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i am running into a new year
and i beg what i love and
i leave to forgive me
– Lucille Clifton
Samira Mohan's father dies on New Years Eve, and it feels ironic even then. As the year changes from 2007 to 2008, as the rest of the East Coast rings in midnight with fireworks and the pop-hiss of champagne corks separating from their bottles, Samira and her mother stand in a New Jersey emergency room hallway. Her father's gurney laid flat. Three doctors, two nurses. Bright red of a crash cart, one that looks practically brand-new. No door, no curtains, patients and families and other doctors looking on as they try and fail to restart her father's heart. Her mother's screams, tightly contained behind a white-knuckled fist and then louder, unwieldy, impossible.
When they'd arrived at the hospital five hours prior, Samira was impatient. There was a party she'd been invited to. Rare occurrence, practically miraculous. A girl in her class having people over to celebrate the new year. Kids in a basement. Vodka mixed with orange juice in water bottles. Maybe a joint someone swiped off their older brother. Music loud and pounding like a heartbeat. She'd allowed herself to daydream about it for all of break. She was wearing a sequined top, curls down around her shoulders. Annoyed at her father for derailing her night by getting lightheaded and dizzy at the dinner table. Annoyed at her mother for worrying, for piling them into the car and to the ER. Annoyed at the wait, annoyed at the triage nurse for parking her father in the hallway where there wasn't even a chair for her, where she sank down to sit on the hard linoleum floor and tapped her foot, sighing like someone would hear her and apologize for the inconvenience.
A doctor younger than her father pronounces him thirty minutes after they begin resuscitation efforts. They pull a sheet over the body and he becomes a bumpy white outline of a thing, one brown hand hanging over the edge of the gurney. Her mother is already grasping it, so Samira touches his wrist. Pulseless and still. She doesn't cry yet, just feels it burn at her throat, shake in her hands.
It's still dark when they leave the hospital without him. Dawn curling at the edges of the horizon, too far out for the light to make a difference. It hits her later, after she sleeps a fitful three hours, waking up to snow coating their front yard, and realizes she'll never see him again.
She doesn't usually work on New Year's Eve. It's the one day a year that she doesn't want to be within ten miles of a hospital. Antiseptic smell, insistent beeping of the cardiac monitors. She's gotten superstitious about it. Instead, Samira stays home. Mops the floors twice over. Makes lists in her journal of the things she wants, needs, to accomplish in the next year. Sometimes she talks to her father, out loud, asks him what she should do next. Never feels like he answers her, but he didn't give her advice in life either.
This year is different. This year, they're shorter-staffed than usual, and Samira finds herself on the roof of PTMC just before midnight, cold wind stinging at her eyes, trying to breathe. Tells herself she'll go back downstairs in a minute. Shivers up her whole body, numb frozen skin. She's no use to anyone like this, when her heart is thrumming like a picked violin string. They've lost two patients tonight, already. Statistically normal, maybe even a slow day, and she feels empty anyway. She isn't doing a good job of pretending tonight, of pretending to be grateful or compassionate or anything other than furious.
The door opens behind her, hitting the brick wall with a metallic thud and creak, a rush of air and a muttered Jesus fucking Christ. When she turns, Jack's walking towards her. Thick black parka, her coat and scarf in his hands. Ears and cheeks already reddening in the cold. He feels a bit like a mirage, or the opposite. The illusion of fire in a frozen-solid tundra.
"Sorry," Samira says automatically. "I know I'm taking too long."
Jack huffs out a laugh, shaking his head as he extends her coat towards her. "You know hypothermia can set in within thirty minutes. We don't want to have to amputate any of your fingers tonight."
"Don't worry, Walsh will do a good job." The lining of her coat is cold from the air as she takes it from him, hesitating. Dim realization that her heart has sped up at his presence. "Is it bad that I don't want to put this on?"
"You punishing yourself for something?" he asks, leaning against the railing. His shoulder is close enough to hers that she can almost feel it, the heat underneath his coat, his skin. Jack knows about punishing himself. Samira kissed Jack ten days ago, outside Dana's and her husband's Christmas party, and he held her face in both hands.
Her eyes are wet and tearing in the wind. "No," she says. "Nothing new, anyway." Jack's eyes are on her, steady and sharp as glass. She feels, not for the first time, like he's disassembling her. "I don't think I'm being a very good doctor tonight," she adds eventually, and he hums, thoughtful. She sees his breath in the cold air like a cloud.
"After Emma— you know, I felt like everything that wasn't life-or-death was so trivial," he says. "Someone could have had an open fracture, been screaming in pain, and I'd just think, God, I'd give anything for that to be me. Anything that could be fixed with a pair of hands." Jack grips the railing hard, knuckles white. "Anytime someone came in to see their spouse and they were okay, or going to be okay, or even just going to survive the day, it made me so angry. Jealous, really. I hated them. I wanted to give everyone even the tiniest bit of the pain I was carrying so that they could understand how lucky they were." He inhales desperately, breathes out on a sigh, his eyes flicking towards hers. He looks nervous. "Sorry," he says. "That probably sounds really bad. Maybe that doesn't help."
Samira shakes her head. "No, it does," she says. "It really does, actually." She doesn't understand how he always sees her so clearly. Manages to get through all the muck that no one else is able to. Defense mechanisms and obsessive habits and so much anger. "I don't know how she died," she says. "Your wife."
"Glioblastoma." Jack shakes his head, laughs hoarsely. "She did cancer research in the lab at Pitt. Fucking ironic." He shifts slightly closer to her, and she can feel the thick padding of his jacket against the bare skin of her forearms, the cotton of her underscrub shirt. "Your dad was a blood clot, right?"
Samira's heart rises into her throat. "How did you—"
"You told me," he says. Slight embarrassment to his face then. "During your intern year. You diagnosed an ischemic stroke, and when he went up for a thrombectomy you turned to me and said 'that's how my dad died', and I couldn't tell if you were kidding. You looked—" Jack laughs. "I don't know. So serious, but at the same time just so…blunt."
Samira can't help the smile on her face at the sound of his laughter, hoarse and unruly. "I'm surprised you remember that."
"I was impressed with you," he says. "It was an atypical presentation, and you were right." His mouth twists slightly, half a smile. "And completely gorgeous, by the way, but that wasn't something I felt— equipped to deal with back then. I noticed, though. I think that was the first time I noticed."
He's not looking at her, just staring out over the city, but his fist is clenching and loosening against the railing again. Image of their kiss slides into her brain again like warm water. The feel of him crowding her against the side of her car, driver's side door half-open, keys dangling limply from her fingers. The taste of him like wine and olives. Her skin buzzing as he'd grinned against her mouth and opened the door for her again. See ya, Mohan.
"The first time?" she says.
Jack smirks, but it quickly turns into something else, a grin that shows off his crooked incisors, the jumble of crowded teeth he's normally shy about, keeps hidden. "And every day since."
Jack walks her home when they get off shift. The sun is just rising, and the entire city is still, smells like snow. The breaths they take of the cold air feel almost cleansing. Sin erased, penance completed. The year sprawls open in front of them, and everything they were carrying they're carrying still, but in the light of day it's a quieter feeling. Samira's got her coat on now, at least, and Jack's fingers are laced with hers, tucked up into her sleeve.
"How do you feel about New Years resolutions?" she asks, and Jack snorts with laughter. He's wearing a hat pulled over his ears, but his curls still stick out, red gone mostly silver, trailing just slightly down the back of his neck. She likes looking at him a lot.
"I've learned to stop pretending I can predict anything," he says. "Even what I'm capable of. You know, you wake up one day with a whole leg—"
"Alright, alright," she says, something dangerously close to a giggle bubbling up in her chest. Jack squeezes her hand.
"Let me guess, you have several," he says, and it's only a little teasing. Mostly gentle. Open, curious. Of course. "Will you tell me about them?"
Samira nods. They come to a stop outside her building, slipping a little on the ice coating the sidewalk. Jack steadies her with a grip on her elbow, and she steadies him with a hand on his shoulder. "Well, I guess to start— my first one is to invite you in, and then, um— take you to bed. If you're interested." It's clumsy, goofy, not even in the ballpark of sexy, but a smile is crinkling the lines around Jack's eyes.
"This is what I mean," he says. "You're so— God, Samira, of course. Of course." He's reaching for her then, pressing his lips to hers, and the angle's a little weird and the soles of their shoes are still sliding against the sidewalk and they both smell like rubbing alcohol and stale coffee, but he kisses her like it's an extension of his heart itself and she feels a sudden rush of hope so strong it hurts. Unendurable, unendurable. To have wells of pain deep enough to drown in and step back anyway. To know death and guilt and grief and decide to want something else. To choose it on New Years Day.