She couldn’t bear thinking about the battle he was waging.
In bed four was a five-year-old girl who’d been bitten by a brown snake twelve hours previously and was on the unit for monitoring after administration of the antivenin. She was doing well, self-ventilating on room air and showing no signs of envenomation.
In bed eight was a four-week-old baby boy who’d had a tracheostomy for a critical airway a few days before. He’d been born with a rat’s-tail trachea, interfering with his ability to breathe properly. He was coping well with his operation but needed to stay on the unit for a week to ten days for one-on-one management in the initial post-op stage.
Bed eight had seen six patients since Ruby’s death a month ago but still the tragedy lingered in Maggie’s soul. Some kids, some cases touched you more than others and made her wonder what the hell she was doing here.
Luckily the patients since Ruby had all been in and out reasonably quickly helping to restore her faith.
Linda had put a Christmas CD on as they worked and it chimed happy, snowy, merry tunes and Maggie concentrated on them instead. It even managed to partially drown out the duff-duff of Toby’s oscillator.
Maggie yawned, bone tired as she threw some tinsel around the base to cover up the rather utilitarian plastic bucket the tree was propped in. The vague queasy sensation she’d quelled earlier returned with a vengeance.
God — night duty sucked!
‘Don’t yawn,’ Linda griped. ‘It’s contagious.’
‘Sorry.’ Maggie grimaced. ‘I know I say this every night duty at this time, but I don’t think I’ve ever felt so tired.’
Linda frowned at her. ‘You burning the candle at both ends? You’re always tired lately.’
Maggie busied herself in the box, scrabbling for more decorations. ‘It’s nights,’ she dismissed casually. She wondered if Linda would be shocked to know she was indeed burning that candle and who she was burning it with.
‘No. It’s daytime too,’ Linda insisted.
Maggie blushed and was pleased to still have her head in the box. She hadn’t been getting much sleep the last month. Maybe a few hours a night — if that.
‘Just getting old,’ she joked.
‘Hey, forty is not old,’ Linda protested. ‘It’s the new thirty. Besides, you’re only as old as you feel, or the man that you’re feeling anyway.’ Linda laughed raucously at her own joke.
Maggie flicked her gaze to Nash and caught him as he sneaked a glance her way, a grin on his face. ‘Come on,’ she said, deftly changing the subject. ‘Let’s use all this leftover tinsel to decorate each bed space. We can string it along the curtain rails.’
An hour later the unit was looking very Christmassy. Red and silver tinsel was entwined and looped through the curtain rails as well as along the desks of the central station and down the corridor. Colourful ‘Merry Christmas’ banners were stuck up on the windows at each bed space and the Christmas cards the unit had already started to receive were displayed on the main swing doors.
‘I love Christmas,’ Maggie sighed as she and Linda stood back to admire their handiwork.
‘Not bad for a couple of hours’ work,’ Linda agreed. ‘What do you reckon, Nash?’
Nash looked around at the transformed clinical environment. ‘I think you two could get jobs as elves,’ he said, and tried really hard not to think about Maggie in a tiny elf costume. And failed.
‘You got your tree up yet, Maggie?’ Linda asked.
‘Nah. Not much point with just me.’
Nash saw the wistful look in her eyes as her gaze roamed around the room, reflecting the twinkling tinsel. She sounded a little sad and he suppressed the urge to stand and draw her into his arms.
‘We had ours up two weeks ago. The kids’ nagging was driving me insane,’ Linda said with a laugh.
Maggie’s gaze briefly settled on Nash’s and he gave her one of his public smiles where his face said one thing but his tropical-island eyes said something much more intimate. She looked away, not wanting him to see the stupid jealousy that had seized her thinking about Linda and the six kids she was going to spoil rotten Christmas morning.
The yearning never went away.
She could work and work and bury it deep but someone talking about their kids or a mother pushing a pram in a street and it all came crashing back.
‘Well, I’m going to get something to eat before I throw up,’ she announced, the horrible nausea persisting.
Would this night never end?
‘I’ll join you,’ Linda volunteered.
Waiting in the kitchen for the toast to pop was torturous. It smelled amazing as only toast could do to a stomach under revolt. Maggie placed her hand on her belly. ‘Ugh. I think I really am going to throw up.’
As often as she felt like this on night shift, she’d never actually vomited.
Linda frowned at Maggie’s pale face. ‘Well, if I didn’t know all about your fertility problems I’d ask the obvious question. Tired. Nauseous. You haven’t skipped a period, have you?’
A surge of laughter bubbled up her throat. ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
Linda quirked an eyebrow. ‘Have you?’
Maggie stared at her colleague like she’d just grown horns. ‘You can’t be serious?’
‘Sure.’ She shrugged. ‘Why not?’
‘Because,’ Maggie spluttered. It was preposterous.
Totally preposterous.
But the ruptured condom was suddenly all she could think about. Her fatigue vaporised. She squinted as she searched her memory for her last period.
‘You are late,’ Linda the Shrewd piped up.
‘I’m forty,’ Maggie dismissed, desperately trying to quell the stupid flutter of hope that had taken up residence in her heart. The toast popped and she removed it and started buttering it automatically. ‘My period’s been a bit all over the shop the last six months or so. Probably just peri menopausal.’
Linda looked at her dubiously. ‘If you say so.’
Maggie nodded and was pleased when Linda let it drop. Because she couldn’t. For the remaining hour of the shift it was there. Taunting her. Mocking her.
A baby. A baby. A baby.
And it didn’t matter how many times she disregarded it and told herself to stop being foolish, she was infertile —infertile, for God’s sake — it wouldn’t quit.
A baby. A baby. A baby.
It whispered its promise to her insidiously. Glowing like a candle in the darkness. Shining like a beacon of hope. Which was crazy.
Beyond crazy.
She’d been diagnosed with idiopathic infertility in the prime of her life. How on earth could she conceive at all, never mind in the dying days of her dysfunctional fertility cycle? It didn’t make any sense.
But she knew, as she grabbed her bag from her locker, that she was going to stop by the chemist’s and buy a pregnancy test. Not because she believed it but because she didn’t.
Couldn’t.
A simple test would tell her the inevitable in two minutes and then she could stop all these ridiculous thoughts and get some sleep.
‘Maggie.’
Maggie stopped short as Nash greeted her in the corridor outside the staff change rooms.
Nash. Oh, no. Among the maelstrom of thoughts in her head she hadn’t even considered Nash.