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It’s 11:16 PM on Friday, December 31, 1999.
Jack Abbot is an MS3 at 25, nearly done with his EM rotation at Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center’s Emergency Department, not even halfway through the New Year’s Eve night shift he volunteered for since he got Christmas off, and feeling a little odd that he’s not desperately wishing to be at home with his wife to ring in the new millennium when the paramedics wheel in a guy with a head lac wailing about Y2K and how the end of the world is nigh.
He’s going off about the traffic lights going down, power systems and water systems failing, military networks and world governments and the entire internet all falling into chaos. Jack isn’t picky about cases, but this is one he’s happy to sit out. He’s pre-emptively bracing himself for the fireworks — they’re pretty, but he’s never been fond of the sound of explosions. He supposes that’ll be a problem when he’s done with residency and the military comes calling for their investment to enlist, but that’s something for future Jack to deal with.
Tonight, best case scenario, he’ll be too busy trying to get in on some traumas or triaging and moving through patients to pick up on the booming outside when midnight rolls around; worst case scenario, things are slow enough that he can find some room to hunker down in for a date with his headphones, the new CD player Linnea got him for Christmas, and some Radiohead. Bleak as it is, he’s not too worried about a quiet shift; there’ll be plenty of cases for him to jump into as midnight draws nearer, the drinks flow more easily, and reckless idiots hit the road in droves.
The Y2K apocalypse-panic-problem, whatever it’s called, exists at the periphery of Jack’s knowledge. The board in dispatch shows folks from the day shift placing bets on whether the hospital will lose power when this century ends and the next begins. The nurses joke about being too busy running the ED to notice if doomsday is upon them. Just last week he treated an anxious patient who, in an effort to not look at her arm as Jack sutured it up, chattered away about how she knew exactly when to start running her bathtub so she’s prepared when the clock strikes midnight. He snorted unflatteringly loudly after Linnea told him about a parent-teacher conference gone awry when a catastrophizing father asserted that martial law will be in effect in the year 2000, which had very little to do with his son’s math performance.
All that to say, Jack’s not too concerned about the end of the world or computers at the moment. He’s got bigger problems that need addressing, like the itch just under his right knee that he can’t quite scratch well enough through his scrubs and figuring out which room on this floor is the most soundproof.
•
It’s 11:22 PM on Friday, December 31, 1999.
Jack Abbot is an MS3 at 26, nearly done with his EM rotation at Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center’s Emergency Department, not even halfway through the New Year’s Eve night shift he volunteered for, and suddenly the Y2K apocalypse-panic-problem is at the forefront of his concerns, because the world is not allowed to end when the technicolor angel he’d seen at Shelly's the day after Christmas is trying very hard to look like she’s not crying in South 16. Under the hospital’s harsh fluorescents, she’s very much muted compared to just a few nights prior: she’s a crumpled mass of gray clothes slumped in a plastic chair with a fistful of paper towels. When she shifts, Jack can just barely make out the Rutgers logo on her sweatshirt.
“Are you all right, dear?” He snaps his attention back to Irma McVries, his 72-year old patient with a mild wrist fracture. Right — he’d been walking her through a closed reduction.
“Sorry about that, Mrs. McVries. We’re going to do a closed reduction, which will help relieve the swelling and pain, and it’ll take the tension off your median nerve and finger flexors.” He motions for the nurse, Vero, to grab some towels and wheel the stool over so Mrs. McVries can lay her forearm on it. While she’s at it, he takes a quick glance over his shoulder to see that the young woman in 16 has the heels of her hands pressed to her eyes.
“All set, Abbot,” Vero prompts, her outstretched hand offering the syringe of lidocaine.
“I’m going to start by giving you a hematoma block for the pain. That’ll take about 15 minutes or so to kick in, so I’ll be back shortly to set you up with finger traps — those are meant to tire out your muscles so the splint goes on more easily, okay?”
“You’re very attentive,” she remarks, wincing slightly when he pushes the needle in. He flashes her a wry grin as he pokes around for the fracture site to aspirate.
“I’m not sure I’d call zoning out attentive,” he whispers conspiratorially with a wink.
He’s just pulling the needle out and turning to toss it in the sharps bin when she says, not unkindly, “You keep checking on your other patient across the hall,” with a knowing smile. “I think that’s quite attentive.”
“Oh, she’s not mine,” he waves Mrs. McVries off, but he can’t help but look at her again — she’s shaking her inky black curls out of a hairclip, and his mind presents him with the memory of how they spilled down her back, rainbows shifting over them under the multicolor lights at Shelly's.
“And she’s not a patient, anyway.” He pulls his gloves off with a snap, and when he turns back to Mrs. DeVries to tell her he’ll be back in a jiff, her eyes are on the black band hugging his ring finger.
He can feel a wildfire’s worth of heat creeping up his neck as he rushes out of the room to see about picking up someone from chairs so he doesn't waltz into South 16 on instinct.
•
It’s 11:34 PM on Friday, December 31, 1999.
Jack’s self-restraint has officially frayed to the extent that desire — curiosity, he insists to his psyche — can barrel straight through it, certainly more gracefully than him when he stumbles mid-stride into South 16.
He’d pestered Dr. Liang, his friend and the intern conveniently on the case, for the details after promising he wouldn’t interfere: 55-year old female presenting with abdominal pain since around 4 PM, awaiting liver panel results to rule out acute hepatitis after POCUS ruled out gall bladder inflammation.
“You’re married,” Liang chided teasingly, “to a very lovely young lady educating future generations of America.”
“It’s not like that!” Jack had thrown up his hands in defense, left cheek creasing with his trademark crooked smile to really sell Liang on his nonchalance.
“Sure it’s not. Remember the cupcakes Linnea sent for my birthday when you’re in there with Dr. Daughter!”
Jack had laughed, thinking Liang meant the daughter was one of those people who thinks she’s got a medical degree now that Google is a thing. That’ll be mildly annoying for student doctor Abbot, but great for Jack, the guy who’s not poaching a patient just so he can see a woman up close and hear her voice while his high-school-sweetheart wife is at a party and probably at the raucous laughter stage of wine-drunkenness.
He knows he’s in trouble when, before he can even get a greeting out, she says, “If you’re not here to tell me you’re ordering a dual-contrast CT, you might as well go check on another patient.”
“Uh—” he starts, and she looks up from what looks to be a thick case study perched on her knee.
Jack doesn’t consider himself superficial, and he knows hospital lighting is harsh on everyone. Up close, a clammy sheen glazes her skin and dark circles ring her eyes. She’s put her hair back up, but halfheartedly so; the clip looks like it’s at risk of surrendering its hold on what little hair hasn’t already escaped in wispy tendrils at her temples. Her lips are chapped and dry. If he stares any harder, he could probably see her carotid thudding at the column of her neck.
She’s spent god knows how many hours of her New Year’s Eve in the ED, a place of healing and life-saving, yes, but also a place of misery from the waiting, the uncertainty, the grief. Even so, she’s lovely in a very human way, entirely distinct from how captivating she’d been in Shelly's jovial atmosphere.
“You’re not Dr. Liang.” Her voice, quiet and weary as it is, carries a frenetic undercurrent. “And you’re definitely not an attending.” All the same, it sounds the way warm feels to Jack, like winter sunlight spooling around him.
He looks at her mother, asleep in her bed, and lowers his voice accordingly to slowly admit, “I am neither.” She looks at him, unimpressed and expectant, in a silent cue to continue. “I’m Abbot. Jack. Student doctor,” he stammers, distracted by the way her long eyelashes frame dark, guarded eyes. Does Jack have a thing for eyelashes now?
“Abbot, are you here to run more tests, or do I have to wait for rounds to talk to someone who might actually listen to me about how to treat my mom?”
“Well, let’s take a look at her chart.” As he grabs the clipboard from the foot of the bed, Jack notes how she didn’t introduce herself, which is probably for the best. Would it be a good idea to know if this was his patient? Absolutely. But he reassures himself that he’s not poaching Liang’s patient if he’s just talking to the patient’s daughter, whose name he doesn’t even know.
Electronic health records are becoming an increasingly regular practice in hospitals, but Jack still prefers paper records. That said, Liang’s borderline illegible penmanship hits like a delayed punchline; he has to squint to make out the name of the patient: Sithara Mohan.
Jack thumbs through the pages, reading and rereading Liang’s chicken scratch. “Not taking any medications currently, symptoms presented earlier today, IV for the pain. No headaches, no bleeding disorder,” he mumbles as he goes down the page, “no hepatitis but we’re still waiting for the panel to come back to confirm, no heart disease, normal BP, platelet count’s a little low though… Does your mom do any excessive exercise, any work or recreational activities where she could have strained her muscles?”
She sighs frustratedly — Jack can’t really blame her, either — and massages her brow; her fingers are long and elegant, her nails bare and neatly trimmed short.
“No. She also hasn’t had any general health changes in the last few months, sudden weight change, bowel or bladder issues, or falls. You’re not gonna find anything remarkable in her bloods. Like I said, she needs a CT.”
Jack doesn’t mean to laugh, but a small huff escapes him. “Are you actually a doctor?” he marvels, feeling stupid for now realizing how literally Liang had meant Dr. Daughter.
“Med student,” she clarifies begrudgingly before tacking on more quietly, “rotating at Presby.” He does his best to conceal his surprise and quell an onslaught of questions that surface at her admission — chief among them, why bring her mother here then? — but he figures that’s a can of worms she’s not particularly interested in cracking open right now.
“Let me go check on her labs. Liang’s a buddy, so I’ll see if I can convince him to order that CT scan.”
“With contrast,” she emphasizes. He echoes it back in confirmation when his hand is on the door handle, and then it’s her turn to laugh, or try to. It’s dry and brittle and crackly, as if it’s been a while since her intercostal muscles and diaphragm last went through these motions and they still need to dust off some cobwebs. In a way, Jack is grateful for it — he’s not sure what a true, unfettered laugh from her could do to him. Bitterly, she asks, “What, no further questions asked? You blindly trust someone who tells you to order an extra test just because she says she’s a med student too?”
He tightens his grip on the door handle and wonders if she’s used to being questioned, if she’s had to justify every choice she makes twice, thrice over.
“Well, I don’t think you’re hankering to expose your mom to undue radiation,” he muses. When he faces her, her posture is stiff with panic, and he wants so badly to tell her to trust him even though he’s yet to give her a reason to. It also feels like an unnecessarily personal ask, since he’s not the patient’s attending physician, and her daughter is a stranger. What would he stand to gain from her trusting him, anyway?
Instead, he nods towards her stack of papers and tacks on, “Plus, the study’s not really standard reading material for the uninitiated, so I trust you know what you’re asking for.”
Her rigid form softens, her spine slowly relaxing against what little contours the plastic chair offers. The moment Jack notices her cheeks coloring, bringing a hint of life to her complexion, he has to look away. “I’ll be back,” he mumbles, slipping out of the room and speeding towards the hub before he can say something stupid.
He drums his fingers on the counter and smiles breezily at Nurse Imelda. “Lab fax over Sithara Mohan’s bloodwork yet?”
She looks through the rack, eyes narrowing once she pulls the right clipboard. “I thought that was Dr. Liang’s case?”
“Just helping a friend out,” he explains, tugging at the board. “Thank you, Imelda.”
He’s already skimmed the results and is on his way back to set Mrs. McVries up with the finger traps when he runs into Liang, who looks at him accusatorily.
“Did you take—” Liang starts, but Jack cuts him off with a firm press of the lab results to his chest. “Liver panel’s clean. You should really order the damn CTAP, man, oral and IV contrast.”
•
It’s 11:57 PM on Friday, December 31, 1999.
The ED remains eerily uneventful so far, as if tonight isn’t one major holiday bleeding into another. Jack discharges Mrs. McVries with a splint and cycles through a fall and a fever quickly, after which he realizes that he may have to get his headphones and CD player after all.
They've got some hallway-dwelling drunkards, a nervous patient on IV fluids and droperidol for a bad case of cannabis hyperemesis, and some more falls; nothing that the nightcrawlers aren’t readily equipped to handle even on a busier shift. He theorizes that maybe the weirdest and the wildest of patients that tend to grace the ED in the twilight hours are also superstitious, enough so to stay home and out of trouble as they forge onward into the new millennium.
Jack knows South 19 is empty — tracks Liang down to the North nurse’s station to let him know that he’ll be there if anyone needs him — and makes a beeline through Central. His sneakers squeak on the floor when he stops short in front of South 16, where Sithara Mohan is still sleeping, hopefully because she’s awaiting CT. There’s a backpack in the bedside chair where her daughter had previously sat; said daughter has vacated the chair in favor of sitting on the floor with her knees tucked under her chin. Through the closed door, Jack can just barely hear her muffled sniffling, and yeah, South 19 never stood a chance.
He raps his knuckles lightly against the glass to signal his entrance, and Dr. Mohan, as he chooses to think of her, quickly presses her sleeves into her eyes. He approaches her slowly and ignores an awkward twinge in his right leg as he sinks to the floor next to her — a respectable enough distance away, as if there’s a magic number of inches that guarantees that he’s not crossing any professional boundaries just by being there and offering her his headphones because that’s all he can give her right now.
“Radiohead, if you’re into that. The Bends.” She blinks slowly at him, lashes clumped wetly together; swallows as she takes the headphones and slides them over her head. The orange foam covers are a stark contrast against her dark hair, like mandarins on ebony-stained maple wood, streaks of lighter browns peeking through. He turns the CD player on and hands it to her, fingertips grazing hers in the exchange. Something in him stills at the contact.
A few seconds later, he overhears the heavy beat of the drums that open “Planet Telex,” watches her eyes close and the rise and fall of her chest following the rhythm of the song. He thinks his breathing is starting to sync up to hers when outside the hospital, distant booming begins. Within the hospital, the lights stay on, and the ambient noise of the ED continues with the addition of some “Happy New Year!” cheers from the staff. The hairs on the back of his neck stand up as the fireworks continue, and a shudder ripples down his spine as the new century begins. His heart starts to race and he tries to focus on the sounds seeping out of his headphones; wisps of pepper and lavender cutting through the scent of antiseptic permeating the air; his hands getting clammier by the millisecond as his thumb taps rhythmically at his knee.
His eyes flicker to the woman next to him, who’s now watching him with curious eyes as he tries to keep himself together. She shifts to cross her legs and carefully nestles the CD player Linnea gifted him in the middle so she can turn and rummage through her backpack. When she faces him again, she’s got a weathered, bright red Walkman cassette player and headphones in hand. She doesn’t know Jack. She doesn’t know what’s wrong, what he’s feeling, or what he needs, but in her eyes is a trace of recognition that seems like it could be as dangerous as it is intoxicating.
Jack does what he thinks any man, married or otherwise, would do when faced with an offer like this from a beautiful woman when he’s at the end of his rope: he smiles at her, crooked and a little pained but very much sincere, and feels the way his pulse steadies fractionally when they touch in the handoff. His thumb passes over the raised letters on a fading label that says R. MOHAN. He slides her headphones on, blue foam cushioning his ears, and breathes out a shaky laugh when he hits play and Bruce Springsteen answers the call with “I’m On Fire.”
He does as Dr. Mohan did — closes his eyes and breathes along to the song, feeling his pulse even out — when he feels her knee knock against his. He’s always liked this song, but he’s never understood it more than he does now.
•
It’s 12:02 AM on Saturday, January 1, 2000.
Jack is watching it happen in slow motion: her head tilting to the side, making a prolonged descent towards his shoulder. “I’m On Fire” is almost over, and Jack is frozen, grappling with whether the warmth of her cheek on his shoulder, her hair tickling his chin, is a step too far. His finger throbs under the weight of his titanium ring when the door swings open and Liang is there, looking at Jack with a mixture of bewilderment and disappointment.
Jack pulls off the headphones and shoots up, and his body has the sense to flush all over in the confusing thrill and shame of getting caught doing something that is both innocuous and a betrayal. He knows he shouldn’t, especially not in front of Liang, but he reaches a hand out to help Dr. Mohan up. She squeezes gently when getting to her feet, her palm a fleeting burst of warmth in Jack’s before it slips out of his grasp. She drifts to her mother’s side and rouses her with a hand gently shaking her shoulder, voice soft when she says, “Amma, Dr. Liang is here.”
“Mrs. Mohan, CT’s ready for you. I’ve got oral contrast for you to drink now, and we’ll be taking you up shortly, where a nurse will inject contrast dye into your IV before the scan. The injected dye will help radiology see your organs and blood vessels more clearly so we can figure out what’s causing your abdominal pain.”
She reaches for the bottle of contrast and tips it to him in a toast. “Thank you, Dr. Liang. Isn’t it nice that you were right, kanna?”
In the periphery, Jack sees her pat her daughter’s hand, but he’s more focused on how even the barest hint of relief reshapes Dr. Mohan’s features. The deep grooves between her brows are mere shadows of what they were when she was making the case for a CT scan; her once frantic and intense gaze has given way to something more vulnerable; and the softened lines of her mouth, taupe edges framing a plush pink center, pucker and curl as she mouths, thank you, and smiles at him. It’s a brief thing, but it’s there long enough for him to see the dimples that indent her cheeks and feel his stomach twist.
The sensation is disconcerting enough for him to be grateful when Eliza, the charge nurse, calls out, “Incoming MVC with multiple traumas, five minutes out!” and Dr. Carmichael, one of the attendings, claps somewhere in Central and warns that they’ll need all hands on deck. Jack barely remembers to return the Walkman and headphones; he hears, “But what about your—” but he’s already out the door and heading for the hub, lauding himself for not turning back at the sound of her voice.
There’s still a few straggling fireworks popping off in the distance while he stands in the ambulance bay with Dr. Carmichael and five residents, but he’s too in his head, trying to make sense of his unbridled thoughts, to pay them any mind.
Jack is married, and he doesn’t feel any particular way about a stranger. Her mind and tongue are sharp, and she’s a vision whether she’s dancing by herself with a drink in hand and an oblivious smile on her face or she’s pressed up against the wall, eyes and nose still red from crying, heart thumping to the beat of Radiohead. She’s rotating at Presby, and she’s maybe used to being questioned even though her instincts seem solid. These are facts — though the last one is more of a working hypothesis — and very clearly not feelings. Nevertheless, space is finite in Jack’s soma and psyche, and he has no place to put this information.
The first ambulance peels in with a ruptured spleen from a seatbelt injury and a cardiac contusion, so Jack lets these facts sit in the back of his mind so he can get to work. If they metamorphose into feelings while he shuffles between Trauma 1 and Trauma 2, well. He’ll just have to shove them down and deal with them later.
•
It’s 4:23 AM on Saturday, January 1, 2000, and later is now.
South 16 currently houses a mildly intoxicated 19-year old with a ruptured eardrum, and Jack is standing there watching an intern flush out the patient’s ear with saline as he contends with an emptiness in the pit of his stomach that didn’t exist at the start of shift.
He’d expected Dr. Mohan to be gone by the time he finally came up for air after hours of critical care, but all the so-called facts he’d squashed down had coalesced into a nascent desire to see her again, triggering waves of guilt surging through him when he thinks about Linnea. Those were feelings.
When he wheels back towards the hub to busy himself with picking up a new patient, he sees Liang furiously scribbling away at his charts and is compelled to ask, at bare minimum to close the loop, “What’d the CT show?”
Jack anticipates some combination of pointed ribbing and judgmental comments about hypothetical infidelity and blatant unprofessionalism from Liang, but he keeps at his scrawling until he gets to the bottom of the page and turns it over with a flourish.
“Dude,” Liang proclaims, disbelief flooding his voice as his mouth hangs slightly open. “CTAP came back with a massive SMV thrombosis that led to venous clot and ischemia. It’s a good thing the daughter brought her in when she did; we got her on a heparin infusion for a few hours and discharged with a script for warfarin. What a way to start the year, huh?”
Jack blinks once, twice, in shock at the diagnosis, the sheer rarity of the clot.
“She’s from out of state, so if she’d waited till she was home to get it checked out, mortality would’ve ranged between 80% and 100%...” Liang trails off, shaking his head and returning to his charts. “Carmichael said it was an extremely lucky catch.”
“Lucky,” Jack scoffs to himself. Luck is not the same as someone knowing your medical history inside and out, advocating for you, pushing for additional tests to cover all the bases. One could argue this was simply because the patient was Dr. Mohan’s mother, but he wouldn’t be surprised if she had a tendency to go to bat like that for any patient of hers.
The corners of his mouth tug upwards instinctively at the thought, and it’s a wake-up call. He reminds himself that he doesn’t know her, that it’s idiotic to cast such expectations on someone he’s interacted with a grand total of two times, but he thinks of the way she looked at him, dark eyes incisive and warm, saw his breathing quicken and his hands fidgeting, and threw him a sonic lifeline in the form of a worn WM-2 that’s seen better days.
Call him crazy, but he would bet on her as surely as some people prophesied the end of the world as they knew it tonight.
•
It’s 8:39 AM on Saturday, January 1, 2000.
The PTMC ED is still running because saving lives doesn’t stop for the birth of a new century, power grids and traffic lights and modern plumbing remain perfectly operational, and to his knowledge, Clinton hasn’t instated martial law across the nation, but something in Jack is broken. He’s driving home with one hand on the steering wheel, the other off to the side in case his backpack topples over in the passenger seat. Balanced delicately on top of them — really, he should’ve just put the whole thing in his backpack — are his CD player and headphones, whose wires are neatly coiled with a level of care he’s never had the mind to give them. Eliza had flagged him down before he clocked out, said a patient's family member had left them for him at the nurses’ station and asked to pass on her thanks.
He doesn’t dawdle at the curb when he gets home; doesn’t hesitate to turn his car off, grab his things, and head into the apartment he shares with his wife, who is still sleeping after ringing in the year 2000 with their friends. He does, however, take longer than usual in the shower: under the heat of the spray, he puts a concerted effort into thinking about everything but South 16. He’ll ask Linnea how the party was last night, whether Gen or Andie dropped her off at home, who was already passed out when the centuries changed shifts. He’ll apologize again for taking the holiday shift, badger her for any good camcorder footage of the lights going out (or staying on) at midnight, offer to take her to get her film developed when he’s off in a few days. She’d brought the Leica she’s had since they were in college — the same one she’d used to take the boudoir photos she left for him to open the night before their wedding.
He’s built a beautiful life with Linnea, he reminds himself as he towels off and slips into his pajamas. He ignores his grumbling stomach; they’ll make breakfast together when they’re properly out of bed, so he can wait it out a few more hours. He hopes his bumbling around in the bathroom isn’t loud enough to wake her, but when he nudges their bedroom door open, she’s already squinting at him in the muted morning light lining the edges of their curtains.
His wife reaches for him, her fingers dancing, beckoning, and he follows their command, sliding into her embrace.
Jack presses a kiss to the crown of Linnea’s head, feels a part of him die a little when, for a millionth of a millisecond, he’s disappointed that his lips find sleep-tousled chestnut waves instead of a fathomless riot of black curls.
“World didn’t end,” Linnea mumbles blearily, her fingers tickling as they toy with the damp reddish curls that brush his neck.
Jack doesn’t have it in him to tell her that it did a little bit, actually — he holds the love of his life a little tighter, but his heart palpitates with want for something other.
•
It’s 2:56 AM on Sunday, June 25, 2005.
Jack Abbot is all done with his EMS residency at Fort Gordon, neither enrolled in a fellowship nor working as a junior attending physician, and sweating while wide awake in his bed in Augusta, Georgia. Tomorrow, he flies up to South Carolina to start Basic Training at Fort Jackson, and he wishes he never bought into the promise of free medical school. Linnea’s fast asleep beside him, her arms curled around his, and he wonders if his life would still be like this if he hadn’t promised over a decade of his future to the military, if he hadn’t pursued medicine at all.
His twilight imagination spins up a life where he and Linnea still make their way from West Virginia to Pennsylvania for a career that doesn’t require him to sell his soul for a medical degree. They can put down roots, find a community, and try to build a family of their own. Maybe he’s a teacher like Linnea — he’s always liked kids, and he has a good sense for how to make information interesting to learn. He likes the idea of helping future generations so he can leave the world better than it was left to him.
He’ll remain blissfully unaware of what the inside of an ED looks like until bouts of nausea and cramps cause Linnea to stumble off a step stool into an awkward landing while working on a mural near the fourth graders’ classrooms. He’d floor it all the way to Presby because in this life, he can be there for her with a reliability that 12-hour night shifts and active duty don’t allow.
They’ll hopefully have an attentive ED doctor who’s as thorough as she is affable when taking Linnea’s history; who listens intently when Linnea rambles about her second graders; who asks questions and runs some blood tests just in case after Linnea offhandedly mentions that she and Jack would like to have a second grader of their own one day, but they’ll have to look into metformin or IVF given her PCOS. A doctor with a stray curl of dark hair that bounces at her temple when she fixes up Linnea’s ankle and pivots awkwardly to ask if her breasts have been sore lately or if she’s had excessive urination. A doctor with kind eyes that twinkle when she shares that Linnea’s blood shows the high levels of androgen and insulin typical in patients with PCOS, but also of HCG, which the body only makes during pregnancy.
A siren wails outside, and it drags Jack back to the reality that lies before him. There is no fall, there is no visit to Presby, there is no surprise PCOS pregnancy. There are only vague visions of an imagined future, the lingering memory of a new-millennium dream, and a war that he doesn’t want to fight.
•
It’s 12:24 AM on Monday, April 18, 2011, and Jack never imagined it going like this.
He was supposed to complete his second tour in two more years and close out this chapter of his HPSP-accrued years of service as a combat medic. Instead, an IED blast has him thrown onto the dirt with a ringing in his ears, dust in his eyes, and a searing pain in his bloodied right leg. He tries to wiggle his toes, but it’s hard to tell if he’s successful. His head pounds and his vision is fuzzy, and though he knows he should be a bit more concerned about the concussion he absolutely has, he pats at his chest where an old photo of Linnea sits in his shirt pocket. If he closes his eyes and focuses on that, he can almost see the image in his mind: New Year’s Eve, 1999, a gold tinsel wreath on her head and a half-full glass of cheap champagne spilling onto her hand as she twirls.
Her blurred motion takes him to another time and place: December 26, 1999 at Shelly's, a bar just a few blocks down from PTMC. Jack is slouched on a barstool, warm and pleasantly buzzed from a few cold beers, contentedly watching his wife do an admirable job at darts despite being pretty damn sloshed.
Glimmers of refracted light make him squint, and when his eyes refocus, they’re on a woman who looks to be about his age, maybe a bit younger, dancing by herself under a modest disco ball and technicolor lights that don’t quite fit Shelly's otherwise divey atmosphere. Jack hears Linnea’s bubbly laugh over the din of rowdier patrons, knows he should go to her and pull her into his arms with a wet kiss on her temple, but he’s stuck on how the lights fold and weave into the dark curls of a stranger’s hair as she moves to the music, a kaleidoscopic halo cascading down the crown of her head.
Something in Jack’s chest tightens when he sees her face, but he blames it on the beers, on acid reflux. Even from a distance, he can see her serene features as she whirls around on the sticky floors. Her eyes are closed, thick black lashes kissing high cheekbones that may or may not be flushed from the mostly-imbibed drink in her hand. A placid smile graces full, pink lips that are shaded more purple as the lights change colors.
In less than a week, their paths will cross again and he’ll want to swipe his thumb across tears that are still drying on her cheeks. His mind will go still at the sight of her neck, its elegant lines and the jut of her vertebra prominens revealed with her hair up. A decade later, he’ll still think about how carefully she’d wound up his headphone wires.
But in this moment, Jack watches her slow to a sway and finally turns his attention back to his wife, whom he adores. When he’s sobered up enough to take her home, he does pull her into his arms and presses a wet kiss to her temple.
“She looks like she’s fun,” Linnea giggles at Jack as they pass by his dive bar angel, and he can only laugh halfheartedly in response.
For a split second, Jack sees Dr. Mohan again, dancing in slow motion behind his eyelids before he’s jolted back into the harsh and unforgiving embrace of the dirt, bobbing in and out of consciousness. Someone shakes his shoulder and yells something indiscernible, and then he feels a tightness around his thigh before he’s hauled into a pair of sturdy arms and blacks out.
When he comes to, the roar of a helicopter drowns out all other sound. The flesh of his palm aches around the harsh edges of the crumpled photo of Linnea, which he doesn’t remember digging out of his pocket.
•
It’s 5:13 PM on Tuesday, February 6, 2018, and while Jack swaps out his forearm crutches for his prosthetic, brushes his teeth, and pulls his scrubs on, he sees a version of the end of his shift play out in his mind.
He can picture the beauty of the Pittsburgh skyline, still shadowy in the winter morning; he can feel the cold, firm press of the guardrails at his back; he can almost imagine the frigid air surging beneath his feet as he steps off the PTMC roof’s edge. He wonders if he’d see Linnea’s ghost before the impact kills him.
It’s not a promising train of thought ahead of his first shift back since she died, but he acknowledges it and moves through it. He thinks his therapist could give him partial credit for that.
Robby, his day shift counterpart of three years who should be enjoying his day off instead of meddling, calls him as he’s bumbling around in the kitchen and digging through his cabinets for a mug that Linnea never used. He makes the same case that he’s made for the last two weeks: you don’t have to come back so soon, you can take more time off so you can properly grieve; everyone would understand if you did. Al-Hashimi can handle a few more nights with junior attendings. It’s a kind but ignorant proposition, only because any more time away would just have Jack showing up to the ED not as a physician, but as a battered patient getting wheeled towards a trauma bay.
Jack brushes him off with something about how after a few months of brain-numbing therapy, the best thing for him right now is getting back to work, so all Robby can do is wish him luck at handoff with the newest attending to join the day shift’s senior staff. He says something about a “hotshot from New Jersey” before Jack tunes him out in favor of getting his janky coffee machine to work — he doesn’t have the heart to replace it because it’s from when he and Linnea moved back to Pittsburgh.
He chimes in with the occasional, distracted mhm and uh-huh, and only after the machine sputters to life with a shitty novelty mug beneath it does he tune back in to hear Robby gripe, “She’s smart but gets too in the weeds; handoff with her takes way longer than it needs to because she’s gotta walk through the minutiae of every single patient. Monty loves her though, so just gotta grin and bear it, I guess.”
“Yup,” Jack grunts, turning to grab creamer from the fridge and absently thinking that this new attending can’t be all that bad if Adamson’s a fan of hers. He adds a splash and grabs some sugar when an itch at his knee flares, and he figures that since he’s got time, he might as well strip down to his stump, scratch to his heart’s content, and refit everything to avoid any further discomfort during his shift.
“I gotta run, man, don’t worry about me. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Robby interjects with a warning about how the new attending’s particular about how you say her name, but Jack hangs up too quickly to catch it. It’s fine. He’ll learn how to say it right when she introduces herself, like any normal person who listens.
Jack settles at one of the four chairs around the kitchen table, which seem kind of pointless now. Without Linnea, he takes his meals hunched over the kitchen counter. It’s strange to sit at the table when no one else will ever fill the seats — he’s not one for hosting and rarely gets uninvited guests, but on the occasion Robby shoulders his way into his house, he guns for the couch. He acknowledges the empty feeling, peels away the layers over and under his prosthesis, scratches the itch, and gets on with his evening. Jack goes through the motions of the same routine he kept before Linnea died, but what little commotion he makes drinking his coffee, taking his SSRIs, checking and double checking his go bag, and catching up on emails while the police scanner goes off on occasion echoes emptily through a house that only has one inhabitant now.
He thinks back to when he crawled into bed with her on the first day of the 21st century and she’d said the world didn’t end. They’d nuzzled further into each other, neither of them aware that their world would end in totality less than 20 years later. He considers stepping off the roof’s edge tomorrow morning, then un-considers it because Robby’d have to deal with the aftermath, and it wouldn’t be cool to do that to a friend.
Coffee cup now empty, he rinses it out and leaves it in the sink. He locks the door behind him, gets in his car, and leaves for his first shift without Linnea kissing him goodbye.
•
It’s 5:57 PM on Tuesday, February 6, 2018.
Jack Abbot is a night shift attending at Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center’s Emergency Department at 42, a widower as of last December, early for his first shift back since then, and grateful for the extra time so he can get his shit together while he stands near dispatch with his jaw slack and his thoughts swirling. The new day shift attending is standing at the hub with her back to him, but after nearly two decades, he’d still recognize that hair anywhere.
Despite being at the end of what looks to be a moderately busy shift, her black curls, now streaked with a few silver strands here and there, are corralled neatly under a clip. He wonders if she remembers how they tickled at his neck all those years ago, how his headphones that now sit in a box somewhere in the garage had rested atop them. As the ghost of his wife roams through the halls of gray matter in his brain, he can’t determine if it’d be better or worse for Dr. Mohan to remember him.
She’s chatting with a handful of residents and nurses about which cases can be transferred upstairs and asking about a round of checks on lab results to determine final disposition prior to handover. Before everyone scatters, she reminds them that there’s muffins in the staff lounge.
Jack trails behind her as she makes her way towards Central 8, keeping his distance but still able to see her knock gently on the door before she goes in to crouch beside a crying teenage girl. When he checks the board, he gathers that the patient is her father, who suffered an eye stroke and is getting an MRI. He turns away when he sees the girl reach for a hug from Dr. Mohan, busies himself by catching up with some of the nurses.
His chest loosens when chatting with Dana turns out to be surprisingly easy because she doesn’t handle him with the same level of fragility as Robby did. She’s filling him in on what she and Benji got up to this past weekend when someone behind him says, “Fancy seeing you here again, Dr. Abbot.” He can hear the smile in her voice, and that alone is enough for him to conclude that it’s infinitely worse that she remembers him. He feels the back of his neck start to warm, feels his heart rate go up incrementally, but stays frozen in place. Dana lifts an eyebrow at him before asking Dr. Mohan, “You two know each other?”
“We go way back,” she jokes with a laugh that floats through the ED like gossamer, “but I think we’re due for a reintroduction.”
When Jack composes himself enough to turn around, the sight of her makes his breath catch in his throat. Age has ignored her more than it has him: she has more defined smile lines and some creasing at the outer corners of her eyes, but more or less just looks like she’s grown into herself. Her dimples tease him still, and up close, he can see how warm her brown eyes are, framed by the same eyelashes that tantalized him all those years ago. She is a world away from his dancing mystery at Shelly's and the daughter who was desperate for someone to trust her to know her mother’s needs, but Jack can already sense traces of those ephemeral identities in her playfulness and care — anticipates seeing more of them in the hours that they overlap moving forward.
“Dr. Mohan,” she says, “but you can call me Samira.”
It should be a revelation to finally learn her first name — which is beautiful and suits her as well as the maroon stethoscope around her neck and the Attending Physician printed on her badge — but the way she says her last name makes his thumb twitch in memory of the label on her Walkman and reminds him of what Robby said earlier.
She stretches her hand out between them, and Jack thinks back to South 16 when he takes it. Her palm is cool to the touch and dry from a healthy hand sanitizer habit, and it nestles nicely into his, which he tries not to think about. She squeezes gently and he feels it in his heart.
“Dr. Mohan,” he repeats, says it the way she does, with the han soft in his mouth like honey. She nods and adds, “But Samira is fine.”
He wants to say it back in affirmation, but the word gets lodged in his throat. It’s just a name, one that she’s asked him to use, but when his mouth opens to echo it back to her, so too does a cavern in his chest with Linnea carved all over the walls in capital letters.
He pivots instead, asks, “Mom okay?” and somehow, that damns him more.
Her eyebrows knit together briefly before her eyes soften and take on a twinkle of wonder. “Mom’s good,” she nods with a small smile. “I can’t believe you remember that.”
Jack shrugs because anything he could say in response would be too—much, revealing, personal, close. Soon, given the ring that still loops around his finger.
“Do you prefer Dr. Abbot or Jack?” She tilts her head, and a short curl springs loose.
He focuses on the stray curl instead of the fact that she remembers his name, which he’d only nervously stammered to her once, and tells her, “Either works,” because he’d much rather leave the choice to her. Insisting on Dr. Abbot might feel like enforcing a professional boundary that she doesn’t hold in kind, but he hopes she doesn’t call him Jack. It’s just a name, but he needs to love how Linnea said it most.
“Well, Dr. Abbot, why don’t you put your stuff down and we can get a head start on handoff? We can fill Baran in when she gets here.”
He breathes a sigh of relief and does exactly that.
•
It’s 10:17 PM on Tuesday, February 6, 2018.
Jack’s brewing another pot of coffee after wrapping up with an anterior shoulder dislocation when he thinks about her again.
Handoff with Dr. Mohan did take longer than it would with Robby or Adamson, but Jack understands why now. After she walked him through the caseload that would bleed into his shift, introduced him to a few outstanding patients and their families, and provided more context than necessary on most if not all of them, Dr. Mohan’s easy confidence faltered for the first time. Her voice lowered, her eyes cast downward, her shoulders slumped slightly.
“I know Dr. Robby thinks I’m slow, but transition of care is important to me. Complete and correct information, attentive care, and an organized and cohesive treatment plan, clearly communicated, make all the difference. This is an easy time to make mistakes, and I refuse to get things wrong here.”
Her voice had wavered at the end, and that sticks with Jack. The ED is too busy for slow handovers at shift change, and objectively, her kind of thoroughness can often be just as costly as efficiency. The chaos of the Pitt isn’t conducive to thoughtful, meaningful time spent with each patient, but for a reason he doesn’t know yet, it’s important to Dr. Mohan, and she manages to make it work as best as she can.
She’d shared meticulous details on patients’ lives and explained her rationale for tests to a degree that told him more than she probably realized. What Jack gleaned from her extended handoff was that in the years that he’d cut his teeth on field medicine and risky procedures with minimal oversight, she’d probably continued to be questioned and required to justify her decisions time and time again. She’s still questioned now, he notes, cringing at Robby’s complaints about her earlier. Some hotshot from New Jersey, smart but too in the weeds.
He laughs as he fills his mug, and for a moment lets himself think about med student Dr. Mohan advocating for her mother. The break room coffee is shit, but it goes down a little easier, a little sweeter, with the confirmation that he was right about her going to bat for all of her patients.
Lena flags an incoming GSW and the moment is over, but not without leaving in its wake a passing curiosity about how fast she is in a trauma bay.
•
It’s 7:42 PM on Saturday, November 3, 2018 when Jack learns a lot of things about Dr. Mohan all at once after months of successfully squashing down any complicated feelings he might have about his colleague: how fast she is in a trauma bay; why handoff matters to her; what it looks like when vacancy devours the liveliness, focus, and warmth in her eyes; how she feels shaking in his arms, her face pressed into his shoulder and tears soaking into his scrub top.
He learns other things, too: how easily her name comes to him when he sees her crumbling apart, holding onto the shape of a physician only by the grace of the exoskeleton that the ED continuing on around them offers. What his name sounds like as a whispered plea. How the wind howling and whipping around him on the roof feels different when he’s not up there to contemplate walking off a ledge, when he’s up there to give her a place to come undone. What it is to fall again: the guilt that eats him alive, and the thrill that reanimates him in his very own Sisyphean hell.
He’d shown up 20 minutes before shift to find her in Trauma 2 coding a patient in asystole. Her compressions were solid and sure as she shouted for one of the residents to bag him and for a nurse to push the first round of epi, and by all accounts, the intricacies of ACLS were well in her command.
Jack had stepped in on the eighth round of epi, after she’d refused a resident’s second offer to take over on compressions. Sweat dripped down her temples, her cheeks were ruddy with exertion, and half of her hair hung frizzily out of a bun that sagged limply at her neck.
“Dr. Mohan,” he said quietly, keeping his distance. All he heard in response was the steady huff of her breaths as she continued compressions.
He’d moved in, a foot behind her, his fingertip at her shoulder. “Mohan,” he’d pleaded. The residents and nurses watched him step closer, rest his hand on her wrist.
His mouth was centimeters away from her ear so only she could hear him give in and say, hoarse and devastated, “Samira.” She’d stopped compressions and closed her eyes for seconds that might as well have been hours, opening them only to look at her watch and call time of death.
Jack knew what she looked like when she cried, but this was new to him: the empty glassiness in her eyes, red-rimmed and hollow. He’d ushered her towards the elevator and taken her to the roof, and in the frigid November night, she’d turned into him and cried. His arms wrapped around her, tentative then reflexive, and he re-learned that time is secondary when you’re holding someone important.
It’s 7:42 PM and they’re huddled next to each other with the railing and the city at their backs, Samira’s sniffles now due to the cold rather than her tears.
“Probably should’ve stopped to grab our coats before coming up here,” she remarks with a humorless laugh.
“Sorry I didn’t think of that before.” Jack rubs sheepishly at his neck. “Wanna head back down?”
He moves to stand up, but Samira’s hand on his stops him.
“Not yet,” she blurts.
“You’re shivering, I should at least grab your—” he tries to reason, but the “Please, Jack,” she breathes out makes him sink back down and remember how Linnea would say it. Her fingers curl nearly flush around his, interrupted only by his ring.
“He thought he pulled his calf on a hike,” she starts. “He only came because his wife wouldn’t stop nagging him. Sat in chairs for god knows how long before the stomach pain started, and even then, we barely saw him before he went into cardiac arrest.”
“DVT into PE?” Jack stares ahead when he asks, but from the corner of his eye, he can see her nodding. For several minutes, all he hears is the bustle of the city coming alive at night.
“My dad already had a bed by shift change, but that didn’t make much of a difference when the doctors didn’t ask a lot of questions and wrote him off as stable when handing over. They discharged him and he didn’t make it through the night.” Clarity doesn’t strike him so much as it drapes around him like a blanket after he’s accidentally fallen asleep on the living room couch.
He turns slowly towards Samira, mouth opening to say words that his mind hasn’t conjured yet, but she smiles wistfully and looks down at their fingers. “I just figured if anyone should know where I’m coming from, it’s you.”
She withdraws her hand and presses herself up, dusts off whatever gravel sticks to her palms and reaches out to help him up. Physically, he is taking her hand and walking with her towards the metal door that will take them back into the building, where her shift will end and his will begin. Emotionally, he has one foot off the edge of the roof, soon to be followed by the other.
“You should go home and get some rest, I can talk to the family,” Jack offers in the elevator, but she won’t have it.
“No, it should be me.” She casts an exhausted, knowing look at him. “Continuity of care is important.”
She rubs at her arms in a desperate attempt to warm up, and Jack has to look away. He feels another Linnea being etched in the cave behind his ribcage at the same time he feels the urge to take Samira in his arms again and let her siphon the warmth out of him.
The former feeling wins out and he puts some distance between them, telling himself that the latter will pass if he simply lets it. He pointedly ignores the way Robby eyes the wet patch on his shoulder when he says goodbye on his way out, looks instead for Baran so she can get him up to speed on what he’s missed since going up.
By the end of his shift, he overhears that Dr. Mohan has called in sick. He has 48 hours off looming ahead of him, and that other feeling has not passed.
•
It’s 8:39 AM on Sunday, November 4, 2018.
Jack is parked at the curb outside of a muted green house in Shadyside, two takeout containers of soup and a plastic bag filled with a variety of teas and every cold and flu medication under the sun in his passenger seat, and he has no business being here.
He remembers drumming his fingers on the counter at the hub while Lena looked something up for him. Everything after — swinging by Bo’s Deli and and just about burning his hand when he tries to carry the containers without a bag, nearly emptying shelves at CVS, punching in a new address into his navigation, and creeping to a halt on Morewood Ave — could only have been the work of someone else, something that possessed him for the last 40 or so minutes.
Though she’s never mentioned them, she could have a perfectly devoted partner making her soup from scratch, kids studiously at work on a get well soon card in the living room while cartoons play in the background, maybe even a cat yowling and scratching at her door while she’s comatose under her duvet. She could have a family that she goes home to after every shift, who help her pick up the pieces on bad days and celebrate with her when she talks about how one of the interns had caught a misdiagnosis by properly listening to the patient and asking the right questions.
He blinks and he’s at her doorstep, fingertip pressed to the doorbell. When she opens the door, bleary-eyed and swimming in a fleecy blanket that pools around her slippers, all he hears from within the house is the quiet drone of the news.
“Abbot?” Her voice is raspy with sleep, and suddenly he’s mortified. What the fuck is he doing here?
He clears his throat and lifts the bags. “Heard you’re sick, figured I should probably see how you’re doing since it’s my fault — continuity of care and all. Just wanted to drop these off.”
Her hand emerges from the blanket to take the bags, her groggy thanks sounding distant as he starts back down the walkway when she calls for him more clearly. Jack. He’s a third of the way to the safety of his car, heart beginning to thunder.
“Do you wanna come inside?”
He should say no — wants to say no. Should go back to his house, which is just the way he left it last night before shift: empty, quiet, lonely, haunted. But a crisp wind blows at his shoulders and something takes over him again, wheels him slowly back around to her porch to say yes, makes him toe his shoes off after he crosses the threshold of her home and whatever other boundaries he’d previously set for himself when it comes to Samira.
By contrast, he’s fully aware of his actions when he shuffles her along to the sofa so he can reheat the lentil soup, breaking the relative silence only to ask where she keeps her pots and dishware. He fills the kettle on the countertop and opens a new box of Sleepytime tea, tearing a packet and setting the bag in a Rutgers mug. He breaks out all the cold medication and preps her next dose, and the six doses after that.
This — the doting, the caretaking — comes naturally to him after life with Linnea: making sure her glass and plate were always full at parties; helping her with her hCG injections when they were trying to get pregnant; keeping track of all her medication and stocking the freezer with cold mitts and socks for chemo appointments when her ovarian cancer diagnosis smashed through their lives; feeding her oyster crackers one at a time at chemo during her second recurrence; brushing his thumb across her knuckles and sitting with her in the quiet at the end.
It should make him feel ill, that he’s slipping back into old habits so easily for someone else, but milling about her kitchen and looking for a ladle, letting the tea steep in her mug and warning her that it’s piping hot when he sets it on her coffee table, wincing when she burns her tongue anyway — it simply feels right, like a return to form.
Jack decides against overthinking it and ladles out a bowl of soup instead, warns her again that it’s hot and watches her blow on a spoonful before drinking, doesn’t stifle his smile at the sight of her. He leaves her to her soup and starts making his way back to the kitchen so he can put the leftovers in the fridge and clean up, but gets sidetracked when he notices how bare her house is.
Furniture is limited to just what someone living alone would need, and her walls are broad swathes of uninterrupted, buttery yellow. Two bookcases are lined with textbooks, journals, and some framed photos scattered throughout; in one presumably from Rutgers NJMS’s graduation ceremony, as Jack infers from the black and green gowns, it’s just her and her mother. Only the photos of her as a child include her father, who looks to be around their age now. There’s a picture on one of the middle shelves where she’s a chubby-cheeked, prominently dimpled toddler sitting on her father’s lap. He’s not looking at the camera but rather beaming down at her, eyes crinkled and fingers delicately holding her little wrists up so tiny gold bracelets stop halfway down her forearms as she strikes a pose. The red WM-2 is propped up beside it, and a stack of cassette tapes with “USAppa Music for Samira” scrawled in blue ink on the yellowing labels.
A slender finger enters his line of sight, and he startles at Samira’s sudden presence behind him.
“I think this is the one you listened to,” her voice muffled by the blanket still bundled around her as she points to the second tape from the bottom.
“Any other Springsteen on these?” Jack asks.
“Definitely. You wanna listen? For old times’ sake?” His eyes snag on the sliver of pink tongue that pokes out of the corner of her mouth as he nods slowly.
“Let me find the other headphones real quick,” Samira mutters, crouching to root around a box on the bottom shelf.
He splits off to quickly sort out the kitchen and at least soak the dishes, and when he returns, he finds her back on the sofa, triumphantly holding up two headphones in a stance that is similar enough to toddler Samira in the photo. When he settles into the sofa just far away enough that she won’t voice any worries about getting him sick, she offers him the familiar blue headphones. She takes the orange ones for herself and for a moment, Jack is 25 again, appreciating how starkly it stands out against the deep brown of her hair.
Samira presses play and it starts on “Fast Car.” Neither of them thinks this is the tape she brought to the hospital that night, and neither of them moves to switch it out.
•
It’s 5:08 PM on Sunday, November 4, 2018.
Jack wakes to the sound of the faucet running and dishes clinking in the kitchen. He knows it’s not Linnea, but he feels okay about it, which is better than he would’ve expected. The last light of the day bleeds in through the blinds, and when he squints at it, it forms a sort of halo around Samira’s figure as she rinses off a bowl and places it in the drying rack.
Jack thinks he fell asleep somewhere around “USAppa Music for Samira 4,” and the last song he remembers hearing is “Don’t Worry Baby.” There’s a blanket — not the one that Samira was swaddled in — draped over him that smells like rosemary and spices that he can’t put his finger on. The WM-2, tapes, and headphones, wires coiled and neatly secured, are on the coffee table.
“You’re up,” she says, and already she sounds much better. He cranes his neck to see if the first batch of cold meds he’d set aside for her is gone and indeed finds only six doses remaining. “Did you wanna stay for dinner? I was just planning on ordering in.”
And he’s so tired of eating by himself at the kitchen counter, and he’s missed hearing signs of life in the house, and he can concede that Samira Mohan, MD, Attending Physician, is lovely and he is only human, so he says yes.
•
It’s 8:39 AM on Wednesday, January 1, 2020.
Jack Abbot is a night shift attending at Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center’s Emergency Department at 44, which has been challenging, to say the least, in the midst of a global pandemic. He’s driving home from a chaotic shift that would have been infinitely more difficult without the talented crop of residents under him, especially an unflagging, overcaffeinated R2 from California that he hopes will stick around.
He pulls into the driveway, grabs his things from the passenger seat, and heads into the green house on Morewood Ave — through the front door, though, because his residual limb aches enough without him having to go up the stairs from the garage. He leaves his shoes and bags by the door, swaps out his prosthesis for his forearm crutches, and heads for the bathroom where a fresh set of his own clothes that he hasn’t seen in a few weeks are already waiting for him on the counter. He lingers in the shower, ass firmly planted on the shower bench for longer than usual so he can take his time massaging the tender skin at his stump.
His crutches thump dully on the floorboards — he’ll get around to buying a rug for the hallway eventually. Samira’s a light sleeper, so he knows that however quietly he opens the door, she’ll poke her head out of the covers and stare right at him, with those dark eyes he has a hard time looking away from, until he pushes her hair back and kisses her on the forehead. She has today off, which is due only to a mandatory 24 hours off rather than festivity. If it were up to her, she’d have asked if she could switch with Al-Hashimi last night so she and Jack could ring in the new year together between traumas in the very ED where they met.
Tumultuous as last night had been, there were no doomsday-adjacent fears about what a new decade would bring. 2020, fun as it is to say aloud and neat as it is to look at written out, is a lot less dramatic than 2000. Even if the year heralded some kind of bad omen for humanity, though, Jack’s got bigger problems that need addressing — like telling Samira that she can’t keep the clothes she steals from him when she stays over for weeks on end, or finding all the mix CDs that Linnea burned for him because Samira’s been badgering him about what her music taste was like. Trying to get his nieces to stop texting her so often even though she’s said she doesn’t mind. Also, figuring out the right time to bring up Shelly’s, December 26, 1999.
The door creaks as he pushes it, and there she is: unruly dark hair fanned out behind her with silvery strands catching the light, deep brown eyes blinking slowly at him, lower lip jutting out just a little bit in an unintentional pout. He takes his time getting to her, appreciates how the little details come into focus as he gets closer: wayward eyebrow hairs falling out of line, a crease on her cheek from the wrinkled pillowcase, a pale white spot of dried drool on her chin.
He kisses her forehead, then her nose, then her lips, and mutters, “Hi sweetheart,” against them. She hums contentedly and he feels her mouth stretch into a smile; she presses one, two, three more kisses back in quick succession and pulls him into the covers, sending his crutches clattering to the floor.
Whatever the year, the decade, the future, may bring, Jack’s not too concerned about the end of the world. He’s already survived it once, so he knows that even after the world ends, there is still life to be lived.