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“This isn't rage, it's too specific
I like to hate symbolic limits
This is no statement, I'm complicit
This is a dream, God put me in it”
The Hand by Annabelle Dinda
As soon as the weather in Pittsburgh threatens to turn warm, Samira religiously takes lemons out of the fridge, a jug out of the cupboard, and makes nimbu pani.
A childhood memory: her chitti Akhila visiting her mother and from a suitcase producing, after scarves and golden-leaf-detailed journals and food wrapped three times in cling film, a bag of lemons. Each fruit could sit nicely on the palm of a girl, not too big, not too heavy. The smell of it clung to Samira’s hand for hours.
Her mother made nimbu pani that night. After dinner with her sister, after the words had been said and the music danced to and the tears of distance tended to.
Years later Samira cuts a lemon in half, takes one part, squeezes it into a jug. There's sugar already in there, a bit of black salt, a dash of chaat masala. She whips a spoon around a couple of times, the metal against the glass ringing clear through her empty apartment. She squeezes the leftover half, does the same to the next lemon on the cutting board.
When she leans towards the sink to wash her hands she pauses only for a second.
Then she licks her fingers.
Index finger first.
It stings. Sour. The tanginess burns her palate.
Thumb last.
Her tongue swipes her lips without meaning to. Bitter.
When she swore her oath, she meant every single word of it. When she swore to herself she wouldn't let what happened to her father happen again, she meant it more.
All she’s got behind her now is the ghost of the father she lost and of the mentor who looks at her and doesn't see her. When did she become a ghost too?
This hospital some days is all you get, when you come in with grey skies and go home after sunset. Some days it feels like the only home Samira has ever known - her childhood bedroom sold off by her mother building another life, her flat sporting clean walls in case of a quick move - and despite being so, so big it's suffocating.
The pictures on the stairs are all the charts she's signed with her name, the fireplace is the hub, the dining room table is a dodgy break room sofa.
The wallpaper is all the people she couldn't save. The ceilings are all the times she should have run quicker. The lamps, the screams she's heard. The chairs, the blood through her hands.
The name on the doorbell is the life she leaves at the door every morning not realizing she has to drag it in.
If only there was a way to peel her skin back, poke and prod at her insides and surgically excise the things that weigh her down.
The doubt. The fear. The failing.
Where would she stop? Would she cut off her mother and the guilt she feels and the rage she tries not to? Would she cut off Robby and the way on occasion she strives to be better for him and it drives her insane? Would she ever cut off her father? Sure, he makes her a better doctor but he also haunts her every breath.
He makes her a person.
Her skin. Her gender. Her mother tongue.
Scalpels are dangerous, in idle hands.
How much of yourself can you cut away and stay you?
Samira shells out advice and reassurance as if they were mints, making sure everyone working below her is on steady footing. She remembers to learn from her students instead of feeling threatened when they suggest treatments she hasn't considered. She clocks low eyelines, sagged shoulders, heavy sighs, she investigates and supports and solves.
The walls of this house are keeping everyone warm. She lit the fire with care. Made herself kindling.
One day she'll scream, she thinks sometimes. When Robby's focus is on prodigal son Langdon, on naive Whitaker, on Santos’s mental health, on the department’s gaps. When all she feels looking at him is the cloud of disapproval haloing his figure. When all that's in her head is the dizziness of daughters meant to become their fathers or suffer the fate of their mothers.
How does it feel to stand on the parapet and struggle to keep your balance?
What do you inherit when the people in your life are handing you their problems expecting solutions back?
There's a scream somewhere in her body. She doesn't know where. She doesn't ask, doesn't look for it.
Samira is quiet because she's good and she knows where her place is. She didn't build this house but she sure as hell can keep it running. Even if no one notices. Even if no one sees her. Even if she has to glide through rooms and perform to Robby's standards and call her mother pretending to be happy and solve her own mind's riddles and blink twice when she sees her father in a trauma room and ignore being ignored and count her breaths on a tough afternoon.
Houses aren't always homes.
Leaving is too hard.
Leaving isn't what you want.
Staying feels impossible.
Coming back every day, bag over a shoulder, shoes against linoleum, is tempting and inevitable.
Even if you know what happens.
When she gets home she cuts lemons. Makes nimbu pani like her mother taught her. Whirls a spoon around. Squeezes the juice in the jug. Leans to the sink.
And she knows. She knows. She knows.
She swears she does.
But sourness on her fingertips is the sweetest thing in the world sometimes.
*
Victoria knows so much.
There's tons of textbooks she could recite passages from, medical conditions off the tip of her tongue, strings of tests like poems in her mind, the long and complicated words coming easy to her.
When she was a child, her favorite game with her father would be reciting words backwards. He'd say them and look at her expectantly. She'd rack her brain, visualize the word in front of her, clear enough she could pull it apart and put it back together in a different order.
His face would brighten up when she could spell ‘procrastinate’ flipped on its head. Skipping down the street for ice cream, mirroring ‘trees’, ‘strawberry’, and ‘sunglasses’ with ease. She loved playing logic games with her dad. He would always come up with a new one. It was out of love.
University at 13 was the expected choice. She might have been pushed into it before she could fully understand the grasp of what it would mean for her life - being the youngest, by far, in every room, a lot of the time knowing more than everyone else, not tagging along to plans she couldn't take part in - but she knew it would mean an earlier start at adulthood.
Victoria knows who she is, she has known for a long time. She grabs lilac t-shirts off the shelf, blasts That’s So True in her headphones, shoves spring rolls down in her short break, makes friendship bracelets on a Thursday evening, goes for a run in the park and gets a sweet treat after, watches a horror movie and a romcom back to back, checks her Co-Star daily. She also stitches lacs, flies through charts, draws bloods.
She knows where she wants to get to, even if her parents push and pull her between specialties. But it's fine. It is. It's out of love.
Getting a nickname on her first day of emergency rotation was not in the cards, but it's grown on her and now it doesn't sting as much. If anything, it gives her a place in this group. This group. People upon people from all different walks of life who still deliver excellent patient care without striving to be the best, but rather the best version of themselves. And sometimes, on hard days, not even that. People who have enjoyed life, who still do.
It's not that she was sheltered growing up, it's that she blew past a lot of milestones to throw herself into this career. To achieve. To reach. It would have been a waste otherwise. With her brains.
But on occasion she looks at her colleagues and sees all the things she could have done, could have been, could have had. And never even got the chance to know if she wanted.
There's a rush in her chest when the new lot of med students show up, when someone pipes up with the right answer before she can, when someone tries to show off at her expense. Most of the time it's fine, she breathes out relieved. She still knows more than she's meant to at her age.
But sometimes.
Sometimes someone else beats her to the punch. Someone rattles out the whole board when she could barely remember a couple of lines. Someone makes a diagnosis by just talking to a patient. Without needing to know everything.
That's what she's good at. Knowing things.
It's who she's built herself to be.
Would her parents still be proud if she wasn't this? If she wasn't this version of herself? If she lost it all today, right now, would her father still offer smiles and fist bumps? If she wasn't smart, wasn't the best, wasn't reaching for the stars?
Is there a world in which she gets to slow down, look around, and still keep her parents’ love?
It isn't conditional, it shouldn't be. She's sure it isn't. She doesn't want to test that theory. She doesn't want to know what ‘out of love' can also mean.
Victoria knows so much. So much. But some days she wonders if she really does. Or if it really matters.
*
Dana knows something about worship, about walking on your knees to repent, about preaching. About Sunday services and being raised religious and singing hymns.
Her cross hangs on her neck, rests on the hollow of her throat, clasped every morning out of habit. She can't feel it anymore.
So many sermons she's listened to in her youth. So many she's missed in the years since. Wonders if any of it counts in the end.
Sneaking a cigarette outside Sonny's was not the first sin she ever committed. She wisely stopped counting a long time ago. Now she just hopes the good things outweigh the bad or at least cancel each other out.
Who knows.
She isn't a woman of faith anymore, some mornings she wonders if she ever was. But maybe what she means is that she doesn't believe in the church anymore. Because there's faith somewhere.
Faith in a different thing.
The emergency department is more of a cathedral than many churches she's been to. It opens its doors to all in need, giving them space to break, to heal, to grow, to be born or reborn. A trauma bay is as much of a confessional as a wooden box, and there might be no lattice panel between her and a patient but the sins are whispered anyway.
There is nothing as holy, Dana thinks crossing herself on a Sunday out of habit, as the work they do every day.
That's blasphemous to think.
Holy is the mother who holds her stillborn baby to her chest. Holy are the words a brother whispers to his twin who can't hear him anymore. Holy is the soothed child who finally rests.
Holy the nurses giving patients dignity in their most vulnerable moments, the smudged lipsticks on smiling drunk girls after a night out, the protein bars passed around between interns, and the stairs to the rooftop and the pictures of who they've lost and people tying each other's gowns and washing blood off the floor and reaching and holding and and and.
If Dana were a woman of faith she would be able to see she's holy too. Holding up the ceiling of this cathedral as if she were Atlas. The weight of the world has never looked so easy to manage.
It's still too heavy.
Shouting orders and keeping colleagues in line is what she does, what she's always done. So many people through these corridors, ones she loved, ones she didn't, ones who became friends and then friends who left. She couldn't blame them, not when this world gets uglier and uglier every time you look.
Skin toughens when you do this job enough, when you do life enough. Dana has been doing both for a long time. Longer than she can remember on a Tuesday afternoon after the third car crash in a row comes in and she has no space for it.
Reaching out to get anything sharp out of the pockets of eager new arrivals is just another hard-earned lesson. She remembers being young, not knowing how this was going to change her life. Everything she is.
Bruises take long to heal.
She does not tell the new arrivals that.
Some scars never do.
She doesn't say that either.
What she does is crack a joke, a strong one, a dark one, a harsh one. Because it's the only way to survive. If you pretend you're finally strong enough to keep it all at arm's length.
But when the knot on her heart is tighter she turns around - always turns around and checks if the room is clear before allowing herself to feel. If no one sees you then you get to walk out and keep pretending. After all, you say something long enough it becomes true.
True: this job might kill you.
True: it might make you numb first.
True: you used to think one of those would be worse.
Still true?
*
If you're a woman and you have a sister there's a way, as you grow up, that you start thinking of yourself in relation to her.
You will always be a sister. There's no changing that. You'll always be each other's.
You become one half of a tapestry you can't untangle. You're either the pink or purple sister, the butterfly or dolphin one, silver or gold. You're a pair now, swapping t-shirts and notebooks and hobbies and teachers and lip balms and hair ties, or getting the same gifts in different shades, eating in the same seats at the table over and over again, laughing for the same joke after years.
Mel doesn't remember a time she wouldn't think of herself as a twin, there's no time she existed outside that. Becca was an extension of her before she knew how to see. Born at the same time. Tied for life.
When she was asked if she and Becca had ‘twin powers’ as kids she would say no. There's no such thing as twin powers. Of course. But there is something between them that they both don't understand. There's a thread that keeps them together, that tugs at them sometimes.
Mel has never shied from hard work in her life, slogging through the long days of medical school, sitting text-heavy exams that made her head hurt, surviving incredibly long shifts. Supporting her sister was just the next step she never questioned she'd take. There is no way she would have ever let Becca down.
She'd do it through gritted teeth if she had to. She'd do anything to keep both of them afloat.
People look at her and make assumptions. Pedantic Mel who points out someone's out of order grammar or lacking differential, who pushes mushrooms back and forth around her plate, who needs the joke explained to her.
But also Mel who understands her patients’ pain, who sits with sisters in viewing rooms, who is laser focused on tasks that would bore other people out of their minds. And who will bend a rule if it means saving a life, who's learnt what people's expressions mean to adjust accordingly.
The bright lights in the ED, the constant whirlwind of gurneys being moved around, the beeping of monitors. It feels exactly like where she shouldn't be. Yet she thrives, in the rushing chaos of the department, moving from one step to the next with calculated aim.
It's all one step at a time. It's logic. It's patterns.
She's learnt to appreciate the way the building moves and breathes around her. There's a safety in the sanitizer clinging to her hair that she didn't think she'd ever find in there.
There's tricks up her sleeve - things she whispers to herself in the mirror, mechanisms to slow down, quietness to be found in storms - that make a day easier to live through. Not all days are hard, some go past without frustration pulling at her wrists, some feel light enough to breeze through.
But some days. Some days people look at her and question her ability to be a doctor, to care, to be steady enough to get them through the hard moments. They have no idea how many hard moments she's walked through. And some days she has to see siblings split by the cruel hand of fate, watch young girls reach out for each other, children cry in pain, mothers die in the blink of an eye. It envelopes her sometimes, all the darkness of this blinding bright place.
She counts her blessings when it happens. Because every night she gets to come back to her sister.
The thread pulls less.
*
It's easy to get lost in life. There's enough chaos around you to lose sight of the finish line, of the sides of the track, of the gravel under your feet.
It didn't take long for Cassie to stumble off the beaten path. To find herself in a mess of pills, drinks, parties. Easy. Or not.
The struggle was there anyway, knowing what the consequences of the choices she was making were but being unable to stop making them.
Becoming a mother didn't save her or anything. Harrison was the cutest baby she had ever seen when he was born, the weight of him grounding her. She somehow wishes this could be one of those stories in which a mom looks into her child's eyes, realizes the error of her ways, and becomes a saint.
But the siren of euphoria was too much to resist. It drew her in or she walked towards it. It's blurry occasionally, the way she found herself tangled in the web again. Blurry the way she got herself out. She did it for her son, for her parents, for her future. She did it with people's help. And fighting against herself the whole time.
Addiction is a disease, Cassie has learned on her own skin, felt in her own blood cells. She knows how hard it is to peel yourself off of the thing you know it's going to kill you.
It's true, the first year of sobriety is the worst. It was one day, one minute, one second at a time. Just to the next and the next and the next. Long enough to see her son again, long enough to make it home at night.
Medical school was because helping and fixing people was something she knew. She'd fixed herself after all. And the system needs more doctors who can look an addict, an unhoused person, a struggling mother, in their trauma bays and see whole people.
She has made plenty of mistakes, she'll own and admit to all of them now. Her body sometimes reminds her of the ones that coursed through her veins. The monitor weighing down her ankle reminded her of another one. Owning your mistakes doesn't mean you regret all of them, and that one she doesn't fully.
The “Bonus mom” T-shirt makes her see red every time. It takes calculated restraint not to jump and choke the girl with her own hands.
How dare she? As if she could claim the title, only because she happens to be screwing Cassie’s ex. She's barely an adult, what would she know of raising a child.
And Cassie's been selfish, she has. She can't run away from it. She's picked herself over her family. She has. But she's walked back home. One painful, barefoot step at a time.
Cassie is not a liar, not anymore - she can't be an addict and lie, not casually, not even to herself, especially not to herself - and she'd be lying if she said sometimes she doesn't miss the feeling. The rush of it, the lightness of it.
On days when her TV echoes through the empty house, the microwave warms her one-portion dinner, one half of the bed stays cold and unmade. When she knows what she's done has led to her son growing up in a broken home. Her old life almost feels within reach.
It isn't. It can't be. She doesn't want it anymore.
It's so hard, though, to remember. To feel. To know. To wake up every day and move. It's easier now, it is.
Some days it feels like the road out of the tunnel leads you nowhere. But she can't stop walking. She knows what's behind her, she knows it gets lighter going forward.
*
People had a claim to Trinity's body before she did.
Hands roaming in ways they shouldn't, wrapped around her wrists, heavy on her legs.
Bruises blooming all shades everywhere. A girl who fought back would only bruise more, she learned early on.
Coaches used to bend her in uncomfortable positions, shape her like a winner, push her to the breaking point and then some. She had it in her, they used to say. On a track to somewhere, she could have been.
Gymnast turned doctor.
A success story or a failure, depends who you ask.
When she finally got a hold of her own life all she did was try to see what happens when you live in your own skin. The alcohol burned just enough, chased with a pill, chased with a cigarette, chased with a sloppy kiss, chased with the numbness of morning light through the blinds. It wasn't good to her, but it was hers.
She grew out of that at some point.
Her body remembers what it's like, to be someone else's. She wishes it didn't. She can't forget it.
How do you?
People whisper ‘bitch’. But she's been called worse. She doesn't dispute it. She moves through life keeping people where she can see them, knowing what happens when you turn around.
Hoping people won't see through the act and begging them to in the same breath.
There's wounds to dress, hands to hold, blood blisters to puncture, lullabies to sing. Children to look out for.
People shrug at her abrasiveness, take offense at the digs towards them. She shrugs too.
On occasion, being mean is easier than being known. When who you are is so twisted you lose yourself in it too often, alone.
Sometimes Trinity feels like a child running around with scissors.
Would she stab herself or someone else if she fell over?
Maybe she's a bitch. Who cares. She doesn't, right? It's been a long time since she's shown anyone she cares about their opinion of her.
It used to sting. Hearing the strings of insults. They'd be needles in her skin. It took her way too little time to find a solution to the haze around her head as a teenager.
When the bathroom door was locked, in the middle of a long day, thoughts getting louder and louder, her body felt covered in bruises again and her soul felt crumpled enough it was never going to be smooth again.
The only thing that made sense was shiny and sharp.
That's who she is too, in other people's minds.
Shiny and sharp.
There's only so many times you can slice yourself open hoping it will all flood out of you. Only so many times you can try and find out what your body's limit is before losing hold of it.
The line is thin.
Trinity's fingertips sometimes brush over the scars. They're just bumps on her skin now. They're hers.
Lines as thin as they come.
All the days she has lived through pile up, fill rooms, wave from the sidewalk. The scars she bears, the ones she can't see, the things she can't even think about.
A little girl with a bruise on her arm gets wheeled through the doors and Trinity wishes she could unlearn her own life.
Too many steps have led her here. Hands on her body, purple on her hip, the scream caught in her throat, her knee hitting the balance beam, the burn of alcohol through her chest, the emptiness of grief.
That is the curse: you are only yourself because of everything that's happened to you.
I'll say that again: you are only yourself because of everything that's happened to you.
If it's a curse maybe it could be a blessing too.