"Meredith?" Derek said. She turned toward him, and he tapped the screen of his phone. If she could've shot lasers from her eyes, she would have. "You're beautiful. I'm sorry, but Zola keeps asking if you're in D.C. What are the chances she's going to ask if I photoshopped this?"
She was glad she couldn't say anything. There were—No. No benefits to this. No fucking silver linings. She didn't deserve that.
It might be better for Zola to think she and Derek had switched places. She had a grasp on Daddy having to go somewhere to learn more about how brains worked, although she had asked, "but doesn't Aunt 'Melia teach Dr. Edwards about brains? Daddy knows more than Aunt 'Melia."
"And there are still things for him to learn," she'd explained. "More than is in your brain book, and all of Mommy and Daddy's books. Things that aren't even in the research library."
Whenever Zola had gone along while she looked for an article, Meredith had told her that anything anyone had ever written about medicine was in there—more like eighty-five percent of contemporary, Western medicine, but they'd been superior to any other hospital in the area before they'd used Foundation resources to expand. Some of their acquisitions would've made the one to find herself drooling out of nowhere.
Lexie would be impressed by Zola's proclamations that one day she'd "read all the 'search pages, and be an everything surgeon." She had not bought Meredith's claim that a general surgeon was an everything surgeon. "You do guts. Aunt Cristina does hearts and breathing, Aunt Callie does bones, Dr. A-berry does skin. Daddy and Aunt 'Melia do brains. And Alex and Auntie 'Zona help when it's kids," she'd added, never wanting to leave anyone out.
Being able to hear about what Zo and her brother were doing; the things they were saying and thinking was so much worse than only seeing pictures. She hated Derek for it, a little. She'd hate him more if he wasn't sharing them with her.
"I'm going to take them for lunch. Maybe that'd be a good time to bring them up here later in the week. You'll have the foley out."
She bared her teeth at him, pointed at the wires for emphasis, and then moving on to the casts. He smoothed his hand over her forehead. This close, she could see the mark on the below his chin. Under the plaid blanket he'd brought from home, she squeezed the ridiculous fox. Derek caught the angle of her gaze. She cast her eyes to the side, but that didn't shut him out anymore.
"It's not a big deal," he said. But it was. She'd never—never— intentionally….That morning, Alex had left for rounds, and she'd gotten so focused on staring at the clock that the click of the door made her startle. Her defensive instinct had jarred her arm, but when the arrival had been two transport techs looking to deliver her to CT; she'd gotten upright to transfer. It'd been so much easier with the lessening pressure and dizziness. Her pulse hadn't gotten loud until they'd started to push her toward the door, and their path had been blocked. The officer had left her post to question the techs, standing to the side of Meredith's elevated leg. The charge nurse had followed, and in the overlap of voices she'd only been able to pick out a few words. "Notes" "page" "lecture."
"Dr. Grey?" the charge nurse—She knew his name. She couldn't remember it—had said from above. "Do you want us to call neuro to clarify?" She'd wanted to run, to shove them all out of her space; to get back in the bed, but she hadn't been able to move.
Then, Derek had appeared, his grin transforming into his boss face. . Part of her berated her younger self for objecting to a knight in shining whatever; another part wished she still could. One of the techs had jumped in to explain: "Just going down to radiology, sir."
"Dr. Nelson ordered a CT," the nurse had added. "Since he's been out of town, he isn't aware—"
"Tell him to order a portable CT. I'm sure that's in my sister's notes. She's not distracted enough to expect him to read a chart."
A tech had snorted, and Derek's nostrils had flared. "Go!"
They'd gone. The officer had followed. While the chair was rotating, Meredith had drawn in enough air to make the incision on her chest sting, and even smiled at Derek when he'd moved into place to lift her out of the wheelchair.
The nurse had come into her periphery out of nowhere, arcing over her to keep the tubes and wires attached to her from tangling. She'd twisted away, her arm cast slamming into Derek's face. He'd cried out reflexively, and she'd jerked again, pulling her right leg up, and crossing her arms over her face. The nurse had done his job, trying ease them down, to keep her from hurting herself, but instead of relaxing her muscles had seized. She hadn't been able to get a full breath, and she had to be able to do that.
She'd heard them suggest sedating her, but she hadn't wanted to be dumped back into oblivion. Not then, with the crack isolated and enchanted replaying in her mind. She'd shrunk from him, twisting at the waist to move blunt weapon of her cast further away.
"Hey, Mer," he'd said, like it was nothing, like this was normal. "That was a lot, I know, but it's just us now, okay? Just us, staying here. Nelson shouldn't have had you going anywhere. Wish he'd gotten stuck. Not in Hawai'i. Somewhere horrible, like Des Moines. I can't believe—I watched that video a few dozen times last night. I called, but you... Karev said you were asleep. Can youshow that you're hearing me? Just…uh, Simon says, touch your nose."
God help her—somewhere between the gunman and the wolves tearing parts off of her sister's body, Meredith had consciously dropped the more obvious religion-based expressions. Words were meant to have power, and what power was there in a doctrine she didn't believe in?—but God help me was all she knew to think at her finger reflexively touching the tip of her nose. Anyone who questioned the quality of her time with her children would get…. Well, they'd get a different finger, but then they'd get this story.
She might as well have flipped a light-switch in Derek's face. She'd almost crumpled again in the face of the moment she'd missed; that she'd been ready for all morning. Where come in like every other day of the past two weeks, except that she'd get to turn to meet his eyes right as the door clicked open. Instead, he'd come in to see that having a sense returned hadn't brought her senses back. Taking cues only from him, you'd think that wasn't a problem.
Though, in a way, she was taking cues only from him.
"Simon says, straighten your right leg."
Oh, we are not doing this.
"Simon says, let me see your eyes. Good. Hey. I know it's silly, but you'll know what's coming, and I want to break this down to be sure I'm not hurting you. That's been… I haven't been sure. Two weeks, and I…I couldn't be sure."
Okay, we're doing this. It hadn't taken that many instructions for her to uncurl enough for him to lift her, and he held her in the glider while Adriana changed the sheets and put in her nine a.m. meds. That'd been where he started giving her the rundown on cute things done by their ridiculously cute kids. He'd never let on that he probably needed one of the fucking jaw bras the whole time. She'd thought the dark purple mark was stubble while he helped her back onto the bed, but he'd turned that side of his face to her while pulling up the covers. Guilt had coursed through her, and he hadn't been able to reassure it away. He continued to try.
"Sweetheart, it was an accident. They were crowding you, and trying to take you somewhere you didn't want to go. You had reason to be defensive." She shrugged. It didn't matter. She'd hithim; with the stupid heavy cast she'd hit him, and he wondered why she didn't want the kids coming up. Derek moved his hand to her shoulder and leaned closer to speak into her left ear. "Intent matters. You know why you're so upset? Because you wouldn't do that on purpose. Do we joke about it? Yeah. Have you ever actually hurt me, even when you've gone after me with your purse? No, and it's not because you're way ineffectual, in any way. You're careful. Intentional. That was fully unintentional, and I would've understood if it hadn't been. I'm the one who underestimated that thing. If I'd had something like that post-op instead of the splints, I'd have probably knocked myself out." She could feel him smile against her cheek. "I would have been worried about hitting you by accident. If I had, you could've been mad about it. I'm not."
He was being so freaking soft. Hadn't he left to put himself out of range of the hurt she'd caused? How did she know he wouldn't head back to Bethesda if it happened again?
The fingers on her right hand weren't confined, and the bruises on that palm were almost cleared up. Only her brain's processing speed, and the stuttering relay to her muscles were to blame for how long it took her to form five letters, and that was after four days of ASL hangman. "S-L-I-N-G."
"Not until the bruising on your neck resolves."
She raised her eyebrows at him. Well, then?
"I'd keep both eyes on them, I promise. I could have Karev or Robbins come along, if you want. They're not going to be unprepared. The picture will get them asking questions tonight, and we've already been talking about the wires, because Zola wanted to call to confirm you were here. Mommy tells truths, you see."
She didn't have to reply. Not with him between her and the white board. She couldn't have told the truth. She wanted him to bring them now. She wanted Zola to tell her about the drawing taped to the windowsill, and to see Bailey's latest silly dance move. That was her immediate, right-brain reaction.. Logically, what she wanted didn't matter.
Prior to Maggie's arrival, she'd had memories she'd tried to forcibly connect to that day in June. The emotional overlap had caused her brain to group them together, but like one of Zola's jigsaw puzzles, the blue of the sky couldn't fill in for the blue of the water if the edges didn't match. With the knowledge that there were two separate gaps, she'd been able to identify the moments that hadn't cohered well with the conflated version, but some sat on the side, too similar to be attributed to one day or the other. There were details she could tease apart. The white bandages on Mom's arms; confidently slipping away from the social worker, that was Seattle. Letting go of a stranger's hand to follow Mom's voice was Boston. Where had Mom screamed for someone to get her out? In Seattle where she'd had authority? Boston where no one knew her? Both? Meredith was sure of only this: She wouldn't give Zola and Bailey a single memory like that.
Children took their parents' cues in disasters, and what was more disastrous than seeing Mommy lose her grip? She wouldn't want to,but the last time she'd been unable to convince herself she didn't need to fight or flee had only been a few hours ago. She wasn't totally sure what was causing it to happen. She should apologize to Owen for the other day; that she knew. (She almost had a better understanding of what he'd dealt with in the past; except that that night he'd strangled Cristina hadn't been his first incident.)
She'd want to be calm; she'd want to be so badly that her own nerves might make her panic, but even if she was, a picture might not keep them from being afraid of all the wires and tubes, the edema and contusions. She would not risk it. Until she was sure it wouldn't, she couldn't let them bring her babies up here. She could wait.
"Do you want me to bring you anything?" Derek asked. She shrugged hard enough for him to draw his hand off her shoulder. He was the only one whose touch didn't make her flinch, but she was getting too used to him being there.
He started to ask something else and paused. That wasn't like him. "I had a message from the detectives—"
He was cut off by a knock, and as fast as she turned to it, she didn't catch the door starting to open. In the hospital knocking was an announcement not a question. She had never been more grateful to see Wilson. She hadn't been letting herself think about the detectives. They'd only need to ask one question: Who beat the crap out of you? She knew the answer. She could write it down. She might be able to sign it, slowly. If she did, there would be so many more questions.
"Good morning," Wilson said. "Dr. Hunt put in an order for your scans to be done in here, with the police and everything." She rolled one machine in, and then ducked into the hall for another. The portable CT and x-ray machines. Great. Meredith pressed her face into the pillow. A resident shouldn't be doing this. "Dr. Pierce wants a chest x-ray. She'll be in to check the incision around two."
"Excellent," Derek said. He kissed her again and headed out to the hall. Whatever. He could make his own choices. He'd protect the kids if it came to it—but she wasn't going to let it.
She stared at Zola's drawing while Jo talked her through the CT. Then, the bulky machine was shoved into a corner, but Jo didn't start placing x-ray plates. Meredith sighed to herself, waiting for the resident to psych herself up enough to speak.
"Um, look," she started. "I've been listening like y…. I've heard stuff. You should know, you didn't bring this on yourself by wanting time off."
The cops must've unearthed the whole visit-that-wasn't. Had they told Derek? No. For a guy who'd failed to mention a whole-ass wife, he wasn't great at hiding his thoughts. She'd been sure that everyone else must've been letting him in on how much she'd been working, that Erin at the day-care would've said something about seeing more of B&Z, but she hadn't caught those looks, either. She'd wanted to hear him speaking to her so badly over the past two weeks, but she'd heard his voice plenty: What happened to you?
She narrowed her eyes at Jo. She wasn't to the point of flipping off residents, but she might get there.
"I heard what you told Alex about getting a chance to not have responsibilities. That didn't give God, or…you're not a God person."
Meredith shook her head.
"Me neither. The universe, fate, whatever, permission to take you from them. You're crazy about your kids. They keep cutting residents' hours because we're exhausted, but they never cut moms' hours. I don't have one, and I see how demanding it is. Having this happen isn't…isn't karma."
Hadn't she wanted a break? Hadn't she wanted Derek to come home? To have to keep his promise to focus on the kids, so that later she could do the same; not be swamped and scared that she wasn't doing enough?
"Look…I have a past. One that I don't want showing up here. Pretty much my worst nightmare. You think no one gets how bad it was, but you also know it wasn't as bad as it could've been. Right now, maybe, you're thinking you didn't have it as bad as me. But this isn't a subjective thing. It's not on a scale. If it were, well, he broke six of your bones, dislocated your jaw and your elbow; you had a pneumothorax, two major surgeries, you couldn't hear for a couple weeks, and you can't tell me to shut up for four more. Nothing makes any of that okay.
"Dr. Grey…Meredith, you're a powerful woman, an incredible surgeon who knows that the only yes is an enthusiastic yes, and abuse is abuse. You're also a patient who came to us after being beaten up by a man who you didn't have a chance against. Healing is how you fight back. And…and part of that is reclaiming the parts of your life that make you remember that…that that's what you deserve."
Jo didn't give her the tight smile she was still giving patients, rather than just showing them her face. It faded too fast; made them worry there was something she wasn't saying. Meredith knew there was. She grabbed Jo's forearm and met her eyes.
This time Jo was to one who nodded. "Yeah. I-It's more than you know. Than Alex knows. I can't say that you should turn it around on the guy. I'd be a hypocrite. I ran. I became a different person."
"Look at you, Dr. Death."
"That would've happened anyway. You won't be exactly the same person you were that morning, but you can be better. That's what they told me at the shelter. I don't actually know how you get better than fifty-one successful procedures in a row."
Meredith's eyes bugged. Better than what?
Jo grinned. "Since, uh, November. From the insulinoma you basically found by instinct." She squeezed Meredith's hand. "Smile at your kids like that. They'll be okay."
Meredith didn't think she could take Jo's word on that, but a fifty-one procedure streak was pretty badass. That insulinoma had been the day Derek left. She'd done fifty-one successful procedures while taking care of both kids, and with every other thought being about whether or not her marriage was over.
Jo must not have shared that with anyone. She would've caught on to something. Even with the police guarding her door and checking ID on anyone who came in, she could see when they were talking about her outside her window, and when they weren't. She knew that Amelia was practicing for Herman's surgery constantly, and Owen was presenting her offerings of her coffee and snacks like a cat on the welcome mat. April was barely leaving the apartment, and Jackson was spending most nights at the hospital. Callie's confidence was returning, but she would drop the subject of her research any time Derek appeared. Meredith wasn't sure if she was pissed at him, or if she thought he might butt in—would it be so bad to give him something to do?—She knew that Alex was exhausted, but in a much better mood than he'd been as Junior Doctor Butthole. Two nurses were pregnant, one was engaged, and one desperately needed to break up with his boyfriend.
It wasn't significantly more or less than she usually knew, but cataloging everythingshe'd picked up while not having been able to hear gave her an appreciation foe how much she understood about this place. She didn't feel bad about constantly collecting information. Half of her life was accounted for in the bundle of gossip she referred to as "The Ballad of Grey." Her mother and Richard's affair, featuring her traipsing the corridors. Did you hear there was a love child? Stories of her adolescence were rare, but not everyone who'd encountered her as Ellis Grey's plus-one was as thoughtful as Jackson. Those years were a hand wave, a fitting symbol for how they sometimes blurred for her, and she wished they always would. If Sadie had told tales, they'd been left out. Meredith wasn't sure if her reputation had improved enough that the ecstasy-in-Ibiza verse was unbelievable, or if it was simply outside of the bounds of the narrative. It was a firm plot point that her mother had been diagnosed in the same year she'd started med school, but there was usually told with an inaccurate cause/effect attribution. She must've been in my friend Pike's year at Dartmouth. I wonder if he remembers…. The click of her heel as she stepped out of a cab at the intern mixer signaled the return of detail.
Derek could fill in the most of the subplots and characters they'd skipped, and more importantly, the emotional arc. Cristina might have a few alternates chapters. Sadie absolutely did. Richard had the backstory. No one had everything. That'd been meaningful to her, until it turned out that she didn't either. Her mother had taken pieces of herself, and therefore pieces of Meredith, to the grave. Maybe she'd thought she was doing it to protect them. Maggie. Richard. Meredith. She'd hurt them. She'd protected her own reputation.
Sometimes, Meredith imagined herself surrounded by Ellis Grey's footsteps like dance steps appearing on the floor in a cartoon. The question was always the same: was she going to follow them? Did she even have a choice?
"It's a HIPAA violation, right?" Derek asked, pocketing the phone that'd just reminded him that he hadn't responded to Detective Moore's text. She'd been told Meredith's hearing had improved, and could he ask if she was up for a meeting? "It has to be!"
"Not unless you revoked the original release."
Derek scowled at Karev. He was stretched out on the couch in Derek's office. He'd only shrugged when Maggie had been the one to say "you know what that gets used for right?"
That meant she'd heard stories (only stories). He hated that (both parts), but the truth was that they'd barely been in here since she'd signed on, let alone—Meredith would smirk—come in here.
He didn't understand how Karev had ended up waiting outside his door with Maggie. He decided never to ask her to lie again, and been grateful she hadn't been joined by a detective. He couldn't judge. He'd committed a sin to be there, lying to Meredith about having lunch with the kids. Today, at least, Miranda had agreed to chart in her room for a while. If she decided to fill Mer in on her TV shows, it would give her something lighter to think about. Whatever was occupying her mind was heavy. Asking her if she wanted to meet the detectives might give her a way to offload it. He wished he knew how she'd answer him, much less the questions they posed.
"Okay," Maggie said. "So here's the thing, Ian was able to pull the records with her name in them."
"Records?" he repeated.
"Exactly." Maggie reached into the black tote sitting next to her on the floor. Out came a ream of paper. "I can see why the one her ex-girlfriend told you about was the most remembered."
"Her what?" Karev shoved up on his elbows. Maggie turned to Derek, her mouth open in panic. Derek closed his eyes. Every time he walked into the hospital room he was struck again by how vulnerable Meredith seemed in a bed that could accommodate patients three times her size. People she worked with, her subordinates, were feeding her, cleaning her, changing her dressings. The other times she'd been hospitalized hadn't been nearly this involved. How exceedingly unfair that her identity, her secrets, might be revealed while her jaw was wired shut?
"Was it Harris?" Karev asked. Derek hummed noncommittally. "I wondered about them."
"Not just her," Derek relented. If he was going to have to out her, he'd make sure her best friend—her person—had the right information. "She's bisexual."
"Should've figured. Women's Studies minor, right?"
"Oh, way to stereotype, Alex," Maggie said, getting up to dig through Derek's desk for something.
"Am I wrong?"
"Factually, I guess not. Spiritually? Yes."
"Whatever. Why'd she shut herself in the closet here? You?" He eyed Derek.
"Broadly."
Karev raised his eyebrows, like he hadn't expected Derek to take responsibility. He was Meredith's best friend, and more similar to her than Cristina had been. Would Meredith make the same assumption? Did she have reason to?
"She hadn't come out to me when Richard called Addison. Didn't take long after that for everyone had an opinion about her sexuality."Including me. He regretted that fight in the stairwell for many reasons, but one was that it'd put her strongly on the defensive when she'd told him. "She didn't want them to see her sexual orientation through that lens. She's told people when it's relevant." He winced. "I mean—"
"It's cool. Can't think of a time I'd have needed to know."
"I think there's a lot that she considers need-to-know," Maggie commented, triumphantly holding up a box of paperclips.
"Why wouldn't she?" Alex asked. "You tell people shit you're proud of. Mer didn't have a lot of that. Not 'til...what, maybe the tumor trial?"
Derek wanted to argue, but every counterexample he could come up with was a situation where he'd said something along the lines of "proud of yourself, huh?" and gotten a coy shrug in response. The way she'd stood in the operating room from the start of that trial had been different. While he'd been frustrated, she'd been encouraging; she'd believed in it, in herself, and in him. Last year, when she'd been frustrated—cure death, Meredith—he hadn't meant to pressure her, but he hadn't been encouraging her well. Now, he worried his encouragement might feel like pressure.
"Yeah. I think her M.D., but it got swept up in the move and Ellis. Has she—?"
"Okay!" Maggie interrupted. "We've got Callaghan & Ors. v. Dr. Schraeder W. & Massachusetts General Hospital (1986); and three juvenile cases Watts (1988), Hoyt & Robertson (1991); and Truman (1995)."
"She's mentioned in all of those?" He grabbed the nearest piece of paper and scribbling down the years and Meredith's age for each of them. Eight. Ten. Thirteen. Seventeen.
"Schraeder and Truman are the ones where she was in front of a judge. The others are depositions. She also testified in Perkins v. Dr. Grey E. & Massachusetts General Hospital (1997)." Nineteen. "There are a couple more malpractice suits for Ellis, but Meredith isn't named in any of them."
Derek had testified against the men who'd murdered his father, and he could remember exactly what it'd been like to sit up there in an overly-starched dress shirt and stiff, new shoes, sure that everyone was staring at his acne. "They'll try to make you sound like a child," Mom had said. "But I know a brave young man who is too smart to fall for their tricks." He'd found her eyes whenever his palms got clammy, or his mouth went dry. It was hard to believe Ellis wouldn't have seen accompanying her to a courtroom as a waste of time. Had Ellis encouraged Meredith at all? Had these experiences led to more contradictory criticism about speaking up for herself, but not wasting anyone's time with her chatter?
"General surgeons get the most complaints," Karev observed. "What's the last thing?"
Maggie, who'd been arranging the packets in a circle around her held up the few pages left in her hand. "It's a DCF file."
"From Boston?"
"Yes."
"Huh. There'd be one here. When Ellis…." He trailed off, but Maggie held his gaze. "Her seventy-two hour hold. We think Mer was in the system about a week. Seems to be where her aversion to social workers came from. It's bigger than her general disdain for authority."
Karev pressed his mouth to the inside of his arm. Did he have that piece of the puzzle guiding Mer down the hall away from the social worker who'd taken her baby? Derek hadn't, not until it'd all been settled. Meredith had revealed it while making him promise that if she ever did anything like Ellis had done, he'd be there for Zola. "Mom…I'm sure she would've said, 'I'd never do that' up until the day she did." He'd promised; although, he knew he'd be doing everything he could for both of them. Derek's chest ached at the memory; the ghost of what he'd felt having Zola taken away, and that'd been a shadow of what Meredith had and would experience.
"This is Suffolk County," Maggie confirmed. "Someone reported Ellis for negligence."
"Imagine that."
"She'd have been worse off in the system," Karev objected.
"Obviously. That bar's the lowest one she's ever encountered." He took the file Maggie. The name of the neighbor who'd tried to do something for her was redacted, but the address supported his theory that it was from one of the houses next door. Probably the couple whose son was in her class. The other side would've known what Karev knew; Ellis was a horrible mother, but the other option wasn't really an option. The occupants of the house she called "the Palace" or "the House of Queens" were the only adult support she'd had, and most of them had known that they couldn't promise to be there for her.
Sometimes, he wanted to contact every other adult who'd been in her life and demand to know what they'd been thinking. She and Amelia had both started school after their traumas. He'd picked up the phone a majority of the times Amy "acted up." There could be years between "incidents," eighties for "times she was triggered." Meredith had gone to a K-12 from first grade. There'd have been teachers, friends' parents, volunteer coordinators. Had no onenoticed anything? Did everyone shrug and say, that's just Meredith?
Of course, it had become Meredith. His Meredith. He didn't want her to be someone else, or wish she had been. But she had so many people in her corner, here. People going to bat for a multitude of reasons. Why couldn't that have been dispersed evenly through her life? Enough that she didn't think she had to do anything to deserve their care.
"Is she, uh…Meredith isn't named as the defendant in anything?" When he'd been stated she'd been vocal about not having a record, but she could've meant as an adult.
"She was, sort of. Accessory in the Truman case. I scanned through it. From what I can tell, Meredith called it in and testified against the other girl. First offense. There wasn't any hard evidence. Drugs were stolen, but all they could pin on Meredith was opening a door into the unauthorized area of the hospital. Defendant said she broke into the pharmacy using information from a cousin who'd worked there."
Derek winced. It was one thing to think of her doing things like that to right a wrong, but he also knew how far Meredith would go for her friends. In a teenager—one who needed validation, had a history of trauma, would be impulsive as an adult—that could be dangerous. He picked up the packet and flipped through it.
WITNESS MEREDITH GREY DID TESTFY AS FOLLOWS…
A: She has-said she had anxiety, and her parents wouldn't take her to a shrink because of appearances, and I... She said she was gonna take, like, Xanax. Valium. Stuff like that.
Q: And was that the case?
A:. No, it was not.
Q: What did she take?
A: Morphine. Oxy. And...well, Ketamine is maybe a party drug, but rophypnol? Someone could've been raped Tara!
Mr. THOMPSON: Objection, Your Honor!
MS. PARK: Your Honor, I'd like to request a break for the witness."Jeez," Derek muttered. "What about the Schraeder thing? Was it diversion?" From what he'd been reading number of doctors stealing opioids was skyrocketing by the month, but that didn't mean it wasn't happening in the eighties. It'd happened since ether was invented, and likely long before.
"I haven't looked yet," Maggie admitted. "All I know so far is she saw this guy do something hinky, and she told."
"I bet she saw a lot of shit," Karev said, toying with his phone. "Tiny kid haunting the hospital? They wouldn't have called her as a witness on anything, unless they had to. This was when she was, what, seven? They must've needed her."
Derek traded out the packets and started flipping. "Almost eight. They recorded her testimony; they didn't make her appear."
A: ...he was nice. Mom told me not to be a bug, so I didn't always say hi. Especially not if he was with a patient. That's important. You have to focus on patients.
Q: Did Dr. Schraeder focus on his patients?
A: A lot. He did their medicine.
Q: That wasn't usual?
A: Nurses do the medicine. Surgeons operate, and check scissions [sic]. And everyone does codes.
Q: Can you tell me what a code is?
A: It's if someone dies. Their heart monitor starts beeping, and everyone runs over with the de-fib. That's a machine that gives them a big shock. Sometimes de-fibbing them brings them back alive. Everyone doing CPR stands back.
Q: And what do you do? If you're, say, on the way to Mom's office, and there's a code?
A: I get out of the way and don't move. Being in the way could mean a patient stays dead.
Q: Did Dr. Schraeder do very many codes, Meredith?
A: Uh-huh. He's a hero, everyone said. But he does the order wrong.
Q: What do you mean?
A: He gives patients medicine first.
Q: When the heart monitor started beeping?
A: Before that. Before the code and epi and charge.
Derek tossed the packet down. "She caught an Angel of Death."
"A nurse reported him," Maggie pointed out.
"Read it. She was seven."
"Wasn't him," Karev said.
"What?"
Derek had a phone thrust in his face. "Old guy's dead. Died in the prison hospice ten years ago. No family. Liver failure. Probably did divert. Shit reporter describes him as avuncular."
"Like an uncle," Maggie murmured.
Oh, Mer. Again he thought of that tiny child sneaking around a new hospital, where no one would be looking for a day-care escapee. She'd had an impressive faith on the structural integrity of supply shelves. This cemented his image of her learning to climb on them and watching over a busy surgical floor. "She was looking for a Richard. She got kills to feel heroic."
"Well. He's not our only possible chump." Maggie thrust packets at each of them. "As my dad says, 'do the Google.'"
"Does your dad also say 'chump?'" Karev asked.
"Fuck you. Yes, he does."
Derek cut a finger across his neck "Bzzt." Both doctors stared at him. "Act like my kids, get treated like kids."
The other two looked down at their packets, but Karev was smirking, and he caught the side glance that came before Maggie snickered. "Which one of them says 'fuck you?'"
Derek didn't answer. With his luck, it'd be Bailey. He was still saying "Daddy eed-yot." Either he hadn't realized the insult could be used for other people, or he understood that no one else in his life deserved it.
Thirty minutes later, they had pictures pulled up on laptops and tablets, and Maggie had out a notepad. "We've got Steven Watts, the piano teacher's nephew who abused her daughter, and threatened Meredith. He's now a teacher in Belize.
"David Hoyt and Greg Robertson, filmed themselves tormenting a kid whom we'd now call developmentally-delayed. They were revealed when the video was played on Boston Prep CCTV announcements the next day. Meredith only got fingered when the friend she'd given the tape to was pressed to tell the authorities where she'd gotten it.
"Hoyt has been in and out of prison. Currently on probation, also five-foot-nine. Robertson went the other way and enlisted. Came back from Afghanistan with PTSD, lives in Southie, works construction and volunteers with his niece's soccer team. She's a cute kid, judging by his sister's YouTube channel. Truman, the pharmacy robber, was as skinny as Mer, but we have nothing on the boyfriend who was pulling the strings."
"Dealer," Karev argued. "We don't know more than that."
"I read her statements and her testimony. Girl thought she was Bonnie; there's a Clyde. I bet he was pissed off at losing an in at the hospital. MGH would've upped security, too."
"Bet they stopped letting Mer wander around."
"Perkins puts her there two years later."
"Hospital security proved it's not perfect two weeks ago," Derek put in. "In the late nineties? A ban having been enforced for six months would surprise me."
"Freida Perkins was a first-generation American immigrated from the D.R. It anyone from her family held a grudge and stopped by, they're an interracial adoptee or maybe albino, and they've never been featured in her many 'Family Reunion' Facebook albums." Maggie tossed the last papers onto the pile like a frisbee. "Could be another one of Ellis's suits. I flipped through. They didn't seem like much."
"Probably nicked uretors," Karev said. "I'm all for scooping the cops if it helps Mer, but it she doesn't say anything to them, you need to hand all this over."
"Yeah." Derek scanned the paragraph of outrage emitted by eleven-year-old Meredith, who managed to make her hatred for piano known without ever deviating from the question. "I will."
Q: Now, Miss Grey, was this the only time you observed Mr. Watts behaving violently?
A: He'd never hit her with anything, but he talked mean, and he'd grab her. Shove her. Nothing I could prove.
Q: And that was important.
A: Yes. I didn't want Mom to think I was making things up, because I su-am not very good at piano. I don't have a camera, so I couldn't show her the hematomas.
Q: You didn't say anything to his mother?
A: I asked about the bruising. She said Janie was always trying to copy him on the swing-set. He told her that's what happened with the trike, too, but...
Q: That was similar to how he explained the femur fracture?
A: Yeah, to the adults. It wasn't a good story, My mom said you can sometimes confirm how a bone broke with an X-ray. I knew they musta taken one, and Dr. Magnus would listen to me….
"It's surreal," Maggie said. "What upper middle-class white girl testifies before four judges before they're eighteen?" Derek twisted his lip. Hospital life warped time; it was easy to forget how new Maggie was.
"The one who'd grow up to hold a bomb, manipulate a clinical trial, and get four people to risk their internships because the fifth went cuckoo for Cocopuffs," Karev said. "She injects herself into things. Then, there's the stuff that wasn't a choice. Plane crash. Drowning. Friend hit by a bus."
"Clark," Derek added. "How'd you forget Clark?"
"She wasn't shot. She asked to be, but she wasn't—oh. Sorry, I didn't think about the baby part."
"She'd say it wasn't as big a deal as a bullet."
"She'd be lying."
"What are you talking about? Who was shot? What baby?"Maggie was looking between them like she was watching an Abbott and Costello routine.
"Come with me to Joe's tonight, I'll see what you know and fill you in on the basics," Karev said. "Unless you need someone with Mer or the kids?"
"No, Amelia's going to be home tonight. You're, uh…on-call tomorrow?"
"Yeah. Same as last week? Cool." Karev flipped through the Hoyt and Robinson packet again. "Man, she started chasing trouble from jump. Speaking of, what made you track down Harris?"
"Oh, uh...a dead-end. The detective found a charge for a flight to D.C., and a hotel at the airport here. Her theory was—is, probably—affair, but I thought…. Well, if she was going to try to give Sadie another chance, she might want deniability."
"Explains why I've been questioned about my feelings toward Mer three times."
"It's like most people meet their siblings as kids or something," Maggie said. "That's what you two are, right? Figuratively?"
"Guess so. Whatever I am, I can tell you that she planned on going to D.C. Yeah, it was around your birthday, but also that was the day Kepner had the baby."
"Shit," Derek swore. April and Jackson had been dealing with one of the complications she'd been terrified of while she was pregnant with Bails. She'd have felt guilty about having had a healthy baby, the same way she'd felt over being jealous of Callie, years ago.
"She spent the whole day asking people to take her shift or watch the kids," Karev continued. "Sorta obnoxious, unless you get that it's Mer, and she wants everyone to think she's taking off instead of freaking out. Almost like…well, exactly like when Sloan died." Karev smoothed out the paperclip he'd untwisted into a long wire. "Look, I don't know how it worked with you and Yang. I'm not going to be your informant. That said, I think you should know this, and it's gonna be awhile before she can say it. May take until the wires come off." He looked askance at Derek. "She wanted to see you. Too much. Said if she'd gone, you would've fought, or talked about fighting, and she was tired of fighting." Derek sank onto the far side of the couch. "She was afraid you wouldn't want to see her, and it would've been over."
"That's…God, that hasn't been true in seven years."
"You didn't give off that vibe," Maggie pointed out. "Like I said the other morning, there's nothing that'd make me think she's, uh, stepping out on you, but I don't know that I believed the whole 'great love story' until two weeks ago. At least, not the 'happily ever after' part. She didn't tell you about me; you said she was terrible at sisters—"
"You put that in her head?" Karev demanded.
"No! I didn't say it to Meredith."
"If it's in this hospital, it's to Meredith."
Derek scowled. Since when was Karev right all the time? "I was trying to get you to stay, and I…I was embarrassed that I didn't know. That she didn't come to me."
"Wow, that's an oldie. Second verse same as the first?"
Biting his tongue to keep from snapping at Karev to shut up, Derek realized something that truly was terrible. "I told her that if something big happened, it didn't matter if we were in a fight." He pressed his hands against his forehead. "She thinks this is a truce."
"If that means she expects you to high-tail it back to D.C. once she's able to carry both kids and do a Whipple, yeah."
"Aren't you?" Maggie asked, swinging her bag over her shoulder. "Going back to Bethesda?"
In his periphery, Derek saw Karev flip her off. Siblings by-proxy was a thing that happened around Meredith. "I'm…I have another month off, so I don't have to…. If she needs me—"
"That's not going to cut it," Karev interrupted. "Not if she thinks you don't want to be here. She'll have everything handled, the same way she did while you were gone. If you want to know what Mer wants, you have to convince her that it's gonna matter. That she's wanted. You've been slacking, there, and it's not going to be any easier when sheneeds you so much."
Goddamnit. Derek pressed his hands against the backs of his eyes. He really needed Karev to stop being right.
The two a.m. vitals check hadn't woken Alex. She understood. He'd come in after eleven and dropped into the recliner. She'd furrowed her brow—"in context, that can replace who, what, where, when, and how, especially for someone as expressive as you," Maggie had said—and he'd sighed. "Robbins has moved into the basement with a walking clearinghouse of fetal surgery who has more techniques to teach than she has days left."
UNTIL HER SURGERY, Meredith had clarified.
"Yeah, well, she's not playing odds, and Arizona wasn't kidding about needing me to pick up her slack."
HOW SO?
"Jonesing for surgery?"
She'd flipped him off; it wasn't a no, but really she could see how much he wanted to talk. He'd come from an internal stricturplasty on a kid with Crohn's, removing severely inflamed small intestine. She'd made him tell her all about the patient before the procedure itself. Partially, that was something she loved, knowing these kids just wanted to eat pizza; instead of having to explain a feeding tube to their classmates, and helping them get closer. What she'd acknowledge only to herself was that she loved that she could hear his voice.
Derek would never say, but she could tell it bugged that Alex had been there when the pressure in her ears leveled. He hadn't been there for Jackson to chew out, either. Not blowing her nose before the two week mark was the bullet sheet he'd given her for post-maxillomandibular fixation. Unluckily for him, he'd gone off within her limited earshot. Slamming the board that read WOULD'VE ASPIRATED ON SNOT on the tray had been a great way of making them remember she existed. Blowing had hurt, but there'd been no hemorrhaging, and she could hear. If Jackson was against that, screw him. She could hear.
Being able to speak wouldn't come from one crying fit over pain, and missing her kids, and her bed, and her husband. From being alone in a room and startling at shadows because she couldn't hear anything coming. When she could hear the tap of the uniform's shoes or the squeak of nurse's sneakers, she knew she wasn't totally alone.
That didn't make time move any faster. The techs were careful, and having her ribs stabilized made having her lungs and chest listened to miserable, not excruciating. She hardly felt it while they were there, because she'd go over the last procedure she'd been told about to take herself away from the moment. It was once the cart holding their cuffs and monitors rolled away that she was left itemizing the pain.
Sometimes it shot from the ulnar side of her forearm. Her deltoids threatened to pull if she tried to move her shoulder. Her knee throbbed, and while she knew good and well that it wasn't swelling too much for the cast to handle—Callie had monitored her closely for compartment syndrome—it sometimes felt like it would explode under the pressure. Her ankle would ache from being stuck in the same place constantly. If she tried to trick it by moving the whole cast, the iliopsoas muscle in her inner-hip twinged from having to move the weight of all her bones, flesh, muscle, vasculature, nerves, ligaments, nails, hair, and the fiberglass and cotton of the three-foot cast. The incisions that'd been made to set bones and suture tears itched and stung. Swallowing regularly made her think of a fire-swallower she'd seen on Montmartre. Most of the time, these miseries occurred in different permutations based on a calculus she couldn't comprehend; no matter how many times she traced every nerve fiber from to her spinal cord to a tract on the anterolateral pathway to the cerebral cortices of her brain, primarily the postcentral gyrus (Brodmann 1, 2, 3). Those that went to the reticular formation were the ones she wanted to manipulate; they affected the level of attention given to pain. Some carried information to the thalamus. Fibers that followed the spinothalamic tract directly were how she knew what burned, stung, or ached. They joined the thalamic nuclei in a way that could be mapped out to bodily location—a somatotropin pattern—and relayed at the insula, not the postcentral gyrus; those were the ones that made pain more likely to be remembered. Others went to the hypothalamus, which caused the reactions she couldn't control.
She'd been through it enough over the past two weeks; she couldn't stop the neurons that synapsed at the reticular formation from insisting that the pain mattered more than why she felt it. Even the fading bruises were making neurons fire. She had to stop thinking about the pain if she wanted to distract from the pain. What else did she have? Muting her mind with substances and sex hadn't been her only coping mechanism over years of living at an emotional eight. As a child, she'd read and re-read library books that reflected her experience more than the sitcoms that were everywhere on TV. As a teenager, she'd memorized the lyrics that made her feel less alone, and taught herself to twirl drumsticks whenever she didn't have anything else to do with the furious energy that never seemed to ebb.
The times her textbooks had been the closest diversion were a major part of how she'd gotten through high school and college. When her mother had shared her diagnosis, Meredith had gone straight to the storage unit they'd had since her mother began commenting from New York to Rochester, and dug out every book that had "neuro-" in the index. She'd come to understand Alzheimer's better than her professors, and that might be why she'd recited neuroanatomy to herself more than the muscularskelatal system or thoracic processes.
Right after she'd drowned, she'd dragged Derek to the Queen Anne branch of the library to refresh her understanding of exactly what she'd gone through under there, and a drawer in the study was full of articles she'd printed between meeting Zola and bringing her home for good.
Currently, she could use exactly none of those methods. The headaches were less constant, but the dizziness hadn't abated, so she wasn't cleared for extended screen time. No TV, no music—no headphones, no blue-light, Alex was asleep—no books. No new information to turn over and analyze. She couldn't even watch the goings-on through her window to the nurse's station; Alex had closed the blinds, saying "Time to sleep, Harriet the Spy. What?" he'd added in response to her cocked eyebrow. "I'm a pediatric surgeon. Kid gets the book from Child Life, and next thing I know they're telling me everything they think they've figured out about the girl in the next room over. It's kiddie Rear Window."
Did the hospital have a copy of the movie with Rosie and Buffy's little sister? Meredith hadn't seen it. Alex wouldn't know who she meant, unless he'd been into that Nick show where Harriet had a cast on her arm for three years. It didn't matter. If they had it, she still couldn't watch it.
The clock was next to the TV, and not being able to focus on it in the dark had driven her nuts. Having her watch on wasn't much better. She could watch the second hand move with the ticks that were incredibly loud considering that her hearing wasn't at full functionality. It would click more than a thousand times before the night nurse, Ulma, came in.
She wouldn't have to risk moving her left hand, or waking Alex with more light than the small flashlights all the night nurses carried. Maggie hadn't been exaggerating when she'd said that most of their nursing staff knew 1-10 in ASL. They always repeated the number she gave, and no one had mistaken six, holding up the three middle fingers, for three, the middle finger, ring, and pinkie.
How did you do seven again? If she didn't move, it was a seven. Nine and F were the same as the gesture for "okay," which crossed-over into ASL, but wasn't a sign. So, eight was the middle finger down. Seven, the ring finger. Meredith twitched her hand, imagining the direction traveling down from her motor cortex.
If she'd been better at follow-through, she'd have kept the signs going while she taught the kids letters and numbers. But she'd had had to learn signs piecemeal as they went, and there hadn't been enough time. She'd left it to the daycare. They'd already been adding more ASL to the curriculum, since a second year resident's baby had Usher's syndrome. He was in Bailey's room, where one of the aides had grown up signing with a Deaf brother, and they'd specifically hired a preschool instructor whose previous position was at a bilingual ASL/English preschool. Meredith was starting to feel like she was unique in getting to adulthood hardly knowing any. Maggie's passionate monologues on the language had reminded Meredith of herself as a young teen, going on about an album. That she had been able to share with her kids, and she shuddered at the idea that she could've lost music. She hadn't. She could hear. Just not perfectly. Just couldn't focus.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
She could hear; she couldn't speak, and all she had was time. Nineteen hours had passed since her sister's visit this morning, and having slept on and off for most of it only made it seem like it belonged to a further past. Strange, when closing her eyes usually brought up memories from years ago.
When Ulma came in, she was counting seconds, but at least she'd moved the ASL numbers one through one-hundred into muscle memory.
The other fact that stuck with her from that morning was that you could sign "pain" with one hand to indicate what hurt, but the general term, just the word "pain" took two. Even what she could express silently had been limited. It was wildly frustrating, but it was also a little bit freeing.