The word that came to mind was weird.

Not fuzzy, not painful, not straining or confusing or unsettling.

Weird.

Mom and dad were here. So was Penny. Which made sense. She’d been in a car accident, for crying out loud.

But they all looked...older.

It wasn’t like her mother had all of a sudden greyed and sprouted the Beesly hunchback, and her father wasn’t bald and using a cane. But she could see it in their faces, if only slightly.

Penny, too.

Her kid sister.

Face thinner, fingers sleeker, a hairstyle that looked way more expensive than their typical $9.99 at SuperCuts.

Even Roy had betrayed her, with his slightly stockier build, rough jawline that was covered in unfamiliar stubble, calluses on his fingers that hadn’t been there yesterday.

Yesterday, when they’d had their first full day of being settled into their new home.

Home.

It was a word that was still happily dancing on her tongue, a light in the...weirdness...of her current surroundings.

Today should have been her first day as a receptionist for Dunder Mifflin, the place where she and her fiance would work only floors apart. They’d drive together--from their home--and kiss as they parted ways like they’d done at their lockers in high school, she heading to advanced calculus while he puttered to biology. They’d share lunches and breaks together, and hop into his truck at the end of the day.

And together, they’d go home.

She wondered if her mother was still mad at her.

They hadn’t exactly left things on good terms.

Then again, things hadn’t really been on “good terms” since she’d dropped out of college after the proposal, claiming that she needed to, “focus her time on making money to save for the wedding.” Yeah. Mom had really gotten over that one well. Dad hadn’t been too happy either, but he was always the more lenient one. Mom, on the other hand, wanted the absolute best for the Beesly girls. And in this day and age, according to Helene Beesly, that meant graduating with a four year degree and pursuing a career that would equip them with financial stability no matter what life threw at them.

Apparently, life was throwing her a car accident.

Hopefully her Dunder Mifflin benefits had already kicked in.

She was starting to get nervous, watching through the crack in her door as her doctor--Dr. Livingston? Something like that--gathered her small pod of family members in a circle. Probably to talk about what was going on. Probably to give them an update on her condition. Hopefully telling them when they could take her home. Or, more specifically, when Roy could take her home. To their home.

God, she still wasn’t over that.

She was getting married! Little Pammy Beesly, the shy, quiet artsy girl that no one paid attention to, was marrying Roy Anderson, the starting quarterback, the hunky jock that cheerleaders fawned over and conversely shot daggers at her for being buried under his arm after the game. She snapped her gaze from the doorway to her left finger, momentarily panicking when her ring, her precious engagement ring, was nowhere to be found. But then she remembered: I was in an accident. I had surgery. They take those things away from you when you go under the knife. I’m sure it’s around here somewhere. For now, she was content to cloud her thoughts with white dresses and flower arrangements and cake and Roy. Those things made her happy.

Why couldn’t her mother just be happy for her?

Sure, there had been that whole thing about moving in with someone before you were married, but who were they kidding, really? Pam and Roy had been having sex since their senior year. She surely wasn’t going to put it on hold until the wedding now. And they surely weren’t “rushing into things.” Out of all the things her mother could have responded with when they’d sat Will and Helene down to tell them the news about the house, a scolding like she was a child again certainly wasn’t what Pam had pictured.

As her gaze peeked around the doctor to her mother’s eyes, she was reassured--and more than a little remorseful--that her mother’s gaze was overflowing with pain. Tears painted her eyes, and her body seemed to be weighed down by a thousand invisible pounds. It was then, as she traced the worn, drooping body of her mother, that she noticed something that hadn’t caught her attention yet. Though her mother and father stood side by side, hands clasped like vice grips, the fingers on Helene Beesly’s left hand were clutched around a wrist she’d never seen before.

She followed the arm--and it was long--to where it connected with a lanky torso, a long neck, and a face of softened features. The mop of brown hair atop his head was unkempt, and honestly looked like it could use a good date with a bottle of shampoo. But as she traced her eyes to his, she recognized him.

It was him.

That guy who had been next to her, holding her hand, whispering into her ear when she’d woken up.

He was still here?

Yup. Weird was definitely the word she was going with today.

While her mother stood hand in hand between her father and this strange man like they were saying the Lord’s prayer at Sunday service, Roy, her Roy, stood almost on the outskirts of the circle, far away from Penny, her parents, and this hollowed out shell of a man who made her eyes pinch together and body suddenly warm and tense all at once. It was frightening, almost, to see him from this distance, with dark rings around his eyes, an uncomfortable-looking hunch protruding from his back, worry lines permeating all over his face. Why was this man of mystery so concerned with her medical status?

As she pondered his identity, his eyes suddenly darted up, almost as if he knew that he was being visually inventoried. Intense, somber green connected with her line of sight, and for a moment, her entire world entered a tunnel, locked solely on the tall man with the frumpy hair. He was effectively burning imprints onto her soul, and although she felt the sudden need to cover herself, hide away from his intrusion, she couldn’t move a muscle. She wanted to yell, wanted to scream for someone to come and shake her from this odd sensation, but as his eyes poured into her, the sense that she was safe tickled at her brain stem. His eyes, so hollow, so dark and desolate, twinkled for the slightest second. They seemed...urgent? Pleading. Yes, pleading was definitely the word. But pleading for what exactly? She didn’t even know him. What could he want from her?

All too quickly, his gaze was snapped back towards the doctor, that same intensity now burning holes in the white hair of the lab coat clad man whom, she thought, was old enough to be her grandfather. His ears reddened under the curls that dropped softly against them, and she had the strange urge to reach out through the door and brush the curls behind them.

The thoughts fled her consciousness as five pairs of eyes snapped to the doorway, causing her to turn her head and shy away, the hospital issued blanket suddenly not big enough. She felt like an animal on display at the zoo, making a silent promise to herself to reconsider the next time she asked Roy to take the trip to Philadelphia.  

There were more quick movements, eyes darting between mom and dad, Penny and Roy, dad and Penny, mom and...she still didn’t know his name. None of the eyes were happy. In fact, as she took more notice, they all seemed to be growing more and more angry, frustrated, embittered by the second. It was then that the daggers all landed on Roy. Her poor Roy. He hadn’t done anything to deserve this kind of treatment. After a few nods of their heads, resembling the wave that they always did at Phillies games--starting with her father, then moving between Penny, her mom, and finally him--some mixed reactions added to the strange ambience. Penny’s eyes rolled, and she turned and walked--stormed?--out of Pam’s line of vision. Dad’s expression turned sour, as if he was holding back the urge to vomit. A sob escaped mom’s lips, and she pulled away the hand holding dad’s in order to stifle the sounds, presumably to keep Pam from hearing them. But why had she let go of dad? Why was she still holding on to...to him?

And then, she saw it.

Whoever this...this man was, looked as though he was about to be swallowed up by the floor beneath him. His head sunk, shoulders hunched, face absorbed by his free hand. Mom seemed to be holding--tighter?--to him, as Pam watched his shoulders heave up and down a few times, strangled and sharp. Regardless of her ignorance, whoever this man was, she actually started to feel sorry for him.

Until, that is, more movement drew her gaze to where Roy was slowly, somberly making his way through the crowd. The only figure who made way for him to pass was the doctor, whose own expression told the same tale of sorrow that seemed to be written across the pages of her loved ones.

She tensed, gripping the edges of her blanket, once again seeking shelter in the small room. When he entered, Roy looked incredibly disheveled, which was fair, considering it appeared that everyone in that waiting room had just been put through the wringer. His eyes wore days of worry, their greyness striking Pam as though he should be the one in the hospital bed. He was tentative as he perched in her doorway, not quite in yet not quite on the outside, his large fingers drumming against the doorway several times before words escaped his tight lips.

“Can I...can I come in?”

It was barely a whisper, layered with a sadness that had tears brimming in Pam’s eyes as she nodded several times in return. His steps resembled eggshell walking; it was as if he was trying to avoid a secret bomb planted somewhere in the floor. When he stopped at the end of her bed, refusing to meet her eyes and retracting his hands even as he placed them on the rail of the bed, she reached out a small hand of her own, offering it to him. His breath was a sharp intake of air, and as his eyes rolled to the left corner of the room, it appeared to her as though he was fighting back tears. Finally, he was at her bedside, sitting on the chair that...he had left. Again, though, she took keen notice of the way he sat as if the chair was made of pins and needles, perched like a bird on a wire. She’d never seen him like this before.

“Baby, what’s going on?”

Her words sounded strange and unfamiliar, her voice richer and a little bit deeper. It was probably from the surgery, from her long hours asleep, she decided, focusing her attention to the man who still wouldn’t meet her eyes.

“Um, nothing, Pam. It’s just...the...the doctor wants you to get some rest before we...they want to run some tests, but he wants…”

He was grasping at straws, words coming in strangled fragments, his eyes darting around the room as if letters were strung above his head and he was trying to put them together in the right order.

His eyes pleaded, begged for her to understand, and she nodded, more slowly now, as she let her head sink into the pillow. The doctor wanted her to rest, so she would rest.

“Okay. Will you stay with me?”

Her eyes lit in childlike wonder, reminding Roy of Bambi or one of those Loony Toon babies from his childhood. The way her curls framed her face brought him back to the pictures in the Beesly’s house of Pam as a little girl. He bit his lip, pleading with God above for the floor to open and swallow him.

She watched him nod, slowly, biting his lips as if this answer pained him. Her eyes furrowed as she settled into the hospital bed. Before they closed for the last time, she saw his shadow hovering outside the door, tall and gangly, still hunched in a sadness she couldn't quite understand. In her dreams, she was surrounded by cans of grape soda.