a one way street
Where the feeling is criminal
Nobody helps me out when I bleed
When Abby felt she had enough composure to face the world, she made her way back to the hospital. She lingered in front of the doors afraid of what she might see. She could see people crying and sad. That would be terrible. Of course, she could also see everyone pretending it never happened and paying no mind, which would be worse. She finally took a deep breath and entered through the sliding doors.
It appeared to her that everyone appeared to be trying to get their jobs done, but she could see an occasional tear slide down everybody's face. Weaver looked up and spotted her, but said nothing. There was no lecture about leaving the premises during work hours, there was just a sad smile, a sympathetic nod and then she went on about her business.
Abby was trying to make her feet go into the lounge, but they wouldn't. They couldn't. Instead they were gravitating her toward the elevator. She decided to follow her feet, which turned out to be only following her heart. The elevator traveled below the first level of the hospital, to the underground morgue. There were no bodies being examined, no doctors looming around, Abby was completely alone, which is exactly what she wanted to be.
Looking for someone like me
Where the feeling is mutual
Can anybody see what I see?
Cause I don't see me
Abby stopped in front of a gurney and shakily put her hand on the white shroud covering the body laying on it. She removed the shroud quickly, before she could change her mind, and was met with the blue lipped, closed eyed, John Carter. He looked so cold. Is that how he had died? Did the cold get to him, or was it the deep bullet wound lying below his chest? Abby closed her eyes and tried to envision Carter as simply sleeping, and not dead. It almost work for a few seconds, and then she opened her eyes and the reality hit her like a ton of bricks. Carter was dead. He was dead.
Abby let a single tear snake down her cheek and covered his body back up and slowly walked out of the morgue. She tried to remember the very last time she saw Carter alive but her mind was too worn with grief to remember. She took the elevator ride back to the ER, and finished her quest to the lounge. Though she warned herself against it, the very first thing she noticed when she reached the lounge was Carter's locker. It wasn't even locked. In all his hurry, Carter must not have shut it right.
Abby walked over to it and pulled it open; she was hit with an overwhelming sense of Carter. She took in the half empty bottle of water he would never finish, the long lab coat with the words Carter, John M.D. stitched in cursive on the breast, his stethoscope hung neatly on top of it. She also discovered an envelope full of pictures. There were childhood pictures of Carter, Carter with Dr. Benton and Dr. Greene, and Carol Hathaway and Susan and other doctors that she didn't recognize. She saw pictures taken at social events, and on the very bottom, there was the picture of them, sitting at a table, right before line dancing. She felt her eyes fill up with tears again and quickly put the envelope back. In her hurry she accidentally knocked down a pile of other envelopes.
She picked the other envelopes up and saw that each was addressed to someone different, in Carter's cursive handwriting on the back. The first one stated to my parents. The letter addressed to his parents was followed by to the ER, to Kem, and then to Peter Benton. On the final envelope, Abby was surprised to see in the cursive lettering, to Abby. She took the letter addressed to her, and the one addressed to the ER, and put the rest in her pocket. She ripped her letter open with a force powered by her grief. She started to read it.
Dear Abby,
Somehow I knew that eventually something like this would happen. I just wanted to be prepared for when it did. I send this letter to you to express more than this pen and this paper ever could. You are the only person I've ever deeply understood. I'm not saying you're the only person I've ever loved, because I have loved many people throughout my life time, though they may all not even know it. You and I, however, have something that I could never have with anybody else. In my entire life, Abby, you've been the only person who gets me.
You always denied that you could make anybody else feel worthwhile because you didn't feel you made yourself worthwhile. You made my time with you worthwhile, Abby. Though we parted, for more reasons I never believed any of the things I may have said in my anger, nor did I believe that we ever should have ended things the way that we did. When I look at you Abby, all I think about is how badly I hurt you and how badly I got hurt.
You've always been a part of me and maybe you always will be there, somewhere, under my skin, unwilling to let go. I know this is mostly because I don't want you to let go. I still love you Abby. I'm sorry, I still loved you. It's weird to refer to yourself in the past tense, but I need this to come out and I need you to know this because knowing me, I'm never going to say everything that I'm feeling. Maybe some things will never get said at all.
If you hear one thing that I'm saying in this letter, hear this. If I left you, then I didn't want to go, and if I couldn't hold on for you, then I'm sorry. I'm sorry because I really wanted us to have a lifetime together. I really wanted us to work things out and be with each other for the rest of our lives. I still have that ring, you know. Who knows, maybe all of these things will still happen for you. I want you to be happy, Abby, and anybody that makes you happy is a good person. I hope you move on well.
With all my love,
John
Don't, let it be
Save it all, don't waste it on me
Cause if I take a chance
And if I hurt again
And if Iet you in, could you be my reckoning
NOTE: The song I used for chapter one and two is Criminal by Alexz Johnson
