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"I hope death feels like being picked up from the back seat, and being carried to my bed,
where, tucked in and half asleep, I can hear those who love me talking through a cracked door."
-- Anonymous
He closes his eyes, and to his relief, it’s easy. It’s the easiest thing he’s ever done. The world falls away like he’s going underwater, and he thinks of summers in Cabo when he was a kid. When he was really, really little. He was five, he thinks. Or six. Bobby was there. Bobby was smiling. He held up a starfish, deceased, desiccated by the sun, it’s arms frozen, reaching out. Johnny remembers. He waved back. And Bobby was smiling.
“Look at all its legs,” he said. They put the creature on the beach between them, just at the edge of the water. Sand was caught in all the fine cilia of its branches. Bobby pressed down on it, pushing it into the soft earth before lifting it out. “A star!” he cheered.
Johnny watched as Bobby did it again and again, leaving a long trail of stars stamped across the shoreline like a meteor shower. “Can I try?” he asked.
Bobby gave him the little corpse, and Johnny pressed the starfish down.
“Harder,” Bobby instructed, but his hands were too small. He wasn’t strong enough. So Bobby put his own hand on top of Johnny’s and pressed until it hurt and Johnny cried for him to let go. “See?” Bobby said, pointing at the shape in the sand. The starfish's body lay beside it, like it was a shadow cast of itself.
Johnny’s hand still ached. He looked down and he saw the shape there, too, pressed into the cradle of his palm, even clearer than it appeared in the sand. In the imprint he could see the long spindles that spread out from the centre like the spokes of a wheel. He could see the raised bumps of its flesh. Johnny looked at it. And then a wave came up, over his toes, and swept the dead starfish out to sea.
The water is cool against his skin, but soon it is gone, running back with the pull of the tide, and all Johnny feels is the warmth of the sun on his skin, and the softness of the sand against his back, and the shape of the starfish in the palm of his hand. He closes his eyes, and it is better — it’s easier — than sleep.
He follows him out to the lounge, but Carter is already gone. There’s no sign of him in the bay, either. He briefly contemplates going to check the nearest L platform, but Peter can’t believe he was so far behind him he’d have made it there already. Maybe he drove? That doesn’t make sense either. Yesterday, when Peter had mentioned the Jeep, he’d said that driving was still too painful. That his leg didn’t have the strength or dexterity yet. That sitting for so long in that position was “utter hell.” Those were his exact words. He’d laughed as he’d said it, and Peter had heard no mirth in the sound, but even then — even then he hadn’t been suspicious.
He’d told him he was in pain. He’d told him he was in hell, and Peter hadn’t given it a second thought. And now, because of how it’s come out, only now he wonders if that was a cry for help. How many times has Carter said something to him, asked for something, come to him, and how many times has he pushed him away.
It’s not lost on him that there’s an element of this night which reminds him of the spring of 1997 when Reese was born and when Carter left surgery, only he’s not quite sure if its the anger or the terror of loss which feels most familiar. Maybe it’s both. If he’s learned anything from Reese’s coming it’s that fear and rage feel the same to him. Both of them feel the same to him.
“Randi, have you seen Carter?”
The desk clerk narrows her eyes at Peter’s tone, her tongue barbed and ready to strike with some sarcastic rejoinder, but once the realization hits about who he’s talking about, she stumbles. “I - no, I thought he left.”
“Did you see him go?”
“No. I -”
Then he’s here. He’s somewhere in here. Hiding. And Peter has a horrible feeling growing in the pit of his stomach. It twists like hunger, but instead of craving food, it makes him feel sick.
Mark comes out of Curtain Three, his grim expression redrawn into lines of confusion at seeing Peter still there, standing alone.
“Did you talk to him?” Mark asks.
Peter shakes his head. “He wasn’t in the lounge. I don’t — I don’t think he went home.”
He doesn’t want to say it. He doesn’t want to think it. But in that instant, by the look on Mark’s face, he knows one of them is willing to see this for what it all is. Mark swallows. Peter’s own mouth feels dry and swollen, like sun-blistered skin on the open ocean. “I’ll go check the roof,” Mark says. “Kerry? Can you cover the board?”
“We should call —”
“Cover the board,” Mark repeats. This time, there is no question, no courtesy in his voice. “Have the nurses check the rooms. Peter? Peter, where else would he go?”
“I don’t know.”
So Mark does his best, and goes to search for Carter alone. While Peter waits.
Useless. Useless. He feels useless. Empty. He should know, he should know something about Carter, something about him that is more than Peter’s own guilt for knowing nothing, but all that’s coming to his head are images, memories without context. Carter’s mouth, a smile made crooked with bitterness when Peter asked him about his Jeep. Carter, fumbling on crutches, face flushed with a shame that Peter took to be no different or deeper than his awkward embarrassment as a med student. Carter asleep in a hospital bed, unshaven, unwashed, his hair greasy at the roots but every time a nurse had offered to help him bathe he’d refused. Carter’s eyes on Valentine’s Day, in the elevator as they took him up, as he looked at Peter, and surrendered himself into his hands, and how he’d looked at Peter as an intern, as a student, on that first day, in his tailored white coat, with his hair falling over his brow, taking notes as though he intended to get his degree simply by reciting back to the board anything and everything Dr. Peter Benton had ever said.
Peter remembers he’d been angry that day. Irritated that the student they’d assigned him turned out to be a soft-spoken white boy who confessed with no apparent dismay that he had rotated through only dermatology and psychiatry. There goes that hope, Peter had thought. Another waste of my time. He wonders now if Carter had been scared.
How often has Carter been scared? How often has he not known?
He remembers once, early on, Carter flinching at a trauma. A burn victim, he thinks, and that makes sense. Burn victims are the worst. Carter had balked, so he’d kicked him out, and it was Mark who went to comfort him.
His first patient. That TIPS procedure. Peter can’t remember the guy’s name — doesn’t know if he ever knew it — but Carter had mentioned a funeral. Had mentioned something about wanting to go, but being uncertain if he should. The specifics of Carter’s conversation escape him, but he recalls his own response. He’d told Carter that it didn’t matter to him. Told him to do whatever he wanted. And he has a memory of Carter’s face, his eyes dark, his mouth open as though waiting for Peter to teach him the answer so that he’d know what he was meant to say, so that he could learn it and memorise it and perform it as perfectly as any procedure, only to be left speechless. Peter doesn’t know if Carter went to the funeral or not. He knows he felt guilty. He remembers he was in a slump for weeks, anxious about every order, reluctant to try any procedure without Peter standing right there, like he wanted him to hold his hand. It bothered Peter then, and he knows now that Carter was scared and had come to him for support. Protection. Guidance.
He came to him first, when he was scared. And when Peter turned him away…then, where did he go?
He doesn’t know, he doesn’t know. And the thought is making him sick.
“I think I’m gonna be sick.”
He can hear Carter’s voice in his head so clearly like he is still right there beside him, elbow to elbow in the trauma room. Or at the admit desk. Or staggering his way through rounds.
He’d caught the two of them in the locker room, Gant standing guard while Carter attempted to talk himself out of a panic attack as a side effect of an earlier dose of compazine.
“He gets nauseous when he’s nervous,” Gant explained.
“And what possible reason would Dr. Carter have to be nervous?” Peter folded his arms over his chest in the stance he fell into regularly when dealing with these particular students. It gave his hands somewhere to go other than around their necks. He waited for Gant’s answer, but his eyes were drawn back to Carter, shaking apart over the sink and hyperventilating too hard to speak for himself. Something consolidated inside of him, and he thought it might be molten anger turning leaden with disappointment because it was Carter’s own stupidity which caused this, and he had no patience for stupidity. But there was also something else there — he can allow that now. He can almost, in fact, name it.
But at the time, he’d only turned away to sigh and drop his head into his hands. When he’d mastered himself at last, he'd spoken only to Gant. “When you’re done in here, give him a couple Benadryl and drop him in the lounge.”
“I’m okay, Dr. B-”
“If he’s really good, you can even leave him with a juice box.”
“Yes, sir,” said Gant.
“Let me be clear. I don’t want to see either one of you idiots on my service again, until you can guarantee there will be no repeat performance of this morning. That goes double for you, Carter. Am I understood?”
The twin confirmations of understanding did very little to soothe his anger. Anger that Carter had reflected badly on him. Anger that he had been arrogant enough to try to play Peter for a fool. Anger that Carter had apparently so little sense of self-preservation that he’d jeopardise his career and his well being over something so stupid as a lipoma removal. Anger at himself for not seeing it.
“I think I’m gonna be sick.”
And all at once, Peter knows where he is.
The door to the men’s room swings open with a sudden rush of noise, like a wave breaking, then it closes behind Peter and everything outside is hushed. Inside the room, there is also silence, except for the drip drip drip of a tap not quite turned to off.
“Carter?” There is no answer, and Peter’s fear grows. “Carter!” he calls again, this time sharper, louder. Angrier.
The first stall is open and empty, but the second…
The door is shut. In the gap below Peter can see a body slumped against it. There is no white coat because he took it off and threw it back at them. There are black shoes, shining and polished. Black slacks. Suspenders. A pale blue shirt, too thin to protect against anything, against cold, or sweat, or water. A patch of dampness spreads across the material from where his sleeve sits in a shallow puddle on the floor, and his hand — limp, loose, and emptied. Like a child fallen fast asleep.
Peter is so, so angry.
“Carter!” He beats at the door, but with the dead weight of a man against it, it doesn’t budge and it’s stupid to waste his time fighting that. So instead, Peter kneels, the tile hard and unforgiving against his knees. He leans forward, and he grabs at Carter’s legs, his waist, his empty hand, and drags him out from under the stall door, the weight of his head bending the stalk of his neck in a way that makes Peter shudder. It’s uncanny, this absence. He is disarticulated, like a doll, soft limbs, no bones, no organs, nothing inside of him at all. “Fuck. Fuck.”
His hands are shaking as he pulls his student closer, bracing his head, pulling him up upon his knees. Carter comes without resistance. He has always come to him, always yielded under the direction of Peter’s hands. He prays to a God he doesn’t believe in that Carter will yield to him now. He begs Carter to listen. He pleads, on his knees, for Carter to hear.
“Hey! Hey, man. Hey, Carter, wake up.” He presses his knuckles against the bony ridge of his chest, rubbing until he’s certain there must be furrows left there in the shape of his fingers. But Carter doesn’t stir. His eyes stay closed. His brow relaxed and lifted as though he is relieved, as though he has been relieved of the weight that had settled on him the moment he had asked if Lucy was dead, and Peter had given him nothing in return. No confirmation, no words of comfort, no reassurance, or promise of safety, or offer of confidence. He swears under his breath in a voice only Carter is close enough to hear that he’ll give all of that now, whatever he wants, whatever he needs. “Come on, man, open your eyes. Talk to me. Talk to me, Carter! I'm right here.”
Peter shifts to pull at his tie, already sloppy and loose with Carter’s own anxious fretting, his apathy, his lack of self-care, and Peter noticed this earlier, the creases in his shirtsleeves, the looseness of his pants, and he did, he noticed this earlier, and he knew it was odd because that’s not Carter, that’s not like him at all. He is not himself. He has not been himself for months now. And Peter knows this, because he knows him. He rolls his body on its back and lowers his head to listen for respirations, to watch his chest fall and rise with breath but he, himself, is breathing too hard to see or hear anything. He holds his breath only to realise that there is nothing to see or hear.
“Oh, God,” he says, and pushes himself back, away from the body, away from the corpse that is not, that cannot be Carter. “Don’t do this, man. Don’t do it. Please.”
The revulsion he feels though, is nothing to the fear, the anger. Rage drives him to his feet. It clears his head. It simplifies everything because it is so familiar. He doesn’t need to sit with it or parse it, instead it has him moving by memory. He throws the bathroom door open, and shouts, is shouting for somebody. Anybody.
It’s Carol who comes fastest. Of course it’s her. She moves past him, between his body and the door frame, and to Peter, she seems like a ghost. He sees her as he did that St. Patrick’s Day in the spring of 1993, lying in Curtain Three, pale and still, and Mark Greene’s face lined with the horror of her prognosis. Doug Ross, at the window. Peter even further away, staring at her listless body, her skin white, her hair, her eyelashes against her cheeks, black. The ER was filled with the sound of strangled weeping.
She was dead. She was dead. She had died, too. This whole place is filled with ghosts.
She moves right past Peter, maybe through him, and time slows down. Sound becomes muffled and distorted. He feels like someone has put their hand on his head and pressed him down underwater, and he can’t breathe. He can’t breathe. He’s not breathing, he’s not breathing, Carter isn’t breathing —
“Breathe, breathe. There you are, sweetheart, take a breath for me." Then, "Peter?”
His eyes snap to hers. They are dark, almost black, and filled with sorrow but no tears. She’s looking to him. Waiting. Confusion furrows his brow until he looks below her where Carter lies, framed in the brace of her arms, to see that his eyes are are open, too. His lips, which had been blue, Peter remembers, they were blue, and he was empty, have bruised to a deeper purple, a red, a pink, as the cyanosis resolves. He’s taking slow, shuddering breaths. He’s curling in on himself, his arms bending up toward his chest, his wrists folding inward, his legs bent at the knees like he wants to disappear but he lacks the strength to make himself small enough to do so. He’s shivering. The tile floor is cold and damp. Peter’s knees are wet from where he knelt.
“Peter,” barks Carol. “Come hold him. I need to get a gurney.”
Even as she leaves Carter lying there, lonely, Peter hesitates. But there can be no hesitation in an emergency. As she passes by, she shoves him forward, her hand on his shoulder, she puts him on his knees again. She’s barely half his size, but Carol has a strength Peter cannot begin to comprehend. “Stay with him,” she says, her voice so much steadier than Peter feels. She leaves, and he can hear as her alarm goes up and is met with the urgent cries of others as they organise their approach.
Carter's gaze is glassy, seeing nothing, unmoored, like a ship on the sea, the tears spilling from his eyes to slip down his cheeks catching light like a mirror and all Peter sees is a reflection of the worst of everything he’s ever learned to fear. Helplessness. Powerlessness. Alienation and obscurity. Dependence. Need. Who is this stranger? Who is he? And where did that eager young med student go?
Fingers, once clever, now clumsy with pain, clawed-crooked, more like an animal than a man or a boy, graze Peter’s knee as Carter grapples for a hand-hold, something to grasp as he tries to move. To roll, Peter realises. He’s trying to roll to his stomach, to get his arms beneath him, fingernails rasping against the wool of Peter’s pants, sliding against the slickness of the tile, catching, bending in the grooves as he tries to hold on to anything. It’s instinct, not thought — not fear, or anger — that moves Peter to help him without question, to grab him about the waist, to steady him even as he trembles and his body fails. When he hears Carter speak, he leans closer to listen so that half his own body lies across Carter’s back, supporting him. Shielding him.
“What?” he asks. “What’re you saying? What do you want?”
“‘M sick,” he murmurs. “I…I’m sick.” His voice is little more than a ghost of itself. A shadow. An impression left in the sand. Sweat soaks his brow. Peter can feel it along his back and his sides, where his shirt clings to him in the shape of Peter’s hands.
He rolls him to his side. Lifts his body off the cold floor to lie across his legs. Lifts his head when he cannot. When the retching starts, it saps him of whatever little strength there remained, whatever energy Carol’s medicine had conjured, whatever will had brought him back. There is nothing in him but stomach acid and bile. No trace or evidence of nourishment. He’s still so empty in Peter’s arms. So light. Like he’s made of nothing. The only thing that’s filling him is air, and he pants out a single word upon the crest of every exhalation so that it breaks over Peter like wave after wave upon the shore. It’s the kind of force that turns mountains into sand. Soft but utterly relentless.
“Sorry, sorry, m’sorry, m’sorry, sorry, sorry…”
The door swings shut between them and the rest of the ER as Carter is wheeled out to a trauma room, and Peter lingers behind. Through the door, all the chaos of orders given and vitals called becomes muted. The terror turns soft and indistinct, and all that is left to be heard are the rising and falling tones of familiar voices. People he knows. Work that he loves. All of them with Carter now, except he guesses Mark must’ve stayed back for him.
“It’s a lonely place to die,” says Mark. Peter looks back at him with a mouth open and empty of any reply and Mark ducks his head as if he hadn’t meant to say it at all. “Sorry,” he says. “I only meant…I only remember bits and pieces. It’s kind of fuzzy, in my head. That’s probably for the best. But I remember sitting here, against the door, wanting nothing more than to sleep and hearing the voices of my, of my friends just outside. And I thought…I should call for them. I should call out. But I couldn’t. Even though they were right outside the door.”
Peter blinks. The floor of the bathroom is wet. It stinks faintly of piss, and bleach, and vomit. It’s an awful place to die.
“He told me it was hell,” he mutters, and the words are enough without any emotion to colour them, because Peter doesn’t think he feels anything anymore. “I couldn’t hear…”
“Go get some air,” Mark says, giving Peter’s elbow a squeeze. “Then come back inside.”
He makes to slip past Peter and out the door, but as he crosses the threshold, Peter calls him back.
“Were you scared?” he asks. “Were you scared when you were - when you were waiting here…alone?”
“Yeah,” says Mark. “I was scared. But when I woke up, all my friends were there.”
Later — it doesn’t matter how much later. Peter doesn’t know. He’s still in the same clothes, but the water has dried. Mark has gone home for the night, but Kerry’s back on. Kerry has stayed. He hasn’t eaten anything he doesn’t think. Jackie came to pick up Reese from daycare. Carla said she’d get him early. Anspaugh told him not to come in tomorrow. Today. He doesn’t know if he means now, or if that’s still later.
But later, Peter sits at Carter’s bedside and watches him come back to life. He’s still on a monitor, still on oxygen, but the vent is gone. They’d had to tube him after they picked him up off the floor of the men’s bathroom because Naloxone, Peter knows, has a short half-life, but the overdose goes on and on and on. But once the tremors and fever had reduced, once his vitals had stabilised, once the drug was washed from his system and his body was wracked only by its memory, once it was determined he could maintain his own airway, the tube came out, the sedatives were lightened, and Peter was left to wait.
The ICU is quiet after hours. Technically, visitors are meant to leave after eight, but Peter isn’t a visitor. He’s a resident. So he sits. He stays. He watches every spike on the monitor, every rise of his chest, every shift, every flinch. Every time someone walks by the room and casts a shadow through the glass, Peter looks up, daring them to say something, to try and pull him away. But no one ever does.
Despite all this vigilance, he isn’t watching closely enough, and it’s Carter who sees him first. He’s come awake without Peter even knowing, so quietly, and easily he’d thought him still fast asleep. But no, because beneath the veil of heavy lids and thick lashes, eyes as dark as Carol’s gaze up at him.
Peter surges forward, an urge propelling him close enough to - to…he doesn’t know. He wants him closer though. He needs to see him closer, to see more in those eyes than darkness and sorrow. He needs to see recognition. He needs to see Carter.
“Hey, man,” he says, voice cracking on something even as delicate as a whisper. “How long have you been awake?”
Carter’s eyes flicker, falling shut as he turns his head toward the ceiling. It’s all Peter can do to keep from grabbing him, forcing him back to look at him. A slow swallow rolls down Carter’s throat as he licks his lips. But though Peter is silent and waiting, Carter doesn’t speak. He only sighs. And Peter falls back on technique, on what he was taught, and what he teaches.
“No sleeping yet,” he scolds. “You know the drill. At least a quick neuro check.”
He runs through the motions, and Carter is compliant, completing each task with all the precision Peter demands of his students, but still Peter is somehow unsatisfied. As he sets the chart aside, annotated with nothing more than the most accurate and sterile of medical conclusions, he asks if Carter wants anything else.
“Water? I can turn off some of the lights? Anyone I should call?”
Carter shakes his head, and offers nothing more.
“You were lucky, Carter,” he says, knowing he’s said these words before. He wonders now if Carter understands him. If Carter agrees. Or if Carter ever even believed them.
He recognises them, at least, feels the rhyme of them, the bitter poetry, because he exhales a ghost of laughter in response. And he’s always had a good sense of humour, always…always been able to laugh at himself, Peter thinks. So he watches him, to see if there’s any relief in it. But there isn’t. Carter's reply is followed only by him blinking rapidly and turning to look as far away from Peter as he can. Tears well and fall in spite of the way he bites at his lip until it turns white and his teeth leave impressions in his skin.
“God,” he says, the word nearly strangled beyond recognition. “I wish I’d — I’ve really messed up this time, haven’t I, Dr. Benton?”
His chest heaves as he tries and fails to hold back a sob, each breath catching on leaden weights of grief which have been hung from his ribs. He is being pulled down by their weight. Drowning. He gasps like he is drowning, and Peter sees him gasping, and dying alone on the tiled floor of the men’s bathroom, where the dampness spread through the knees of his pants but Peter barely felt it he was so angry. He was so scared. He feels so desperately, desperately scared even now, with Carter lying awake and alive in front of him.
Wildly, he thinks of those early days with Reese when they knew something was wrong, but couldn’t imagine what. How at night, he would scream with a terror so primal that no matter what Peter said, or called to him from the other room, soft words of comfort and love and reassurance, it felt as though Reese would never settle. He only grew louder, angrier, more and more frightened until Peter relented, opened the door, turned on the lights, lifted him out of his cradle, and held him.
“We’ll spoil him,” he’d said to Carla. “He’ll never be able to sleep alone. He’ll always be afraid of shadows. He needs to learn independence. We’re just outside the door.”
But Reese didn’t hear them. He couldn't. And the best thing Peter could do for him, the only thing he could do to calm him was hold him.
He can hold him.
He needs him brought close. Closer. He needs him closer now. So he climbs onto the foot of the bed, shoving one knee between Carter’s legs and bracing the other along the outside of his thigh. He should be careful, he knows, but God, he needs him closer. Carter doesn’t seem to realise what’s happening, still sobbing, still trying so hard to breathe through an ocean of tears. Peter pulls his hands free of where he’s knotted them in the bed sheets so that he can slip his own arm behind Carter’s shoulders, and the other one up along the back of his neck until his head rests in the palm of Peter's hand, the way you’d hold a newborn. He lifts him upright until he’s sitting, then draws him closer so that he falls against Peter’s chest, his head pressed to the juncture of his neck and shoulder.
“Shh, shh, shh,” he whispers, his lips against Carter’s ear. He holds him so close so that even if he can’t hear him, he’ll feel the vibration of his voice, the rhythm of his heart, the steady rise and fall, rise and fall of his lungs filling out his chest. He says meaningless things as gently as possible until Carter’s breathing evens out and matches his, and his hands lock around Peter’s back and it’s not just him holding Carter, but Carter holding him. They are holding each other, pressed so close that Peter thinks that maybe he'll be able to leave some impression on Carter of what he feels but can't ever say.
“I’m sorry,” Carter says, right by Peter’s own ear. “I’m so sorry. I don’t — I didn’t know what else I could do.”
“It’s alright,” Peter sighs. He doesn’t know if it’s true, but it’s what he always says to Reese. “It’s alright. Go to sleep now. I’ll be here in the morning.”
And maybe it’s God, or maybe it's just them there, but someone is listening because eventually Carter drifts off to sleep. A slender beam of golden light peeks in from the hallway carrying with it a familiar current of voices of the people he knows and loves. He is heavy. He is warm. In Peter’s arms, he goes down so easy.