Unwrap these Presents

by Astrid Ohletz

  Oh God. Fiona wanted to hide her face underneath her palm and whimper. This was…she didn’t have a word for what this was. Not what she had planned, anyway.

  “Running away was the only good decision that kid ever made!” Sekelsky seemed to be trembling; another person might have spat at Fiona’s feet. “Now she’s afraid of dying, huh? Well, she should’ve thought of that before she threw away her brother’s life. Maybe it’s God’s will, wanting her to face up to what she did. If there’s any justice in the world, that’s what this is. That kid ain’t my flesh and blood anymore!”

  He turned, looking frantically around to orient himself and almost walking down the wrong corridor, but then he found the exit sign and stumbled away, the ruins of his life almost visibly trailing in his wake.

  Well, that could have gone better, Fiona thought, although that was a massive understatement. She wanted to clutch her neck with both hands and hide from the world.

  Seeing Brian down the hall, a stone’s throw away, didn’t help. Of course Brian would have heard—it was that kind of day.

  Her friend was standing in the door to MRI 1, lab coat rumpled, cheek reddened where it had rested against a hard surface in his sleep. But he was looking wide awake at Sekelsky’s retreating back, then turning to stare at Fiona with almost comically wide eyes.

  They looked comical, anyway, to someone as close to hysterics as Fiona. Probably not so much to people who didn’t feel like their life was suddenly breaking into little pieces in even more ways than before.

  “The fuck, Fiona,” Brian breathed, his usual wittiness falling off and making way for an expression that said that he didn’t know how to process this, but it scared him. That was startling, too—Brian looking scared. “Tell me that wasn’t what it sounded like, and you didn’t actually go behind a patient’s back to talk to her father! What in the world was that all about?”

  “Just trying to make something right,” she muttered, waving it off to show it didn’t matter. She slumped against the wall.

  Brian swore.

  “Are you out of your mind?” he said in a lower voice, a concession to the fact that sound carried in these halls. Two big steps and he reached her, looking like he wanted to grab her, then reconsidered and rubbed his head instead. “That’s a doctor-patient confidentiality breach, big time. Do you have any idea what the Dean will do if the patient complains about that? Remember last year, that whole mess with Jennings? People lose their license for that kind of crap.”

  But Fiona was so tired of doing nothing. She… God, she had no idea what she’d been thinking. It had seemed like such a good idea until Sekelsky showed up with a whole story that hadn’t been what she’d expected, and the complex tragedy had poured down on her. She couldn’t even make out who the bad guys and the good guys were in this one, too much information at once to immediately process. All she knew was that she’d had this great idea, until it hadn’t been great anymore.

  “Don’t tell me you wouldn’t do anything you could to save a patient’s life,” she ground out, although she couldn’t look Brian in the eye. It shouldn’t be a platitude; it should be a good reason, but it didn’t sound like one the way she said it. “A couple of months and she’s probably dead.”

  “You should hope that she’ll be dead,” Brian snapped. “Dead people can’t sue.” Staring at her for another moment, he shook his head. “What’s wrong with you? This isn’t a House episode. This is real life.”

  There was nothing she could say to that, and when she made a helpless gesture, he shot her a grimace.

  “The fuck,” he repeated. “You want to fall apart, you do it on your own time, where it won’t destroy your career.” Rubbing his neck for another moment, he seemed to reach a decision. “Go make sure your patient hasn’t heard about this. And get her to understand if she did. I’ll try and find out if that man complained to anybody on the way out. Didn’t sound like a guy with a lawyer. You better hope this’ll blow over,” he muttered, already walking away.

  Fiona resisted the urge to sink to the ground and curl up into a ball in the middle of the empty RAD corridor.

  The magnitude of what she’d tried to do hit her, making her realize how much it had backfired. Why in the world had she ever tried to do anything like this? She didn’t have a right to meddle in a patient’s life. Nobody did. It wasn’t her job, and it had been an arrogant thing to ever think differently.

  It had been so much easier to try and fix June’s life instead of her own, though. It had been easier than facing the fact that she couldn’t handle her own problems.

  She could admit that now.

  * * *

  At the Admission desk on the Oncology floor, Jessie McGee was waiting for Fiona, holding a phone in her hand. She wasn’t wearing the hat and mask for the isolation room, and she looked astonishingly beautiful, with long waves of black hair and delicate features—if it weren’t for that helpless look on her face distracting from the sight.

  “He called me,” she said without preamble. “He said we better stay away from his family forever, or else.” Her face said he’d also spiced it up with some insults, probably aimed at her and June’s sexual orientation, or how they were a mixed couple.

  It took a moment for Fiona’s brain to catch up. At first all she heard was that she was busted; it sent a cold shudder running down her spine fueled by a heavy dose of shame. Then she parsed the most important part: Mr. Sekelsky had Jessie’s number saved on his cell.

  He knew her.

  “You’ve tried talking to him, too,” she stated.

  Jessie shrugged. “Yeah.” She looked tired, a girl of eighteen or nineteen preparing to go off to a very good college, and madly in love with a dying girl. “June can’t know,” she whispered as if it were confession at the church.

  I’d do anything too, her tone said.

  Jessie pressed her lips together.

  “It’s not that bad,” she continued, as if trying to convince herself as much as Fiona. She looked up, determined. “It’s not that bad. June thinks she’s going to make it. She’s staying positive about it, and so should we. She’ll get better with the unrelated donor transplant. She doesn’t need her old family. She has us for family now.”

  How could so many wonderful and so many terrible things all happen to the same person?

  Fiona wondered if she’d be willing to pay the price of a terminal disease if in return, she’d get an otherwise happy life, married to a Miriam in love with her. She wondered if she’d exchange Miriam for health, her marriage for a bone marrow match.

  It would have been an easy question to answer before Christmas had come around, but it wasn’t anymore now.

  * * *

  People stubbornly maintained the idea that all doctors should be infallible. Obviously, every med student learned the opposite the moment they saw their first real patient. Nevertheless, they too tried to keep up the illusion, partly because they clung to the hope that it would become reality one day and partly because it made their patients more compliant, their jobs easier to do. People sue human beings; they don’t sue angels of mercy.

  Fiona had always felt safe as a doctor. She’d felt competent, knowing she was already good at what she did or else she could read up on things and practice and improve. She might not be perfect, but she always knew what she was doing.

  Now she felt lost and like everything was floating. The scare after her confrontation with Brian and Jessie had left her shaky. At the same time, she knew that state would pass, and everything would settle down in a better way than before, although she didn’t yet know how. It was the strangest feeling.

  June was lying curled up in her bed. For once she seemed too tired to keep up the proud façade, and she just looked faded and sick, the way every other patient in the cancer unit did.

  “You know what creeps me out about the transplant shit?” she said without raising her head, sounding hoarse.

  “What’s that?” Fiona had taken a seat on the visitor ch
air again.

  “That they kill off all my old bone marrow before they transplant the new stuff. With the radiation, right? Doesn’t matter if a part of it is still healthy and stuff. They kill that dead, too.”

  “Medicine sometimes just works like that. Your own immune system is damaged, so it needs to be replaced by the donor’s. But the old marrow has to be gone for that to work. You need to make space.”

  June shrugged, a small twitch of her shoulder. “Just seems weird that you’ve gotta destroy something healthy to grow something new, is all.”

  Fiona sighed, looking at the bald girl in the patient gown that the cancer had tried so hard to make anonymous. But it couldn’t eliminate her attitude, any more than it could damage her tattoos.

  It was late afternoon on Christmas Day. The sun was going down outside; soon the night shift would start trickling in. Kapstein had called, wishing her a Merry Christmas and assuring her that she didn’t need to come in on her free day to round patients with him; handing them off to the night-shift resident would suffice. It was a strangely thoughtful gesture for the Chief Oncologist, who was known to never trust residents on principle and who she’d thought couldn’t remember her face.

  Fiona would return to St. Anne’s to do doubles through New Year’s, three long free days in between, and when she did, June would already have been relocated to the ICU after receiving her transplant. If Kapstein needed another substitute in that time, an intensivist would be the better choice.

  She watched June for a while, resisting an urge to stroke her head; the gesture would undoubtedly have been met with dismay. June wasn’t a child.

  “Do you believe you deserve the long odds of the transplant because of what happened with your brother?” Fiona asked in a soft voice. She’d told June that she’d talked to Jessie about what had happened. Now that the first shock had passed, she had a hard time feeling guilty about the fact that she had tried to help, even if it had been for the wrong reasons.

  Stress and treatments having worn her down, June’s eyes started filling with tears. Angrily she brushed them away. “I’m eighteen. I can do what I want. I don’t need them for anything now.”

  Then she muttered abruptly, “They left us alone all the fucking time.”

  “Your brother must have loved you a lot, trailing after you like that.”

  The tears were running down June’s face now, silently melting onto the pillowcase.

  “I didn’t want him to go on a ride with those guys,” she whispered. “But I couldn’t leave him alone in the house.”

  Fiona remained quiet for a moment, hesitating. If she had learned one thing in these two days, it was that she shouldn’t assume she knew enough to judge.

  But now, she was clear on one thing: June was eighteen and allowed to make her own calls. She’d decided to go build her own life on her own terms, no matter the odds. No, it wasn’t perfect, and the transplant probably wouldn’t turn out well. But it was still her choice, not Fiona’s. Fiona had different choices to make.

  Suddenly it was impossible for Fiona to blink away the exhaustion of too many shifts in a row.

  “You’ll be all right,” she told June quietly. It wasn’t a promise, but a statement of fact. It had nothing to do with whether the transplant would take.

  * * *

  When Fiona made her way out of the hospital, the halls of St. Anne’s seemed eerily empty, as they had throughout the Christmas shifts. She wondered if they ever really had been quiet, or if the strain of the last five months had made her see things that weren’t really there.

  An icy breeze and a heavy wave of snow hit her full in the face in the parking lot, which was entirely covered in ice. The snow poured onto her head as if a bucket had been dumped on her from the sky, and she surprised herself with a chuckle when she looked up, snowflakes tumbling into her eyes. She had always liked the way snow made her feel: free and slightly adrift.

  Her car door was frozen to the frame, and it took two hefty jerks to get it open. When she slipped inside and turned the key, the radio came alive with a stutter, promptly spitting out another Christmas carol. It was “Jingle Bells” again.

  Fiona wondered what she would do with herself in these upcoming days. Her empty apartment still felt daunting, the rooms too sterile and the walls too white. It didn’t have any personality yet. Somehow, she’d always expected that would happen by itself. She’d open the door one day, and it would finally feel like home.

  Now she thought maybe she should spend her free days painting the walls in a color she actually liked. Maybe she could invite one of the neighbors’ kids to build a snowman in the yard, complete with a carrot for a nose; one of her neighbors was bound to have a kid.

  One way to pass the time, she supposed.

  Carefully navigating her car across the ice, Fiona turned onto the main road, rows upon rows of decorated houses left and right, lush Christmas lights and plastic Santa figurines on roofs. They might have looked silly, but a part of her still appreciated the trouble that people had gone to, the effort that they’d made to decorate the street for random passersby just because they could.

  She thought about destroying things and making space for something new.

  Flea

  Lois Cloarec Hart

  It wasn’t my fault. Honest! Who knew the kid would actually pull the fire alarm? Okay, so maybe I told him what it was, but I warned him in no uncertain terms not to pull it. Still, four-year-olds can be sort of unpredictable, so I probably should’ve known better. But really, I don’t think it was entirely my fault.

  I’m not sure the Boss will see it that way, though He’s pretty good at overlooking the occasional mistake of His Guardians. Unlike Him, we’re not perfect. He only expects us to do our best, and that is what I was trying to do.

  I guess I should start at the beginning. My name is Flea, and I’m a Guardian. You people have a lot of different names for us: angels, faeries, sprites, pixies—the list is endless. But then, you also have a lot of different names for the Boss. He doesn’t mind, so why should I?

  My current assignment is the third floor of a large metropolitan children’s hospital. It doesn’t matter what city, because there are millions of us and my post isn’t much different from that of many of my colleagues.

  And look…about my name? For millennia I was perfectly content with my given name—Felicity. But we Guardians usually make our home in something unremarkable so that no one takes notice of us while we go about our duties. Once I hitched a ride in Dr. Jess’ briefcase to an out clinic, where their Guardian lived inside a pink ceramic pig. Each to their own, I guess.

  As for me, I’d taken up residence in a small, stuffed toy elf that a child left behind many Christmases before. It was pretty cute, actually, with canary yellow woolen hair and robin’s egg blue button eyes. The stitched-on smile is candy apple red, and its clothes were once a bright scarlet and forest green, though they’ve faded over the years. The white pompom on my hat and the bells on my curled-up slippers were lost long ago at the hands of an overexcited toddler; but other than that, I think I’ve held up well with age.

  At least I thought so until the day about ten years ago when an arrogant young resident knocked me off the counter at the nurse’s station where I normally sat. Instead of apologizing and picking me up, as any reasonable person would, he kicked me. I bounced off a file cabinet and fell back on the floor, one leg twisted behind my head.

  He snarled at me as if I were Doctor Jess. She’d just chewed him out for his abysmal bedside manner, and he was hopping mad at the whole world.

  “Where’d that flea-bitten thing come from anyway? It doesn’t belong here.”

  I objected to that “it.” I am a girl; make no mistake about it. Couldn’t he see my delicate embroidered eyelashes and long, golden curls? Sheesh, what kind of doctor was he going to make? Luckily, all the nurses thought the young resident was a jerk, and they leapt to my defence. Polly picked me up and straightened out my limbs, while Jud
y and Alma scowled at him. Alma, the senior nurse on duty, spoke up on my behalf.

  “She may not be the prettiest thing on the ward, but many’s the child who found a little cuddle with that elf was just the thing to make a scary place a little friendlier. You leave our Flea alone.”

  Darn. That was it then; from that moment on, I was Flea. My fellow Guardians thought it was hilarious and ever after “forgot” to call me Felicity. Even Anemone calls me Flea, but at least when she does it, her eyes twinkle and her wings shimmer, which makes it easier to bear.

  But back to the unfortunate fire alarm incident.

  You have to understand what I do around this place. Contrary to popular belief, I’m not a miracle worker. Okay, I can do some minor stuff, but nothing like the Boss or those higher up the celestial hierarchy. Mostly, I pop up in the wee small hours of the morning when children wake up frightened, hurting, and wanting their mommies and daddies. They don’t always see me, but I lie on their pillows and whisper in their ears, reassuring them that everything’s going to be all right until they drift back to sleep. Or I sit on the shoulder of a scared parent as their child is in surgery. I try to give them hope.

  Sometimes the Boss calls a child home, and then I cry with their devastated loved ones and wrap them in invisible hugs. It’s those times especially that I wish I could work miracles at will, but that’s reserved for far wiser beings who outrank me. I just do the best I can.

  This particular day, Bobby was due to be released from the hospital. His left arm was in the cast that he needed after a tobogganing accident during the first snowfall of the season. His parents had been held up getting to the hospital to take him home, and he was bored with the cartoons the nurses thought he was watching. Bobby and boredom were a potentially potent mix, so I took it upon myself to entertain him.