Cynthia Reese - Secret Santa

“You have to save him, Charli! You have to!”

“They’re doing everything—” She halted before she tried that path again. “Tell me,” she said, trying her best to distract her mother and get her to focus on something besides her own emotions. “What happened?”

Her mother hiccupped, ignored the tissue Charli had extended her and wiped her eyes on the sleeve of her turquoise blue cashmere cardigan. “He was tired....” Here her mother shot her an accusatory glare. Charli chose to overlook it.

“So he came home tired?”

“Yes, and I asked him what he wanted to eat. I’d made him some supper, but of course he was late. And...he didn’t touch the coconut cake.” Violet drew her brows together. A spasm of guilt coursed through her features. “I don’t care if he’s late every night if he’ll just be okay!”

I’ll send him home early every day if he’ll just be okay. Charli’s mental bargain echoed not only her mother’s but every patient’s distraught family member she’d ever talked with. This is what they feel like. I thought I knew what they felt like, but I didn’t. I didn’t have a clue.

“He didn’t eat a thing...said his stomach felt iffy, some indigestion.” Violet blinked. “Oh, no. Indigestion. It was his heart all the time. Why didn’t I—” But she got nothing more out beyond a torrent of tears.

Charli gave up on soothing her mother. She dropped down on the floor and twisted to lean against the love seat. Beside her, her mother shook with grief and recrimination.

Thankfully, though, her mother ran out of steam a few moments later. She sniffled loudly. “They’re not telling us anything!”

“I could go and find out....” Charli hesitated. Should she leave her mother alone in the state she was in? “Why don’t we see if Lainey—”

Her mother was on her feet in an instant and headed for the door. “You go! They said I couldn’t see him, but they have to let you because you’re a doctor!”

Inexplicably Charli’s feet felt nailed to the ground. Did she want to see her father as sick and weak as she’d seen other patients?

Violet threw open the door to reveal Neil Bailey still in the waiting room. He’d sat down in a chair in front of the door. Now he and Charli stared at each other.

She was embarrassed that he’d caught sight of her on the floor, as though she’d collapsed from emotion. Scrambling to her feet, she joined her mother. “You’ll wait here?”

“I can’t take that room a minute longer,” Violet insisted. “The walls are closing in on me.”

Charli agreed, but still was uncertain what to do with her wreck of a mother. She craned her neck to find Lainey, but didn’t see her.

“Hey, if you like, Mrs. Prescott, you can wait here with me,” Neil offered.

Violet swooped through the door and dropped into the chair beside Neil. A flicker of irritation poked through the welter of Charli’s emotions. Why did her mother insist on latching on to men for support? She’d done it all her life with Charli’s father, and here she was now, already gripping Neil Bailey’s arm with her neat little hands and gazing up into the man’s face as though he were her knight in shining armor.

Honestly, her mother might as well have been a character off Madmen or a 1960s sitcom. Women’s Lib had completely passed her by.

No need to look a gift horse in the mouth, though. At least her mother was calmer with Neil than she had been with either Charli or Lainey. Charli shook off the irritation and murmured a thanks to Neil. Gathering her courage, she walked toward the doors to the E.R. treatment areas.

She heard it before she even got to the nurses’ station. It was a full code, expertly run, and she could predict the orders of the attending as he got feedback from each of his desperate attempts to restart her father’s heart.

“Clear—shock him again!” came the latest order.

“Rhythm still in v-fib!” a nurse called out.

“Come on! Come on, old man!” the doctor shouted. “Don’t you give up on me now! Another push of epi!”

“We’ve lost rhythm!”

Again with the defibrillator. Again with more meds. Again with more compressions. Again with no sustainable rhythm.

And over and over again, until the doctor choked out, “How long without a rhythm?”

Charli couldn’t hear the nurse’s answer.

The attending swore. In a quieter, more resigned voice, he said, “I’m calling it.”

Silence descended in the tiny E.R. Not even an errant beep from a monitor seemed to penetrate the quiet.

In the middle of that quiet came the doctor’s next words. “Time of death, uh, 11:31 p.m.”

Charli put her hand to her mouth and felt her knees give way as she crumpled to the cold tile floor.

CHAPTER THREE

CHARLI DRANK IN the silence of her car’s interior with guilty relief as she sat in her driveway. Nothing but the ticking of the cooling engine disturbed her. No chatter of helpful women, no well-meant condolences of her father’s friends, no bustle of people preparing food, or asking for the hundredth time if they could “fix you some little something, Charli? For heaven’s sake, you’ve got to eat!”

Charli had spent the horrible, horrible week following her father’s death at her mother’s—who’d had a houseful of her friends hovering over her the entire time.

Violet’s entourage had buzzed around Charli like a hive of bees, busy and industrious and trying to take care of her and her mother’s every need and whim. The incessant chatter had been just what her mother needed—but it was torture for Charli.

She’d escaped out the back door at a near-dead run, accepting the stack of Tupperware containers filled with goodies from one of her mother’s friends just so she wouldn’t be delayed by an argument. Charli hadn’t even had the courage to say goodbye to her mother. She’d go back. Later. She’d call. Later. But for now, she simply needed some quiet.

At that exact moment, Gene Autry started belting out “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” Charli banged her head against knuckles that gripped the steering wheel. Neil and his blasted Christmas lights. All they did was remind her that this Christmas was going to be the absolute worst Christmas ever, in a long, long line of horrible Christmases in the Prescott family history.

That wasn’t entirely true. Neil’s Christmas lights reminded her of that. But Neil himself... He’d been so sweet. He’d hung right in there with her and her mom the night her dad had died. He’d come by her mom’s every day, and Charli was so grateful for the way he’d made her mom smile in those early moments.

At the funeral, Neil had waited patiently for the many, many people to greet them at the graveside. There, under the green tent the funeral home had provided, he’d gripped Charli’s hand in a tight comforting squeeze and assured her she could ask for anything she needed. The man had a kind heart—she could tell that.

So maybe if she walked through the gap in the hedge and asked him for this one night if he could forego the music...he might.

She hoisted herself out of the car on legs that still felt wobbly. As she approached the hedge, she saw Neil, his back to her, happily tinkering with a snowman’s lights, adjusting the display with his good hand.

She cleared her throat, but the music drowned out the sound. Somehow it seemed too intimate to watch him without him knowing of her presence as he fiddled with the lights, completely engrossed in his task. His attention to detail rivaled some of the surgeons she’d trained under, and he could have no greater focus to his task than her favorite chief resident.

“Neil?”

The name got his attention. He turned around. A smile lit up his face and warmed her, despite the raucous rendition of “Rudolph” in the background. “Hey! You’re home! How’s your mom?”