Yours Truly (Part of Your World #2)

Right before I left for the day, I found an envelope in my locker.

I broke into a grin the second I saw it. It was a little long, and I got a flutter of anticipation when I saw all the pages.

This was fun. I was actually having fun, for the first time in I couldn’t remember how long. I took the letter home and crossed my legs under me on the bed and unfolded the papers.

Dearest Briana,

While we’re on the topic of insufficient apologies, a story for you if I may.

I have three sisters, Jewel, Jill, and Jane. And yes, my parents named all of us with J names. My brother is Jeremiah, my mom is Joy. Please do not hold any of this against me.

Jewel is a tattoo artist. She owns a parlor in St. Paul. She’s very gifted.

A few years ago I lost a bet with her. If I lost, I had to let her give me a tattoo of her choosing.

I don’t have any tattoos. I’ve always been too afraid to commit to something so permanent. But Jewel is amazing at what she does, so I thought she’d give me something profoundly beautiful, an everlasting imprint that I’d cherish. Something I never knew I needed to carry with me through life.

She gave me a tiny lawn mower on my chest next to a small patch of shaved chest hair.

I cackled.

I laughed so hard I think I scared the cat in the other room.

It was sort of surprising how funny Jacob was. He seemed so uptight. But then I realized that it was probably the anxiety that made him come off that way. I felt like there was a lesson here about not judging books by their cover or something…

I read on.

The tattoo has since been lasered off, which cost me eight hundred dollars and was quite painful. She refused to apologize. Something about stupid games and stupid prizes?

If Jewel had lost, she had to shave her head. She shaved her head anyway. She’s always wanted to, apparently, so my losing was a foregone conclusion. I should have known after a lifetime of experience that I am not capable of outsmarting the women in my family—which I suppose was the lesson.

I think I would have enjoyed the tiny horse.

Sincerely,

Jacob

That was it. No more letter.

I was starting to wish I had his number—well, I did and I didn’t. Part of the fun was the letter thing. But then it was over so fast. Just a couple of minutes and then nothing for like a whole day. I wondered if I would have this much fun talking to him on the phone or texting him. I bet I would.

Benny was still sleeping. I had to wake him up for dinner and do his dialysis, but I decided to wait so I could write Jacob back really quick. If I didn’t deliver a letter tomorrow, it would be longer until I got one from him again.

I was about midway done when Benny came dragging into the kitchen.

“What are you doing?” he asked, sounding so out of it I wondered if he’d even understand the answer.

He looked like a sleepwalker. He was wearing the same clothes as yesterday. A gray wrinkled T-shirt and checkered pajama bottoms. He needed to shave.

I’d known moving him here wasn’t going to be a quick fix, but I was hoping he’d be doing a little better by now. He was taking his medications. At least he was this week. I’d been handing them to him myself. And he was back with his therapist now that I was here to make sure he went. She said he’d missed several weeks leading up to his ER visit, which explained a lot.

He wasn’t alone anymore, and he was in a safe place. I was doing all the right things for him. But I wanted a sign that he was still in there. That some of this, any of this, was working. Even a little.

I cleared my throat and looked away from his haggard body. “I’m writing a letter.”

He dropped into a chair at the kitchen counter.

I set down my pen. “Hey, what do you think about watching a movie tonight?”

He didn’t answer, just stared into the kitchen.

“Benny?”

He didn’t reply.

I reached over and put a hand on his wrist. “Hey, let’s go for a short walk after dialysis. Just around the block. Yeah?”

He squeezed his eyes shut. “Just…stop nagging me,” he whispered.

I had to swallow the lump that bolted to my throat.

There was this mother who came into my ER once. She’d ridden in on the same ambulance as her son after he made a suicide attempt. We weren’t able to save him.

When I came out to tell her the news, she was so…resigned. Like she’d known this was coming for ages. Like she’d already cried about it and grieved him and this just made it official. She looked up at me with bloodshot eyes and said in the most sincere way I’d ever heard, “I did everything I could.”

And it terrified me that now I knew what that meant.

There was nothing else I could do for my brother. There was nothing else to pull from my arsenal except for pleas to get him up and moving. He was already in therapy and on depression meds. I couldn’t get him into an inpatient program unless he agreed to go, which he wouldn’t. He couldn’t be forced unless he was a danger to others or himself—which he wasn’t. I didn’t worry that Benny was going to hurt himself. Not directly, anyway. He was just going to give up on trying to stay alive.

He didn’t want to live in this body. Not broken the way it was.

I knew many, many patients with disabilities and chronic illnesses who lived their lives with dignity and joy and purpose. I knew people in end-stage renal failure, just like Benny, who didn’t even slow down. They took vacations and raised their families and had fun and made memories and plans. Jacob was right about dialysis. It was a gift. It gave you time. And I had hoped that Benny would get there, that he’d accept his new normal and find a way to keep loving life. But he wasn’t. He was withering. It had all happened too fast and taken too much from him. He couldn’t pivot. And the dialysis was the constant reminder that the worst possible thing had happened. Every time he sat down for it, he lost more of himself. Only a kidney could change this in any fast and meaningful way. And I couldn’t get him a kidney. I couldn’t even give him hope.

“Who you writing to?” he asked again, breaking into my thoughts. His tone was conciliatory. He probably felt bad for snapping at me.

I sniffed. “I’m writing to a friend. That doctor who came into your room that day in the ER.”

“I thought you didn’t like that guy.”

I shrugged. “I like him. He’s nice.”

“Are you trying to date him or something?”

“No. We’re just friends.” I put the letter facedown and pushed up from my seat. “I’m going to fill up the tub for you.”

He groaned. “What? Nooo.”

“Yes. I’ll grab some clothes to change into when you’re done.”

He let out a resigned noise from the back of his throat. “No tub. I’ll just…take a shower,” he muttered.

“Cool. And shave. Then we’ll go for a quick walk and watch a movie while we do your dialysis,” I said, trying to keep my tone bright.

He sighed deeply and then got up and went upstairs. I watched him go and deflated as soon as he was gone.

It was hard to be strong for us both. I barely had enough for me.

The next morning, I left the letter peeking out from under the keyboard of Jacob’s charting computer the second I got in.

Jacob,

Okay, but would you really enjoy the tiny horse? Really? I mean what do they even do? You can’t ride them unless you’re like seven or something. They’re cute, but it’s totally not practical.

It’s like those little pet monkeys that wear the diapers. They seem so cool, but they bathe in their own urine and fling poo and unscrew all your lightbulbs.

I think I knew exactly the moment that he’d read this part because I heard a laugh come out of the supply closet. He liked to take his breaks in there.

Hey, you don’t have a girlfriend, do you? It just occurred to me I never asked and me slipping letters into your locker might not be appropriate. I’m not hitting on you, in case you or your girlfriend are worried. I just want to be clear about that. I’m single and off the market, so no one can tell me who can write me letters or what kind of exotic pets I’m allowed to bring home. Might get wild and start realizing my dream of running a skunk rehab. They’re supposed to be good to cuddle once their scent glands are removed.

I’d signed it with a terrible drawing of a skunk.

I figured I should make it clear that none of this back-and-forth was in anything other than the spirit of friendship, just in case he thought I was flirting.

I didn’t date men I worked with. That was a personal rule for me—even if he was exceptionally attractive. Maybe especially because he was exceptionally attractive…

His personality really took it up a notch.

By lunch, I had a letter on my charting computer. It was on the stationery he used when he wrote from home, which meant he brought it to work just to write me. I grinned.

Dearest Briana,

I’m single as well. My ex and I broke up last year. I didn’t mistake your friendship for anything other than what it was, but I suppose it’s good we clarify, especially since we work together.

I think I could handle a Shetland pony. I have a bit of experience with hard to manage animals. Lieutenant Dan was a rescue with behavioral problems, and I grew up with a parrot. A thirty-year-old African gray named Jafar. He’s a bit of a jerk. He knocks things over and then blames the cat. He also likes the word (and you’re going to have to excuse the language here) “motherfucker,” so sometimes we’re treated to the sound of shattering glass followed by “The cat did it, motherfucker!”

I was laughing SO HARD.

Jafar just added “bullshit,” “cocksucker,” and “you’re sitting on the remote” to his twisted repertoire. We have no idea who taught him this, though I suspect it was my grandfather, who seems to enjoy a certain level of chaos at elegant family gatherings.

I replied on my lunch break with a hurried story about a patient I’d had that day who cut off his own pinky toe to prove to his friend we could reattach it. We did, so I guess he was right, but still.

Jacob wrote back by five about a guy who won a bet that he couldn’t eat a whole container of sugar-free gummy bears. He had severe diarrhea. Jacob had to prescribe him Desitin for his diaper rash, and the guy’s friends were cracking up so hard Jacob had to kick them out.

Then our shifts were over. We went home and now both had four days off because Jacob and I had the same schedule: twelve-hour shifts for one week with four days on and three days off. Then the next week it was three days on and four days off.

Four days, no letter. It sucked.

Now I really had nothing to do. I was so bored.

My first day off, the weather was nice so I took Benny out for ice cream, which I hoped would cheer him up, since he hadn’t been able to have any for the last six months. He just poked at it and said it tasted weird. Probably his meds affecting his taste buds. I stopped at a park on the way home and made him walk with me around the lake. He acted like he’d been kidnapped, and he looked miserable the whole time. When we got back, he went straight to his room.

If I didn’t have to be here, I’d probably drive down to see Alexis for the long weekend. I guessed I still could. Do Benny’s dialysis now, get back by tomorrow night in time for it again. But I didn’t really feel good about leaving him alone, even if he didn’t care if I was here. So I just stayed. Doing nothing.

The next day off, I did laundry. I did the dishes. I cleaned the litter box. Then I lay on the sofa and started scrolling through TikTok.

I realized that the only thing that I looked forward to these days were the letters with Jacob. He was so interesting. And fun.

I wondered what he did on his days off. Maybe his letter would be about how he spent the long weekend?

I wondered if he was on TikTok. I typed his name into the search bar, but nothing came up except a slightly viral video with a couple thousand likes on it. Some patient a few months back at Memorial West, recording Jacob from across the ER, talking about how hot her doctor is. I went straight to the comments, and they did not disappoint. I think I laughed for a solid five minutes.

“I know where I’m getting my next Pap smear.”

“This is why your grandmother always told you to wear clean underwear in case you’re in an accident.”

And the top comment said:

“As if Minnesota isn’t wet enough already.”

I died.

I hoped Jacob didn’t know this existed—he would probably be mortified. I hearted the video and the comments.

I continued my quest still smiling and went to Google, but all I got was his bio on the Royaume Northwestern website. No Facebook or Twitter. I went to Instagram. He didn’t come up on a search, but when I combed through Zander’s friends, I found him.

His page was private. I immediately sent him a friend request. A few minutes later he approved it. I sat up with a smile and went right to creeping on his wall.

He only had twenty-three friends, but there were a ton of pictures. I scrolled down and went all the way back to the beginning, about three years.

Most of it looked like family photos. Shots at Christmas, barbeques, lake pictures. Jacob wasn’t in most of them and he didn’t seem to take selfies. Even his profile picture was just a nature shot.

There were lots and lots of Lieutenant Dan. His dog only had three legs.

I burst out laughing the second I saw it. He’d named his dog after the amputee in Forrest Gump. Jacob had never mentioned the missing-leg thing. He was surprisingly funny, in this self-deprecating, understated kind of way.

I think one of the best parts of this new thing with Jacob was drawing him out. I wanted to unravel him, find out more about who he was. I felt like I was peeling his layers back one letter at a time, getting these little glimpses of someone I could tell was highly private and super reserved. I liked people like that. Benny was like that. You had to earn their friendship. They didn’t just fling it all over for anyone who was interested, and when they gave it to you, it meant something.

He seemed to be renovating a small cabin somewhere. He shared a lot of pictures of that.

No ex-girlfriend pics. Maybe he’d deleted them. God knows I’d deleted every picture of Nick after we broke up. It took me like a million years to get rid of them all. Probably would have been easier to delete the whole account and start over, but I refused to delete my non-Nick-related memories on principle.

They should make an app for that. A facial recognition one that could detect and delete photos of your ex. One click and your whole device is wiped clean. And it should delete all their comments too, so you don’t have to see things like “hot mama!” on a picture of you in a bathing suit at your best friend’s house on a day when I now knew for a fact he was at home having sex with Kelly, in our bed.

Nick and his lies tainted everything. Even the memories he wasn’t in.

I shoved the dark cloud down and kept scrolling.

Jacob had a shot of Gooseberry Falls and Split Rock Lighthouse up by Duluth. A hiking trail. About midway through, there was a rare picture of him. He was in a kayak with a blond woman. Maybe that was her? They had on life jackets. I couldn’t really make her out. Another shot of him kneeling with an arm around two little kids on either side of him. A girl and a boy. He was really smiling in this one. It made me smile. He looked so happy. The opposite of how he looked at work, I noted.

Hector mentioned seeing him at the Cockpit. After seeing Jacob’s wall, I was almost certain Hector had been mistaken. None of his pictures were of any places remotely like that, plus I didn’t picture a man with social anxiety being in a rowdy bar getting drinks from a server blowing on a whistle while you took shots.

I scrolled through for a few more minutes. He hadn’t posted anything in the last few days. No clue where he was today or what he was doing. When I got to the last picture, I sighed.

I was beginning to feel like letters were not enough. It was fun, but they couldn’t keep up with the demand. We’d passed four letters back and forth on our last shift alone, and I still felt like I had more to say and so did he.

I wanted to hang out with him. I wondered if he’d be open to that. I’d have to really reiterate that I wasn’t hitting on him, though. Hanging out seemed a little line blurring, especially if it was going to be outside of work and only the two of us. But maybe I could get him to come to Mafi’s the next time everyone else went. That would be okay.

I liked the last picture he posted, a shot of his dog sleeping on a wooden porch, and I posted a little comment. A few minutes later he hearted it.

That was all I’d get of Jacob until work on Monday.

Unless…