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It’s one of the worst sounds you can hear in the ER. Others, you learn to ignore – vomiting, babies crying, that sort of thing. You start to tune them out after a while. But some sounds are impossible to get used to.
A woman down the hall is sobbing, in that way that comes out more like screaming. Every now and then, the word ‘please’ leaks through her voice, watery and strained, but most of it’s unintelligible. Loud, inconsolable sobs. The rest of the department is uncharacteristically quiet; like those within earshot are holding a moment of silence. Abbot clenches his jaw, squinting with focus at the sutures he’s placing.
“Can someone… help her?” His patient (30-something male, accident with an overeager son and a kitchen knife) asks. “Isn’t there something you guys can give her?”
Abbot doesn’t look up from his work, replying with a curt shake of his head. “She’s not in pain,” he mutters. “Not physically.” Snip. Two down, four to go. “She’s someone’s family, not a patient.”
The man furrows his brow, then scratches his head with his non-injured hand. He strains his neck – trying to get a better look at the scene of the crash, so to speak. “How can you tell?”
Focused breath in. “Just can.”
Meanwhile, the cries have begun to melt into heaves. The woman is gasping for air and there isn’t enough of it. Words begin to take form, little by little. ‘How did.’ ‘What happened.’ ‘Can’t you.’ No sentence is completed, but they don’t need to be; any doctor in that situation is gravely aware of what she’s asking. To turn back time.
“Damn,” his patient says, then takes a sharp inhale when Abbot pushes the needle through again. “That’s intense.”
“How could you – could you let this happen?”
Hard stop. A flare, sent up in Abbot’s brain.
(It’s not necessarily unexpected for a loved one to point fingers at the main physician. After all, doctors make mistakes. Sometimes they do miss something. Plus, someone’s got to be blamed; it’s too cruel to imagine that people just… die. That a person you love can just be taken from you, for no reason at all.)
Still, if shit’s going to hit the fan, that’s the first sign. A family member snaps that the doctor should’ve kept a closer eye. They demand to see the chart, or a supervisor, or the hospital’s lawyer. One time, a patient’s fiancé actually spat in Abbot’s face after being given the news.
He listens carefully as he closes up another suture. Snip.
“Ms. Sinclair, please just sit for a second.” For the first time since the sobbing started, Abbot recognizes a pleading voice coming from the wreckage. He’d know Mohan’s voice anywhere.
He can tell instantly that she’s absolutely shattered; if the earnest tremor in her voice didn’t give it away, the simple fact that it’s Mohan would have. It’s one of the things that’s easiest to love – scratch that, admire – about her. Something in his chest twists with how pained she sounds. He can so clearly imagine the look on her face; the one she gets when empathy floods her. Soft, brown eyes, bigger than the world.
The other woman is raising her voice again. An accusatory tone, thinly rising above the haze of anguish.
Abbot’s hand stills, forceps hovering above the laceration. “Give me a second.” He drops the needle onto the tray, suture thread still looped through the eye, and stands up without another word.
Now on high alert, he heads for the family room. There’s no game plan. He knows better than to just burst into that conversation without a damn good reason. It’s a shitty thing to do, to the patient’s family and to Mohan. It’s not like she can’t handle herself; she’s a good woman, and a damn good doctor. Plus, he has no doubt that she did absolutely everything she could for that patient. Same as she does for all of her patients. She’s got this.
So, there’s no reason for him to be walking down the hall in the first place.
Just in case, though. If she needs an assist.
He stops short of the room, within earshot and on standby.
“You said you could help. You said you could save her.”
“She lost too much blood, Kelly. I’m so sorry, but we did everything we could –”
“No, but you didn’t!” Standing closer now, the conversation sounds… bad. Worse than bad. “You missed something, she – she was fine, she was talking in the ambulance on the way here.”
Mohan’s voice shakes. “I know, but her – her heart couldn’t handle the –”
“You killed my sister!” From his post outside the door, Abbot hears a chair scrape against the floor: the woman standing up, suddenly. “You said you could fix it, and she’s – she’s dead. My sister is fucking dead.”
A single set of erratic footsteps begins pacing back and forth, while the other individual (Mohan, he knows that it’s Mohan) is motionless. A deer in headlights. Her words are selective when she talks again. She speaks slowly, carefully. “The shock and adrenaline kept her lucid, but too much time had passed, and the blood transfusions just couldn’t keep up.”
“Enough,” the woman – Kelly – suddenly snaps. "I don’t want your excuses. I want my sister, here, alive.”
Mohan falls silent.
“You… you killed her, Doctor. She was supposed to be fine, and we came here for – for help. And you got her killed.”
Abbot holds his breath. Don’t do anything rash. Hold off.
More pacing, another pause. Then, in a low voice: “You have… nothing to say?” The quiet of the family room undulates back and forth. An unsteady tide, calm in the way the air gets before the surge of a storm. He’s felt it countless times before. Warzones and hospitals are the same, sometimes. Sure enough, Kelly’s voice begins to rise again. “You can’t think of a fucking thing to say?”
He’s sure of it now. The tension’s swelling, in a high-pitched way that clenches Abbot’s fists for him. It burns in his stomach like water boiling on a stovetop. In his experience, the harshness would’ve subsided by now – when fury gives way to grief. But this, this feels unstable. Uncontrolled.
Mohan speaks slowly; her discipline over her own voice flickers like light. “Kelly, I need you to know that I did everything I could for Alex.”
“Do not say her name –” a clipboard clatters against the wall, probably with some idiotic insurance form, Abbot hears it break apart on the floor – “I swear to God, do not say her name.”
With that, a line is crossed and a switch is flipped. Kelly is still shouting when Abbot throws open the door. “I don’t know how they let a doctor who is so unbelievably useless work here, but –”
“Alright, enough,” he shouts, louder than he intended to but loud enough. His eyes flash between the two: Kelly with mascara streaking her firetruck-red cheeks, Mohan and her expression of shell-shocked horror. Despite his better instincts, he takes in how she bites her trembling lip, ever so slightly. So she doesn’t cry, Abbot thinks to himself. He shelves the observation, helplessly.
“I understand that something… unspeakably shitty has happened,” he says. His voice is low and gruff, and his word choice isn’t much better. Dana and Robby have characterized his bedside manner as ‘unique’. (Uncouth.) It doesn’t matter right now. “But that doesn’t give you the right to disparage and harass my doctors –”
“Dr. Abbot,” Mohan’s voice falters.
“– and you sure as hell can’t threaten them. You know how many doctors and nurses are verbally, physically attacked each year? Your tragedy doesn’t mean you get to violate Dr. Mohan’s right to safety.” He speaks staring directly into the sister’s eyes. He feels for her, he really does. It’s not like he’s never lost someone he loved. But his heart slams against his ribs, locked on the clipboard that’s in pieces on the floor. His gaze shifts to Mohan, briefly, and he can feel his expression soften when it does.
Steeling himself, he continues. He really should stop talking, but he can’t. “Dr. Mohan is the most dedicated, compassionate, and capable doctor in this ER. She is the best of the best. Your sister wouldn’t – couldn’t have received better care.” Against his own will, his attention flickers to Mohan again. There are tears in her eyes. “Anything that Dr. Mohan could have done to try and save her, I’m telling you, she did it. Sometimes…” Abbot clenches his jaw. “Sometimes it’s just too late.”
A beat passes imperceptibly, then he reiterates, as levelly as he can, “There is no doctor more devoted to their patients than her. I promise you.”
Suddenly, with remarkable timing, Abbot hears Dana’s voice from behind him. “Hey, everything alright in here?” Thank God. “Perlah, why don’t you go grab Ms. Sinclair a glass of water? Let’s all just take a minute, huh?”
Just like that, the bustle of the hospital is set back in motion. Until they returned, Abbot didn’t realize that the sounds of the ER had faded out completely. Now, gurney wheels are squeaking down the corridor; keys clack rhythmically for charts, orders, labs. It’s like his body is sinking back into his shoes.
He turns to see Dana quietly beckon Mohan out of the room; Mohan hurries to the door without a word and Dana takes her place, gesturing for Kelly to have a seat, smoothing everything over. As usual, she’s a hell of a lot better with this stuff, Abbot thinks. For a split second, in the midst of Dana working her miracle, she catches his attention.
From the look in her eyes, her sympathy couldn’t be clearer. (Whether she’s feeling it for Mohan or for him, he can’t tell. Probably, no, definitely Mohan.) Then, she cocks her head ever so slightly, nodding towards the hallway. Go. Go check on her.
He walks out without another word.
~ ~ ~
Abbot finds Mohan in a dim room, the sheets freshly folded. The patient had just been discharged, maybe a half an hour before; she was lucky no one had claimed the bed yet.
She’s sitting in one of the visitor chairs with her head in her hands. She’d taken her ponytail out, so dark hair hangs in front of her face like a curtain. Her fingers are interlocked, tangling the waves at her scalp. Everything is quiet, besides her soft, shallow breaths.
It takes deliberate effort for Abbot to shed his attitude from moments before. Like always, he finds it a hell of a lot easier to be stern and direct than to be… tender. He’s not sure he remembers how to be tender in the first place. It feels more manageable, though, when he sees Mohan like this. Heartbroken and wounded. He closes the door behind him, as gently as he can, turning the handle so it doesn’t click. He pulls the window blinds, too, for extra measure.
“You did what you could.”
He doesn’t know why that’s the first thing he thinks to say. Sure, an ‘are you okay’ or ‘I’m sorry that happened’ probably would’ve made more sense. It just came out; if the roles were reversed, it’s what he’d want to hear, anyways.
Mohan doesn’t look up, but she sniffles. “It was bad,” she mutters, almost to herself. “She must’ve already lost three liters of blood by the time she got here.”
Abbot winces. He’s seen that play out before. It’s never pretty.
“She was young.” Mohan sits up a little and wipes a tear from her cheek. Her eyes glisten, catching light in even this dark of a room. “Twenty-five. I know situations like that need a miracle, but…” She glances up at Abbot, her face pained. “I thought I could get her a miracle, you know?”
All he can do is stare back at her. It aches to hear the sadness in her voice, and his awareness of that stings in turn.
Whatever it is he feels for her is an itch – one that he’s usually all too content to ignore. He catches a glimpse of how beautiful she looks, beaming at a patient when things are improving; he buries his nose in his charts. He hears her laughing at something that Princess or Donnie said; he finds a trauma to hop in on or a body cavity to stick his hands into. Here, with the door closed and the blinds drawn, there’s nowhere to hide. She’s sitting right there and she’s hurting.
He doesn’t pull away from her gaze, and suddenly, Mohan gasps for air and squeezes her eyes shut. She clutches her chest, more tears fall, and she’s shaking her head, “I’m sorry, I don’t usually cry, just give me a minute.”
Without hesitation, Abbot goes to her. He crouches down to her level, bending a knee. His prosthetic scrapes against the floor with a metallic clink, he doesn’t care, he searches desperately to meet her eyes again.
Her head is bowed, and he outstretches his hand without thinking. Gently, as gently as he can manage, he pushes the hair from her face. It’s soft enough to be overwhelming, brushing up against every nerve ending of his fingertips. He tucks the strand behind her ear, and lingers.
Abbot doesn’t realize that he’s holding his breath, waiting for her to react, knowing that he can’t expect her to. He has no way of knowing what she needs, and why would he? Stand up. Back out. Give her space.
Before he gets the chance to, though, Mohan shifts. Ever so slightly, she leans against the hand still poised at her ear. The movement is so faint that he might have missed it, if not for the contact against his palm; the impossibly delicate locks of hair, the warmth of her skin. She shuts her eyes tight, weeping.
Unsure of himself but sure of her, Abbot slowly, slowly traces the strand tucked behind her ear once more. He doesn’t want to say a single thing. If this is what she needs, this is what she gets. That’s it.
The room is as still as a painting. She’s not hooked up to a pulse ox monitor, he’s got no reading on her heart rate, and her vital signs are anyone’s guess. In this moment, Samira Mohan is a mystery. Still, proximity counts for something. In Abbot’s peripheral vision, he watches her chest steadily rise and fall. Her breaths are rhythmic (although it takes effort not to time them). And again, she leans in to his touch, wordlessly saying what would sound impossible out loud.
Starting from her roots now, Abbot runs his hand through her hair. He’s grateful that she hasn’t looked at him; eye contact in this moment would be destructive. So, his gaze flits across her face, zipping from the tears streaming down her cheeks to the subtle bow of her lips to the freckle on her chin. And as he studies her – admires her, he keeps stroking her hair, gingerly and with careful precision.
(It’s not like they’ve never touched before. Their knuckles brush when he passes her a beer, her arm presses up against his when they work on the same patient. It’s not even the first time he’s seen her cry; most of the staff did, at the Pittfest shooting memorial service. This is… different.)
After a minute, Mohan leans in – or maybe he does, or maybe they both do – and the two meet in the middle. She rests her head on his chest, her shoulders shaking with small sobs, and he wraps an arm around her. With her this close, it’s all he can do to pray that his heart isn’t pounding loud enough for her to hear it.
“You’re a great doctor, Samira,” Abbot mutters. “I promise, you are.”