Chapter 6
Savannah
Ten Years After Leaving Town
"Jesus, not another night shift."
I say it to nobody in particular. There's nobody to say it to at eleven forty-five on a Thursday night except the intake desk and the flickering strip light above bay three that maintenance has been promising to fix for six weeks.
I've always wanted to be a doctor. My whole life, that was the plan, the thing I was working toward, and I don't regret a minute of the training or the med school or the residency.
But after six years in this ER, I'm kind of sick of it.
Not the medicine. The medicine I still love.
Just the particular grind of it, the hours that swallow everything else, the way I go home some mornings and can't remember the last time I did something that had nothing to do with saving someone else's life.
I didn't go into this to have no life of my own.
"I know," Luke says, appearing at my elbow with two coffees. He hands one over without me asking and leans on the counter next to me. "It's supposed to be quiet at night but we both know that's not what happens around here."
Luke has been working beside me for six years.
We tried dating once about three years in, realized within about two weeks that we were a spectacular mismatch romantically and a very good match as friends, and adjusted accordingly.
He is the person I call when something goes wrong and the person I eat takeout with on the couch when nothing is going wrong at all, and I love him in the uncomplicated way you love someone who has never once let you down.
"I'm thinking of going home," I say, still not looking at him.
"What do you mean? You've only started your shift."
"No." I wrap both hands around the coffee cup. "I mean home. My actual home town. My parents are getting older and I've always said I'd open a practice there eventually. I think eventually might be now."
He's quiet for a second. I can feel him processing this the way Luke processes things, methodically, not jumping to a reaction. "You want to go from extremely busy ER to running a practice? Savannah, it'll be too quiet. You'll want the high that you get here and you won't have it."
"I know. But I feel like I've done enough of this particular kind of medicine.
My parents always wanted me to open there.
Not that they're pressuring me, they've never pushed, but it was something I always said I would do and I think if I don't do it now I'm going to be here in another six years saying the same thing. "
"Wow." He looks at me properly. "You've really thought about this. Why didn't you say anything?"
"I'm saying something now. My mind's not fully made up but I wanted to know what you think." I finally turn to face him.
"I'll miss you." He says it straight out, no hedging. "You're my best friend." He reaches out and touches my hand.
"Do you want to come with me? We could do it together."
I look up at him and I know the answer before he gives it. I can see it in his face, the way it goes soft with a look that's fond and regretful at the same time. Luke and the ER are the same thing. You couldn't separate them with a crowbar.
Before he can answer, pandemonium breaks out. The doors burst open and the next several hours cease to exist in any form I can narrate.
"Looks like you were saved by the patients," I say when the first wave hits, and we split for our respective bays and that's the conversation over for now.
"Oh my god. Thank god for that coffee."
Road traffic accident. Multiple casualties. Two of them died and there was nothing either of us could have done differently and I know that and I still feel it in my sternum the way I always feel it, the particular weight of a life that came through your hands and left anyway.
That's the part they don't tell you about in med school. You get used to it, but getting used to it doesn't mean it stops landing.
"You'd miss this," Luke says, walking past me into the next bay. "You love the adrenaline."
He's not wrong. I do love it. That's the complicated part.
It's another three hours before we're done. We drive home in silence, both too wrung out to talk, and when we get back to the apartment I drop onto the sofa and look at the ceiling and Luke drops into the armchair and does the same.
"You don't have to come with me," I say. "I meant it when I asked but I know what your answer is and I'm not upset about it."
"I love the ER." He says it simply. Not defensively. "It's where I belong."
"I know. And that's enough." I look over at him. "Just promise me you'll visit. Or I can visit you. Regularly. Like, annoyingly regularly."
He gets up and pulls me off the sofa and wraps his arms around me properly, the way he hugs when he means it. "I love you, Savannah. Always."
"I love you too." I hold on for an extra second. "Don't find another best friend while I'm gone."
"Impossible."
The next morning I hand in my resignation and I start packing.
This is really happening. After more than ten years away, I'm going home.
I sit on the edge of my bed that night with a half-filled box in front of me and I let myself think about it properly for the first time.
Home is not what it was. I'm not what I was.
The town will have changed. I've changed and most things will be the same in the ways that small towns are always the same.
I can't wait to see my parents, my old friends, the streets I grew up on.
That's what I love about going home, that sense of belonging to somewhere specific, of having a place that knows you.
I left under horrendous circumstances and I know that bumping into Austin, if he's still there, is going to be complicated.
But a lot of water has passed under the bridge.
We were kids. We're not kids anymore. Once I see him I'm sure whatever I'm carrying will reduce to something manageable.
Something I can smile through and walk away from.
That's what I tell myself on the edge of the bed in the dark.
I almost believe it.
The drive home takes four hours and I do the last stretch with the window down even though it's cool out, because the air starts to smell different about thirty miles out, something I can't name but that's specific to this part of the world, green and open and slightly damp, and breathing it in does something to my chest that nothing in the city ever does.
The memories start around the same time as the smell. They don't announce themselves. They just arrive.
The way the road feels at dusk when you're on the back of a bike, the particular sensation of it, the wind, the vibration and the horizon going gold ahead of you.
I spent enough of my teenage years on the back of Austin's bike that my body still remembers it without being asked.
The way I'd rest my chin on his shoulder.
The way he'd reach back and squeeze my knee at a red light without looking away from the road, just a quick sure pressure that meant I'm here, I've got you.
I don't want that memory. I didn't invite it.
It's there anyway.
Then the diner on Route 9 goes past on the left and I remember stopping there once on the way back from somewhere and Austin ordering for both of us before I'd even looked at the menu.
Not in a controlling way. In the way that means someone has been paying such close attention to you for so long that they just know.
Cherry pie. He'd known I'd want cherry pie even though I hadn't eaten it since I was twelve. He'd been right.
I turn the radio up.
It doesn't help. The next thirty miles deliver a memory I didn't ask for about every ten minutes.
The particular silence he had that always felt like company rather than absence.
The way he laughed at things that weren't that funny and made them funny anyway.
The way he smelled in autumn, leather and cold air and something underneath that was just him.
I turn the radio up further.
I'm a doctor. I understand that the brain stores sensory information alongside emotional memory and that returning to a place triggers retrieval. I understand this. It doesn't make it less annoying.
The town comes up around the familiar bend in the road and my stomach does something complicated.
I know these streets. I know the water tower and the church spire and the particular way the afternoon light sits on the main road in autumn.
This is mine. Whatever happened here, this place is still mine, and I want it back.
My parents are standing outside the house when I pull up the drive and the complicated feeling in my chest shifts into something simpler.
Mom gets to the car door first. "I can't believe you've finally come home, Sav."
She gets her arms around me before I'm fully upright and she smells exactly the same as she always has and I almost break down right there in the driveway.
"Give her space to breathe, Rachel." Dad pulls her back gently and gets his own arms around me. "Good to have you home," he says quietly into the top of my head.
"It's good to be home."
And I mean it more than I expected to.
Inside the house there's coffee brewing and it smells like every weekend morning I can remember from childhood, and I sit at the kitchen table with a cup in both hands and let it settle over me.
"Now," Dad says, sitting across from me with the particular expression he has when he's organised something he's pleased with. "We've spoken to the realtor and the building you want is available. You just need to sign the paperwork tomorrow."
"Dad. You're amazing."
He waves this off. "You'll need to come and see it properly but from what your mother and I could see, it's got good bones and it’s a good location. Right on the main street."
"That's fantastic. I'm so excited to start this." I look between them both. "You'll both help me get set up and organised? Decorating, the practical stuff? I'm going to need all hands on deck."
They both laugh.