The morning has passed by fairly quickly. The coffee, coupled with the adrenaline rush stemming from a massive trauma in the ER, had fueled Meredith to keep going at a high rate of speed. But, now that the codes and the surgeries are over, fatigue has finally set in. She can feel the tiredness seeping into her skin and latching onto her bones. She wants nothing more than to go home and collapse into her bed, but she knows that is not an option. She still has 8 more hours left of her 16 hour shift.
She sets off to find an on-call room to at least catch a 15 or 30 minute nap. Her arms hang limp at her sides like dead weight, and her tennis shoes squeak against the freshly mopped hallway as she shuffles along her way. The last door on the right beckons to her and she is glad to find the room empty when she flips the light switch. As soon as she closes the door, she sighs contently and kicks off her shoes. Her lab coat is discarded and placed over the back of the chair in the corner, and then she is removing her pager from her waistband. She tosses the tiny black device onto the seat of the chair, flips the light switch, and nearly lunges for the bed. By the time she pulls the covers up to her chin and lets her head hit the pillow with a soft thud, her eyes close and the darkness surrounds her. It doesn't take more than five minutes before she is fast asleep.
And then the dreaming starts...
"He's gone. He's gone again!" She screams as tears fill her eyes and drip down her flushed cheeks.
Meredith looks on with a frightened expression, her eyes wide and worried. She feels helpless, because there is really nothing she can do but comfort her. Only, Meredith doesn't really know how to do that. "Mom, he's not... he's not gone. This happened a very long time ago. It isn't happening now."
Trying to reason with Ellis Grey on a normal day is hard enough. It's even more difficult on days like today, when mentally she is somewhere else, and her reality is much different from that of the present time. As she paces, she wrings her hands over and over each other until her skin is bright pink. Her eyes are frantic and she never breaks her stride as she moves from one end of the room to the other.
Meredith stands in the middle of the room watching, her arms folded so that she is hugging herself. She wants to reach out and stop her mother's repetitive strides, but she is afraid to touch her. Ellis has never been a very affectionate person, and Meredith isn't about to start trying to make her one now, so she grips both sides of her shirt in her hands and tries her hardest not to console her.
"You don't know what you're talking about!" Her mother spats harshly, causing Meredith to flinch and take a step back. The venom in her voice in thick. Ellis has bypassed upset and is now coasting along the angry freeway. Meredith hates when her mother gets like this.
"Maybe if you could just... stop pacing and calm down, you could think more rationally about-"
"Rationally?" Her mother interrupts, turning sharply to glare at her. At least she got her to stop pacing. "I am thinking rationally!" She argues, her lips pressed into a thin line. "He... he is the one who isn't thinking so clearly! How could he do this? How could he leave me alone with a child to raise? She's only five! And she's not the easiest child to deal with. She's always meddling, getting in the way when I have work to do. What am I supposed to do? Bring her with me to the hospital? Strap her to a chair in the operating room? She'll want to touch everything!"
"You hired a nanny." Meredith speaks quietly, her eyes downcast to the floor.
"What?" Ellis' tone is softer now, confused. Meredith looks up to see that her expression has crumpled, like she's trying to put the pieces together, but she just can't seem to make them fit right.
"When dad left, you hired a nanny so that someone would be at home while you were at the hospital." Meredith tells her. "Hellen. Her name was Hellen."
Ellis' shoulders drop like she's lost the fight that was once inside of her. "Hellen." She repeats the name absentmindedly, her eyes looking out into the distance like she's trying to picture a face in her mind to match the name. She obviously can't come up with anything because she shakes her head and gives up. When she turns her head to face Meredith again, her eyes look different and that signifies to Meredith that something has changed and her mother is already gone from the moment and her mind has already taken her to another place in time. Where that is, however, is anyone's guess.
"Mom?" She asks tentatively, "Would you like to sit down? It's late. You must be awfully tired."
"Meredith?" Ellis' face shifts again and tears well in her eyes once more. "Is that really you? Look at you. You're all grown up."
Meredith nods silently as her mother steps forward. The vice grip on her shirt loosens as her hands release the material. Her arms drop to her sides. Ellis reaches out like she's going to embrace her, but before she can get close enough, a loud beeping fills the air. Meredith moves fast, but it is not fast enough. Before her hands can close around the pager at her waist, the loud sound has already startled her mother, and her eyes are wide with panic, her mind shifting again to some other far off place.
"You have to leave! You can't be here! I need to be in surgery right now, Meredith! They are paging me and you are just in my way! Leave! Now!"
"Mom." Meredith tries to speak calmly, but the look in Ellis' eyes and the condescending tone in her voice brings up too many past emotions, and she struggles to remind even herself that her mother is not living in the present.
Ellis just keeps yelling, over and over again. Meredith keeps repeating the word 'mom' as calmly as she can.
All the while the beeping of her pager keeps sounding, adding to the chaos and confusion.
Meredith wakes up in a cold sweat. Her breathing is erratic and she looks down to see her chest rising and falling rapidly in the dim light of the on-call room. There is a constant sound in the room and it takes a few seconds for her mind to process the fact that the noise is actually the beeping of her pager that sits discarded on the seat of the chair in the corner. Groaning, and still half asleep, she shoves the covers away from her body and fumbles out of the bed, nearly tripping over her shoes in the process.
After retrieving her pager, she plops down into the chair and squints at the bright, blinking display of words that she is somehow supposed to comprehend in her foggy, half-sleep induced state. It takes her brain another few seconds to focus on the words and she realises that she is needed in room 4136. One of her surgical patients from this morning has taken a turn for the worse and her intern doesn't know what to do.
The details of the dream she's just had floats around in her mind and she tries desperately to push those thoughts away. Now is not the time to feel helpless or sad, or even angry. She is at work. She has a job to do. And reliving those moments with her mother is not going to do her any good. She wishes she didn't dream about them, but over the past month, once her eyes shut and she begins to drift, it is like she has lost all control over that part of her brain that represses these certain memories.
When she is finally dressed and her hair is pulled back into a fresh ponytail, she leaves the on-call room and hurries down the hallway. When she reaches room 4136, Cristina is already there, her face grim as she looks down at the watch on her wrist. In a clear, but sorrowful voice, she states, "Time of death, 2:23 p.m."
Meredith stands dumbfounded in the doorway. "What?" She asks disbelievingly. "What happened?"
Cristina looks up. "There was a clot, Meredith. A huge one. I had to open him bedside. We tried everything, but he lost way too much blood... way too fast."
It is then that Meredith's eyes travel to the bed where her dead patient lies, the surgical scar that ran the length of his stomach now open and exposed for the world to see. Her heart sinks as his wife's face flashes in her mind.
"We were on our way to the grocery store. The car came out of nowhere. He was driving and... oh, God! He'll survive, right? People have internal injuries and pull through all the time, right?" She sobs, tears falling rapidly down her high cheeks bones. There is a thin line of dried blood than runs along the side of her face, and she is holding her purse in front of her so tightly that her knuckles are white.
"We'll do everything we can, Mrs. Stone." Meredith tells her with the calm, even tone that she has perfected for all of her patient's distraught family members. "I'll have one of the interns update you as soon as I can."
She turns around and heads toward the scrub room, the metal doors closing solidly behind her, shutting out Mrs. Stone and the rest of the world.
"Do you want me to...?" Cristina trails off, pulling Meredith from her thoughts as she gestures toward Mr. Stone.
Meredith shakes her head. "No. No, I'll do it," She says, already moving to the other side of the bed. As she puts on a pair of latex gloves, she orders one of the interns to bring her a suture kit. When everything is in place, she begins to stitch Mr. Stone's wound closed. She will prepare him as best as she can, and then she will leave to find Mrs. Stone to tell her that her husband is dead.
Everyone else files out of the room. Cristina lingers a bit, but doesn't say anything. She knows that these things just happen sometimes and when it does, it is beyond anyone's control. She just hates that Meredith has to deal with this on top of everything else in her life.
"I'm fine." Meredith says, looking up to see Cristina standing near the door.
Cristina just stares back at her, not saying a word.
"Seriously. I'm fine. Stop... loitering."
"I'm not loitering. I'm watching." Cristina replies defensively.
"You're watching?" Meredith asks. "Cristina Yang, MD from Stanford, is watching me suture a dead guy?" A laugh sneaks past her lips, but it is short-lived. She shakes her head and looks down again. "Go, Cristina. I am fine."
"Fine." Cristina states. She's not going to argue with her right now. With one more hard look in Meredith's direction, she exits.
The room is silent and Meredith sighs.
"Fine." She repeats.