On Saturday night I was sitting on Annie's couch watching movies. She had invited over about 6 of her friends for a "movie night." Annie always had a way of making me feel better. I knew most of the other women there, so I was having a really great time relaxing, listening to the conversation swirl around me, smiling over their laughter and the hilarious choices in movies, and stuffing my face with popcorn.
I was startled when my blackberry starting vibrating violently in my pocket. I pulled it out and checked the screen to see a text message from Bobby Goren "can you meet me?" That was all. I looked at the screen for a moment, trying to decide how to proceed.
"Is someone calling you?" Annie asked, noticing I was holding my blackberry in my hands.
"Kind of. A text, but I need to call back." I replied. I expected her to give me a bit of grief. Had it just been the two of us watching movies, I knew she would have laid on the guilt for the interruption. But there was a whole room full of us, so Annie did not say anything.
I crossed the room to stand in the kitchen and dialed Bobby.
"Lucy?" He answered; clearly he knew it was me by his caller id.
"Are you OK?" I asked, thinking about his cryptic text message.
"Are you at a party?" He asked, not answering my question, responding to the background noise on my side.
"At Annie's." I replied. "Are you OK?" I asked again.
"Can you meet me?" He asked, again not answering me, letting me know that he was probably not OK.
"Where?" I asked. I closed my eyes as he told me he was in the ER.
"What?" I kept my eyes closed as I asked the question. Nothing duty related, something about him smashing his fist into the window of a car. The window had held, his fist had not.
"Can you meet me?" He asked again.
"Yeah, 20 minutes." I said, calculating how long it would take for me to get there.
"I'm sorry Annie, I have to take care of something." I said quietly to my friend. She did not ask me about it in front of everyone else. I knew she would call me tomorrow. I said goodbye to everyone, it was late, and so it was not too out of the ordinary for me to be leaving.
I walked through the visitor's entrance into the ER, the bright lights making me blink a bit. I looked around the waiting room, which was relatively empty, maybe about 5 people sitting, waiting to be seen. I did not see Bobby. So, I went to the information station to check on his whereabouts.
"Did Bobby call you?" I turned to face the person asking me the question, and was surprised to find Detective Alexandra Eames standing in front of me.
"Yeah, yeah he did." I offered, honestly. She nodded, looking at me, not saying anything.
"When did he call you?" She said after a few moments.
"About 20 minutes ago." I replied.
"What did he say?" She asked.
"He said he punched the window of a car, and that the window held and his hand did not." I came close to answering her question with one of my own, but I knew that could be very frustrating, my questions could wait. So, I did my best to be open and direct.
"That was pretty much the way of it." She said, she looked at me for a moment longer, and then she looked around. By her response, I could tell she had been standing there when it happened.
"Was it your window?" I asked.
"Yeah, yeah it was." She replied.
"He's fine, you know. Probably nothing broken, but they X-rayed to make certain. His knuckles, they're a bit split open." She said, looking at me.
"His hand probably hurts like hell." She continued. I nodded.
"So he called you." She said again. She was obviously still trying to make sense of that piece of information. I felt fairly certain that she knew that he was no longer my patient. And I wondered if she called my professional judgement into question about recommending that Bobby could return back to work. Him punching a car window, off duty, in an of itself was not necessarily significant. Part of me did wonder, and I'm sure part of her wondered if this was indicative of future behavior. I was thinking probably not. My guess was that he didn't often punch car windows, that usually his anger kind of snuck up on him and he probably threw a suspect against the wall. This was probably a case of him managing some restraint and punching the car window after whatever had been bothering him had passed.
I looked at Alex Eames, who was still looking at me, still sizing me up. I knew there was a disconnect between them, and I knew that it had a lot to do with everything Bobby had been through in the past year, and I guessed that he had not been especially communicative with her about everything he was feeling.
"I don't think he called me instead of you. I think he called me in addition to you." I tried to explain, I didn't know if what I said made much sense to her.
I guessed the truth of it was that I was a bit easier for him. He did not rely on me in the workplace, he did not rely on me for his life. He relied on her for those things. And, he did not have years and years of history with me. So, comparitively his feelings for me were probably relatively straightforward. His feelings for her on the other hand, probably were not. In me, he had someone that would come out in the middle of the night after he punched his fist into a window, and pick up him from the hospital, and not ask too many questions. With her, it was much, much more complex.
"Whatever." She said, and looked at me for a long moment. She rubbed her forehead with her fingers, she was clearly tired.
"You can be here instead of me." Her voice was soft, exasperated. I watched her turn as if to go.
"Ask him," She said, "ask him to call me." She did not turn to look at me, she simply asked this of me. I could tell that she wanted to hear from him, I could tell she was concerned.
"I will." I said, and she walked down the hallway to leave the hospital.
When I turned back around to the ER desk, the woman behind it was looking at me.
"I'm here to see a patient, Bobby Goren." I offered.
"Are you related?" She asked.
"Yes, I'm his sister." I responded without hesitation. I was not in the mood for a back and forth about whether I would be permitted into the exam area. The woman looked at me for a moment. She had asked what she was supposed to ask, I had answered how I was supposed to answer.
"Exam 6." She said, and buzzed me back through the door.
I moved through the curtain to find him sitting on the exam table, his right hand bandaged.
"Your right hand?" I blurted out the first thought that had irrationally entered my mind. He was left handed, so I had expected his left hand to be injured. He looked at me and smiled, I was coming to know this particular smile as his reaction to when I said something completely unexpected.
"I was holding something in my left." He replied.
"Clearly it wasn't your temper." I smiled. No use getting into anything. It was what it was, the rest probably would come up in conversation later. His smiled widened.
"You look different." He said, tilting his head a bit, looking at me.
"It's the middle of the night." I replied.
"Everyone looks different in the middle of the night." I added. I realized he was again kind of awkwardly referring to my appearance. I was wearing a pair of incredibly old loose jeans, an ancient oversized hunter green fisherman knit sweater, and my hair was pulled back into a messy pony tail. I looked like a college co-ed.
"Everyone looks different in the middle of the night." He repeated my words with a slightly different tone and meaning. I looked at him a bit more closely.
"Did they give you something for the pain?" I asked, thinking he looked a little sedate, a little slow.
"Yeah." He nodded, choosing that moment to move to stand. He nearly fell over on me.
"Where's Eames?" He asked, looking around.
"She needed to go." I said.
"She asked me to ask you to call her first thing in the morning." I said.
"What for?" He asked, looking down at me.
"Please, just call her." I replied, not wanting to get into a discussion with him about why. He needed to talk with her about that, and I did not want to be in the middle.
"OK." He said, after a moment. Then with his left hand, he scooped up some papers that were on a nearby table. I took them from his hand. They were his discharge papers.
I took a step backward. I wanted him to take a step toward me, and make certain he was steady on his feet. He looked at me like I was behaving strangely.
"I just want to see if you are steady on your feet." I looked up at him. He took a step toward me, ending up almost on top of me.
"I'm steady." He said, reaching out and touching a stray curl near my temple. He playfully pulled the tight spiral straight, and then he let it go and watched it bounce back into place.
"Yeah, you're steady." I laughed a little, thinking that a clear headed Bobby wouldn't being playing with my hair.
"Steady as I'll ever be." He reached out, again taking that strand of hair in his fingers, but this time he moved his fingers more slowly, this time he looked into my eyes as he caressed the spiral curl and touched the side of my face. I looked up into his eyes, so intense. In what I felt to be the last possible moment, I took a small step backward.
"We, um, should go." I said, my voice betraying me by being a little uneven. I noticed his next step was not at all steady, and I watched him pause to catch his balance. Whatever they had given him for pain was probably hitting him full force.
We walked in silence to the car. I opened the passenger door for him and watched him climb in, a bit awkwardly with his right hand bandaged. I helped him with the seat belt, and then I moved and climbed into the driver's side. Bobby's eyes were closed. He gave me directions to his place, keeping his eyes closed. I could tell by his breathing that he was not asleep, but I didn't try to engage him in conversation. I figured if he wanted to share why he had punched his fist into a car window he would. But I also figured I was not really the one he needed to share with. If he was with Eames when he did it, what he did was most likely related to work, and I really hoped he would talk with her.
When I pulled up in front of his building, I put the car in park and came around to open the door and undo his seatbelt, which would have been hard for him to work with his bandaged right hand. He climbed out of the car, and again I found myself standing close to him, close enough again to reach out with my palms and feel the heat of his chest against my skin. But I refrained.
"Thanks Lucy." He said, looking at me, not moving away from me.
"Call Alex." I said, encouraging him to communicate with her about what had happened tonight.
"Right, call Alex." He said, but it seemed a bit unconvincing.
I watched him walk into his building, his lumbering stride a bit uneven. He was a bit uneven. I wondered if that was why we were drawn to each other. I was even, he was uneven, and to him maybe I seemed like a nice way to even out what was putting him so off balance.
Even and uneven. It made my brain jump to Emil. He was even, I was uneven. People were relative to circumstances, and I wondered how current circumstances might change people around.
A/N: Thanks for the continued encouragement with your reviews. I wonder, can you see that what you write to me affects the direction of the story. You change my thinking, you change my writing :) Again, please keep me thinking by telling me what you're thinking.