Chapter Text
Michael “Robby” Robinavitch, at fifty-one, hates everywhere he's ever been.
That is not some moody exaggeration. In fact, he wishes it were. He wishes it weren't so easy for him to get bored with a place before he's even considered putting down roots. He wishes it weren’t an indicator of an overactive mind lacking stimulation when it isn’t outright numbed by whatever he chooses. Regardless, Robby’s tried a little bit of everything and little pieces of all over, and absolutely nothing has moved him beyond the initial novelty of new surroundings.
Cities always need doctors specialized in trauma and emergency medicine, so he's tried almost all the notable ones. Los Angeles is too hot and too superficial, Seattle is too gloomy and pretentious, and Portland only took him about three weeks of uneasiness to know he'd never fit in. New York's noises and especially potent smells left him turned around and out of breath; he couldn't be paid any amount to work a job for the pricks in D.C.
He’d decided, a little less than a year ago, that rural life might be worth living.
Leaving Pittsburgh—his latest and longest attempt at something bustling—to find long stretches of open air was fairly simple.
Ohio, Kentucky, and Missouri were all both noteworthy and forgettable in their own ways. History deep and rich in each state, each territory. But still, the developed areas were too big, too imposing, too daunting. No, he wouldn’t be able to truly be alone without paying exorbitant prices for a private but recently-built house in a development—some sort of elaborate prop folks are acquiring to play at being “country.” The illusion of rural life while still being subject to an HOA. Places with long paved driveways and landscapers to ride sit-down mowers through the property’s pristine, domestic grass.
Genuinely close to losing all interest in his quest for true-to-form peace, Robby is put at ease the second his motorcycle wheels roll over the Nebraska state line.
Hell, it puts him at ease before he even finds a place to stop.
There's nothing in particular to love about it. There's no grand spiritual awakening at the state line, no particular flaring of his "intuition" welcoming him to peace everlasting. Those are things he has no belief in anyhow, and they're embarrassing to think about believing in, too. Truthfully, the thing that affects him enough to warrant his noting it is the flat, unflinching nature of the sunlight. It doesn't need to find cracks in the city skyline to glow. It just swims through the sky, which is enormous without obstruction.
Nebraska skies don't impede on your state of mind, he thinks. They're indifferent to you. That's what I'm fuckin' talking about. And that's what he immediately loves about this new piece of all over. He hates being recognized for anything. The indifference is key.
He rents a property about twenty miles outside of a town small enough that even locals seem uncertain how to describe it. It might as well have been perfectly designed and tossed into his lap. He finds it by stopping at a gas station and talking to the person behind the counter for longer than he intended to, which is how most things in rural life happen. He knows that much from just travelling.
The woman at the register says there's a "cattywampus" property that's been sitting untended for a long while because its owner aged out of his dreams for renovation. She writes the directions on the back of the receipt for him, but only after he asks her to, as the verbal direction wouldn't be as helpful to someone who has no idea where the fuck they are. Obviously, he doesn't say it that way. But the look he earns makes it clear his attitude may have communicated it a little too clearly.
The property is a main house and a second structure—smaller, a converted barn that isn't entirely a barn anymore, too homey and oriented like it has a human purpose—connected by a long gravel path lined with overgrown grass that nobody trims.
There's land. Not cultivated land that'd actually require farm knowledge that he sure as shit lacks. Nothing with rows or irrigation lines or any of the agricultural ambition that marks working farms. Just land, flat and expansive, given over to whatever wanted it first. Prairie grasses. Wild clover. Stands of cottonwood and box elder that cluster near the creek that runs along the property's edge. It's the kind of land that doesn't require anything of him.
That is, specifically, what he wanted. Land that tends itself, that got along fine without him and will continue to get along fine without him. He wanted land that doesn't send up any particular distress at his arrival and won't be too affected by his eventual and almost guaranteed departure.
The smaller barn-house structure becomes the practice.
There's enough room for a sitting area, an exam room, and a smaller, more functional room where he can keep his files and Mr. Coffee percolator and sit in silence between patients. He's always needed that extra room. For panic, for reflection, for escape. Though he's not sure what there is to escape out here.
He orders a desk, a lamp, a chair, an exam table, and everything comes together quite simply. Of course, he's soul-crushingly aware that this could mirror some deeper thing he feels about himself—about the denial of frivolity. About the bare-bones structure being necessary to feel stable. But that's a bit much for idle thinking while assembling a filing cabinet.
For the final flourish, he staples his medical license and his diplomas to the blank wall above his front desk. They need to be visible, and they say his name, and make the reality concrete, and that's the end-all be-all of it.
The actual house gets a similar treatment.
A bed, a kitchen table, and the record player that is a non-negotiable piece of infrastructure wherever he goes. There's a wood-burning stove that he's already looking forward to when October comes and the nights get chilly, though he slightly dreads chopping wood with genuine effort. There are windows on the south face that let in an afternoon light that he finds he doesn't want to close the curtains against. He doesn't analyze why. He just leaves the curtains open and says nothing about it, even to himself.
The quiet, when it finally sets in, isn't the kind of quiet that feels like an absence. This sort of quiet is dense.
He was ready for the quiet, of course. That's so obviously part of why he left Pittsburgh that he's almost shocked when it's something stranger than he bargained for. When it's something he doesn't quite know what to do with for the first few days. It's an entirely different beast than having a room to reflect or a bedroom with windows that let in light and birds chirping. Somewhere around day four, the quiet starts occupying space, pressing gently against the eardrums in a way that could be mistaken for pressure on an airplane. The sun swims without intention. The silence seeks.
What surprises him even more is what happens when he breaks it.
That morning, he fills the kettle and sets it on the stove. He stands in the kitchen while it heats, looking out the south-facing windows at the grass lying flat and swaying like water in a light breeze. Calm, pastoral living. And when the kettle begins to whistle, the sound is so abrupt, so razor-sharp against that blanketing absence, that his whole body flinches. Not that it brings up any sort of plain trauma from ambulance sirens or beeping machinery. The reaction, he reasons as he is wont to do, lands somewhere between being completely startled and disorientingly dizzy.
The static of vertigo slowly fades from his mind as he moves the kettle off the burner, and he waits for the detoxing ease he thought he enjoyed from pastoral living to slip back into place.
It doesn't quite.
Later that week, he puts a record on. He's had the urge to own a turntable for fifteen years, has bought one through Pittsburgh and Los Angeles and Seattle and every other failed experiment with city living. It's one of the few possessions he can call a genuine necessity. He drops the needle on something he's heard so many times it barely registers as sound anymore, Leonard Cohen going long and meditative, and the opening notes do something that Cohen has never once done in any of the dozens of apartments or houses he's played this exact record in.
The notes reach into the corners of the room. They bounce off the walls and come back changed. Morphed and misshapen. They fill the space in a way that feels almost too full. Not unpleasant, because Cohen can't be by principle, but the dizziness returns. He stands in the middle of the room until he adjusts, or something does something like adjust, and lets it play through.
It gets easier. He stops flinching at the kettle by the end of the first week. But the strangeness never really resolves. It just becomes familiar as a particular quality of this place, this life, the trade he's made.
Which is a trade he's happy with. For a while, it's all he wanted. Robby Robinavitch wakes up without an alarm beep-beep-beeping at him. He drinks his coffee, looking out those south-facing windows. He waits for patients that may or may not arrive, and in the hours between them, he reads. Or he sits, or he walks the property's edge along the creek, looking at nothing with a level of attention he hasn't given to simply nothing in a very long time.
His nervous system gradually unknots in a process that he mostly doesn't monitor, the way you don't watch a bruise heal. You just notice, one day, that it doesn't hurt when you press it anymore, even if the color is still clearing.
Having clients for his medical practice isn't exactly a problem, even all the way out here.
That's what he'd tell someone if they asked, at least. And he means it as a natural fact. But it doesn't, in his head, land flat and certain the way natural facts are supposed to. It's different from what he thought it would be. Even that isn't the right way to describe what occurs, what the daily texture of practicing medicine out here turns out to feel like, how it arranges itself into something unlike anything in his previous professional life in urban areas.
In cities, emergency medicine is pure volume. It is an unrelenting swinging door of cases, of intake forms and triage decisions and the constant management of what's acute versus what's going to become acute. The shuffle of urgency levels, the administrative machinery grinding alongside the medical one. Trying to keep people from dying while you're pretty sure you're dying yourself. He was good at it. He didn't love it the way some of his colleagues claimed to love it, but he was competent, efficient, and he could be, mostly, relied upon not to fall apart, which in emergency medicine covers most of what's required.
Out here, truly rural people don't fetch a doctor until there's no longer a question of whether they need one.
It's a regular trope of working in any hospital, and he'd known it to be theoretically true. What he hadn't understood was the way it would feel to see it in practice, repeatedly and exclusively. The stoic delay, the waiting until a thing has gone beyond what an individual can manage or ignore. He's stabilized farmers until ambulances arrived many times already, men who've come in with injuries that have been untended for days, whose stoicism or practicality or stubbornness or some combination of all fucking three kept them working through what definitely needed to have been a trip to the emergency room.
He's treated three Amish families, small children with the croup and chicken pox, mothers with infants who wanted vaccines but hadn't been able to get them because of their husbands' objections, who'd found him specifically because he was close and could be visited without making it an occasion worth a day's expedition. Those visits tend to happen on weekday mornings, when he's learned, without being told explicitly, not to ask too many questions about logistics.
He gives vaccines to every mother who comes to him wanting them. He asks nothing about the husbands. That's never gonna be a complicated decision.
There's a routine shaping up, in other words, and the routine is satisfying in a key that's lower and quieter than what he's used to. He's not used to it, but it's more sustained. Not the sharp, bright satisfaction of stabilizing something acute in an environment with no inhibitions, but the steadier kind that comes from showing up in the same place every day and watching people begin to trust that you'll be there. He hadn't known he was capable of valuing the latter kind. He's starting to think he might be, just as he's starting to think he enjoys pastoral living. Which is to say: it's good, but the dizziness persists.
He's beginning to adjust to it—to the pace, to the proportions of this life, to the specific shape of the quiet—when the noise starts.
Late at night. Way too late.
Much later than anyone ought to be up. He's been out here long enough by now, a month and some change, to have absorbed the unspoken rules of the middle-of-nowhere-ness, the code of rural living that nobody writes down because it's so basic it seems like it should be legible on its own—and one of those rules, genuinely the most basic, is that noise has a curfew. There are miles of flat land and few enough neighbors that sound carries differently out here than it does in any city, and the people who live here seem to understand, without needing to talk about it, that the quiet is a shared resource. That you don't disturb it without cause. When the sun is down, and there's no work left to do, you let the dark be dark and silent. No one's awake to work. There's no reason for any noise.
So when he wakes at what his phone tells him is twenty past two to a sound from outside, his first half-asleep thought is an animal. Some large animal keening, or something caught in a trap or fence somewhere, or something just generally in distress. His second thought, coming in sharp as he sits up and his senses arrive more completely, is that this is distinctly not an animal.
This is beyond freaky as fuck.
This is vocabulary, guttural and muffled, and coming from an unintelligible distance, impossible to locate in the dark and the quiet. It seems to arrive from everywhere and nowhere, which might be the result of the flat land bending sound in ways that make him dizzy. It's the sound of a human being in pain, or possibly of a human being releasing something through a register that is adjacent to pain, that he associates with pain because that's the context in which he's heard it before, through ER walls and behind curtained bays with metal beds.
He stands at the window and looks out at the black nothing of the property. The grass and the dark sky and no lights for miles.
It lasts for close to an hour. He knows this because he stays at the window for most of it, unable to make himself go back to bed, though he also can't do anything useful from where he's standing. The sound rises and subsides and rises again, going hoarse in phases and then recovering, and there's no distress call coming in on his phone, no lights appearing on the road. Whoever is responsible for that sound, they are apparently not in danger of a kind that anyone else has decided to do something about.
He could call the police. He stands there for a while with his phone in his hand, thinking about calling the police, and then decides, for reasons he can't fully articulate, not to. There's something about the sound that doesn't fit an emergency. He is a man who has spent a great deal of his professional life sorting the sounds of emergency from the sounds of other things, and this sits in a category that he doesn't have a name for. Something archaic, something that tugs at a part of his memory not from medicine but from somewhere older. Somewhere where the grief lives within a body.
He goes back to bed before it's over. He doesn't sleep. And the next night, it happens again. And the night after that.
By what would've been the fourth day, it stops being heard. And by the fourth day—daylit, routine, a mother and toddler coming in from down the road, him washing his hands and prescribing amoxicillin and asking how she's sleeping—the occurrence has already begun to lose some of its sticking power. It sits in the back of his mind as a thing that happened, classified as not-his-business, inexplicable but not emergency-grade. He notes it and leaves it be.
This is how he's always managed things that don't have a category. You put them somewhere that isn't the front of your thoughts, and you wait for them to either resolve or become relevant. Usually neither happens. Usually they just sit. Michael Robinavitch has a mind full of nothing and everything.
He's been there nearly two months when the young man appears in his doorway.
It's close to midday, the dead stretch of a quiet morning with one patient already seen and no expectation of another before afternoon. He's in the back, reading, sitting in the disorienting silence that he has stopped fighting with any actual effort. He hears the front door. Doesn't immediately move, because sometimes people wander in, curious, and wander back out without wanting anything specific. He's learned to let that happen without jumping up, and also not to see it as a waste of time. The two things can coexist without impatience. Instead, he waits.
Footsteps have walked the length of the exterior drive, from its gravel path to the practice's threshold. Then they stop.
Now he gets up and goes to the waiting room, and in the doorway, one hand on the frame, is a young man who is not coming fully through the door yet. As if he hasn't made the final decision to commit to being inside.
He's in modest attire—long sleeves and wool pants, both too heavy for the July temperature outside, and a hat with a solid brim that puts him somewhere adjacent to Plain dress but not precisely in it. Not any Amish community Robby recognizes. The hat's a little wrong, and something in the cut of the pants is wrong. Curly hair the color of dishwater, getting a bit long, starting to push out from under the brim. He looks young. Twenty-something, mid-twenties perhaps, and his face does a thing that Robby has seen before and always found difficult to describe clinically.
There's history resting in it. Something is sitting behind the features that makes them quieter than they'd otherwise be. He's sweet-looking, and his eyes, when he meets Robby's, are a sunken and downturned blue that is immediately compelling—not for any reason Robby really thinks is smart to examine right then, but in the basic observational sense. Purely observational. The sense in which some rare things simply and immediately capture attention.
He's also moving carefully. There's a slight unevenness to the gait and a way he holds himself against his own clothing, as if the friction of fabric on skin is something he's managing moment to moment. It's subtle. A layman wouldn't necessarily catch it, especially because the kid is trying so hard to avoid showing the effects. Another case of a rural man not seeking the doctor until the alternative becomes worse than the admission.
"You're the… doctor? The new one?"
His voice is quiet. Uncertain where to land in the room. Directly to him? To the walls? The open space?
"I am." Robby settles into the straightforward register, the one that's calibrated to not alarm anyone nor coddle. "Doctor Robinavitch, this is my office. You got questions? You wanna step inside?"
The young man steps inside. He looks at the walls—the diplomas, the license, the absence of any decorative intention—and then back at Robby, and says, almost to himself, "You're not a Nebraskan." Then, registering that this was possibly not a polite opening, he adds, "I can hear it in your voice."
"Nope." There's no point in arguing with accuracy. "Pennsylvania originally, but I've seen a lot of places. Lived almost everywhere." He gestures toward the chairs in the waiting area, which are plain and functional, nothing that tries to communicate warmth it doesn't have. "Come. Sit, if you wanna talk."
The young man sits, and the sitting is notably uncomfortable. Robby doesn't comment on it. He leans against the edge of his desk and waits with the quality of patience that he's been cultivating out here, the kind that gives things room to arrive at their own speed.
"So many places, and yet you pick here." He looks at the room again, at the flat Nebraska nothingness visible through the small window. "Couldn't even find a home in Omaha? Had to have the whole corn shucker experience?"
"The quiet suits me, Mr.…?"
He pauses just long enough to do something with his expression. There's a contemplative, intentional loosening of the rigidity in his brow. The softening makes his eyes seem even bigger, even more fit for a professional, thorough observation. "Oh, Whitaker. But you can just call me Dennis."
"Right. Well, Dennis, I imagine you didn't come all the way here to ask me questions about myself."
Something shifts in Dennis's face. He looks at his hands, then back up, like someone who had a reason for being here that they're now second-guessing the wisdom of. Or who's actively stalling. Or both. Probably both.
"I could've. We don't get a lot of outsiders this far out."
"You could've," Robby agrees, letting a pause he's not actually using fill up the space between words. "But did you?"
The quiet between them has a stickiness, a traction that isn't, Robby immediately knows, ordinary to doctor-patient conversations. Even ones this unconventional. Dennis's eyes drop to his own lap again, and then come back.
"…No sir, I did not."
The sir does something that has no business doing what it does, landing on Robby like the first note of something he didn't know was being played. He processes it in the flat, practiced way that he processes a lot of things, and keeps his expression precisely level.
"Describe the problem. What are your concerns?"
Dennis looks at the wall to the left of Robby's shoulder for a moment. "It's… I don't know. Maybe I ought to show you."
"We can do that. I'll show you back to the exam room. Uhm, just through here." He nods, gesturing for Dennis to follow him.
The exam room is clean and spare. Table, stool, the cabinet with its supplies. The overhead light is clinical and LED, pure white and unflattering. Dennis comes through the door and stops in the middle of the room, hat in hand now, turning it slowly by the brim with both hands, and Robby moves past him to the stool and sits, giving him room.
"Take your time."
Dennis takes his hat off. He sets it on the table with some care. Then he reaches for his shirt hem and begins the process of untucking it, and it's immediately evident, even before anything is visible, that this is a process requiring management—the muscles in his neck brace for tension, his movements slow and deliberate, going still for half a second when the fabric shifts against his back in some way that irritates whatever's wrong.
The shirt comes up, and the whatever's wrong is immediately real.
Lash marks. Deep and plentiful, distributed across his back in patterns that speak of repeated application with something thin and intentional—no accident, no farm equipment, nothing as chaotic as a fall. The bruising around them has the coloration of injury that has been accumulating across some days without treatment. The marks run close enough together in some places to overlap, the deeper ones at their centers a darkened red-pink that hasn't moved toward healing in any meaningful way. Above the collar of his pants, below the hem that the shirt usually covers. This isn't a problem in one area, but rather all of them.
"Shit." He says it before he can decide not to, and then he backpedals. "I mean—alright. Alright." He stands and moves to the table. "Take a seat on the edge of the table there, and I can help you take this off."
"Yes, sir."
"Look, kid—you don't have to call me 'sir'. Doctor is just fine."
Dennis turns to sit on the edge of the exam table, careful and slow about it in a way that involves managing both the sitting itself and the rotation of his body, and looks at Robby with those sunken blue eyes from the monumental, wide distance of about two feet.
"Whatever you like, doctor."
The 'whatever' has the same sticky quality as the tame waiting room conversation. He doesn't examine the quality, because, frankly, now's the furthest from the appropriate fuckin' time. He collects himself—one internal moment, addressed and set aside for mental scolding later—and reaches for Dennis's shirt hem to assist with the removal.
"I'm going to pull this up over your head. Some of these may have dried to the fabric, so I want to do this carefully. Can you raise your arms for me?"
Dennis raises his arms, or raises them as much as he's able to, and what that looks like—the effort and the particular held-breath quality of it—gives Robby a more specific picture of the distribution before the shirt is even off. He works the hem up slowly, watching the points of contact, pausing when he feels resistance, managing the separation from skin with the mechanical attention that he gives to any wound, and sets the shirt aside on the supply cabinet.
They're everywhere.
That's what his brain reports before it starts logging any of the specifics. Everywhere, extending up the back of his neck, the first marks clearly visible above the collar of his shirt when he'd walked in, and Robby had missed them, and disappearing below the waistband of his pants without reaching a terminus. No final destination. The marks on his upper back and neck are fresher; the ones at mid-back have some days on them. There's a geography to it, a repeated attention paid to areas for a reason he can't even imagine dreaming up.
"More under there, I'm guessing?"
"Yes, sir." He corrects it. "Doctor. Yeah, there's more. To the soles of my feet."
Robby takes a breath through his nose and moves to the supply cabinet. Saline, gauze, antiseptic, and suture materials on the off chance they're needed, though he's already forming the sense that some of these are past the window for stitching without risking contamination. He straightens his glasses before putting on gloves, which has the secondary effect of giving him half a second to compose a face that is doing several things right now.
"You walked on—" He stops. Starts over. "Okay. Dennis, you mind telling me what happened?"
"That I do, sir."
He's pulling the stool to position behind Dennis, laying out the supplies on the counter where he can reach them. He registers the response without reacting strongly to it, which takes some work.
"You mind?" He raises Dennis's arms to get the comprehensive view of the worst of it, checking the extent of the damage. "This shouldn't sting. A few of these might need sutures, but I wanna get you cleaned up first."
"A few on my legs are already sutured." He says it with the flat factual tone of someone reporting a completed task. Then: "And yes, I mind. Very sorry if that impedes care, and I understand if you want me to go. I can go. Really shouldn't even be here for too long."
Robby pauses with gauze in hand.
"Hold on. Just—wait." He puts the gauze down. "You gave yourself stitches?"
"…Yes."
"Can I see those?"
The silence has a particular quality in the exam room. Dennis looks at his knees.
"My pants. They're on my legs."
Robby stands, moves to the door, opens it. "Right. I'll step out. Take those off when you're ready and just knock."
He stands in the hallway with the door between them, and occupies himself with the specific discipline of not thinking while he waits. That practiced emptying of personal dreck, the kind he's been doing in waiting rooms and hallways for thirty years whenever the alternative is premature analysis clouded by useless emotion. He looks at the far wall of the corridor. He breathes through his nose. He listens to the quiet sounds of Dennis moving on the other side of the door, which are slow and effortful and tell him, without his needing to see anything, that this is taking more out of this man than any of it should.
The knock comes, and with the sign, he goes back in.
Dennis is on the table, pants folded and set aside, sitting in his Plain dress-adjacent undershorts with his legs extended and the sutures visible on both thighs and one calf. Robby crouches to get close.
They're weirdly good.
They're good. Nice and even, properly spaced, the knot tension consistent, the suture line as clean as anything he'd produce himself in a clinical setting with the right materials. The materials here are, objectively, wrong. He can see sewing thread that's been led through by what was probably an uncleared non-surgical needle, the kind of improvised solution that should theoretically produce infection and scarring at clinical levels, and yet the technique is correct in every way that technique can be correct. Better than he's seen from burses and doctors with proper materials in the stability of a medical bay reserved for a single patient.
He crouches there for longer than he needs to, looking at the sutures and at the older wounds surrounding them, some of which go to the back of the knee, and down the shin, and he will take this man's word for it about the soles of his feet.
"Where did you learn to do these?" His voice is even. He means it as a clinical question, though it does more than clinical work.
Dennis is looking at the ceiling, chewing on his bottom lip.
"I know things," he says, which is not an answer, and is the most answer he's probably going to give right now.
Robby stands. He looks at Dennis, sitting on the edge of the table with his hands in his lap and his eyes on the ceiling and his entire body doing the thing it's been doing since he walked in—existing in a state of managed endurance, the ongoing performance of fine that people learn when not being fine is not an achievable option.
"I'm going to start with your back," Robby says. "Clean and dress what's there. Then your legs. Then I want to look at your feet, if you'll let me. We'll go in that order and I won't ask you anything else about it right now."
Dennis's eyes come back down from the ceiling and settle on him. Something in the face considers the announced anonymity. The way he's looking at Robby isn't really readable, or rather is readable in a way that Robby elects not to read right now, not in this room, not with this patient and these wounds. That's a line of thinking for later, with a glass of whiskey and an album and more of the quiet that makes him a little dizzy in a good way.
"Okay," Dennis says.
"Okay." Robby pulls the stool behind him again, uncaps the saline. "This might—"
"It won't bother me."
He says it quietly and plainly, and it lands as information rather than bravado—not trust me, pal, I can take it but pain in this specific context has already been negotiated with extensively, by me, before I walked in here. It sits in the slightly-too-warm Nebraska summer air of the exam room for a moment, and then it goes wherever things go when they're too large for the immediate, pressing context.
Robby begins to clean. He is methodical and thorough, and he says nothing that isn't clinical, and Dennis is right—he doesn't react to any of it. The quiet in the exam room is the particular quiet he's been living with for two months, dense and weighted and honest. Outside, the cottonwoods move against the July sky, bending in some direction, unbothered.
And he keeps Dennis for close to two hours.
Most of that is the sheer volume of wound care required—cleaning, irrigating, dressing the worst of the lash marks with antibiotic ointment and gauze that he knows will need to be changed in two days, the careful documentation of the sutures Dennis has already placed and the two that Robby removes and redoes with proper materials. He gives him a tetanus booster. He checks his blood pressure and his temperature and his eyes and reflexes, not because he has any reason to suspect neurological involvement but because if this is going to be a patient of his, he's going to have baseline readings... and because the process of doing each of these things gives him an excuse to remain in the room with Robby watching him.
Dennis submits to all of it. Compliant in an odd way, impossible to place—not passive, not absence of confidence, but the quality of a person who has made a considered decision to extend trust in a new direction and is following through on that decision with a doctor-like precision. He answers yes or no when clinical questions require it. He doesn't offer anything unsolicited.
"You should come back in two days. These need to be changed." He says it while writing in the chart he's opened for Dennis Whitaker, which contains more gaps than any chart he's made and is going to stay that way. "If anything opens up or starts to look infected before then, sooner."
Dennis is sitting on the exam table, dressed now, hat back on, looking entirely like a person in the process of deciding whether to still be here or to be somewhere else in his mind.
"You might think I've got reason to be careful about doctors," he says. It's not quite a warning. More like information, offered in the limited way he can offer something.
"I imagine you might," Robby says. He closes the chart. "Doesn't change what I told you. Two days."
Dennis looks at him for a long moment with those downturned blue eyes.
"Yes, sir," he says, and this time Robby thinks there might be something deliberate in it. Some faint and careful delivery that makes him hold back a very obvious, very intrigued double-take.
He watches Dennis walk through the front door of the practice, across the gravel and out toward the road, moving with the same careful management of self that he walked in with. The slight uneven gait. The held-together quality of him.
Robby goes back to the exam room and stands in it for a while, in the particular quiet.
In his chart he writes:
25, M. Multiple lacerations consistent with repeated flagellation, varying degrees of age and depth. Several sutured by patient. Good technique, inappropriate materials, no current signs of infection. Cleaned, redressed. Patient declined to give account of injury mechanism. Tetanus current. Returning in 48 hours.
He stands there with the pen in his hand.
He adds, after a moment: Sewing thread, uncleared. Very good technique.
Outside, the cottonwoods are still moving. The road has gone back to empty. The quiet has absorbed Dennis Whitaker into it as if he was never there, the way it absorbs everything. Completely, without comment, leaving no record.
Robby goes back to the main house, fills the kettle, and stands in the kitchen while it heats, waiting for the whistle.
When it comes, he doesn't flinch. And he only gets a little dizzy.