"Cathode Ray Sunshine"
Arizona makes a visit to a place that brings new harm to old wounds, and makes a familiar new friend. Later, she has to reconcile her old friends in new ways.
Title: "Cathode Ray Sunshine" by Dark Tranquility. The song title refers to what seems to be brightness but coming from a place of toxicity, of damage; it resonates with April's sense of losing her place of belonging but finding a smile in alcoholism and meaningless sex. It also, as do the lyrics, relates to a sense of escapism and certain desperation, connecting with the Arizona-centric plot here. It is also a twist on both the familiar and unfamiliar, a central theme.
"Carry our streams/Lift up our less than elated lives/[...]Sensory perception/Turn the nighttime into day"
I.
Arizona is curled up on her sofa, sipping wine and reading, when she gets a knock at her door. She opens it to Parker holding up an intoxicated April. She reaches out to take her friend's dead weight then steps back and joins Parker on her other side, the pair acting as crutches, then deposit April on the sofa.
"Hey, you are the guy who blew off the blood bank door, right?" Arizona asks slowly, smiling at him.
"Guilty as charged, ma'am." He replies, comforted by Arizona's warmth and becoming less awkward.
"Good, so you're, you're the responsible intern, right? Because if April's going to be out partying with interns, I need you to just, look out for her?" Arizona talks quickly, pacing only slightly so it seems like she's anxiously vibrating.
Parker gestures to the corner of sofa where April's feet hang off and sits in the space.
"I can do that. Do you need any more help now?" He asks, beginning to take off April's heels, Arizona resting against the other end by April's head. As Arizona makes eye contact with him, possibly about to answer, a cry is heard.
Arizona brings Harriet down the last few steps, noticing Parker hovering.
"I don't know what someone's told you, but I can carry a toddler down the stairs," Arizona mumbles, but in a mothering voice and looking to Harriet in her arms, before glancing to Parker.
"I could take her? Home, I mean, to her… to Dr. Avery." Parker remains by the bottom of the steps, standing loosely but protective.
"Dr, what's your name?" Arizona asks, placing Harriet into a car seat across the room. She hears a mumbled 'Parker' as she turns to face him, then walks over.
"Parker, hey, I'm a big girl. I have fought my own battles for a very long time, sometimes in silence and inaction, and sometimes I've cried," she speaks in a measured voice, not angry or lecturing at him, in effect giving this speech to herself, as well, "but if something makes you sad then you know it's something you've got to fight and if I go down then it will be swinging. I have fought my way out of situations far harder than walking down steps holding a child. That's easy." She places a hand on his shoulder, "Thank you for being concerned and, and helpful, but I don't need to be treated like a newborn. And I'm kind of an expert."
Harriet cries again as Arizona mentions 'newborn', and it roused April, who groans and tries to sit up now, drawing Arizona and Parker's attention. They rush to her, and lay her back down, exchanging an annoyed and worried look.
II.
Arizona walks across a large parking lot outside of a grand hotel, sighing and visibly aggravated. Her concern about April, and also the memories that fueled her mini-speech have stayed with her. An SUV swerves past her, causing her to raise her hand and step back at the proximity, only noticing she's dropped her bag when the SUV is being parked in the background minutes later. She kneels slightly to pick it up, and sobs a little at how bad her week seems to be going.
She pushes her way round the revolving door of the hotel, glancing around a little uncertain before settling her gaze on the front desk, walking over. When she's checked in, she deeply inhales and walks a short distance through the lobby, elegantly decorated and increasingly crowded.
Meanwhile, other well-dressed people, a small group of 30-year-olds, make their way down a large staircase on the other side of the lobby, everything seems completely silent. They knock into a woman of about 40, without noticing, as she ascends. She writhes on a large platform step as the group moves away, also going in the direction of Arizona.
Mid-talk, Arizona is looking on in awe at a speaker on a short stage from her fancy seat in the ballroom, her purpose at the hotel attending a conference. Her sight settles on the collection of images being projected as the speaker talks, enraptured in what he is saying, until the image flickers to one of a post-surgery residual leg. She blanches, but she really knew it was coming. She refocuses on the speaker's words, talking about his new method of creating securer and easier to sanitize prosthetics, and demonstrates one - the one he's wearing. Arizona's focus again becomes isolated, now on his movement and the limb. The speaker seems to be finishing up and thanks the audience, the 'Disabled in Medicine Conference.' Arizona stands and claps, like many others, and then makes her way over to the group of doctors networking by the stage, but is interrupted before she can talk to the speaker.
"Arizona Robbins?"
III.
"Um, hello." Arizona responds as she turns to find a young doctor smiling at her in relative surprise.
"You do not recognize me. That's awkward. Dr. Sanchez, from Phoenix. Also called Phoenix. Like the bird..." The young woman has a jovial but nervous tone, and goes to shake Arizona's hand, which is accepted. Arizona grins with growing understanding through the introduction.
"No, no, hey I do. You're still in Washington? Or just visiting?" Arizona asks. Dr. Sanchez is a surgical resident in a Phoenix, AZ hospital. She smiles, somewhat cheekily given to her age, and suggests catching up with coffee before the next talk.
A security guard bursts into the ballroom and asks for a doctor. Everyone briefly stares at him, but when no elaboration is given, they then all speed walk out of the room. A member of the hotel staff is fawning over the woman who fell on the stairs earlier, a growing crowd of medical professionals surrounding them, when Arizona and Dr. Sanchez push through. Almost immediately, another large security guard who is with the woman pushes against the crowd saying they need space, knocking Arizona down.
"Hey, hey, can you be less violent over here?! Your friend came to find a doctor, and now that you've got 500 of us you're telling us to back off?" She glares as the guard shuffles over and Dr. Sanchez kneels next to the woman, then also kneels, between them. "Do we know who she is?" The hotel worker replies with the name from ID and leaves to look her up on the hotel rooms list.
The woman grabs at Dr. Sanchez and tells her that it's her baby that's having the problem. Dr. Sanchez turns to Arizona, who heard, and then stands to leave.
IV.
Arizona is now equipped with medical supplies, whilst the crowd of doctors has largely dispersed, though they are only scattered and many are on cell phones. Dr. Sanchez is talking at the concierge desk.
"Hey, Lisa, I'm Dr. Robbins and I'm going to be looking at your baby, okay? But could you tell me what happened? Any sudden pain?" Arizona smiles brightly as she turns on a portable ultrasound device.
Lisa just shakes her head.
"Nope? You can't remember? Well, that's okay, because you managed to get sick in a hotel full of doctors." Arizona comforts as she turns Lisa slightly onto her side.
"Lisa Trent. T-R-E-N-T. Like if you combine a tree and a dent. Come on. Are you spelling Lisa right?" Dr. Sanchez speaks into the speakerphone at the concierge desk, annoyed. As an 'uh' comes through, her expression drops to disbelieving boredom, and she continues, "It's like L for lazy, I for idiot… oh, you got it now, okay."
Arizona has the ultrasound device slowly pulsating over Lisa's rather flat stomach, looking at the screen in concentration. Lisa tries to glance, too, but wiggles.
"Uh-uh-uh. Sorry, Lisa, this thing doesn't turn and I really need you to stay still so I can look at baby." Arizona glances down at her patient warmly, and beams at the screen, "There they are. Look at that. So, Lisa, it seems like baby is healthy but is more active than usual for the first trimester, and at the moment I cannot see why. I'd like to get you to a hospital to have a look." Arizona speaks in her kind doctor voice, as Dr. Sanchez approaches, and wipes gel from Lisa's abdomen and pulls her blouse down.
"Oh, look at the chubby little miracle," she coos at the ultrasound screen, helping pull Arizona to standing. The pair of doctors slowly walks away from Lisa. "So, three months pregnant, 39 years old, had two miscarriages previously. But, she does have a healthy child who is her most recent. No indicators of, you know, a scary uterus situation. The front desk staff do think that the pain didn't cause her to fall, but the fall caused the pain. And she couldn't get up for an hour. My guess is it's blood related, the ultrasound looked fine."
"So we call the nearest hospital." Arizona looks back as Dr. Sanchez stops a few paces behind.
"Lisa's blind." She says, and then awkwardly makes circles with her hands.
"Huh," Arizona grunts, eyebrows raised and mildly annoyed.
V.
Arizona is sat in the back of an ambulance, en route to the nearby hospital. She gets a phone call, and answers with a falsely perky "Hey there, Chief." After listening for a few seconds and cringing, she replies "I know I had that surgery, but I have an important thing here." She sighs and looks through her bag briefly as Chief Bailey continues talking, then says simply "Thanks, Chief, you're the - I know - you're the best. Bye." and hangs up.
The ambulance pulls into the pit, and when the doors open Arizona's face turns dark. She experiences a flashback to rolling up to the same hospital in an ambulance, but as a patient, after the plane crash.
There is a nurse with a wheelchair waiting for Lisa to step out of the ambulance, but they both stop to look at the fear across Arizona's face. After a few moments of tense stillness, the nurse steps up into the ambulance and takes a static Arizona, helping her down, before getting Lisa into the wheelchair. Arizona moves languidly, following them, not fully present.
VI.
Every turn inside the hospital is met with another, long-suppressed, memory of her first days post-accident.
Looking at a crooked blind, she remembers someone trying to fix it as someone else also re-set her bone.
At a nurse putting bloodied sheets into a blue bin, she remembers the new blood whenever she woke up weeping out of the wound.
A baby cries and she remembers the first time Callie brought Sofia to see her. She felt dead.
An elevator arrives, and she remembers the plane going down, and down, and down. The elevator next to it arrives, and the plane keeps falling. Then another behind her, until they turn to a quiet hallway.
The quiet reminds her of the somber nights in this hospital, all alone. Sometimes those memories turn to empty whiteness, empty redness.
A clank switches the memory to fighting the doctors, always fighting the doctors.
The sound was a tray being put into medical waste, and she focuses on the words, remembering the appearance of the term 'medical waste' on all kinds of documents. On an incinerator room door, and she feels the burn.
They finally leave the ER and enter the maternity unit, and the sounds of the hospital return.
"Dr. Robbins?"
VII.
Arizona is examining Lisa in stirrups in a private room, taking small samples in tubes and placing them on the tray. After the third, Lisa speaks from the bed.
"So you're quiet now. What happened to the ball of sunshine?" She jokes. Arizona looks contemplative, annoyed, for a moment.
"Maybe I'm not quiet, maybe you're going deaf, too." She chuckles as she slides her chair over to the tray of paperwork. Lisa also laughs a little. Arizona sighs after a few moments of less pensive silence. "Why did you look, try to look, at the ultrasound if you can't see?" She asks.
"I wasn't trying to look," Lisa says, as Arizona slowly wheels the chair over to be by her head, "I was trying to see. Because it's my little baby's body, and I know that it's, mind and heart, are more important than looks. But it's not about looks." Arizona has stood at this point, walking over to the tubes of blood and tissue, but turns at this. "A body isn't just about if you're pretty, it's a lot of who you are. And I just want to get to know my baby. Parents always point out whose nose is on the blurry scan screen and the personality of their kid and, I want to see him. If you turn your head to an ultrasound machine, sometimes you can feel. It sounds stupid, but you can feel the image of your baby." Arizona had slowly made her way back over to Lisa, and pats her hand.
An intern in brown scrubs suddenly slams the door open, wincing and then grabbing for the sample tubes.
VIII.
Arizona is slowly pacing around outside the labs, when a doctor comes into the hallway and smiles at her, striding powerfully over.
"Arizona Robbins!? Wow, I hope you don't mind me being frank - ha - and saying I'm surprised to see you alive." He beams, and pulls her into a tight but brief hug.
"Thanks." Arizona bashfully, but not in surprise, says quite loudly. The doctor looks a little shocked at the volume, but begins talking again. It seems like with every word he says he gets perkier and perkier.
"Not that I'm surprised, totally, I'd heard you were still, you know, not dead yet. Heard you switched specialty, well not a switch really, but you got a better job, well maybe not better, but-" He's interrupted by a call from the lab with Lisa's results, and Arizona, who had been gaping at the hyperactive doctor, quickly grabs them and waves to him.
"Nice to you see you, sorry." She apologizes and he beams despite being dismissed, waving enthusiastically.
IX.
Arizona is approaching Lisa's room, when suddenly a code rings out on the floor. Arizona has the memory of the alarm ringing as she started dying and Alex saved her. The ringing keeps getting louder, even as her mind returns to the hospital she's in now.
Arizona closes the door behind her as she's entered the stairwell. She takes a deep breath and goes to sit in the middle of the floor. She stands up and breathes again, takes out her cell phone.
"I need help. I'm at Boise." She whispers.
Dr. Sanchez's voice comes through loud and clear. "Hey, I'll come get you. This is what support group is about. Is it bad?"
Arizona hangs up. She thinks "It's worse than it was then."
Dr. Sanchez appears in the stairwell on the floor above. "Arizona?" She comes down, "Arizona, I've got you." She pulls Arizona from her self-reflective position leaning against the cold cement wall. "You didn't know this is the nearest hospital to Caldwell, did you?" She asks, quietly, more genuine than she's been heard yet. Arizona's vacant, but a single tear breaks free down her face. "I've got you." Dr. Sanchez repeats.
X.
Arizona and Dr. Sanchez are sat in a car, in a parking lot. It's dark out.
"I sometimes forget that I lost my leg." Arizona breaks the silence after a long time. "Obviously, not the physical oh, I don't have a leg anymore where is it," she laughs, but turns gloomy, "The actual losing it. The process of being broken and broken again, I forget it happened. Sometimes."
Dr. Sanchez smiles sadly and lamely pushes a tray of churros towards Arizona, who returns the smile.
"And I've never. The actual memories. I never had them. I have never really known or remembered anything between the crash and, I, I have a few memories, I'd wake up and be angry at everyone, and then I'd go back to sleep. Maybe it's the same one, maybe I really was confused and angry for months. But between the crash and going home, without a leg. That's when I start to remember. Not when I woke up. No. When I woke up in my bed, at home, and it seemed like a normal day. But I couldn't move. And I tried to remember why, and all I had was small clips, like trying to watch an old celluloid movie, of falling. And hurting. But then I saw things and I remembered it all, the amnesia cleared before I could realize it had and it felt like it was all happening again but everything was louder, or darker, or more painful. Because I didn't really feel it at the time. But I felt it."
"She died." Dr. Sanchez says after a long silence, even the world quietly breathing in Arizona's words. She pauses again after speaking, waiting for it to register in Arizona's numb brain. "Lisa. Hemorrhage."
"And the baby." Arizona adds, "That's sad."
"Daisies and fruitcake and your dad's cologne, come on Arizona." Dr. Sanchez says when she notices Arizona rolling down the car window. "You're allowed to feel, and you're allowed to feel safe." She whispers as she leans over, rolls the window back up, puts Arizona's seatbelt on and her own, and drives off.
XI.
It's dark out, but a different day. Arizona's face is also dark as she parks and goes to unlock her door. Carina and Sofia are inside, Carina squatting to talk to the child. Neither notice Arizona arrive.
"What do you mean?" She asks calmly, more annoyed at herself. She then speaks in Italian, asking Sofia what April had said when she got in and what state she was in. Sofia replies in Spanish, saying that April was what mama calls tequila's best friend and said she needed Arizona's sofa.
"Hey sweetheart, hey you," Arizona makes her presence known, pushing off from the door and turning to lock it. "Can you repeat for those of us who barely passed English?" She kisses Sofia on the head and goes to kiss Carina on the cheek when she spots April on the sofa.
"April is here." Carina explains. Arizona moves around to check her friend, making sure her body is at least responsive.
"Yeah, I got that. Sofia, how about you go order momma's favorite pizza in the kitchen?" Arizona uses a sweet voice to coax her daughter away.
"And I thought I was-" Carina starts to respond flirtily, when April vomits into her own mouth.
"Oh no." Arizona says, pushing the sofa back to roll April onto the floor.
XII.
Parker arrives at Arizona's house and they pass in the door, Arizona telling him to take April home. He looks confused then walks in to see April in recovery with her head in a bucket, still unconscious, and Carina trying to distract Sofia, and tilts his head. Carina rolls her eyes as if to say 'well get started'.
Arizona arrives at an unfamiliar bar, and sits down at the bar, she then turns to the person to her left, Amelia.
"Arizona?"
"I have a friend, who has a problem. And I didn't want to tell Richard. But I need to know, how do I help?" Arizona rants, grabbing Amelia's wrists.
"No, Arizona, you. You, are hysterical. Are you okay? Arizona?" Amelia grows concerned, eyes wide and, in Arizona's mind, getting wider as all she can feel is her friend's face. "Arizona?"