No Regrets

“Happy holidays to you, too.” Nothing in Molly’s voice revealed her painful memories of Christmas Eve. “I’m sorry I’m late.”

“It’s getting tougher and tougher to run that gauntlet,” Yolanda said with a frown. “Nobody rides the bus in L.A. Especially not at night and in this neighborhood. You really ought to get yourself a car.”

Molly smiled, feeling the shadows drift away as her equilibrium returned. “Why don’t you write a letter to the Pope and suggest he cosign a loan?”

Yolanda’s shrug suggested she’d expected that answer to the ongoing argument, but intended to keep on trying, anyway. “You didn’t miss anything,” she said. “It’s turning out to be a blessedly silent night. According to Banning’s report, it was pretty quiet on the day shift, too. Which is pretty amazing, given that not only is it a holiday, it’s a full moon.

“They had only half a dozen patients during their last three hours,” Yolanda continued. “The last one was some guy who sliced his finger to the bone trying to put together a bicycle for his eight-year-old son. He was stitched up, given a tetanus shot, advised to pay the ten bucks to have the store do it next time and was leaving just as I was coming on duty.

“By the way,” she tacked on as an afterthought, “the baby Jesus is gone.”

“I noticed as I walked by the crèche.” Molly sighed. “I suppose it isn’t surprising. Putting a baby doll outside in this neighborhood is just asking to have it stolen, especially this time of year.”

Molly was of two minds about the theft. She found the act wrong, but she couldn’t help envisioning the joy on the face of whatever child received the doll on Christmas morning.

“Santa’s gonna be paying a surprise visit to some kid’s house,” Yolanda said. “Apparently from now on, the swaddled babe is going to be a bunch of rolled-up towels. The visual impact won’t be the same, but administration has decided it might last through the night.”

Molly wasn’t so certain about that, since clean towels were even more precious than baby dolls around there.

It was almost eerily quiet. There were no metal-bound triage charts in the racks, crisp white sheets covered the high-wheeled gurneys lined up in the hallway outside trauma area A and all the booths were empty, curtains pulled back in anticipation of patients. Molly was Irish enough to be vaguely superstitious of such calm.

“Where’s Reece?” Molly asked.

“Your handsome young brother-in-law is hiding away in waiting room A. Seems he’s got a hundred bucks’ bet with Dr. Bernstein on the Houston Rockets over the Bulls—it’s the third quarter, Jordan’s on a roll and he’s starting to get nervous that his bride is going to murder him when she finds out.”

“Lena would never murder Reece. She adores him.”

And rightfully so, Molly thought. Dr. Reece Longworth, Mercy Sam’s ER resident, was the nicest man she’d ever met. He was also her best friend.

“And he’s nuts about her. The guy lights up from the inside like a Christmas tree whenever she’s around.” Yolanda sighed. “If I could ever find me a man who looked at me the way Reece looks at your little sister, I’d marry him in a heartbeat.”

“Lena’s lucky,” Molly agreed. Lena had met Reece one night two years ago when she’d shown up unexpectedly to eat dinner with Molly in the cafeteria. Instantly smitten, Reece had proposed within the week. It had taken him six months to convince Lena to marry him.

Until Reece, Lena’s choices in men had been disastrous, eerily similar to their own mother’s. All of her lovers—and there had been many—had been carbon copies of their abusive, alcoholic father. Molly often thought that Lena hadn’t believed she was deserving of love, even though she’d been ravenous for it all her life. During those bad years, Lena had reminded Molly of a bottomless, fragile porcelain bowl—impossible to fill and capable of shattering at a touch.

Molly sat staring at the lights of the small artificial tree atop a filing cabinet at the nurses’ station thinking that Lena’s first Christmas Eve with Reece had probably been the only truly happy one she’d ever had. The lights blinked red, green and white, flashing gaily on yellowed and cracked plaster walls in the unnaturally quiet room.

Normally, Molly would never have questioned the rare peace. Emergencies came in spurts. But she could never remember it being as quiet as this.

“You know, this really is starting to get a little spooky,” she said thirty minutes later as she bit into a bell-shaped cookie covered with red sugar sprinkles. “So where are all the customers?”

She’d no sooner spoken than the dam broke—a drive-by shooting; an attempted suicide who’d washed a bottle of nitroglycerin tablets down with a fifth of Beefeaters gin, then burned the inside of his mouth trying to blow himself up with a Bic lighter; and a cop carrying a newspaper-wrapped bundle.

“One of the bums found her in a Dumpster,” he said, shoving the bundle into Molly’s arms.

Sensing what she was about to see, Molly gently placed the newspapers onto a gurney and carefully opened them up. The baby’s eyelids were sealed shut, its pale blue skin gelatinous. She was wet and so tiny, she reminded Molly of a newly hatched hummingbird.

Reece, who’d just finished the unenviable task of telling the shell-shocked parents of the thirteen-year-old honor student that he’d been unable to save their son, paused on his way to check out a lacerated scalp.

“Aw, hell,” he responded in his characteristically even tone that was faintly softened with the accent of the deep South. “Get a neonatologist on the line, stat,” he told the clerk. “Tell him we’ve got an extramural

preemie delivery. And start arranging for a transfer upstairs to NICU, just in case.”

Unlike so many other physicians Molly worked with, Reece Longworth never raised his voice except when it was necessary in order to be heard over the din. Few had ever seen him get angry. Such a relaxed, informal demeanor helped calm the staff, as well as thousands of anxious patients. The fluorescent red plastic button he wore on his green scrub shirt reading Don’t Panic probably didn’t hurt, either.

“She’s so small,” Yolanda murmured as Reece managed, just barely, to put the blade of the infant laryngoscope into the baby girl’s rosebud mouth. “She could fit in the palm of my hand.”

“Probably another crack kid,” the cop muttered as he stood on the sidelines and watched.

While Reece slid the tube between the tiny vocal cords, Molly said a quick, silent prayer and checked for a pulse.

“Sixty,” she announced grimly. She did not have to add that it was much too slow for a preemie.

“Dr. Winston’s the neonatologist on call,” the clerk announced as Reece put in an umbilical line to start pushing drugs. “He wants to know how much the baby weighs. Because if it’s less than five hundred grams, the kid’s not viable.”

As soon as the line was in, Reece bagged the baby girl, forcing air directly into immature lungs through the tube. Molly wrapped a towel around the frail infant in an attempt to warm it.

“See if you can find a nursery scale,” Reece instructed Yolanda. “And round up an Isolette, too.”

When the baby suddenly kicked, Molly felt her own pulse leap in response.

“It doesn’t mean anything,” Reece warned as they exchanged a look. “It’s only reflex. No matter what she weighs, we’re not even talking long shot here, Molly.”

“I know.”

Yet, even as she prepared for the worst, even as she saw the infant crumping before her eyes, Molly took the weak little kick as a sign of encouragement. Death was a frequent companion in her line of work, but Molly had also witnessed enough miracles to allow her to hang on to hope now.

Yolanda came back with the scale and a hush suddenly came over the room as Molly placed the baby girl on it.

“Four hundred and twenty grams.” Molly closed her eyes and heard the onlookers sigh in unison.

“Too light to fake it,” Reece said what everyone already knew.

The clerk passed the information on to the neonatologist still waiting on the phone. “Winston says to pull the plug. The kid’s FTD.”

Fixing to Die. Accustomed as she was to the term, Molly was irritated by it now.

As was Reece. “Easy for Winston to say,” he muttered. With an icy, controlled fury that was almost palpable, he marched the few feet to the phone and snatched the receiver from the clerk’s hand.

“As much as I appreciate your consult, Dr. Winston, we don’t throw terms around like that in my emergency department. She may be small, but she deserves the same respect we’d show your child, or wife, or mother, if they showed up down here.”

He hung up.

“All we can do now is make her as comfortable as possible,” he said. Every eye in the room was riveted on him as he turned off the line, pulled the plug from the baby’s lungs, wrapped the painfully tiny girl up again and placed her in the Isolette.

“She’s still breathing,” Yolanda pointed out unnecessarily.

“She’ll stop.”