13. Erin
ERIN
Tuesday, December seventeenth.
His text comes at four in the afternoon: Dinner at the cabin if you’re not busy.
More like a reminder than an invitation.
I’ve been at my desk since two-thirty staring at Cleo’s mid-cycle CBC without fully reading it — platelets forty-two thousand, up from twenty-eight, a number I’ve been approaching sideways since Monday with the careful attention I’d give an unstable patient I don’t want to startle.
The cottage is quiet. Cleo is at Laura’s in Denver for the weekend, which means the clinic is lighter too, and the late afternoon has nothing for me to do but read the same four lines of a journal article and count the minutes between the radiator’s ticks.
Erin
I’ll bring dessert.
David Perry
Don’t.
I bring a bottle of wine I already had open.
The porch light is burning when I turn up the mountain road, the porch just catching my headlights through the trees.
The road up from town is empty at this hour.
The whole mountain is evening-quiet, the snow packed at the shoulders, the sky clear and full of stars that don’t exist in cities.
Something smells of garlic and stock from twenty feet away, coming out through the gap around the front door.
He opens the door before I knock. Dark henley, flour on his right forearm he hasn’t noticed or decided not to care about, a half-second check of me at the threshold — the same SAR-trained assessment he can’t help — and then hey , step back, come in .
The cabin is warm. The photograph of Claire is on the mantel where it always is, and I look at it for a half-second and carry on, because it’s the right thing to do and I’ve been practicing it. Behind me David is already back at the stove, and I feel him notice without turning around.
We cook together without needing to discuss it.
He moves right; I go left. He opens the drawer I’m already reaching for, closes it, hands me the spoon.
I know where the bowls are now, more or less, and he knows I’ll want the sharper knife.
We’ve learned this by doing it — the cabin twice before tonight, the diner, the hours side by side in the clinic with Cleo between us — and what we’ve learned is where the other one’s hands are going to be.
The third plate, Cleo announced the first time, pulling a stool to the counter with full seven-year-old authority: that’s your seat, Erin, it’s already decided, I don’t make the rules. We’ve both been operating as though the rules are made.
We eat at the table. He takes great pride in his sourdough loaf, and I can taste and see why.
The crumb is just right, and toasted is perfect for the soup.
I tell him the soup is so rich with the beef broth and butter.
I’m fishing for the secret ingredient, really, and he winks and says he’ll never tell.
Cleo’s drawings are on the refrigerator — the crayon still vivid on the copy paper, a truck, a cabin, two tall stick figures and one small one between them, captioned in the phonetic spelling of a child still finding her letters.
Claire’s coffee mug sits on the second shelf, and the familiar arrangement of the kitchen that isn’t mine settles into the rhythm of a place I know.
Dinner is wonderful. Cleo’s counts are climbing. There is a man across this table who goes to the grocery store and packs lunches, and fixes chairs in other people’s waiting rooms, and builds beautiful things out of wood, and I’ve been here enough times now to know where his hands go next.
After dinner we clear together, he washes and I dry, and then we take the rest of the bottle to the couch and the cabin goes quiet around us.
The fire has burned to a working heat. Outside the snow has stopped for the night and the cedars are still.
The lamplight settles the room down to amber.
The photograph on the mantel, the mountain going quiet when the wind stops and the cold settles in.
The silence between us has the settled quality it’s had for weeks now. The kind that doesn’t ask for anything.
I don’t plan what I say next. It comes out because I’ve been holding on too long to it, I think, and opening this is another way to close the gap.
"There was a boy," I say. "His name was Tommy."
David doesn’t move. He’s forward on the couch with his forearms on his knees and his glass between both hands, listening.
"He was six years old. He had what Cleo has." I look at the fire. This is not the version I gave Whitlock, the ordered clinical account with the timeline, the committee, the protocol numbers. That version has a structure. This version is the one underneath it, the part that lives in the body.
"The morning after he died, I woke up and I couldn’t remember why I’d wanted to be a doctor.
Literally. I lay there for forty minutes trying to find the reason, and it just wasn’t there.
The whole of the last nine years — the residency, the fellowship, the children I had trained to treat — and I couldn’t remember my Why.
" My hand goes to the locket at my chest and comes away.
"I pushed for an experimental treatment while he was still alive.
A protocol I was co-developing with a team in Philadelphia.
The data was sound, and I pushed hard, and the hospital ethics committee denied it.
" The cold starts in my fingertips, slow and reliable.
It always comes before the thought. "He got standard immunosuppressive therapy. He didn’t respond.
He died in September with his mother holding his hand. "
The fire crackles and sputters. "His mother. Susan. She would keep herself so carefully together in the waiting room every time I came out to update her. Complete composure, no matter what I brought to her." The cold is in my palms now, and I let it be there because it belongs there, because it’s the body’s honest account of what this costs.
"She carried herself like that so I wouldn’t have to manage her grief on top of everything else.
She thought she was protecting me. I was in my first couple of years as an attending, and she was sitting in a hospital waiting room protecting me from her own grief while her son was dying. "
I stop, swallow. Start again. "After he died, the hospital closed ranks. Quietly, completely, the way they always do. No revisiting. No conversation. The case was part of standard procedure. The system had registered a loss, adjusted, case closed.
"Six months later, they adopted my protocol." I shake my head. "The one they’d denied for Tommy. Do you know they never told his family? I found out at a quarterly review at a conference, of all places, from a slide on a deck, while someone talked about data on a graph."
The snow would have been coming down by then. A late spring storm. I remember the parking lot — the hood of the car going gray with it, the gas-station coffee going cold on the seat beside me while I sat and didn’t go anywhere.
"I walked out of the conference room, drove to a gas station on the highway, and sat in the parking lot for thirty minutes. I didn’t know where I was going.
" I look up at the fire. "I turned around for Cedar Hollow because of Tommy. That’s the honest answer. I think he’s the reason I couldn’t keep driving.
There might be a child I could still reach, one I hadn’t missed yet.
Maybe it wasn’t all already done. Maybe I wasn’t done. "
I blink at the fire and take a short breath. "And there was Cleo. Different kid, same diagnosis. Her platelets are in the forty-two thousands now."
Silence. He doesn’t fill it. He never fills silences, which is part of what has let me say all of this.
He sets his glass down on the table.
He takes my hand.
He doesn’t say anything. He takes my hand and turns it over and presses his lips to the inside of my wrist, held and warm and slow, a real pressed kiss against the pulse point, long enough to mean something.
The lamplight catches the cord at his throat, the dull glint of the ring, and I see it, and I don’t look away.
The ring has been there since Claire, and I’m sitting beside this man in his cabin and he is holding my wrist to his mouth, and I hold all of it at once.
He doesn’t let go.
Neither do I.
The fire settles. His thumb moves once along the inside of my wrist and then rests there, and neither of us speaks.
The silence is an understanding between him and me, that not everything needs to be said, and it lands like fresh-fallen snow.
The lamplight holds the cabin in amber. The photograph of Claire is on the mantel in the dark, and I’m aware of it the way I’m aware of the cord at his throat: completely, honestly, without flinching.
"This town," he says, low. He looks at my hand, its hills and valleys and calluses, and turns it slowly in his. "There’s more here than you’ve let yourself see yet. If you let it."
I turn to him and meet his eyes. Something settles in his face.
"And maybe…" He pauses. Small and deliberate. "If you’re keen. Maybe you could let me."
I can’t answer with words. I take his hand in both of mine and turn his palm up and I show him — a slow and quiet guidance, my palm over his, his fingers following where I lead them.
His breath changes. His touch when he answers is softer in the asking than I was prepared for, and fiercer in the answering, and I understand with complete, unhelpful clinical clarity that I have been afraid of exactly this since August.
He kisses me.
Both hands come up. My face, my jaw. I’m kissing him back, both hands at his chest, his cupping the back of my head, and neither of us is steady.
The lamplight doesn’t change, and neither does the cabin, and all we can hear is each other’s breath, and my heart beating in my ears.
We break apart and hold the small distance — foreheads together, his eyes still closed, my breath not entirely my own — and neither of us names what just happened because both of us are inside it, and the inside is enough.
"Your lips are soft," I say, when I have breath.
A sound from him, warm and involuntary, not quite a laugh. He kisses my cheek, pulls me closer. "You’re soft all over."
We hold the small space between us for a moment, his hands gliding down my body, my hands still at his chest, both of us breathing.
Neither of us tries to close it again yet.
The moment is complete as it is, and we breathe it in together.
The lamplight is amber, the fire is steady, and this is the most still I’ve been in fourteen months.
I lean into him. His arm comes around me and I let my head come down against his shoulder, and something in my chest that’s been careful and locked for fourteen months turns over, slow and quiet, like a tide making up its mind in the dark.
"I could stay like this," I say.
He presses his lips once to the top of my head. "I’d love that," he says, low and certain.
His hand settles in my hair, his fingertips massaging my scalp.
I hear his breathing slow and even out above me, and I think: he’s not going to sleep either.
Good. And then I think nothing further than that, because the lamplight is going soft at the edges and the cabin is warm, and his shoulder is solid, and there is nowhere I would rather be than exactly here.
This is the first time I let myself fully sink into that thought.
At some point the fire dies. My hand is loose in his.
The weight of the evening — the soup, the confession, the cold in my hands that stopped when his mouth touched my wrist — settles into something I have no classification for, and there’s no need to reach for one. I am asleep before I know I’m gone.
I surface at four in the morning.
The room is dark and the fire has gone to embers.
Sleep gives up ground slowly. I’m being carried, my arm around a neck, my face turned against a chest, woodsmoke and cedar and the particular warmth that is his, the steady motion of him walking with me against him the way you carry a sleeping child.
We go down the hall. The dark is total out here, just the faint cold blue of the window at the far end and the sound of his steps, steady and unhurried on the floorboards. I’m awake enough to feel the motion and not awake enough to do anything but be carried.
"Mm. Where we going?" I say into his chest. My own voice sounds far away.
"Spare room," he says.
"Is it far?"
"No," he says.
There’s a small silence. "Okay," I mumble. My breath is slow and even against his collarbone and I breathe him in, woodsmoke and cedar, the warmth that is his.
We come to a door, and then the soft rise of a mattress, and the quilt settling over me — pine-scented, heavy, the warmth of cloth that has stored sunlight for months.
"Stay," I say. My voice is still mostly asleep. Just the honest word, nothing more than that.
He doesn’t answer.
My hand slips off the quilt. I reach toward the dark and his hand is already there, waiting. He brings my hand up and presses his lips to the back of my fingers, held and deliberate, and he doesn’t let go.
I open my eyes.
He’s solid in the dark beside the bed. I can see the shape of him.
The broad shoulders in the low light, the loose tail of his hair, the cord at his throat just catching the faint blue from the window.
His back is against the mattress. He hasn’t lain down.
He is sitting on the floor at the side of the spare bed with my hand in his, and he is not climbing into bed with me.
I’m so used to hearing men eager to share a bed, but this.
Something about him won’t let him, but he is staying anyway, and the difference between those two things is everything tonight.
"David," I say.
He squeezes my hand once.
My eyes close. The quilt is warm. His hand is warm. I’m going back under by degrees, and the last thing I know is his silhouette against the cold blue window, and the fact of him on the floor at the side of my bed, and the door is open, and he is there.