Page 8 of Christmas On Call
Max injected into the line, steady as a metronome. “O2 still dropping,” she said, but softer, as if for Asha alone.
Asha could feel her own pulse in her teeth. She switched to mouth-to-tube, forcing each breath with the precision of a machine, counting under her breath. The numbers didn’t change, didn’t improve, and for the first time in months she felt her hands start to shake.
“Come on,” she whispered, and it was a prayer, not a command.
“Doctor—” Max’s voice cut through the panic, clear and warm. She reached for the stethoscope, set it on the tiny chest, and then, very gently, her other hand came up and closed over Asha’s wrist, stopping the tremor.
Their eyes met. Max’s gaze was unflinching, calm, and in that instant Asha understood the unspoken message: You are not alone. We have him. We have each other.
She drew a breath, recalibrated, and resumed compressions.
“Sats rising,” Max reported. “Seventy-four. Seventy-eight.” She smiled, and it was all the reward Asha needed.
After two more cycles, the monitors relented. The baby’s chest moved, shallow but determined, and the color returned to his lips. The father sobbed, the mother collapsed in the chair, and Max released Asha’s wrist only when she was sure the emergency had passed.
“Keep him on the vent,” Asha ordered, voice raw. “Run another blood gas in fifteen. Prep for possible intubation.”
“On it,” Max replied, already moving.
The pod flooded with light and personnel—RTs, the charge nurse, the resident blinking in useless awe—but none of them mattered. Not in that moment.
Asha stepped back, the sudden adrenaline drop making her vision swim. She braced herself on the side of the isolette, acutely aware of the thin sheen of sweat on her palms, the lingering imprint of Max’s hand on her wrist.
She watched as Max bent to reassure the parents, her touch light, her words an anchor in an ocean of panic. The mother clung to Max’s arm, shaking, and Max knelt beside her, speaking quietly until the storm of sobs gave way to shuddering breaths. Max was so able to dish out her affection like a soft warm blanket. Asha admired it and felt slightly jealous as she never had the ability to do the same. Instead, her words often stabbed like a cold knife, never received with much warmth,
For a minute after, Asha just watched. The data had stabilized. The machines were silent. Life—so stubborn, so unpredictable—had clawed its way back.
She turned away before she could be seen, retreated to the staff sink and washed her hands, over and over, even after the gloves were long gone. She stared at her reflection in the stainless steel panel above the sink, searching for signs of fracture, of failure. There was nothing but her own face, pale and drawn, the eyes too bright, almost feverish.
She dried her hands on a paper towel, then returned to the pod. Max stood at the bedside, charting the event. When she saw Asha, she offered a nod. It was nothing, but it felt like everything.
Asha cleared her throat. “Good work, Nurse Benson. You were?—”
“Just doing my job, Doc,” Max said, but the softness in her voice thickened the words.
There was a pause, and in it, the crackle of everything unsaid. She knew she’d taken it too far before.
Asha tried to leave but stopped. “Earlier,” she said, voice thin, “when you asked about holidays—I never had any. I mean, not real ones. So, I don’t—” She faltered, unable to finish.
Max regarded her for a long moment, then smiled. “There’s always a first time.”
Asha nodded, not trusting herself to speak.
Behind them, the monitors settled into their old, reliable rhythm. In the hallway, the Christmas lights blinked and blinked, refusing to be put out.
For the rest of the hour, Asha carried on her rounds, but the feeling lingered: the strange certainty that, in the moment of greatest crisis, it wasn’t just the baby they’d saved, but some fragile thing between them, too. And an attraction she could not ignore.
And every time her hand trembled, she remembered the warmth of Max’s fingers, and how, for a few seconds, the worldhad narrowed to just the two of them—and she wanted to feel it again.
4
MAX
By three a.m., the NICU belonged to the quiet ones.
Max rolled the cocoa cart down the hall with the confidence of someone who could navigate these linoleum bends in her sleep. The whole place felt different at this hour—infused with a kind of soft focus, everything blurred around the edges, like the world’s eyelids were half-shut. Even the glow of the monitors seemed gentler, their lights blinking less with urgency and more in time with the muted holiday playlist still piping in from the nurses’ station.
Someone had draped the cocoa cart in two lengths of iridescent tinsel and, at the very front, a construction-paper cutout that readNight Shift Cheer. The cart had started the month as a joke—Max and Martha, spiking the Swiss Miss with cinnamon and a dash of cayenne, sneaking marshmallows in by the handful—but by Christmas Eve it was as much a part of the unit’s routine as glucose checks and pulse-ox readings. Tonight, the scent of cinnamon and cocoa seemed to have seeped into every corner, blunting the sharp edges of antiseptic and latex.
