Out Of Character

You can’t talk a man off a ledge who’s committed to jumping. Who’s thought everything out, and has said his goodbyes, and is so done with everything else in this world and on to the next.

Maybe he could’ve asked Jack to do something. They were close, right? They were brothers in everything but blood. Jack could’ve stepped in. But that was the thing of it, wasn’t it? You can’t pass on a burden to someone else and live with it. He wouldn’t do that to Jack—couldn’t do that to Jack, who he knew tried endlessly. Tirelessly. Who’d talked Robby off that ledge many times, off that roof, off those feelings that suffocated him so often. No, he would not shift the weight off of his shoulder like that.

This was his, and Robby had given it to him, and he’d be damned if he wasn’t going to carry it.

Maybe he could’ve betrayed whatever trust Robby instilled in him, and reported the decline, and had Robby hate him for it. He could handle being hated. But for what? A few more months? He doesn’t know. He wants to think that that would’ve sufficed. Anything would have sufficed. But sufficing is not enough.

He knew that, realistically. Sufficing was not enough.

He knew that with patients. With himself. With his best friend, who also carried that weight. Sufficing just wasn’t enough, and if it didn’t happen now, it could happen whenever. Stopping Robby wouldn’t have done anything. A man like that, so unwilling, so relenting in his inability to seek help—that didn’t change, and if it did, it did not change easily.

Dennis doesn’t want to be mad at a dead man.

He really, truly doesn’t. It’s not fair. Not to himself, not to Robby, not to the parts of him that are over being tired of being this angry, petulant thing that can’t control itself.

But he can’t help it. He can’t help the anger in his stomach. Can’t help the frustration, the agony of it all, the desperate dispare that eat at his core when he thinks about it. Which is more often than he’d like.

He remembers the day he’d gotten to work, nothing but dread in his stomach, dead on his feet. He wasn’t going to let himself hope. Three months of living in someone else’s home, haunting it because he was made to.

Dr. Al-Hashimi did well. He respected her. Everyone tried to, with Robby gone. They co existed as best they could — but everyone felt it. Everyone felt the absence.

And then the week came, and went, and that dark green fleece remained somewhere else—somewhere far from the swivel chair at the desk, where it belonged.

The whole department got the email at the same time.

Dennis doesn’t want to think about that.

Six months in total. It was strange. It was all so strange, and Dennis felt dull to it. He’d already grieved months ago.

He’d started long before Michael left.

How sad was that, mourning a man who was alive? He tried not to. But that first week in Robby’s home…

People still look at him like they’re sorry. They don’t say it anymore—the ER is face paced, always going, going, going—but he can see it in their eyes. In the way they hesitate before clapping a hand down on his shoulder.

He thinks maybe they’re scared he’s on the same path. He isn’t. He doesn’t think he is, at least. Maybe that’s why Jack keeps checking in on him. Even though it’s been months, and people have moved on.

(It kind of makes him sick that people have moved on. That people can ignore the absence, the lack, the Robby shaped hole missing in their too busy ER. It makes him sick that everyone seems so fine. Are they pretending? Or is it that easy? Why is it so hard for him? Why can’t he pretend? Why does everyone know how torn up he is? It happened, and they just go back to work? He knows that’s how it is for everything. He knows that. It doesn’t make it right. It doesn’t make him any less sick.)

He tells Dennis all the time that it’s not his fault. That he couldn’t have done anything. That Robby was as stubborn as he was troubled, and that it was one thing after the other. That it was going to happen later, if not now. That he’s known Michael a long time, and that he’d always prepared himself for this when he’d realized how important not being here was to him. He’d tried, he stressed. For years. There were some things you couldn’t talk people out of, no matter how long you stayed or how hard you fought for them.

He wishes Jack would stop talking about it. Wishes Jack would stop reminding him that he was caught in a helpless situation he shouldn’t have been included in. He’s sorry, he says. He’s so sorry that Dennis has been dragged into this.

But he thinks that maybe this is his way of coping. As if he can convince Dennis that he’s okay, and that he doesn’t have to carry this thing. Like he sees it on Dennis too—the way everyone’s afraid he might follow in the footsteps of his mentor. Cut it out before it’s too late. Jacks way of staying behind those bars on the roof, and not on the opposite side, where he’d found him more than once.

They don’t go up there anymore.

He wants to say he’s doing better. That it’s getting easier to breathe, these days. That he doesn’t stay up wondering what if, what if, what if. But he’d be a lair if he said any of that.

Because things aren’t okay. He’s not doing better. It’s not easier to breathe. He can’t shut off the constant stream of what if’s, can’t go to bed at night. He can talk to a therapist about it all he wants, but a therapist can’t hold him at night. A therapist can’t fight away the night sweats, the terrors that keep him up. A therapist can’t bring Robby back.

He’s going to live with this forever, he thinks. Dennis knows one day he’ll stop grieving. But that day feels so, so far away. He’ll think about it, a few years from now, and it’ll still feel fresh.

He’d been desperate enough to pray. The words never made it past Robby’s roof, he figures. They died in that the room he knelt in, hands clasped tight. How stupid of him, to think he could reach God somehow.

He lives with Trinity again. She tries, for him. To get him out of his room, out of his head. Tries to be normal, for him, for the both of them.

They don’t talk about it. She knows what it’s like to lose someone that way.

It’s been a few months, now.

He wants to transfer to a different hospital. But he knows that that’s not going to starve off Robby’s ghost. It’s not going to get rid of the hands on his shoulders, guiding him. It’s not going to make brown eyes any less vivid, less there. Leaving changes nothing— he learned that when he left home.

So, he tries not to think about it. Tries not to think about how in another six months, he’ll go from an R1 to an R2. Tries not to think about how he’s going to be twenty eight, and how Robby’s always going to be fifty four. He doesn’t think about it. He tries so hard not to let it breach his mind.