On the El, heading to work, Susan tries out baby names--girls' names, mostly. But every time she finds one she likes, she can't put it together with a last name without the sound of it suddenly turning ridiculous in her ears.

Watch out, that's the little Martin kid you've got there.

It's Lewis until she says different, but isn't it a little sad to be passing on your maiden name that way? Just an indication that maybe she isn't ready, despite what those years with Suzie may have taught her. Just a whiff of desperation in the air. Just a hint this isn't what she wants, no matter what she insists on telling herself when she wakes up in the middle of the night, Chuck sawing logs beside her. His breath hitches every minute or two in a random pattern of sleep apnea that drives her crazy, because she knows that someday he's not going to take that next breath, and presto, she'll be calling a code right in her own bedroom.

She tells Abby that she's happy, that this is going well, that even drunken Las Vegas weddings cum divorces cum shotgun common-law parenthood can turn out okay. She winces a little inside every time it looks like Chuck's about to propose, because she's worried she'll blurt out something stupid before she can, sensibly, say yes.

She's not known for blurting out the sensible.

In the middle of the day it seems perfectly natural to marry Chuck, to make with the nuclear family and let him call the kid Martin if he wants to. It's his kid, fifty-fifty as the genes go, no doubt there (she hasn't been with another man for a year); but damn it, if she's the one with the bigger gametes, shouldn't she have the bigger say? And in the middle of the night, when her back aches and she can't sleep because her bed is so strangely filled, it's not Chuck's smile when she told him he was going to be a dad that she's thinking of.

It's someone else's smile. It's--

Crazy. But then, that's what her life has been, ever since she moved back to Michigan. Arizona moves at a slower pace, and things make a kind of sense in Phoenix that they can't in Chicago. Maybe it's the weather--all those freak blizzards and the wind-whipped detritus echoing the soap opera storms she's surrounded by at work. Maybe it's the people, the changes she could never have guessed at when she left, the way that someone else is smiling at her these days when before it was just--

Crazy.

Weaver is showing off baby pictures of Henry when Susan stomps into the lounge, knocking muddy sleet off her boots and shrugging out from under the woolen weight of her scarf. Randi and Chuny are oohing and ahhing with appropriate vigor. Abby stands back a bit, arms folded, Styrofoam coffee cup in one hand, and her smirk is almost a smile. Susan stuffs bag and coat and newspaper and lunch and boots into her locker, exhausted before her shift even starts. She yanks out her lab coat and tries not to groan as she squeezes into it.

"Hey, Dr. Lewis, you gotta see these pictures," Chuny says. "You wanna see what you're looking forward to."

"We're practically starting our own nursery," Randi adds. "With Carter and you and Dr. Weaver all being parents at once. Maybe it's something in the water around here, eh?"

"Yeah," Abby says, mostly to herself, "and maybe all the screwing in this place finally caught up with everybody." Susan rolls her eyes and Weaver seems to think the remark was quiet enough to ignore--or else, Susan thinks, she figures it's hardly applicable to her.

With a painful smile, Susan waddles to the table and sits down next to Weaver, trying to admire the pictures and put on her work shoes at the same time. Four or five photos of Henry in his NICU crib, round face scrunched and purple, tiny arms flailing at the camera. One Polaroid of him with Weaver, Sandy, and Abby, celebrating. In the next, Sandy is cuddling him, but her bright-eyed laughter is entirely for whoever's working the camera...three guesses who, and the first two don't count. The last shows Henry in Weaver's arms, staring at her with baby fascination. And Weaver, looking down at him, one pinky trapped in a chubby fist, has that shy, tender smile on her face...

That smile that turns her from Weaver to Kerry.

That smile she's giving Susan right now.

Susan finds herself smiling back--it's really impossible not to, when suddenly she finds herself looking at Kerry the human being, Kerry the woman with a family and emotions that go beyond "if you mess up I will roast your balls on a stick".

"He's beautiful," Susan says, with husky sincerity, and Kerry nods.

There's a moment of silence, then Randi and Chuny start the shuffling of people who realize they should have been elsewhere about ten minutes ago. Susan drops her eyes from Kerry's face and finishes tying her shoes. Abby dumps the last of her coffee down the sink and clears her throat, mutters something about too many cigarettes. Then they're all leaving, Chuny and Randi back to Admit, Abby out to track down Pratt to present her patients, and Kerry...Kerry opens her locker and tapes the picture of Sandy holding Henry to the inside of the door.

"Heading out?" Susan asks, though she knows. She's here to relieve her, after all.

Another nod. Kerry's looking down, aside, anywhere but at Susan sitting at the break-room table. Susan wonders if it's for the same reason she's finding it so difficult to go out there and start her shift. "Sandy's coming to pick me up," Kerry says at last, gently, the way she talks to sick kids.

It's Susan's turn to nod. She heaves herself up from her chair, puts a hand to (the little Martin kid) her stomach, and heads for the door. Halfway out, she turns around, and says, "Hey, Kerry?"

"Yes?"

"You--with Henry, and Sandy--it looks like you're doing great. I hope I'm as lucky as you."

Kerry gives one last hint of that tiny smile. "You will be."

"Yeah, well--" But Susan's not about to get into it. Turns out she can stop the blurting when she needs to. She tilts her head a little, a kind of so-so gesture, and there's really nothing else to say. "Looks like they need an Attending out there. It's a war zone."

And she's out, into another one of those Chicago-blizzard days. When she gets home, Chuck meets her at the door wearing a Kiss The Cook apron and she does just that. She tells him about her day and laughs and snuggles next to him when they go to bed.

And she stays awake all night, thinking up baby names, and not a single one fits.

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April 14, 2004