EMPTY ROOMS

A Nurse Jackie fan-fiction
by Cappuccino Girl

Disclaimer: Not mine. Don't sue.
Notes: Takes place after the end of season three. For Z & N, with all my love.

She shredded the Sotheby's auction catalogue this afternoon. What else was she supposed to do with it? Pop it on the coffee table? Sell it on eBay? Save it for the children she'll never have? So she cracked opened a bottle of wine at just-gone midday instead, and made the triggers of her childhood disappear. Just like that.

They had to sell it all, she and her sister: the flat in Chelsea, the country house, the paintings. The inheritance tax didn't leave them with much choice in the matter. They could have kept the flat, but Chelsea's too far up its own arse these days, littered with the people they fled from long ago. They'd packed their bags and finalised paperwork and severed their ties as permanently as the new century would permit. Nobody waves goodbye to airplanes these days.

A black and white photograph of Fernclyffe, her family's former country pile, hangs above the fireplace in the living room. It seems like a century ago when they ran about the gardens there, climbing trees and exploring the disused icehouse by the lake. She salvaged some of the furniture, most of which is scattered about the house now: her grandmother's dresser, that leather sofa she used to curl up on when she was home for school holidays, those rusting patio chairs which have found a new home in her garden. She actually has a garden in the city, her own little pocket-handkerchief of green.

She lets her hands run through the shredded catalogue, her mother's precious art collection in a mass of colourful strips at the bottom of a bin. She wishes she knew why her mother did it, why she left everything to her girls. Perhaps it was her final olive branch, the only way she knew how to apologise for their father, for their stepfather. Or maybe she knew exactly how much it would hurt them both to have to dissolve everything, painstakingly, all the things they'd intentionally left behind. It's for the better that they'll never know the truth. Sadism or love, it's all gone now anyway, and those Russians are bound to love their new house.

"Dr O'Hara?" a concerned voice asks from behind. Turning her head around, she sees Fiona staring at her. "Are you okay?"
She presses her index fingers into the corners of her eyes. "'Course I'm alright sweetie. How was school today?"
"I got an A on my spelling test."
"You did?" Putting on her best smile, she takes the little girl's hand and walks with her to the kitchen.

The French windows are flung open, and summer has finally arrived. Grace picked a bouquet of flowers yesterday, which sits in a vase on the counter. Aside from the fashionably battered table, there's still that faint newness about the place, the smell of paint and wood-glue and grouting, a kitchen that gets used for entertaining guests far more than it ever does for cooking. A stack of unread medical journal articles sits beside the phone. O'Hara doodled over the front page of the first one today while on the phone to her sister, but that's about as far as she got, and now there are far more important things to be done.

"There," O'Hara says with a smile. Fiona's A-grade spelling test is now stuck to the fridge. "Now everyone who walks into the kitchen can see how clever you are."
She grabs the last of her custard cream biscuit stash and pours two glasses of ice tea, which they take out onto the lawn together. It's Friday, so they sprawl out on the grass, stains on school uniforms be damned. Fiona rests her head on O'Hara's stomach and, together, they look up at the patch of sky between the buildings.

If she closes her eyes long enough, the grass beneath her bare feet becomes the browning patch under the rope swing, a hockey pitch, the park behind her old flat in Cambridge, the Jardin du Luxembourg in the first flush of spring. She never wanted this, the house and the garden and the dripping tap in the upstairs bathroom. Somehow, after all these years of packing up and leaving, of sleepless nights and slammed down receivers in the middle of a Sunday afternoon, her mother's parting gift was forcing her to put down roots, in whatever extravagant form they might take.

"It's hot." Fiona says with a sigh.
"So change your clothes, silly!"
The little girl just shrugs before sitting up to take a lengthy slurp from her drink. O'Hara loves the way she holds the huge tumbler between her little hands, the big glass dwarfing her face.

"When I was your age, I lived in Morocco. Do you know where that is?"
Fiona shakes her head.
"It's very far away, and it's very hot and they have camels there."
"Really?"
"They do. And outside of the city, it's desert, just miles and miles of sand."
Fi gazes intently at O'Hara before whispering, "I like grass."
"Me too."

"Can we get pizza for dinner?" Fi asks with a huge grin.
"Let's wait until Grace gets home from drama club, shall we? Now go put your mufti on," she says, giving her a playful poke. "Shoo!"

There's something utterly inexplicably wonderful about sprawling out on the lawn in your garden that belongs to your house, and eating custard creams which your aunt posted to you in a jiffy bag together with Curly Wurly bars and an outdated copy of the Friday Evening Standard magazine.

Somewhere inside the house, she hears the distant thuds of doors closing and bags being deposited. That'll be Jackie and Grace, bringing with them a whirlwind of medicated anxiety and delight. O'Hara glances down at her bare wrist to check the time. It might be six pm if Jackie managed to get off her shift on time, which is never.

"Gracie go get changed!" Jackie yells over her shoulder as she steps out onto the patio.
O'Hara's still sprawled out on the lawn, admiring the remnants of her pedicure and daisies. "How was work?" she asks absentmindedly from behind her sunglasses.
"Coop? Still a douchebag."
"That's not news."
"Three traffic accidents, a kid with superglue, and a guy who figured it would be smart to defrost his deep-freeze with a blowtorch. And fucking Akalitus—
"Still breathing down your neck?"
"Like you wouldn't fucking believe. And it's not the fact that she's testing me all the time; it's the way she does it, constantly pulling me over so we can 'talk a minute', and everyone can see it. Except Zoey who's too obsessed with the idea that Lenny might be proposing to her in the next five minutes. And Kelly's too busy trying to be 'Nurse of the Year' or some such shit to have any time to help with administration crap and keeps leaving it for everyone else, but if he doesn't do it, then Akalitus is up my ass again, and Coop's giving me the I'm-smarter-than-you look."
"You've got to admit that it's better than the I'm-about-to-grab-your-tits look."
"No. I think it might actually be worse," Jackie assures her.

O'Hara sighs and gets up from her comfortable place on the grass and stretches. "My day was fabulous, thanks for asking. Shall we go inside?"

They both pick up glasses and plates, and wander back inside.

"The tenants are moving in to the upstairs flat tomorrow," O'Hara mentions as she pops things into the dishwasher.
"That's good, right?"
"Yes. At least I think so," she says doubtfully. "Not sure I know how to be a landlady, but I have the plumber on pre-emptive speed-dial. Just have to hope I picked people who aren't excessively finicky."
"You'll be okay."
"They seemed nice enough when I met them, but first impressions can be so deceiving."
"Like yours, for example."
"Likewise." O"Hara says with a sly grin. "You fancy a beer?"

Jackie nods, tearing the shrink-wrap from O'Hara's Chelteham Ladies old girl's magazine which arrived with this morning's post.

"You have a very clever daughter, you know," O'Hara says from behind the fridge door. "Look!" And waves her hand around the door in the direction of the spelling test.
"An A? Wow."
"Indeed."
Jackie takes a closer look. "She got 'cinnamon' right."
"I know. Even I can't get that right without predictive text."
"You text about cinnamon?" Jackie blurts right out. "Guess that answers Kevin's question."
"Which one?"
"Oh. He was complaining about school fees again."
"You know what I've told you about that," O'Hara assures her.
Jackie lets out a long sigh and pokes her fingers into the seized-up muscles in her neck. "I do, and you know I can't go there with him. He hates paying them, but he won't quit it either."

"I kissed you last night," O'Hara confesses as she hands Jackie two beers. "I'm sorry and I promise it won't happen again."

Jackie cracks the bottles open on the corner of the table and takes a seat. "You were drunk," she scolds, passing O'Hara a bottle.
"I was," O'Hara says to convince herself as much as anything. "I was very hopelessly drunk and I'm sorry. Again."
Jackie nods, unnecessary apology accepted.

They sit in silence, nursing their drinks. O'Hara has perched herself on the kitchen counter and her legs dangle down, bare feet absent-mindedly hitting the cupboard door below. Jackie's bag is on the kitchen table. Part of her would like to look inside, see what else Jackie has squirreled away in there aside from the medication she's prescribed her. She knows she's getting other highs.

"Sarah's back," O'Hara mentions between swigs of beer. "I mean, she's back in New York."
Jackie stops cracking her knuckles. "She called?"
"Not here, but on my phone, yes."
"I'm moving in with Eddie," Jackie says calmly, and the meaning of the sentence slowly settles into the room.

The kitchen is suddenly too large for O'Hara's taste, and all she wants to do is reach over to Jackie and squeeze her hand. "Fiona asked if we could have pizza for dinner," she says quietly, as if to herself; anything to stop the awkward silence she knows she didn't cause.

"Fiona and Grace are going to stay in the house with Kevin. School's closer. You'll have your house back…"

Somewhere upstairs, O'Hara can hear the girls squabbling or playing. They both sound the same at first, and she's not quite got the hang of telling which is which. If she had a few more weeks she might be able to crack it, be able to differentiate between a distant squeal and a shout. She watches Jackie fiddle with the buckles on her bag, daring her to ask what's inside that one pocket, the one there to the left with the slight bulge. It's too big to be tampons, not quite the right size for a prescription bottle. She hasn't told Jackie about Kevin's visit last week, of his warnings about plastic Easter egg stashes and blue pills selotaped to the bottom of underwear drawers. She never will. Instead, she will continue to play the good doctor, the innocent bystander, the loyal friend who continues to skirt the issue at hand in favour of those few moments when Jackie's actions are not fuelled by her addiction, when O'Hara loves her more than anyone else. She's practically got a PhD in playing this game.

"Jacks? Pizza?"
"Sure."
"One pepperoni, one veggie like last time?"

Jackie nods, gets up from her place at the table and takes her bag with her. "I'd better go check on Grace. She was freaking out about math on the way home."
"Tell her I got an A. I am the queen of maths."
"Bullshit."
"But I do an excellent job of carving a chicken."
Jackie smiles and stuffs the menu of the pizza place into O'Hara's hand. "Order."

O'Hara loves the sight across the table from her. From Fiona's purple fingernails she can deduce that the girls have raided the make-up box in her bedroom again. Perhaps it's the beer, but Jackie doesn't seem as agitated as she usually does at the end of a long week. Between pizza boxes and bottles of fizzy pop, she can almost see promise, and it looks a little bit like home.

"We're going to stay with daddy," Fiona says confidently.
On the opposite side of the table, O'Hara can see Jackie's face contort a little. "That'll be nice, won't it?"
"You said you'd take us to the movies tomorrow," Grace remarks, giving O'Hara a quality point-blank stare of disapproval.
"Your dad can take you," Jackie tries to reassure her. "What were you going to see?"
"Mr Popper's Penguins," Fiona exclaims.
"Uh. No. We're not," Grace retorts. We're going to see The Green Lantern."
Perhaps the illusion of domestic bliss has frayed a little around the edges after all.

"Can you pass the salad over, Grace?" O'Hara asks in an attempt to redirect the conversation.

"Did you pack your stuff yet?"
Fiona nods, while Grace pretends to ignore her mother's question.
"Grace?"
"I'll do it after dinner."

Jackie is visibly ill at ease, and a part of O'Hara just wants to tell her that they are more than welcome to stay the weekend. They could make eggs on toast and lounge around in their pyjamas all morning. O'Hara could take Grace to see her movie and Jackie could take Fiona to the other one, and they could meet in the park. They could move out on Sunday when she's at work. It wouldn't be any bother: quite the opposite. But she knows she mustn't. "I've arranged for my driver to pick you up at eight, if that's okay."
"We would've got a cab," Jackie protests.
"I know you would. But I wouldn't, so you have a ride," O'Hara says with a smile. "Now stop fretting and finish your pizza before I do."

They continue eat in silence while O'Hara looks out onto the back garden as dusk creeps in. Absentmindedly, she reaches over with her fork and begins to eat the remaining salad out of the wooden bowl next to her. As she does so, Grace glances up from her plate and their eyes meet. The little girl smiles at her, and, taking her own fork, proceeds to do the same.

At the bottom of the stairs, among a pile of sports bags, the two girls wait for their mother to appear. Fiona's teddy peeks out from inside a Trader Joe's bag that has seen better days, and it looks like divorce.

"You got your clothes out of the washing basket? Hairbrush? DVDs?" O'Hara asks Grace while she helps her put her hair up into a ponytail.
"Grace made a list," Fiona tells her from her perch on the end of the banister rail.
"Well, that's very responsible." O'Hara pats Grace on the head. "All finished."

"I called your dad and he's expecting us in half an hour, "Jackie tells them as she walks down the stairs, suitcase in tow. Then, looking at the pile of stuff and then her kids, she asks, "All packed? You ready?"

"Yes. I have everything," Fiona tells her confidently as she jumps down from the railing, "But Grace couldn't find her gym shorts."
"Shut up." Grace scowls at her sister.
"She made a list," O'Hara whispers to Jackie, nodding her head in Gracie's direction.

Jackie puts her arm around her daughter. "I'm sure O'Hara will find them and give them back. There's a spare pair at home with daddy, anyway. Okay?"
Grace looks up at her, clearly unconvinced.

"Ooooh! Wait!" O'Hara exclaims, suddenly running off to towards study. She returns with a book, which she presses into Grace's hands. "Will you read this to your sister for me?"
Grace stares in awe at the leather spine and marbled cover. She reads the gilt letters out loud, "The Secret Garden."
For a moment, O'Hara questions her decision; what if she's given Grace yet another thing to worry about, worry about the responsibility, worry about losing it, worry about spilling hot chocolate all over something that isn't hers. "Will you?"
Grace nods, wide-eyed.

Ready?" Jackie asks again.
The girls nod, confidently this time.

"If you've forgotten anything else I'll just bring it to work, so it's no bother really," O'Hara mentions as she picks up Grace's suitcase.

Fiona opens the front door, the sounds of the city flooding in. Outside, the air is beautiful, a wonderful temperate June evening. The black car is waiting for them as promised, front window rolled down. The driver opens his door, and helps Jackie load the bags into the trunk while O'Hara helps the girls get into the car. There's an odd familiarity to it all.

"Well…. It's been lovely having you."
"You working the early shift next week?" Jackie asks she slams the trunk shut and strides over to the car door.
"Yes, yes." O'Hara says impatiently, giving her a little shove. "Now go on, or you'll be late. No need to give Kevin any further ammunition against you, is there?"

"And lunch on Monday!" O'Hara calls as she slams the car door shut.

With that, the car drives away. O'Hara walks up the steps and into the grand old entrance hall. She closes the door behind her, and the house is hers again, hers and hers alone. Upstairs, a tap drips loudly into the washbasin.

She's pouring bath oil into the tub when she hears the echoey ring downstairs. Afraid it might be Kevin, or, worse yet, an emergency, she turns the water off with a defeated sigh.

There really ought to be an intercom in this house, she thinks to herself as she tip-toes downstairs, the marble floor ice cold on her bare feet. At night, the giant empty corridors and stucco rosettes on the ceiling take on a life of their own in the dark. When she was young, she would have liked the fright they gave her, but now they just remind her of the fact that there's no reason to keep the lights on in the hallway.

Through the cast iron and clouded glass, she can faintly see a single figure on her doorstep, possibly female. She gives the sash on her bathrobe one last tug to make sure it's done up properly before opening the door.

"Hello stranger. Like your house."
"How did you know—how did you find my…"
"The world at my fingertips," Sarah says with a smile.
And O'Hara bursts into tears. Just like that.

~* fin.