aka matt meir meets pollie kleinfelter.
Matt trembled, lifting his palms upward. “They’re–there’s a massacre in Cisterna. Our forces are far outmatched, the intelligence was wrong. You have to go now, before there are no rangers left.” Men barked orders around him, bodies rushed past in a blur, but Matt could only stare at his hands, covered in a mix of dirt and the blood of his brother.
“Oh, sweetheart,” he says on a gusty exhale. “I wish you’d let me drive you home.”
The ICU rooms at Presby are smaller than the ones he’s familiar with at PTMC, but on the whole are roughly the same. Critical care rooms pretty much are, anywhere you go.
Slowly, the past thirty-six hours or so piece together. It is the middle of June. Nearing the end of her residency, all rotations and requirements of her complete, Samira Mohan works an unscheduled double because she has the next day off. By 7 AM, she is at the end of the tether securing her brain to the dexterity and aptitude needed to practice medicine, let alone operate a moving vehicle. He offers to give her a ride. She declines, holding up her illuminated phone—she’s already called herself an Uber. It was a five dollar cancellation fee. He should have pressed the issue, he should have driven her home.
Her nurse follows him in, tapping through information on her chart.
“She was intubated at the scene,” she reads. It would be different, if he hadn’t introduced himself as a doctor, if he didn’t say he only started looking for her now because they’ve been working opposite shifts at the hospital, if hadn’t told the truth except when necessary to gain access to her, to this room. “Left leg deformity splinted, C-collar in place. When she presented to us, she was condition stable, but started to get agitated with the ETT so the trauma team started sedation. EFAST was negative. CT scan was performed. Two small subdural bleeds were present, but when consulted neurosurgery wasn’t immediately concerned. She was taken to the OR at 1105 for an ex fix on that left leg.”
He can tell without looking at a single scan that she has a tibial plateau fracture. Car accident is all the nurse told him, hand clamped onto his bicep as she led him through roving hallways. Tibial plateau fracture, most likely from the high strike force of a car being crumpled on top of her lap.
“Several rib fractures were also noted on the CT,” the nurse, who looks too young to be a nurse, but assured him that she’s in her late thirties and that her name was Jen, like his dead wife, continues. “She was taken from the OR to the tender hands of the critical care team at approximately 1450. Preliminary neuro exam was good, but her team has decided to keep her under sedation until they’re confident they won’t have to operate. I have the note here, if you’d like to read it, Doctor—”
There is a chair next to her bed. In the vicinity of her bed. Vaguely near her bed, abutting various machines that they do not get to play with down in the Pitt. She’s on an infusion pump of mannitol, and has a central line with a CVP. Bedside monitors with an EKG, pulse ox on waveform. Besides the central line, they have access to both cephalic veins.
“Abbot. Jack Abbot. I—we both work at Pittsburgh Trauma. In the emergency department,” he says, because that much is true. “What happened?”
Robby, calling him until his phone rang through Do Not Disturb. Robby, telling him that Samira hasn’t shown up for her shift. Robby, telling him that Samira’s phone doesn’t ring at all, just goes straight to voicemail. Robby, telling him that the police are giving him a runaround and he’s sent McKay on her day off to her apartment, but no one has her spare key, and does he have any favors he could call in from volunteering with tactical EMS? Jack called every level one trauma center in the fucking county. Spent hours on hold, transferred between departments, gave her physical description over and over and over again. It became easier just to say—
“You said your wife took an Uber home from her shift, right?” Jen asks, coming to rest her hand on his shoulder.
He nods, because part of that is true. Samira took an Uber home from her shift. Samira is not his wife. Samira is not his anything, but lies are expedient and he needed to see her, needed to speak with her medical team, needed to—
Neither of them are the type of person to have an emergency contact.
“She was sitting in the back passenger side of a silver Nissan Altima,” she says, and then stops, biting her lip. “The other driver, going approximately eighty miles per hour in a Ford-250 Superduty, ran through a red light and T-boned the front passenger side of the Altima. The Altima rotated 180 degrees, slid, and collided with a storefront. This was at 0728 hours, in… Squirrel Hill, at Forbes and Murray. It took the Fire Department about an hour to get her out of the car. She didn’t come in with any personal effects—”
“I know how hard it is to locate next of kin,” Jack says, swallowing hard down the painful knot at the back of his throat. He smiles weakly. “I’ve got some experience with that, working in an emergency room.”
“Is there anyone I can call for you?”
Yes. No?
He should be calling Robby, or the main switchboard, asking to be connected to whoever is working charge today. Or maybe the right thing to do would be to call Human Resources, try to get connected to Samira’s mother, who may or may not even be in the country. But Samira doesn’t have a roommate, and doesn’t have a cat, and he’s fairly certain that even if Samira’s cell phone wasn't a warped block of cobalt and silicon and broken glass, if he called Aditi Mohan right now from her daughter's number, it’s highly unlikey that she would pick up.
The right thing to do wouldn’t be to shake his head, to rest his hand gently on her uninjured leg, thumb stroking the lip of her patella. Because if he calls anyone, anyone at all—
Then she’s not his wife. She’s not his fiancé, or his girlfriend. Samira Mohan is a woman he works with, a woman he’s spent tiny incremental days with falling in love, barely noticeable at all, especially when broken down into hours or minutes or interactions in a trauma bay, shared cups of coffee on the roof, a bummed cigarette at midnight.
“Not yet,” he rasps. He needs the illusion to last. He needs the spell to not be broken. Not before he's had his fill. “No, but thank you. Not yet.”
you know that, post-coming out, compilations start popping up online from years of nhl mic'd up promos that nobody ever thought twice about before that mostly consist of shane saying "microphone" when ilya skates up to him.
