Cynthia Reese - Secret Santa

Once he’d negotiated closing the door with his right hand, he started the car and backed carefully out of his drive. It seemed to trigger something in her. “I’m never like this,” she said. “I’m always cool in a crisis.”

“Hey. It’s your dad. You’re thinking like a daughter, not a doctor.” Gravel that had collected in the dip between the street and the drive crunched under his tires as he backed out onto the street and started for the hospital. “What happened? Do you know?”

She jerked her head in the negative. “Lainey—a nurse—”

“I know Lainey. She called?”

“After they got a call in from the EMTs. It’s bad.”

She would know. She’d probably handled lots of these in her work, Neil figured. At the stop sign, he hung a left and made the subsequent turns to the main road in town.

“Do you want to call your mother?” Neil asked her as they stopped for the last red light between their neighborhood and the hospital. “I didn’t think to ask if your mom needed a lift.”

In the crimson glow of the light, he could see Charli’s swallow. “Should I go back?” he asked.

“No. Lainey—Lainey said Mom was riding with the ambulance.”

The light turned green and he took his foot off the brake, trying not to gun it, but still going a little faster than the speed limit.

Charli seemed calmer now, but he could tell from her drawn face in the glow of the streetlights she was anxious.

“You said it was bad. How bad?”

“I don’t— What if he dies?” She put her hand to her face. “Listen to me. I don’t have any information. I’m just freaking out, and I tell my patients’ families to wait, to see, that we’re doing all we can. They’re doing all they can. They are. I know.”

Neil understood why she’d blurted out her what-if. Did he ever know that desperate thought. He’d never forget the night they’d taken his mother to the hospital. A terrified six-year-old, all he could think was, What if she dies? And she had died.

Now wasn’t the time to tell Charli that life was survivable, if far poorer, after the death of a parent. Honestly, there was never a time when anybody should say that, but Neil knew it for the truth it was. Instead, he reached over, squeezed her hand and said gently, “You are a doctor. You know way too much about, well, about everything medical. But I think you’ve just given yourself some excellent advice.”

The reminder of who she was seemed to fortify her. She straightened up and leaned against the gray fabric of the car seat. “Well, we don’t have enough information. We have to wait and see.”

“And we will. We will wait and see.” Now they were in the parking lot of the emergency room. The small, low 1960s building seemed perfectly preserved in the lights of the vapor lamps, but Neil knew that the morning sun would not be kind to it. It would reveal the overdue paint job, the scraggly bushes that the understaffed and overtaxed maintenance guys never got around to hedging. But for a town this size and this poor, simply keeping the doors open on a twenty-five-bed county-run hospital was an achievement. Across the street lay the town’s doctors’ offices—the offices where Dr. Chuck Prescott had spent much of his professional career.

Beyond Neil’s car, bathed in vapor lights and the Corolla’s headlight beams, lay the big circle with the H in it, ready for the helicopter that would certainly come for Chuck Prescott, to take him to a larger trauma hospital. If, that is, the E.R. could stabilize him.

Charli didn’t budge. For a moment, Neil let her sit there, collect herself. He saw the last vestiges of her earlier emotion hidden behind a mask that covered all the pain and fear and confusion.

“Okay. Let’s do this.” She flung herself out of the car and strode toward the hospital, back straight, head high. Even without the lab coat and the stethoscope, Charli looked every inch the doctor he’d seen earlier that evening.

Neil shook off his amazement. Scrambling to follow her, he caught up with her halfway to the entry. The doors whisked open in front of them, a belch of hospital air their greeting.

Lainey dashed toward them and wrapped Charli in a quick, tight embrace. “Charli, I am so sorry. He’s here, they’re working on him....”

For a moment, Neil saw Charli’s mask slip. “Who’s working on him?”

“Shafer—well, everybody, except me. They’re running the full code. Your dad...he didn’t have a DNR in place.”

Neil noticed Charli’s face blanch. “Where’s Mom?” she asked.

“Around here.... Come on.” Lainey guided her around the corner toward a private family room.

As soon as she saw the door, Charli balked. “Why...why there? That’s where we do notifications.”

“I had to. She needed some...space. You’ve got to be strong, Charli. She’s in a complete meltdown.”

Those pink-tipped fingers were by her sides, and Neil saw her try to stuff her fists into lab-coat pockets that weren’t there. She looked long and hard at Lainey and brushed past the nurse.

The door shut behind her with a soft thud. Neil stood there, unsure what to do.

“You didn’t want to go with her?” Lainey asked.

“Uh, no.” How could Neil explain that their acquaintance, such as it was, had existed for only a few hours.

“She might—”

Neil shook his head. “I’m her neighbor. I don’t really know her that well—and, see, she needs the time with her mom.”

“Oh. I thought you two knew each other.” Lainey shook her head. “It’s hard to remember that you haven’t always been here. I’ve known Charli all my life—we went to school together. We were best friends. I guess I thought you’d already talked to her. You know, to do an article on her for the paper.”

“I’d called, but her dad said to give her a bit—”

He shook his head. Any minute now, he expected Dr. Chuck Prescott to come blasting out of the double doors and tell them the patient was fine.

But the patient was Dr. Prescott. Who would fight to save the town’s hospital now? Who would keep the doors open on the little community clinic?

Lainey cast an anxious glance at the closed door. “Violet wouldn’t let go of him when they brought him in. We had to peel her off him. She kept saying that if he’d come home, he wouldn’t have gotten sick.”

Neil fiddled with the coat in his hands. “Maybe I should have gone in with her,” he murmured. “But I figured they needed their space.”

“You could peek in, see if Charli needs some help? You know how high-strung her mother is.” A noise behind them attracted Lainey’s attention to some people coming in the E.R.’s main doors. “I’ve got to—”

Neil waved her away. “Don’t worry. I’ll wait for her.” And as Lainey shot him a grateful look, for the second time that night, he dropped down into one of the E.R.’s uncomfortable chairs to wait. Despite Lainey’s suggestion, he didn’t think Charli would appreciate him intruding on her private moment.

* * *

CHARLI MARVELED AT the fragile quality her mom exuded. A petite woman who’d never come to more than midchest to Charli’s dad, Violet felt tiny and almost birdlike in Charli’s embrace.

There was nothing petite about Violet’s outflow of emotion, though. Sobs racked her mother’s slender shoulders, and Violet seemed mindless about the stained carpet as she knelt against an equally stained love seat. Charli understood all too well why Lainey had tucked her mom in the notification room.

“Mom, Mom...” Charli stroked her mother’s golden hair, the only thing she’d inherited from Violet. She was tall and gangly where her mother was petite. She had her father’s big hands, where her mother’s hands were barely big enough to wrap around a liter of soft drink. She was pragmatic and strived for a cool facade...and her mother?