static - 3.1k - frank pov
When Abby stays, nothing happens.
The world doesn’t collapse, God doesn’t come down from his supposed clouds and strike him down for his actions, his in-laws don’t pound at the door demanding that she leave, his children don’t scorn him.
A part of him that feels stunned, the part of him that awkwardly catches her when she throws her arms around him and cries. (He can’t remember the last time she cried for a reason that wasn’t him.) And all that he could do was hold her, while she said she’d wouldn’t leave him, not when he needed her the most.
“We’ve gone through hell and back together, Frank. This is just going to be one more round trip.”
He convinces himself that he’s in shock. Coming home from the airport, (the PHP had sent him to a center in buttfuck Kansas.), where he’d spoken to her the day before saying he’d get home by himself, no need to get a babysitter for the kids so she could pick him up or wrangle them in the car pointlessly for a too long drive where they’d be cranky the entire time.
As he walked up to the door, he braced himself for the moment his housekey wouldn’t turn, even when it did, smoothly as ever.
He stood outside the door, facing the light brown wood in its frame, preparing himself for what would be on the inside: an empty home, devoid of furniture, all save for a note explaining that Abby had left with the kids, and below that, a pile of divorce papers.
Instead, when he walked in, a brown puppy came to bark and yip at him for intruding yet still wagging its tail. All the furniture seemed to be in the same place, though it felt wrong. The furniture felt foreboding, familiar but distant as it lined the room all around him and he knows that the problem is him, he’s the one of place like Alice, staying the same size as the hallway got smaller and smaller.
Abby is surprised when she sees him, but he can’t even hug her as his children run to him, their faces pure excitement. He drops to his knees making back twinge, but they’re hugging him, pulling at his hair and reacting weirdly to the beard he hadn’t shaved off. And they giggle as he hugs them so tightly that they can’t pull away and all he can try to do is not scare them off with his tears.
They all sit down to eat in the kitchen as both his children tug on him for his attention and beg for a spot on his lap as they both try to catch him up on everything, Tanner a million times faster than Penny but Penny certainly much louder than her brother and all he can do is watching their little faces that had grown so much in just a month that he’d been away.
Abby smiles and calms the kids down as much as she can, cleaning up the plates after they finish and they all go to play with the brown little dog they had ended up naming Buddy.
It’s only after lunch and putting the kids down for a nap, that his stomach turns. He’s alone with his wife for the first time in over a month and he waits.
Waits for her to condemn him. Give him the killing blow after these last hours of kindness. To slap him. To choke him out. To tell him to kiss their kids goodbye and get the fuck out of dodge.
But she hadn’t.
And nothing happened.
He sat there, holding her. Till she pulled away to look at him, red eyed and teary and he plastered a smile on his face and kissed her and apologized, because that what he was supposed to do.
_
It’d never been easy for them. Abby got pregnant in his final year of medical school, which had them rushing to get married over Zoom with their families freezing up as they watched them say their vows in their first apartment. Once he’d been accepted into PTMC, his first choice (his only choice,) they’d had to move states, far from their families in the middle of a global pandemic with Tanner about to come into a world they were no longer certain of.
Months of isolation, staying at Robby’s to avoid getting his newborn sick while his wife cried because the baby wouldn’t stop crying, and would call him on the phone because she didn’t know what else to do, and neither did he and the newly minted doctor part of his brain kept diagnosing his child with every nightmare situation he had seen during the day.
Residency still took away most of Frank’s time to be at home, raising his child in fragments once it was safe for him to go back. A year later, Abby showing two pink stripes on a pregnancy test for him on his birthday, and they not expected Penny and had to calculate a resident’s salary for a family of four with two infants in the mix.
But they survived that, they’d gotten through it all, together. So, after everything they’d gone through, having a junkie for a husband was just background noise at this point.
_
It’s strange, actually living in your home after so many years.
He takes care of his children the way he’d only been able to at night time, early mornings, or his rare days off. He learns and re-learns their habits of which pajamas they like or how Tanner has a new food he hates every day and he loves hiding them in weirder and weirder places so he doesn’t have to eat them, and Frank only finds them when they’re moldy or ants literally lead him to them.
The way that Penny cries when he drops her off at daycare when he has run errands or see his therapist or go to the mandatory three NA meetings a week that the PHP demands (all the while, bleeding him dry), while Abby’s at work, and his sweet little girl clings to him so hard her little nails dig into his skin and there’s a part of him that’s destroyed that his daughter thinks he might leave her again.
He walks the dog around the neighborhood and listens to medical podcasts and tries to stop every thought that comes to his head about everything he’s ever done and reminds himself he seems to be the luckiest son of a bitch that’s ever lived when he has the most beautiful kids and a truly wonderful wife and he’s lucky enough not to be going to prison and instead he has emails in his inbox with PTMC administration stating that they’re starting the process for him to repeat his final residency year.
But all he feels is static in his chest.
When he’d come home after Pitt Fest, stumbling into his car and driving home after his shouting match with Robby, and after seeing one hundred shooting victims and losing his faith in humanity with each face that he saw, he felt static. Disconnected, detached from everything all around him because he’d just lost his job because no one got the fact that he was just weaning himself off of pain meds that he was done and he thought to himself why don’t I blow this up too?
And he told Abby.
He’s not sure why he did it, a part of him was so sure that she’d agree with him, that’d she know he wasn’t a drug addictand okay you can go to rehab for a month so you can play it off perfectly for them babe, I get it. He was convinced she’d understand, that she’d stay.
He was certain this would finally be her breaking point, because every other time they were working toward something, a new job, a new life, a future together and this felt like a slap in the face and fifty steps back, and she’d leave because wouldn’t be able to stand it, her husband admitting he’d been on drugs in front of their children, her husband hurting his patients for his own benefit.
Do you know what benzos do? They slow down your brain and your nervous system. I just needed things to slow down, it’s not like I was high. I took these to stop taking the pain meds that Dr. Hagen, —you remember when I went to see him? — he’s the one that overprescribed, don’t you get it? I was treating my withdrawal I was getting better; I am getting better And I couldn’t just go get them out on the street, do you know how many people we’re seeing from fentanyl overdosing every day, Abs? I could never do that to the kids. Or you.
Days later Abby drove him to airport in silence.
_
It’s not like before that everything had been perfect. There was always something. How little he was at home, or how distracted and spaced out he was, but also how fidgety and irritable. How he couldn’t just call to talk to the kids because they wanted to talk longer and he’d have to hang up after a few minutes and she had to deal with them upset.
How there was always something: a marathon to be trained for, an ice plunge to suffer through, boxing classes just for the hell of it.
But Frank had always done what he could, he tried to be considerate and show them his love in a way that could always be there since he wasn’t. He was the breadwinner of the home, he could get the kids good quality clothing with Bluey characters and get Abby the Birkin she had mentioned, and a dog for them to play with and salmon for them to eat for dinner if he got home early enough.
Because what mattered was that he tried. It didn’t matter that Tanner was four and could barely take care of a dog, and that a Birkin was pretty fucking expensive and he barely knew how to buy stuff if it wasn’t on Amazon. He tried and he would always keep trying for his family and if he didn’t get it right the first time, he’d get it the second.
Yet, the static.
Humming in his ears as his wife greeted him good morning and he barely felt her kiss him on the cheek while he made coffee.
Nipping at the back of his mind at the thought of returning to bed where she was already asleep, during late nights after mindlessly watching TV on the couch, convincing himself it was easier to just sleep there instead of trudging all the way back to the bedroom.
It was a heavy layer stuck on his skin in the moments when he couldn’t bring himself to talk to her, because he no longer knew what to ask, he couldn’t think of what to say beyond basic pleasantries and he was waiting for the moment she noticed
The months go by and their conversations dry out, except mentions and anecdotes about their children, the things they’d done throughout the day, the chores they had to do by morning; and at night they’d go to sleep, her in their bed, him on the couch, playing with his ring until he lost consciousness.
It’d always been comically loose even before he’d lost weight through the detoxication process at rehab. He couldn’t really remember it annoying him before, the way the ring dragged up and down his finger not letting go but never staying in place.
Some mornings it just ends up in his pocket. When he’s alone with Penny, and Abby’s gone at work. He goes and picks up Tanner from kindergarten without wearing it and feels the nerves of other parents seeing him and reporting him back to his wife, but still he keeps it off for hours at a time until Abby’s keys dangle in the front door and Buddy’s paws could be heard running to greet her and he’d fiddle with in it his pocket, slipping it on, smiling at her awkwardly.
It feels wrong, like he’s pretending to be some other man.
But it always so much easier to pretend when no one was looking.
He knew he could never leave Abby. Not after everything she’d gone through with him.
At this point in his life, he’s aware of just how cruel he can be. His addiction justifying every decision he made to calm his conscious, aware of every person under his care that’d that broken his oath that he would not harm them.
He could never do that to Abby, to just see the world she’s kept steady as possible around him, and take it for granted. For him to start his recovery, look at the woman who’d stood by his side through it all and say: “Thanks for everything, I’ll take it from here.”
If she woke up one day and wanted him out of her life, he would understand and try to not cause her as much grief as much he’s already done. But he knows she’ll stay.
She always had.
_
Slower than expected, Frank goes back to work.
It was two days earlier than when he should’ve come in, he was scheduled for Monday but someone had gotten sick or they were on vacation or a family emergency, and they needed him to sub in early. His wife only smiled tightly and nodded when he came downstairs with a backpack tucked with his scrubs.
Most of co-workers seemed to be happy to see him. The same ones that hadn’t sent him a text message the ten months he was gone. No one mentioned anything about trying to reach out, or some excuse about how they thought about it but never did. Dana pretty much tells him to pick up his pity party and go work.
So, he does.
And he makes his apologies and people accept them and people don’t, and what was cellulitis at seven a.m. turns into an amputation by midday and Louie fucking dies on him, and Robby would rather see him dead than in the emergency department again and he feels like he’s drowning all fucking day long and maybe he’s not really cut out for it and—,
Mel’s there.
And Mel’s drowning too, and no one seems to notice it either.
So, he decides maybe it’ll be easier if they both try keep the other afloat. Everything seems to be a lot easier when she’s by his side.
Mel who missed him. Mel who didn’t know why’d he left. Mel who he never let down.
And there’s an ease to it, that he’d only felt once before, ten months ago when he met her. It’s a comfort for his eyes to follow her braid whipping around the ER as he charts. For him to find the gaps around her while they work on a trauma together, because he just knows what she’ll do next. To share his meals with her because he never sees her eating but when he sits down and gives her half of whatever warm leftovers his wife made, she eats as well.
Rumors follow them around like vultures on a wounded animal, circling above them as he tries to keep Mel out of the predatory loop. He sees Tim pass Ahmad some money, and he watches him press a purple sticky note down on terribly hidden whiteboard, on a column titled Cheating. Right next to Separation, right next to Divorce.
He tries to shine his wedding ring at them, at the same time as he tugs Mel’s hair, feeling electricity run up his veins as she turns around and smiles at him brightly.
But as wounded animals do, they fend off any outsiders with bared teeth, and broken nail.
There are heavy glances when Mel comes to find him when she’s overstimulated, or he drags her away for a moment just so he can hide his face in her shoulder and gasp for air in between sobs, there are subtle suggestions that they should speak to Kiara or Dylan for support during these emotional episodes but they just get better at telling each other I need you with a look from across trauma rooms.
He gets into an argument with Robby, who’d come back after his sabbatical having found himself and that version that he’d found still wanted Frank dead, and it takes Mel interfering politely telling their attending that she found his behavior towards Frank to be a violation against the ADA, and it gets Robby even more pissed off but at least he backs away.
When Dana tells Mel off for sticking her nose too close to a married man’s business, causing Mel to shrink into herself and avoid him for a few days until he can pull the truth out of her, it takes all his strength to politely tell Dana to fuck off, that she doesn’t have his best interests in mind and she shouldn’t speak on behalf of him or his marriage regarding Mel.
Out of spite, Frank begins driving Mel home after that shift.
And after that’s it’s just so simple to drive her home from work each night, assuring himself ten minutes of time alone with Mel somewhere quiet after the chaos of their emergency department. As they sit in the car for one moment, a space that only exists for the two of them.
The ten minutes that kept getting longer each night, as he ignores his phone buzzing as his wife tries to call him and ask where he’s at, as he insists for Mel to go on with whatever she’s saying, and they get distracted and talk about anything and everything, in the darkness lit only by the pale white LED street lamps in front of her place.
Saying goodbye takes longer as he doesn’t want her to leave even though she insists that he has to back home to his family, and he just holds her for a moment before she goes.
It’s so easy for Frank to hug her goodbye and go in kiss her on the freckle next to her eye when he says good night, only for her to try and pull away from their embrace at the same time, so he misses the high of her cheekbone and catches on her mouth instead.
So easy for Frank to give into the mistake and just kiss her and kiss her and kiss her.
It’s so easy to follow her into her apartment, wondering to himself if Abby will stay after this too.
