I retrieve my suitcase from the dinky airport’s baggage carousel and emerge through the front doors feeling like a woman in a tampon commercial: overjoyed, gorgeous, and impossibly comfortable—ready for any highly physical activity, including but not limited to bowling with friends or getting a piggyback ride from the unobtrusively handsome guy hired by central casting to play my boyfriend.
All that to say, I am happy.
This is the moment that’s carried me through thankless hospital shifts and the sleepless nights that often follow.
For the next week, life will be crisp white wine, creamy lobster rolls, and laughing with my friends until tears stream down our cheeks.
A short honk blasts from the parking lot. Even before I open my eyes and see her, I’m smiling.
“O Harriet, my Harriet!” Sabrina shouts, half falling out of her dad’s old cherry-red Jaguar.
She looks, as ever, like a platinum Jackie O, with her perfectly toned olive arms and her classic black pedal pushers, not to mention the vintage silk scarf wrapped around her glossy bob. She still strikes me the same as that first day we met, like an effortlessly cool starlet plucked from another time.
The effect is somewhat tempered by the way she keeps jumping up and down with a poster board on which she’s scrawled, in her god-awful serial-killer handwriting, SAY IT’S CAROL SINGERS, a Love Actually reference that could not, actually, make less contextual sense.
I break into a jog across the sunlit parking lot. She shrieks and hurls the poster at the car’s open window, where it smacks the frame and flaps to the ground as she takes off running to meet me.
We collide in an impressively uncomfortable hug. Sabrina’s exactly tall enough that her shoulder always finds a way to cut off my air supply, but there’s still nowhere I’d rather be.
She rocks me back and forth, cooing, “You’re heeeeere.”
“I’m heeeeere!” I say.
“Let me look at you.” She draws back to give me a stern once-over. “What’s different?”
“New face,” I say.
She snaps her fingers. “Knew it.” She loops an arm around my shoulders and turns me toward the car, a cloud of Chanel No. 5 following us. It’s been her signature scent since we were eighteen and I was still sporting a Bath & Body Works concoction that smelled like vodka-soaked cotton candy. “Your doctor does great work,” she deadpans. “You look thirty years younger. Not a day over newborn.”
“Oh, no, it wasn’t a medical procedure,” I say. “It was an Etsy spell.”
“Well, either way, you look great.”
“You too,” I squeal, squeezing her around the waist.
“I can’t believe this is real,” she says.
“It’s been too long,” I agree.
We fall into that hyper-comfortable kind of silence, the quiet of two people who lived together for the better part of five years and still, after all this time, have a muscle memory for how to share space.
“I’m so happy you could make this work,” she says as we reach the car. “I know how busy you are at the hospital. Hospitals? They have you move around, right?”
“Hospitals,” I confirm, “and nothing could have stopped me.”
“By which you mean, you ran out of there mid–brain surgery,” Sabrina says.
“Of course not,” I say. “I skipped out of there mid–brain surgery. Still have the scalpel in my pocket.”
Sabrina cackles, a sound so at odds with her composed exterior that the whole first week we lived together, I jumped every time I heard it. Now all her rough edges are my favorite parts of her.
She throws open the car’s back door and tosses my suitcase in with an ease that defies her lanky frame, then stuffs the poster in after it. “How was the flight?”
“Same pilot as last time,” I tell her.
Her brow lifts. “Ray? Again?”
I nod. “Of sunglasses-on-the-back-of-the-head fame.”
“Never seen him without them,” she muses.
“He absolutely has to have a second set of eyes in his neck,” I say.
“The only explanation,” she agrees. “God, I’m so sorry—ever since Ray got sober, I swear he flies like a dying bumblebee.”
I ask, “How did he fly back when he was still drinking?”
“Oh, the same.” She hops in behind the steering wheel, and I drop into the passenger seat beside her. “But his intercom banter was a fucking delight.”
She digs a spare scarf out of the center console and tosses it at me, a thoughtful if ultimately meaningless gesture since my bun of chaotic dark curls is far beyond saving after three back-to-back flights and a dead sprint through both the Denver airport and Boston Logan.
“Well,” I say, “there wasn’t a pun to be found in those skies today.”
“Tragic,” she tuts. The car’s engine growls to life. With a whoop, she peels out of the parking lot and points us east, toward the water, the windows down and sunlight rippling over our skin. Even here, an hour inland, yards are dotted with lobster traps, pyramids of them at the edges of lots.
Over the roar of the wind, Sabrina shouts, “HOW ARE YOU?”
My stomach does this seesawing thing, flipping from the absolute bliss of being in this car with her and the abject dread of knowing I’m about to throw a wrench into her plans.
Not yet, I think. Let’s enjoy this for a second before I ruin everything.
“GOOD,” I shout back.
“AND HOW’S THE RESIDENCY?” she asks.
“GOOD,” I say again.
She glances sidelong, wisps of blond snaking out of her scarf to slap her forehead. “WE’VE BARELY SPOKEN IN WEEKS AND THAT’S ALL I GET?”
“BLOODY?” I add.
Exhausting. Terrifying. Electrifying, though not necessarily in a good way. Sometimes nauseating. Occasionally devastating.
Not that I’m involved in much surgery. Two years into the residency, and I’m still doing plenty of scut work. But the slivers of time spent with an attending surgeon and a patient are all I think about when I clock out, as if those minutes weigh more than any of the rest.
Scut work, on the other hand, goes by in a flash. Most of my colleagues dread it, but I kind of like the mundanity. Even as a kid, cleaning, organizing, checking off little tasks on my self-made chore chart gave me a sense of peace and control.
A patient is in the hospital, and I get to discharge them. Someone needs blood drawn, and I’m there to do it. Data needs to be plugged into the computer system, and I plug it in. There’s a before and an after, with a hard line between them, proof that there are millions of small things you can do to make life a little better.
“AND HOW’S WYN?” Sabrina asks.
The seesaw inside me jolts again. Sharp gray eyes flash across my mind, the phantom scent of pine and clove wafting over me.
Not yet, I think.
“WHAT?” I shout, pretending not to have heard.
This conversation is inevitable, but ideally it won’t take place while we’re going eighty miles an hour in a pop-can car from the sixties. Also, I’d rather have it when Cleo, Parth, and Kimmy are all present so I won’t have to rip off the Band-Aid more than once.