I slept with my laptop beside me, powered up and dialed in to the video chat app we favored on the off chance Erin wanted to talk. She was most reflective in the middle of the night. Most honest with herself, too. But it was ridiculous. She wasn't reaching out. If there was one thing I knew about Erin, it was that she didn't feel entitled to taking the first step.
"Fuck it," I mumbled to myself, thumbing my phone to life. "Just fuckin' fuck it all." I tapped Erin's contact information, initiated the call, and pressed the phone to my ear, all while grousing about her penchant for only checking her phone a few times each day. "If she doesn't fuckin' answer, I'm goin' to Iceland and pickin' her up my-fuckin'-self."
"What's that Doctor Acevedo?" one of my residents called. He'd been lurking around all day, just waiting to scrub in or get his hands on a procedure, and now he was listening to me talk to myself.
Still ringing.
"Why aren't you in the ER?" I snapped. I'd been doing that with some frequency, yelling at residents. Interns, too. I feared the nursing staff enough to know better.
Still ringing.
"You didn't send me to the ER," he replied.
Still ringing.
"Go there anyway," I said.
Still—
"Hey," Erin answered. It was the bashful kind ofheythat saidYeah, Ihavebeen ignoring your calls and emails but please don't forget that you like me a whole lot. It also could've beenYeah, we broke up in an airport but you won't stop emailing me and this is getting weirdbut I was rooting for the former.
"Hey," I said. I was stunned that she'd answered, and didn't have my response ready yet.
"Not to end this conversation before it starts, but…I'm kinda busy," she said.
Of course you are."With?" I asked, hoping that she'd fill the silence with news of her research and data analysis problems so that I could figure out how the hell to get her back here before Shannon's baby was old enough to drive and vote.
She hummed for a second, and I imagined that crooked smile-scowl that she made when she was thinking about her work. "Lab stuff," she said.
There was a punch of dismissiveness in those words, and it was clear I wasn't getting an update on the chemical composition of the soil beneath Greenland's ice today. I cleared my throat and stepped into an empty patient room to avoid the roving pack of residents that seemed to sense I was engaged in a highly personal conversation, and chose this minute to hover even closer.
"Shannon's having the baby tonight," I said, shutting the door behind me. "Come home."
"Who's asking?"she snapped.
That right there, it brought the first true smile to my face in weeks. I loved Feisty Erin.
"Because I'm comfortable stating that I'm neither pivotal in the childbirth proceedings nor am I useful," she continued. "I know all about things that explode, but not as it pertains to amniotic sacs, or vaginas. Hell, me showing up would probably make the experience worse for her, and that would only add another crime to my tab. If anything, it will make this all about me and Shannon, and not Shannon and Will and Froggie. I don't want to force an awkward scene. Don't you think she has enough to worry about right now?"
"And I'm comfortable stating that vaginas do not explode during childbirth," I said. I laughed at that, and it didn't feel like a brittle spasm anymore. It felt good.
"But if Patrick's asking," she started, "it's because he thinks he's going to reenact the Christmas Truce of 1914, and that is ludicrous—"
"I love when you force obscure bits of history to fit your arguments," I murmured, smiling like a lunatic.
"And this isn't the trenches of Saint-Yves," she said, carrying on as if I hadn't spoken. "If Matt's asking, please tell him that he's been formally relieved of his official role as Walsh Family Arbitrator."
"But he really likes it," I said. The biggest smile possible. "Don't rob him of that joy."
"I know Sam isn't asking because he sent me an email two hours ago," she said. I could picture her in the stark white Reykjavík apartment—I still had her schedule on my kitchen calendar, and knew she'd returned from Greenland late last week—ticking off her siblings on her fingers. "Sam and Tiel, they're having a boy, by the way."
Another laugh, and that brought my total for the day up to two. Tiel was four months along, and Sam was the textbook definition of an anxious father-to-be. He texted me with no fewer than ninety-seven questions about pregnancy and babies each day. "Trust me," I said. "I've heard and I believe he's buying the Green Monster at Fenway Park so he can have it painted with that news, too."
"It's not Riley. He texts me whenever he has something worth sharing," Erin continued. "So, tell me: who's asking?"
Several things were unbelievably positive about this. First, she'd taken my call. Erin was the queen of ignoring calls from people she didn't want to talk to—her brothers, namely—and then immediately emailing or texting back to find out what they wanted. She could've done that but didn't. On top of that, she wastalking to me. Real, hyperbolic babble that only this woman could pull off with a semblance of sense. And finally, shewantedto come home. She wanted this request and she had to stage some opposition in the process, but she wanted it.
All this time, I'd thought it would be me. I thought I'd be the one to convince her to end the war with Shannon and allow her siblings back into her life, but I was wrong.
