Archive of Our Own

Robby spent the morning lurching from one crisis to the next while dodging admin, billing, and the rumor mill. So, situation normal; “all fucked up” pending. As usual.

He left Mohan and King with a pedestrian vs cyclist only to be drawn to trauma 3 by a whole lot of yelling. He stuck his head in, where he saw that Whitaker’s patient had a broken nose and an arm sticking in the wrong direction, but neither the pain nor the inability to breathe properly could stop the man’s ranting. Bloody spittle flew as he monologued at both length and volume about how he was going to save the world with his patented ergonomic office furniture and homemade Greek kimchi, if only everyone would get on board. He was neither Greek nor Korean, but he assured everyone that he knew their secrets.

“The reason we’re all in a state is because of the unnatural postural demands of modern life and our failure to look after our gut health! You’re a man of science, you need to get your name down on my list of first orders!”

Whitaker, who was still unclear on the difference between active listening and being overly deferential, had yet to get him to calm down enough for an IV.

“You make furniture? That’s really amazing, Mr. Stillhead, where’d you learn that? I’ve always wanted to try woodworking. If you could just stop waving your arm like that—”

“Look, look—I don’t see a single shitty desk in this place but your chairs are a mess! You know I’m right!”

Donnie took pity on Whitaker and caught the patient’s attention with exactly the right kind of complementary crazy—if Mr. Stillhead would let the nurses get him some pain meds, Donnie would call up his uncle, the head of the World Ergonomics Association, to tell him his brilliant patient had blown this thing wide open and he’d want a meeting ASAP.

Robby caught Whitaker’s eye and jerked his head toward the corner of the room. Whitaker managed to look both eager to hear what Robby had to say and like a dog who may soon be smacked on the nose with a newspaper.

“What’s the deal here?” Robby asked, pitching his voice low while Mr. Stillhead ranted on.

“Well, broken nose, obviously, and I haven’t been able to do a proper exam yet but I’m thinking broken elbow rather than radius or ulna?”

“Sure, but did he say how this happened?”

“He’s pretty stuck on the furniture-kimchi thing.”

“Well to me it looks like someone got sick of hearing it and beat the shit out of him,” Robby said.

Whitaker winced.

“Yeah, probably. What do you…I mean, should we call the cops?”

“The last thing this guy needs is cops,” Robby said. “Call psych right after you call surgery though. This isn’t just a trauma case.”

“Oh, yeah, will do. Thanks, Dr. Robby.”

“And don’t be afraid to be firm with your patients when they need it, Whitaker.”

“Yeah, definitely. Sorry.”

Robby shook his head and patted Whitaker on the shoulder.

“Don’t apologize, kid,” he said, and ducked out of the trauma bay.

When he went to check the board, he instead caught sight of someone who should have left two hours ago.

“Jack, what the hell? Go home.”

Jack was sitting (in a very shitty chair, it must be said) in front of a computer at the charge station, banging away at the keyboard. He had his glasses on, which felt like a hate crime against Robby personally.

“Admin’s on a warpath about the fucking ICD-10 codes,” he said without looking away from the screen. “I had hit after hit last night so I gotta catch up where I can.”

Robby scrubbed both hands through his hair. He’d been ducking Gloria’s emails for weeks and her flying monkeys for days.

“And none of the residents whose cases these actually were could tackle this basic cornerstone of their education before they left?”

Now Jack sent him a sour look.

“Do you not have better shit to do than ride my ass right now?”

“Oh you’d know if I were riding your ass, Dr. Abbot,” Robby said with a bounce of his eyebrows.

Jack rolled his eyes and went back to his charting.

“Don’t make promises you can’t keep,” he said. It would be flirty if his tone weren’t so reminiscent of a dog gnashing at you through a fence.

Robby scoffed and hoped it hid the way his heart flopped around against his ribs. Jack would always say shit like this only to back off when Robby almost got the courage to make something of it. It had been five years since Marisol died and no matter how outrageously Jack flirted with anyone who turned his way, there seemed to be no real intent behind any of it. Robby didn’t even know if he’d slept with anyone else in all that time. There would be a string of broken hearts in his wake if he weren’t so goddamn charming that no one could hold it against him.

All of which was to say that Robby wasn’t special, and he wished he could get his heart on board with what his brain already knew. Hell, flirtation aside, he didn’t even know if Jack went for guys. The whole thing was moot.

“All right, lover boy, look alive,” Dana said. “GSW incoming, three minutes.”

When it arrived, Robby had to swat Jack away from helping.

“Finish your shit and go get some sleep, brother,” he said, snapping the curtain shut between them.

Over the next hour and a half, Robby lurched from crisis to crisis, and when he finally got a second to breathe, Jack was still at the goddamn charge station. But so were Drs. Whitaker and Jefferson, so Robby sidled up to them. He was going to ask about Mr. Stillhead, until Caleb went full Caleb on him.

“Hello, Michael,” Caleb said in that long-suffering way he had, as if they’d been twenty years married and five divorced instead of a six-month thing that ended almost a year ago.

“Caleb, answering your calls with a swiftness today I see.”

“And how is therapy going?”

Robby hated the pushing and the prodding, but he hated looming more, so he pulled up a stool next to Caleb and Whitaker scurried away only to come back with one of his own.

“Well I blamed it all on my mother and now I’m cured, so thanks for the referral,” Robby said.

Caleb sent him a flat look. Whitaker fidgeted. Robby could feel Jack’s searing eyes on him, but he didn’t glance his way. A phone rang and Dana picked it up.

“God forbid you let anyone care about you, Michael,” Caleb said.

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we’re at work.”

“The only place I can get you to speak to me, yes.”

“And we have a patient to discuss, so if you’d please…”

“I already discussed Mr. Stillhead’s case with Dr. Whitaker. Prematurely, I might add.” A pointed look at Whitaker now.

“I didn’t know the meds would chill him out that much,” Whitaker said. "Bit of a lightweight, that Mr. Stillhead."

“It’s not Dr. Whitaker’s fault you took your sweet time getting down here. Would you rather we left the patient in pain?”

“Do you think we’re all twiddling our thumbs upstairs just waiting for you to summon us?”

“Robby!” Dana cut in. Robby looked up. She slammed the phone down. “Billing’s on your ass about the CMS codes and somehow I’m the one who’s gotta hear about it. Again!”

“Jesus, yes, fine!” Robby stood and rolled his stool out of the way. “What’s their problem this time?”

“If you’d read your emails, maybe you’d know,” Dana said.

“It’s never something reasonable,” Robby said. “It’s always some bullshit that a desk jockey who doesn’t treat patients wants us to bend time and space to make possible, and then I have to go waste my time telling them they’re in fucking dreamland! And then—”

Dana waved a quelling hand at him as her face grew more and more incredulous.

“I don’t care, Robby, just make them stop calling me about it!”

The red phone blared to life, and that was Dana off. When Robby turned around, Caleb was gone and so was Whitaker and he was left with Jack, staring at him in grumpy disbelief.

“What?” Robby said.

“What the fuck was that?”

“You’re living it, man,” Robby said, nodding at Jack’s charts.

“I don’t mean admin, I mean that jilted lovers’ display with Jefferson.”

Robby’s ears flamed. On the other side of the charge station, he saw Princess and Perlah go curiously still.

“It’s nothing,” Robby said. “Joking around.”

“Weird joke, brother,” Jack said. By the tilt of his eyebrows and the pinch of his mouth, he didn’t believe Robby for one second.

“What’s got your camo panties in a twist?”

Jack’s jaw ticked.

“Why do you always gotta shit where you eat, man?”

“What the fuck does that mean?”

“You know what it means.”

Embarrassment flashed over him in waves of heat only to flood out in the form of anger.

“Go the fuck home, Jack,” he snapped.

“Not if you want admin to stop breathing down your neck about this shit,” Jack said. His typing grew so aggressive Robby wondered if any of the keys would fly off and hit him in the eye.

“You’re too tired. You’re gonna make mistakes I’ll have to clean up.”

“Fuck off, Robby.”

“Hey, did you know I’m your boss?”

“Good luck with that,” Jack said.

Robby was saved from saying something cutting for no reason by the arrival of a wailing old woman bleeding profusely from a head wound. Mohan, Perlah, and Jesse jogged up to her gurney as the paramedics rattled off a bunch of stats and a middle-aged Asian woman hurried along at their side, panic barely banked in her expression. Robby meant to join them, had started toward her, but some invisible hand froze him where he stood. Stopped his heart, seized his lungs, shorted his brain.

The patient was white, small but sturdy with a long face, a prominent nose, and a painstakingly coiffed mane of pure white hair, flattened on one side by blood. Her mouth, her eyes, even her ears canted at a particular angle that sent tremors through Robby’s gut. For a moment, the past slid atop the present like a photo negative and Robby was looking at his grandmother, shrieking and bleeding. The illusion was so complete, he had to shake his head as if to clear the cobweb of memory from his eyes. He blinked and blinked, but there she remained, the specter of a woman gone more than twenty years. She disappeared into a trauma bay with his staff while he stood there, useless and blanking.

After who knows how long, Santos saw him standing there like a lump and snagged him for a consult on a twelve-year-old’s weird rash. When he emerged, the wailing had stopped but there was still a kerfuffle coming from trauma 2. A thin, raised voice, unintelligible, and the sounds of medical professionals attempting unsuccessfully to soothe its owner. He strode over only to pause at the curtain and tuck his name badge into a pocket before plastering a smile on his face and stepping inside.

“Hello hello,” he said, planting himself at the computer. “I’m Dr. Robby, the attending physician. What’s going on today?”

The patient, who really did look remarkably like Bubbe, paused in her weepy babbling to stare at him. Her face had been cleaned up and Perlah was checking beneath the gauze on her wound.

Mohan sat up straight and said, “Julia Tsang, seventy-five years old, history of arterial blockage for which has had stents placed, chemotherapy and radiation for cancer in 2017 and 2018, and dementia. She took a fall on some concrete steps today and sustained a head lac and bruising. She’s on warfarin so we’ve administered vitamin K to help the clotting along. We’re waiting on X-ray and CT, and as soon Mrs. Tsang is ready, we’ll stitch her up and have her feeling better soon.” Mohan smiled and patted Mrs. Tsang on the hand.

Robby meant to ask Mohan where the med students were—this would be a good one for suture practice she didn’t need anymore—but two things happened at the same moment, and that vertiginous collision of past and present overtook him again.

1. He saw on her chart that her first name was actually Yuliya and her date of birth was August 2nd, 1951.

2. She said, in a small voice that stripped away more years than Robby had been alive, “Papochka?” Daddy?

Robby was lucky that when he swayed, there was a chair nearby to catch him. Mohan’s attention was suddenly sharp on him; she was halfway out of her seat, a hand outstretched toward him as if she could have stopped him falling. He pulled his chair up to Mrs. Tsang’s bedside, the two of them caught in the nauseating tractor beam of mutual fascination. He became aware that the other woman in the room, her daughter no doubt, was speaking.

“I’m really so sorry about this, I don’t know where it’s coming from at all. No one even knew she spoke anything but English! She only gets like this when she’s really agitated and we never know what she’s saying. She should be back to English soon, I’m so sorry.”

“There’s nothing to apologize for,” Mohan said with the air of someone who had said just that several times already. “This is fairly common for dementia patients. I’m the one who’s sorry that our interpreter is taking so long to get here.”

“I don’t know that we need one,” the daughter said. “It’s really just nonsense I think.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” Mohan said. “Your mother is trying to communicate in the only way she can right now. It’s worth it to listen to her.”

Tears, silent and copious, had begun streaming from Mrs. Tsang’s eyes. She reached for Robby, who met her over the railing with both his hands. He let her clutch at him.

“Papochka, papochka, papochka,” she mumbled, over and over. “I couldn’t find my way home.”

Robby swallowed around the lump gathering at the base of his throat. He had no memories of his mother speaking Russian to him. He remembered, in flashes and images, her frustrated snapping back in English when her own mother dared speak to her in her native tongue. But he should have expected it. The two of them were raised by the same people, after all.

“I saw her address is in California,” Robby said without looking away from her. He cleared his throat when the words came out in a croak. “Can you tell me what brought you here and how she fell?”

“God, it’s all my fault,” the daughter—your sister! Robby’s brain asserted—said. “She’s having more bad days than good days lately, but sometimes she has a run of good days where she’s lucid and sharp and you think wow, she’s really still in there. And she’s really f—freaking convincing. She’s from here originally, and lately she’s been talking about coming back for something. She kept calling me and my sister and hassling us to take her back here before it was too late. My sister kept saying no, she needs to stay in her memory care facility, but I thought, well. I thought what’s the harm? I can take care of her for a few days. So I did a jail break. One last adventure for Ma, right? I’m such an idiot. Well, we went by the house she grew up in, but other people live there now and she kind of lost it.”

“Where is Mamochka? She’ll know what to do. She’ll know where to find him."

“Find who, zaychik?” Robby asked. His words were stilted, dusty after long decades kept inside, but he dragged them out and shoved them forward now like clumsy fawns. “I’ll help you look.”

In his peripheral vision, he saw Mohan’s head snap up.

“You know what she’s saying?” the daughter asked. “What’s she saying?”

“Where have you been, papochka?” his mother said. “Why did you leave me there?”

“I’m here now, malyshka. What do you need?”

“I lost him.”

“Who?”

“The boy, the boy! Where did he go? Mamochka will know, where is she? Tell her to come here. She promised, she promised!”

“Mamochka is out, zaychik. She’ll be home soon.”

“With my Mishka?”

His elderly mother, gone from his life for nearly fifty years, sounded like a little girl overjoyed at the prospect of seeing her playmate again. Everything inside Robby was quivering. His eyes went hot. His hands, so much bigger and sandwiching hers, shook. Suddenly, he was not a grown man, a doctor, the chief of the emergency department. He was a little boy to match her little girl, and the grief and rage inside him were bigger than his body could contain.

“Why did you leave him all alone?” he asked. “He needed you. He missed you. Why did you go, Yuliya? Why did you go? Why?”

She withdrew her hands and shook her head, cowering into the far side of the hospital bed amid a fresh flood of tears.

“What’s going on?” her daughter said. “What did you say to her?”

“She thinks I’m her father,” Robby said. He avoided Mohan’s eyes.

“Ma, it’s okay, this is the doctor,” the daughter said. “See? You don’t have to be scared.”

Robby turned to look at her properly for the first time, trying to see if there was something in her face he could recognize. Would he know her on the street? Would he pass her by without a thought? Her hair was darker than his, nearly black but for a generous sprinkling of silver, thick and piled up all messy on the top of her head. She had high cheekbones in a long face, and her nose was less exuberant than his or his mother’s or his grandfather’s. There was something familiar in the shape of her mouth, her jaw, but the real tell was the eyes. She had clear brown eyes tilted in a gentle almond shape. Robby saw those eyes in the mirror every day, if it happened to be a day he could bear to meet them.

Robby didn’t know what to do with a sister.

“What’s your name?” Robby asked.

“Me?” Her eyebrows rose, but she stuck her hand out toward him. He felt strange and cold, as if his meat had stepped away from his skeleton. He saw more than felt himself take her hand and shake it. “Shannon Tsang.”

“Shannon,” he echoed. He blinked and cleared his throat again. “Is there a history of dementia in your family? She’s a little young for it.”

Zayde had stayed sharp and hale until the day a heart attack dropped him at age seventy-three. Robby had been in high school. Bubbe faded only a little bit in the final months of her life, and lived to be almost ninety. Robby’s uncle died young in Vietnam and never got a chance to do anything at all.

“I’m sorry, I don’t really know,” Shannon said. “She’s a black box when it comes to her past. I never even met my grandparents. I do know—” She cut herself off with a wince.

Once upon a time, he wanted to tell her, your mother was my mother. She dropped me off at my grandparents’ house and I didn’t see her for forty-eight years. When she finally came back, she didn’t know me when she saw me.

“Anything you can tell us could help,” Robby said. He ignored Mohan’s desperate attempt at psychic communication from the other side of the hospital bed. None of this was relevant to the injury at hand, but he didn’t seem to be in control of his body or brain at the moment.

“Well…you know,” Shannon said. She shrugged one shoulder. “It was the ’70s. She was partying a lot back then. She finally got sober when we were kids.”

“I see.”

“Could that have contributed?”

“Sometimes yes,” Robby said. His attention drifted back to his mother. “But also sometimes it just happens.”

“What’s important now is that we make her feel safe and comfortable,” Mohan said. “When she gets something wrong, like mistaking Dr. Robby for her father, we don’t have to correct her. It can be scary and confusing for a dementia patient.”

“Oh. I’m sorry. My sister is the one who usually talks to the doctors.”

“I know it can be frustrating, especially if you’re having to repeat yourself a lot.”

“Sometimes she doesn’t know who I am and I just—” Shannon’s breath hitched, not with grief but exasperation.

“That’s so hard,” Mohan said.

“Papa,” his mother whispered from the corner of her bed. “Papochka.”

Mohan and Shannon kept talking about support for dementia patients and their families, but all Robby heard, all Robby saw, was Yuliya.

“Do you know where I can find my boy?” she asked. “You promised to take care of him.”

Spit flooded Robby’s mouth. He swallowed it down even as a storm gathered low in his gut.

“And you promised to come back, so that’s what our promises are worth.”

The weeping started again. She keened out a high, weak whine. She was chanting papochka, papochka, papochka. My boy, my boy, my Mishka.

There was movement around the room. Robby pushed away from her bedside.

The curtain snapped open to reveal Gloria wearing a peacock teal blazer and the expression of someone trying to look pleasant while sitting on an active volcano.

“Dr. Robinavitch, may I speak with you?”

Robby’s limbs did all the standing things. The mechanics of following her out were automated. Good thing, because his vision was tunneling.

“Robinavitch?” Shannon said somewhere behind him. “Wait, what? That’s—”

Gloria led him out to the charge station. She was speaking in low, furious tones, and none of it was sinking into Robby’s head. There was static all around him.

“Dr. Robinavitch, are you listening to me?” she finally snapped.

“I’m gonna puke,” Robby blurted.

“You know what, Robinavitch, I don’t appreciate the way you treat the basic administrative tasks of your job like some kind of—”

“Gloria!” Jack’s voice came like the crack of a whip, and then Gloria was stumbling backward as Jack shoved a trash can between them and got an arm around his shoulders.

Robby buckled to his knees, clutched at the bin, and emptied his guts.

Over his head, the world seeped back into being in dribs and drabs. Dana shooing away his residents before kneeling beside him. Gloria asking Jack to cover Robby’s shift. Jack responding with a “fuck no” that she probably took a lot better coming from him than from Robby. Shannon lurking at the edges of his vision.

He coughed out the last of what was left inside him and sagged against the charge station. Dana was rubbing a hand up and down his back. Jack was beside him, and that wasn’t good, he shouldn’t be on his knees like this.

“Let’s get you up,” he was saying. “I’ll take you home and you can lie down. I can make you my special soup, what do you say?”

Robby shook his head. He shrugged both Jack and Dana off of him and staggered to his feet. He ignored all the eyes on him, the calls of his name, and found a supply closet to close himself up in. He sat down and buried his face in his knees. He couldn’t stop shaking.

There came a thunk on the other side of the door.

“I’m coming in,” Jack said.

“I’m fine, Jack. Go home.”

The door swung open. Robby covered his face with his hands.

“You’re full of shit, as usual,” Jack said.

He shuffled inside and closed the door. They were enveloped in darkness again. With some effort, Jack sat down beside him, hip snug against Robby’s in the narrow space. There was no hesitation when he slung an arm behind Robby’s neck so their shoulders wouldn’t get in each other’s way.

“You wanna tell me what that was about?” Jack asked.

Robby shook his head.

“Okay, well, you may not want to but I think you need to,” Jack said. “Help me out here, brother.”

“You first,” Robby said. His voice sounded like he’d been gargling broken glass.

“I’m not the one who ran out of a patient’s room and almost hurled on our boss.”

“So?”

Jack heaved a sigh.

“Jesus,” he muttered. “What am I even going first about, man?”

“Why you’re so pissy at me.”

“My shitty mood is not why we’re sitting in the dark right now.”

“You don’t have to be here at all!”

“Why can’t you let me be there for you, huh Rob? Why can’t you just—”

“If it’s such a goddamn chore—”

“It’s not a chore! I never said it was a chore! I’m saying it’s the exact opposite of a chore, for fuck’s sake! I want to be someone you can go to when you need it, Robby, do you get that?”

“Why?”

“Because!” he shouted, flinging out his free hand. A box of pens cascaded onto their heads and made Robby squeak. Jack drew an audible breath and held it for a long moment before letting it out and lowering his voice. “Because you’re my favorite person in the world, okay? Because every fucking day I watch you keep your shit inside and it’s poisoning you, man. And I wonder why you seem to think friendship is when I lean on you but you stand alone every goddamn time.”

Robby shuddered. He meant to bury his face in his knees again, but he landed on the slope of Jack’s chest instead, nestled in his underarm, hand twisting in his scrub top. Jack hugged him close by the crook of his elbow and laid his cheek in Robby’s hair.

“What happened, Robby?” he said, so softly that his voice cracked. “What’s going on?”

“I thought I was okay never seeing her again,” Robby whispered. “I thought I was over it. But now I’m just—” He gestured at himself helplessly, as if Jack could glean blindly that he meant so much more than the pukey, shaky mess he was right now. That he meant the obliterated boy he was deep down, the broken failure of a man he’d cobbled together from the wreckage. He knew that there was something very wrong with him, root-deep, that everyone could see, and soon Jack would too. Jack would see, and Jack would leave.

“Who, Robby?” God, he was so gentle, leading Robby to his execution. When Robby didn’t say anything, Jack asked again, even softer. His hand had come up to cradle the back of Robby’s head, and his thumb rubbed softly over the skin on the back of his neck. Robby’s eyes stung, and he turned to mash his face into Jack’s chest.

“My mom,” he said, and gasped sharply. “My mom was Mohan’s patient. She didn’t recognize me.”

Pressed up close like this, Robby could hear Jack’s heartbeat stumble and speed up. He shifted enough to get his other arm around Robby too.

“Okay. Okay, Rob.”

“Forty-eight years, Jack. I haven’t seen her in forty-eight years.”

“Jesus Christ.”

Jack’s breath shuddered out of him. He squeezed Robby tighter.

“She had a whole other family she actually wanted. She sobered up for them. She loved them well enough that they’d break her out of the home to take her on a trip across the country. She—she—”

“Hey, listen to me.”

Jack groped for him in the dark. A big palm landed clumsily on the side of his face.

“None of her shit is about you, darlin’,” Jack said. “Whatever made her do what she did, it was not you, do you hear me?”

Robby shook his head. Not in disagreement but in disbelief. Jack didn’t know how sensitive Robby had been, now needy. How often he cried, and how tiresome it was. How his mother would rage at and fawn over him by turns, how he did everything—everything!—to abide by her ever-changing roulette wheel of rules to keep her happy but he was always wrong anyway, how she told him it was the two of them against the world only to turn around and remake her world without him in it. How he waited at the window every day for a year.

Sure, with adult eyes he could see that she was troubled and he was powerless in the situation, but at the end of the day, he was the thing she couldn’t choose. He was a gangrenous limb she lopped off to save herself. There were no platitudes for being someone your own mother couldn’t love.

Robby pulled out of Jack’s arms and wiped hastily at his eyes.

“Do you think I scared Gloria off?” he said. “Maybe I bought myself another week without her chewing me out.”

“Robby.”

“I’m serious about you going home, don’t you have another shift tonight?”

“We’re off the hook for the next couple days. I may have implied there was a norovirus outbreak. Gloria’s probably taking out real estate in a decontamination shower as we speak. ”

“No, no, I gotta get back to work.”

“Rob.” Jack’s hand closed around his wrist. “You’re done for the day. We’re both done for the day. We’re gonna go back to my place and have a nice rest and then we’re gonna talk some more. Maybe we both call our therapists, and maybe you think about what you need to say to this woman who came into your ED pretending not to know you.”

“You think she was pretending?”

“I don’t know dude, it just seems too neat to be a coincidence.”

“She’s gone, man. Dementia. She wasn’t even speaking English anymore.”

All Robby could hear was Jack’s breathing, and the rush of his own blood in his ears. After a minute of what passed for silence, Jack spoke.

“I’m gonna talk to Mohan.”

“Please don’t tell her.”

“Man, that other lady mighta let that cat out of the bag already.”

“Fuck, what did she say?”

“She was asking if Robinavitch was a common name in Pittsburgh. And then you were yakking, so she backed off. But we don’t employ stupid people here, as you’ve taken pains to remind admin.”

“Fuck. Fuck.” Robby gripped his hair.

Jack’s hands felt around for him and landed on his wrists, on either side of his face. He gave them a gentle squeeze, and Robby let go of his hair.

“Robby, hey. What’s gonna happen if people know?”

Robby almost laughed. What would happen? They’d know he was a fake, an interloper playing at being a real boy. They’d see that he didn’t belong there, among people who knew how to care the right way. They’d be able to name the nebulous wrongness inside him at last, and they’d turn away from him too.

“I’m the chief,” he said.

“Even chiefs have mothers, darlin’. I know it’s hard to believe, but everyone kind of already assumed you had one.”

“It’s not just that she’s my mother.”

“I know, Rob.”

“She came in here and shoved her real kid in my face and now everyone will see.”

“All anyone will know is you’re human. There’s nothing else to know.”

“I made a scene.”

“It’s the ED, there’s always a scene.”

Jack hadn’t let go of his wrists. Robby’s forehead came to rest against Jack’s. Their noses bumped together, and he could feel the brush of Jack’s eyelashes against his own cheeks. Robby’s heart had sped up. By Jack’s breathing, so had his. Robby tried not to want to much, but he was not a strong man.

“Jack.”

“Are you—”

“What.”

“Did you date Jefferson for real?” Jack asked.

Robby drew back as if there was anything to look at, Jack a black on black silhouette.

“Are you serious?”

“Rob, just—please.”

“Yes,” Robby said. “For a while after PittFest. Why?”

“What’s a while? And was it just fucking, or were you—”

“Jesus, Jack. What’s it matter?”

“It matters because I need to know if this is just comfort for you or if you want something real here,” Jack said. “I need to manage my expectations.”

Robby disentangled their hands, turned away.

“It was my last serious thing, until I fucked it up, as usual,” he said. “That’s what you should expect, Jack.”

Robby got up, and he meant to help Jack up too, he really did, but the hunted animal inside him pushed the door open and ran.

The locker room was blessedly empty when Robby crept inside and grabbed his stuff. He felt the eyes of his colleagues land on him as he wove through the ED, but he tucked his chin into his chest and forged on without looking up. He left through the ambulance bay and turned toward home, only to run into Shannon leaning against the brick facade, smoking a cigarette.

He stopped short and could not make his legs take him further. Her eyes went wide. She dropped the butt and ground it down under her toe.

“Dr. Robinavitch,” she said. “I, uh. I’m really sorry for all that, back there.”

“It’s not your fault,” he said. He hitched his backpack up on his shoulder. “If you have any questions about your mother’s care, you can ask Dr. Mohan.”

“Wait! Wait. Can we just—Hold on.” She rummaged in her purse until she came up with a pen and a bent pad of sticky notes. She scribbled her name and her number on one and peeled it off. She held it out to him. “Here. Just in case. I know it’s weird. I know you probably don’t want anything to do with us. But I’d like to know you, if you’d let me.”

He took it. He stood there not moving, a lump growing in his throat. She was staring unabashedly at him. Searching him, as he’d searched her.

“We’re gonna be here another day or two, I think,” she said. “All her scans were clear, but Dr. Mohan said she was dehydrated and some of her vitals were funky, so. We’re gonna have to wait til she’s stable to get home.”

“Dr. Mohan knows her stuff,” Robby said.

“I was thinking I shouldn’t have brought her here, but.” She gave him a pained facsimile of a smile. “I think it was worth it, to find what she was looking for.”

“I wasn’t hiding.”

Shannon winced.

“I know. I’m sorry. You must think I’m an asshole.”

“I don’t.”

“It would be fair if you did,” she said. She drew herself up and squared her shoulders. “Listen. I know you’re probably not interested, but she might be more coherent once she gets stable. If you wanted to talk to her at all, maybe one of the other doctors could let you know?”

“She was perfectly coherent, actually.”

“Oh. Um. You don’t have to tell me, but I’d like to know what she was saying. Like I said, we didn’t even know she spoke another language, and it’s been coming out more and more. It’s cool that you can—” She cut herself off with a wince.

Resentment like a hot coal threatened to crowd out the air in Robby’s lungs. How ironic, that Yuliya had withheld a second language from all her children, and only by the grace of her own parents was her misshapen first try now able to convey information between her and the daughter she actually wanted.

“She was a child looking for a lost plaything that just happened to be me,” Robby said. “But she didn’t know me, and telling her who I was would have been scary and disorienting. I suppose we’re lucky I look like my grandfather.”

A tremor ran through Shannon’s face. She nodded, crossing her arms over herself and subsiding back against the bricks.

“She was so intent on coming here,” Shannon said. “She’ll be upset she missed you, when she’s back.”

“Respectfully, Shannon, that is not my problem.”

“No, yeah, definitely. I didn’t mean—I’m sorry.”

He held up her sticky note, gave her a flat-lipped non-smile with a dip of his head, and started home again. He’d taken five strides or so when he stopped, cursing himself, cursing his conscience. He pivoted on his heel.

“Shannon?” he called.

She looked up, red-eyed. His bubbe’s grandchild.

“Yeah?”

“West View Cemetery,” he said. “I don’t know the exact plot numbers off the top of my head, but if you contact Rodef Shalom, they’ll be able to tell you. David, Zuzanna, and Maximillian Robinavitch.”

“Thank you,” Shannon said, voice quavering.

Robby jerked his head in a nod and turned back around.

Maybe he’d walk home today.

Of course, when he got home, Jack’s truck was in his parking spot. He rested his head against his front door for a moment, bracing himself for the ambush. He turned his key in the lock.

Jack was standing at parade rest in front of the fireplace, looking at some pictures on his mantle. Usually, if Jack was here, his leg was off and he was lounging on the couch with a beer, maybe bullying Robby into nicer delivery than pizza. He looked up when Robby entered, and fuck if he didn’t look like he was about to cry too.

Banner fucking day at PTMC.

Robby set his backpack down and toed off his shoes.

“What did I say about getting some sleep, Jack?” Robby said, sailing past him to pour himself a glass of water in the kitchen.

“I wanted to apologize to you,” Jack said.

Robby flicked his eyes up. He leaned back against the sink and drained his glass, eyes trained on Jack. Jack tipped his chin up like he was facing the firing squad. Robby raised his eyebrows, waiting.

“I’m sorry,” Jack said. “I picked the worst possible moment to put my shit on you. I shouldn’t have put it on you at all, much less when you were having an entire crisis. On top of it, I came at you with weird accusatory energy and just—I’m sorry. I took my mood out on you exactly when I shouldn’t have, and I wish I hadn’t, and I hope I didn’t make things worse for you because that’s the last thing I ever want.”

“Okay,” Robby said.

Jack frowned.

“‘Okay?’”

“Yeah, okay. Are you gonna tell me what your problem is now?”

Jack closed his eyes for a long moment.

“It’s just the same old stupid shit, man. Patients picking fights and then trauma after trauma, we couldn’t catch our breath all night. Then I get a bunch of static from Billing about the fucking ICD-10s, threatening my fucking residents, so I have to go over their shit with a fine-toothed comb when admin’s the one with unclear instructions that change with the fucking weather. Everything’s a goddamn annoying mess, and my fuse was already short, and then—” The muscle in his jaw ticked alongside a lopsided shrug.

“And then…”

Jack took a deep breath and looked him in the eye.

“And then you show up saying flirty shit when I know you don’t mean it, because you don’t go for guys, only suddenly it looks like you very much do, only you never told me, so it must just be me you don’t go for, and even saying that out loud after the day you’ve had is so fucking selfish I feel like the world’s biggest asshole and I snapped, okay? I just—it was a bad day, and I lost it, and I’m so fucking sorry, Robby.”

Robby rubbed his eyes. He set his glass on the counter and crossed his arms, rolled his shoulders in.

“I don’t know what you want, Jack.”

Jack shook his head like he didn’t have the words. He was swaying a bit—shifting his body weight from one leg to the other in turns.

“Look,” Robby said. “Why don’t you get off that leg, I’ll order lunch, we’ll talk.”

“Are you really gonna talk or are you just gonna get me to and then wiggle out of actually saying anything of your own?” Jack asked, mulish.

“Jack…”

“Because like. Objectively, you had the worse day. It’s really, really not your turn to be the one who props the other one up.”

“Would you just sit down please?”

“Man, we almost fucking got there on the closet floor,” Jack said. “Do you need me to turn the lights off? Do you want to go into the closet?”

“It was where I could hide!” Robby shouted. Jack’s jaw clicked shut, eyes wide, brows tilted at an angle that was so terribly, painfully sympathetic. Robby’s heart threatened to beat right out of his gullet. He tried to swallow it down. “Sometimes she would be so mad she’d scream and throw things. Sometimes she wasn’t mad at all, just so, so sad, and she would sob like someone was killing her. Sometimes, she’d have a man over. So yeah, Jack, I would hide. In the fucking closet.”

Jack took two steps toward him, slid a chair out, and manhandled him into it. Jack bustled around getting water and and cutting up an apple, and then he was in the chair beside him, shoving a plate toward him.

“I know I said it like an asshole, but we can 100% go sit in the closet if you want,” Jack said.

Robby’s laugh sounded creaky and broken. He swiped at his eyes.

“I hate when people look at me,” he said.

“I know, man.”

“You don’t want in on this, Jack. I hurt everyone I try to be close with. I’m like a fucking disease.”

“You haven’t ruined me.”

“I would if we did anything more than this.” Robby waved a hand between them.

“But do you want to?”

“It doesn’t matter what I want.”

“It’s been ten years, Rob,” Jack said. “I’m still here, and the only way I’m fucking off is if you tell me I was such a shithead today we can’t be friends anymore.”

Robby shook his head.

“It’s not the same as a relationship.”

“What do you think—” Jack cut himself off. He rolled his neck with a series of pops. “Okay, you know what? The whole ‘what are we’ thing is my fault, I muddied the waters with it like a frigging teenage girl, but it’s not why I’m here right now, okay? We can save it for another day, or never talk about it at all if that’s what you want. Right this second, I’m trying to make sure my best friend isn’t alone on the day his estranged mom showed up out of the blue with a raging case of dementia.”

Robby looked at his plate so he didn’t have to look at Jack. He ate an apple slice, and another, and another. Minutes ticked by under an uneasy silence. Finally, Robby said, “I’ve been thinking about her a lot, the last couple years. I refused to Google her, because I’d be damned if I would chase someone who dumped me first chance she got. I figured she was dead. And then suddenly she’s there. You know I thought I was hallucinating? Not her—my grandmother.”

“That sounds fucked.”

Robby huffed out a weak laugh.

“Yeah,” he said. “It was like I wasn’t in my body anymore. And then she was speaking Russian, and she thought I was her father, and—God, Jack. I’m such a piece of shit, man.”

“What happened?”

“I blamed her and made her feel bad. She didn’t even know what was going on, and I gave myself free rein to say whatever because no one else understood. But now I know I’m the guy who’ll harass a fucking dementia patient if it suits me.”

“Don’t do that, man,” Jack said. “Don’t beat yourself up for reacting badly to an impossible situation. And she wasn’t your patient, was she? She was your mother, and she had a lot to answer for. You would never treat a patient’s family member the way you’re treating yourself right now.”

Robby closed his eyes.

“I never told anyone,” he said. “The kids at school knew anyway. The neighbors. Everyone at temple. It was like Hester fucking Prynne, A for abandonment. So I made sure when I left home that no one would ever know this thing about me. But you know what? People can smell it on you, even if they don’t know what it is.”

Jack laid a careful hand on the back of Robby’s neck. Robby shuddered but leaned into the touch.

“And then last year, I was coming apart at the seams, and all this shit started pouring out,” he said. “I told Dana, I told a baby who can’t talk, I told Duke, I told this guy who sells me weed gummies. It was like everything I didn’t want to think about was suddenly front and center in my brain and I couldn’t get it to stop. I just wanted it to fucking stop, Jack.”

“I know, Robby.”

“You know you saved me that day.”

Robby couldn’t look at him, but he could feel him—the tightening of his hand, the hitch of his breath, whatever he was trying so valiantly not to show on his face.

“Yeah?” Jack’s voice cracked. “I’m so fucking glad, brother.”

“I feel like her showing up puts me right back at square one,” Robby said. “I was doing okay for the first time in years. At least breaking even on the bullshit. I take my meds, I go to the fucking shrink, I don’t think about driving into traffic. So of course she’s gotta break a solid fifty-year streak and come ruin everything. Of course she’s gotta twist the knife one last time. And you know what the real fuck of it is? The worst fucking thing?”

“What?”

“She doesn’t even know she’s doing it.”

If Robby looked Jack in the eye right now, he would fly apart. He took him in in bits—the square line of his jaw, limned in silver stubble. The little moue of his mouth when he chewed the inside of his cheek. The freckles disappearing in the flush of red up his neck.

“I’m sorry, Robby.”

“Oh, don’t, man, I can’t take it.”

“You remember when my dad died, and I thought I’d be happy, but I fucking broke instead?” Jack asked.

Robby nodded.

“I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me,” Jack said. “I used to literally fantasize about killing him. I was gonna piss on his grave. I was gonna throw his ashes into a porta-potty. So why did him dying make me feel like my heart was thrown in a wood chipper?”

Robby risked a glance at his eyes. Jack was staring him down intently as ever. Waiting for an answer.

“Was that not rhetorical?” Robby asked.

“It was not. So why, Robby?”

He and Marisol had been there to hold Jack together when his fury had turned into something else, something Robby couldn’t even name. The sound Jack had made—the memory of it heated Robby’s eyes, even now. God, everything made him cry; he really was pathetic.

“Because as long as he was alive he had the potential to be the dad you needed,” Robby said. “He was never going to be, that was never in the cards, but if he was dead it was really never happening.”

Jack splayed his hand firm and warm between Robby’s shoulder blades and held him steady.

“The human heart is a real bitch, brother,” he said. “You cannot throw logic at it. You cannot tell it shit.”

Robby nodded. Grief—old, weary, still-bleeding grief—welled up inside him, tested the mettle of those seams he’d spent the last nine months months repairing, and surged out of him with the force of a breaking dam. He covered his eyes with both hands as if he could push the tears back inside, but they came anyway. Jack pulled him into his chest, impervious to the flood.

When Robby woke, it was to the late afternoon light slanting in from between his curtains to stab a headache into bloom behind his eyes. He winced away, rolling onto his other side, only to hit a wall of warm, fragrant flesh.

Jack grunted at the contact.

Robby squinted one eye open. Jack was on his stomach, face mashed into the mattress, left leg drawn up around a pillow. He was haloed gold in the sunlight. Robby wished he had it in him to reach out, to take what he wanted—what they both wanted, apparently—but he knew how it would go. You don’t let me know you. You won’t talk to me. You’ll never love anyone as much as you love the job. It had only taken him forty years to absorb the lesson.

Jack might think it made him a coward, but Robby knew the truth: he was saving both of them the heartache.

He rolled away again and hung his legs over the edge of the bed. A groan broke containment when his body protested. He was sore all over and his head was throbbing, as if he’d spent the last few hours pounding shots instead of being fed and rubbed and spooned into a sleep so deep he time traveled. It was the adrenaline come-down after whatever all that was—some kind of low-grade panic attack, he guessed.

“You okay?” Jack asked, voice rough with sleep.

“Feel like I got hit by a truck.”

Jack shifted behind him, then there were big warm hands on his shoulders again, thumbs sweeping firmly over his trapezius, his splenius capitis, his semispinalis capitis. Robby’s head dropped forward and he let out a helpless moan as Jack worked out the knots and kinks that had gathered along his shoulders and up his neck.

“You don’t have to,” Robby said, even as he actively opened to Jack’s touch.

“You need a real massage,” Jack said gruffly. He cradled Robby’s skull and pressed his thumbs into the base. “I’m just a tinkerer.”

Robby hummed. He closed his eyes and let himself float without thought under Jack’s hands. The attention eased his headache, loosened him some, but he needed more. Hours more. Meanwhile, he was thirsty and he had to piss. The body did so insist on itself.

Too soon, Jack’s hands gentled until all he was doing was stroking through Robby’s hair. He was kneeling behind Robby, knees on either side of his hips. It would take nothing for Jack to plaster himself to his back, to kiss his neck, to wrap his arms around him. It would take nothing for Robby to let him.

He pulled away.

“What time is it?”

Jack twisted around.

“Little after 6,” he said.

“Christ, I slept all fucking day.”

“You needed it, brother.”

“I should have run some errands.”

“So we’ll go now, no big deal.”

“You don’t have to—”

“Can we not do this song and dance, Robby?” Jack said. Exhaustion, plaintive and peevish all at once, colored his tone. “No, I don’t have to. Yes, I do want to. Just assume going forward that hanging out with you is fun for me, not an inconvenience.”

Fun? When he was in this state? Robby almost laughed. Jack’s idea of a good time was wading into firefights in tac gear twenty years after an honorable discharge, so maybe his internal metrics were skewed. It worked in Robby’s favor though, and Robby was a selfish man.

Jack’s leg was propped against the foot of the bed. Robby grabbed it and handed it to him.

“Gimme ten minutes and we’ll go to Giant Eagle,” he said. “Is there anywhere else you wanna go?”

“Maybe the hardware store,” Jack said.

“Good. Great. We’ll go there first.”

Robby only got free of the weight of Jack’s eyes when he got into the bathroom and closed the door.

“When was the last time you had a vegetable?” Jack asked. He was the one maneuvering the cart through the produce section, while Robby ambled along beside him with his hands stuck in his hoodie pockets.

“I got bell peppers on my pizza over the weekend,” Robby said, just to see several muscles in his face twitch.

“Jesus, you’re gonna get scurvy.”

Jack reached over and swept a bunch of clementines into the cart without a bag. An old woman gaped at them, scandalized. If only she had a string of pearls to clutch. Jack winked at her as they passed, and Robby’s head felt light and fizzy, liable to pop off and float away.

“Ooh, strawberries are in season,” Jack said. He grabbed no less than four pints.

“Get the local stuff,” Robby said.

“Duh. Oh, do you wanna go berry picking this year? That one farm has an insane deal for all-you-can-pick.”

Robby let Jack’s idle talk wash over him as he continued collecting fruit. Melons and grapefruits and not-quite-in-season peaches. Robby inspected the wall of prepared salads, but when he reached for one, Jack’s voice lashed out quick as a hand slapping a child’s wrist for fishing in the cookie jar.

“Those are for shit, Robby; if you want a salad, we’re making our own.”

Suddenly he was right there, leaning into Robby to put back the Cobb he’d picked up. He was close enough for Robby to smell, to feel his solidity and his heat, even amid the refrigeration.

“I can never make one that tastes as good as one someone else made,” Robby said.

“The answer is, like many things, layers of flavor,” Jack said. “Also salt.”

“Honestly, everything I like in a salad is the stuff that makes it bad for you.”

“Okay, but the stuff that makes it taste good doesn’t cancel out the stuff that makes it good for you, you know that, right? You’re still getting all those vitamins and fiber and shit.”

“This how you keep up your girlish figure?”

“Yeah, dude, it is.”

“Sure, plus all the compulsive gym time,” Robby said.

“Come on, what do you like?” Jack asked. “Candied pecans I know. Goat cheese I know. What else?”

It was cold in the grocery store, even in summer, even in with the hoodie. Robby shivered and crossed his arms, hunching into himself.

“Hard boiled eggs,” he said. “Dried cranberries. Fruit in general. Sweet dressing, like raspberry vinaigrette or honey mustard. Literally anything that might convince a child to choke down a salad, so feel free to put some chocolate on the list.”

Jack grunted in acknowledgment. When he got onto his toes to grope at the bottles of dressing deep in the recesses of the top shelf, Robby smirked, stepped into his space, and got it for him. Jack rolled his eyes, but couldn’t quite contain the flush on his cheeks. He scooted the cart away.

“Any chance I’ll be able to slip some kale by you?” he asked.

“I will literally choke,” Robby said.

“Man, you haven’t had kale done right.”

“There’s no way to do kale right, Jack. It’s like trying to swallow a tree’s cartilage.”

“I’m taking you to the Korean place ASAP.” Jack grabbed a pack of arugula and a big head of butter lettuce. “What are your thoughts on beets?”

“Neutral until I forget and go to the bathroom two days later.”

Jack let out a surprised guffaw that reverberated through the produce section, which seemed to surprise him as much as it surprised Robby.

“Beets it is,” he said, and put a big bulb in the cart. He pointed at a pile of bright pink and green rhubarb and made a funny squeaking sound. “Look at how pretty that is! Wanna make a strawberry rhubarb pie?”

“Are you actually gonna make good on all these cooking plans or am I gonna have some weird shit mouldering in my fridge for the next month?”

“$12 a pound? What the fuck?” Jack grabbed four hefty stalks anyway, slung them into a produce bag. And then, derisively, “Imported.”

“Xenophobia, Jack? Right in front of the immigrants?” Robby nodded at the rhubarb.

“Taking the jobs of hard-working American rhubarb,” Jack shot back.

Someone passing by scowled at them. Robby thought he might actually go up in flames. He and Jack both muttered apologies, which the stranger only acknowledged with a shake of her head as she walked away, and then they dissolved into giggles against each other.

“Shut up!” Robby hissed. He slapped at Jack’s hands only to get slapped back.

“You shut up!” Jack whispered, laughing.

Jack gathered a bunch of root vegetables without appearing to inspect or even really see them.

“What are you doing?” Robby said. “Are we preparing for the apocalypse?”

“They’re versatile and last a long time,” Jack said. “Grab a butternut squash over there, too.” He put his hands on a big lumpy rutabaga still crusted with dirt.

“Come on, man, not a rutabaga,” Robby said. “Why does it look like a person?” A grumpy old man trapped in a deformed fetus’s body, to be exact.

Jack shot him a look identical to both the other customers they encountered in this store so far and covered the rutabaga’s “ears.”

“He can hear you!” he said.

“He’s somehow bland and bitter all at once, what’s the point of that?”

“Aww, don’t listen to him, Rudy,” Jack cooed, setting it in the cart with a pat. “I know you’re a sweet boy.”

“Sweet?”

Jack threw him one of his infuriating little half-smiles, the kind that felt like a secret just between the two of them, crowned it all with a sparkle in his eye.

“Yeah, sweet,” he said. “Just has to be treated right to let it fly. But what’s sweet worth without a little bitter? Complicated, surprising, comforting. He’s my favorite.”

Robby’s jaw hung open without a retort. He found himself staring after Jack, who was back to pushing the cart along. Robby caught up with him in three strides, but his brain was still not giving him anything to work with. Jack, not yammering for once, plucked up onions and garlic and sugar snap peas. As they passed into the deli and Jack started circling the artisanal cheeses with the same intensity he brought into a trauma bay, Robby risked opening his mouth.

“The thing about rutabaga is that it ruins every meal it’s in. Like even if it starts out good, eventually you realize you just can’t keep eating it.”

Jack’s eyes flicked to his for a fraction of a moment before dropping back down to the cornucopia of cheese before him.

“Every dish is about the right combination and ratio of ingredients,” he said. “Rutabaga isn’t somehow single-handedly responsible for any weird flavors that crop up.”

“I mean, you’d be surprised.”

“No.”

“No?”

“No,” Jack said. He picked up a little pot of locally-sourced goat cheese and put it in the cart. He inched along the cheese section, scanning for God only knew what. Robby was helpless but to trail after him. “I’m a good cook, man. I’ve been enjoying rutabaga for a long time. Adding something new to the recipe wouldn’t ruin anything. And, if we try real hard and keep an eye on things so nothing catches fire, maybe it makes the best meal we’ve ever had. All you have to do is push your palate to be a little more adventurous.”

“I guess I just don’t get why you like rutabaga at all. With the…dirt, and all.”

“Maybe you don’t have to know why, you just have to trust that I do.”

Jack chucked a block of halloumi into the cart and pivoted toward the baked goods. There were some fresh baked strawberry shortcake cupcakes on sale. He held up a package, turned around, and hiked one eyebrow up in question.

“Should we? Or will the pie be enough?”

“I mean, the pie’s gonna take a few hours, right?” Robby said.

“Too true, brother,” Jack said, and the cupcakes landed in the cart too.

Robby’s brain felt smooth and empty. He dropped back into himself when a little old lady with a besotted look on her face nudged him and stage whispered, “Your friend is right, you know. Rutabaga’s a real treat if you know how to handle it. Once you try a rutabaga shepherd’s pie, you’ll never go back, I swear. You gotta find Martha Stewart’s recipe.”

Robby pulled a big smile and thanked her profusely. When he looked up, he saw Jack laughing at him from the fish counter.

There was something hazy and unreal about trailing Jack through the grocery store and listening to him dart from one subject to the next like skipping stones across a pond. If Robby had some clever reply, Jack would smirk or twitch a brow or bark out a hearty laugh. If Robby wanted to keep his own counsel, Jack’s monologue would glide on by, always inviting, never pressing. And even if a stranger encroached with small talk, Robby still felt like they were a society of two sharing some grand inside joke. Sometime in the last decade, they had developed their own language, one of the great gifts of Robby’s life. With Jack, everything was lighter, even the darkness he claimed to embrace.

Once they were outside and loading the unbelievable shitload of groceries into Jack’s truck, the heat and humidity plucked the gossamer from Robby’s eyes and everything was suddenly too bright and too loud. Jack’s hand landed heavily on his shoulder and abruptly dumped Robby back into his body. When he blinked, his line of vision was filled with Jack, wearing an expression of tightly banked concern.

“You all right, brother?” he asked.

Robby blinked. He sure did have fingers and toes and a head. His muscles still ached from the adrenaline crash. He was more person than creature, for once. And there Jack was in dazzling Technicolor, the silver in his hair and on his jawline glinting in the sun. His freckles made Robby feel reckless and truthful.

“Could you hug me?” he blurted.

There was no hesitation. Jack’s arms came up around his neck even as he stretched up to meet him, their chests colliding, no self-consciousness, no manly bro-slaps, no end in sight. Robby got his arms around him tight and secure and let himself melt into him. Jack smelled like sunshine and clean sweat and fresh laundry. Most of all, he smelled like himself, something heady Robby couldn’t name but dragged into his lungs in a desperate attempt at preserving this moment for as long as he had brainwaves.

What if you didn’t have to memorize it? he wondered. What if you could have this every day, free of charge?

He’d fuck it up. He always did. But maybe Jack would be there to catch him, like he always was. Maybe Jack had been making him these promises for a long time, had been showing up with strong arms and a stronger constitution every time Robby needed him, and Robby finally got his head out of his ass long enough to notice.

Jack’s carotid thrummed against Robby’s mouth, tender and vulnerable. A tilt of his head, a hand in Jack’s hair, and without fanfare they were kissing, slow and deep and hungry. It felt new and familiar at the same time, the logical next steps in a dance they’d been locked in without progress for so long. Jack cradled Robby’s head in his hands as urgency mounted, and then Robby couldn’t get close enough, wasn’t touching enough skin, needed more more more.

A car honked and they startled apart. Jack blinked up at him, dazed, his mouth shiny and swollen.

“Let’s get home,” he rasped.

He shut the trunk and climbed into the drivers seat. Robby got into the passenger’s side as the truck flared to life. Jack smacked the radio’s power button so music wouldn’t start up. They stared out the windshield for a moment before turning to each other.

“I thought you—”

“So what happened with—”

Their mouths snapped shut in unison. A laugh bubbled out of Robby’s throat.

“You go,” Jack said.

“Um. I guess I just didn’t know you were ready for something new.” Robby nodded at Jack’s ring. “And if you were, I didn’t imagine for a second it would be me.”

Jack fiddled with the ring for a moment before sliding it off.

“It was never gonna be anyone else, Robby.”

Robby felt his face heat.

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“You really weren’t gonna say anything?” Robby asked.

“I wasn’t gonna make a pass at my straight best friend, no. Come on, man.”

“Probably should have ascertained some facts before committing like that,” Robby said.

Jack rolled his eyes, but his mouth quirked up in a smile.

“Yeah, yeah. Tell me about Jefferson.”

“You’re really stuck on that.”

“It’s not lost on me that you said you were serious with him and when it was done, the revolving door of ill-advised bedmates began.”

Robby sighed.

“You should drive,” he said. “Our cold stuff’s gonna melt.”

Jack gave him a look, but he stretched his arm across the seats and turned around to reverse. When they were on the road, Robby spoke.

“Remember that awful gala they threw ostensibly ‘to honor the heroes of PittFest’ but really to pump the donors for money, and Gloria made me go, and you were being such a shithead claiming night shift couldn’t spare you but really you switched shifts with Shen to get out of it?”

Jack snorted.

“Ha, yeah,” he said, as if it were a fond memory.

Robby rolled his eyes.

“Well, Caleb was there, and we ended up being wallflowers together, getting drunk and ducking donors. I laughed a lot. It was the first time I’d actually spent time with him outside the hospital, and he was, you know. Smart and funny and charming and handsome.” Robby shrugged. “He asked me out, I said yes. I liked it, I liked him, it was good for months, but then…you know how I get. I broke plans a lot to cover shifts. I didn’t talk to him enough, or in the right way, or something. I was, quote, ‘an avoidant mess who won’t let anyone love me.’ My shit bothered his shit, which made him passive aggressive, which made me avoid him more, and so on. He was the one who broke up with me, but I really, really hurt him, Jack. So I decided I was done. I wouldn’t inflict myself on people anymore. If I wanted sex, that was easy enough to get. If I wanted friendship, well.” He gestured vaguely in Jack’s direction.

“You were with him for months and you didn’t tell me,” Jack said. “You had a whole-ass boyfriend I didn’t know about. I don’t know that that feels like friendship, man.”

Robby wiped his palms on his knees. He rubbed his thumb along an eyebrow.

“I didn’t want you to look too closely at it,” he said eventually.

“Why not? Why would I think less of you?”

“It wasn’t that,” Robby said. “I was afraid, I guess.”

“Of me?” Jack’s voice went high and pitchy. “What did I—”

“Of you seeing what I really wanted, Jack, okay?”

Jack’s hands tightened on the steering wheel.

“Jesus, the pair of us,” he said. He glanced at him sidelong and reached a hand over the console.

Robby laced their fingers together and didn’t let go until Jack needed it to pull into Robby’s parking lot.

Jack made moves like he was really gonna cook dinner at a time like this, but Robby plastered himself against his back, nosed into the crook of his neck, found a spot behind his ear that made his knees buckle in a split second. Jack abandoned his knife and spun in Robby’s arms, yanked him down for a searing kiss that had Robby staggering back until he hit the wall. The show of strength made him whimper, and Jack had his number in an instant. He was manhandled into the bedroom, where the dark and the quiet sapped the desperation from Jack’s touch, and everything turned delicate, reverent, breathing each other’s air.

Jack’s mouth hovered over Robby’s. He cupped Robby’s face and traced worshipful lines over his cheekbones. Their noses brushed.

“Jack,” Robby murmured.

“Tell me what you like,” Jack said. Robby felt the low rumble of his voice in his guts.

“Anything, everything.”

“Tell me how you want it.”

“I don’t know, I don’t care—anything you want, Jack.”

“Wanna make you feel good,” Jack said. “Wanna take care of you. Can I take care of you, Robby?”

Robby’s breath hitched. He shook his head, helpless. He wanted things he couldn’t tell anyone. He wanted to be turned inside out. He wanted to be absorbed. He wanted Jack to fold him up and swallow him and keep him there forever, a hungry teratoma lodged in the space between heart and rib. Yes—he wanted to be kept even when he was barely human.

“I don’t…”

“Please, Robby.” Jack pushed his forehead against Robby’s. “Tell me how to make you mine.”

Robby drew a sharp breath.

“Inside me,” he gasped. “Inside me, bare, please, Jack.”

A growl erupted from Jack’s body and vibrated through Robby’s. Robby was swept into a kiss even as his clothes were peeled away and discarded. Jack had hard, strong hands that turned gentle on Robby’s body. He had a running commentary about how beautiful Robby was, how delicious, how badly he wanted him and for how long. Robby groped for his own go at Jack, ravenous for skin and muscle and heat. He squeezed Jack’s hip and swept his palm down his leg only to hit plastic. He drew back.

“Why’s this still here?” he asked.

Jack paused.

“Sometimes it’s weird, in bed. I figured, the first time…”

“No,” Robby said.

“Um.”

“You don’t have to put on a show for me, Jack.”

“Jesus,” Jack muttered.

Robby sat up and settled against his side as Jack removed the prosthesis and flung the liner away. Robby ran his fingers over Jack’s residual limb. The skin was hot and taut, a little damp. Nothing concerning.

“Okay?” Robby asked.

“Yeah,” Jack said.

Robby rested his chin on Jack’s shoulder, laid a hand on his cheek.

“You know I’m impressed by you all the time?” Robby said.

Jack gripped him by the back of his neck, nudged at his mouth.

“You make me fucking crazy, Rob,” he said.

The kiss started soft, but gathered heat quickly. Jack bore Robby down into the mattress and resumed his careful mapping of Robby’s body. He found spots Robby didn’t know would make him quiver and jolt. He rubbed his face in his underarm and his inguinal crease, licked up his sweat, pushed and pulled and devoured until Robby had no thoughts beyond the thrum of arousal lashing through his veins, all his electrified nerves, and Jack, Jack, Jack.

Robby found himself on his stomach with his legs spread, Jack’s weight on his back and at his ear telling him how good he was, how sexy. Jack stroked and kneaded Robby’s ass, petted through the dusting of hair along the underside, and slipped his fingers into the space between his cheeks. Robby groaned at the ghost of a touch over his hole. A little attention there always turned him into jelly, and he was already more throb than thought. His spread his legs further, and Jack’s touch grew bolder.

“You like that?” Jack said.

Robby whimpered.

“You need it so bad, don’t you, darlin’?” Jack went on. “You got a greedy hole here, huh? Needs some attention?” His voice was a rasp, his lips catching on Robby’s ear. Robby whined and pushed his ass back into the cradle of Jack’s pelvis. “I got you, honey, I’ll take care of you.”

Jack dragged kisses down Robby’s spine and over his ass. He parted Robby’s cheeks and nuzzled into his crack. Robby’s hole throbbed and twitched in anticipation. When Jack licked a broad stripe over it, Robby jolted uncontrollably, muffled his shout in the bedding. Jack’s answering growl rumbled through him. He squeezed at Robby’s cheeks and began licking and sucking on his hole in earnest.

Robby shifted enough to reach back and pull his cheeks apart. He pushed his ass further into Jack’s face. Distantly, he was aware that he was chanting nonsense. Oh God, oh God and touch me, fuck me, look at me and please please please.

“I see you, Robby,” Jack said. “All I see is you, honey. Let me hear you, that’s it.”

Jack slipped a hand underneath him and gripped Robby’s cock. Robby bucked and wailed and begged.

“God you’re so pretty like this,” Jack said. “Always knew you would be, fuck, Robby.”

Jack draped himself over Robby’s back again, nudged him into a spooning position, dragged the blunt edge of his teeth against the back of Robby’s neck, sucked a kiss behind his ear. Slipped a slick finger into his hole. Robby moaned and squirmed and pushed back into it.

“I got you,” Jack was saying, “God, you’re a dream, darlin’.”

He pressed his finger slowly around the sleeve of Robby’s ass. Robby twisted up so he could hook an arm around Jack’s neck and kiss him, lick the taste of himself out of Jack’s mouth, swallow Jack’s answering moan. Another finger slid inside, and Jack stretched him out slow and steady, even though Robby was desperate, even though his cock was leaking, even though he could feel Jack’s own cock hard as nails and searing a column into Robby’s thighs.

After so long, too long, after Robby was slack and grasping and begging for more, Jack finally pushed his cock inside and stilled, breathing harshly against Robby’s shoulder blades. Robby wailed, his body spasming around the thick curve of Jack’s cock. Jack muffled a curse into the nape of his neck. He ran a soothing hand over Robby’s thigh, hooked his knee, and lifted his leg up out of the way. He rocked into Robby’s ass, ground in deep, swiveled his hips. Robby shuddered and moaned and reached back to grip Jack’s hip and haul him closer.

Jack’s rhythm started steady and easy, but soon he was snapping his hips quick and hard, every thrust striking Robby’s prostate and making him sob. His brain had whited out, left him with no awareness beyond pounding, relentless pleasure exploding outward from the deepest core of him. And being held. Cherished. There was that, underwriting all of it.

Jack, meanwhile, had a litany of loving filth streaming out of him.

“…look at you, darlin’, you’re so fucking perfect for me, aren’t you, so hot and tight, gonna fill you up, make you mine, fuck, Robby, Robby, Robby, Jesus fuck, I never thought—” His voice broke and rasped and lit Robby’s nerves up, and Robby was rapidly reaching supernova. He made a frantic grab at his cock. When Jack’s rhythm stuttered and he choked out, “oh fuck, Robby, I love you, I love you,” Robby seized up, strangled the cock inside him, and came so hard he might have stopped breathing.

Jack was still inside him when Robby came back to himself. He was stroking Robby’s flank and sucking on his shoulder. Robby groped for his hand and tangled their fingers together, pressed the knot of their hands to his heart. He laid his head back against Jack’s.

“Feel good?” Jack asked.

“So fucking good, Jack.”

He felt the curve of Jack’s smile on his neck.

“I’m glad.”

Jack’s cock was deflating, so Robby shifted enough to ease it out of his ass. He was a wet mess inside, but he didn’t want to get up. He wanted to wallow in it as long as he could get away with. Jack nudged him and pulled one cheek away from the other to peer at him. Robby’s face flamed, but he pushed some of the come out to give Jack what he wanted.

“Jesus, you’re fucking beautiful, full’a me,” Jack muttered. He dragged two fingers up Robby’s crack and pushed the mess back inside.

Robby’s balls zinged and his spent dick gave an optimistic twitch.

“Jack?”

“Mm.”

“Did you mean it?”

Jack was silent, the fingers inside him still. He made to pull out, but Robby closed his hand around Jack’s wrist and stopped him.

“If it helps,” Robby said, “I’ve loved you for a very, very long time.”

Words that Robby had had trouble saying in previous relationships, words that had become such a bone of contention in the past, poured out of him now easy as breathing. Easy as loving Jack had always been, even when it tortured him. Robby said them, and some caged thing inside him came untethered and flew away.

Jack’s breath shuddered out of him, and he pressed closer, as much skin touching Robby’s as possible.

“Then yeah,” he said, words mashed into Robby’s back. “Yeah, I fucking meant it.”

Robby turned and curled toward him, forehead to forehead, nose to nose. He laid his palm on Jack’s cheek. Jack’s soiled hand came to rest on Robby’s hip.

“I don’t wanna fuck this up,” Robby whispered.

“So we make a commitment to talk when shit gets hard,” Jack said. “I know your favorite thing is running away, but you can’t hide from me, darlin’. I won’t let you.”

“Okay.”

“And I’ll let you in on a little secret,” he added. “I’m perfectly capable of being the one to fuck things up.”

“By, say, getting shot at for shits and gigs.”

“Among other things.”

“I just don’t want to disappoint you,” Robby said.

“I’m gonna disappoint you,” Jack said, and Robby frowned. “I’m gonna irritate you and make you mad and embarrass you, and the fuck of it is you’re still gonna wanna be around me, because I’ve already done all those things and here you are, declaring your undying love and shit.”

“You’re such a romantic,” Robby said with a scoff. But he meant it, and by the smirk that sliced across Jack’s face in the dark, Jack knew so.

“Baby, let’s at least get to the good part before you catastrophize about an end that doesn’t have to happen.”

Robby shuffled forward until their knees bonked and their bellies touched. He kissed Jack soft and sweet. Jack quieted, let the humor drain away, and told him, again, that he loved him. That he wasn’t going anywhere. That he was tougher than the rest, the old plagiarizer.

Robby’s stomach reminded them loudly that it was late and they hadn’t had dinner. Jack rolled out of bed and reattached his leg, only to lean over and pat Robby on the ass.

“Take a shower while I get dinner started,” he said.

“Ugh, delivery would be quicker,” Robby said.

“After we bought all that good food? Hell no.”

When Robby came out of the shower and shambled into the kitchen, limbs still languid, he saw Jack cutting up the rutabaga.

“Christ, Jack, you’re not serious about that thing.”

Jack threw a mean little grin over his shoulder

“Of course I was, what did you think we were talking about?”

“You’re the absolute worst, Abbot, you know that?”

Jack threw his head back and laughed.

They went to West View in the early afternoon, after a morning of laughter and roaming hands and trading kisses over cut fruit and pie crust. It was a beautiful cemetery, lovingly tended with impressive structures old and new and plenty of tree shade and benches. Robby directed Jack through the narrow roads into the heart of the section his grandparents were buried in. They found a good place to park and walked the rest of the way, a handful of flat rocks clacking together in Robby’s pocket.

But, when they followed the bend in the path that would lead them to the Robinavitch plot, Robby saw a figure standing in front of the gravestone. Robby stopped short. Jack kept going, kept talking, but after a few steps he turned back to Robby, eyebrows raised.

“It’s Shannon,” Robby said, nodding toward the grave.

Jack glanced over. He held his hand out, and Robby took it.

“D’you wanna wait til she’s gone? I think I saw a cool pond on the map.”

Robby hesitated. His instinct was to run, to wait her out and avoid her forever. But he was so sick of his own shit sometimes, so sick of being afraid. When pressed, he couldn’t actually name what he was afraid of in any of it.

She was just a woman, middle-aged and prone to apologizing too much, whose mother had just blasted a hole in the fabric of her life. If nothing else, they had that much in common.

“No,” Robby said. “Let’s go.”

Shannon turned when they got near, and Jack hung back. She looked surprised, then apprehensive. Robby gave her a weary smile and held a hand up to stop the sorry, sorry, sorrys from tripping out of her mouth before they could start.

“I invited you, if you recall,” he said.

Her answering smile was pained, but her shoulders relaxed, and she turned back to the marble monument he’d splurged on when Bubbe wasn’t around to tell him not to anymore. ROBINAVITCH appeared in both English and Cyrillic. Underneath, there were four names and corresponding dates.

David O.
1915-1988

Zuzanna E.
1918-2006

Maximillian L.
1946-1968

Michael M.
1971-

“It’s a beautiful stone,” Shannon said.

“Thanks,” Robby said. He stepped up to it and stacked his little rocks on top. “She would say it was too much, that I shouldn’t make a fuss, but she’d be secretly pleased.”

Zayde’s and Max’s graves had been humbler than they’d deserved, so he’d replaced them without regret. A completionist, he had very briefly considered putting Yuliya’s name there too, but he figured she’d made her choices, and they had nothing to do with Robby or the only family who’d ever wanted him around. Besides, he’d never be able to fill the date in.

Shannon was looking at him now, eyes too tragic to bear meeting for too long. Jesus, is that what people saw when they looked at him? He felt like he was peering into the open bleeding heart of her.

“What was she like?” she asked.

Robby stuck his hands in his pockets, chin to chest, and smiled.

“Funny,” he said. “Viciously funny, in a dark, Eastern Bloc kind of way, but also sad. She never wanted me to see her sad, so she would make up wild stories about why her eyes were watering. She made such a killer apple kugle that neighbors would get into fights over it whenever she’d bring it to a potluck. She wanted me to be a rabbi and always pretended she was only begrudgingly accepting of my choice to be a doctor, but she really was very proud. She had been through a lot, and while she was loving, she wasn’t soft, she never said feel-good things like grandmas on TV. She showed you she loved you by pushing you, and feeding you, and making sure you knew where you came from and were proud of it.”

“She sounds like a force of nature,” Shannon said. “I’m sorry I missed her.”

Something young and jealous at the heart of him was glad he’d gotten her all to himself. He took a cleansing breath, stretched his neck, and told the only truth Shannon had to hear.

“She would have been delighted by you,” he said. “And your sister, was it?”

“Jess, yeah,” Shannon said. “She’s two years older than me. Twelve years younger than you.”

Robby rolled his shoulders inward and bounced up on his toes. He nodded into his chest. He could feel Jack’s eyes on him.

“How about your grandfather?” Shannon asked.

“Good guy,” Robby said. “A Jewish carpenter, ‘just like Christ!’ he would say, like it was the best joke in the world. I spent a lot of time in his woodshop. He made me bookshelves and train sets and little trucks that really rolled, and he let me paint them. He didn’t talk much, so when he did you really listened. I know it can’t be true, but it feels like I remember every conversation we ever had. He was the one who taught me you just have to help people when they need it, and that that help couldn’t come with strings. Sometimes you’re the only person in a position to help, and it’s your duty, your responsibility, to provide it. He was very committed to the concept of tikkun olam.”

“Heal the world,” Shannon murmured.

Robby glanced over at her and smiled.

“Exactly,” he said. “He did a lot of work for local housing charities. Died of a heart attack during one of the repairs.”

“May his memory be a blessing,” Shannon said. “Both of them.”

“I miss them,” Robby said. “There wasn’t enough time.”

“I’m not sure there is such a thing, with the ones we love.”

Robby swallowed around the thickness gathering at his throat.

“Your turn,” he said, and cleared his throat.

“Huh? With what?”

“Tell me about her, because I missed out.”

Shannon was silent for a moment. In the periphery of Robby’s vision, he saw her flex her hands, inspect them, before balling them up and shoving them into her pockets.

“Volatile, when we were younger,” she said, “but I bet you knew that part. She could be so much fun, and then—” She snapped her fingers. “—she’d be screaming, or crying, or locking herself up in the bedroom. My dad eventually threatened to leave her, and then she went somewhere for a few months and when she came back she was medicated and didn’t drink anymore. It was harder for Jess to forgive her, but the older you get, the more you start to see your parents as human instead of, I don’t know, all-seeing, all-knowing god figures. Now when I look back, I see how hard she was trying after rehab. I see that she was loving us and supporting us the only way she knew how, and if it was imperfect, so what? Every mom is. Every person is.” She turned to him, looking bruised. “I swear to God none of us knew about you, Michael. I’m having a really hard time reconciling this. And I don’t know if we’ll ever get the answers out of her, anymore.”

“Don’t take it onto yourself, Shannon,” he said. “It’s hers to bear, not yours.”

“I just…it really would have been nice to grow up with you, I think.”

Robby’s eyes stung. He held his hand out, and she placed hers in it like a handshake. He laid his other hand on top, and she hers. He let himself sink, just for a moment, into that fantasy: playing dolls with shrieking little sisters, warping their musical taste so they’d never be in step with their peers, buying them secret beers in high school. Taking them to R-rated movies. Vetting their boyfriends. Being the person they could come to when their problems weren’t for parental eyes. He didn’t know what it was to be someone’s brother, but he imagined it would have suited him.

“Me too,” he said. He patted her hands one last time and let go.

“Listen,” Shannon said. “I was just dropping by for a quick look here, but I left Ma in the car with the A/C on and an old movie on my iPad. You don’t have to, but, if there’s anything you want to say to her…”

Robby drew a shaky breath. He glanced at Jack, who challenged him to be brave with a minute nod.

“How’s her memory today?” Robby asked.

Shannon bobbled her head.

“Not great, but she seems to understand English this time.”

“Okay,” Robby said. “Yeah, let’s go.”

Robby took Jack’s hand again on the walk down. He introduced him properly to his sister. This is my partner, Jack, he said, and the smile Jack slanted him tugged something loose inside him. He felt as though he had walked through the door of a cage he hadn’t even known he was in. He lifted Jack’s hand to his mouth and kissed the center of his palm.

Once they were at the rental, Shannon unlocked the doors and opened the passenger’s side up. When Yuliya squinted up at her, she gently took the iPad away.

“Ma, look,” she said. “There’s someone here to see you.”

She stepped back so Robby could take her place. He knelt in the grass beside his mother. She looked at him, smiling the polite smile of someone who knows they should know you but doesn’t. Robby took a deep breath.

“Hi, Mama. It’s Michael. Mischa. Do you remember?”

She nodded, but there was no recognition in her eyes.

“That’s okay,” he said, strangled by the gathering humidity in his throat.

“You look like someone I used to know,” she said in Russian.

“Yes,” he said. “Yeah, you’re right.”

He reached into her lap and touched her hand. She smiled at him and grasped his fingers as best she could.

“Okay,” he said. “All right. Here we go.” He blinked back tears and looked her in the eye. “Mama, I don’t forgive you. I don’t forgive you, but I release you. I hope there’s peace for you now.”

With one last squeeze of her hand, Robby stood. He touched her hair with the lightest fingertip to check out her sutures. Expertly done and all cleaned up, naturally. He stepped back and closed the door. He met Shannon’s gaze over the roof of the car, the specter of an unknowable history swelling between them. Then, Shannon raised her hand in farewell and slipped into the driver’s seat.

Jack laid a hand on Robby’s back as Shannon pulled away.

“You okay?” he asked.

Robby smiled even though a tear dripped off his lashes.

“I’m outside on a beautiful day with the love of my life and a pie waiting for me at home,” he said. “I’ve never been better.”

Hand in hand, they followed the paths that led them to the oldest part of the cemetery, where graves from the 19th century still stood, clean and cared for. They made a game of finding the oldest ones. They pointed out names they’d never heard before.

Their ghosts, for once, were quiet.

End