I walk into the break room and don’t see one familiar face. That’s because none of the coworkers I’ve become friendly with have volunteered to work on Christmas Eve. They all have friends and family in town. So the faces staring back at me when I enter are either loners like me or new employees who didn’t have the seniority to avoid the shift.
There's only one nurse two doctors and an orderly in there, but all of them stop chatting as soon as I open the door. They all stare at me, not a welcoming smile in the bunch. I mean no one is trying to eviscerate me with their eyes but the looks are cool, aloof, and slightly judgey. Apparently, even the skeleton crew tonight has heard the rumor Heather is spreading that I cheated on Beckett with Conner Garrison. A rumor I stupidly started myself.
I flash a brief smile at all of them, walk to the coffee machine, make a quick coffee, and then head right back out. I should have opted to be on call tonight instead of coming in. The head of the residents told me I could. But I didn’t want to sit at home alone, so here I am, getting treated like the outcast in a high school dramedy.
There's a break room down the hall with two beds. If I'm lucky, I will find it empty. As it turns out, I am lucky and it's blissfully empty and dark. I put my untouched coffee on the small table, drop onto one of the cots, and close my eyes. But I can't resist the urge to re-listen to that drunken message Conner left me a couple hours ago. So I pull my phone out of the pocket of my scrubs and hit play.
His words bring heat to my cheeks, just like when I listened to it for the first time. And the seventeen consecutive times right after that. Now eighteen. There wasn’t a single word in that message that didn’t make my insides fizzle and pop.
Yes, he was drunk but… you could hear the authenticity in his words and the need in the way his voice quivered a little. I hit play again. When the message ends I almost fan myself.
Had I responded to that message at all, in any way? Nope. Because what the hell was I supposed to say? This whole thing was too much to process. Two weeks ago I hadn’t thought about Conner Garrison for more than a hot second in years. Now I thought about him like he was my Roman Empire.
Before I can listen to his drunken confession again, I get a text from the ER telling me we have an ambulance arriving and it’s all hands on deck.
My heart sinks, not because I can't indulge my Conner vice, but because no one should be in an ambulance on Christmas. I haul myself out of bed and out of the break room and rush to the emergency department. The thing about interning at a small-town hospital like Silver Bay is that, even though I have a specialty, I am still floating to any department that needs me sometimes, like on holidays.
It's a horrible situation. A seven-year-old boy tried to climb out his bedroom window and onto the roof of his house to prove Santa Claus was real. He fell. After the initial assessment, I'm asked to handle the parents as the two other doctors on staff stabilize the child and the nurses call Portland and prepare his transfer. He's going to need an orthopedic surgeon immediately and Portland is the place to do that.
Yes, I have the training to work through this kind of crisis with the parents and the child's siblings, of which he has three, which is why the other doctors assigned this task to me but prepared or not, it takes an emotional toll. Luckily the child should make a full recovery after several operations for his broken arms and legs. The parents take little comfort in that right now, which is fair. I make sure they’ve got a way to Portland and then when they head off to follow the ambulance with their son, I call child services, because it’s protocol, so a social worker can meet them at the next hospital.
When that crisis is over, the sun is pushing through a bunch of gray clouds and my shift is about half an hour from completion. All I want is my bed. My phone buzzes as I head to the office I share with another resident and I pluck it from my lab coat.
Right. I promised the fam a moment. Might as well be now. I open the door to my office, flick on the lights, and FaceTime my dad. He answers immediately and his big, gregarious smile fills the screen. His face is, as usual, scruffy and covered in nicks and scars from his previous hockey career and his own rough childhood.
“Mac!” he exclaims and then turns his head away from the screen. “Baby, our baby is here. Christmas can start!”
“Oh, hey Mac! We miss you, kid!” My mom scurries over and after some commotion and a second where I’m looking at the ceiling of the kitchen in our Hampton’s house, I see both their faces again. Mom is sitting on Dad’s lap and if I squint real hard I can see the shoreline out the kitchen window behind them.
“I miss you guys too. And Cassia. Where is she?” I ask about my sister.
“Upstairs,” Mom replies and then raises her voice to yell. “Cassia! Mac is on the phone!”
My sister, Cassia, came into the family five years ago. Even though I was long out of the house and a full-grown adult, I made it a point to go home lots that first year and try to bond with her. Cassia, like me, had been a runaway. But unlike me, her birth parents weren't dead. They considered her dead because she was transgender. They booted her out of the house at just ten years old. After bouncing around a foster system that isn’t always safe for trans people for two years, she ended up at my mom’s charity, which helps teens who have been failed by the system, live independently. Cassia was too young to enroll in my mom’s program so Mom immediately fostered her, which led to adoption within the year. Unlike me, Cassia knew a good thing when she found it. She’s fit in with our family like the link we never knew we were missing.
“You look exhausted, Mac. And thin,” Mom notes. “Is everything alright?”
“Just work,” I say.
“Mom! Don’t tell your daughters they look like crap.” I hear Cassia’s voice as she enters the kitchen and walks into frame behind our parents. She smiles at me, but it immediately turns into a yawn. “I think you look great. Miss you!”
“Miss you too,” I say with a chuckle as Mom looks horrified.
“I didn’t mean it that way. I just…” Mom looks positively distraught.
“It’s okay. I do feel like crap. It’s six in the morning and I’ve been here since seven last night,” I explain.
“Don’t let her off the hook, Mac,” Cassia says with a grin. Then she leans in and kisses Mom on the cheek to prove she’s just joking. “Also, I’m exhausted too. These two get up way too early. I need my beauty sleep.”
“It’s Christmas!” Dad argues. Cassia rolls her eyes and Dad turns the conversation back to me. “We wish you could have come home.”
“Next year, when I’m an actual doctor, I can close my practice for a few days and be with you guys, I promise,” I say and mean it, but the idea seems so far off. It’s hard to believe I’ll be an actual psychiatrist in less than six months.
“And we won’t miss you so much because we’ll see you all the time because you’ll be back in New York City, right?” Dad goes on. “That’s still the plan?”
It is not exactly the plan anymore. To be honest, I don't know where I'll set up my practice. I had gone into medicine intending to return to New York but now… Beckett aside, I really like Maine. I had started looking at Portland, which is a great, vibrant city a couple hours from Silver Bay close to the ocean and with a need for doctors of all kinds.
“Mac? Are you thinking of not coming back to New York?” Mom asks, and she doesn’t sound upset, just shocked.
“I’ve been thinking of Portland.”
“Oregon?” Dad gasps, and I smile. He doesn’t want me all the way over on the west coast.
“Maine.”
He actually sighs audibly in relief. Cassia laughs in the background. "I guess that means you won't be thrilled if I get into one of those West Coast colleges I applied to."
"I'll be very proud and happy," Dad responds without hesitation. "But not as proud or happy as I would be if you got into an East Coast school."
“Dad!” I bark and shake my head as Cassia laughs at his honesty.
“What? I don’t want empty nest syndrome,” Dad says. “I need you both close. And for the record, I’m good with Portland, Maine. I like the idea.”
“Really?” I have to admit that shocks me a little.
“We have news too. Your father has gotten a call from a hockey team,” Mom announces.
“What? Really? Coaching again?”
Dad coached for a decade after he retired. First with the Barons and then with the New York City Monarchs. He was actually an assistant coach with the Barons when Conner was drafted by them. “They haven’t made an offer, but if they do… I’d consider it.”
That’s a big deal. He stopped coaching because the teams making offers were too far from New York and Mom’s charity is tied there. “Mom? Cassia? You guys on board with this? What team? Are you leaving New York? All of you? What about your foundation?”
“Whoa! Hold up. I’m not going anywhere, not forever anyway. The foundation is my baby and I will always run it. And New York is our home, full stop,” Mom tells me, and Cassia nods in agreement in the background while pouring coffee. “We’ll figure out the logistics if it happens. We can make anything work.”
I want my parents’ partnership. I’ve always wanted it. They are a great example of unconditional love and open communication. They haven’t always had it easy, and it’s not that they don’t have arguments, but they work at it. At all of it. I never had anything resembling that with Beckett, even though it’s what I wanted to have. So why did I give him years of my life? It seems so obvious looking at it now, in the rearview, that we were never going to be the unit my parents are. How did I ignore that?
“Dad, if some player has a giant contract, what are the chances they’ll be scooped up from waivers?” Okay… why did I blurt that out?
"What?" Dad sounds absolutely gobsmacked because I don't talk about hockey, ever. He blinks as he recovers enough to give me an answer. "Well, it makes it very difficult. And it's rare a player with a big contract gets put on waivers because if the team is offloading them, they can usually find a buyer. They'd make every attempt to trade them first to get something more than salary cap room out of the loss."
I chew my bottom lip as I absorb this. “Can team management be vindictive? Like would they shoot themselves in the foot for no reason other than they didn’t like a guy on the team??
“What’s with fifty questions, hockey edition?” Cassia asks and she pops into view over Dad’s left shoulder. “I thought you were like me—entirely indifferent about the sport.”
“I was. I am.” I chew my lip again. “It’s just that I’m surrounded by hockey here. Silver Bay has kind of made the sport its entire personality because half the league is from here.”
Dad snorts. “Yeah, there’s something in the water over there.”
"Anyway, never mind, I was just curious, and no better person to ask than our family expert." I smile at my dad. He grins back and gives me a wink.
“Okay well love ya sis but we gotta go open our gifts,” Cassia says. “So I can get back to sleep.”
Dad jerks his thumb in her direction. “Can you believe her? What kid wants sleep over presents?”
“Wish you were here, Mac,” Mom says and blows me a kiss.
“Do you need anything?” Dad asks.
“You guys sent me my gifts and I opened them last night before the shift.” I shake my head. “You spent too much. I told you I don’t need anything.”
They got me a subscription to a food box for gourmet meals, a pair of durable yet somehow very stylish winter boots, and a hefty gift certificate to Sephora, which is where I get my fancy bubble bath from so the timing on that is perfect. My brain is thinking of Conner again as I tell my family I love them and end the video call.
I check the time on my phone. It’s just a minute past seven. My shift is officially over. I open up the door to my office and jump. Because someone is standing in the hallway in front of the door—Conner Garrison.