Chapter Text
May 2020
It’s 2AM and she’s free from the hospital until noon; the days and nights have blurred into a streak of fluorescent lights, gasping breaths, and shrieking monitors. Abby Lockhart is barely treading water in an ocean of sweat, cortisol and adrenaline. Nobody was prepared for a pandemic, and she hasn’t really had a day off since early March. While she isn’t a stranger to crises, this is so different. It’s bigger and worse, it’s a nightmare and it’s not over. Though Boston hasn’t been hit like New York City (she can’t stomach the pictures of shrouded bodies stacked outside in makeshift morgues), Mass General certainly is overwhelmed by sickness. They’ve got beds lined up in triage now for admits, and the parking lot is triage, and she’s in full PPE most of the time.
Abby rubs at her forehead, and then behind her ears wearily, the indents from her plastic fluid shield and the double surgical masks doing damage to the thin skin. She’s clammy and overwhelmed, her thoughts almost dark enough to ruin just-under-seven years of sobriety. Mercifully, she’s home in the two bedroom apartment she once shared with her ex-husband and son, and because Luka’s been gone since sometime in early 2015, there’s no alcohol here. Or maybe there is, but she’s certainly not about to raid her fourteen year old’s room to see if he’s hiding some shit liquor in his shoes.
She is exhausted, but it’s the kind of exhaustion that knows no sleep. The apartment is eerily quiet, it’s still too cold to turn on the air conditioning, so there’s not even the white noise of air to keep her company. Joe is at Eric’s place in Quincy, ostensibly doing schoolwork and avoiding Abby’s post-shift germs. He’ll come home next weekend, she thinks, as long as she doesn’t pick up Covid. So far, she’s been lucky, while some of her colleagues have not.
Eric is a high school physics teacher these days, thanks to the miracle of modern psychiatric medications and his desire to continually take them. He’s got a saint of a wife and twin ten year old boys to occupy Joe, so it’s good that he’s over there, while she’s doing whatever she can for the sick people of Boston proper. She’s proud of Eric, really, she is; proud of how he’s made life with bipolar disorder look easy after his rough start (she’ll never forget how he fell into a grave at a funeral). Sometimes, though, when she’s feeling a bit maudlin, she’s jealous of his happiness.
Abby talks a lot with her current therapist about her inability to be happy for other people who get what they want. The antidepressants do help, despite her reluctance to take them, but she’s a glass half empty kind of girl. Other people can be cheery optimists and leave her the fuck out of it – she’s 51 years old, and she’s allowed to be who she is. Besides, those “other people” haven’t been as kind to her as she’s been to herself in that regard: ‘Killjoy’ is the nicer version of what Luka called her on his way out, amongst other things. Unlike the first go-round, this time she does blame him, for all of his moodiness and bitterness and his inability to communicate about any of it. Luka had once said she and Joe would always be enough for him, and he lied. In the end, he’d also wanted her to be somebody she isn’t, somebody happier, somebody less argumentative – he’d wanted to save her, and she still won’t be saved by any man.
Sighing, Abby throws the clothes she’s been wearing all day into the hamper by the front door and pads directly into the bathroom to shower off whatever germs she’s brought with her. She sits down for a moment on the closed toilet lid while she waits for the water in the bathtub to heat, the pipes in the building are turn of the century old, giving into the immense relief of finally being off her feet.
Mindlessly, she scrolls through her Instagram feed, recognizing with some consternation that she’s maybe too old for social media because she doesn’t at all understand the choreographed dancing she sees her son and nephews doing on Eric’s account. It’s nice to see what everybody is up to without the need to ask them about it, antisocial tendencies through and through, but just when she is going to put the phone down and get into the bath, there it is.
It’s a photo of John Carter, a man who does not post often and when he does post, it is generally of black coffee in a mug on a table or a Chicago skyline sunset or more often, a Chicago sunrise, occasionally with his face obscured by his phone mirrored in the liquid. It’s how she knows he’s still in Chicago. In this particular photo, he’s holding the phone like a selfie so that the people behind him are in the frame too. He’s in Millenium Park with Peter and Reece Benton. They're all the dorkiest of rule followers, so they’re probably very accurately six feet apart, but it doesn’t matter. She and Carter didn’t work out, she understands why they didn’t, but she’d be lying if she said she didn’t feel something when she sees him now.
She can’t see the bottom half of Carter’s face in the angle of the photo, but she can see the crow’s feet around his brown eyes (much deeper than she remembers, but they look good on him), his high cheekbones, and his nose (too strong, oddly attractive, and still so very familiar). His hair is a mix of brown and silver, close cropped (a much better cut than when he was younger) and she thinks he might have a beard because he definitely has a mustache, also a mix of brown and silver. Abby can’t help herself, she’s so goddamn lonely these days, she wants to see his smile.
Suddenly, a wave of nostalgia crests so intensely that she turns the bathwater off, left blinking into the rising steam. Barely registering the snark back and forth between Carter and Benton about if they’re family vs. friends in the comments, she hits the message button.
abbynormalMD hi
Abby feels her stomach drop like she’s a teenager again. She rolls her eyes, sets the phone on the bathroom countertop and turns the water back on, laughing at her own stupidity. It’s idiotic, sending him a text. It’s irrelevant, because it’s done and she doesn’t think she can undo it. She gets in the shower, heart racing, and she tries to force herself to calm down. She takes several deep breaths as she washes her hair, now dyed a uniform dark brown from a box because she’s not ready to go grey, and tries to get lost in the running water. Instead, because her brain is a mess, she remembers showering with him a million years ago, back at her old apartment in Chicago. It’s bittersweet, remembering how she felt back then. It’s not even like he’s going to respond. They haven’t spoken outside of stray comments in years, not since she posted a photo of Joe’s gap toothed grin after he lost his first tooth and he had messaged her about how grown Joe looked. The conversation had fizzled out, mostly because she hadn’t known how to ask about what she was curious to know.
None of that stops her from straining her ears to hear if her phone is buzzing with a new message on the counter. Abby rolls her eyes again and forces herself to do her whole hair care routine, conditioner and everything, just to ignore the phone. When she’s confident that the messaging crisis has passed, she gets out of the shower and wraps herself in a fluffy grey towel to comb out her hair.
Her phone buzzes with a new message, of course it does.
Abby grabs it immediately and looks at the red message notification on her Instagram app. She tells herself to ignore it, it’s almost 3AM, but she’s never been great with impulse control.
JTCIIIYYKM: hey there yourself, stranger
She bites her lip.
abbynormalMD: what are you doing up so late
JTCIIIYYKM: same as you, I assume - just back from county, can’t sleep
abbynormalMD: you never sleep
JTCIIIYYKM: guilty as charged but how do you know?
abbynormalMD: approx 3 million photos of boring black coffee, yawn
JTCIIIYYKM: Instagram is for showing your food
abbynormalMD: boring
JTCIIIYYKM: ok fine, it’s boring. Tell me something good, instead.
abbynormalMD: 2375
JTCIIIYYKM: that is a number
abbynormalMD: sober number
JTCIIIYYKM: !!!!
abbynormalMD: enough of that. Tell me, what does your handle mean? The YYKM?
JTCIIIYYKM: I am never telling you. I can’t handle the mockery. You figure it out.
abbynormalMD: come on
JTCIIIYYKM: no.
abbynormalMD: then I’ll go to bed right now
JTCIIIYYKM: you should do that anyway. Hey Abby Normal?
abbynormalMD: yes?
JTCIIIYYKM: I don’t check this app very often. If you ever want to know the answer, you'll have to text me. Same number as always.
abbynormalMD: that’s assuming I still have it
abbynormalMD: Carter?
Her messages sit unread for a few minutes as she combs through her hair, pausing to think. It would be stupid to do this in general, and more than stupid to do this with him, wouldn’t it? They’re still friends, aren’t they? They left things as friends, she donates monthly to the Carter Center. The sudden and unexpected warmth in her belly and the stupid grin on her face tell her that she’s allowed something for herself, especially when everybody is socially distanced and alone. A little voice corrects the word alone to lonely. Maybe he’s lonely, too. Maybe they can be less lonely, together.
Abby still has his phone number.