As it turned out, Larissa was the first to arrive, bustling into the room at seven on the dot. She was immediately followed, however, by the doctor, whose arrival and perusal of Jim’s chart and vitals gave Pam a moment to look her over. Larissa looked…better, she decided. Awake, for one thing, and less droopy. She had looked decidedly peaky last evening before Pam had gotten her to go home and rest, and the rest appeared to have done wonders for her while not damping down her similarity to Jim in the slightest. If anything, it had heightened their resemblance by putting the shine back in Larissa’s eyes in a way that tugged at Pam’s heart by reminding her of how Jim had always looked at her at work. Or at least it heightened her resemblance to the image of Jim that Pam carried around in her soul—a glance back at the real Jim in front of her made he realize that he too didn’t look much like his former self, and that Larissa had possibly looked more like this Jim when she was exhausted.
Pam didn’t like thinking of it that way at all.
She tried hard to shut up her inner monologue and focus on what the doctor had started to say. She was a young but firm-looking Sikh woman with her hair up in a turban, and she was calmly telling Larissa and now Pam that Jim’s lungs were working much better than the last time she’d seen him. She explained that his pallor was due more to residual effects of the crash on his body as a whole and the fact that, as she put it, “unconsciousness isn’t quite as good for you as real sleep” than to any issues with oxygenation or breathing in general. Pam could tell that Larissa was extremely relieved to hear that, and felt herself release the breath she hadn’t realized she was holding. This was her first real update on Jim’s condition besides the little pep talk from the nurse the night before, and she had been worrying (she wasn’t sure if it was rational or not to worry this much—she didn’t have a lot of experience with people she cared about lying around gray and unconscious). At this news she let her mind wander a little with relief, and found herself focusing on the doctor’s turban.
Instantly images flashed back in her mind of another time she was close to someone wearing a turban—the tech (Sadiq?) who helped Michael set up the email surveillance program on their work computers. Sadiq had been a pretty cool guy, as shown by the fact that he hadn’t walked off the job two minutes in when Michael assumed he was a terrorist, but also as shown by how quickly he’d charmed her and Jim when they’d sat down together in the break room. He’d told stories of even dumber people than Michael—though she was pretty sure he was just trying to defuse the tension, because she really hoped those stories were fake—and it had turned out he and Jim had been on the same youth basketball team about three years apart, so they’d joked about the coach for a little while, and ultimately Jim had ended up inviting him to the barbecue at his place that evening. She hadn’t seen a lot of Sadiq at the party, but they’d hung out in the break room every time he’d come by do to some routine IT maintenance since.
Remembering why they hadn’t hung out at the barbecue sent a red flush up Pam’s cheeks involuntarily. Oh god, that party. How had she not realized it right then and there? Hiding in Jim’s room? Giggling over his yearbook photo? Of course Phyllis thought that they were the secret office romance she was referring to. Dwight and Angela—well, she was pretty sure she was right about that, but still—were just too weird to show up on anyone else’s radar. Her and Jim though…that was back before the Booze Cruise, back before Casino Night, back before she’d let herself realize just how much time he spent up at her desk or how much she basked in the attention…or how much she let Roy get away with because he wasn’t actually her primary emotional connection. But in retrospect it was totally obvious.
She suddenly remembered a moment she had totally ignored earlier but that suddenly became much more significant in memory. The one interaction she’d had with Sadiq, at Jim’s party. He’d come up to her asking where the bathroom was. At the time she’d assumed it was just because he’d seen her go on the upstairs tour with everyone else, but now that she recalled it (and why, oh why, did she recall everything from that night so clearly? Oh yeah, because she was in love with Jim. God she really was blind to everything) she remembered that he’d gotten up from between Ryan and Kevin to ask her. Ryan and Kevin who had also been on that tour. He’d come to ask her because he had assumed she knew because he had assumed she and Jim were…close. Probably because he assumed they were dating. Because even someone who’d only hung out with them for twenty minutes (well, nineteen minutes and 37 seconds, she knew because Dwight had yelled at her for taking more than her allotted fifteen minutes) in the office break room and sat on Jim’s ugly couch for a couple hours could see it.
She shook her head slightly to clear it and refocused on the room. The doctor offered Pam and Larissa her card (Priya Kaur, M.D., Pulmonology Associates) and said her goodbyes, reminding them that although Jim’s lungs were doing well, and if it were only the lungs they were concerned with she was sure he’d do well, she couldn’t speak to the rest of him. Then she was gone.
Larissa turned to Pam. “Hey. I see I made it just in time.”
“You could say that. If I didn’t know better I’d say you planned it with the doctor, actually.” Pam smiled. Larissa treating her like a friend made it a lot easier to deal with her memories of how she’d strung Jim along. It reminded her that there was future here too, that if (when) Jim woke up she had a chance to make it all better. “In fact, I think your T-shirt complimented her scrubs—are you sure you guys didn’t coordinate?”
“Hah. I’ll forgive you for saying my favorite T-shirt looks like hospital scrubs if you’ll tell me how the night went, Pam.”
“Oh, you know, pretty good actually. Ellen told me as long as there was no frantic beeping and he kept breathing it was OK, and, you know, that’s basically how it went.”
“You get any sleep?”
“A little. But, well, you know, you’ve been here for a few nights, it’s not that easy.”
“Yeah. Thanks again for making me go home last night. It meant a lot to actually sleep in my own bed, shower, change clothes, things like that.”
“My pleasure.” And she meant it. It really was a pleasure to be by Jim’s side—to feel like part of his family even if she hadn’t really earned it. He’d have done the same for her, after all.
“Hey, what’s this?”
Pam glanced back from looking lovingly at Jim to see Larissa pointing at the sketch she’d propped up next to Jim’s bed.
“Did you make this, Pam?”
