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Cassie McKay arrived home under the blaze of a luminous orange sky on a muggy August night. Her shift had, miraculously, not run overlong, and she’d pulled up outside her slightly lopsided house before the sun had fully set. The pop-crackle of her tires upon the asphalt caused the two individuals currently standing barefoot in the minuscule patch of scraggly grass that constituted the McKay front yard to pause guiltily.
“Hey, mom!” called Harrison cheerfully, hoping his bright demeanor would mask the fact that he was currently wearing swim trunks and dripping wet from the sprinkler-jumping-session-turned-hose-fight he had just been engaged in. The carefully kinked green length held firmly behind his back was doing him no favors.
“You, ah, got home early.” noted Victoria Javadi nervously, her brown doe-eyes barely peeking out from behind the sodden curtain of ink-black hair hanging in front of her face like the coat of a shaggy dog. Like Harrison, she was clad in only a bathing suit, though hers consisted of a violet two-piece that left little to the imagination.
“Sure did. You two, ah, have fun?” Cassie asked, eyebrow raised even as a lopsided smirk hung on her lips. Her gaze drifted back and forth between the guilty parties searching for the fault line that would signal who was going to crack first.
Victoria and Harrison exchanged a silent but extremely loud glance. “Uh-huh!” chirruped the med student with false cheer. Inside, her stomach was churning. What if Cassie never let her babysit again?!? Lost both personal and professional respect for her because-
Before the younger woman could mentally spiral further, Cassie’s crooked smirk turned into a full-blown smile. Bingo. “Come on, you two. Let’s get you dry before the chill of the night sets in.” She turned to Victoria, eyeing her attire significantly. “I assume you brought a change of clothes, since this little escapade was clearly planned ahead of time?”
“Y-yep! In my bag!” Victoria called over her shoulder, already high-tailing it for the front door.
Cassie let out a laugh before turning an expectant eye towards her son. “Turn the water off and put the hose and sprinkler away before you come inside, mister.”
“But mom-“ came the expected protest.
Unfortunately, Cassie was quite prepared for an argument. “No buts. And if I find out you lied about Victoria coming over to help with your summer project, you’ll have a lot more to complain about than a two-minute chore.”
Wisely, Harrison chose to quit while he was ahead.
Thirty-five minutes later found the trio sitting on the overstuffed couch located in the heart of the home’s cozy living room. Knickknacks lined shelves and every available surface, and there were pictures of Harrison grinning from every wall. Once in a while, one of them would contain a shock of red hair, or head of white curls that meant they also contained Cassie or her father. Most of the furniture was mismatched, but the pieces were, for the most part, sturdy and elegant. Three steaming mugs of freshly-brewed hot cocoa sat upon an exception to that rule; a rickety coffee table whose back left leg had seen better days. Fixing it was on Cassie’s to-do list, but as a resident physician and single mother, the mile-long document rarely experienced any form of completion.
Harrison and Victoria, freshly showered, were changed into garments that did not cling to their skin and invite the rapidly cooling night air into their bones. The young man had opted for PJs, the navy blue Henley and checkered fleece pants making it clear that autumn was fast approaching. The twenty-something, on the other hand, was clad in an oversized t-shirt the exact origins of which she was unsure. She’d stolen it from Santos and Whitaker’s place after crashing (yes, Trinity had not stopped making jokes about it for a week) there after a night out, but which doctor had been the original owner was anybody’s guess. Beneath its fraying hem, the ends of the tiny grey athletic shorts she’d had since undergrad peeked out. She hadn’t worn them in a while, and as such hadn’t realized exactly how much skin they’d show on her non-teenaged form.
The atmosphere was relaxed, but as the room rapidly darkened, Cassie decided to break the serenity and flick on the burgundy lamp standing proudly next to the couch. Immediately, the shadows of dusk were chased away by the warm butter-yellow glow. However, the new lighting happened to hit Victoria’s skin at an angle that illuminated an old, silvery scar that sat fairly high up on the woman’s exposed thigh. As both a doctor and a woman who was extremely nosy when it came to those she cared about, Cassie couldn’t help but make a comment.
“What happened there?” she asked, tone casual despite the way her eyes were trained on the long-healed wound like a pair of powerful magnets.
“Hm?” questioned Victoria, drowsy and zoned out in the way that came only after a long day of fun in the sun.
“Your thigh. You have a scar-“ The redhead lifted a hand and indicated the spot on her own leg, which was clad in a pair of torn, baggy jeans that were likely older than both of the other inhabitants of the room.
Victoria felt heat rush to her cheeks. “Oh, that, it was so stupid and embarrassing.” She blurted, gaze suddenly finding anything that wasn’t alive, or, more importantly, sitting on the couch with her, the most fascinating thing in the world.
In tandem, mother and son sent their guest supremely curious looks. Feeling the combined weight of the blue-hazel stares, the med student had no choice but to look at her hosts. Taken out at the knees by the irresistible tag-team, Victoria resigned herself to telling the story the pair had worked so hard to drag out of her.
“Ugh, fine. So, one time when I was a kid, I found out about the secret cookie stash my dad keeps on top of the fridge. Naturally, later that night I decided to sneak into the kitchen and try to steal some. I managed to get one of the tall chairs from the counter over there without much trouble, but when I stood on top of it, the seat spun out from under me and I fell to the ground. My leg caught the edge of the metal backing on the way down, and it slashed open a few inches of my thigh. Of course, the whole thing caused an absolute ruckus that alerted my Mom, and she basically came running with a surgical-grade medkit.” The recounting had begun with animated flare, Javadi’s arms swinging wildly in the air as she delivered an account of her youthful antics. Towards the end, though, a bitter edge crept into her voice, and the amusing atmosphere slid into something resembling the kind of tense conversation with a patient’s loved-ones every employee of the Pitt hoped to avoid.
Cassie blinked, then tilted her head. The story seemed pretty typical so far, but something was niggling in her mind. Plus, Victoria had gone stiff, and was playing with a raised seam of the couch in a way that screamed nervousness. Ohhh. That was it. Raised seam.
“Huh, you wouldn’t think a surgeon like Shamsi would do a suture job that would leave a scar like that.” observed the elder doctor. Indeed, the scar on Victoria’s thigh was remarkably uneven; almost invisible on one side, but much more pronounced on the other.
Victoria’s shoulders twitched up towards her ears as a sudden tension raced up her spine. “Um, well, she only did the first couple…” grumbled the med student, looking and sounding utterly small.
“Who did the rest, your dad?” piped up Harrison, who had been silent for the exchange thus far, content to listen quietly as one of his favorite people shared a story from her childhood. Victoria talked a lot, Harrison had noticed, but it was rare for her to talk about her past. So, when she did, he tended to hold on to every scrap of information he could. As such, he’d remembered suddenly during the recounting that Victoria’s father was also a doctor, but not the kind that gave stitches anymore. So, he decided to speak up and let Victoria know that he cared enough to remember.
Unfortunately, though, the young woman was too far lost in her own head and emotions to pick up the subtle show of care from the pre-teen. She could feel her chest tightening in anxiety, both because of the current conversation and reverberating from the past. Blunt nails coated in chipped lavender paint dug into tanned thighs in order to ground Victoria and keep any hint of a waver from her voice. (The technique was an old one. Even older than the story she was telling.) “Uh, no. I did. My punishment was that I had to take care of the wound myself. Mom numbed me up and did the first few stitches so I could see what to do, then talked me through the rest. Then she had me bandage it, wrote out some wound-care instructions for me to follow, and sent me back to bed. Obviously, I wasn’t exactly an expert physician back then, so it left a scar.”
Victoria’s final statement was punctuated with a forced little laugh that made Cassie feel ill.
“Jesus. How old were you, Javadi?” murmured the resident almost involuntarily. If she were honest, she didn’t actually want to know the answer to her question. She knew without a doubt it would break her heart.
The younger woman glanced toward the ceiling in thought, as if her steel trap of a mind actually had to search for the answer. “Oh, well, it was a good few months into taking high school level courses with my tutors, so, nine.” She answered eventually, casual as you please. As if her statement wasn’t patently horrifying.
Bile rose in Cassie’s throat as she pictured the scene. God, how much smaller had the woman been? No bone in her body could ever understand how a mother could look at their child bleeding and crying on the ground and decide it was a good time to detach herself from the situation by teaching a prepubescent little girl to perform medical procedures in a way no modern teaching hospital or medical school would ever condone. The older doctor could already feel the horror that would jolt through her the next time she saw Javadi with a suture kit in her hands. The only thing she was going to be able to picture was a tiny, shaking hand plunging the needle into her own thigh.
In his spot on Victoria’s other side, Harrison was feeling cold, his chest and throat tight. He remembered when he was nine and had dislocated his shoulder falling off the playground at recess. It was the most (physically) painful thing he had experienced in his life, and he had cried and screamed his head off the entire ride in the ambulance. It was during his mom’s first year as a full doctor, and also during the time her custody was extremely limited. Despite that, the minute he was wheeled into the PTMC, she’d dropped everything to be by his side and care for him. A lot of that day was blurry, to be honest, but he clearly remembered his mother’s soothing words, the way her cool hands had wiped sweat and tears from his face, and how she’d held him through the shots and reduction, physically blocking the “scary medical stuff” with her body so he didn’t have to see what her coworkers were doing to fix him.
The thought of his Victoria having none of those things when she’d been in similar shoes made his heart hurt. He’d always thought that it was cool that they had something in common, both being the children of doctors. But clearly, Victoria’s mom was nothing like his own. Harrison’s mom always made dumb, eye-roll worthy jokes about how being a doctor helped her “take care of him extra special hard”. Apparently, her medical degree made Victoria’s mother do the exact opposite. So, with a stubborn set of his jaw that made him look remarkably like the eldest person on the couch, Harrison made a decision.
“Well, if anything like that ever happens again, make sure you call my mom for help. She’s pretty good at patching people up.” he stated, the words landing far more genuinely than either adult had expected from the usually flippant pre-teen.
Victoria sent the boy a toothy smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes. “Well, Hare, if I could take care of myself back then, I can totally do it now that I’m almost an MD.” It had the trappings and cadence of sarcasm or a joke, but the humor utterly failed to land.
“I don’t care if you can, I meant that you shouldn’t have to, and that my mom is really good at taking care of people. She’s been a doctor longer, so she’s better than you, right?” he retorted brusquely, heat creeping into his tone as his frustration grew.
“Hey, bud, simmer down. There’s no need to-“ Cassie tried to diffuse the situation, despite the way she completely agreed with her son’s sentiment. She would show up for Victoria any way, any how, if she ever called for help. Of that, she was sure. Thankfully, it also seemed like Javadi believed it too.
“All right all right, I surrender. If I ever find myself in need of patching up, Dr. J will concede to Dr. McKay’s superior wisdom.”
Dark eyes were sparkling again, and Cassie felt something loosen in her chest. “Damn right!” she crowed, preening exaggeratedly in false pride. Four youthful eyes rolled in tandem, and as the moon rose over the jagged horizon of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the homey, peaceful atmosphere seeped back into the cluttered living room. Soon, the air was filled with laughter, and the beating of two hearts secretly planning to drown the third in the kind of love and safety it had clearly never been nurtured with. To them, Victoria Javadi would always be a person first, and a doctor second.