Their Christmas To Remember

Just as he was about to ask her about the lunch he’d heard she’d refused, and the breakfast she’d also refused, she started squirming in the bed, trying to shift up higher so that the bend of the mattress fit the bend of her body, and all the color drained from her face.

He knew that look. Pain. Kids could forget they’d had their bodies cut open and that they weren’t yet able to move freely.

“Easy...” he said, stepping in to gingerly help her into a more comfortable lean. “Don’t want to pull a staple. I did a good job there, but I’d like to revisit it about as much as I’d like to go see that big silly tree.”

She settled, and he watched her for a few seconds as her breathing evened out and she lost some of that worrisome pallor. “All right now?”

“I love the lighting and the tree.” She sailed right past his question and got back to what she wanted to talk about. But the fact that she was talking at all answered his question. “We go every year.”

When her little mouth twisted at the end of the statement, he knew it wasn’t physical pain.

Conley had been there before him, and had done something to brighten Jenna’s spirits, but he’d somehow just made her sad again.

Emotions. He wasn’t good at emotions. He could generally identify them, or when there had been an emotional shift, but he wasn’t good at responding. At least, he wasn’t good with all the emotions that weren’t amusement. He was good at that one. But even he failed to amuse when things ran too deep, too real.

Without his usual joking to fall back on, and knowing he’d not made the situation any better, it took him several seconds to come up with something resembling the proper response. “Family tradition?”

She nodded, then swiped her eyes with the arm that didn’t have the IV in it. “Except this year. They’re going without me.”

Joking wouldn’t help this. Even with his limited emotional palette, he could see that.

The location of the door through which he could escape became this presence in his mind, temptation glowing behind him. Hard to ignore. It would be so easy to say something polite, manufacture a reason to dart out and make his escape, maybe summon Conley back to cheer Jenna up again. Easy, but impossible. Good guys didn’t do that kind of thing.

“Aww, lass. I’m sorry you’re stuck here with the like of me this year.”

She sniffed, mustering such a pitiful little smile he felt worse for wanting to leave. “I like you.”

“I like you too.” It seemed the thing to say. Reassuring. Maybe even putting the conversation back to one where he knew how to respond.

Then she asked, “You really don’t want to go to the lighting?”

“Nah.” He waved a hand, made an exaggerated face of dismissal, shook his head, played up what silliness he had in him at the moment.

Then he saw it, a little sparkle returned to her dark eyes. She tilted her head and crooned, “You wouldn’t go with me if I could go?”

The playful and entirely unserious flirting of a twelve-year-old? That he could deal with. Much easier to play than try to solve problems he had no business making worse through his inadequacy. Stick with what he was good at: bodies. He was good at fixing bodies. He wasn’t a neurologist, or a psychologist, although that might’ve been helpful when his brother had been shot. Or now, with a fragile, overwrought twelve-year-old girl.

Ruffling Jenna’s short, dark hair, he teased, “That’s a bit different, isn’t it? I’d be goin’ with you for the company. No’ the silly tree.”

“You would?”

“Course I would,” he assured her, then, trying to make sure this was on proper ground, added, “We’d bring your whole family. And Dr. Angel.”

“Dr. Angel’s going to take me tonight,” she suddenly announced, voice far brighter than it had been. “And you can come with us!”

Her happy, chirruped words set his shoulders to granite, stiff and rigid enough to build on.

Was that how Conley had brightened her mood? The woman who smelled of heaven had promised to take his patient out of the hospital without a discharge order or consultation?

Surely not...

“Dr. Angel said she was taking you to Rockefeller Center tonight?” he asked, just to be sure. Always best to do your due diligence before ripping some hide off a colleague.

“Jenna, don’t fib to Dr. McKeag.” Angel’s voice came from the door at his back, then she came into view and he looked at her fully.

Smiling. She was smiling. This was a joke?

Jenna argued, sullenness drifting into her voice as she folded her arms. “It’s true. Sort of.”

“Yes,” Angel agreed. “But the ‘sort of’ part is important. Look how red his face got.”

Jenna innocently asked, “Are you embarrassed, Dr. Wolfe?”

“Angry,” Angel corrected.

“I’m waiting to decide. After someone explains ‘sort of’ to me.”

Jenna frowned so dramatically it’d have been comical in any other situation.

“I’m going to go to the ceremony and live stream it for her, let her tell me where she wants me to film. That sort of thing,” Conley explained, as if that were an everyday occurrence, nothing special.

“It’ll be almost like I get to go,” Jenna added, but Wolfe couldn’t take his eyes off the angel in the room, living up to her name.

He couldn’t stop himself from smiling either. Nurses went above and beyond all the time for their patients, but Wolfe didn’t see it much in the physicians. Even in himself, which at that moment made him feel like a jerk, so the smile kind of annoyed him. It warmed his cold, anti-Christmas heart. Slightly.

Had to be relief over not having to cause drama at the hospital. “That’s really—”

“My end of the deal,” Angel cut in, then directed her attention back to Jenna. “Speaking of, Dietary will bring you something good any minute. And when we get finished with the tree, I’ll bring you the peppermint cocoa.”

“And the snickerdoodle.”

“And the snickerdoodle,” Angel confirmed. “I haven’t forgotten.”

Bribed with sweets and the ability to boss an adult around for her own amusement? Someone should teach Dr. Angel how to bargain. And maybe take lessons from Jenna.

“Dr. Wolfe is going to go with you,” Jenna said.

Wolfe snapped back to the conversation. “I’m what now?”

“You said you would go with me,” Jenna reminded him, sounding terribly pleased with herself. So much different from the sad little sprite she’d been earlier.

He looked at Angel to get a read on her reaction, but her carefully closed expression and the lack of any sort of verbal response told Wolfe he’d get no help from her. She wasn’t even looking at him.

Did that mean she did or didn’t want him to go?

Dammit. All these emotional landmines. He hated trying to sort this stuff out. He’d much rather deal with actual guts than metaphorical ones.

If he backed out now, that’d probably be insulting a colleague. As a pediatric emergency specialist, she worked more with his brother in Emergency than with him but was actually in pediatrics. Which would violate his rule about causing stress in the work environment. Stress often led to scandal. It was one of his guiding lights to bring as little extra drama to the floor as possible; these kids and their families went through enough without dealing with that kind of selfishness.