AUGUST, 1992, SEATTLE, WA
LINDY HAD TO stop reading the magazines. She was holding up horribly on her stupid promise to forget Kurt once and for all; she found herself again flipping through the pages of an old spread detailing the success of Nirvana and the triumph of a recent tour that they had been on.
But as of recently, she had a different reason now for reading up on Kurt.
"I'm worried about him," Lindy said into the phone, having called Trae to voice her concerns. She had talked herself into thinking that her worries were justified and that she was not still clinging to the same ghost.
"Worried about him? Lindy, don't do this. You don't know him anymore," Trae sighed. He never wanted to hurt his sister, but found it necessary to always tell her the truth, especially the truth about Kurt. He had made it clear to her that he did not think it was smart for her to worry over someone so unattainable.
"Trae, they're saying he's into drugs. That he's . . . shooting up," Lindy said gravely, forcing the words out between her teeth. She felt a wave of nausea as she imagined Kurt injecting himself with a needle. She could recall a time when he had once balked at the idea of being pricked by them.
Trae paused, knowing that this information was dire to them both.
"I thought everything was going well with Jack," he finally said, attempting to steer the conversation in a different direction.
"It is! But this is important!" Lindy cried. "This is Kurt we're talking about! The Kurt we cared about for all those years!"
Trae was not lying when he assumed that things between Lindy and Jack were solid. The past six months of Lindy's life had been filled with more happiness than she had experienced in quite some time. Jack was shaping up to be the ideal boyfriend and Lindy could say confidently that she had fallen in love with him, something she never would have guessed would happen.
Work was an odd occasion — the nurses had all found out and most of them decidedly stared at her with disdain nowadays. Beth had argued that they were all jealous. Lindy, in the fashion of not giving a damn what anyone thought, ignored the glares when she walked through the hallways of the hospitals. Her relationship with Jack existed outside of the space that she occupied at work, even when they only floors away from each other. The opinions of other people did not matter.
Regardless of anything else, she had found security with Jack and she trusted him to take care of her heart. He was down to earth and understood her in ways that she did not think anyone could. The fact that he was a gorgeous doctor no longer played a role in Lindy's decision to love him; all that mattered was that Jack had ended up becoming one of the dearest people in her life.
But then there was still Kurt.
The thought of him always found its way back to her. It was like a shadow at her heels, following her everywhere she went. No promise that she made would actually make Kurt's memory, burning brightly within her, go away.
She'd done an okay job at not loving him as fiercely as she had before. Lindy had never thought she'd stop, but her aching desire for Kurt had been greatly subdued by her newfound interest in Jack. It had certainly not been replaced, but she had lived happily without feeling plagued by the thought that she'd lost something meaningful.
She had even heard that Kurt was expecting a baby with his wife Courtney — this had definitely been hard news to take in, but once again Jack had unknowingly saved the day, spending the night holding Lindy in his arms and not once questioning why she had seemed so inconsolable.
