KEEP YOUR HEART CLOSE TO THE GROUND early #mohabbotmonday blurb based on this leak
“Hey, where’s Dr. Abbot?” Samira asks, peeling off her billowy white smock and shoving it down into the biohazard bin. Her feet compel her forward, drifting behind Robby as he exits the trauma bay to stare up, yet again, at the overwhelmed board.
The last she saw of Abbot, he was striding towards the door to the stairwell, fingers hooking into the protective neckband of the bulletproof jacket strapped to his chest. Hair matted down with sweat, flushed from his hairline down, snapping the blue nitrile gloves off his wrists. Maybe if she’d been able to look him in the eyes, if she wasn’t giving report to the surgical team, if she wasn’t distracted—
“Uh…” Robby looks around, vaguely, already mentally moving onto the next problem on his list, the next obstacle impinging on his ability to leave for his sabbatical. “Probably went somewhere to clean himself up and change into scrubs.”
Maybe. But Samira knows what Abbot looks like when he’s retreating from triage to scrub the blood out of his silvery hair, to change out of a pair of soiled scrubs, to wipe himself down waterless shower foam until his skin smells like skin again. She knows Abbot’s face, neutral and plain, mischievous and amused, frustrated and worn thin from exhaustion. The expression he wore, limping towards the stairs, is not familiar to her.
So she follows him up.
Finds him, some ten minutes later, collapsed in on himself under the flight up metal steps that lead up to the roof access door. Slumped against the wall, his chest heaves against the weight of the tactical vest, hands resting limp in his lap as if he had briefly struggled, trying to remove it, and then gave up. Imagining it makes her heart twist in her chest.
“It’s just me,” she says, careful to not let the fire door close on its full weight. “I didn’t want to startle you and make things worse.”
Head turning a miniscule amount, Abbot blinks at her slowly. Fingers clenching and releasing, he tucks one leg under him. His left leg; not the prosthetic. When he speaks, his words are measured, but still a little breathless.
“You could never make things worse, Mohan.”
Her feet carry her a little closer to him. “I saw you disappear. I got worried.”
“You’re needed downstairs,” he says, voice preternaturally flat. “Just let me handle this.”
Four years in emergency medicine, Samira knows what a panic attack looks like from the outside. Abbot is carrying this one well, continuing to mask his symptoms even after crawling into a dark corner to hide. Sure, his breaths are uneven and his face is a little red, but the terror wears on his face like a certain type of weariness she has long been familiar with. As much as his nervous system lies to him, he knows he’s not going to die.
But he still feels it.
“I’m needed right here,” she says, crouching down in front of him. Eases down gently, telegraphing every move, until she’s sitting cross-legged in front of him. He has to be suffocating in all the SWAT gear. “Can I help you get this off?”
Her fingers pluck at the velcro latches at the shoulders of the flak jacket. Breathing through pursed lips, pupils wide with adrenaline, Abbot nods. Slow—she keeps all her movements slow. Unhurried, she peels apart the first straps, latching the protective sleeves to the shoulders.
“When was the last time you wore one?” she asks.
It’s slightly less condescending than asking him if he knows what year it is.
“Fuck, um.” Swallowing down on a dry mouth, his eyes flit and flicker around the dark stairwell. She can watch him count five things you can see. “Nine years ago, now.”
The clips on the side, under his arms, are next. She lifts up the chest plate to tug at the ballistic material covering the groin, detaching it from the thick strip of velcro on the inside of the vest. Gentle, her fingers trace the neckplate, looking for the fasteners.
“And what happened when you were wearing it?” she murmurs.
“Took six rounds from a Kalashnikov to my right calf.” A gasp hitches out of his lungs. “Tied off a tourniquet and kept going.” Abbot looks at her, really looks at her, like he needs her to understand this just as intuitively as she understands how to put in a chest tube, how to intubate with the glidescope, how to cauterize a bleeder. “Didn’t have much of a choice.”
And yet, when a truck crashed through the crowd control barricades and the driver and passenger riding shotgun started firing into the crowd, he ran towards it. Threw himself into the throng of police officers hunkering down to return fire. Stole a ballistics vest from Pittsburgh PD, and treated victims with bullets whizzing over his head.
“There’s a—there’s a hidden clasp,” he says, as she struggles to undo the neckpiece. “You gotta pull the velcro—yeah, just like that.”
It comes loose at last; she tugs it free, tossing it to the side.
“I feel like I’m your squire or something, taking your armor off after a battle or a joust,” she says, trying to say something worth smiling for.
“It is a little bit like that, yeah.” He says with a jerky little nod. Brows furrowing, his tongue darts out to wet his lips. Another drop of sweat escapes from his hairline; Samira swipes it away with her thumb to prevent it from rolling down into his eyes. “Full—full battle gear is much worse. I just stole this out of the back of the SWAT van when no one was looking. They’re probably gonna want it back. Fuck.”
At last, she can loosen the straps enough to start pulling everything up and over his head, letting it drop next to them. The vest is heavier than she expected, close to twenty-five pounds if she had to guess. “There we go. Any better?”
It hits the concrete floor with a dull thud.
“A little bit,” he says, panting. “Thanks.”
“You got any rescue meds?” The floor is cold, even in the heat of July. Arching her back, Samira shifts her weight onto one hip, straightening out the opposite leg on the floor as one of her feet goes numb. She wants to take his hands, clenching into the fabric of his shorts. She wants to pull him into the softness of her body, give him somewhere to bank himself, somewhere to cry.
They’re friends, of a sort.
Have been, since PittFest.
“Took three propranolol,” he says, nodding, still nodding, chin bobbing up and down towards his chest before finally thunking back against the cinderblock wall. “I’ve got a couple of lorazepam in one of my pockets if that doesn’t work.”
“Need a cigarette?”
Most days, Robby swears that he’s finally quit for good. But some days, she’ll find him up here, sitting in the doorway out onto the roof, a lit cigarette burning down between his fingers. More of the attendings used to smoke. Maybe it was the stress of the pandemic that pushed them towards the habit; Samira remembers reading somewhere that emergency medicine nurses and physicians have the highest per capita usage of nicotine out of all the medical specialties. Nowadays, the unit doesn’t have many smokers left. But Abbot used to be one of them.
“Quit when my wife got sick,” he offers by way of a belated explanation. “Since when do you smoke?”
Jennifer Abbot. Blonde, forty-one, a beloved chemistry professor at UPitt.
Dead long before she was due from atypical lung cancer that was largely asymptomatic until it metastasized to her liver and brain. It was just a cough, and then two months later they were adjusting the schedule so the correct people could attend her funeral. Samira wrote Abbot a card, and volunteered to cover Shen’s shift the night before so he wasn’t showing up at the 10 AM service on only the dregs of sleep after a twelve-hour shift.
“Borrowed from Dana’s stash, just in case.” Two parliaments and a bic lighter sit in the pocket of her scrub pants. “She says you bum one off her, from time to time.”
He huffs a laugh; it comes out almost like a sob. “She’s a snitch.”
“Can I touch you?”
Has anyone since she died? Samira knows the bare details, the rough sketch of their life—what someone gleans from an obituary written for someone who was loved completely. She knows they went to high school together in West Virginia, but fell in love after stumbling across each other on New Year’s Eve, far from home, in Germany. She knows they were together for two years before the amputation, and knows they got married by a chaplain on the surgical ward at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center.
They had eight years together, and then she died.
Just a little over two years ago.
“I—uh, yeah,” Abbot says; the question unmoors him. “Sure.”
Scooting across the floor, paint peeling up from the unfinished concrete, Samira places herself at his side. This vantage point is mundane; she is, more often than not, working at Abbot’s side. She knows the angle of his jaw, the straight line of his nose, the shape of his brow. She knows his body, broad and strong, and his hands, held above the patient in the sterile field.
“I’m just gonna hold your hand, that’s all,” she says, reaching for him. Maybe it’s an old habit, muscle memory his body can’t quite let go, but he laces their fingers together. “I have some cold water, too.” She pushes the bottle, fresh from the cooler downstairs, towards him. “Your face is flushed, but that could also be from the fact that it’s at least a hundred degrees outside.”
Which is probably the reason she didn’t find him outside on the roof.
“Or, you know, because I’m pasty.” Abbot doesn’t go to drink it, instead holding it against the backside of his neck. “Don’t see a whole ton of sunlight. Pretty sure I put on sunscreen this morning, though.”
“What SPF?” she asks, not entirely convinced.
“A hundred.” One corner of his mouth twitches upwards, head rolling to the side. With her free hand, Samira adjusts the bottle so that it presses against his occiput, applying counterpressure to the headache she suspects is brewing. Eyes fluttering closed, he exhales slowly. “That feels nice.”
He’s fond of her, she thinks.
“Has anyone checked you out?” She metes out the question quietly, with concern. No one ever asks her that question like they want an answer—no one but him. “Are you injured anywhere?”
“Not injured. Just gonna feel it in the morning. It’s been a minute since I fireman-carried a full grown man anywhere, let alone a couple of city blocks.” He squeezes her hand, looks at her out of the corner of his gaze. The lassitude in his frame is colored by relief, not shame. At last, he looks like he ran for miles in the July heat. “You can check, I don’t mind.”
He looks at her, and looks at her, and looks at her. Plenty of people do; Samira fancies that Abbot sees her.
“Okay if I just sit here with you, then?” she asks.
They’re staffed heavy on doctors today—two attendings, five residents, three medical students—before getting to the number of nurses and support staff. Samira hasn’t taken a break since she badged in a little after six. If they need her downstairs, someone will page her.
Abbot’s thumb strokes over the back of her hand. “I think I’d like that.”
She watches behind his eyes as his meds finally kick in. It’s not even two in the afternoon on the Fourth of July; fireworks haven’t started yet. Jack Abbot, former Army Ranger, is in for a long day and a longer night.
Is this the last time today that he’ll take her hand?
