Work Text:
“I'm making her a card.”
The door made two sharp sounds—once as it opened, and another as it shut.
Heather sat, her fingers interlaced. Her body weighed heavy on the chair. She lifted her eyes, which had fallen to the floor at Mel’s exit, to Kiara. They exchanged a look, a soft, pained pressing of the mouth. This was not the first time they’d exchanged this look in this room.
Crayon scribbled against the wooden table. Bella colored a blue stripe in her rainbow.
“Excuse me,” Heather said. She pushed herself to her feet. Mrs. Phillips’s gaze jerked up to watch her, deep lines at her forehead and chin. “We’ll be right back.”
Mrs. Phillips bobbled her head.
She took a deep breath as the door double clicked again, open and shut, and gave herself a second to lean against it. I’m making her a card. She longed for the heating pack she had at home that her aunt got her in med school, full of rice or beans or something she’d never much bothered to formally research. Thirty seconds longer than the tag recommended in the microwave, and then she could lay it across her abdomen, or cradle it in her arms, and try to fill at least one of the absences.
Hadn’t the last half hour been lesson enough? Heating packs could only do so much.
A wheel squeaked. Esme approached with her cart. Before she could get a chance to say anything, Heather drew her posture straight as with a string she imagined pulling from the back of her head up through her spine. Tension pinched her shoulders.
She knocked on the door of the restroom immediately beside the family room. At no answer, she tried the handle, not sure what she expected—but the knob twisted, door swinging open, so at the very least her resident hadn’t followed in her seventeen-year-old patient’s footsteps and barricaded herself within. Seeing it empty, she moved onto the break room next door. The table was still a wreckage of Primanti’s, a couple of the techs pecking at the scraps like seagulls on dropped fries.
“Hey, Doc,” one of them said. “Heard about that ambulance parlay!”
“That was crazy. How’d you know? Frat boys?”
She pursed her lips. “Lucky guess,” she said. Her phone burned against the hand she had in her pocket. The back of her throat ached. “Excuse me.”
She backed out and walked towards the hub, the main cluster of desks, her eyes seeking Dana, the only person who knew about the stroller, the only person she could imagine making this whole day into even a little bit of sense. She was nowhere to be found. She spied a bunch of other heads clustered around a bed in Trauma 2, equally of no help.
She turned, fading, until she spotted: “Perlah.”
“Yeah?” Perlah pulled up short, doubled back to meet Heather where she leaned against the counter. Her eyes flicked up and down and Heather didn’t want to think about the greyish version of herself that had stared back at her from the bathroom mirror. “All good?”
“Yes. Well. Child drowning.”
Perlah made a knowing noise in the back of her throat.
“Have you seen King?”
“Yeah, just caught her zoned out in the hall. She asked me if we kept stuffed animals in pedes. I told her the hospital’s cheap and makes us buy them.” She tipped her chin to the stairs.
Heather breathed out. Her chest pressed in toward her sternum. “Got it. Thank you.”
“’Course.” Perlah waved her off and headed back to whatever she was doing.
Heather considered. She should wait for Mel to come back down on her own, to make sure she didn’t miss her, to keep ratio. There was no real evidence that she needed help, and it was hard to justify stuffed animal acquisition as a two-woman job. When she glanced up at the board, the rows of colored names took up the whole screen. It was full. The board was full and the waiting room was full and she was empty, in a dull, hollow, rattling way. Her hands shook like dry leaves. You are a rule follower, Robbie had said, in an environment that requires flexibility.
She thought about Mel and Bella, mirrored across the table, both with their dirty blonde hair parted on the same side.
It was her junior resident. She would only be a minute.
Her cheekbones aching, she took the elevator up the single floor. She stepped out into the lobby, wincing past the glass sliding doors that made the day out to be blinding. In the gift shop, an older white woman stood behind the counter; she smiled to see Heather, and Heather quirked her lips back. She mouthed the hello of a stranger, since she only knew Ms. Rochelle—who was off on Fridays, thank God. To see her right now might undo her.
She looked around the flowers and the balloons and the chocolates and the gimmicky racks of children’s games, the towers and towers of cards. The entire back wall held shelves of stuffed animals, and it was there that she found Mel, stuck before them.
“Hey,” she said, coming to stand to her right.
Mel jerked. Her hands, twisted together, spasmed, tightening. “Dr. Collins,” she blurted. “You’re– I’m, uh, sorry I walked out, I shouldn’t have. I just– It– It was unprofessional and it won’t happen again–”
Heather held up a hand.
Mel stopped, pale face bracing and anxious, eyes fixed somewhere on Heather’s forehead.
Dragging gentleness from a nearly empty well, Heather said, “You’re fine, Dr. King. It was a hard one.”
“Yeah. It, um. It was.” Mel’s chin shuddered. Her gaze sank to the floor.
As exhausting as Heather found Mel’s streams of words, her quiet gouged the air between them. Heather looked at Mel’s hands, made whiter than they already were at the points that they met. Those hands had spent the last half hour switching between breathing for Amber and beating her heart. “This is a good idea.”
Mel looked up, startled.
Heather nodded to the stuffies.
“Oh! Oh, yeah. Um, my mom– My mom was in the hospital when I was younger? And they had these, uh, child life specialists.”
“Mm,” Heather hummed. She’d worked with child life on other rotations in med school—she’d wished, more than once, that they had some of their own here in the ED.
“And they came over and sat with my sister and me. They had this little plushie koala. And we were probably a bit old for it, we were teenagers—we’re twins—but with my sister– Anyway, they explained that they were gonna show us everything on the koala first, everything that was happening with our mom. Everything they would do.” Glancing up briefly, Mel explained, “Excision. She had a very aggressive pheochromocytoma. Didn’t work.”
Heather wrapped her cardigan tighter around herself. “I’m sorry.”
Mel opened her mouth and stuttered on air before the sound resumed. “Thank you. Yeah, I mean, the koala did help. They showed us each step. They had us repeat it. Afterwards, my sister kept asking me to go over it, again and again, all through her operation. It calmed her down.” A self-deprecating tip of her head, and she confided, “Calmed us both down.”
“You two sound close.”
“She’s my best friend.”
Heather’s hand rose to clasp at her necklace, the interlocking loops. In one of her more recurring nightmares, it was Kennedy, her best friend, who got rolled into the ED on a stretcher.
“I know it’s too late, because there’s nothing we can explain, but her parents don’t want her to see her sister, so I thought… If it were us. I would– I couldn’t handle it if–” A muscle in Mel’s jaw jumped. “I thought maybe she could say goodbye?”
Swallowed tears burned the back of Heather’s throat. Her belly twisted. She rolled her lips between her teeth, trying to find words. “I think so, too.”
Mel managed a brave smile. “I’m just, uh, having trouble picking one.”
Heather turned her attention to their choices. A green alligator, the size of her hand; a purple hippo, big enough to wrap her arms around. A range of teddy bears, polar white to black with a tan muzzle and paws. She reached out to touch one. Her fingers grazed its plush fur. Her abdomen flared.
She grimaced, hand dropping instinctively. The cramp continued, clenching, clawing her uterus. A flash in her mind—the thick blood in her underwear. The smell of it, metal and cold.
Amber’s mother, gasping at Robby’s horrible, calm words, rocking forward, gasping again, her throat raw, until she was crying out, clutching for her child. The thin red base of her nose as she bent to her chest. Apologizing.
“Are you okay, Dr. Collins?”
She fought back the urge to drop to her knees and lie on her back with her legs bent and feet hiked against the wall. Mouth tight, she nodded. “Fine.”
Trying again, she reached out to the shelf. Her hand closed around the waist of a silky, mid-sized bear with sandy fur the color of Amber’s hair. Wordlessly, she handed him to Mel.
“Oh.” She accepted him, wrapping her arms around him like Heather couldn’t bring hers to. “This one?”
Heather arched her brows.
Mel nodded. “He’s good.”
“Good,” Heather echoed, clipped. “We should get back.”
Resolve firming, Mel nodded. She led the way to the counter, where Chrissy, who, unlike Ms. Rochelle, resembled Heather’s grandmother not at all, rung them up. “Yinz have a good one, now.”
“Thanks,” Mel said, with a rougher-voiced approximation of the perkiness she’d clocked in with. “You, too.”
Back in the lobby, she moved to the stairway door, but when Heather stood stolidly in front of the elevator, thumbing the button, Mel course-corrected to stand at her side.
“Um, are you sure you’re okay?” she asked.
“Do you feel comfortable talking to Bella with Kiara?” Heather asked instead of answering. She knew it was abrupt. But she didn’t know King, not yet, and she felt two inches away from going to pieces.
“Yeah, of course. I’ve got it.”
Heather sighed, in relief, mostly. The doors dinged open, and they stepped into the elevator. “I believe you do. In that case, I’ll take the grandmother to her son.”
“God, I can’t imagine what this is like for her.”
Heather could only shake her head.
Elevator reopening, they stepped back onto the floor. It was louder than before; the number of visitors had swelled. They maneuvered through to reach the family room again.
“You ready?” she asked Mel.
Mel took a deep breath, teddy bear held to her chest. Surprising herself, Heather took one hand out of her cardigan pocket and reached out to wrap her fingers around Mel’s exposed wrist. She squeezed. Mel frowned down at their hands for a beat and Heather pulled away. Then Mel’s eyebrows smoothed. Some of the tenacious good-naturedness she’d been brimming with this morning ebbed back into her eyes. Not much, but hopefully enough to carry her through these next few minutes.
The only thing ebbing into Heather’s eyes, on the other hand, were some black spots. She swallowed. “Ready?” she asked again.
“Ready,” Mel affirmed.
With a single click, the door opened. From behind her, she heard Mel announce, “We’re back.”