April is the cruelest month. That'd been the truest thing sixteen-year-old Meredith discovered in a poem. She hoped it stayed true.
Not that she expected one line to be a panacea. People and places named Elliott—or Eliot, sue her, she wasn't an English major—tended to let her down. She didn't see what could be crueler than being able to remember Aprils that had been all pink flowers, blue skies, yellow sunlight—and birthday balloons in the same colors. Slowly, it became just another month. In one year, it became the month George's dad died, she died (technically), and the month her mother died. The range made it crueler.
It was also cruel that Derek's death came at the end of a month. It would've been cruel for it to happen in the middle with it's been a month, and it's another month and he's gone two weeks apart.
It had been a month.
If April was still the cruelest month, she felt like it was going to be by degrees.
It's gonna be May.
Sadie had sent Meredith the N'Sync meme at midnight, but she didn't see it, or the follow-up text remember the time you learned this dumb dance to spite your judgey grunge friends? until morning.
The rest of the song played in her mind like she'd listened to it in the ten minutes she'd been lying awake in the ball she'd managed to sleep in. It was such a Derek song. Everything was a Derek everything to her, granted, but she had a far better memory for lyrics than for idioms, and that one was in most 90's playlists that played in public. She'd accused him of plagiarizing it whenever they heard it.
"Why would you think I've ever listened to the lyrics?"
"Look me in the face and tell me none of your sisters' kids were obsessed with boy bands."
There'd been a spark that appeared in his eyes at the thought of his niblings. Moving across country ousted him from their lives and she knew he regretted that. Seeing all fourteen of them at once and hearing their "Uncle Derek" stories had shifted the guilt soundly to her. The ones she recognized she'd mostly met at Mark's she'd encouraged Derek to face up to his sisters, rather than enabling him with her familial issues; they might have seen him more than a couple of times in the last eight years.
They'd still gotten longer with Uncle Derek than his daughter had with her father, her uncle Mark, her aunt Lexie, and more than Sofia had gotten with her father or Uncle Derek. The bitterness this awoke in Meredith was disgusting. If she felt that way, shouldn't she want to get to know them? For her kids to know them, and to know Laura and Molly? Instead, she had the opposite instinct, wanting to gather her children close, and not let anyone else near them.
She wasn't doing this wrong. It wouldn't be wrong unless she shut them out, too.
Zola's exhales were crackly, almost snores. Bailey was lying facing away from her and babbling himself awake with nonsense syllables that almost fit the tune of Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. His silly singing had been the way she discovered how many children's songs had the same tune. She lightly tapped the rhythm of like a diamond in the sky out on his back, and he flopped over, sleep in the corners of his bright eyes.
"Momma, is a mornin'!"
She stroked a lock of hair away from his morning-pale cheek. "It is, baby boy."
It was the first morning in May, and Derek was dead.
"Are you all right?"
Meredith liked Fatimah more than the average person she'd encountered three times in a monthy, but if she was asked that question one more time, she wasn't going to be responsible for her actions. That must have shown on her face, because Fatimah held up a hand. "You haven't said a word in five minutes. I'm only checking in."
She waited for Zola to pipe up with her "sad thoughts" explanation. All she could hear was Bailey's breath coming from the carrier on her back. The sense of unease that rippled constantly underneath her skin surged, until she saw bright red shirt a few yards ahead of them. The outfit, with matching socks and denim shorts was Zola's choice, but it stood out helpfully against the pale green grass and rocky sand on this trail of the Mission Trails Regional Park.
Meredith's instinct had been to hem and haw her way out of saying yes to the invitation Fatimah issued that morning. But saying that she didn't have any desire to "take advantage of the breeze" and "take the kids on an adventure" might imply that she wasn't sure she could tolerate a two-mile hike, on a day where the temperature was hovering in the high sixties.
That was true, but she wasn't going to admit it to a social worker, former or not.
"Sorry," she said, as Zola returned to them. "I'm…." Exhausted, pathetic, a space case?
"Entranced by Balboa County's multitude of diverse flora and fauna?" Fatimah offered, and any questions Meredith had about her suitability for Sadie—well, the other way around, really—eroded.
"We'll go with that."
"Come on," Zola urged, climbing up onto the rail lining the trail and then hopping down. "There are people riding horses there!"
Losing track of Zola wouldn't have been a worry if Meredith wasn't continually losing track of herself. Every time the girl got more than ten paces away, she retraced her steps. She was going to wear herself out. Bailey had rallied, gamely letting her tug him to and fro for about half a mile. Then he'd pulled Meredith down to his level with marked determination and put his mouth to her ear, imitating Zola telling him to ask for something she didn't think they'd get. "Carry?"
She'd surveyed the upcoming part of the trail, which was flat enough that they could've brought the stroller, and said, "This looks a little bit rocky. I think Bay should stick with me."
"Momma carry," he'd agreed, informing Zola with an expression that begged his mom not to give him away.
When they found the spot with the view of the horseback riders, Zola started skipping around them clicking her tongue. Meredith felt Bailey inhale but anticipating the whinny didn't prepare her for the way it would blow her hair up against her scalp. She smoothed it, tickling Bailey in the process, which was the only provocation he needed to repeat the trick. How would she have ever smiled during this time without them?
He'd only recently gotten big enough to comfortably ride the FAO Schwartz rocking horse Carolyn had sent for Zola's first Christmas at-home—why did they have no simple firsts?—and as content as he was to have her as a stand-in, Meredith wondered how many playtimes he'd be spending overworking the wooden rockers and making noises for both himself and the horse, if it wasn't gathering dust in Seattle.
"Is she still running on chocolate eggs?" Fatimah asked.
"Hm? Uh, they're a bribery tool, yeah."
Last year, she'd finished off the Easter candy that hadn't been put in the baskets within a week, and blamed Obama every time she tossed out an empty package. Another example of how Derek being gone wasn't like Derek being gone at all.
"But she's always loved hiking," she added.
"I've never been to Seattle, but I've heard it's got some really diverse scenery."
"Everything from Bundy's beaches to the Killer's Green River." That's a Cristina thought, Meredith chastised herself. Were there Cristina thoughts if she wasn't in-contact with Cristina?
Surprisingly, Fatimah laughed.
"We're surgeons, though." She was determined not to drop out for another five minutes. "We don't do much in the way of day trips. The truth is…. Okay, so, I'm a third-year general surgeon, my salary is good. Really good. But Derek did impossible things. He left a private practice in Manhattan to head our neurosurgery department in '06. He was wasted up there, but he had clients who could pay out the nose." Or he could've taken their brain through it. She wished that fact hadn't stuck with her in the twenty-five years since she had an interest in Egyptian mummies. They didn't do that anymore, right? She tried to look up to burn out the feeling of wanting to laugh while tears formed behind her eyes.
"The hospital in Seattle had to match that?" Fatimah prodded.
"Y-Yeah. I don't think they did to the decimal, but he was the hand-insured-for-a-million-dollars guy. What he got in Seattle doesn't matter s'much in this situation. It's that he had all the money from his practice, and…this doesn't make him sound like a great person."
"Habibi, you obviously loved this man with all you had, and I happen to think you have good taste, but she sure as hell isn't perfect now, much less eight years ago."
"Twelve." Meredith snapped. "Whatever she…we were done that day at The Flying Pig." Fatimah raised her eyebrow. "It's a hostel. We were gonna stay there a day and mess with the American guys while we figured out where the Dutch boys hung out. Couldn't just get a bed and…. You're right, I fall for people while they're assholes."
She mimicked Zola, putting her feet on the first rung of the rail. She let the wood take on most of her weight. Her calves were burning, but no more than she'd have expected with the ground they'd covered. What she didn't want Fatimah to catch onto was the extra weight pulling at her upper-body while her head alternated between too heavy and too light. She wished she had asked that they take a stroller-friendly path, but they were too far into it to reverse now. Literally, they'd begun the return half of the loop.
"Did Sadie mention that I'm not out in Seattle? Some people know, but I'm not out."
"She didn't, but that's your story, not hers."
Meredith snorted. She was aware that she shouldn't, but there were too many other words and feelings to suppress around another person. That was why she avoided other people. "The night I was gonna tell him… I'd already told him about my mom. Do you….?" Fatimah inclined her head. Sadie must consider the cause of that fight—Meredith's decision to go home—part of her story. In a way, it was.
Meredith stared out over acres of grasslands below them, and multiple peaks surrounding them. The sky was cloudy, which helped keep her from interrogating the gray cast of light beyond her sunglasses. "That night, his wife showed up. I had no idea she existed."
"Yikes."
"Mmhmm. By the time I did tell him, the rest of the hospital thought I was the head of neuro's dirty mistress; I'd gotten into the program on my name; and I'd sleep with anyone with a dick. I didn't wanna deal with what they'd say without the caveat."
"I think you want judgement, but you're not getting it from me. You did what you needed to do," Fatimah said, standing next to her. "See those lavender flowers there, with the dark edges that go paler in the center?"
"Uh-huh."
"That's called a Blue Dick."
"Nice!" Meredith pushed off the rail and continued along the trail, which was narrowing into a patch of sycamores. "Derek probably dealt with that a lot that year. Like, more than I know. They weren't divorced yet. She'd cheated on him with his life-long best friend, the co-owner of his practice. That's his version. It wasn't actually that cut-and-dry. He and Mark had envied each other their whole lives. Derek had family. Mark had money. Addison was guaranteed interesting cases as an OB-GYN with a fellowship in fetal surgery. Mark was pretty easy going. Happy having his friends around, being in a city where one-night stands were judgement free, especially for a guy. They were raking it in, and I've gathered the procedures got repetitive."
"Can I climb?" Zola called, from a seat straddled on the lowest branch of a tree.
"Two more branches before I get there," Meredith allowed.
Zola kept staring up into the limbs, searching for the perfect next perch.
"Derek gets—got—mulish if he wasn't being challenged. He'd take it out on everyone, pull away instead of using his words, especially if he thought he was expected to be satisfied—and of course, he was the only one in the world with such pain."
Fatimah laughed at Meredith's dramatic-teenager-Derek voice. She'd perfected it during the fall, though only in front of Alex. Amelia was—had been— making her suspect it could be a Shepherd trait.
"I think it's a having four siblings thing. Point is, he'd shut both of them out. Mark…he came to really love Addison. They lived together for a couple months. I don't know if the first time was an envy thing on his side, or a revenge thing on her part." They got to Zola's tree, where she'd gotten to a third branch, putting her at about eye-level with Meredith.
"Want to keep going?" she asked. Zola nodded, and Meredith took her hand, locking her arm to give her the support she needed to step onto a nearly parallel limb. "None of them are excused, but no one is the victim in that story. If he'd told me…. I knew there was something. I tested him for days. What he would tell me was minimal. It shoulda been a red flag, but he made it so romantic." She held onto Zola's waist as she put a leg up over another branch. For a moment both Bailey and Zola's weight was entirely on her. The symbolism of that made her knees want to buckle more than the physics did.
"He took me out to this Airstream trailer sitting on forty-acres of land on Bainbridge Island. Said he'd just bought it, and he had no idea what he was going to do with it— Try that one, Zo, and tell us what you can see.—With everything I know now, with everything I've ruminated on, I think it was a vindictive move. Putting his part of their money into land that was exactly the opposite of what he had in Manhattan. He believed Addison would hate it.
"They tried to make things work for six months, and she ended up hating the trailer, but she wasn't against the land any more than my city-kid ass was made for it. People are more adaptable than that."
"A bunny rabbit!" Zola exclaimed.
"Bun-bun? Where, Sissy?"
Meredith scanned the distance off the side of the trailnand caught the quick movement of ears in the tall grass. She took Bailey's hand from her shoulder, and pointed it in the right direction, hoping he could follow it. "You see, bub?"
Bailey's response was more whine than word. Zola scooted forward on her branch, moving her finger from the front of Bailey's face to point at the cottontail.
"Do you see it?" she said, in her most patient big sister voice.
"F'owers, f'owers, all f'owers. Wan' a bun-bun!" Meredith flinched as Bailey slammed against the carrier. They were over half a mile from the car. What could she use to distract—? "Birdie!" His squeal gave no hint of distress. He kicked his legs behind him, and following Zola's gaze, Meredith found the swallow that'd distracted him.
"A Bailey birdie," Zola declared. "Good job!"
"Great spotting," Meredith agreed, holding her hand up. He gave her an exuberant high-five. "Let's keep going."
She guided Zola down, placing a foot whenever it started to flail, and firmly holding on whenever Zola had to let go. Once her small hiking boots hit the ground, Meredith's hand lingered on the final limb. It took more than it should to keep her voice not only level but encouraging. She'd reassured Zola across the gaps, but hadn't stopped herself from imagining her slipping, landing beyond the railing, and tumbling down to the next switchback, if not further. She wasn't that kind of hovering parent, usually, but without surgeries to concern herself with, her tendency to come up with worst-case-scenarios was diverted.
"Do you want me to take him for a bit?" Fatimah asked.
"No need." Meredith took a step forward hanging onto the tree and then let go once she established that she wasn't going to lose her balance. "Thanks, though." She pulled the water bottle out of the pocket on the side of the carrier and gulped from it. The solid green plastic hid the fact that she'd filled it with Pedialyte. "The land made me think he'd made this huge investment in staying in Seattle. Compared to…." She bit her lip.
"My reformed rolling stone?" Fatimah offered.
"I wasn't any better," Meredith insisted. "Once I had freedom of movement, all I wanted to do was move. In Seattle…we'd left two months after my fifth birthday, but the house, the hospital, it all felt like home. And there's this guy who hadn't been there much longer, who hadn't thought he'd ever want to live anywhere but Manhattan…." She sipped from the bottle again, and then returned it to the pocket, not sure she'd be able to swallow a third time. "We made it to the point I imagined that night. We built a house on the land, and we had kids. The year this guy was born—" She shrugged the carrier higher up on her shoulders, and Bailey giggled. "—I was starting my second year as an attending, and I'd…. I panicked a little over not being competitive. Derek offered to step back from surgeries, spend his time on research, where the hours are more predictable, and spend more time with the kids. It didn't…he ended up with the NIH pretty soon after that, but they went hiking a lot."
He'd seen out all of, what, two, three months of that promise? Made it before Halloween, started interviewing with government officials by the new year. Neurosurgery. Parenting. Nothing was guaranteed to be challenging enough for Derek Shepherd. That's okay. It's okay. I don't care. I'd take every year with them. I'd put up with brooding, jackass Derek. I'd put someone else on every neuro consult—give up every possible opportunity to scrub in with him. I'd convince Obama to re-hire him myself.
"Meredith?"
She glanced toward Fatimah; thankful she'd given into the sunglasses this time. Being questioned about her latest film of tears would have her voicing the churlish thought that only proved how aberrant—aberrant and abhorrent—she was; barely functional with grief, and yet holding onto grievances.
"Zola adored it. She'd draw pictures of what she'd seen, and at night, unless I had something go obscenely late, she'd use them to tell me all about it while I fed Bay. She was only three, so I was getting a filtered highlight reel. On weekends, we'd all go out, and it was like every week she had new skills. She was like a little mountain goat, scrambling all over the rocks."
Fatimah was the quiet one for a minute, leaving Meredith to try to turn up the sounds of birds, and the other groups of hikers they'd come across. She'd been grateful that the park wasn't on the ocean, but the crash of waves would've been preferable to the way her mantra of Derek is dead, Derek died, Derek will always be dead synced up with her footsteps.
"Why not just say that she's been hiking on your land?" she asked. "I wouldn't have assumed you were some Real Housewife of Seattle. Look at my girlfriend."
"I didn't think you would," Meredith said. What had she been trying to say other than "Mom's estate wasn't neurosurgeon money"? Why had she wanted to bother with that?
"It's more that owning forty-acres of untouched land was part of who Derek was, independent of me. I loved it about him. That he…that his past might've let him down hard, but he'd invest in a future."
Zola returned from her latest scouting mission and took Meredith's hand. A set of wide, flat stairs appeared around a curve. "Those rocks look like a graves yard," she said, pointing to a circle of stones to their right.
"You're not wrong," Meredith acknowledged. "It'd be a cemetery, though. A graveyard is attached to a church."
"What's the difference?"
"The church. Other than that, I don't— "
"Oh my God, Estella!" The shout came from the bottom of the rock-steps, and Meredith narrowed her eyes to focus on the group of teenagers. One of them had fallen forward and was writhing…no, seizing.
"Zola, hold on to Fatimah," Meredith said, unclipping the first of several straps that attached the carrier. Fatimah grabbed the frame without her saying anything, holding him in place until she could lower it. "Do you know what the emergency bag looks like?"
Zola's lower lip overlapped the top, but she nodded firmly.
"It looks like someone's in trouble. I'm going to go see what's going on. If I ask you to show Fati where it is, can you do that?"
"Yes, I can. Easy."
"Good girl." Meredith kissed her forehead, and Bailey's cheek, which was going red as he tried and failed to understand quite what was happening. He'd be able to see her. Meredith hoped that would be enough and jogged down the remaining three-quarters of the stairs. The unsteadiness she'd battled for the other mile and a half didn't disappear, but she repurposed all her focus onto not letting it take over.
"Hi, guys," she said to the group gathered around the seizing girl. "I'm…Meredith, I'm a doctor. You three, can you stand at the edge of the step, just there? Good. We want her to stay on this level."
"We got her in the recovery position," one of the guys offered. "I know…I've heard that's for if you're wasted, but—"
"I'm not the fuzz, don't worry. That's a great instinct. How long has she been down?"
Most of them made uncertain noises, but another girl said, "Two minutes."
"Thank you…?"
"Tamar."
"Thank you, Tamar. Has this happened before?"
"I-I…she has epilepsy, but I've never…she said to time it if it ever…."
"She was right. You did great."
"Aren't we supposed to put something in her mouth?" one of the others asked.
"You are not. Where was she when it started?" Estella's movements were slowing down, and Meredith caught the shine of a linked bracelet on her arm. MedicAlert. Excellent. "Did she hit her head?"
"She, like, I think she knew it was coming?" The girl standing on the upper edge of the perimeter they'd all made around their friend said. "We'd gotten, like, here," she darted up one step and stopped at the halfway point. "And she kinda did this?" She took two lunging steps forward, each getting closer to the rock. "But she must've hit then, because she fell onto her side and rolled down." Stopping by the abandoned backpack that must've been Estella's; she demonstrated by turning her hand over, to Meredith's relief. A demonstration leading to another fall wouldn't help the situation.
"Oh, man, I did not."
"Estella!"
Meredith waved off the surge of concerned teens. "Let her breathe, everyone. Estella? How're you feeling?" She clicked on the narrow flashlight attached to her keychain. It wasn't the extra one of Derek's penlights she had in the car, but it would suffice.
"Dumb."
"You did everything right." Meredith checked the engraved plate on the bracelet. tonic-clonic seizure disorder treated by Fycompa and Topamax.
"I hadn't had one in, like, two years, and I'm supposed to take my test next month!"
"Your test?"
"My driving test! I'm sixteen."
"I see. I'm sorry, but think of it this way, you probably just need your meds adjusted. You'll get five extra months to avoid failing the first time and having to wait to do it again anyway. Just makes the whole thing more stressful."
"You sound like you had that happen." Estella managed an impressive side-eye for a girl lying on her side, covered in dust.
"I took it three times," Meredith admitted. Spring of 1994 had not been great for her. She knew what it was like to suddenly face the ways you were different."Squeeze my hand."
"Guess it coulda been worse. I was terrified I'd collapse in front of everyone at my quinces."
"That was last year?"
"Yes, this year is 2014. Obama is the president, yes we did."
"Frequent flyer all right." Meredith went through the rest of a neuro check, palpitated the bruise forming around the scrape on the side of Estella's forehead, and then helped her sit. Still, wouldn't say no to a nurse suggesting a CT.
"Have you been getting water today, Estella?"
"Yeah." Meredith raised her eyebrows. "Seriously."
"We went to In&Out on the way out here," said one of the boys said. Meredith noted the way Estella inhaled at his attention. "Shouldn't be a blood sugar thing." He smiled at Estella, his brown eyes meeting hers, a big deal in a teenage boy. "My brother has diabetes. He's totally wiped out in way worse situations."
The sweet caress of twilight….
Meredith ended up concerned only by the wrist the girl was holding close to her chest.
"Momma dere!" she heard Bailey announce and looked up to see him pointing with his hand in Fatimah's face.
"Everything okay?" It'd been ten minutes, and with him in the carrier the walk should've been pretty quick.
"Oh sure. Did some animal spotting. Played pan for gold. I think this Mister must've misunderstoo, and produced gold. I was going to see if you needed anything from the car."
"Give us one second." Meredith faced Estella. Without saying anything Fatimah herded the others a little farther out of earshot. "What's your plan supposed to be?"
"Go to the nurse."
"Next?"
"Call home," she admitted. "Let my tía decide what I do next."
"Let's see what she says, then."
With a sigh Estella unearthed her phone. It hadn't taken any damage judging by her exclamation of relief. While the initial conversation started in Spanish, Meredith kept thinking of that day in tenth grade; the time she'd been the one to go down.
The news of the suicide that had rocked everyone who'd listened to new music in the preceding five years—aka, not Ellis Grey—had hit two days ahead of her sixteenth birthday. To avoid having a crowd surging off Boston Preparatory Academy property, her teachers had turned their TVs on. Meredith hadn't wanted to see memorials or rewatch Nirvana's music videos. The times she'd caught her classmates observations—"I've never known someone who offed themselves!" "It must've been gnarly. Think his brains were on the walls?" "Kurt had given us all he could. All we can do is be grateful" —she'd come close to breaking her rule against hitting first. She'd wanted to be hit, wanted to have fists, and elbows, and metal-toed shoes jammed into the soft parts of her body; anything that might distract her from the shit going on in her head. The memories. Then, she'd walked into last-period Chemistry, and hear the announcer say, "Whether Cobain considered the effect on his infant daughter—" and fainted for the first time in her life.
"Dr. Meredith?" She'd snapped back to see Estella holding a phone up to her. "Tía Gracie wants to talk to you."
She took the phone and put on the "talking to parents voice" she'd started perfecting at fifteen. There was nothing illicit about the hiking trip, so the aunt seemed to feel much the same way as the niece, disappointed but resigned. They arranged for Meredith and Fati to escort the group the additional half mile to the parking lot. Meredith could do further first-aid with access to her emergency bag, and Gracie would be there within half-an-hour to collect Estella and her friends for dinner. "I don't want her out of my sight," she told Meredith. "But she needs to know her friends aren't going to shut her out, don't you think?"
"I think she's got good support," she said, while Estella laughed at something the brown-eyed boy said to Bailey.
The school nurse had let Meredith go at the final bell, and she'd drifted through a half dozen impromptu gatherings over the afternoon and evening. She wasn't interested in the communal mourning for an icon with anyone who'd never bothered reading interviews or liner notes. He was only a musician to them. No one remembered he had a daughter. She hadn't been into the angry, music-burning bonfires, either. Her records were more than recordings. They'd been buying a record with a cover that might make her mother confiscate it, standing in line at Newbury Comics at dawn, and having to carry In Utero around for the whole school day, scavenging used record-stores and tables on sidewalks with her hand in Layla's and returning to Boston with bootleg tapes.
Meredith had run home, ignoring friends trying to get her to follow them to the nearest house with MTV. She hadn't wanted to keep hearing his voice, and she'd known her mother would be out. She'd dialed the phone number with her school bag still over her shoulder. Layla had had her own line, a result of having two sisters who'd since gone onto college. She'd also been three time zones away. That'd been the first time Meredith didn't subtract three hours from the time since returning home from Seattle at the end of the summer.
"All right, ready to get up?" Meredith asked Estella, holding her hands out to the girl.
"We can help if you need it," Tamar added. Brown Eyes couldn't decide if he wanted to have his hands in his pockets or make sure they were available to be grasped. Estella turned away from both of them, and then raised her eyes toward Meredith, pleading.
"Fatimah, can you and these guys start moving forward? Estella and I will follow." There was a burst of refusal from the teenagers, but Fatimah had them wrangled in moments, assuring them that Estella would be joining them. The girl didn't look up.
"Do you have a sweater in your bag?" Meredith asked.
Estella shook her head. "Extra pants and stuff. Can you help me change?"
"I would, sweetheart, but all of that—" Meredith pointed to the leaves on the edge of the trail. "—is poison oak. You don't want to be bare anywhere near it."
"I'd rather have that than letting Kiko see me wet myself like a baby."
"He was doing all right with my baby."
A soft smile appeared on Estella's face. "We volunteer as playground monitors. He's super sweet with kids. But you expect this from kids, not…not love interests."
Meredith smiled. She'd let her discover the situations where that wasn't true from someone else. "Stand up with me."
She let Meredith pull her up and examine the wet spot on her narrow-legged jeans. Meredith knew what the solution was. The thought smashed the wall she'd built around this situation, and her hands shook while she undid the knot of the shirt tied around her waist.
"Meredith!" Fatimah's voice didn't sound panicked, but there were only two reasons Meredith could imagine her yelling for her. She motioned for Estella to stay in place and ran down to the base of the wedged steps where Fatimah was waiting. The cluster of kids was further down on the trail, and a flash of bright red and blond proved hers were with them.
"Latino Aladdin down there thought the patient might need this," Fatimah said, holding up an SDSU hoodie.
"Wow," Meredith said, draping it over her arm. "Girl might have a keeper."
"Hard to find such a thoughtful fifteen-year-old boy." Fatimah laughed.
Five hours after she'd gotten home that Friday in 1994, her lab partner Paul Waxman had found her taking a bottle from the dry bar of Geraldine Carlson's unfinished basement. "You okay, Grey?"
"I don't wanna talk about it," she'd said, looping her arms around his neck. Paulie had been flirting with her all year, but she hadn't been interested. He was a baseball player; one of the school's significantly celebrated sports, and they'd had nothing in terms of common friends or interests.
She'd grabbed the lapels of his jacket to slam him against the wall, and he'd spun them so she hit the other side of the corner. She should've let the commonality thing go before this. Most people were afraid to shove her around, even the boys who'd given her black eyes on the playground— "Puberty increases muscle mass, Meri. Aren't you the one who wants to be a doctor like Mommy?" Any dude who called her "Meri" was introduced to the negatives of having his balls drop, but tended to lose interest in making out.— Paulie lost words when she shoved him into one of several nearby beanbags, only making noises of assent in response to the questioning looks she gave him every time she undid a button or tugged a zipper.
The rumors about his encounters with the Boston Latin Women's lacrosse team were as exaggerated as the ones about why Meredith had often been found in the darkest corner of the library on weekend nights. She snaked her hand around to his wallet and removed the wrinkled condom. He'd taken it from the bowl outside the school nurse's office; she recognized the wrapper. He closed his eyes when she took it out, like he couldn't believe the time of having it in there taunting him, had ended. He didn't ask if she was sure. She was making it obvious, but Layla had asked with every—Layla was over. Layla was over, Kurt was dead, and Meredith was tired of being told to come back once she'd been popped, because newly deflowered virgins were too likely to become attached. Those dickheads weren't wrong, but like the rest of the patriarchal world, they overestimated power of their cocks. Their definition of virgin might be 'a person with a vagina who has not yet had a piece of skin stretched to the point of bleeding, specifically by a male sexual organ' but that had nothing to do with attachment. That was a result of letting the hormones that were released when someone brought you to orgasm get the better of you. Biology wanted you to get attached to that person, because bonded people could create and/or raise viable off-spring. Biology could be manipulated.
She had about a minute's sense that she'd found a way to wipe out the darkening whirlwind of disorientation, rage, and dejection that'd been powering her all day. Then, Paulie had latched onto her hips, trying to propel her into flipping. She'd tightened her legs and tried to figure out how to shift to take him in deeper. His expression became concerned; not pain, but like… he tried to roll her over again.
"Don't you like it?"she'd asked, feeling stupid. She was supposed to know; Layla could—
"I do, b-but isn't the guy supposed to be on top?"
For fuck's sake. She felt bad for whatever girl had to train this vanilla bean, but it wasn't going to be her. If he wanted to be the one flashing his ass to anyone coming around the corner that was…maybe not fine. His uncertainty cleared up; she could feel, now, that he'd actually shrunk while trying to determine which one of them should lie back and think of—of wherever the missionaries came from. To the zealots' credit, they weren't being jammed into different dips in a beanbag with every pump. She forwent holding herself up to slide a hand in between them, and—okay, maybe if she could match his—Paul's spine arced, the "deeper" thing almost made sense, and then he was lying flat against her. His failure to check in with her turned out to have nothing to do with how obvious she was being. It turned out he hadn't cared. He'd muttered, "That was wicked, Grey," before he'd left her.
Fifteen-year-old boys, in her opinion, had sucked. Not literally.
Estella's face lit up, and she held the hoodie out like it was the most gorgeous prom dress she'd ever seen. "H-he guessed?"
"I'd assume something similar happened to his brother."
"But I'll get it all messed up."
"Wash it this weekend," Meredith suggested. "Give it back to him on Monday." Estella nodded, biting her lip. "Or don't."
The girl laughed and tied the hoodie around her waist, standing still for Meredith to arrange it to hide the spot that looked more like a shadow.
Meredith slipped on Derek's flannel and tried not to think of the particular spark in his eye whenever he draped one of his shirts or jackets over her shoulders.
Meredith and Estella made it to the parking lot and visiting center, and she spotted the girl while she changed, wrapped an Ace around her wrist and Steri-Striped the scratch on her forehead. By that point, the aunt had arrived, and she took charge of the teen crew, loading them all into her SUV while examining every inch of her niece.
"Tía, I already got looked at by a doctor."
"Who would understand if your aunt wanted to make a stop at an ER, so don't bring me into this," Meredith informed her. "It's my opinion that you'll be safe making an appointment with your neurologist. Which reminds me," she added, looking up at the aunt. "I have a bit of an unusual question to ask, but since it's Googleable, I hope you'll humor me. Can I get said neurologist's phone number? We're…new here, and my daughter needs to be followed by someone competent."
With an item on her Zola&Bailey list potentially checked off, Meredith accepted Estella's hug and her aunt's thanks, before gladly climbing into the passenger seat of her own car.
"Good doctorin' Momma," Zola said.
"Thank you, love-bug."
"Do you need to do a surgery on her?"
"I do not," Meredith said, thinking of the way her hands had shaken while she tugged at the knot around her waist.
"That was pretty impressive," Fatimah said.
"Basic first-aid."
"Doesn't change the fact that it's a skill to be able to switch modes so easily."
Meredith appreciated all Fatimah wasn't saying. Maybe she wasn't reconsidering Meredith's general competence, but she doubted it.
"Tacos?" Fatimah suggested. Meredith let the kids' cheers be her answer.
With Paul, and her virginity gone, she'd ended up on her with a bottle in her friend Manderly's sound-proofed garage in Dorchester. Her father was a pilot who got his hours whenever her mom had custody, and her bandmates came and went all the time. Meredith wasn't one of them, yet, but she'd moved enough equipment to qualify as a roadie, and Manderly had given her the code to the padlock.
"Better you take your shit out on a drumhead than a dude's head."
It'd been dawn by the time she'd left for the T. She might've been able to go home and sleep soundly through her last Saturday of being fifteen if her mother hadn't decided to forgo being fifteen minutes early to work.
Meredith's life would've gone far more smoothly if covered parking weren't cheaper at the hospital. She could never judge if her mom was home by the location of their car.
"Had a sleepover at Sadie's," she'd lied. "Since tomorrow is my birthday."
"Yes, I was there the first time," her mother had said, like that meant she'd never postponed a celebratory dinner, or forgotten and pretended it was a postponement. "I'm off Tuesday. We'll go to the DMV."
"We will?"
"Unless you're not prepared to take your driver's test."
"I, no, yeah."
"Which is it?"
"I am." Meredith had been electrified with excitement. She couldn't wait to tell Layla; so what if it was four in the morning there, she'd be able to…. "Mom? Un-unless you have to? I don't need to go to Seattle this summer." Meredith had continued toward her room —don't linger if you've said your piece. Ellis didn't know why she'd been hinting that they should go back, and Meredith hadn't known that the research project she'd run at Seattle Grace had been an early attempt to make an impression on the board.
"I do know what happened today."
Meredith had frozen, and her eyes had whipped up to meet her mother's. In spite of the way she'd immediately pictured her the way she'd looked on the kitchen floor eleven years earlier; her skin paler than the tile, and that Meredith had spent the past eighteen hours immersed in a different suicide, her first thought was that her mother had found out about Layla.
Layla who had said, "All stars burn out. We've still got his music. That's his light and it'll keep shining."
Meredith had scoffed. "That's really pretty, Lay, but it's bullshit."
Her mother stood at the end of the hall, her keys in her hand. "Mental illness and addiction are medical conditions. You can't force someone to accept treatment. That's why we have AMAs. All you can do is give a patient all the information, and explain the consequences, an adult can make their choice."
"He had a daughter," Meredith had said, echoing what she'd said to Layla, who didn't have her mother's insight into its significance. "She's the one who has to live with the consequences."
Her mother hadn't replied.
"Were you a Nirvana fan?" Meredith asked Fatimah who jumped. Great. No telling how long she'd been in her head, about not-Derek. She used to time things by the kids' playlist, but she'd had to delete it to bear driving anywhere once they stopped in San Diego. She hadn't built a new one; she just kept it shuffling Disney.
"Sorry, no. You were?"
"To Sadie's eternal annoyance. We fought the day Ku—Cobain went missing. She understood more than I did about how someone…someone extraordinary can think their world is better without them. It wasn't exactly my first death, but it was the first one that came out of nowhere, and I…I broke up with my first real girlfriend."
"Difference sides of the saint vs. sinner debate?"
"Time difference. I spent three hours with every clipping I had about him and Courtney. I didn't see the appeal of Romeo and Juliet, but those two disturbed assholes keeping it together for each other? That I could get behind. By the time she called, I'd decided that if any of it was real, the screw-ups should be protecting the rest of the world from ourselves. From there, I chickened out and told her my mom said we weren't going to Seattle that summer."
Spending the weekend on her last letter to Layla had been failed driver's test number one.
"You're still a better driver than Hellis," Sadie had offered. She'd gone on one of her few trips out to Manderly's drum-kit after Meredith asked if the Harris mansion had any China in the attic that could be broken without Himself noticing.
The comedown hit her with the air-conditioning in the restaurant. Her day-to-day life in Seattle kept her adrenaline at a higher-than-typical level, rising and falling with much more gradual dips than a typical person would experience when faced with her level of responsibility. She'd said 'no' to being a trauma surgeon for a reason, but she could handle the spikes of emergency well. In the moment.
Like "big feelings," the drop always hit eventually, because she was a human being with a body. She'd been running on anxiety for weeks, true, but not of a kind that required her to rise above the way her physical and mental wherewithal had been drained the last week of March.
Another goalpost for returning to Seattle; be able to deliver a neuro exam without trembling within an hour, thinking of all the times she'd seen Derek flicking his penlight, or the times she'd been on the other side, and watched his eyes light up. Picturing blown pupils, refusing to follow the light.
A waiter came by. Meredith pushed the plate of chips and salsa toward Fatimah, pointedly handing pieces to Bailey and Zola, whose "pennight" had been one of the essentials that came south with them.
She stared at the menu, which had three pages of margarita variations. Wouldn't be her first meal of corn chips and blended drinks. The waiter returned. Fatimah made a face when she only asked for a Sprite with the "Tot Taco" and the "Bugaboo Burrito," but Bailey wouldn't eat all of his. Not with the damage he was doing to the chips.
Zola also objected to the order. "I am not a tot-ler this year," she said, like she was taking it on herself to keep her mother in the present. "I'm a Pre-K."
"One:" Meredith said, bopping Zola on the nose with her fingertip. "You are a preschooler, but you start Pre-K in the fall. Two: is Bailey a bugaboo?"
"No, he's a tot-ler."
"Depends on how you look at it. Some people might say he's a baby until next week."
"That is silly. You're a tot-ler when you start tot-ling."
Meredith winced, exaggeratedly. "Don't say that! He was a baby far longer than that."
Across from her, Fatimah laughed. "Early walker?"
"Mid-March last year. The nineteenth, I think."
Between Derek's conference calls with NIH representatives and lawyers. Had she taken time to be excited or had the first thing she'd said been, "This is the kind of thing you're gonna miss,"
Had she shown him the video she took before saying, "Can I send this to Callie, or do I have to go through Lloyd?"
"Ten and a half months," she added. "Not unheard of, but he was several weeks early, so, adjusted we were impressed."
"Did I walk impressed?" Zola asked.
"You walked at exactly the right time." She sipped her soda, trying to stop the way her thoughts thundered over the crossing that led to a doorbell that rang ten minutes later; a baby who'd started walking three weeks earlier unobserved by anyone; who didn't walk, because the condition keeping her in pain hadn't been treated. "Tell me what you saw hiking with Fatimah."
Zola did so animatedly, and her brother chimed in repeating the names of a variety of flora and fauna. From there, Meredith asked Fatimah about her job, and the school's charter. The majority of the meal could've passed for something normal.
She was fork-feeding Bailey the insides of his deconstructed burrito and picking at his side of yellow rice when Zola put down the chunk of tortilla she was nibbling and asked, "What do they do if a kid dies?"
Not "do kids die?" She'd grown up in a household that didn't make a secret of patients dying. Of people dying. She knew they had children as patients; it made sense that she'd reason it out. Meredith had never hidden the truth of what she did from her kids; she'd had to figure out for herself that her mother's bad moods had far more to do with bad surgical outcomes than her daughter. They did say "a bad outcome" sometimes, more to keep "my mom made someone die" from becoming something Zola got accustomed to saying at day-care and caused issues at kindergarten. Euphemism wasn't Meredith's thing, and overall, she thought it'd helped that Zola understood what she did.
They hadn't had the kid conversation specifically. Meredith would've remembered that. When April and Jackson lost Samuel, she'd considered saying more than "they're not going to have a baby anymore, and they're sad about that," but in December that'd been all Zola needed to know.
Derek would've told her if he'd discussed it with her. He might've blamed it on Meredith. We're surgeons, Derek.—She's four years old! She doesn't need to know that…that she could—Meredith's mental Derek voice cut off. She couldn't think it. Not that it would change anything. Imagining Derek dying; not imagining Derek dying, that hadn't done any good.
But looking at Zola's bright eyes below brows pulled together by curiosity and having with Bailey leaning on one of her arms trying to get at the crayons—Meredith moved the sugar canister she'd stowed them in closer to the other side of the table—she couldn't let herself imagine anything happening to her. To either of them.
"Bum in your chair, bud," she said, pulling the hem of Bailey's t-shirt to get him down into the high-chair and put a fork full of ground beef in eye-line instead. "What do you mean, Zo-Zo? The girl we saw today is going to be okay."
"I know. You doctored her, and she didn't even go to sleep. A'sides, she was a ten-ager. If a kid dies." Meredith glanced at Fatimah. Did she have the same philosophy of honesty as the Dillard social workers? No better time to find out.
"That can happen," she said, trying to will herself to be a doctor again. Second time in a day, so impressive. "When a child is very badly hurt, or very sick."
"To make their body not work anymore."
"That's right. All doctors work very hard to try to stop it, just like…just like they should do for anyone."
"Then they put them in the box. Um, but what if the box is too big?" Zola continued. "A kid could slide all around being carried in. Wouldn't that be bad?"
Meredith switched Bailey's plate out for the coloring book she kept in her purse. Zola's focus on getting an answer was clear when she didn't object to him scrubbing in a blue tree.
"Do you…do you remember what the box is called?"
"A coffin. Not to do with coughing," Zola added. She might never forget the laughter that'd followed her poorly whispered "but Momma, Daddy didn't have a cough." Meredith wouldn't. They'd definitely have different views on the moment.
"Okay. Good…in some places, making coffins is a job, and that used to be how it was everywhere. They make them especially for someone's size. Now, here it's…it's more like whenever you get clothes. They make them in certain sizes, and they fill the space with soft stuff." The back room at the funeral home had been like the lot of a car-dealership, and the salesman who'd sold her her Lexus had been far less smarmy. She'd seen child-sized coffins before but seeing them empty and open was a different experience. Her mind was all too ready to fill in the space.
"But the body can't feel?" Zola asked, and that was exactly why Meredith had wanted to call the babysitter that day; to let them stay home through the service, and go straight to the reception.
"No, sweetie. If a body doesn't work—if the heart and lungs, and everything stops—it means the brain doesn't work. You can't feel touch or pain."
At some point in this, the waitress had left the check booklet. If she searched reddit over the next week or two, would she see this transcribed on a board for weird customer conversations?
"Do they do a funeral?"
Two weeks ago, Meredith had gone into Zola's room to see her arranging all her stuffedies, dolls, and the contents of Zola's Zoo on her bed. She was more surprised by her correct pronunciation of the word now than she'd been by the answer to "what are you doing" being "playing funy-real." Play was how children processed. She'd left to rejoin Bailey in the living room, knowing he was engrossed in the day's first episode of PAW Patrol. A better mother would've asked for more information or watched for longer.
"They do. Remember, a funeral is sort of like a party, where everyone comes to talk about the person who died, but it's sad, because you miss that person."
"Is that why they get embellished to view? So, at the wake part of the party, it's like they're 'wake?"
Embellish? Embolism? Where did she pick that…? Embalm. Obviously, embalm. Meredith didn't have the background for this. She'd had a vague understanding of viewings, but most of the families of Irish descent she'd known in Boston must've been Protestant, because she'd thought wakes belonged to the nineteenth century. That'd only been the start of the chasm between her expectations and the Shepherds'.
Her next few breaths came in one on top of the other, and she had to stop that. If she freaked out, Zola would freak out, and this wasn't a matter of a few (hundred) tears. She balled her fists up on her lap.
"That is one reason, yes. It used to be that people stayed awake all night to have the party, because…." Well, because they believed in ghosts, but putting that aside…. Meredith forced another long breath. "Do you remember the times we've found dead animals on the land?"
Zola screwed her face up. "It's yucky. But Daddy says that gives the ground nush-ment, to grow, and other animals eat the grown stuff, and it's like the Lion King circle."
If two months of a promised year stepping back, and the few other weekend hikes he'd taken Zola on had been enough to reinforce that, Meredith wouldn't take it for granted again.
"That's what happens to human bodies, too, if you…when you bury them. It's called decomposition. That means coming apart. A lot of places, that's what they've always done. That's why there are cemeteries, and graveyards. For some people, that's a place where they go to remember the person they love.
"But not everyone…bodies make some people uncomfortable. Or… they only want memories of their loved ones alive. Sometimes that means they bury bodies quickly. Other people, they want to be able to see that person like they were when they were alive, but our bodies start changing right away."
"We have people coming in from all over the country…"
"To make them look alive, we have to use a lot of chemicals. It doesn't mean they never decompose; nothing can stop that, but it takes much longer, and if you bury a body with those chemicals inside, it's bad for the ground. For the nature around it."
"Like litter-pollution?"
"Like litter and pollution, yeah." Meredith wished for a moment that Sadie was there instead of Fatimah, who probably thought she was telling her kid far more than she needed to know.
"Do people have to get put in the ground?"
"No," Meredith said, too quickly.
She glanced away from Zola, and when she looked back, she could only see Bailey's rice-bowl. Yellow rice. Not white. Not mistakable for…. Maggots were used for wound care; they could be incredibly beneficial. In controlled circumstances.
"A body isn't a person anymore. You understand that, yes?"
"If a brain isn't working, there's no thoughts, and no thoughts is no you," Zola said.
"Good. So, mostly, graves are for the people who are still alive, to remember. Sometimes, people want a specific place to remember their loved one, but there isn't much land. Most people who don't bury do something called cremation. It's like when we burned the leaves last fall. They'd already fallen, which means they were dead, right?" She waited for Zola to nod. She wasn't sure she was explaining this right, but she had to give her daughter an alternative. She hadn't known she'd needed one, until she did. "We do that with bodies. Not we. Professionals do, and they give the ashes to the family.
"Sometimes the person who died wanted to be part of nature again as quickly as possible. Other times it's so they can put the ashes somewhere that person liked, where you're not able to bury a body, because it's nice to think of them being there forever, or they keep them in a container kind of like a vase—but that's all for the people who want to remember."
"Like a de-minder?"
"Like a reminder."
"The burning is hot?"
"It is. Heat and air cause a reaction that makes solid things into ashes." Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. How do you say that with no ashes?
"But it doesn't hurt?"
"Absolutely not. I promise, Zo. A dead body can't hurt. Anything that's done to it is about the people who are still alive." And what the dead wanted while they were alive.
"The burning way. The animals on the land were icky, and I won't be 'wake." Zola said, and then drank down her juice until her straw was only getting air. "You could use this," she added, holding up the empty cup.
"For what?"
"If I had to be ashes. A kid'd be smaller than a vase."
Meredith got up, touching Bailey's hair as she went around his highchair. Then pulled Zola's chair out to face her and crouched in front of her. "Zola Grey, look my way."
Zola's face relaxed a little. She knew she wasn't in trouble. "I am!"
"I need all of your attention."
"Okay, Mommy."
"Every little bit."
"I'm listening!"
"Right here."
"I am paying attention!"
"Good. You do not need to think about dying, Zola. You are as safe as anyone can be, and I will do everything I can do to make that as true as it can be for as long as possible. You know are things surgeons can't fix, and I wish you didn't have to, but you let me worry about that. You let me worry about the big scary things because that's what mommies are for. Do you understand?"
"Uh-huh."
"Tell me."
"I'm safe, because you worry about all the big stuff, and, um, we don't need to have a grave to remember?"
"Okay. One more question." Zola's smile started in the muscles right above her cheeks. "Do you know how much I love you?"
"All the much."
"That's exactly right."
Meredith tried to focus on the ride to the condo, she really did. The wedding ring she wore around her neck left a mark on her palm she was pressing it so hard, but her thoughts were everywhere, from death rituals she'd read about as a weird kid—if Zola asked that question again in a few years, there were all kinds of weird memento mori attached to the Victorian cult of the child—to what she should've said, to what Derek would've said, and the next thing she knew they were parked next to Fatimah's car.
As usual, Bailey had fallen asleep. The day might've been tiring enough that she could get him into a clean diaper and pajamas without a full revival. She was grateful that habit remained, even if he wasn't crazy about being in his car seat yet. Maybe when she moved him to the front-facing one she had in the small storage room that came with the condo. Zola looked like she'd drifted off, too, though getting her to admit it would take longer than getting her to bed.
"Thanks for coming with me today," Fatimah said, standing beside her open car door.
"Sorry, we ruined your peaceful Saturday."
"You didn't. It was nice having someone along. I'm a bit of a loner; most of my friends are Sadie's friends. I have colleagues. Plus, I had a feeling you wouldn't want to go out tomorrow."
Mother's Day. Holiday Two.
"Correct. That's true most days, but children need sunshine, apparently. Something about growth and strength? I think we covered it in med school."
"I'll take your word for it." Fatimah put a hand tentatively on Meredith's shoulder. At least she wasn't inadvertently giving off Medusa vibes. She tried to indicate it was okay, and Fatimah relaxed. Surprisingly, it was okay, when last time the situation came up, she'd have hacked off the hand of another stranger who tried to touch her. "You handled that incredibly, by the way."
"Which part?"
"Exactly." Fatimah smiled. "Sadie's back on Thursday. If you need anything before the birthday, let me know."
"I'll keep it in mind."
Fatimah had been too understanding all day for her to lie about her intentions outright.
Meredith remembered what it was like. There were times where Sadie had disappeared; she missed a planned outing, or stopped answering the phone, and she didn't see her for a week, or a month. They might be sanctioned absences, now, but being the one left behind probably wasn't much different. Meredith had learned that she came back—hadn't she?— but she also knew nothing could influence how long that took.
She hadn't, for instance, called the day the lead singer of Meredith's favorite non-riot band had been found dead. She hadn't appeared on her birthday. She had been sitting on her stoop Monday afternoon.
It had taken an hour or two of letting her steer the conversation before Meredith relayed the circumstances around "letting Layla go."
"I can't say I'm sorry," Sadie had said. "I like it when you're all mine." It'd come with a sharp, sly smile, and the fire that'd burned on Meredith's face made her all the more certain that Layla deserved someone better. Someone who wasn't hung up on her best friend. Someone who could hear about a rockstar killing himself in Seattle and not detach from reality completely.
"I have the Alzheimer's markers. Early Onset can start showing up as young as thirty. Mom was forty-eight."
"That must've been a tragic situation."
"Uh, yeah, it was. But that's not…. There's this thing I do where I remember a thing, or-or think about something too long, and I…disappear."
"You have a tendency to dissociate, yes."
"You don't think it's an Alzheimer's thing?"
"Not particularly, knowing your history. Is it a new symptom?"
"Um… I've always been prone to zoning out. Mom called it idle daydreaming, but other kids played pretend, too. Still, I…I usually didn't lose the thread totally. I guess the stress of residency made it happen more, because more of my friends had ways of snapping me out, but… it's been a lot worse. And I thought, maybe…."
"Losing Derek is a lot worse, relatively, based on your reports. Early childhood trauma often manifests in a need to escape the situation you're in, mentally, when it's impossible physically. You don't have signs of a more extensive condition; a personality disorder, for instance."
"Like BPD?"
"That is one, yes. My guess is you developed it as a coping mechanism early on, and you return to it in times of stress."
"Huh. That might be my least destructive coping mechanism."
"I could see that. Were you to need me to clear you to operate today, I'm not sure—"
"It's never happened in the OR! I'm not…I wouldn't be okay to operate now, I get that, but it never happened—
"No…. I'm sorry. That's not true. If flashbacks count, it has. After the plane crash, I walked in for a routine appy and the patient was Derek, and Clark was standing at his head, about to fire…. BokHee, my scrub-nurse bumped into me, and I came back. That might not've been an accident. BokHee's observant, and she's been there since I was an intern. She's probably seen more of the highs and lows than anyone. That's the only time. Derek and I decided that it was probably plane crash PTSD, and if it happened again, I'd tell someone. It didn't.
"I mean, I was…unfocused the day of the accident. I had a feeling. And we were treating plane crash survivors. Maybe…maybe it does happen in the OR. Rarely."
"We can start working on grounding techniques. I'd planned to do it soon, regardless. I'd like you to be able to do what BokHee did yourself, at least most of the time. It might be worth speaking to her, and others who you work close to, and asking them to tell you if they notice a lapse, but not interfere immediately."
"I don't—"
"You don't want it to affect your job. You don't want to burden anyone. More of column A or column B?"
"Equal."
"Improvement is a good sign; the further you progress in your grief, the less episodes you'll have. However, you experienced them before. It's not impossible that another event, or a significant enough reminder, could result in an uptick. You want to keep them from invading the OR? Have a system to start coping before chronic becomes emergent."
"It's gonna take a while to get Medusa back from 'Shepherd's widow.' I don't want to land on Crazy Grey. Almost everyone who knew her is on my side, but it never takes long."
"Why couldn't you just be Meredith?"
"I haven't been 'Meredith' in Seattle since I was a tiny kid. I met Derek my first day at work. Everything they know about me revolves around Meredith-and-Derek. Even the seven or eight months we weren't together, the whole thing was so dramatic…. He had a reputation as this brilliant neurosurgeon, and I…I had a name.
'I figured it out…being Ellis Grey's daughter, I knew…know what it means to me. Outside of our hospital, she's simply a legend. Not a legend who became a very real woman to anyone there, and their gossiping friends... My name is starting to be known, too. Inside Grey+Sloan? I think I'm still 'Shepherd's wife, the general surgeon, you know, she was his intern? Yeah, Debbie says she used to dance on tables at Joe's.' Maybe there's a 'shit don't let her see you' in there—they call me Medusa, which Mom wishes—but I don't think…."
"You don't think they respect you?"
"Dunno…. I guess…the single Meredith they knew was a train-wreck. I went from whatever Sadie and I were, and if you count the time from when we met to Amsterdam that was…twenty-two, twenty-three… is still…. fuck. Sorry, Der, you're never getting the superlative…. my longest relationship, or whatever. Then Derek and I had this soap opera-esque thing that just piled onto…. It really…. I guess it wasn't just being single. In four years of med school, I got to know a security guard better than my classmates—I had a dorm, but I was basically commuting to Mom's. Then I had a month to get all the sales done, to fly Mom to Seattle—I thought I'd lost her checking in at Logan, and knowing what I know now, that was my first real experience with panic.
"She'd told me a hundred times, go to the best program I could, and Seattle Grace was incredible, but also we had the house, and the nursing home was supposed to be stellar. I thought I'd made a really good, adult decision, for both of us. I told her we were going. 'Fine, Meredith, fine. They're a highly reputable program. I'm sure some nepotism was involved, but now that you're in…'
"I don't know what did it. We went by the house to drop off my stuff. The movers hadn't come with the Boston shit, but the Seattle stuff was out of storage. She seemed fine. Tired. I asked if she wanted to stay overnight. No, she wanted to get it over with. So maybe…at the time, her reaction to the house made me think I should sell, get a one-bedroom within walking distance of the hospital. I didn't, and it ended up not mattering in terms of…. I never had time to take her out, but maybe it wasn't the house. Just Seattle. She started regressing a lot more. I couldn't visit much but compared to the previous four years…."
"Early onset progresses rapidly."
"I know! I know that. I…Just, she got stuck. She, uh… she wasn't… wasn't…wasn't…."
"Take your time."
"She wasn't ever my mom again. Not the one I knew. She could be 'Mommy' at times, but that wasn't…she wasn't great at Mommy. Wasn't great at Mom either, but at least she was…I was…more than a nuisance…sorry. I know. if I apologize for crying, we'd never get anything done, but shouldn't the crying be about Derek?"
"Derek was part of your life. There was a time before, and now there is a time after. Examining them is part of this, and your reactions are as valid as your feelings."
"I thought I did all that. All the mom-talk with Dr. Wyatt, and I didn't realize that it bothered me. Not only that she wasn't lucid, but when she thought she was."
"And you think the move caused that increased regression?"
"Couldn't have helped."
"Was she unhappy in Seattle?"
"The first time?"
"Or in her memories?"
"She talked a lot about being with Richard. Her…the guy she cheated on my dad with. Losing him. The one day she had lucid she…she panicked. Had a heart attack. Turned out she had arrhythmias related to coronary artery disease. They wanted to do a radioablation, and she…she tried to refuse. I had medical power of attorney. She…the stuff she said…. That day was…was a lot. A lot I don't wanna talk about … not today. Just…it was a major shock for her, waking up in Seattle. Me being there, all naturally-colored hair, button-down shirt, nice sweater; going on about how great things were with my boyfriend. I'd changed so much, she kept asking 'what happened to you.' And I was…I was working for the man who she'd wanted to raise me; the man who broke her. Who got her pregnant again, and never sought her out. I was acting like I was about repeat all her mistakes, and I…I made it worse. I all but said she was a burden! I was terrible, and she lost lucidity, and she never recovered."
"Physically. I don't have to give you CAD stats in women over fifty, do I? You got her to the hospital immediately, which suggests that the CAD injury was significant. Whether or not—Meredith?"
"Sorry…the hysterics are alternating with the crying lately. Um, her heart it hardened. My mother, my mother, her heart was…was too hard….
"Okay. Sorry. I'm fine. Crap, last week I thought I wanted that to happen, and…nope. Definitely not. Um, the arrhythmias…the shock of finding out what'd happened to her…that her life was…what it was…it gave her a heart attack. She didn't need me bitching her out on top of that."
"You had her in a care facility, and the CAD had progressed quickly enough that it hadn't yet been detected. Whether or not her heart attack was anything other than a random event, her risk for additional CAD injury—"
"I understand the medicine! That doesn't change the fact that she asked to refuse care. She didn't want to live with what she had left."
"She might not have known what that was. You say you'd changed enough to be nearly unrecognizable to her; that must've been startling, because you'd been her constant as much as it was the other way around. Whatever mistakes you think you were heading for; you were on the path she'd followed. Knowing what you had going for you, how demanding your job was, and that her care would be a distraction from the career she wanted for you—the one you point out she dedicated herself to, and could no longer pursue? To her, her life may well have seemed over. To you, it did not, because even when she wasn't lucid, she was still a person whose presence affected your life."
"She wasn't…it was hard, but…I let her think…she was my mother. And I was…."
"Her only responsibility. And she believed you were happy."
"I don't think she did. I've thought about that day a lot. It was one of the worst days of my life, but... but I'd changed. I had. Meeting Derek…thinking I could have that, and be the surgeon I'd always dreamed of being, that changed me. I was happy with him. Everyone thinks…I assume they think it all…all my damage came from Derek staying with his wife, but the truth is, a lot of it was there. I had just started letting him see it. We got back together, and I so badly wanted to be…I don't know. I didn't know. Mom saw I'd put on this veneer to hold myself together.
"Whatever Sadie and I were; it ended in Amsterdam. I went home and became Mom's case manager. Anything else…my social life, my maturity, it got put on pause. …. My friend Callie, she says this thing about how residencies are like high school with scalpels, since we're all nerds who spent our lives studying, but I didn't exactly strive in college, and I took two years off…. She did the Peace Corps, so if anyone came in an actually mature human being…."
"Meredith?"
"Sorry! That's-that's the zoning out thing. We treated Callie…that's an example of why I don't love who I was a lot of year. Maybe I see myself as a trainwreck.
"Mentally I was twenty-three, twenty-four. Mom was dying and gone in that order. My boyfriend, my first real anything had a wife. I wasn't ready to move in, let alone be that serious, but I'd really thought… I hadn't believed in happily-ever-after two months earlier. I thought romance was for romcoms. A nice thought, but not possible, because two people could never be aligned like that. I've read stuff about the whole aro/ace spectrum, and if I'd seen it then, I'd have said I was aromantic, but that's not it. I knew the feelings existed. Having them reciprocated? That was entirely different. Derek did stuff just for me. He wanted to stay over. He wanted to hold my hand and kiss me in the lobby. I told him about my mother, and he didn't run. He didn't think I worked too much, but he also didn't seem to mind that I hadn't grown out of some of the party girl stuff…because I hadn't. I hadn't dealt with shit since I got that call in Amsterdam….
"Derek started as…as unpausing. He didn't break me; but the way we met was a symptom of being broken, and he had a wife. I'd never, gotten in the way of someone else's relationship. And the way I dealt with it was immature. There was a lot of tequila. There were a few weeks of hooking up with randos. I made at least one truly regrettable sexual choices. And the story, it still goes around. So, I can only imagine how many ways it has been told in the past six weeks."
"And you think your colleagues expect that to happen again?"
"They do. I opened a few of the e-mails last night. 'Just be safe, Mer.' 'Look out for yourself.' Like I didn't get my act together on my own. Like all of that didn't start before Derek and…I wasn't getting hurt…I was trying to heal myself. To prove I didn't need him, just…that maybe there could be… Whatever, that didn't work. Not long after Mom died, we broke up again. I wasn't ready. I couldn't let him love me. I wasn't being me. It took months in therapy to reconcile it all… what I'd lost over that year, over five years. To prove to myself I belonged in the program; that I was worthwhile independent of him, and my mother.
"I focused on surgery. I discovered a possible treatment for malignant brain gliomas. Derek was the lead on the clinical trial, and aside from discovering that…that two people could be aligned, I came to see that…that he did…could love me. Cracks and all."
"That he didn't create."
"Right, but they didn't really…they all knew about him before the rest of it. So, so… they think that's how I reacted to him breaking me."
"But he didn't."
"He was the fall. The cracks were there."
"His death hasn't broken you either."
"I don't have all my pieces. There are dents. Corrupted batteries, or chips. Messed up connections, but… no. Not the way I was then."
"Do you think it should have?"
"Shouldn't it? The way I loved Derek…. I put aside almost everything else I thought I knew about myself, at some point or another. I mean, even…what I said about not being a home-wrecker? He took that from me, and by the time I really was, it didn't matter. Being us…having us… it meant more. Last…in March, I told him I could live without him, but I didn't want to… I didn't ever want to, and then…."
"You were willing to be just Meredith, and you had the choice taken away. And you think Seattle would've expected a similar reaction to what they saw the last time you believed in a future with him that was denied."
"Won't they?"
"I'm not sure. Perhaps they think coming here was the first step in that—no, let me finish—when we know it was not, the people who matter will see that. They will see Meredith. On her own. Without Derek. Some part of you knew they would; and didn't want to be with them until you could fully be her. The rest will be underestimating you."
"What if it's an overestimation? What if…what if there's not enough Meredith-with-Derek in Meredith? What if I just become Ellis Grey's failure daughter again?"
"All those questions tell me is we need to get you past underestimating yourself."
The green hill is covered purple Blue Dicks. As she ascends, she sees the cluster of headstones. It's a nice place. She could have seen bringing the kids here to sit and read and remember. She could have.
There are figures in black gathered around the stones. A funeral—the graveside service, she assumes. As she climbs, the sky gets darker, nightfall skipping dusk. Close to the summit she notices the first disturbed grave. It's been entirely excavated. The coffin at the bottom is open and empty; the padding destroyed. The name on the headstone is unreadable. Faded? Or—are those scratches?
"My boss." The gravelly voice is familiar, but it's the tone that makes her turn. Playfully rueful, a little resigned. Primarily proud.
There's no one there.
"Mark?" She steps forward. "Mark?" Something crackled under her foot. She jerks backwards, and something she'd have taken for a dead leaf flutters in the grass. It's a shred of fabric. Black. From a suit.
She wants to run, but there are people waiting for her at the next disturbed graves. The figures in black turn to her, and she falls against the stone behind her. Reed Adamson and Charles Percy don't approach her, but she can't move either; she's hypnotized by the clean hole in Reed's head.
"My boss's boss," they say in absolute unison. They revolve to stare at the headstones again. They're pristine, the stones, the ground, and she can't figure out—
"They're not here, Mer." She takes off uphill toward the voice, picking up her feet in the hateful shoes she said she wouldn't wear again to keep the heels from sinking into soft dirt. Her eyes are on the ground, because if Mark was— She collides with him, with George, and he looks normal, except for the uniform she only saw once.
"My teacher," he says.
"He was," she agrees. George doesn't respond. "I was supposed to be…. I should've been better. George, what's going on?"
"I decomposed a long time ago," he says. "It's Seattle. Waterproof only lasts so long." He steps aside. She sees smoke where the former Mercy West doctors were standing. Ash falls to the ground.
The next grave is open, and the body that can only have been its occupant is splayed, as if it'd been dragged a few feet away. Meredith goes to her knees automatically to help an injured person, but that is not what she—this—is.
"My teacher's teacher. My teacher," she says—her voice says; the string of cartilage holding the jaw doesn't move, and her trachea has been ripped—not rotted—out.
"What is this? Brooks…Heather, what is this?"
"The wolves," Heather says, and then Meredith bumps onto her heels as a skeletal hand rises, pointing to a totally demolished gravesite, where wood and fluff are everywhere. "Your sis—"
Meredith leaps up, and forgive me, Lexie, bypassing the open pit and whatever it contains, because she remembers. She remembers him turning her stammering into mockery without mocking her, and she remembers what came next.
Zola is sitting on the headstone at the apex of the hill. "I'm your daughter," she says when she sees Meredith.
"You are." Meredith kneels, desperately checking her for injuries. Zola kicks her shoes against the stone to a familiar rhythm Meredith doesn't want to place. It's gotten darker. She can barely see. In the distance she hears something crackle. A growl. She clutches Zola to her chest.
"Don't worry, Mommy, they don't dig here," Zola says. "They all wanted a piece of Uncle Mark, but they don't disturb Daddy. The chem-cals work on them. Just not on everything forever." Meredith has a flash of insight, and then Zola starts to sing with her tapping. "The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out, the worms crawl in and out your snout…."