3:02am

Chapter One - TIPTOES

Chapter One - TIPTOES

The latex gloves she'd worn all day had left her skin feeling parched, there was no resistance as she peeled the rubber away from her hands and dropped them in the trash. Slipping out of her blood stained scrubs, Abby scrunched the top and trousers together into a ball and lobbed them at the laundry chute with a 'hazardous waste' symbol above it. She sighed as she caught a sneak peek of herself in the mirror, blood had soaked through the top layer of scrubs and she was now wearing a reddish white undershirt, pulling this over her head, that too ended up in the hazardous waste bin ready for the hot wash and press before the start of her next shift in roughly... she glanced at her watch.. six hours and 48 minutes to be precise. Standing in her lingerie shivering against the coolness in the room and the lack of sleep she'd had in the last two weeks of continual nights/days shift patterns, Abby pulled a fresh set of mauve scrubs from her locker. Slipping the cold fabric up and over her butt she fastened the drawstrings at her bellybutton and shrugged the v-necked shirt over her flowery bra. Fingers plunging through her hair, ragging it back into a messy ponytail, she pocketed her phone and car keys, grabbed her bag, pulled her jacket over her shoulders and exited through the back door straight into the stairwell.

Nine flights of stairs, a few mumbled farewells and hand gestures later, she swept through the revolving doors out onto the snow scattered streets of Chicago on one of the coldest nights on record that year, her breath clung in little clusters of wispy smoke around her face as she pulled the ruffled neck of her coat up higher against her chin in a poor attempt to hide from the freezing wind. She'd moved here nearing five years ago now, after the breakdown of her marriage and subsequent death of her husband at the unfortunate hands of her daughter, Clarke, who had been the driver of the vehicle that fateful day in the middle of her final year at Brown. They'd been on a father daughter day to see the Rhode Island Rams in the playoffs, they'd won and the atmosphere was alive with the electricity of the day, the smiles and the a damn good time well spent. It wasn't Clarke's fault, an elderly man with a heart condition had rolled a stop sign, run the red light and hit the passenger side of their 1970 Dodge Challenger at 55 mph, the force had broken Jake's back, six of his lumbar vertebrae had shattered upon impact and as the car rolled over and over and over down a steep embankment off the 195 interstate, his cervical vertebrae snapped breaking his neck. There was no suffering, it was quick. That was a blessing. The emergency services had focused on the elderly gentleman, his heart attack had awarded him a trip to the hospital in the back of a super fast ambulance. Their car lay undiscovered for nearly 12 hours, the emergency personnel had not realised there was another car involved until early the next morning, and an unsuspecting Abby was the doctor called out to assist the paramedics with two casualties, one DOA the other a walking wounded. Jake was dead and had been for some time, Clarke was traumatised and Abby got to work in the only way she knew how with all efforts to hide what she was really feeling.

Clarke had just walked away, despite being thrown around like a rag doll, the cuts and bruises she sported were superficial, it was the scars on the inside that would wreak their damage later on, she would row with Abby frequently. Her most venomous spiteful words would come out when she was blaming Abby for the death of her dad and accuse her of having no heart and so, when failing in medicine a couple of years later, she would take a year out that ended up being four and she was off in some far flung country on the other side of the world nursing a broken heart from her latest lost love. Abby didn't speak to her often, their relationship was strained, forced and misshapen. Abby's bonus points were waning this year as she had also forgotten her birthday and neglected to send even a card overseas. She was a bad mother. She was also a bad person, but she was a good doctor, and that's what got her through even the toughest of times.

Today had been the toughest of them all since she had joined the hospital surgical team, she had had a girl not far from Clarke's age, same hair colour, seafoam green eyes on her table that evening, convinced that she was not good enough to live, the beautiful creature had slit her wrists from the heel of her palm vertically down to the midway point on her forearm. The six inch gash was deep, severing tendons and slicing through the radial artery. The amount of blood was etched in Abby's mind, staining her scrubs and seeping through onto her undergarments. She couldn't save her, the damage was too severe and just as she had fought so viciously to stem the flow, she had fought back the tears when it was clear she was already gone. She'd spent a long time in the pre-prep room sobbing her heart out after they had cleared the theatre. It had been a veritable struggle to dry her eyes, wash off her face and break the news to her worried next of kin in the waiting room. It wasn't the first patient Abby had lost since being in Chicago, and it most certainly wouldn't be her last, but it was a memory that would not leave her for a long long time to come. It was haunting and made the pang of her missing Clarke just that much more noticeable.