Chapter Text
when you try your best, but you don’t succeed // when you get what you want, but not what you need // when you feel so tired, but you can’t sleep // stuck in reverse
Fix You – Coldplay
Another streak of lightning crashed outside the emergency room concourse. The hurricane that was expected to hit the gulf coast had been downgraded to a tropical depression, but the winds and rain were wreaking havoc on the city. Four multivehicle accidents had already been brought in. None of the injuries had been surgical, but Randolph was still the trauma surgeon on call and on alert for pages from the emergency room.
Shortly after four o’clock, his pager read Incoming MVC trauma 9-1-1, and he was in the ER concourse two minutes later.
“What’ve we got?” He asked, tying the surgical smock behind his back. Rain was being whipped around by the wind and the ER resident had taken her glasses off to dry them before two ambulances arrived.
“Two-vehicle automobile accident. The driver of the first car was transported to General, we have the two from the second: a driver and passenger,” she explained. “We don’t know many details. One is in critical condition, the other is grave. The medics aren’t sure they’ll make it back.”
Two ambulances wheeled into the concourse up just as he finished tying the knot. He met the EMT’s from the first ambulance as they opened the back doors. The patient on the gurney, a woman who looked to be in her mid-thirties and had been intubated in the field. Her clothing was torn and stained and the blue ambu bag was no longer being inflated by the paramedics.
His stomach dropped and he shook his head. “Damn it.”
“DOA, Dr. Bell,” one of the younger paramedics confirmed. “They’ll need you for the passenger.”
Randolph turned around to the second ambulance, the one with lights still flashing. Two paramedics were assisting a resident in removing the gurney, this one much smaller. The ER resident was receiving instructions and wheeling the gurney past him.
“Female, four to seven years old, severe abdominal and thoracic trauma from motor vehicle impact…”
The remainder of the vital stats were lost to a crash of thunder from the storm and a ringing in his ears. The young girl’s blonde hair was bloody and soaked from the rain but unmistakable. A memory stirred of a night thirty years ago, a summer night with a storm just like this, and Randolph was frozen in place in the ER concourse. It was déjà vu.
Only once he heard the shout of, “Dr. Bell! We need you!” from the resident was he able to return inside and attend to the child in desperate need of a trauma specialist.
Her mother, he assumed, was dead in the first ambulance, and she needed him. Randolph moved on instinct and addressed her injuries, assisting the technicians and stabilizing her for surgery. The girl’s vital signs were weak and the bleeding was extensive. She would need several hours of surgery and at least five units of blood to replace those left behind on the pavement and staining her park district soccer uniform.
The paramedics had put a C-collar on in the field during the extraction, and Randolph checked what he could of the reflexive responses. Whiplash on a child this age was severe and there was already limited blood flow to the lower extremities. He turned to one of the nurses and adjusted the collar.
“Possible damage to C2 and C3. Page Dr. Voss to OR two, stat. We’ll meet her there,” he ordered.
The emergency room team stabilized the bleeding for long enough to confirm the internal injuries. He stared at the screen with glazed eyes. Trauma this severe was catastrophic in adults, but in a child… the prognosis was not good. His ears were still ringing and he moved purely on autopilot, cataloging the injuries and mentally preparing for the surgery as the transport team wheeled the gurney into the operating room.
Kit had not yet arrived to oversee the spinal injury. Instinct told him to wait until she did to avoid any further damage, but before he could, the team was scrambling. The alarms from the machines filled the space along with the shouts from the surgical team, and he ran into the sterile room.
The frantic beeping of the monitors continued as he stood over the girl’s abdomen and tried to locate the source of the bleeding prior to opening the area. Based on the imaging scans he knew the bleeding had to be internal. Randolph steadied his hand and picked up the ten blade, preparing a clean incision down the girl’s stomach.
“Oh, God,” he muttered. With only a single cut, he was already operating underwater and losing the battle with time. “I need help in here!”
The MRI images from only ten minutes ago had not accounted for the extent of bleeding he was met with. He called for more lap pads, more suction, furiously fighting to keep the girl and ignoring the rapid beeping of the monitors alive until eventually the noises faded to a single piercing hum.
“No — no, damn it! Come on! Come on, stay with me,” he shouted.
The monotone beeping continued for twenty more seconds. The patient no longer had a heartbeat and had lost too much blood to administer CPR. It was too late.
They had stabilized her and gotten her onto the table but it was not enough. His table. He was the one who could not do enough to save the little girl with the blonde hair who was on her way home from soccer practice. Randolph hung his head and dropped the scalpel as the anesthesiologist silenced the tone. He took a single deep breath and shut his eyes tightly, erasing the echo of the flatline from his mind.
“Time of death… sixteen forty-two.”
He tore the surgical smock off, shoved it into a trash can, and stormed out of the operating room. His hands slammed against the edge of the scrub sink and he braced himself against the cold metal, fighting the churning in his stomach and avoiding scene through the window. Between the severity of the accident and the location of the bleeding it was unlikely that any patient would survive, but the cases with children, no matter the prognosis, were always excruciating.
The little girl was still wearing the grass-stained tall socks and shin guards from soccer practice. He never even got to know her name. He never got a chance to save her life.
The door opened twenty seconds later and Randolph flinched at the sudden movement. Kit was tying her hair back in a rush to prepare for the surgery but stopped as soon as she saw him breathing heavily over the sink. She looked to the operating room and the sheet being pulled over the child’s lifeless body, and dropped her hands.
“The trauma was catastrophic,” he said. “There was hardly any time to stop the bleeding much less address the injuries. We did everything we could.”
His voice was empty and hoarse, like he was only saying what he could and not what he felt, and he left the room before allowing a response.
The blue fabric of his scrub cap had started to wrinkle after being held so tightly in his fist. Randolph paced around the surgical floor locker room for two minutes, hoping the stark white walls and empty rows would erase the red of the blood that stained his memory. The girl had lost her mother but by now the police would have notified next of kin. He swallowed thickly and shrugged on a clean, dry set of scrubs and prepared to face the waiting room.
It was surgical policy for the attending surgeon to notify the families, but even if it had not been, he told the remaining members of the surgical team that he would handle it. He could not let anyone else be the one to inform the grieving family members.
When he approached the waiting room, there were a few loved ones scattered about the seating area. He scanned the groups and turned to one man sitting against the far wall. He looked to be in his early thirties, maybe thirty-five, and his clothes were soaked from the storm. He had been crying, judging by the redness in his eyes and the pile of tissues nearby, and Randolph assumed that he had already been notified of one tragedy. Fear overwhelmed the heartbreak as the man wrung his hands between his knees, anxiously waiting on news from the operating room.
There was no doubt in his mind that this was the man he was looking for.
This man had woken up this morning, watched the weather report of a tropical storm, then gone to work. His daughter went to school and soccer practice, and his wife went to pick her up to bring them back together. Everything had been fine, until his world stopped. Now, Randolph would have to tell them man that it would start again.
Randolph swallowed the bile that rose in his throat and approached the man. “Mr. Davidson?” He asked.
“Andrew. It’s Andrew. My wife and dau— ah, no. My daughter, Jenny. Jennifer Davidson.” The man stood up and his eyes widened with hope that disappeared as quickly as it formed. “No. No. Please, no…”
“I’m so sorry, sir. We did everyt—”
The rest of his sentence was shortened as the man collapsed to the chair. His shoulders shook and heartbreak coated every quiet no, no, please, no, that the man muttered through silent sobs. The sounds of grief overwhelmed everyone within a ten foot radius and Randolph bore the brunt of it. He sat beside the man as shock faded to heartbreak and tried to provide comfort, but there was no comfort in a moment like this. All he could be was present.
“I was supposed to be with them…” the man explained, his breath shaky and broken. “It was supposed to be me. I was supposed to pick Jenny up but I was working… and now… now they’re gone. Both of them. What am I going to do?” He whispered, “What am I going to do without my girls?”
The question was rhetorical, not meant to be spoken aloud nor heard, and drowned out by tears. No response to such a question would ever provide a true answer. There was no reason for a question such as that to ever be asked. No one should have to wonder what life is like without a wife and daughter, much less experience it.
Randolph clenched his jaw. The sense of déjà vu from the emergency room had returned, this time in a different setting. He fought to maintain control over the tightness in his chest and turned to face the man.
“You will carry them with you, always. A loss such as this is unbearable, and it will feel like nothing will ever get better for a long time,” he said quietly. “In truth, it may never get better. But one day, with the right support… one day, that grief will be smaller. They will always fill your heart with love and laughter, and the grief will be small enough to allow those moments with them to shine.”
The man let out a silent sob and Randolph prayed that he was saying the right things, as though there were right things to say in this moment. Usually when surgeons notified families they left before facts became grief, but he felt compelled to stay with the man who had yet to turn him away. In the short time they had been connected, a bond had formed, and he stayed seated next to the stranger.
“Your wife and daughter will always live inside of you, Andrew. I promise. They will always be with you.”
The man dropped his head and nodded skeptically. Whether it was just to get him to stop talking or a true acknowledgement of the loss, Randolph moved on to the next stages of this evening, the worst evening of his life. He helped to arrange some services, transportation, support, and finally contacted a family member to stay with him for a few days.
Finally, he pulled a single business card from his back pocket and wrote his cell phone number on the back.
“This is my personal line. My cell. Please, reach out to me any time you need to talk, day or night. I, um, I… I know what you’re going through. I know what it’s like to live with this grief.” The man gave him a quizzical look, to which Randolph replied with a knowing, sad nod. “I do. I know exactly what you’re going through.”
“Thank you,” the man rasped. “I know you did everything you could.”
The words of reassurance sounded so much more sour hearing them from a family member. He did not want to hear them, but he certainly did not want to hear them like this. Randolph put his hand on the man’s shoulder and said, “Take care of yourself. And don’t hesitate to call me if you need anything.”
Another person would be needed to assume his position beside the man, so he signaled back to the desk. Expecting to find a team of compassionate nurses, he was surprised to see a surgeon surgeon in royal blue scrubs, with kind eyes and no reason to be there. One who had witnessed everything, or at least, his final statements.
The nurse’s station was too far away from the chairs to hear the extent of the conversation, but Kit had followed all of the body language. She arrived shortly after he left the locker room, sensing something was different about this case than those previous, and she wanted to check in with him before leaving for the evening.
Randolph was a charming surgeon, not renowned for his bedside manner, but she had never seen him this close after a notification. She had certainly never seen him give his personal cell phone number to patient’s family. His eyes caught hers and Kit froze under his stare. There was an emotion just below the grief at the surface that could not be identified.
He craned his neck and turned away and Kit’s heart sank.
The emotion behind his eyes was… embarrassment?
Randolph turned away again, unable to even face her, and walked past her out of the waiting area. It complicated her analysis of the afternoon and left a pit in her stomach. She turned to follow him, keeping a distance as she tried to find more clues from his body language.
Despite the flood of regret and heartache clouding his vision, he knew he was being followed. Kit openly worried about her colleagues and it was clear that right now, she was doing so with him. While the inevitable confrontation was sure to add additional insult to injury, it was better than having her bring it up tomorrow. He held the elevator open and Kit silently followed, riding the two floors up to his small office and inside.
“I don’t want to talk to you,” he said curtly.
“What?”
“I saw you watching in the waiting room, and now you’re here. I don’t want to talk to you.”
Kit fought the urge to counter the argument. He had allowed her to follow all this way, all but inviting the opportunity to open up, but now he was combative and quiet. The rain poured against the window and made his reflection hard to read.
“I didn’t ask,” she said.
“And that’s why you’re here now? To not ask?”
Thunder crashed outside and reflected the storm of emotion within. He had not stopped moving since entering the office, fidgeting with his scrub cap and flexing his hands, craning his neck to the side at the end of every question. It was not unusual for him to be prickly following a challenging surgery, but the hostility was new.
There was something brewing inside of him that he could suppress with movement and anger but he was near to boiling over. Chastain was not the place for such an eruption, certainly not after an afternoon like this. More than that, Kit did not want to lie to him, and decided it was best to give him space.
“Okay.” She caught a glimpse of his reflection in the window and softened her expression to one more neutral. “I won’t ask. Have a good night.”
His fist tightened as hers wrapped around the doorknob. “Kit — wait.”
The words left his mouth more quickly than he could rationalize why they formed initially. Everything had gone blurry, even blurrier than they had been when the ambulance rolled up and cued the first ringing in his ears. It had only gotten stronger since he left the waiting room and now it was joined by something much darker.
His shift was over and he could no longer silence the memory nor move on autopilot. Instead, his nervous system was speaking for him, turning his stomach, and tensing the muscles in his hands and transporting him back to a stormy evening from years ago.
The last time he had felt like this, he drank until he couldn’t feel anything.
Randolph scratched at his neck. His throat was dry and his vision hazy, and the words poured out as though some unconscious voice spoke for him. “After today… I need a drink. But I shouldn’t. Not alone, at least. I just… can we — or, rather — could you…”
Kit closed the door behind her and tried to meet his eyes that were looking everywhere but her.
“Do you want to go out?” She asked calmly.
Pacing behind the desk, he shook his head. Earlier he was hostile but now he was nervous and visibly upset, and Kit knew that she had put him there somehow. It was beginning to make her nervous. She could not leave him alone, not like this, especially now that he was crying out for help in his own way.
“No. No, it’s… forget it.” He shook his head and waved his hand in front of his chest. “Forget I said anyt—”
“Or, I could come to your place.”
Looking up with weakened eyes, he nodded. “Yeah. Okay. Okay, fine.” He cleared his throat through the words and tried to regain some of the composure that had been fading since they entered the office. “You, um, already have the code for the lobby.”
“Okay,” she echoed. “I’ll leave right after my shift.”
…
The cool hallway of the high-rise did little to calm her nerves. Only an hour had passed since she had left his office, enough time to finish the charts, change, and park in the guest spot beside the Porsche. It felt like an eternity now that she was once again staring down uncertainty.
Just as it was the last time she was invited to his apartment, the door was unlocked. She knocked twice as a courtesy and entered the spacious apartment, even cooler than the hallway to counteract the summer heat and humidity. Kit locked the door behind her, removed her shoes, and wandered into his home quietly.
There was no music and no noise from the TV, only the sound of the rain and wind outside could be heard. Randolph was seated on the couch, staring at an unopened bottle of Scotch with two glasses beside it, his elbows resting on his knees.
Earlier he was fidgeting and hostile but now, he was hauntingly quiet.
Randolph had lost patients before. Hundreds of patients. Dozens of children under ten who never should have been brought to the hospital, too. Scotch had served as a memorial for many of the lives unsaved, whether in a bar or restaurant or a couch just like this one, but the bottle was still unopened on the coffee table. Something about this particular afternoon was hitting him thirty times harder. He did not want to talk about it but now that she was here because he asked her to be, she would not leave until he felt better. There had to be something she could do to help him feel better.
A heat built low in her core. Kit stifled the memory of the reason she knew the code for the lobby and where to park, and the last time that she had to help him feel better. Tonight was different. They really should not sleep together tonight.
Those last few times were heightened by alcohol and grief and however wonderful, it could not become a habit. They both agreed it was physical catharsis; a night of sex and whiskey to be reminded that they were not alone in the world, replacing loneliness with endorphins and release. The first time had been fueled mostly by the alcohol, the second by loneliness, and the third by a combination of both and neither.
Regardless of how effective and satisfying the method was, Kit would not allow it to be used tonight. There were many reasons why, the least of which was that she did not want sex with him to only be a means of preventing tears, or a way to feel without actually having to feel anything real.
She approached the couch and he sat backwards to acknowledge her arrival. A small wooden box sat beside the whiskey and she tilted her head towards it with a wordless question that went unanswered. He poured the amber liquor into two glasses as she sat beside him and took a long swig, letting the burn of the alcohol cover the burning emotion behind his eyes. It would speak for him until he could manage a sentence.
“I’ve never seen you like this,” she admitted. “What is it, Randolph?”
He reached for the box. It was roughly six inches by eight, three inches high, and the hinges that held the lid were beginning to rust. The box had been with him since he was eight years old, one of the first projects made at his father’s carpentry bench in the garage, and now was home to the memories of a period in his life kept guarded by rusting hinges and sanded pine.
As soon as he arrived home this evening, he retrieved the wooden box from the bottom of the closet. The memory had been compartmentalized this morning and through the afternoon but once the day ended and everything flooded in with the storm, he could not keep it buried any longer.
“There’s something… there’s something I need to tell you.” He ran his thumb along the edge of the box and avoided looking up. “Today is not a good day for me.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“No,” he answered quickly, reiterating the answer from the afternoon. “No, I really do not want to. But it’s been so long since I have. This day in particular… I’ve never talked about it.”
He followed the movements of his hand over the box but her eyes were focused on his. She wanted to reach out and comfort him, to soothe some of the pain away, but she followed his pace. Placing the glass of whiskey beside his, she held her ground and waited to comfort him until he was ready. Until he was ready to talk, all she could give was her presence.
A long moment passed, interrupted by a single broken sigh.
“Today is the day that I lost my family.”
Everything went still. Even with the thunderstorm raging outside, the air in the condo was thin and silent.
Randolph opened the lid of the box and placed it on the table again. Inside were dozens of photographs. They were faded and worn, some from disposable cameras and overexposed film, and polaroids from what looked like the late 1980s. Given the extent of the fading they could have been from any point in the last forty years.
He removed a few photos from the top before pausing at a photo more worn than the rest and passing it to her. Its edges were softened from repeated handling and it was slightly warped, like it had been wet before. In the center of the photo was a beautiful woman with long brown hair, somewhere in her early thirties, and a little girl with blonde curls and a toothless grin who could not be more than five or six. They were huddled together on a blanket in a park, flowers and green grass in the background, smiling wide without a care in the world.
She held the photo as though he had just passed her the most delicate part of his heart. Perhaps because he had.
“Who are they?” She asked quietly.
She expected for him to say his sister and niece, his mother and sister, or even a close family friend whom he considered family. Kit knew so little about his past and his personal life that truly the people in the photo could be anyone.
“Margaret,” he pointed to the woman, then to the little girl, “and Eleanor.”
The women now had names, but it was not the answer to the question that she asked.
Still pointing reverently at the child in the photo, he whispered, “Our daughter.”