Chapter 8 #2
Razor looks at me steadily. He's the kind of man who takes in a room all at once. "Thank you for what you did for our boy, Doctor."
"It's what I'm here for."
Brick steps forward. He's aged but he's still unmistakably Brick. There’s that same density, that same quality of occupying space more completely than other people. "Savannah. It's good to have you home."
"Brick." I hold his eyes for a second. "I'll need EJ to rest for forty-eight hours. He can go back to normal after that. The stitches come out in ten days."
"We'll bring him back here," Austin says.
"Dr. Foster can do it. Or the hospital."
"We'll bring him here."
I turn back to EJ's notes and don't respond to that.
"I'd love to take you to dinner," Austin says to the side of my face. "To say thank you."
I turn around and I look at him properly for the first time since he walked in, which I've been avoiding deliberately.
He's built out in the last ten years, broader across the shoulders, and there are tattoos on his forearms that weren't there before.
Dark ink running down from the sleeves he's rolled back.
He's got his cut on, and his eyes are the same exact shade of blue I’ve been successfully not thinking about. But now I'm thinking about it.
"You don't need to thank me for doing my job," I say. "Take EJ's mother out for dinner."
Something moves across his face. "That's not a situation."
"Austin." I keep my voice professional. "If you gentlemen would kindly leave, I’ve other patients this afternoon."
EJ climbs down from the table and walks straight to me and puts his arms around my waist and squeezes, the uncomplicated full-body hug of a child who has decided he likes you. "Thank you, Dr. Savannah. You're much nicer than Dr. Foster. See you soon."
I put my hand on the back of his head for a second. "Take care of that side."
"I will." He looks up at me. "Can I come back?"
"For the stitches. Yes."
He nods, satisfied, and goes to Austin. Austin picks him up without looking at me again and carries him out of the treatment room. I listen to the sound of them going down the corridor, through the front door and then silence.
The waiting room is not silent.
I need to get a fresh dressing from the supply cupboard, which is unfortunately through the waiting room, and when I push the door open I stop.
There’re three men I don't know in the waiting room, one with the kind of easy grin that means he finds most things at least mildly entertaining, and one who is standing in the corner watching the door like he's waiting for something to come through it. They are large men in a room that was designed for normal-sized people, and the effect is something between a waiting room and a very quiet siege. They’re all here to support EJ and Austin. I remember Austin telling me about the brotherhood in the MC, I think I’ve just witnessed it for the first time.
They’re like one big family, all looking out for EJ.
Millie is behind the reception desk with the expression of a woman who is professionally calm but personally overwhelmed.
"Is there coffee?" the grinning one says. He looks at me when I appear in the doorway. "Sorry. Hi. Is there coffee?"
"Cash," the quieter one says, without looking at him. "Sit down."
"I've been sitting down. I sat down for ten minutes and now I'm asking about coffee."
"There's water," Millie offers, in the tone of a woman offering a peace treaty.
"Brilliant," Cash says, in the tone of a man for whom this is not brilliant.
The man in the corner, the one watching the door, turns and looks at me briefly and then looks at the door again. He hasn't said a word. Somehow he's the most unnerving person in the room.
I reach past Cash for the supply cupboard, get what I need, and go back through the door. As I close it behind me I hear Cash say to the room, "Nobody is even going to acknowledge that there’s no coffee?"
I almost laugh.
Almost.
I keep seeing patients until six. Two ear infections, a sprained wrist, a man in his seventies who needed a prescription renewed and spent forty minutes telling me about his garden.
I sit with all of them properly, I ask the right questions, I do the job.
On the inside I feel like a robot that's been reprogrammed to look human.
When the last patient leaves, Millie starts closing up the front desk. I go back to the treatment room and I start cleaning. Methodically. Every surface, every tray, every instrument back in its place. I need something to do with my hands.
"Savannah." Millie appears in the doorway.
"You can head off. I'll finish up."
"I know, I just." She pauses. "Are you okay?"
"Fine. Long day."
She's quiet for a second. "You know him." It's not a question.
I keep wiping the treatment table. "He's an old friend."
"Okay." She says it in the way people say okay when they mean something else.
"Millie."
"He called you Sav," she says. "Not Savannah. Sav. Like he's been calling you that his whole life."
I stop wiping the table. I look at the cloth in my hand.
"An old friend," I say again.
Millie picks up her bag. "I'll see you tomorrow." She pauses at the door. "For what it's worth, he looked at you the way people look at things they thought they'd lost."
She leaves before I can answer that.
I finish cleaning in silence, and I lock the front door, I turn off the lights room by room and I go upstairs to the apartment.
It's small and its mine and normally I love it for exactly those reasons. Tonight, I sit down on the sofa, and I don't turn on a lamp. I sit in the dark for a long time. Images flicker there, in the darkness.
EJ's face when he was trying to be brave. Austin's hands in his son's hair. The way he said please save my boy with his voice doing the thing it did.
I hadn't realized until today that he had a son.
I'd known, in the abstract way you know things you've heard from other people, that there was a child from the situation with the woman from the club.
But knowing it in the abstract and then seeing the boy's face and knowing immediately whose son he was, that's different. That's a thing that takes up space.
And the boy himself. EJ, with his focused questions and his careful bravery.
His simple certainty about what his father is and what the club is.
He didn't perform for me or try to impress me.
He just wanted to understand things. He was nine years old and the most straightforward person I've spoken to since I got back to this town.
Austin made that child. He raised that child. Whatever Austin is now, ten years and a patch and whatever the Black Saints have built in this town, that boy is the evidence of who he became when I wasn't here to see it.
I don't know what to do with that either.
My phone lights up on the cushion next to me.
LUKE
Hey Sav. How's the small town treating you? Miss you.
I look at it for a moment. Then I pick it up.
SAV
Miss you too. You need to come down on your next days off. I'll show you around. It'll take about fifteen minutes and then we can find somewhere that sells wine.
LUKE
Sounds like a plan. I actually have this weekend off. Am I invited?
SAV
Hell yes. Come Friday after your shift. I'll send you a pin.
LUKE
It's a date. Well. You know what I mean.
SAV
Unfortunately I do. See you Friday.
I set the phone down and look at the ceiling.
He called you Sav. Like he's been calling you that his whole life.
He has been. That's the problem. Some things don't stop being true just because you need them to.
I get up and make coffee, then I stand in my small kitchen in the dark and I think about Austin's eyes when he walked in with EJ in his arms. I think about the way the fear in them shifted when he saw me, and I think about what Millie said.
I think about EJ asking me if I was going to be a doctor when I grew up.
I think about all of it.
Then I drink my coffee, go to bed and I stare at the ceiling for a very long time before sleep comes.