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6 P.M., MONDAY, JAN. 17, 2022, OHSU — Blair took the bus up to OHSU for visiting hours. She could have asked for a ride, she supposed, but people were so upset. Bianca could barely say Will’s name she was so angry. And Ben was grim with barely controlled rage. Others didn’t know about what happened, other than the concussion, and were practically in tears worried about him. It all felt like a burden, and it drowned out any attempt to know what she felt.
Blair called the therapist Dr. Clarke had recommended, and scheduled an appointment for Tuesday at 11 a.m. Maybe she could help her figure out her own feelings amongst the uproar of everyone else’s.
Until she did figure them out, however, she figured she should ‘act as if.’ EWN’s mantra. So she went up to sit with Will. She talked to his surgeon first who was pleased with Will’s prognosis. “There should be no lasting damage,” he told her. “He needs to take it easy. I’d recommend two weeks of doing nothing. Followed by a gradual return to normal duties. He’s a student, right? Can he miss two weeks of classes?”
“This early in the term? I’m sure he can,” she reassured him.
“And then we can see, but my guess... it will be a month after that before he can do much more than classes. If he has a job? He probably can’t work for six weeks.”
Blair nodded. “When can he come home?” she asked. She found she dreaded the answer.
He thought about that and reviewed his chart. “We try to get people out of here quickly,” he said. “COVID, you know. Does he have a place to go?”
“Yes,” she said, and her dread increased. But she knew her duties to the commitments she had made to Will. And quite frankly to EWN. Her own needs, especially when she didn’t even know what they were, could wait.
“Then I would say Friday.”
“Thank you, doctor,” she said quietly.
He nodded, and then hesitated. “It’s important that he stay calm until the concussion has passed,” he said. “And that can mean good things as well as bad things. If we release him on Friday, I’d like to see him back the following Friday. And until then? No sex. I’m sorry to be blunt with you, but truly, calm is important to recovery here.”
“I understand,” she said. She actually felt grateful, and that wasn’t a good sign. “But would you do me a favor, and have that talk with him before Friday? So I don’t have to be the one to tell him that?”
She smiled at him, and she made it a bit teasing, and the doctor laughed. “I can do that,” he promised. “With a list of other things.”
She made her smile bigger and said thank you, and then she went down to sit with Will. He was sleeping and she didn’t wake him. For a while she just sat there and tried to see the man she loved in his features. Asleep, she thought she could. She pulled out her phone, called up a book she was reading for class, and read for a while.
She didn’t know how long she’d been reading, when she looked up, and saw Will was watching her, with a smile on his face, more bittersweet than sweet.
“Hey,” she said quietly. She reached over and took his hand. She told him about going to the zoo with everyone at the Portland Heights house. “It was fun,” she said. “I wish you could have been there too.”
He smiled. “I don’t think I’ve ever been to a zoo.”
Blair smiled back. “I think it was a first for Emily too, and for all the Castros as well. I’ve only been once, I think. You would have fit right in.”
“Did you call my parents?” he said somewhat abruptly.
“Ryan did,” she answered. “I sat in on it. They were worried. Your mom wanted to come right up, but Ryan convinced them to wait. And then he asked about vaccinations. He’s planning to have them call the hospital if they ask again about a visit — so the hospital staff can be the ones to tell them about COVID tests.”
Will moved a bit restlessly. “Is it possible to be both embarrassed by them and love them too?”
“Of course,” Blair said. “We all have mixed emotions about our families, don’t you think? And we love them anyway.” She wondered if that was true for Ryan. That would be hard.
“Not you and your parents though,” he said.
“Me and my parents too,” she said firmly. “We will talk about that someday, but not today. You’re supposed to stay calm and think happy thoughts, or they will make me leave.”
“Blair,” he began, and then he started to cry. Blair stroked his face gently and crooned wordlessly to him.
“Shush,” she said finally. “It will be all right, Will. Truly. It will take time, but there is plenty of time. No rush. Dr. Clarke recommended you see your therapist again to deal with some of the emotions that came out this last week. Emotions I don’t think you even knew you had. Is it OK if I call him? Maybe he can make a visit to you here before you are discharged.”
He nodded. He bit his lip. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “I have these jumbled images — Ryan used to call his a kaleidoscope. And I get it now. And they horrify me. I don’t even know if they’re real.”
“And that’s why seeing your therapist will help,” Blair said.
“Ryan knows him,” Will said. “Ryan. He hasn’t been to see me. Is he mad?”
“I don’t think so,” Blair said. “He was here Sunday, but the doctor only wanted one person at a time, and then you fell asleep while I was holding your hand. Remember?”
He smiled and nodded. “I fucked up.”
“No,” she said adamantly. “You got hurt. That’s different. Remember? We’ve been through a lot together. No guilt for what you can’t help.”
He sighed. “I love you.”
“And I love you.”
He fell asleep again, and she put away her phone and went to leave. Ryan was waiting for her outside the door. “I came to see him too,” he said. “But it looked like the chair was already taken. Want a ride back?”
She nodded. “Can you take me to the Goose Hollow apartment?” she asked. “And then I’ll walk over to EWN.”
He didn’t argue. Instead, he told her about his pending meeting with Steve Planck in the morning. She nodded. “I’ll assign a reporter tonight,” she said. “Kari maybe. She can request appointments with them all. That will light a fire under them.”
Ryan laughed. “Good thinking,” he said. She’d be as manipulative as he was before her year as editor was over.
“And I want to be there,” she continued. He opened his mouth to protest, and then reconsidered. He just nodded.
Since she seemed to understand university politics, he also told her about his meeting with Dean Fisk. She was laughing hard by the time he was done.
“What?” he said, with pretend injury.
“You’re so bad,” she accused him. “Manipulative bastard, indeed. And you had to rub his nose in it by having the proposal done and waiting to send.”
He grinned at her. “I just signed on for a hell of a lot of work and untold headaches,” he said. “Let me have my fun where I can.”
She giggled. “What will President McShane say?”
“Probably ‘let’s see what happens,’” Ryan said with a laugh. “That’s what he usually says.”
Ryan parked behind the apartment building and got out.
“You don’t have to stay,” she said uncertainly.
“I think I should,” he said. “I had it cleaned, but I haven’t been in to see what they did. And I don’t think you should do this alone. Unless you’d rather call Bianca?”
She shook her head. “She hasn’t seen it, has she?”
“Just me and Ben,” he said.
“Then no.”
She unlocked the apartment door and went inside. Compared to the glimpse of it she’d had days ago, it wasn’t what she had feared. It was clean. Some things were stacked neatly for her to decide what should be done. The pieces to the rocking chair. Well those could go. It was a $99 special from Target, and she could easily replace it. It had mattered, because it was a rocking chair, not because it was that rocking chair.
It looked like someone had mended the rug, and that touched her. She bit her lip so as not to cry.
She noticed the Avengers poster was missing, but she didn’t ask about it. Best not to know. She put off their bedroom to last. But the bed was made and there was her grandmother’s quilt folded neatly on the bed. There was a note on it.
She read it and started to cry, and she couldn’t stop the tears. Ryan pulled her into a hug, and he pressed her head against his shoulder. “Cry, girl,” he said. “Go ahead. Just you and me. Cry.”
She nodded and swallowed back some of the tears. She handed him the note.
It was from Joel: This was made with love, and that’s worth preserving. A gift from my wife who also quilts. Best regards. Joel.
Ryan looked like he was a bit teary after he’d read it too. “There are nice people in the world,” he said. “Joel is one of them.”
She nodded. She tried to get control of the tears, but she couldn’t. “I’m sorry,” she said, and then she got the hiccups. She laughed.
Ryan grinned at her. “Come on, let’s get you some water.”
She drank the water and fought to get control of her emotions. “I don’t know why, that of all things, the quilt undid me, but it did.”
“Sometimes, when we’ve had to be strong for so long and for everyone else, it’s the small gift of love that unravels us,” Ryan said.
She nodded. “I’m seeing that therapist in the morning,” she said. “I don’t know how I feel about anything. And everyone else’s feelings are so loud!”
He laughed at that. “Yes,” he agreed. “They are. That’s good about the therapist. I heard Will give you permission to call Sam. You want me to do that?”
“Is that who Will sees?” she asked. “Yes, please. I talked to the doctor who said Will can come home Friday. I’d like him to see Sam before then. Do you think he can?”
“Sam would be the first to agree that he should,” Ryan predicted.
“And he’s not supposed to do anything for two weeks. Read I guess. Then classes only for a month. That’s six weeks, Ryan, before he can come back to EWN.”
Ryan frowned. “We’ll see how it plays out,” he said. “And Will and I have some talks ahead when he’s feeling better. But my recommendation would be to transition from you as interim editor to you as EIC. And that when he’s ready he can return to reporting. That’s what he loves.”
“Maybe,” she said uncertainly. “But he thinks I’m undercutting him as it is.”
“That’s the ugly gunk that leaked out,” Ryan said. “He needs to figure out which is real — the gunk, or the stuff he normally says he feels. And that’s going to take some time and some therapy.”
She nodded.
“But what do you need?” he asked. “Do you want to come back here? I didn’t think you did. But maybe it isn’t as bad as you thought?”
She wandered through the apartment again. Noting what was there and what wasn’t. She opened up the closet and saw that a lot of her clothes were missing. That hurt more as a sign of what had happened here than any real attachment to those clothes. After all, she had more downstairs. And she could always go shopping. Buy new clothes that weren’t pink.
She closed the closet door and turned to see Ryan watching her sympathetically. She smiled and shrugged. “I have more clothes downstairs,” she said.
He laughed.
She nodded decisively. “OK,” she said. “I can come back here. I wasn’t sure that I could. And that would have posed a whole set of other questions. But Joel’s gift? It goes a long way toward helping me deal with this. Do you have his address? I need to thank him and his wife.”
“I’ll get it for you,” he said. “I think you should stay with us a few more days, Blair. Maybe until we bring Will home. Even for introverts, being alone can bring dark thoughts. I was going to offer you that little unit for as long as you need it. It’s still available for you if that’s what you decide.”
She knew what he meant and was too tactful to come right out and say it. If she didn’t want to return to living with Will. Truthfully, she wasn’t sure she did. But living here, taking care of him, no sex allowed? She could do that. He needed her. And well, they could see then, what both of them wanted.
“One step at a time,” she said. “But I’m OK with bringing him home. Doctor says no sex, and I told him to have that talk with Will so I don’t have to. So we can test the waters, one toe at a time.”
Ryan laughed. “You are amazing,” he said. And she heard the sincerity in his words; they warmed her. “Do you want to go back to EWN? Or home? It sounded like tonight was going to be an easy one. Dona’s piece starts tonight, and that will be the keystone of the broadcast. She said it was already edited and ready to go.”
She thought about it and nodded. “Let me call Ben and let him know.”