Unwrap these Presents

by Astrid Ohletz

  You’re pathetic, she informed herself, but she’d known that already. She just couldn’t bring herself to care.

  * * *

  An hour later she should have been on the way home, but with the looming prospect of her empty, half-furnished apartment, she never quite made it to the staff locker room. It was December twenty-third, and she had promised Dr. Kapstein from Oncology to take care of his patients through the Christmas holidays so that he could spend it at home with his wife and three children. So she dropped onto the couch of the doctors’ lounge and immersed herself in the case files the old oncologist had practically thrown at her on the way out. Rounds wouldn’t be necessary, he’d said. The resident would be at the ready to disrupt his skiing vacation at any point if she had any questions. He was so grateful for Fiona’s offer, he’d assured her on his way to the elevator, leaving her with a stale sense that he’d forget her face and her favor by tomorrow.

  The door opened. Bald, gangly Dr. Brian Eddleston sauntered in, as if he had any business crashing her floor instead of getting actual work done in the radiology labs where he belonged.

  “No, I won’t have time to go to the staff Christmas party tomorrow,” she said rather unkindly, not bothering to look up. From the corner of her eye she saw Brian take one of the chairs and turn it around, straddling it to sit in front of her. He rubbed his head unabashedly.

  “Not even with an astonishingly handsome and successful doctor such as myself?”

  “I’m gay.”

  “That’s not a problem for me.”

  “You’re gay.”

  “Sexuality moves on a continuum,” he said sagely, then shrugged and added in a normal voice, “Or so I keep reading in Cosmo.”

  She rolled her eyes, suppressing a chuckle. “Yeah, you’re so gay.” Looking up from the chart after all, she found herself facing her supposedly forty-year-old friend’s self-satisfied smirk.

  “In other news,” she said, determined to change the topic and pointing at her charts, “did you know that Oncology is treating an eighteen-year-old for multiple myeloma? She’s waiting for a bone marrow transplant now. It’s wild: chemo, autologous transplant, none of that’s an option anymore. And it’s going to be a one-allele mismatch—unrelated registry donor—so she’s running straight towards the light there. The whole hospital should be talking about this. I mean, she’s eighteen. I bet Kapstein took her on just so he can publish about her.”

  “The hospital is too busy placing bets on whether or not that cute new nurse from the E.R. will turn out to be a lesbian when you woo her at the Christmas party.”

  “I’ll be on-shift at the Christmas party.”

  “See, that’s why they invented those little devices called pagers. Some might say they’re old-fashioned, but they’re really reliable in that they—”

  “I’ll look a little bit bad if Kapstein’s crowning glory of a paper dies while I’m drinking fruit punch. He’ll be at that party, you know.”

  Now it was Brian’s turn to roll his eyes, and Fiona resisted the urge to tighten her shoulders defensively. It was as if her whole body wanted to curl up and present a wall. She’d been feeling like that rather a lot recently.

  “I just…have a lot of work to do, okay?” She turned the page on her chart despite not absorbing anything it said since her friend had walked in.

  “You’ve had a lot of work to do for five months,” Brian pointed out softly.

  His face had turned serious; she didn’t even need to look at it to know. The change in tone hit her like a lightning bolt, the way a raised voice never could have. She immediately hated everything about it.

  “Brian…” She put the chart on the pile in her lap, knowing that she sounded pained.

  “Fiona,” Brian said, in that firm voice of his that convinced patients to do a procedure, even though it would suck. “Listen to yourself. This isn’t healthy anymore.”

  She shot him a furtive look. “Come on. It’s just a stupid hospital function. Nobody ever really wants to go to those.”

  But Brian was shaking his head. “I’m not talking about the party. Forget the party for a moment. All this?” He made a gesture that encompassed much more than the charts in her lap. “It isn’t good for you. You’ve barely moved into your apartment—”

  “Yes, because I work all the time, all right?”

  “Because you hide yourself away at work like you don’t even want a private life anymore! Used to be that you and I would go out for drinks. You used to have friends. Now you’re practically living at the hospital, and you pull all that crap where you do favors for people like you actually care about promotions, and the only people you ever talk to are old dying folks!”

  Taken aback, Fiona leaned away from him, making sure he saw the way she raised her eyebrows to show how little he’d impressed her with that last one. She was a geriatrician who worked at palliative care, the unit for pain management. Most of her patients were in the last stage of their lives, yes. Many would never leave the hospital alive, but somebody had to take care of their special needs now that treatments had failed, and make things more bearable for them, and help them retain some dignity. Brian had never found anything wrong with that before. “Oh? Says the glorified brain photographer?”

  Brian sighed as if she’d never made the quip, although she personally thought it had been a pretty good one. “I’m saying I’m worried about you.” He hesitated. “It’s been long enough, Fiona. Yeah, you didn’t want a divorce, but there you have it anyway, and you’ve got to move on. Miriam—”

  “Leave Miriam out of this,” she snapped, her tone changing to something that sounded ugly even to her own ears. She couldn’t help it, though. In truth, this whole conversation had been about Miriam from the start. Everything always was about Miriam these days.

  No, Fiona didn’t hang out with her friends anymore, because they had been their friends, and God knew which of them had known about the affair: the way Miriam had been cheating on her with some Parisian stewardess of all people, who probably had endless legs and a go-to plastic surgeon.

  She still couldn’t bear to think about it.

  “Miriam was a bitch,” Brian declared.

  “Miriam was my wife.”

  “Yeah,” Brian said. “And now she’s not.”

  Frowning, he stood up, brushing imaginary dirt off his lab coat and placing the chair back in a corner. He would be working through Christmas as well, Fiona suddenly remembered in an angered, jealous way. It wouldn’t be because he had no better place to go. His husband worshipped the ground he walked on, and was probably preparing the Christmas turkey already. Brian only had to work because he’d drawn the shortest straw in Radiology.

  That thought left a bitter taste in her mouth. The sudden surge of anger ebbed off as fast as it had come when she noticed how petty she sounded even in her own head. Fiona slumped back, feeling tired and faintly miserable, like when she stabilized a patient after he or she had crashed and all was well, except not, because they would be dying anyway.

  She really didn’t want to go home. She didn’t.

  “I’m not hiding out,” she muttered without looking Brian in the eye.

  “Sure,” he said. “That’s why you’re going to the Christmas party with me. I put a fifty down on you and that nurse.”

  Fiona groaned.

  * * *

  “We’re called Fragged. Garage punk gone death metal. Band’s touring through Ohio right now, but Doc Kapstein says if I’m lucky, I could catch up with them in New York in spring and play at least a song or two.”

  It was a lot of words to say at once for a hoarse eighteen-year-old who was undergoing chemo and high doses of radiation; they were systematically bringing down her immune system in preparation for a bone marrow transplant. Exhausted to the core, June Sekelsky was bald and a translucent kind of pale. Sunk into the pillows of her bed, tiny to begin with, she might as well have been a child. But there were tattoos of dragons snaking all over her arms, re
mains of clipped black nail polish still glued to her fingernails, and she seemed admirably determined to retain her sense of self.

  Even more interesting to Fiona was the petite woman sitting at her bedside. Jessie McGee—June’s fiancée, introducing herself with a politeness that spoke of a lifetime of strict nannies—stood in stark contrast to June: her careful prep school enunciation to June’s Boston working class drawl, her health and radiant beauty to her fiancée’s exhaustion. Jessie was African American, while June was white, though so discolored that the circles under her eyes looked like bruises. Fiona admitted without shame that Kapstein’s medical marvel had become two hundred percent more notable to her the moment she had turned out to be a lesbian.

  Jessie took June’s hand in her own gloved one, throwing her a sickeningly loving look, the rest of her face obscured by her facial mask. “My dad discovered them when they were playing at T.T. The Bear’s,” she said to Fiona. “He’s a music producer. It’s how we met.”

  June gave Fiona a weak smirk. “Don’t forget to tell her that he’s paying all my hospital bills, just ‘cause I’ll marry his daughter. He’s awesome like that.”

  “That’s what family does,” her fiancée said in a soft and insistent voice, as if she had reminded June of that many times.

  June grimaced, acquiescing unhappily.

  The duty nurse finished checking the IVs. With a nod, she left Fiona to mark down June’s status on the chart. As a palliative doctor, Fiona worked with a lot of cancer patients, and she’d be just fine in Oncology as long as nobody expected her to heroically do an emergency transplant. Having rounded on almost all of Kapstein’s other patients before attending to June, she was already well on her way to settling into a routine. There wasn’t a lot that could be done for the girl during transplant prep, apart from careful monitoring. She had kidney damage, but it was mild, and they could probably gently hydrate her through; if not, a nephrologist would be at the ready to start her on dialysis. The isolation room she was in minimized the risk of bacterial infections, as did the administration of broad-spectrum antibiotics, and the most worrisome new symptom she had reported this morning was a sore throat. Her hemoglobin was down but her platelet count remained stable, so all in all, things could be worse.

  Apart from the partial match transplant she would be receiving next week, anyway. After that little deal with the devil, Fiona would likely be meeting June again while she died in the palliative care unit.

  “It’s good that you have somebody to stay with you.” Fiona checked off the last couple of boxes. “This can’t be how you imagined spending Christmas.”

  “Better than dying,” June muttered, and Jessie looked like she was trying to be scandalized, except that she agreed.

  “Me and the band are gonna all go bald for real the moment I get out of here,” June informed Fiona, touching her head. “I think it looks rad.”

  “You’re so full of shit,” Jessie said fondly.

  June shrugged. “Cancer sells, I bet,” she said, and coughed.

  Beneath her mask, Fiona forced a smile.

  She might very well be seeing June in palliative care again, yes. But she shouldn’t. The girl was young and obviously strong-willed, sick with a disease meant for Fiona’s regular patients—sixty-five plus. A part of her felt like she should run from the room before the misery simmering beneath the brittle optimistic surface could make her choke. But at the same time—maybe because those two girls made for such an unbearably sweet couple—they infused her with an unfamiliar, unexpected, almost desperate sense that she should help. Eighteen-year-olds weren’t supposed to die of MM. None of this was supposed to happen.

  It was December twenty-fourth. It wasn’t supposed to be a time of death, either. Fiona thought of med school, of when she’d still believed that medicine would be about improving people’s lives.

  That had been a very long time ago, though.

  * * *

  As Fiona had feared, the Christmas party wasn’t the best idea Brian had ever had.

  She forced a blank face. Standing with both hands wrapped around a glass of bad, non-alcoholic fruit punch, she had edged into a corner of the garishly decorated cafeteria, escaping from surgical fellows competing over who’d managed the most exciting flip on their snowboard during the last vacation, and bleary-eyed residents comparing the relative merits of ER night shifts during Christmas with those at Halloween. “When you’ve been puked on by Count Dracula, you’ve seen it all,” she’d heard one of them say, and the other had smirked into his drink: “Only if he puked up blood.”

  Christmas meant working with an even shorter staff than usual, doing more shifts in a row than was technically allowed. Meanwhile, suicide attempts went up, as did turkey-induced salmonellosis, and the emergency room supplying the rest of the hospital with more and more work put a strain on everybody. Doctors and nurses alike dropped into bed like dead weight when it was finally over and slept until it was time to rinse and repeat all that at New Year’s—with less salmonella, but more burn injuries.

  All in all, physicians were about the last people on Earth who should be tortured with a Christmas party. Or so Fiona kept telling herself, despite the laughter all around. The lights and tinsel on the walls looked as fake as only professional interior designers could achieve, complete with a huge Christmas tree and a recording of trembling children’s voices blaring “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” through the speakers on what was starting to feel like infinite repeat.

  Through the crowd of chatting receptionists and security staff, Brian was making his way to her, a curvy blonde in nursing scrubs trailing in his wake.

  Great.

  It should have been her pager that saved her. It wasn’t. Instead, her phone buzzed in the breast pocket of her lab coat, and Fiona pulled it out a second later. Waving it at Brian apologetically before discarding the punch and getting the hell out, she ignored the outraged face her friend made at her—another thing she rightfully didn’t care about.

  What she did care about was the caller ID, when she had a belated look at the display once the doors closed behind her, cutting off the noise in the dim hallway.

  It was as if everything froze, after catapulting her back into the past.

  Her hands shook when she raised the phone to her ear.

  “Miriam,” she breathed.

  You shouldn’t have kept calling her. You knew you shouldn’t have kept calling her. You knew she’d call you back eventually, and then what?

  A part of her couldn’t help clinging to the wild hope that Miriam would tell her all those things she’d imagined hearing when she was alone, lying on her bed with those sheets that didn’t fit, because they were made for a double bed. Miriam had decreed that Fiona should have those, because she’d chosen them. But it had been Miriam’s house and Miriam’s bed, so Fiona had ended up with sheets she couldn’t use.

  Miriam’s and Fiona’s were categories that hadn’t even existed in her head before the night she’d learned the truth.

  Miriam’s real voice sounded a lot more agitated than the cheerful recording from the day before, real emotion in place of multi-purpose holiday greetings.

  “Hello Fiona,” she said. It was a firm voice, learned in law school and well-practiced in court. “Listen, I don’t know what you’re playing at, but you have to stop calling me like this. It creeps me out.”

  Miriam would have looked at herself in the mirror before she called, straightening her shoulders and muttering those words to herself to check her tone.

  Funny how that worked. Fiona knew that she would have done that, but it didn’t take anything away from the effect. Miriam might as well have been talking to a stranger.

  Closing her eyes, she took a deep breath to calm herself and not go into fucking cardiac arrest. She struggled for words.

  “I’m sorry. God, Miriam, I’m sorry. I just…I’ve been trying to reach you. I didn’t want to disrupt your holiday. Uh, it’s just, there were some of your books in
one of my boxes and I wanted to know if you would like me to—”

  “Oh, cut the bullshit.”

  Fiona’s mouth snapped shut. Miriam sounded weary and angry, like she was out of patience and tired of her ex. Fiona wondered if she was working through the holidays too, because she did that, especially when Fiona wasn’t there to watch out for her. But Miriam’s mind clearly wasn’t on that. She continued with more determination.

  “I don’t know what this is about. But it’s making me uncomfortable, all right? I know you’re not trying to reach me at all! You call when you know I’ll be at the gym, or at Kim’s. You don’t leave messages. You just call.”

  “Ah, I must have lost track of time. My schedules have been—”

  “It’s over, Fiona,” Miriam said, an edge to her voice.

  Fiona flinched. She couldn’t help it. It hurt.

  There was another pause.

  Miriam sighed, as if she had been there to see.

  “Listen, I’m sorry,” she said, her tone implying that she was anything but. “I’m sorry I broke it off so abruptly, okay? I wasn’t being fair to you when I did it that way. I realize that now. I thought that a clean break would be best for both of us.”

  Well-measured cadence. Sometimes, Fiona ended up telling patients lies exactly like this one. She didn’t tell a dying man that his daughter hadn’t cared enough to visit, or that the reason they couldn’t reach his wife was because she had moved away to live in Spain.

  “But it’s been months,” Miriam continued, “and you agreed to sign the divorce papers and all, and you keep calling my voicemail like some kind of stalker…”

  “You left me!” Fiona exclaimed. The words spilled out, a wave of dry nausea accompanying them. She took a furtive look around, but the hallway was still empty. Still she lowered her voice to a hiss, retreating further into a corner. “What do you expect? You left me for some stewardess! Next thing, you say you never loved me anyway! Do you have any idea what that felt like? How do you expect me to just…to just…” Anger mixed with a helpless void, a lack of any available reactions. “How do you get over that? Explain that to me, please.”