Page 5 of Christmas On Call
The man made a sound halfway between a laugh and a sob. “I keep thinking she’s just going to stop breathing if I turn away for a second.”
Asha nodded, slow and deliberate. “That’s not an unreasonable fear. But our monitors don’t sleep, and neither do we.” Her voice was quieter than Max had ever heard it. “I know you wish you could do more. But being here, just being here, is the best thing you can do for her.”
Max felt a prickle behind her eyes, surprised at how fiercely she wanted to believe it, too.
“I’m supposed to be the calm one,” Mr. Winters said, voice cracking.
“There’s nothingsupposed to behere.” Asha’s hand, cautious, hovered before settling on his shoulder, a feather-light touch, but steady and reassuring. “I can’t promise you what will happen. I wish I could. But I can promise we’re doing everything possible for Emma. And we won’t stop taking the best care we can for her.”
There it was; the smallest wobble in the doctor’s tone. A leak of humanity, quick and dangerous. Max watched, frozen, a snowflake ornament clutched in her fist. Her heart skipped a beat as she watched the moment like a festive fly on the wall.
The man scrubbed his hands over his face. “Thank you, Doctor Patel. Really.” He looked at his sleeping daughter, then back at Asha, and for the first time since Max had met him,the terror had drained from his expression. He looked merely exhausted.
Asha squeezed his shoulder once, then stood. “If you need anything, you page the unit. Doesn’t matter what time.” She hesitated, then tucked a stray lock of hair back into her bun.
Mr. Winters just nodded, his eyes fixed on Emma.
Asha drew the curtain halfway closed, then turned and nearly collided with Max.
“Sorry,” Max said, at the exact moment Asha murmured, “Excuse me.”
For a second, neither moved. Max saw the faint crescent moons under Asha’s eyes, the strain at her temples. She also saw, in that instant, something softer: a yearning, maybe, or the ghost of old sadness.
Asha’s mask snapped back into place like a seatbelt. “Nurse Benson, is the IV for five ready?”
“On it,” Max said, a bit too fast. She held up the snowflake, unsure why. “I was just…” But she didn’t finish.
Asha’s gaze flicked from the ornament to Max’s face, and for a heartbeat she almost smiled. A real one, unpracticed, slightly uncertain. Then she looked away.
“Thank you,” Asha said, so quietly Max almost missed it. “For the… decorations.”
Max blinked. “Really?”
Asha nodded, once. “They help.”
Max wasn’t sure if she meant the babies or the parents or herself. Maybe all three.
She stood there a moment after Asha walked away. She let herself remember the sound of Asha’s voice, the gentle way she’d spoken, the hand on the father’s shoulder. Max had always thought of her as the frozen-hearted one, the polar opposite of everything Max prided herself on. But now, for the first time,she wondered if maybe they weren’t opposites at all. Just two different strategies for surviving the hardest nights.
She hung the snowflake above Emma’s isolette, then smoothed the curtain closed, giving the Winters family their small, private world.
Then, with her own smile, Max went back to her rounds, certain of at least one thing: she’d seen something tonight she wouldn’t forget.
3
ASHA
The hour had slipped past one a.m. and still the NICU hummed, a muted diorama in faded jewel tones. Only the faintest tinge of fluorescents cast light on the long stretch of tile, and Asha Patel moved within it like an actor in a half-remembered play: every step choreographed, every motion accounted for, every deviation from the script quietly eliminated. She had discovered years ago that if you pushed your rounds late enough, the world shrank to a manageable sphere: a few dozen grams of fragile life, a handful of monitors, a stack of charts, and the softest exhale of machines keeping both the living and the grieving in limbo.
But even at this hour, there was no escaping Maxine Benson’s handiwork.
The decorations—if they could be called that—remained. Someone (likely Juliette, with her new shade of Day-Glo pink hair) had taped a lattice of snowflakes to the acoustic ceiling tiles, so that every trip down the hallway sent a few drifting loose, pirouetting in the recycled air. Strands of twinkle lights in various states of electrical decay wound their way around computer carts and poles, blinking at uneven intervals like acode only babies could interpret. The patient-board, usually a drab grid of numbers and surname initials, now sparkled with glitter tape and was crowned by a felt Santa hat, clumsily affixed with micropore. Asha caught herself peeling a stray fleck of red felt from the charting keyboard and flicked it away, distaste fighting with the nagging edge of amusement.
She ran her finger down the list of overnight labs, reading each value aloud, more for the comfort of sound than any real necessity. “Sanchez: glucose 78, potassium three point eight. Winters: bilirubin holding at twelve.” The numbers made sense. The numbers never lied, never called for conversation, never expected anything beyond calculation and decision. That was why she loved them, and why she relied on them to fill the echoing blankness of a December night shift.
A chorus of jingle bells slipped in from the nurses’ station, muffled but insistent. The source was some retro holiday playlist—crooned, tinny, and strangely relentless in a place so often ruled by code blues and hush. Asha clenched her jaw, but the music chased her anyway. It floated up and wrapped around the edge of her thoughts, snagging on a strand of memory she had worked very hard to quarantine.
She was eight. Sitting cross-legged at the dining table, she pressed hard with the red crayon, coloring the Santa’s hat on the front of her card.To Ma and Baba, she’d written in blocky print, and underneath, a careful drawing: the three of them, all holding hands. Her mother was prepping samosas in the kitchen, her father on the phone with the Mumbai office, and neither one looked up when she set the card beside their tea mugs. Later, when she peeked, the card was buried under a printout of her report card, still pristine, Santa’s beard uncreased. They’d noticed the test scores and congratulated her at dinner; they never once mentioned the card.
