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Samira is used to being overlooked in the ER. She is used to being punished for being slow, and not quite enough, and for making Robby feel a little too much like he’s looking in the mirror. She knows, intellectually at least, that it’s unfair. Has dissected it ad nauseum in her own brain; conducted the autopsy and sat through the deposition. Still, when she curls up in her bed, after long shifts and cruel words tossed out casually, her hands nevertheless itch for her laptop - for her research. Some part of her mind believing that if she just prepares a little more – is a better version of herself – it might be enough for Robby to realise how good she is at this. How great she could be if he gave her even half a chance.
And then there is Pittfest.
And then there is the day after.
Samira works, because of course she does. Robby works, because of course he does too. Stands five foot away from her and bickers with Dana; talks scheduling and tosses out the nickname that has been haunting Samira since about six months into her residency. The one she tries to pretend, even to herself, doesn’t make her feel a skin-itching combination of anger and shame. Slow-mo, he says, like Samira hadn’t spent the previous evening on fire. As if she hadn’t been right next to him in the heart of the red zone, with her hands in people’s bodies.
She is not the only one who notices. Emery Walsh - just in her eyeline, the surgical primary vest she was wearing last night long since discarded – clocks it and immediately shoots Robby the filthiest look Samira has ever seen.
“You were the one who did the burr holes.” Walsh says to her. It is not a question, but Samira nods anyway, heart seizing in her chest. It has been a long day already – a long year, or maybe two, before that – and Samira isn’t sure she can take another knock back. Doesn’t need to be told how stupid it was or internalise another opinion from someone who doesn’t think she makes the cut. But then, Walsh surprises her. “Good,” she says, something that might be either approval or amusement in her eyes - and then, with a grin, “slow, Doctor Mohan, is steady. Don’t let the bastards grind you down.”
She is gone before Samira can reply, but two weeks later - at quarter past three in the morning - an application form for PTMC surgical electives appears in her inbox.
*
Samira spends eleven weeks learning precision and surgical protocols at Walsh’s elbow, and a further six days learning how to break them when the need arises. She follows it up with a five week stint providing abortions for girls who struggle across the border from West Virginia, and then a month at a rural hospital in Pennsylvania farm country, the latter of which nets her the publication of her first case study.
By the time her mother upends her life plans – decides to remarry and sell her childhood home – Samira is done with looking for Robby’s approval. Standing in the ambulance bay at the end of the last day she’s supposed to see him for a while, or maybe ever if the way worried eyes have been tracking him all day are to be believed, she thinks about apologising. Doesn’t even know what for, not really – but still, she thinks about it. Thinks about every time he’s failed her, and every time someone else has picked her up. And then she thinks again.
Samira walks back into the ER with her head held as high as the weight of the world will let her. Nails chewed and lip bitten, options opening up in front of her like sun on Newport beach after the haar has lifted.
Six months later, she waves a half-hearted goodbye to dayshift and walks out of the Pitt for the last time. Later still, in a bar a couple of streets away from the hospital, Walsh hands her a tumbler of whisky. “You did good, Mohan.” Emery says, clinking her glass against Samira’s own. She is wearing one of her tiny sharklike smirks, and an otherwise completely unreadable expression on her face, as she continues, “I think you’re going to like Boston.”
*
Her first shift in the new hospital, once she’s finished up the paperwork and introductory tours, is an overnight. She joins the gaggle of other staff milling around the central hub, and is immediately offered a doughnut by a nursing student who looks like he’s about twelve years old. “Dunkin’s” the man says seriously, in just about the thickest Boston accent Samira has ever heard. She is reminded viscerally of John Shen, and the cup of iced-coffee he’d had practically surgically attached to his hand for every shift; half-wonders if people from Massachusetts are just like that.
“Samira Mohan,” she introduces herself, offering a wave rather than her hand to shake, on account of the sticky powdered sugar that is now coating her fingers. “Is this where you guys do hand-off?”
“Adam,” he returns her introduction, wiping his palms on his scrub pants, “and yeah – Abbot likes to do a pre-shift huddle thing.” He gestures off-handedly in the direction of forty-something guy, with curly grey hair, who is bouncing slightly on one foot as he chats through a chart with the day shift attendings. As Samira watches, his brow furrows and then relaxes – his face splitting open into a grin at some joke being made in his vicinity.
Her stomach flips.
She barely has time to interrogate why though – to file it neatly away in her head to be examined later, or more likely never at all - before they are being called to order. Abbot’s huddle is perhaps the most absurd thing Samira has ever been a party to within the walls of a hospital. They are nightcrawlers, apparently. A speech that wouldn’t be out of place before a college football game, and finished off with an army-sounding exclamation, of the sort that might have made Samira laugh, if it hadn’t been returned so remarkably earnestly by the rest of the staff.
*
Hours later – after blood and guts and a life saved on the kind of Hail Mary that makes her brain sing – Jack Abbot turns towards her and grins. Arms folded across his body and his eyes more than a little bit wild; like the mess of it all thrills him the same way it thrills her. "I'd heard you were good, Mohan," he tells her easily, "but hoo-boy, was that something to watch."
Something about the way he’s looking at her forces her to return his grin with one of her own, for once entirely unrestrained. The thrill of a successful code spiking her adrenaline like nothing else can. “Who told you I was good?” she asks, shifting her body towards him and genuinely curious. It’s her first day on the job proper, and she doubts the paperwork she's spent most of the last two filling out has made a significant impression on anyone.
If it's possible, his smile stretches even wider in the face of her evident confusion. "Emery Walsh is my sister-in-law," he tells her, voice just shy of conspiratorial, "she phoned to warn me about you – something,” he continues, a teasing lilt to his voice, “about burr holes with an IO drill on the ER floor?”
She feels her cheeks heat. Maintains his slightly too intense eye-contact, somewhat in spite of her best intentions. “It was only that one time,” she protests, less than half-serious, “and the patient did live, after all.”
His mouth twists with barely concealed laughter as he reaches round her to discard his gloves in the hazardous waste bin by the trauma room door. “Well, if he lived…” Abbot says, clapping a now clean hand on her shoulder, “why don’t we see if we can’t make it twice before the year is out.”
*
The next morning, he brings her coffee. And then again three days after that, and a week later too. He will smile at her, and trust her, and call her the future of medicine without a single trace of irony in his voice. Six months down the line, burned out and crashing after a brutal shift, Jack will tell her what Emery Walsh had really told him about her on the phone.
Oh the line about the burr holes is true, for sure, but Samira knows Jack better now. Knows what he will countenance under the guise of improvisation and necessity and saving lives. She has learned what he looks like when she has surprised a laugh out of him or impressed him or - once, at least - disappointed him just a little. She knows now, the way he will lean against her doorframe after walking her home from the bar and neither of them can bear to stop the conversation. The way his lips feel against hers, under a lamppost in the always loud Boston night.
The line about the burr holes is true, he will tell her. But, alongside that tongue-in-cheek warning about medical malpractice, Emery had been laughing at him down the phone. "Hey Abbot," she'd said, serious and not at the same time, in the way that only people who truly know you can be. "This one's special," she'd told him, "try to last more than five minutes before you fall in love with her.”
*
“And did you?” Samira will ask, once she’s digested his words. Her tired head resting against his shoulder, and teasing nonetheless. No one has told her they love her since she was thirteen, and here is this man who wants to wind his fingers round hers in the car; idle in the parking lot until they’re both ready to go home.
Over the gearstick, he squeezes her hand. She can’t see his face, but she knows he’s smiling. Soft and slow and just for her. “Nah,” he tells her, voice achingly fond, “don’t be ridiculous. I saw you,” he says, “and that was it. Never had a hope in hell.”
“Yeah?” she asks, smile tugging at the corner of her lip and the wild thought that she should probably send Emery Walsh some sort of thank you card fizzing in her brain,
“Yeah.” He replies, so sure of it that echoes in the space around them.
She lifts her head off his shoulder and looks across at him, silhouetted by too-bright fluorescent lighting and exhausted and still doing his best to make her feel something other than the weight of the worst kind of shift. “Well then,” she says, “I should probably admit that I’m in love with you too.”