Work Text:
In a world full of pretty things
You carry out only what you bring in
Square your shoulders
Lift your pack
And lay your feet back down on the track
I.
She watches it happen. Watches, but doesn’t comprehend. It doesn’t make sense to her, not really, can’t understand where the patient pulled a weapon from, can’t understand why security doesn’t move faster, can’t understand why it’s Jack who is running towards the man with the butterfly knife. Her eyes are open, but can’t see Jack analyze the composition of the room, recognize that Javadi has been fenced into a corner, and act.
The sound that exits her mouth isn’t a scream. A scream would be purposeful, a scream would have power, intent. The sound that finds its way up from Samira’s throat is pathetic, closer to a choked whine.
From twenty feet away—maybe a little more, a little less—Samira watches as Jack Abbot is stabbed once, twice, and then a third time. For all that she’s treated puncture wounds and impalements and lacerations of all kinds, she’s never known what sound the human body makes when it’s been stabbed. Jack gives as good as he gets, leveraging all the adrenaline coursing through his veins to tackle the patient up and over the gurney and onto the floor. He has the patient’s wrist in his grasp, slams his hand to the floor over and over again until the knife is battered out of his grip, skittering across linoleum towards the wall.
Samira is running, something she discovers solely by how fast the door to South 15 rushes up in front of her. Robby is already there, hauling Jack up onto his feet. Security pushes past her, and somewhere under the hammer of her pulse in her ear, she hears the electric hum of a taser. Jack staggers, gait clumsy and uncertain as he slips Robby’s hold. He crashes into the wall, lifting up the hem of his shirt. Slides the palm of a hand over sticky, weeping wounds. Attempts to apply pressure, Samira thinks. His face is stunned, uncomprehending.
Seventh intercostal space, and ninth. Intra-abdominal, depending on if he was inhaling or exhaling. The blade is short, but sharp. Maybe splenic, or renal, or hepatic, based on the angle of insertion.
Samira does nothing. Her mind cannot provide her with a single thing she should be doing. All medical training leaves her as Robby and McKay hoist Jack up onto the abandoned bed, triaging. All she can do, all she can think to do, is force her feet to move. With stilted, awkward movements she walks to the head of the bed, cupping Jack’s face in her hands. His eyes are distant, but fight to find her face. Around them is chaos—a phone call to Surgery, the application of sensors, a blood pressure cuff, a pulse oximeter. Perlah deftly guiding an IV into his left hand, his right forearm. Mateo hanging blood. Robby pushing ketamine and morphine and ancef.
He’s said it. Jack is good at saying it. Was a good husband, was a man who said it multiple times a day and meant it. Said it in ways that never felt perfunctory, never felt cursory, never felt like an excuse. Says it to her now every chance he gets, at their lockers at shift change and when they’re falling asleep at night and every time she brings him a cup of coffee. He says it, and never makes her feel inadequate that she can’t quite figure how to say it back, as if all the comorbidities from dearth of affection she’s received since her father’s death are simply things he can wait out, something he can make room for, something that doesn’t surprise him about her in the slightest.
Jack says it to her all the time. Her mother barely says it to her at all.
She has to say it. She has to say it, because the last time someone was rolled away from her on a gurney it was to the morgue. Brushing the pads of her thumbs over his cheekbones, Samira stoops until their foreheads touch, her lips ghosting over his.
“I love you,” she whispers, eyes wide open.
Jack’s mouth curves into a gentle smile.
“I know.”
II.
Walsh is nice to her. That’s just about the moment that Samira’s nervous system thrashes her back down into her body, a sudden sharp awareness closing in all at once.
“He’s gonna be fine, you hear me?” she says, gripping Samira by the shoulders.
Walsh needs to go. She needs to be scrubbing in. She needs to be joking with a scrub nurse as she wraps herself in a sterile gown and carefully layers on sterile gloves. Samira’s eyes catch on Walsh’s surgical cap. She’s never seen it before. She’s never had a reason to. Walsh comes down from the fourth floor when paged, plays with them like a predator plays with its food, and then goes up to the OR, taunting them as she drags a gurney into the elevator.
On Emery Walsh’s surgical cap are scratchy cartoon grim reapers situated in polaroid mugshots. Six individual drawings with different facial expressions and poses, repeated around the width of her skull. Without her permission, Samira’s brain commits the illustrations to memory. The grim reapers all look far too pleased with themselves despite being under arrest.
“Hey,” Walsh says, voice piercing but not unkind. “Look at me. He’s gonna be fine. I will drag that bastard back from hell if I have to. I’ve done it once, I’ll fucking do it again—”
Samira nods. “I know. I know you will.”
She’s not sure who she’s saying it for. Walsh will do the surgery, because no one but Emery Walsh would possibly do the surgery. Walsh would not allow it.
Jack will either live or die.
Or he’ll live for a bit, and die anyway.
“I’ve got this. Olenna—”
There’s a gap there that will always exist in her memory. Walsh disappears, and Samira is standing alone in the hallway. She’s beyond the red line, literally and metaphorically. As a doctor, she has access rights to this hall, has taken many patients down this way to an OR. Has been paged up to assist with a difficult airway or to assist with a code when staffing is short. As Jack Abbot’s girlfriend, she shouldn’t be here. She should be folded into a chair in the waiting room, having a panic attack in the women’s restroom.
Olenna turns out to be a no-nonsense surgical tech in her forties who takes Samira by the arm and winds her further into the maze of the surgical floor.
She is delivered to a room.
It takes her a long moment to realize that the room is Emery Walsh’s office.
III.
Walsh’s office is a shoebox. Samira’s not surprised—trauma surgery is not nearly as flashy as some other specialties. There is no need to confer with patients over treatment plans, or hold their hands while she delivers a grim diagnosis. She meets them when they’re already unconscious, and is out of the room before they’re awake. Her office is a place to write procedure notes and watch YouTube videos during slow nights spent on-call.
It’s spartan in its decor—framed degrees from UPenn and Yale hang on the wall, commendations from her career in the United States Army Medical Corps sit on a bookshelf between old journals and medical textbooks.
Sitting behind Walsh’s desk provides a slightly warmer perspective. Along the bottom of her computer monitor is a line of wallet sized photos, scotch taped to the bottom of the screen. Walsh and her wife at their wedding, Walsh and her toddler son in her arms. Two dogs, tussling in a backyard. Walsh in a huddle of uniforms, elbow resting on Jack’s shoulder as she gives the camera a bemused look.
Samira’s seen that one before; a larger version of it is framed and sitting on a credenza in Jack’s house. Jack displays very little from his former life as an Army Ranger Battalion Surgeon. There is no uniform in a framed display, neither medals nor awards in some gleaming shadowbox. She knows he received them, has seen his CV when he’s submitted articles and case reports for publication. Jack has instead kept photos of both the dead and of the living, the men and women who served under his command, were trained and educated by his hand.
They call. Sometimes in the middle of the night, sometimes not.
Because Jack has made himself into the person you call, when nothing’s gone right and the future looks like a hill too steep to climb.
There was fear in his eyes.
She didn’t know that, in the moment. Maybe her brain was protecting her from the information—Jack was afraid.
Jack is never afraid.
Gasping, he’d tried to reach for her, but his arm wouldn’t work. It flailed a bit, towards her, fingers flexing and relaxing as things happened around him, happened to his body. Robby’s trauma shears halving his scrub top and undershirt in one go, sleeves cut in two before the whole garment is ripped off his chest. Pants next, a little slower, the fabric thicker. Jack didn’t wear scrub pants today, avoids it when possible, always complains that they don’t have enough pockets.
Who has his things? Dana, probably. Dana would think to bag them and label them and shove them in with his backpack under the Hub.
The phone on Walsh’s desk rings, EMERG MED flashing on the caller ID.
“Hello?”
She doesn’t recognize her own voice.
“Hey.” It’s Mel, as steady as she ever is. “I have your phone, and I can grab whatever you need from your locker. I uh—Robby said whoever you’d like to sit with you can come up? I didn’t want to assume, but I’m happy to—that’s wrong, I’m not happy to, this isn’t happy—I can bring you your stuff, and maybe a blanket? I know you probably don’t want to eat, but I have some herbal tea bags, I can make tea—”
“Tea would be—” Her voice shorts out like a lightbulb. Clearing her throat, Samira tries again. “Tea would be nice, Mel. And some company. Thank you.”
“Okay. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”
The call disconnects.
Her hand feels far away from her body as she replaces the phone in the receiver. Stares at it for a few seconds, as if it might ring again and she won’t know how to pick it back up. If someone held her at gunpoint right now she’s not certain if she would be able to tell someone if she was hot or cold.
The computer sits in front of her, tempting.
Samira thinks Jack would almost be offended if she didn’t use her hospital credentials to check on his status in surgery. But she’s not certain how much time has actually passed, or if he’s even in the system yet. Probably? Most likely? It’s not like he’s a John Doe who was dropped in their driveway. Everyone here knows who Jack is.
It’s technically a HIPAA violation. She’s not his wife. They’ve been in a relationship for five months. They’ve been pretending that they weren’t in love with each other for years before that, following the prescribed protocol for attendings and residents experiencing emotions that aren’t exactly Human Resources approved. They’ve been pretending, wasting time for the sake of propriety.
She should have said it. She should have fucking said it.
Her eyes return to the phone.
She could pick it up, dial the number Amma has had since she was eleven years old. But her mother won’t pick it up, never picks up unknown numbers. It won’t matter that all calls from the hospital phone spit out from the switchboard, that it would make sense for her mother to have the number for her daughter’s place of work of five years saved in her contacts—she doesn’t. Her mother lives a seven hour drive away in New Jersey, with her second husband and her teenage stepchildren who love her and rely on her.
Samira is certain that if she cracked open her mother’s head, she’d just get confirmation that the only thing that her voice reminds her of is years of living in a mildewy one bedroom apartment, working three jobs and driving a blue Ford Focus that limped along until the transmission gave out entirely Samira’s second year of college. She is her eldest daughter and only biological child, the sole remainder of years of hardship and empty refrigerator shelves.
Even if she called, even if Amma picked up—what would she tell her?
My boyfriend, who is fifteen years older than me and up until six months ago technically one of my supervisors, was stabbed in our place of work by a patient. My boyfriend, who is white and a widower and a combat veteran who so much as walks into a room with a mental health professional and gets a PTSD diagnosis, is currently on the operating room table under the knife of his professional rival and best friend, who incidentally cut off his right leg ten years ago. My boyfriend, who you have never heard of before literally right this second, might be dying. It will ruin me. I will not be able to move on. My world is ending in front of me. I don’t know what to do.
Amma didn’t know what to do with her when Appa died.
Why would she know what to do with her now?
The phone rings again. EMERG MED.
“What?” she rasps into the speaker, unable to summon anything else.
“Hey, just me.” Robby’s voice is warm, even crackling through the phone line. “I just accessed Jack’s employee file—did he tell you that you’re down as his emergency contact? And I’ve uh—I’ve got a notarized durable medical power of attorney form on file here, listing you as the designated agent. It looks like he gave it to HR four months ago.”
“Robby—I, what? ”
Robby heaves a tired, affectionate sigh. “He didn’t tell you, did he?”
“No. No, uh, he did not.”
Four months ago. Four months ago was New Years, and she’d rung in midnight in the Pitt. Jack towed her into a supply closet to sneak a kiss as the ball in Times Square descended on the television. This year, he’d murmured. She nodded, understanding him completely. This year.
“Yeah, that sounds like Jack.” Robby groans, low and pained. “Of course he wouldn’t tell you that he’s put his life in your hands.”
Samira’s voice drops to a strained whisper. “Please don’t say it like that.”
“Right, shit, sorry. I’m—Samira, I am so, so sorry.”
“No, I—” She can’t bring herself to say that it’s alright. Because first of all, Robby will tell her that it’s not. Instead, she finds herself nodding, pressing the backs of her fingers to her mouth. “How is everyone downstairs?”
“We are okay,” he replies, firm. “Do not worry about us. Mel should be up to you shortly.”
“Okay.”
“Anything you need, Samira. Anything—”
She is not capable of knowing what she needs right now. Some dark corner of her mind wishes someone had offered to sedate her, crammed her in a corner of post-op and let her spend the next few hours drugged out of her mind.
One of them was always going to die inside the other’s arms.
“I will,” she says, hoping the affect to her voice is comforting instead of manic. “I will, I promise.”
“I’m not gonna hang up first, Samira.”
Fuck. What is she supposed to say to that? I don’t know what you could possibly have to offer me, because I don’t know how to take it? She’s been alone for too long. She barely knew how to react when she realized that Jack had all of her favorite restaurants saved in his DoorDash account.
Thankfully, Mel pushes through the door to Walsh’s office with two paper cups of tea in her hands, and saves her from having to say anything else.
IV.
The tea smells like peppermint but tastes like nothing. It’s not Mel’s fault, it’s good tea, made from little pyramid-shaped tea bags that come from a shiny green tin. Mel’s steeped it until strong, stirred in honey and a little bit of raw sugar. The paper cup, doubled up since they ran out of the little cardboard sleeves in the cafeteria over a week ago, is warm in her hands, steam curling up into her face.
None of the grounding exercises are working.
Jack’s face, full of frightened recognition, keeps pushing to the forefront of her mind. The smell of blood, the crackle of the taser, the sound of fabric ripping. His hands, shaking as Perlah placed IVs. The sound of Robby’s voice, tight and anxious. Dana’s pitchy yell. The wail of sirens as they approached.
The clock in Walsh’s office ticks, and ticks, and ticks.
Samira jolts herself into the present, eyes wide. A little bit of hot tea sloshes over the rim, and onto her hand. “Shit, don’t you have to pick up Becca? What time is it?”
“I called and explained to her what’s going on,” Mel replies, shaking her head. She sits ramrod straight in a pilfered waiting room chair pushed up against the opposite wall. “She told me she’d prefer I stay with you so you’re not alone.”
Friday nights are Girls’ Night at the King household. They’re also nights that Jack is usually working, the chaos of a Friday night in the Pitt the closest it comes to battlefield medicine. So even though they’re dating and practically living together, Samira will still usually spend the night at Mel and Becca’s apartment as Jack spends his night between trauma rooms, tending to MVAs and GSWs and college students who need their stomachs pumped.
“You’re sure?”
Appa needed to go to the ER, and Amma couldn’t leave work.
It was the era of subprime mortgages and bank bailouts, and every hour that her parents worked was meticulously budgeted for. Amma was at work, and it was the summer between seventh and eighth grade. Her parents were fighting over bills and overtime and if they could afford to buy Samira a new field hockey stick after she sprouted up another two inches since last fall. I don’t have to play , she wanted to say. I don’t want to be the reason that you fight. Appa needed to go to the ER on day three of a headache that has been stealing his vision and making the world spin. Appa needed to go to the ER, because they couldn’t afford for him not to go to work the next day more than they couldn’t afford the ER bill.
Appa needed to go to the ER, and Samira went with him.
“Yeah Samira, I’m sure.” Mel maintains eye contact until Samira lowers her gaze. “Is there anything you need right now?”
She needs to go back in time, and tell the ER doctor who gave her father the brush off that he needs a head CT with contrast. She needs to go back in time and never fall in love with Jack Abbot.
It’s too much, it’s all too much.
“I couldn’t tell you—even if I did, I wouldn’t know. I don’t know.”
They coded Appa for an hour. Three rounds of ACLS drugs, endless chest compressions, no shockable rhythm except a brief run of ventricular fibrillation that petered back to asystole after thirty seconds. Appa was thirty-six, not a single strand of gray in his hair, and smoked a pack of Marlboros a day. They wouldn’t have even needed to order a head CT, not really, they could have performed a carotid ultrasound or an echocardiogram, could have listened when he provided his patient history. They could have called neuro and fobbed it off on the stroke team.
They could have seen the clot travelling from plaque in his heart before it travelled to his brain, before it became a hemorrhagic stroke.
“If I brought you something, could you eat?” Mel asks.
Thirteen years old, she stood there silently. Rooted to the floor.
Her father is dead. Her father has been dead for eighteen years, and she is still searching for the line of demarcation that explains where his life ended and her grief began. Was it when they checked in at the front desk? Was it in the triage room? Was it in the curtained stall where they did CPR? Or was it when they ceased their efforts, and someone realized that his daughter had been there watching, the whole time?
“No, I don’t think so. I don’t feel—nothing feels real right now.” But that’s not quite true. She knows that everything happening around her is real. She knows that Jack, the only man she has ever really allowed herself to love, might die.
Who would she call?
Her mother’s family is still in India. Her father’s family was largely cut off after the funeral, Amma too hyper-focused on surviving to consider letting anyone else in, to allow anyone to see anything that could be construed as weakness. Samira follows her cousins on Instagram, likes their posts about weddings and baby showers and birthday parties. You’re always invited. You can always come , her aunties say. You’re always welcome, Samira. She doesn’t know how. She receives save the dates and invitations in the mail, but they always feel like they’re to some other planet where she learned how to be a part of a family.
Maybe if she hadn’t been an only child.
“That’s normal,” Mel murmurs.
Mel’s parents are both dead. Mel held her mother’s hand as she died. Mel identified her father’s body in the county morgue after he wrapped his car around a tree with a blood alcohol content of zero-point-three-two.
“Can I touch you?” Mel asks, suddenly standing in front of Samira, removing the still full cup of tea from her hands and placing it carefully on Walsh’s desk blotter.
Did anyone hug her when Appa died? She can’t remember. She remembers hiding in the curtains pulled around his bay in the Emergency Room, pulling the fabric tightly around her as she worked it between her fingers. There was a social worker, perhaps? Or a nurse?
She sat with his body until Amma came.
That’s what love is.
“Yeah.”
Her voice doesn’t sound like her own.
“Can I braid your hair? Get it out of your face?” Mel’s hands land on her shoulders, like Walsh’s did. But she doesn’t force eye contact, doesn’t try to promise her anything. Just two warm hands, resting gently. Samira realizes that the curtain bangs she asked for at her last haircut have fallen into her eyes.
Will she have to sit with Jack’s body?
Not alone. Not alone, not alone, not alone. No one here would allow her to do that alone. Swallowing hard, she allows a glance at Mel’s face. Stoic, but concerned. Not alone.
Samira nods.
“Okay.”
V.
At some point, well beyond sunset, Dana and Robby join them. At some point, the day shift is completely handed over into night. Langdon comes in to spare Robby from working a double, Ellis has decided to cut her trip short and is catching the first flight back from Charleston to cover Samira’s shift in the morning. Trinity has offered to run to her apartment and pack her a bag with anything she may need. Samira filters that information through the film that adheres itself to everything happening around her.
It happened right before shift change.
It was the kind of shitshow day, shitshow week, where they’ve all been coming in early and staying too late. Jack strode through the Pitt’s employee entrance a little after six, braced for a ten hour backup in Chairs that would have taken all night to sort out. Jack came in early. Samira already knew she would have to stay late, chasing a diagnosis for an eighteen month old with symptoms that pointed to everything and nothing. Jack came in early, she was going to stay late, and they locked eyes as he dropped his bag at the Hub and asked Dana where he was needed.
Javadi and Whitaker were wrangling a combative patient in South 15, a possible case of drug-induced psychosis. Not one of their regulars. No name, no patient history. Dropped off by police after they found him unconscious under an overpass. Soft restraints, lorazepam and haloperidol. Blood tox and CBC.
So Jack wrapped his hands around both ends of this stethoscope, and walked into South 15.
Jack did not walk back out of South 15.
Dana organized Jack’s things.
The cops took the bloodied clothes and the knife. Garcia took nail scrapings from under Jack’s nails, bagged them and passed them off to the police in the middle of surgery. Not that it matters. The entire Department of Emergency Medicine witnessed it. They got it on camera. The DA won’t press charges on someone not mentally fit to stand trial. He’ll be remanded to state care. None of this will matter.
Dana wiped down his phone and his pens, scrubbed his blood off everything she could before putting them in one of their green plastic drawstring bags meant for personal effects.
At some point, they all migrate to the floor.
“Should I call one of his sisters?” she asks, after the second time Mel has braided and re-braided her hair. She has his phone now. She knows the PIN to unlock it; Jack doesn’t trust thumbprints or facial recognition, has read too many news articles about cell phone companies complying with warrants, but he told her the PIN to his phone so she could order food while he took a shower after she spent the night for the first time. “We never—we never talked about what I should do—I’m trying to remember if he ever mentioned it when he told me about when he was shot, and his leg, but…”
“You could ask Emery,” Robby says, looking like somehow he might fall over while sprawled out on the ground, his limbs folded into sharp angles. “She would know.”
Samira doesn’t know what shows on her face, but Dana collects her into her arms. Face pressed into Dana’s neck, Samira nods. “Please.”
Robby crawls up onto his hands and knees, then pushes himself to his feet.
The number keys on the desk phone depress with gentle clicks and taps that sound loud in Walsh’s tiny office. Clearing his throat, Robby brings the receiver to his face.
“Hey. Put me through to OR 4, I need to speak with Dr. Walsh.” Someone on the other end of the line replies. “Tell her it’s Robby, and put me through.” He’s silent for a long moment; they can hear the hospital’s hold music through the speaker. “Jack’s sisters. Should we be calling one of them? What would he want?” Walsh replies. Robby hits another button, puts the phone down in the cradle. “You’re on speaker.”
“First of all—Dr. Mohan, do you want an update?”
Dana’s fingers sink into her bicep, holding her tightly. Mel’s palm lands on her ankle where her legs are loosely crossed in front of her.
“Please. Just—just the facts.” Her voice comes out as a croak. She hates it; there’s nothing that she can do about it. She feels small, she feels helpless, she feels like every moment of her life that she has spent knowing Jack Abbot is stretched out in front of her like boxcars on a train. One moment after the other, tidied into freight. She hears the screech of the breaks over the rails. “I just need to hear the facts.”
The facts can hurt her. But they can’t lie to her.
“Patient is hemodynamically stable,” Walsh starts, voice professionally bland. “Patient presented with multiple penetrating chest and abdominal wounds. Right sided chest tube had no output, indicating renal or hepatic trauma and exploratory surgery. We optioned for an exploratory laparotomy.”
Nipples to navel is no man’s land.
Samira has heard Jack talk about the strains of being a field surgeon, how by structure and design you know that the patients who will end up on your table will be the soldiers in your battalion. Odds are, at some point, you will operate on someone you know. On a friend. You may not be able to save them.
“We discovered multiple bleeding and pulsatile perirenal hematomas. We were able to establish early vascular control. We are reconstructing the renal unit using various methods, including renorrhaphy, omental pedical flaps, and surgical mesh.”
Samira knows that Jack and Emery knew each other before he ended up on her table in Germany. Knows that Jack was, for a time, her superior officer at Fort Benning after he caught a bullet in the back in Kandahar, a friendly fire incident during the 2011 NATO campaign to push the Taliban and al-Qaeda out of the city. Knows that even after he returned to the 75th Battalion in Afghanistan, that Emery was often on the other end of the satellite phone as he coordinated medevacs.
“Initially, the procedure was complicated by scar tissue from a previous gunshot wound to the abdomen, which was resected. While resecting adhesions we also discovered a grade one liver laceration, as well as a non displaced rib fracture. His calculated ISS at the time of first incision was twenty-seven.” Collectively, they all cringe. Dana swears creatively, and under her breath. “We’ve administered TXA, calcium glutamate, and four units of PRBCs and FFP. He’ll get two units of whole blood in post-op.” Walsh’s voice softens, and it makes Samira want to claw at her skin until there is blood. “I’ve got him, Samira. I’ve got another two hours worth of work ahead of me, but I’ve got him.”
Somehow, after she takes a shaky breath and wets her lips, she manages to reply: “He’ll be so pleased you don’t get another piece of him for your collection.”
“He’s gotta stop telling people I have his foot in my basement. I gave it a perfectly adequate Viking funeral in Landstuhl.” From what Samira has heard, she saluted it as she sent it into the incinerator. But Samira has also heard that Walsh ate it, that Walsh has it in her basement in a bucket of formaldehyde, and that Walsh uses it as a doorstop. “So what’s up, Mohan? Need sister-in-law advice?”
She’s an only child, of course she does. Jack has three older sisters and fourteen nieces and nephews. He keeps in touch with cousins and aunts and uncles and every few years, someone successfully wrangles him back to New England for a family reunion or a wedding. He has calendar reminders on his phone to send birthday cards. Jack is stunningly adept at functioning in a large family in a way Samira can only assume prepared him to be the commanding officer of a squadron of combat medics, to assist in the running of an Emergency Department.
“Would he want me to call them?” Samira digs the heels of her hands into her eyes. “One of them? None of them?”
“Have you met any of them?”
Not as such, no. She’s just been in his proximity when they’ve been on the phone.
“I’ve met Brianna.” Was intimidated by the fact that she is essentially the same age as Brianna, who in fact turned out to have been the one nudging Jack along to name a single one of his feelings, so Samira still feels like she got let off easy there. “But uh, no—not any of the sisters.”
Walsh inhales slowly, then exhales unevenly. “Wait for him to tell you he wants them here. They’re a lot. He loves them, but they baby him and it drives Jack fucking nuts. It’s a ten hour drive from Burlington, Vermont and every flight is a connecting flight. Though I think it’s just Tess and Trish in Vermont now, Kathy moved to North Carolina for her husband’s dumb bank job.” Samira is pretty sure Kathy’s husband is fairly high up at Bank of America. “Whatever. They won’t be able to get here fast even if they wanted to. But he’d probably want you to text Brianna, she held his medical power of attorney before you.”
Samira chokes on air. Walsh knew? Samira suspects that when she gets her hands on that piece of paper, Emery Walsh is going to be listed as one of the witnesses.
“Yeah, a heads up about that would have been nice.”
“I’d say I’m surprised he didn’t tell you, but I know exactly how fucking stupid he is.” Walsh grumbles under her breath about wives being better than husbands. “Anyway, text Brianna. Tell her you need her to call you ASAP. She’s not insane and won’t try to mother him, since she’s, you know. His niece.” Samira understands the strategy. Brianna is sixteen years younger than Jack and one year younger than her. An NP at Brigham and Women’s in Boston, the oldest daughter of an oldest daughter, Brianna cannot be talked into or out of anything. “Anything else?”
Samira wants to beg Walsh to stay on the phone, to narrate her every operative decision and every protocol she’s abiding by until she hands things off to a resident to close. But she can’t do that. There’s a reason Walsh didn’t put her in the OR viewing gallery, why she shoved her into her office instead.
So instead, Samira catches Robby's concerned gaze. Gives a small shake of her head.
“We’ll let you get back to it. Thanks, Em.”
Walsh makes a noise of complaint.
“That’s two you owe me now, Abbot.”
VI.
They sit, and they sit, and they sit. Robby’s phone is open to his Spotify, his algorithm of soft rock and the best of the 80s, 90s and today filling the silence.
Her body starts to relax into the terror of it all; the adrenaline long worn off, her limbs feel clumsy and heavy and ill-used. At some point, Samira jerks herself out of a slippery sort of daze. At some point, Samira finds herself pressed downwards, her head coming to rest in Dana’s lap, Dana’s hand brushing the same lock of hair out of her face again and again.
Her father died, her world ended. Did her mother hug her?
Or was it her grandmother?
Dana’s hands are small and lithe, the pad of one finger tracing the arch of her cheek and brow bones. “I’m gonna offer this once,” Dana says, “and you can tell me to fuck off.”
Blinking slowly, Samira looks up at her. “What?”
“Do you want a sedative? There’s no rule that you have to be awake for this.”
That feels untrue. That feels like a thought she should have been punished for having, hours ago. That feels like a rule she’s already breaking, like she should be on her feet for all these long, awful hours. Like she should keep herself moving, alert, loping through waiting rooms and hallways as she waits for the news that Jack’s out of surgery. Like she shouldn’t be here, mind settling into the canyon between vigilance and exhaustion, sinking into maternal affection that doesn’t rightly belong to her.
Swallowing hard, she shakes her head. “No I just—don’t leave me alone.”
She might be able to learn that tonight. In the days to come.
Not alone.
She’s been learning it with Jack.
“Never, Samira.” Robby reaches across the carpet, some particularly heinous industrial blend of blue and grey fibers, pressing his hand atop of hers. “As long as you need us.”
“We got you, honey.”
Dana’s nails scratch over her scalp, again and again and again.
VII.
Around ten in the evening, the door to Walsh’s office opens, swinging hard into Robby’s foot. Walsh steps through the doorway, looks down at him with a grunt of distaste, and steps over his long legs. Samira pushes herself up onto her hands, leveraging herself onto her knees, before climbing back to her feet.
“Garcia is closing now,” Walsh says, looking at Samira. Her scrub cap with the cartoon grim reapers is crumpled in her hands, the dark hair at her crown rumpled. “As long as he remains stable, he should be able to skip the ICU and go home in a few days.”
Will he be able to make it up the stairs? He already makes her nervous on crutches, and now he won’t be able to use his crutches. It doesn’t matter. His couch has a decent pullout bed and she can always haul his pillows and mattress topper down from his bedroom.
“The kidney?” she asks, her voice unrecognizable to herself.
“Nephrology will take a look at him in the morning, but I think he’s gonna keep it.”
Robby groans. “With how much ibuprofen he takes—”
“I know,” Dana says. “He’d kill himself.”
How many times have they gone to Costco together, sharing a soft pretzel as they dumped in bottles of vitamins and OTC meds and frozen appetizers? Jack, telling her to pick out a bouquet of flowers from the little refrigerator for them to put in a vase on the dining room table. Jack, asking her if she wants chicken or salmon for dinner. Jack, grabbing the massive box of protein bars that she likes, grabbing baby wipes so he can clean her up after sex.
“Can I see him?”
She wants to see him. She needs to see him. Needs to hold his face in her hands, needs to watch him breath, needs to feel the exhalations on her skin.
“Was gonna offer to walk you to the PACU myself,” Walsh says, one hand on her hip, her thumb pressing into a trigger point on her back. Samira looks down; Walsh is still in her street shoes, not the orthopedic sneakers she switches into once she gets to work. She must have just gotten to PTMC when she got the page. “There’s no reason why you can’t sit with him while we wait for the anesthesia to wear off. Saves me the trouble of doing it myself.”
Samira’s heart trembles in her chest, never mind the fact that it’s anatomically impossible. Fabric rustles softly behind her, and she feels Mel’s hand thread through hers.
“I’m not going to hug you,” Samira says, choking down a sob. Walsh goes fuzzy as her eyes brim with tears.
A tight smile appears on Walsh’s face.
“Thank god.”
Robby scoffs. “I’m gonna hug you, fuck that—”
“Ew, gross.” Walsh takes a step back, eyeing him warily. She allows the hug anyway, returning it with one arm thrown around Robby’s shoulders. “I’m getting his room sorted on med-surg. His prosthesis got pretty bloody, so I’m getting that cleaned by one of the techs. Currently fighting with Ellerson’s newest little lackey if he should be admitted to surgery with nephrology consulting or vice versa.”
“Who’s winning?” Dana asks.
“Me, he’s staying in surgery. I’m not giving those nerds the satisfaction.” Never mind the fact that Walsh, with her two Ivy League degrees and multiple publications in The New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet is in fact, a nerd. “Mohan, you with me?”
Her legs feel like they’re full of concrete.
“Yeah.”
It must show in her voice, based on the expression on Walsh’s face.
“Take a breath, you’re good.” She eyes Robby, Mel, and Dana. “You three can wait in our breakroom, but it’s only one person back in post-op, it’s not a party. And before you try it, you don’t have badge access back there.” Samira’s fairly certain that’s a lie; Robby’s badge in particular will let him through any door in the hospital. Firm, but still gentle, Walsh grabs her wrist. “Come on.”
Even after close to seven years of med school rotations and residency and even now as an attending, she doesn’t know her way around the fourth floor past the point where most of her patients get dropped off, first class express, do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars. It makes it easy to let Walsh tug her around corners and through doors.
“I’m gonna make sure Olenna brings you some juice and crackers. Do you need a pit stop? Bathroom? Vending machine? Panic attack?”
Samira shakes her head, even though Walsh’s eyes are straight ahead. “The panic attack is running on a delay. I’m sure it’ll hit at some point tomorrow.”
It almost hit earlier when clarity edged in a little further to her memory of minutes following the stabbing. It was so close, fight or flight raring in her parasympathetic nervous system as she recalled Jack’s head jerking towards Robby as he twisted his fingers inside the entry wound, probing for bleeders to quench. A gasp of pain, his face going even paler, freckles standing out against grey skin like a sky full of stars. Jack had looked at Robby, and—
Take care of her. Take care of Samira.
Humming, Walsh nods in understanding. “Well when it does, don’t be a hero. That’s why mankind invented Klonopin before we went to the moon. You come to me, or you come to Robby.”
“What’s the final assessment?”
She needs to know. She needs to know how to take care of him.
“It’s a little rough. Face and neck are fine, but the right side of his body is a little gnarly.”
“What tests are we using to gauge kidney function? EGFR? Serum creatinine?”
Walsh keeps nodding, hand slipping from her wrist, moving to the middle of Samira’s back to apply gentle pressure. “And BUN, and microalbuminuria. Little bit of everything to be safe. We’ll repeat it all again in the morning. Finally get a CT. I took some pictures while I was in there, but I was a little busy and Ellerson doesn’t pick up his phone after six.”
“Wound care?”
They come to stop in front of a set of automatic double doors. POST ANESTHESIA CARE UNIT.
“He’s got a JP drain and a nephrostomy tube until we’re certain of kidney function on that side. The liver lac isn’t concerning me right now, I cauterized the bleeder while I was in there. It was surface level, no biggie. But the kidney—the knife went straight through it, more than once. Lacerated the artery. He probably put out two or three thousand before we could stop it.”
She wonders if this is surreal for Walsh, if she was the one who called Jack’s first wife as she waited for a flight to Germany paid for by the Red Cross. Was that how it worked? Or did she call Jack’s CO, who would have relayed the information to the Red Cross? Were casualty notification officers sent to their house on base, or to her job at the local high school? Was Walsh contacting all their mutual friends, trying to find a cell phone number? A point of contact?
“Okay.”
Patchwork of tegaderm over surgical glue and steristrips, betadine staining pale skin and silver body hair. Her mind maps onto a paper doll. Did he shave before he left the house? She didn’t pay attention when he came in, doesn’t remember if there was stubble under her hands.
“So when he begs you to climb into bed with him, left side.” They both stand there, at the entrance of the PACU, staring straight ahead. “I’m gonna go ahead and get started on his FMLA paperwork. He’s gonna fight me on his recovery time, but he needs at least a month before he even thinks about light duty.”
Jack Abbot and light duty are not concurrent phrases; Samira snorts, a tear escaping the corner of her eye. She wipes it away as soon as she feels it.
“And when he refuses to do just light duty because he’s stubborn and hardheaded?”
“Two months away from this place. Minimum. Would love to see three, but I’m a realist.” The way Walsh holds her jaw changes, slackens slightly. She opens her mouth wide, stretching until the tendons covering her temples feather under her skin. “How much PTO do you have?”
Too much. She’s never taken the four full weeks offered to residents, let alone the generous six offered to attendings. It’s always rolled over, except the year she donated some to Langdon to help cover his paternity leave.
“I haven’t used any this year.” Her voice comes out low, like air is just barely reaching her vocal chords. “We planned on going to his cabin in the Alleghenies for two weeks around the Fourth of July.”
It’s a two hour drive if you leave before or after rush hour. The cabin sits right on the edge of the National Forest, and there are never any fireworks no matter the holiday or time of year. The Forest Rangers don’t allow it. Jack loves it there, sneaks away any time the weather’s nice and he has more than two days off at a time. He’d brought her up there three weeks after he called her his girlfriend in front of other people for the first time. They got snowed in together two and a half miles from the closest neighbors.
“Might wanna move that trip up.”
It’s three rooms, a main room, a bedroom, and a bathroom at the top of a gravel drive up at the top of the mountain. It has power and running water and internet via satellite. The windows in the bedroom have an easterly view, the bed positioned to look out over sunrise as the rosy fingers of dawn reach out overtop the black cherry and white ash trees, the tulip poplars.
There’s an inflatable hot tub on the back deck, and she’d rested with the back of her head against his chest, nestled between his legs. They shared a bottle of wine.
“Maybe he’ll actually rest.”
Walsh sighs. “Mr. Three Hundred Hours of Comp Time. Asshole. Make him transfer some of that to you.”
Almost like it’s an afterthought, she digs into the pocket of her scrub pants, fishing something out. Taking her right hand, Walsh mechanically opens Samira’s fingers, dropping something into her palm. Jack’s dog tags, his black tungsten wedding ring threaded onto the bead chain that has been tarnished by sweat and age. Unbidden, she remembers him explaining that the band—gold, a soft metal, dented with use, engraved with their initials and the date—that Jen Abbot gave him on their wedding day in 2002 sits inside her urn. The tungsten ring—lightweight and nearly indestructible—was a concession to deployments, a monument to separation.
He wears it on his right hand, these days.
“Ready?” The persona of Walsh, the surgeon, collapses into Emery, someone trying to be her friend.
Samira squeezes the metal tags in her hands. Lets the thinned edges—the little notch she knows is meant to fit between the front teeth of a decedent in a body bag—rub up against the delicate skin between her middle and index finger. Grip tightening, she can feel the ident of each and every letter.
ABBOT
JOHN P.
489-36-8350
O NEG
CATHOLIC
John P, she read off his chest, after they’d slept together for the first time. He shrugged, gathering her hair off her sweat-tacky shoulders. John Patrick. We all have good Irish Catholic names. He’s a cradle Catholic, heavily lapsed, but when at the end of a rough night she can’t find him on the roof she knows to check the hospital chapel. He doesn’t go to mass on Christmas and Easter or any other day of the liturgical calendar, but he will say his Hail Mary’s in Latin and light a candle for the patients he couldn’t save. His faith is like a reflex. He tests it every so often, in between providing teenage girls with abortions and holding the hands of gang members as they cry out for their mothers.
She likes to steal his dog tags while they’re kissing, catching the chain in her fingers like a child playing cat’s cradle, pulling it over his head and around her neck. Likes to watch as she straddles him, tags swaying between her breasts, his eyes watching her hungrily.
She knows each and every scar on his body. It wasn’t until she met him that she realized that might be the definition of love.
“Not really.”
Is there a way to be ready? There can’t possibly be.
Walsh nods sharply, pulling her badge from the reel and pressing it against the door lock. The mechanism gives a solid clack , one door swinging towards them and one door swinging away.
“Let’s do it.”
VIII.
Someone dragged a chair next to his bed for her. A nice one she recognizes from the administrative floor, as if Robby or Dana sent someone from the Pitt upstairs to pilfer one of the ergonomic office chairs from one of the conference rooms that abut either side of Gloria’s office. Samira rolls it as close to the gurney as she can, sinking her weary bones into the cushions and lumbar support.
She drinks the apple juice Olenna hands her. She eats two graham crackers out of their crinkly wrapper.
Jack will be dismayed if he wakes up to find out she’s developed hypoglycemia.
Post-op is a calm place, the antithesis of the Emergency Department. There are no alarms screaming for attention, no squalling babies who need blood draws, no trauma victims moaning through an EFAST exam. It’s just her, Jack, and the two overnight Med-Surg nurses monitoring the emergent cases that trickle through.
He’ll be awake soon, fighting the anesthesia as soon as he starts to rouse from it. There’s a variation in the MC1R gene, a translocation that accompanies the mutation for red hair, that means that he needs twenty percent more anesthesia than someone without it. Before the charcoal and silver curls, his hair was auburn. She sees the remnants of it in the wiry hairs on his chest and legs. He’ll be hazy, and groggy, but every cell in his body will be crying for him to be awake and alert, ready for bogey that will not be coming for him tonight. Not here. Not while she’s sitting watch.
Samira doesn’t realize that she’s crying until a tissue is pressed into her hand.
He’s alive.
Pulse is thumping at a steady sinus rhythm, blood pressure hovering at one-ten systolic, red blood cells oxygenated and healthy. No signs of hypothermia, no signs of acidosis, no signs of coagulopathy.
He’s alive and she can hold his hand, still warm from the heated table pad in the OR.
Lacing their fingers together, she brings his hand up to her mouth. Carefully, as if she might shake apart if she moves too fast. Squeezing her eyes shut, she brushes her lips over his knuckles. She knows his hands, every callous, every line, and every scar. She knows his hands, and his hands have known her.
Samira watches his face for a long time.
Can tell on the heart monitor when he starts to wake, when he starts to feel the pain. Samira knows that hearing will return to him first, then touch, but the sedatives will make it hard for him to open his eyes. She sandwiches his hand between hers, hoping that the pressure is reassuring.
“Who’s there?” he asks.
His voice is tremulous, aware but uncertain of his surroundings. She knows his throat must be sore from being intubated. The adhesive from the surgical tape holding the tube in place has abraded the sides of his mouth.
Everything she tries to say sits in the back of her throat, a hard knot of emotion that threatens to become a sob.
“Someone who loves you,” she whispers.
Her voice is the voice of a stranger, pitiful and weak. His thumb, tracing up and down the side of her pointer finger, stills.
“Samira.”
IX.
It’s 3 AM, and Jack Abbot is awake, despite the best efforts of the morphine drip. It’s 3 AM, which is his afternoon. After 7 AM he will have to contend with Emery and her gaggle of bloodthirsty residents as they round, with hospital administration and the Ombuds office coming by for his statement for the official incident report, with endless vitals checks and consults from nephrology where they ask for even more blood tests and urinalysis.
It’s 3 AM, and he’s spoken to Brianna on the phone and promised her that she does not to get on the first flight out of Boston in the morning, because one time she was seventeen and there were fourteen hours where no one knew if he was dead or alive on a medevac to Landstuhl, and while she’s the only other person in the family with a background in emergency medicine, he’d rather see her once he’s discharged. It’s 3 AM, and he’s promised his niece that he will call her mother in the morning, or maybe the afternoon, because if he calls her too early then Theresa really will get in the car and start driving, picking up Trish on her way, and they both will call Kathy and really, Samira will take care of him. It’s 3 AM, and he’s been kissed on his cheek by Robby and by Dana, and Mel King has looked at him with tears in her eyes behind her thick-framed glasses, thanking him for not dying today. It’s 3 AM, and his body hurts, but his mind has found the hush.
It’s 3 AM and Samira Mohan is curled along his left side, the flat of her hand resting over his heart. It's 3 AM, and his dog tags are wrapped around her wrist like a rosary. His wedding ring is wrapped around her thumb.
Jack Abbot has known life by fiat. Love by fiat.
His life has been spent following orders. He has swallowed guilt and embodied shame and found penance outside of his body.. He has done things for which he can never be forgiven. Participated in wars. Engaged in unlawful occupations. Did not question the times, the leaders, the institutions he should have questioned. Obeyed orders he should have belayed.
At the age of forty-six, Jack Abbot has finally found absolution.
He has found a home for his devotion.
“I love you,” he tells her, not for the first time or the tenth or the twentieth. And definitely not for the last.
For as long as she is willing to have him, he is hers to use and hers to keep. He is her vessel, and his penance is hers to give. Wherever she will go, he will go. Wherever she will stay, he will stay. Love is what they bring into the world.
Jack Abbot’s love for Samira Mohan is what he will carry out.
She’s crying again, and it’s less awful than the tears that tracked down her cheeks when he clawed his way back to consciousness in post op. She’s crying, but smiling, eyes ringed with exhaustion.
“I know,” she whispers back. “I love you too.”
The bridge of her nose finds the curve of his shoulder, and she exhales.
Under a streetlight I call your name
It's only darkness, it's not that late
Now stop your sleeping, pull the blinds
And pour your future in this cup of mine
Jakob Dylan, “Stardust Universe”