Chapter Text
Robby rode like something was chasing him. He stopped when he had to fill up the Bonnie's tank, or when he was so tired he knew he was a danger to other people, but otherwise he spent hour after hour on the bike. His back hurt; his head felt hollow. States whipped past him, their landscapes blurring into a smeared nothingness of fields and trees and subdivisions, a thousand separate highway off-ramps each promising the same blend of McDonald's-Subway-Exxon-Quality Inn-Next Exit.
He made it to Head Smashed-In Buffalo Jump in seven days flat. There was a smattering of cars and RVs in the visitor centre parking lot when Robby drove in, but mostly he seemed to have it to himself. Just Robby, and the sound of the wind moving restlessly over the Albertan prairie, and the huge, huge bowl of the sky.
It was exactly what the tourism websites had promised him. It wasn't what he'd expected. What exactly that was, he didn't know; couldn't name. Revelation? Release? Instead there was the land, witness to century after century of human history, and keeping its own counsel about it all.
Robby took a photo of the view and sent it to Jack. Made it. No buffalo harmed in the pursuit of this road trip.
Even with the time difference, Jack was unlikely to be awake for another few hours; Robby didn't expect an immediate response.
He strolled through the visitor centre, looking at all the exhibits and reading all of little placards, because that seemed the polite thing to do. He walked the outdoor interpretive trails that looped out to the ancient buffalo kill site and back again. He found himself crying again while he walked, and had to scrub at his cheeks and blow his nose before he went back inside.
In the gift shop, he bought two fridge magnets and a Coke, and checked his phone to find that there was still no response from Jack.
Fair enough, Robby thought as he got back on the Bonnie and pointed her south. If he were Jack, he'd want more than a week's break from Robby's bullshit.
Robby had no timetable now, no particular place to go, so he crossed the border into Montana and stopped in a tiny town where one low-slung building was a combination diner, motel, convenience store, and gas station. Robby parked the bike, checked in for the night, and left his bags into his room before looping around the building to the diner.
Inside it was all red leatherette booths and white-painted wood, with several taxidermied owls arranged in a mutely judgemental row on a shelf along one wall. Mounted over their heads was a series of rusted saws. Robby raised his eyebrows. Somewhere like New York City, a decor choice like that would have been a deliberate exploitation of camp used to jack up the prices. Here, it just meant you could get a meatloaf dinner for $7.25 from someone who'd probably killed the birds themself. Who ever said that travel couldn't broaden your outlook?
While Robby waited for the server to bring his food, he pulled out his phone. There was a message from Dana (Just checking in), one from Whitaker (Had to buy you a new watering can but everything is absolutely fine, I promise. Plants will be ok and I'm putting all your mail on your kitchen table), and two, finally, from Jack.
The first said, Looks like a postcard.
The second, sent almost an hour later, said, I'm enjoying not being made to look stupid. Keep it up, brother.
If Robby had sped west, he dawdled his way south. Open plains and deep green forests gave way to an impossibly saturated landscape, where ochres and pinks and oranges were layered together in whipped confections of weathered stone. Sometimes Robby would park his bike on the side of the road and just sit for long stretches and admire the view. After so many hours—years—spent beneath the Pitt's fluorescent bulbs, cooped up within its white and greige walls, the sunlight and the sheer colour here felt like a shock to his system.
One morning, he forgot to put sunscreen on his nose and it burned fiercely before shedding an improbable amount of skin.
"Oh honey," said a concerned woman in an oversized American flag t-shirt who passed him at a rest stop just outside of Cedar City, "maybe you should have a doctor look at your poor face."
"I'll get right on that," Robby said, deadpan.
Every few days, he sent Dana a photo of where he was, tacit proof of life; in return, he got tiny glimpses of how things were going in the Pitt without him.
Salmonella outbreak at one of the local Denny's, and let me tell you I never, ever in all my born days want to hear another joke about a Grand Slam. Not one.
I think Santos and Garcia are now officially DONE done but as best I can tell they were never officially ON on so do with that what you will. I'm getting too old to keep track of all this.
Overheard Gloria telling Norris that DPCS Comm, quote, was apparently also unofficially part of Dr Robinavitch's remit and one FTE appointment alone isn't going to cut it even if we're merely trying to ensure that all his workload is covered at a minimum level and that is ultimately your problem, end quote. You're welcome.
Robby and Jack exchanged messages more frequently, with Robby sending Jack a slightly more expansive range of photos than Dana got: not just landscape shots, but sometimes also photos of meals he'd eaten, or the bike's odometer, or a particularly cool bug.
Jack's responses came in staccato bursts, sometimes mid-afternoon and sometimes in the small hours. He never mentioned the hospital at all. Robby supposed it was a function of Jack having to step up more at work—in Robby's absence, Jack was probably the longest-serving attending in the ED, other than Hicks—and because of that wanting to keep any non-essential talk about the place to the absolute minimum.
Robby could respect that. After all, it was his fault that Jack was having to do so much in the first place.
Instead of work, Jack's messages covered a free-floating array of topics.
What the hell are the Pirates thinking with this line-up? It's like they've got some kind of public humiliation fetish. Christ almighty. Fucking hell.
We're fucking weird about lawns in this country, brother. That's all I'll say.
A link to a long-form news article about something to do with the Pentagon, a rogue general, mission deployments, and line-item budget misappropriations that Robby didn't really follow when he skimmed it, but that Jack was clearly pissed about.
Who invented soup? A goddamn hero, that's who. Soup is fucking great.
The last one was sent just after eleven in the morning, east coast time. Not when he'd anticipate hearing from Jack, but Robby knew that he had occasional bad pain days that fucked with his sleep schedule. Maybe cooking was an attempt at finding a distraction.
Better than a SWAT team, at least.
Soup is great, Robby wrote back, the first message that he'd actually written out in text to Jack in a while. Then he felt like an idiot for having written soup is great, so he followed it up with a photo of the view from his current bedroom window: a depressing strip of cracked asphalt and two blocks of neon-signed fast food places and cheap motels, silhouetted in front of some of the most starkly gorgeous mountains that Robby had ever seen.
God bless America, Jack replied.
Visiting the Grand Canyon had been on Robby's bucket list for years, but in a vague, middle-ranking kind of way. The photos of it were beautiful, of course, and a widely-agreed on natural wonder felt like the kind of thing you were required to include on a bucket list—but there were lots of beautiful places in the world, and an attractive hole in the ground was still a hole in the ground.
And then Robby got to the North Rim.
He got there and he looked out across the expanse of air ahead of him, and down to the steep drop below, and at the informational sign that told him that what he could see right now was just one small section of the canyon as a whole, and all of it took his breath away. The distance and the light haze in the air turned the walls across from him into a smeared chalk pastel of blues and pinks and purples, lightly furred by dark stands of juniper and pine.
The Grand Canyon was a hole in the ground, and the sight of it was like a jolt to his heart.
Robby lost track of how long he stood there, watching the shadows of clouds drifting for miles across the crags and valleys. No wonder this was a place so many peoples held sacred. If he'd remembered the words to the berakhah on seeing a wonder, Robby might have said it. Instead, he let himself imagine his Bubbe—whom he didn't think had ever taken a vacation in her life—standing next to him and reciting it for them both.
He knew he must have had one of his crying jags at one point, because when Robby came back to himself he realised that there was salt water drying on his cheeks. He swiped at his face, irritated. And then something in him realised, hazily at first and then with growing clarity, that he'd stood there that whole time and he hadn't once thought of taking one last, irrevocable step. He'd presumed that he would. But he didn't want to see how much closer to the edge he could get. He didn't. He took a step back.
Why was this something that made him cry even more?
Robby walked back to the bike with his trembling hands shoved deep into his pockets; stood next to it while gulping down great mouthfuls from his water bottle, now turned lukewarm. He was tired, and he was angry, and he was scared, and he was—he was so fucking sad, he could see that now—but somewhere between Pittsburgh and here he'd attained the distance he'd needed to see where his feet were planted. To see how far he was from where he wanted to be, and to allow himself to picture some hazy path for how to get there.
After that, Robby tracked back east. He let himself have a couple of nights in a decent hotel in Denver, where he showered and slept, did laundry and slept, ate three meals a day and slept and slept. He drove on. Passing through Kansas, the Bonnie's brakes started playing up. He spent two days in Topeka waiting on some new pads to be fitted, reading through a couple of old Grisham novels in his motel room and wishing that every garage could be as efficient and no-bullshit as Duke's.
Once he was on the move again, Robby sent some more messages: telling Whitaker that he'd be back in Pittsburgh a little ahead of schedule, thanking him for his help and telling him that he could leave the key with the building's super; asking Dana if she could get Caleb to forward him the contact info of the therapists he'd thought might be a good fit for Robby. Robby knew that this was cowardice on his part. Caleb was too much of a professional to ever say I told you so if Robby were to call him up and ask him directly—it was just that some cringing part of Robby couldn't stop fearing that he would.
Everything else, he told himself, everything else could wait.
A month and a day after he left, Robby took the exit marked Pittsburgh off I-79. Nothing looked different. And thanks to Whitaker, Robby's condo didn't have that usual stale-air feeling that came from a long absence. His plants in their pots were still thriving, drinking in the sunlight that poured in through the big window in the living room.
The only real sign that Robby had been away at all was the small mound of mail sitting on the kitchen table. Robby walked past it, dropped his bags at the foot of his bed, stripped off every bit of dusty, sweaty clothing, and walked straight into the shower. At first he turned the water cold, colder, making himself gasp and curse, before cranking it as hot as he could stand it, letting the stream beat down hard on the nape of his neck, his too-tight shoulders.
By the time Robby emerged from the shower, he was flushed pink and had a message waiting for him. Dana: Caleb says to check your email. Welcome back, cap. Robby stood staring down at his phone. He did not have the energy needed to open his work email just then. It was late afternoon, he hadn't eaten since that morning's shitty free hotel breakfast, and so Robby made a command decision. He messaged Jack: You on shift today?
He'd just finished towelling off and pulling on jeans and a t-shirt when Jack responded with a crisp Nope.
That made things easy.
It was strange to be back in his car after so many weeks on the Bonnie. Robby drove over to the grocery store and bought a six pack of one of the few beers that he and Jack could agree on. From there it was two blocks to Jack's favourite burrito place, where Robby got their usual order, and another five minutes brought him to Jack's house, a neat 1960s bungalow a little south of Schenley Park. It was only after Robby knocked on the front door that he realised that he'd just assumed that Jack would be home—he could be at the gym, or the library, or Ace Hardware, or various other places that Jack seemed to crop up in on his day off—but Robby soon heard sounds of movement from inside the house and a muffled, "Hold on! Coming!"
It took Jack a little longer than normal to open up. Robby assumed that he'd been lying down, and needed a moment to get his leg back on while still sleep groggy—but then the door opened, and there Jack was, with a baby in a carrier strapped to his chest.
A live, human baby.
Robby's jaw dropped. "What the fuck?"
Jack put his hands on his hips and looked Robby up and down. "I might say the same to you."