The sterile, unforgiving light of the Emergency Room was its own kind of Christmas decoration. It bounced off chrome equipment and the weary faces of my colleagues, a harsh contrast to the gentle, twinkling lights I imagined adorning my parents’ home. It was 10:30 PM on Christmas Eve, hour fourteen of a sixteen-hour double shift I’d taken so a junior nurse with young kids could be home. The air was thick with the scent of antiseptic, blood, and the quiet desperation that holidays always seemed to amplify in a hospital.
A car crash victim, a teenager who’d had too much festive cheer, was stabilized and being prepped for surgery. A grandmother who had slipped on an icy patch was getting a cast on her wrist. I moved from one bay to the next, a ghost of calm efficiency, my mind a million miles away. I pictured my daughter, Abby, walking into my parents’ house. She’d be sixteen, newly licensed, and so proud to be driving herself to the family’s traditional Christmas Eve sleepover for the first time. She’d be enveloped in the scent of pine needles and my mother’s roast turkey, her cheeks pink from the cold. The thought was a tiny, warm ember in the cold cavern of my exhaustion.
When I finally clocked out at 11:15 PM, my body felt like a machine shutting down. The drive home was a blur of streetlights and phantom carols on the radio. All I wanted was to fall into bed for a few precious hours before waking up to drive to my parents’ place for Christmas morning chaos.
But when I opened my front door, the scene was all wrong.
The house was dark, silent. And there, sitting neatly by the door, were Abby’s snow-covered winter boots. My heart seized. My first thought, the ER nurse’s thought, was that someone was bleeding. Was she hurt? Did she get in an accident on the way home? Then I saw her coat, not hung up, but slumped over the armrest of the sofa as if dropped in a hurry. Her overnight bag, the one she’d so carefully packed with her new pajamas and gifts, sat on the floor, still zipped shut.
