Chapter Text
Robby is still annoyed about Baran’s changes to the triage workflow when dispatch calls to say an ambulance is two minutes out with a woman attacked near the T stop. His mind goes to the worst place possible, to the fact that Baran had insisted on taking the train home rather than waiting for him to wrap up a few things here. She’d been angry at Robby for undermining her authority, and he knows he shouldn’t have nitpicked her changes in front of others, regretted it as soon as he’d spoken. Baran had taken over the thankless job that Robby held and hated since Adamson died. She’s doing a far better job running the department than Robby ever did and he hardly tells her, just complains when some improvement she suggests inconveniences him. And so, they’d argued because the shift had been long and difficult. They argued about work even through they promised each other they wouldn’t.
Baran was still angry at the end of their shift, and Robby had offered to drop her at home and go back to his place if she didn’t want to spend the night together. He just wanted to give her a ride after a long, exhausting day. But she’d left with a comment about being capable of both running the department and commuting home without his help while he was wrapping up with his last patient and she’d already finished signing out.
Robby takes out his phone and texts Baran. I’m sorry. I know you’re angry. Please text me and let me know you’re all right.
He expects his phone to ring or to get a text back immediately asking why he’s worried. They fight about stupid work things often enough, fight and then promise to never fight about work again, then do it anyway. They’re both quick to argue but also quick to forgive, to recognize that the stupid things they bicker about because they’re opinionated and stubborn don’t matter enough to ruin their relationship over. They’ve been dating seriously for a year and a half after months of both denying that it was anything more than casual. Baran has never gone silent on Robby, would never over something trivial like this. Robby stares at his phone. His message is still unread when EMS arrives.
Terror and relief hit him almost at once as he sees Baran rolled into the department on a gurney. The terror comes first because her face is covered in blood, the relief a split second late as soon as Baran sees him rushing over to her and tells him, “I’m fine. It’s just a scalp lac.”
Most of the day shift residents have already left but some are finishing notes and many of the nurses are finishing handing off their patients. The ED is busy and the sight of an attending being brought in by EMS draws a crowd. Dana and Lena rush over and take control of the situation because Robby can do nothing but stare at Baran’s face, the blood coating the left side of her head, caked in her hair. “Trauma two,” Dana instructs as Lena moves the growing crowd of people away. Robby is grateful to her for remembering Baran’s privacy when Robby is too terrified to think of anything but making sure Baran is all right.
“Attendings only,” Lena says as she shoos everyone away from trauma two. “Santos get over here.”
Robby is still getting used to the idea of Santos as an attending, but Baran smiles at her when she walks in, grateful it seems that Lena and Dana have decided that it should only be them and Santos in the room now.
Baran stubbornly shifts herself over to the hospital bed, refusing any help, thanks Ziggler and Kerns as they leave like they’d been kind enough to give her a ride to work, not brought her here after she’d been attacked walking to the train station. Dana pulls the curtain behind them as they leave.
“Where are you hurt?” Trinity asks and Robby remembers that he’s a doctor, that Baran is a trauma patient, that while he’s been staring at her bloody face, at her hand, swollen and bruised from where she seems to have punched her attacker, at the finger shaped bruises on her upper arms, he’s been wasting precious time. She looks fine now but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t have a major head injury or abdominal bleeding. He tries to put from his mind what those handprints mean, the thought that someone pinned Baran to the ground or up against a wall. There’s blood coating her scrubs and Robby doesn’t know where it’s from. Dana begins cutting away Baran’s clothes.
Robby gets the ultrasound, but Santos takes the probe out of his hand. “I’ll be the doctor here. You be Baran’s husband.”
“We’re not married,” Robby and Baran reply together. She smiles at him then, and Robby does everything he can not to cry. How is Baran smiling at him after she’d been hurt? If they hadn’t argued they would be getting into his car right now to go home. He puts his hand on her shoulder, grateful when she doesn’t jump at the touch.
“Fine,” Santos says. “Be whatever it is you two are that means you get distracted staring at each other while residents present to you.” She looks at Baran then with professional care, the seriousness Trinity has with patients that is so different from who she is when she’s joking or complaining with her coworkers. “What happened?”
“I was pushed to the ground from behind,” Baran says. “No LOC, no amnesia, no vomiting, not on blood thinners.”
Trinity laughs softly as she flashes a penlight in Baran’s eyes. “Point taken. Patient does not believe she needs a head CT.” Trinity looks in Baran’s ears.
“And what’s your opinion Dr. Santos?” Baran asks, sounding too put together, too much like a doctor.
“I concur.”
Dana’s already cut Baran’s scrub top off giving Santos access for the eFAST. Robby stares at the black lace bra that he’d watched Baran put on this morning with a teasing smile that promised a good evening, so horribly far from this one.
Dana pushes a stool over and gently sits Robby in it. There’s a rush of motion next door, and Baran looks over at trauma one. “Is he dead?” she asks, her voice emotionless. It’s only then that Robby pieces it together. The partner of the domestic violence patient Baran treated earlier today. That’s who Shen is coding in trauma one.
“What happened after he pushed you down?” Santos ask as she ultrasounds Baran’s abdomen and Robby looks closely at the monitor to make sure there’s no free fluid Santos is missing. Santos makes eye contact with Baran, voice gentle but serious as she explains, “I need to know where you were injured so I don’t miss anything.”
Baran nods, and Robby reaches for her hand, touches it gently. He can already tell she has a boxer’s fracture. They’ll need to splint her hand after they make sure she doesn’t have any more serious injuries. He suddenly realizes they haven’t given her anything for pain. She must be in pain. Before Robby can ask his eyes are drawn to Baran’s thighs as Dana cuts off her scrubs. Everyone in the room seems to hold their breath as their attention goes to the bruises on Baran’s upper thighs. “He didn’t,” Baran says. She takes a deep breath. “He tried, had me pinned down, but he didn’t notice I’d taken the knife from his belt until I stabbed him with it.”
“Attagirl,” Dana tells Baran with a look of pride, but all Robby can think about is Baran pinned to the ground, Baran having to fight a man off before he raped her, Baran stabbing someone. Robby blinks back tears, won’t let Baran see him cry now.
“No chest or abdominal injuries,” Baran says. “My arms and legs are bruised. I think my fifth metacarpal is broken. I’ll just need you to you to repair the scalp lac and splint my hand and then I should be fine.”
Robby keeps one hand gently on Baran’s, his other hand stroking her forearm softly trying to ground her. She sounds so completely disconnected and he thinks about her being five years old, intubated, sedated, restrained in a PICU. And he thinks of her surviving a massacre in Afghanistan, feeling helpless as people were killed around her, terrified she wouldn’t survive. He wonders just how young she’d been when she learned not to feel anything during a crisis.
“Any pain in your chest or abdomen?” Santos asks, slower now that she’s ruled out anything emergent, pressing on Baran’s ribs to check for any pain that Baran hasn’t yet registered in the haze of adrenaline. Baran shakes her head.
“Pain med of choice?” Santos asks Baran. “Morphine?”
“Just acetaminophen,” Baran replies.
“Got it,” Lena says.
“Tell us if you want something stronger,” Dana says, and Baran nods. She’s trembling now, and Dana must notice too because she brings over a blanket, though Robby isn’t sure the trembling is from being cold. He rubs Baran’s arm, unsure if he’s providing any comfort at all, unsure if she even registers his touch.
Dana sends Robby to get Baran clothes from her locker. Dana has spent enough years working here to recognize dissociation after trauma, to know that at some point the calm will break and there will be tears and flashbacks and the weight of what happened tonight. Dana also knows how often women hide things that happened to them, especially in front of their partners. She needs to ask, needs to give Baran the chance to talk when Robby isn’t here.
Dana sits down on the stool next to Baran. “I know you said that he didn’t rape you,” Dana says, and Baran looks at Dana with surprise as if finally registering that she is so close, “but I need to ask again. You know as well as I do that if he did that it’s important to collect evidence sooner rather than later.”
Baran smiles and tells Dana, “Thank you for asking. He didn’t. He tried.” Baran’s eyes look haunted for a second before she blinks the memory away, and Dana knows this isn’t something to be minimized. Being held down by a man who had beaten his girlfriend within an inch of her life earlier today will haunt Baran even if she stopped him before he raped her. “He would have if I hadn’t stabbed him.”
“Don’t you dare feel guilty for that,” Dana tells Baran. “You did what you had to.”
“I don’t,” Baran says. “Maybe I will.” She shrugs and Dana remembers that blank, numb feeling from after Doug Driscoll punched her. What happened to Baran was so much worse. Dana is sick of watching people here be hurt by patients and their families. A part of her thinks she would be relieved if this man died though she knows she should feel guilty for it, knows no good person would feel that way. “He’s in the OR?”
“Yeah.” Dana takes Baran’s uninjured hand gently and tells her, “I already arranged coverage for both you and Robby tomorrow.”
“I can work,” Baran says, and Dana actually considers for the first time whether this woman might be more stubborn than Robby. She had previously doubted such a thing were possible.
“I’m sure you can, but you’re not going to.” Baran chuckles at that, and Dana smiles even though she wants to scream and cry and punch a wall. “You’re still covered in blood. Do you want help getting cleaned up before you leave?”
Baran reaches up and touches her face, feels the blood caked on her skin. “I can do it.”
“Ok, let me get you some warm water.”
“Thank you.”
Dana has liked Baran since she started working here but she’s gotten to know her better since she’s been with Robby, spends time with them outside of work, learned that Baran is an excellent cook and an affectionate mother to a smart, precocious seven-year-old boy. “Don’t thank me,” Dana says. She fills up a basin with water and grabs a towel. “I’m off tomorrow, so if you need anything at all I want you to call me.”
It’s easier to focus on meticulously applying concealer to every bruise on Baran’s body than thinking about the fact that she killed someone yesterday. She’d found out at two in the morning when she’d texted Lena for an update, surprised herself by feeling numb when Lena replied that he hadn’t made it through surgery.
It’s easier to focus on covering the bruise along Baran’s hairline. She catches Robby’s eyes in the mirror, staring at her from the doorway. “I know you don’t think I should hide this from him.”
“It’s your decision. Babak is your son.”
“It feels like too much for him to know,” Baran says, turning to Robby. She wants him to understand. She just wants to protect her son a little longer from the reality of how cruel people can be, how dangerous the world is.
“Do you remember a time as a child before you knew how fucked up the world was?” Baran asks, knows that Robby’s answer is the same as hers. He shakes his head. “Do you remember a time when you weren’t terrified of losing the people you loved?”
“No.”
“I just want to protect Babak from that a little longer.” He’s seven and inquisitive, already beginning to understand the suffering and injustice in the world, but still a child, still sheltered in so many ways. Baran wants so badly for her son to have the normal childhood she never did.
Baran’s son is curled against her side on the sofa, her good arm wrapped around him. He feels safe dozing off, trusting her still to take care of him, to protect him from the world.
Babak had been so worried when he saw Baran’s hand, asked if he could kiss it and make it better like she does for him when he gets hurt. She’d almost cried when he kissed her hand and asked if she felt better.
She’d promised she did, promised he had made it all better. Baran promised her son that she was fine, told him nothing hurt, then spent the day being the most nurturing version of herself possible, making sure that her child didn’t think for a second that it was his job to take care of her. She never wants her son to feel like he has to take care of her, felt that way with her own mother, shielded her from so much when Baran was young, pretended to not be sick or scared so that her mother wouldn’t have to be afraid, couldn’t bear to see her mother cry over her anymore.
Baran is grateful as Barak clings to her, his breathing deep and even. He looks so peaceful sleeping against her chest. She’s so grateful that he can be her little boy for a while longer.
Four days off in a row is too many, too much time for Baran to have nothing to do but think about a man who is dead because of her, to think about his warm blood soaking through her scrubs, watching his blood wash down the drain of her shower, scrubbing the tub clean before she’d dressed and gotten into bed with Robby and wondered if he could even recognize her.
Being home and having Robby constantly doting on Baran is getting to her. It’s not him, she knows that. He’s caring and concerned, brings her tea and food, wraps her in blankets, makes sure that she isn’t in pain, asks what she needs, what she wants. He’s being attentive and loving. He’s doing nothing wrong, and yet Baran cannot stop being irritated, cannot stop snapping at him.
“Do you want something else?” Robby asks as he clears Baran’s bowl of now congealed oatmeal from the table. She’d only managed to eat two spoonfuls of her breakfast before feeling too nauseated to have more.
“I can feed myself,” she tells him, anger rising in her that she knows she shouldn’t feel. “I’m not a child. I can decide if I’m hungry.”
Robby leans over and kisses her hair gently before taking her bowl to the garbage to dump out the oatmeal. Usually, Baran loves when Robby kisses her. Now his touch bothers her, makes her irritable, afraid she’ll lash out.
She’s been jumpy too since the night she was attacked, so jumpy that Robby makes sure to start talking, to make eye contact, to make sure Baran sees his hands, before he touches her. She’s so angry at herself. She’d been this way after Afghanistan too, went to therapy because she is a doctor and she knows PTSD is treatable. She’d worked with a therapist for a few months about those memories and the trauma symptoms had all but left her, Afghanistan reduced to painful memories that no longer made her jump at loud noises or get lost in flashbacks. She knows she’s going to have to go to therapy again, feels so angry to have experienced another event big enough to need fucking therapy to work through.
“I’m sorry,” Robby says, sitting down at the table with Baran. She looks up from her mug of tea. He’s looking at her with so much pain and she can’t handle it, her own emotions too much, no room for his, angry that she needs to manage his pain as well as her own. “What do you need?” Robby asks. “How can I help now?”
“I know you feel guilty, but you can’t make up for that by hovering over me like I’m unable to take care of myself,” Baran snaps.
“Just tell me what to do, including give you space, and I’ll do it.” His eyes are wet, tears about to fall, and she knows he’s angry at himself, knows he wants to take care of her. But Baran is so angry that she has to take care of his feelings. She’s the one that was almost raped, not him.
“You can’t fix me, Michael.” She wants to be alone. “Having you here treating me like a child is driving me crazy.”
Robby turns away at her words so she can’t see his face, tells her softly, “I’m sorry.” Fuck, she can hear that he’s crying. “I’ll leave. If you need anything just call. I can drop off anything you want. You don’t have to see me.”
The rational part of Baran’s brain knows that it isn’t him. She’s frustrated by not being able to use her hand, by being in pain, by that fact that her mind is reacting to this with every fucking textbook trauma symptom even though she knows she’s safe, even though she’s survived worse.
“I’m not angry at you,” Baran tells Robby, will not let the irrational part of her brain take over this conversation. “This isn’t your fault, and I don’t blame you.”
“It’s all right if you do.”
Baran forces herself to take a deep breath, to not yell that Robby’s fucking self-loathing takes up too much space, that she’s too exhausted to reassure him now. “I need to go for a run,” she says, needs to leave before she says something to him that she regrets. “I’m just frustrated.”
“Do you want me to be here when you get back?” Robby asks, looking at her with wet, red eyes.
Baran thinks if it were just about what she wants the answer would be no, that she would want to be alone. “Yes,” she answers, because she knows they deserve to have a conversation when she doesn’t feel like she is going to claw her skin from her body if she doesn’t move. She leaves Robby alone at the table crying.
Baran feels better after her run, the angry, pent up, frustrated energy spent on sprinting faster than she has in years. Robby looks afraid when she comes in, stares at her from the sofa like she’s going to tell him to get out.
“I’m sorry,” Baran says. She gets herself a glass of ice water and sits down on the sofa next to Robby. “It’s not you.” Her body is spent, her mind calmer.
Robby would normally reach out and hold her, always does after an argument. He doesn’t touch her now. She didn’t want to be touched before, but she does now. Baran can’t bring herself to ask him to hold her, hates how she’s behaving, hates that she pushed Robby away and now wants so badly to be close, wants to not feel the distance between them grow even more than she feels like it has this week.
“I know you just want to take care of me. It’s really not you. You taking care of me reminds me of how overprotective my mother was when I was a child. For years she wouldn’t let me be alone. She didn’t even let me sleep alone in case I had a seizure when I was young. Being worried over and watched so closely reminds me of how suffocating that felt. It’s not your fault. You aren’t doing anything wrong. The feeling of someone worrying about me like this just makes me feel like that child who had no control over her life.”
“Can I,” Robby starts, his voice breaking. Baran looks at him. He’s on the verge of tears, swallowing hard to try to stop himself from crying. “Can I hold you? I don’t have to. Only if you want to be touched now.”
She wants to be close but that feels like too much, too tender after what she just admitted, feels too much like Robby being her caretaker. But she needs him to touch her so badly, wants to feel his hands on her. She straddles his lap and kisses him. Robby is tentative, waits a moment before he puts his hands on her back, gentle and soft. She presses him against to sofa cushions, nips his bottom lip as they kiss, tugs at his hair. She doesn’t want him to be gentle, doesn’t want him to treat her like she’s going to break, like she needs to be taken care of. Robby moans into Baran’s mouth and she feels him growing hard as she moves her hips. She grinds against him, pulls a low whine from him that makes her ache, make her move more desperately against him. Robby pulls back from the kiss and asks, “Bed?”
Baran doesn’t want anything slow or gentle, pulls off her shirt and sports bra as she leads Robby to the bedroom. She steps out of her running shorts, briefly conscious of how she’d just been running, should offer to shower first. But Robby has already shed his clothes, is closing the distance between them to wrap his arms around Baran and kiss her.
She pushes Robby down on the bed and climbs on top of him. His hands are gentle on her thighs as he urges her higher. “Come up here?” Robby asks as he leans against the pillow and smiles at her affectionately. His hands are so gentle, and Baran knows he’s worried about her thinking of that night and a different man’s hands on her.
Baran thinks again about how she hasn’t showered yet, about how she should tell Robby he can eat her out a different time. She’s wet enough already that it won’t hurt, ready enough even if she does usually prefer an orgasm before Robby is inside her. But the way he’s looking at her with a mixture of affection, care, and want, the way the idea of Baran straddling his face has him so hard against her, makes her forget about showers and sweat, makes her shift so that her legs are on either side of Robby’s head.
She straddles his head and closes her eyes and focuses on the feeling of his mouth on her. She’d been surprised to find that this was genuinely something Robby loves as much as any of the women she’d slept with, that it hadn’t just been a line when they first started sleeping together and he told her that eating her out was the best part of sex.
Baran focuses on the feeling of his tongue, of pleasure building low in her belly. She struggles not to grind against his face. She feels him smile against her as she restrains herself. He can tell that she wants more, doesn’t want to be teased today, doesn’t want slow or gentle. Robby moves his tongue against Baran’s clit, sucks hard, knows after two years sleeping together how to get her there quickly. When she comes it’s equal parts pleasure and relief that her body cooperated so easily, that her mind didn’t take her back to how close she’d come to being raped while Robby was touching her.
Baran lets Robby coax aftershocks of pleasure from her, feels her body clench around nothing as he softly licks at her. When her body calms she shifts to lie on top of Robby, feels him hard against her leg as she kisses him and has to force back the memory of being pinned to the sidewalk, of that man hard against her thigh, turned on by hurting her. Baran breathes and focuses on the feeling of Robby’s hands, his touch so gentle on her back, the smell of his deodorant and sweat, so different from the smell of cigarettes that she remembers vividly from that night.
Robby doesn’t ask if Baran is ok, and she’s grateful for that, but he studies her carefully as she shifts, groans when she touches him to guide him inside her. She knows Robby wants to ask if she’s ok, if she really wants this, wants to tell her to stop if she’s at all uncomfortable. But he knows her too well, knows how she would react, so instead he studies her as Baran moves above him, focuses so intensely on her, on making sure she’s ok that she’s surprised when his breathing speeds up and his face pulls tight, surprised when it only takes a couple minutes before he comes. She’s already so close, grinds hard against him, gives herself enough friction to come with him still inside her.
Robby smiles at Baran, reaches up to stroke her cheek softly, and she no longer feels angry at the tender, protective way he looks at her, checking wordlessly whether she’s all right. She smiles back at him, remembers how loved and safe he can make her feel. “Do you want to come again?” he asks because she usually does, usually needs to come at least three times before she’s satisfied, but today she’s exhausted, sated, body relaxed after her intense run followed by sex.
Baran moves off Robby, shifts to lie next to him. He extends his arm in invitation, and she happily rests her head on his chest, his arms wrapped around her. Tears well in her eyes. She’s felt so disconnected from him, so irritated, angry, unable to access any warm feelings at all really except with her son, until now. Baran’s breathing grows shaky as she fights back tears, grateful to feel love and closeness. Robby tries to shift to look at Baran, worried she’s certain. “I’m all right,” she promises. She is. She’s better than she has been since she was attacked, she thinks.
Robby pulls the blanket over them, and Baran closes her eyes and lets Robby hold her, his hands warm on her back, thumb gently caressing her skin. “I was so afraid,” Baran says. They haven’t spoken about the attack since he’d been in the trauma room with her. “I thought he was going to rape me.”
Robby kisses Baran’s head, her face still pressed against his chest, her eyes closed, enjoying the feeling of his hand gently stroking her hair. He waits for Baran to keep talking, waits several minutes, just touching her softly, holding her, letting her feel her body relax, feel herself able to be open and comfortable for the first time in days. When the silence stretches and Robby can tell that Baran isn’t going to speak again, he asks, “Is that something you’ve experienced before?” It catches Baran off guard because she doesn’t know why he would ask. She wonders what he’s sensed in her, whether he’s wondered even before the attack but never asked.
“No.” Baran takes a deep breath, her eyes still closed, face pressed against Robby’s chest. He keeps stroking her hair and her back, his lips pressed to her head, resting there, steady. She feels like a liar, even though her answer is technically true. He touches her now like he knows she’s holding something back, like he’s trying to make her feel safe, like he knows there’s pain here even if she chooses not to speak about it. “I didn’t tell my college boyfriend that I have epilepsy,” Baran says, a wave of anxiety in her as she says this for the first time. “He didn’t stop when I had a seizure in the middle of sex. I still don’t know if he realized what was happening.”
Baran had blamed herself for hiding having epilepsy, for putting herself in that situation, for not telling him she could have a seizure and that he needed to stop if she did. A part of her always wondered if he might have known, if he had been able to tell that she wasn’t really there as he’d kept moving inside her, if even if he didn’t know it was a seizure, he had seen how blank her face got, how quiet she had been suddenly. Baran didn’t know which felt worse, the idea that a man she was dating raped her or that she put herself in the position to have someone have sex with her while she wasn’t conscious. The thought makes her nauseous. What is wrong with her that she’s so desperate to hide that she risked this again and again? Robby is the first person she’s slept with who knows she has seizures. She’d been lucky it only happened during sex once.
She looks at Robby then, needs to see his reaction. “I’m so sorry, Baran.” He cups her face in his palm and looks at her with so much obvious pain in his eyes, doesn’t look away from her and what she’s admitted, from the shame that she thinks surely he must be able to see in her right now.
“He probably didn’t even realize,” Baran says with a shrug.
“I can’t imagine that makes it feel like any less of a violation.” Robby isn’t looking at her with pity or like she’s weak or broken because this happened to her, isn’t telling her that it’s her fault for not telling her boyfriend, her fault for putting herself in the position to be hurt.
“No, it doesn’t.” Baran doesn’t say that it made her hate herself but that hatred still wasn’t enough to make her tell her next partner. She doesn’t tell Robby that she wonders more and more what is wrong with her that she can’t even bring herself to share this, to demand others respect her even once they know she has epilepsy rather than hide it because she’s so afraid someone will look at her differently. She doesn’t say that at forty-three this is her first relationship with someone who knew about her illness from the start, where it wasn’t something she hid then agonized about disclosing when things got serious, something that she’d hidden from her husband until after they were already married.
“Thank you for telling me,” Robby says as he caresses her cheek with his thumb, rubs her back, doesn’t look away from Baran for a second.
Baran goes to therapy because she knows how easily trauma can rewire the brain and the body. She also knows that treating the symptoms early can prevent developing PTSD, and she isn’t too proud to ask for help.
A week after the attack when Baran is still jumpy, when she still struggles to sleep, when Robby pressing her up against the kitchen counter and kissing her pulls her mind back to that night, Baran calls the therapist she saw after coming home from Afghanistan.
Baran went back wanting to do what she did after Kabul, work through the trauma, process it and lessen her body’s hypervigilance, lessen the flashbacks and the nightmares. But she’d made the mistake of mentioning to her therapist how irritable she’d been with Robby, how his constant worry and doting sets her on edge, mentioned being sick as a child, mentioned her mother.
Of course, the therapist wanted to discuss Baran’s childhood. The words feel strange to say, so odd to try to put narrative structure to what lives in her mind mostly as disjointed memories of emotions and sensations, of pain, terror, anger, and shame.
Baran’s family didn’t believe in therapy when she was a child, and she’d brushed off the suggestion as a young adult when her neurologist made it. She’s never talked about this before, no more than brief mentions with Robby or occasional times she and her brother discuss something they remember from childhood. But mostly, Baran tries not to think about how helpless she’d felt as a child, how out of control, how broken.
She’d only meant to mention it to her therapist as context for how she’d felt with Robby, but then everything seemed to come pouring out, her anger at how unfair everything feels, at the childhood she still grieves, at her mother, though she feels so guilty for that anger, because her mother sacrificed so much for Baran, has every reason to be angry herself but never shows it if she is. Everything came pouring out, and Baran can’t figure out how to tuck it neatly back away again.
Baran doesn’t like to remember being held down for an LP. She doesn’t like to remember the terror and the pain and the complete helplessness she felt as a child. And she doesn’t like to remember being twelve, two years after her last tonic-clonic seizure, finally on medications that kept the seizures infrequent and less devastating, when she needed to beg her mother to let her sleep alone in her own bed at night. She’d fought her whole life to be in control of her life and her body, fights now to be completely in control of her mind.
When Dana puts her hand on Baran’s back as she moves past her in a crowded exam room, Baran startles. She knows Dana assumes it’s because of the attack. It’s not. A month later now, that memory has settled, found a place tucked away with the memories of Afghanistan, painful, terrible, but firmly the past, not something that makes her body react like it’s in danger now.
No, Dana’s hand on Baran’s back brings her back to being five, a different nurse’s hands on Baran. Faceless nurses holding her down so that doctors could inflict pain on her. Nurses tying her to the bed. To keep her from pulling out her lines and ET tube, Baran knows now, but her panicked, sedated, confused, child’s mind didn’t understand why her wrists were in restraints, only felt the fear of it.
She’s afraid these memories will never be relegated neatly to the past like Afghanistan and her patient’s boyfriend attacking her on the way to the T and coming back to consciousness after a seizure with her boyfriend inside of her, the weight of him on top of her, the sound of him grunting. Fuck, she can still hear him. Maybe that one is not so behind her, she thinks ruefully, that memory is perhaps too bound up in the shame she pretends she doesn’t feel.
Dana just smiles, doesn’t ask anything, doesn’t ask if Baran is ok, trusts her to still take care of the patient in the bed in front of them.
The memories of being a child, the helplessness, the shame, the fear, it’s all come back so much stronger since Baran started talking about it in therapy. Everything feels so complicated, so overwhelming that she wonders if she’ll ever be able to process it like her therapist wants her to or if she’ll once again need to bury it, a shameful, terrible part of her life that she has no choice but to never think of.
She pushes the memories away, will face them again in two days on her psychologist’s couch, will try to deal with something that she’s run from for thirty-eight years. But now Baran will push it down and get through her shift and be a fucking doctor, be an adult woman with a child, a partner, a job who cannot unravel now.