Chapter Text
Sarah signed off the video call and Brendon dropped his face into his hands. On the other side of the computer screen, Noor calmly wrote down some new notes in her folder.
“If it makes you feel better, we made it 24 minutes into the session before you reached a disagreement,” she said. “That’s a new record.”
“You should take up comedy if this whole family counseling thing flops,” Brendon gritted. Noor smiled, poised and impartial as always.
“I’ve noted that Sarah has exited the call, and I’ve made some notes on the interaction that will be added to the joint file later. Would you like to roll on into your individual session or shall we continue at another time?”
He wanted a stiff drink and a punching bag. But that was one of the avoidant behaviors they were trying to curb, and he didn’t want that on the documentation (if only for the sour spite of Sarah’s disappointment) should it ever be needed in family court.
“We can start,” he said gruffly.
The screen froze for a second (The recording has stopped), jilted, and then glitched again (The recording has started).
“In our last session, Brendon, you were getting ready to close on a house. How did that go?”
“Fine,” he replied. “Six bedroom, four bath. Big yard, privacy fence. Ten minute drive from here, ten to they boys’ school, twenty five from her house.”
“What do the boys think of the house?”
“It needs some TLC.” Brendon crossed his arms, eyes avoiding the older woman on the screen. “I want them to see when it’s finished.”
Noor made a note of that. Wrong thing to say, Park.
“Hmm,” Noor said, flipping back a page. “We’ve previously discussed a goal to help Ezra and Silas acclimate to the new family arrangement by giving them choices. We had spoken about their participation in choosing your new home.”
Silence. Waiting.
“Ultimately, the home is mine,” Brendon gritted out. “They get to go back and forth between there and the townhouse with Sarah. They’ll have plenty of choice between the two for their own rooms. I’m the one living there, probably for many more years. When they’re grown up, they’ll be able to make choices about where and how they live. I’m an adult now, so I make those choices.”
A curling scritch of the pen against paper.
“How did your last visit go?”
“We stayed in,” he said. After days of surgeries, he wasn’t feeling up to being out and about, especially dragging a whining preteen and a small child around. “Silas is still obsessed with ‘Gunsmoke’ right now. And Ezra has his books. I had an article I was finishing up for CORR.”
“So you all shared the same space, but didn’t interact much,” Noor noted, nonjudgemental but unforgivingly clear.
“What did you call it when you were reviewing Si’s notes?” Brendon asked. “Parallel play? We don’t have anything in common, and by the time our every-other-weekend rolls around we’re all too exhausted to try. Doesn’t it count if we’re sharing space and doing our own thing?”
“They are your weekends, Brendon. What you choose to do with your sons on those four days of the month is between the three of you.”
Brendon flinched internally, glowered externally. The implication (the truth) that what little time he had with them was squandered in silence month after month was not lost on him. But he was picking up the pieces of his life, and so were they. He was owed some grace, wasn’t he?”
“Have you and Sarah met further with your lawyers to discuss terms?”
“Alimony and child support for all three of them. Subject to change when I’m more settled and able to have the boys with me more. And again…later.”
“So you still will be paying support for Sarah and all three children? You’ve decided against the paternity test at this time?”
“I don’t want to discuss this further,” Park snapped. “You’ll have to excuse me, Noor, I am being paged downstairs.”
A lie. Well, half of one. The alert that came through on his work device was for an orthopedic surgery consult. He could send someone else, but if he did he would have to confront-
“Of course.” Of course. “Thank you for your candor today Brendon.”
“Goodbye,” he said, and signed off of the computer.
He rested his head back against his desk chair. That was…fuck.
He needed to move. Needed to work, needed to pour this anger and this hate into something that needed him, something he couldn’t hurt. So he reattached his name badge and moved down the hallway to the elevator, headed for his least favorite place in the building.
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Before the clusterfuck that was the fourth, Park would have called the Pitt the most aptly named place on earth. People swarmed through it like minnows in a too-small pond. Every crying baby and shouting man and hysterical woman and chaos junky doctor was trying to talk over one another. It smelled of harsh antiseptic’s fight against the human condition, and the bright white lights that seemed so crisp and clean upstairs forced everything in the ED into stark, ugly relief.
Al-Hashimi, he conceded, was efficient to a fault in running her temporary domain. They got on decently, if not distantly, and he appreciated the way she seemed incapable of staying down when knocked to the ground by circumstance.
“Dr. Park,” she greeted as he entered the trauma bay. “Thank you for your prompt timing.”
He hummed something that might have been acquiescence or a dismissal or nothing but a sound to make, and looked for the source of the trouble.
Of course, he’s right in the middle of it.
The patient was a child, probably no more than eight or nine. The chin and the tip of his nose and his cheek bloodied from where he’d eaten the sidewalk. A fretful woman still wearing her teacher’s badge hovered at the periphery, but the child didn’t reach for her.
He was wrapped in the lap of Dennis Whitaker, the new-and-shiny R1 Robinavitch had been grooming.
The man sat cross legged on the bed, his boots haphazardly discarded next to it. The boy was slouched in his lap, too tall and too old to be easily held, but certainly young enough to want it. Whitaker was showing the boy a video on his phone.
“...yeah, and that’s where- boom! Right into the wall!”
“You didn’t stay on it very long,” the boy said, unimpressed.
“Hey! I’ll have you know you have to stay on eight seconds to qualify for anything at all,” Whitaker huffed. “Most people get chucked off straight out the gate.”
“Did you win?”
“I placed third. But I was the youngest person there, too. I was only 16.”
“Woah,” the kid said, respect restored.
“Getting back on that skateboard when Doctor Park here says you can doesn’t seem all that bad now, does it?”
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, Dr. Whitaker,” Park said, leaning into the man’s personal space to examine the wrist in question. “X-Ray?”
“Clean snap, Radius and Ulna both,” Whitaker said, far more demurely and professionally than he had been a few seconds ago.
They spoke back and forth for a few minutes about medication, parental consent, and so forth.
“What were you doing in that video, anyway?” Park asked as they left the boy and his tearful teacher’s aid.
“I rode rodeo for a few years. Barrel racing, mostly, got up enough prize money to get my prereqs for med school while on scholarship for Theology. But I did a lot of rough stock, too. Bull riding, saddle bronc, bareback. Y’know,” the younger man shrugged, avoiding his eyes. “All the typical cowboy stuff.”
“...Whitaker, were you literally telling that kid how to get back on the horse?”
“Hey, he needed the encouragement. He wiped out in front of his big sister and her very pretty friends.”
“Oh, god forbid,” Park rolled his eyes. “Better make sure you sign his cast before he leaves tomorrow. He can impress them with stories of the ER Cowboy he met.”
Whitaker laughed, a short, breathy thing that tickled along the nape of Park’s neck, even though the shorter man was walking alongside him.
“Will do, boss man,” he said. “Is Ortho getting hassled by Management too?”
“How do you mean?” Park asked, surprised by the change in conversation. No one wanted to keep talking to him after consult.
“They want to borrow Attendings to act as seconds for Al-Hashimi while Robby’s gone. Don’t know why, she’s doing great.”
“Agreed,” Park said, shaking his head. “Robinavitch is circling the drain, let him drown. Fresh eyes on the place, better shape up.”
“Hey, watch yourself about Robby,” Whitaker said, elbow nudging him. If he wasn’t short circuited by the younger man actually talking back to him, he’d have been rocked back on his ass by the (friendly? Chastising, certainly. Casual?) contact. “We’re all really worried about him down here. He’s not perfect, not by any means, but that’s our Staff Dad.”
“Apologies, didn’t know I was dealing with an acolyte of Saint Robinavitch.” Shut up, he begged himself. Stop digging, just shut up and get out of there.
“Whatever man. Just- listen, if you hear anything about the Attending thing, think about it.”
“What?” He turned and watched Whitaker as he walked away, not realizing the man had walked him all the way to the elevator. “Me? Why?”
“Maybe I just wanna see your pretty face, Shark,” the younger man grinned. “But seriously, you’ve been…well, frankly, more of an asshole than usual lately. I don’t remember you acting like that when I was up in surgery. Strict, yeah. And you don’t pull punches. But I’ve never known you to punch down either. I don’t know man, not my business…But” He looked over his shoulder towards the waiting ED. “Change of pace might do you some good. Or you’ll hate it and I’ll be right there for you to cuss me out. Win-win.”
He turned away. “Later, man.”
><><><><><><
He’d never called his parents by their titles. No “Mom” to tuck him in, no “Dad” to praise his grades. “Sir” was something always out of reach. “Christine” was something worse- something he knew didn’t want him to reach.
He’d had a string of nannies. Routinely changed out with the seasons or the milestones of his growth. He’d been used to it by high school. Technically, he didn’t even need a caregiver at that age. But Frederick Park was a businessman whose work was far reaching, and his wife’s society life even more so. Someone had to be there to manage the day to day dealings of the house and sign consent forms when they were gone for weeks at a time.
Naomi had stayed with him from the time he was fourteen. She’d needed a change of pace, she’d said, after the loss of her husband. A few years out of her hometown in Philadelphia to “laze about” with a teenager in genteel Nantucket seemed like the ticket. Slow enough for her health, purposeful enough for her spirit, and just comfortable enough socially for her to heal. A novel experience for a chronic workaholic.
“By God, Bren,” she’d said one night as they sat watching the gulls on the back patio, stupidly expensive blankets wrapped around their shoulders as they drank hot chocolate with cinnamon. “If my Heath saw me today, he’d laugh his everloving ass off.”
Naomi understood more about Brendon’s situation than even his parents or siblings did, he thought. To his parents, he was a consequence. To his siblings, he was nothing. Of course, his sister Florence was fourteen years his senior, Paul and Vernon five years older than her. They were married with their own children by the time Brendon swam up from the deep well of loneliness long enough to gasp and realize the sheer injustice of it all.
“Don’t let it make you bitter, Brendon David,” she’d say. She used his middle name so he knew she meant it. “Don’t. You’ll regret it all your life if you do.”
So he’d pushed it down. He’d received his cold congratulations from Christine and a handshake from Franklin the day his acceptance to Johns Hopkins came in. Naomi had politely waited until they had gone to bed before pulling him into the kitchen for some sneaky rum cake and ice cream. He hadn’t told her he was applying for a school in her hometown. He didn’t want to face the rejection.
“Oh, buddy, you’re gonna have the time of your life!” She’d beamed. “I already called Margot and Eileen, and they’re looking at apartments for you.”
Naomi, the antithesis of his parents, was so good, so kind, so wonderful. He didn’t think anyone else could ever measure up to her. She worked hard- real work, not “playing with numbers” like his father. She cast her social circle wide and laid it on thick (“how icing is supposed to be, Brendon”) and true and real, unlike Christine. She opened her home and her arms to him without asking anything in return. And she was proud of him. Proud of him. “This is my boy, he’s gonna be a doctor one day,” she’d say.
The day she died was the worst day of his life.
Brendon looked at the near empty bottle of rum sitting on his liquor shelf in the kitchen. He could almost hear her. Oh, honey, don’t. But she wasn’t loud enough.
Sarah was still waffling about doing a paternity test. Apparently Jordan wanted paternity established to make dual citizenship or passports or whatever easier. She didn’t want it established because it would be irrefutable proof of her infidelity.
Brendon didn’t want to see another child go through what he did. And maybe his sons already were, kind of. He knew he was distant. Avoidant attachment style. Noor seemed to want to press for some other kind of testing, but what was the point? He was that he was.
He tried, sometimes. Every weekend, really. He tried to hug Ezra, who shrugged away from him (did he know? Oh God, did he know?). He tried to hug Silas, who bore it stiffly before retreating in silence to the couch. Every weekend something in him curled up in cringing, pitiful mass. He couldn’t even hug his children. He could replant amputated limbs with the highest success rate on the East Coast, he could command a room of medical professionals with ease, he could conduct and publish studies that changed the face of his profession every year.
He’d failed his marriage. He was failing his children. He had become bitter and he was failing Naomi.
He caught a whiff of the vanilla bean scent of his rum and his mind was transported back to walking through the Pitt, Whitaker at his side. If he didn’t move, if he let his eyes unfocus, he could pretend the black gym bag sitting next to him on the couch was the leg of the younger man’s scrubs. Could pretend that, for whatever reason, the younger man was pulling up videos of him getting chucked around by “rough stock” to talk to him about getting back in the saddle.
Whitaker wouldn’t tell him that if he knew everything. Wouldn’t reach out his hand. He never had, to Brendon at least, but whenever he tried to think of the young doctor, he was somewhere above him, hand outreached to clasp his. If he knew, if he knew, then he would pull that imagined hand back. He would council Brendon to give up, to start over. To let himself be isolated the way he was meant to be. To stop being so selfish, so needy, and yet so avoidant that he couldn’t even tell his family how much he-
Brrt-brrt. Brrt-brrt.
GLORIA UNDERWOOD CALLING.
Park set the rum down and answered.
“Brendon!” Underwood smiled through the phone. He could feel the irritation of a request he’d hate already. “Terribly sorry to call you so late. We’ve been trying to get some other Attendings to help down in the Emergency Department, and the person we had on the docket for tomorrow has called out sick. Would you be able to spare an Ortho Doctor for tomorrow for a few hours?”
“I’ll be there myself,” he said, surprising them both. “Need a change of pace, recently.”
Needed to see if he could get back on the horse.