For the Mercy Street Holiday 2016 Prompt Challenge on Tumblr: "Christmas Stocking" (Dec 3)
"Holy sh…night…"
Mary glanced up from her dog-eared paperback to see Dr. Diggs – Samuel, she reminded herself, now that they were friends she could call him Samuel – standing in the doorway, staring wide-eyed at the back wall of the break room. Under normal circumstances, he was pretty unflappable, so the fact that he had barely been able to catch himself before swearing spoke volumes about his state of shocked surprise.
"Yeah, I know…" Mary said, raising her eyebrows and offering him a chagrined half-smile.
She understood: she had experienced a similar reaction the first time she had walked in the door and seen it. It had been the Monday after Thanksgiving, and she had just wandered in to get a quick cup of coffee, only to be visually assaulted by what appeared to be an entire department store's worth of Christmas decorations stuffed into their tiny break room. Garlands of holly and bright tinsel, festooned with wide red ribbon, decorated nearly every available surface, and tiny pinecone-shaped holiday lights were draped from the ceiling. And on the far wall, held up on little plastic gold hooks, were dozens of burgundy and forest green-colored Christmas stockings, one for each doctor and nurse in the ward. But Samuel had been gone for a few days, off visiting his family in Philadelphia, and this was obviously the first time he had come in since his return.
"Nurse Green?"
"You have to ask?" she replied.
He walked over to the wall, his gaze still taking in the dizzying and colorful array.
"Did she write all our names with –"
"Puff paint? Yeah, I think so."
"Wow."
He ran his finger along the letters of his own name, a white stylized snowflake dotting the "i" in Diggs.
All in all, it was fairly impressive work on the part of the young nurse, if only a little overwhelming. Ever since she had started at Walter Reed two months ago, she had seemed determined to get the staff fully into the holiday spirit. Every single holiday, apparently. In one of her snarkier moods, Mary wondered if Nurse Green held particularly strong feelings about Arbor Day.
"There's something in yours."
"What?" she asked in confusion.
Looking up at her own stocking – it was towards the middle, a few rows from the bottom, the "P" in Phinney striped like a candy cane – she realized that he was right. There was something bulging slightly at the bottom of it, something with enough bulk to make the fabric pull a little. What was even weirder was that it hadn't been there on Monday – she definitely would have noticed.
Dropping her book on the table, she pushed back her chair and made her way over to the back wall. As she took the stocking off the hook, it was clear from the weight that there was something inside, and with her curiosity now fully piqued, she sank her hand into the bottom and pulled out the object in question.
It felt hard and smooth, marked by rounded plastic edges, and as she opened her hand, her state of confusion only seemed to deepen.
It was a small snow globe, no bigger than her palm. Once the chaos of sparkly flakes settled against the bottom of the water, she could make out a tiny Lincoln Memorial, the dome of the Capitol, and in between the two, the long, pointed spire of the Washington Monument.
She stared at it for a moment, not being able to make any rhyme or reason of it at all. Why would anyone leave this, a tourist's souvenir, for her in a Christmas stocking in the break room? It was kind of pretty – in a slightly kitschy way – but who out there would think what she had much interest in watching glittery snow fall over Washington?
The memory came back to her suddenly, and she bit her lips together, feeling the slow curl of a smile emerging from the corner of her mouth.
It had been about two weeks ago – a nasty, wet mid-November day, still warm enough that the press of humidity fogged up the windows of the hospital shuttle that ferried her to work from the Metro station. She was soaked and bedraggled – a casualty of the long rainy walk from her apartment to the Metro – and had never quite dried out, despite the forty-minute commute. She missed Boston terribly that morning, a proper city that knew when it was time to stop being fall and start being winter, and she missed the way it snowed there, the way the cold hung in the air, so clean and crisp against her cheeks and the tip of her nose. After the first snow of the season, the streets and sidewalks would be covered in a soft white blanket, the glow of streetlights casting everything in hazy auras of gold and pale yellow.
She had only moved in April, so she had no idea what the snow looked like in D.C. Based on her experience of the summer – a never-ending ordeal of heat and humidity – it seemed entirely possible that it might never arrive at all.
It was just a coincidence that he had been there, standing by the nurses' station as she walked in, but he took one look at her vaguely-drowned-rat-like appearance and offered her a warm grin of sympathy. It might have actually been pity, but at that point, she was willing to take what she could get.
Somehow she had found herself talking – about Boston and snow and the strangeness of this city, originally built on top of a swamp, which really did explain a lot – and she had ended up asking him what it was like here, in the winter, when it actually snowed. Dr. Foster had lived her long enough, she reasoned, and he had grown up in Baltimore, only an hour's drive away.
Go down and see the Mall after the first snow, he had told her, as fast as you can before the herds of tourists stomp their meaty footprints all over it. His gaze held hers and he had smiled again, softer this time, perhaps no longer provoked solely by feelings of sympathy or pity. Trust me, you should go see it, he added. It's worth it.
She hadn't quite understood – normally he wasn't given to speaking in such elusive, enigmatic terms – but now, as she looked down at the snow globe in her hand, she could begin to see what he meant, how there might be something peaceful and still and starkly beautiful about the monuments in winter, something worth taking the time to experience. What was harder to wrap her head around was the gesture itself. Because clearly he had thought about their conversation, thought about it enough to find this tiny – and strangely sweet – memento and leave it for her as a gift. But still, he probably didn't mean anything more than that by it, right?
"Do you have a Secret Santa or something?" Samuel asked, the sound of his voice quickly pulling her back from her thoughts.
"Maybe so," she murmured, trying her best – and failing – to disregard the pleasurable tendrils of warmth slowly coiling through her chest as she slipped the snow globe into the pocket of her cardigan and hung the now-empty stocking back onto its hook. Maybe this was what it felt like to fully embrace the holiday spirit, she thought with a wry smile. Nurse Green, no doubt, would be more than pleased.