The Night Shift Bet

The intercom crackled at 1:40 in the morning and I nearly jumped out of my chair. "Dr. Engel to radiology, code gray, radiology department!" a voice said, all urgent and breathless. Lawrence Engel, MRI operator, that's me, fifty-four years old, and I have run exactly zero codes in twenty years of sitting in that little control room. I still hauled ass down the corridor like a rookie.

I pushed through the double doors ready for a dead scanner or a fallen patient or something. What I got was Beth Haskins, charge nurse for the night shift, thirty-eight and built like somebody who runs stairs on her days off, leaning on the radiology desk with a cup of vending machine coffee. She was grinning before I even got my breath back.

"Code gray?" I said. "There's no code gray here. I looked it up last year, we've got nine codes and gray isn't one of them."

"There is now," she said, sipping her coffee. "It means old man too slow."

"Beth."

"What? You came running, didn't you? Took you a minute and a half though. That's embarrassing. A real old man emergency and you'd have arrived just in time to watch him pass."

I sat down on the edge of the desk because my heart was still going from the sprint. I know I'm not supposed to sit on desks, I wipe the thing down every shift, but honestly. She'd paged me over the whole hospital. The security guard in the ER probably heard it.

"You scared the daylights out of me," I said. "I had my hand on the phone to call a real code."

"Good. That means you're alive in there. You know I watch you sometimes? Through the window, when I do my rounds. You sit there with your little coffee and your little crossword and you check the scanner every six minutes on the dot. I could set a watch by you."

"It's my job to check the scanner."

"It's nobody's job to do a crossword."

"Somebody has to keep sharp." She laughed at that, a real laugh, and I have to admit it did something for me. Beth's been on nights for twelve years. We've shared a thousand slow hours. She's single again after a long thing that ended when she was thirty-four, and I've been happily on my own for eight years now, and somehow we never once got around to talking about anything but work until maybe two months ago. Now every quiet night turns into this.

"Face it, Lawrence," she said, turning her cup around on the desk. "You're boring. You are a boring, cautious old man and you will die boring and cautious."

"I am not old. I'm fifty-four. That's middle-aged."

"It's middle-aged for a tortoise. When's the last time you took a risk? A real one. You use your turn signal to pull into your own driveway, I'd bet money on it."

"Signal use is a virtue."

"It's a symptom." She pointed at me with her coffee like a lawyer. "Name one risky thing. One. I'll wait. I've got seven hours."

I thought about it, honestly I did. The best I came up with was the time I microwaved fish in the break room, and I wisely did not say that out loud. Beth waited. She's good at waiting, it's her whole profession.

"That's what I thought," she said. "You know what your problem is? Nothing's ever happened to you because you never let anything happen to you. Everything on a schedule. Everything wiped down. Everything double-checked."

"Things get missed when people get loose, Beth. I've cleaned up enough of other people's spills to know."

"Spills. We're talking about life and you're talking about spills." She set the cup down and looked at me, and I want to note here that she looked pleased, not annoyed. She likes an argument the way I like a quiet shift. "Okay. New game. Let's make it interesting. You say you're not boring. Prove it."

"How?"

"Bet. One month of coffee runs. Every shift, I order, you fetch. Latte, extra shot, the fancy stuff from the place on Fifth that doesn't open till seven so you'd have to go before you come in."

"You drive a hard bargain."

"Or you do a dare right now and I never bother you again about being old. You want to hear it?"

"You're going to tell me either way."

"Strip down to your boxers," she said, like she was asking me to sign a form, "and stand in the open MRI doorway for ten seconds. Right there where anybody on the corridor could see. Ten seconds, full count, arms at your sides. Then you can say you took a risk and I'll leave your little crossword life alone."

I stared at her. She stared back and drank her coffee. The MRI hummed its low hum down the hall. Somewhere on three a call light chimed, then quit, some patient rolling over.

"Beth. We're at work."

"It's two in the morning, there are eleven patients in this building and ten of them are asleep. The one awake is watching Wheel of Fortune with headphones. Who's going to see? Janitorial's done our wing at midnight. It's just me and you and the cameras, and the camera in that hallway hasn't worked since the flood in March."

"You checked."

"Of course I checked. I'm a professional." She grinned. "So. One month of lattes, or ten seconds of courage. Which one?"

Now this is true about me. I really am cautious. I really do check the scanner every six minutes. But there was something in the way she said it, like she already knew the answer, and I have been called boring by three separate women in my life and I was tired of the word. Also, one month of buying her coffee is real money. A guy's got to think about real money.

"And if I do it," I said, "you never call me old man again. And no coffee runs."

"Deal. Deal. Oh my god, are you actually going to do it?" She actually clapped her hands once, quick, like a kid. "Ten seconds, Lawrence. I'm counting out loud. Nobody's coming. If somebody does come, you can dive into the MRI room, it's not like they haven't seen you in there."

"The patients haven't seen me in there without my pants on."

"Then it's a night of firsts for everybody. Come on. Shoes off, shirt off, pants off, stand in the door. I'll count. Go,"

I looked down the corridor. Dim, empty, the exit sign glowing green at the far end. The ultrasound room window was dark on the left, the patient rooms all shut, the hallway ours. My hands went to my shirt buttons and stopped there, and Beth made a noise like a kettle starting.

"Oh he's really doing it. Look at those careful little fingers. Unbutton, Lawrence, it's not a bomb."

"You are enjoying this way too much."

"I have not been this entertained on a shift since the Jell-o incident of 2019. Shirt. Go."

I got the shirt off. Then the undershirt, because a man wears an undershirt, and Beth gave a low whistle that echoed off the tile. Then my shoes, one-handed, propping my foot on a chair. I could feel my own pulse in my ears. Twenty years in this building and I had never once been out of uniform in the corridor, and now here I was at two in the morning getting undressed because a nurse called a fake code.

"Pants," she said. "Come on, coffee's on the line."

I undid my belt and pushed my slacks down and stepped out of them, and there I stood in my boxers and my socks in the open MRI doorway, arms at my sides like an idiot soldier, while Beth Haskins leaned against the desk and started to count.

"One," she said. "Two. Three. Looking good, old man, four."

"You promised no old man."

"Fine, fine. Five. Six."

And that's when we both heard the elevator ding at the end of the hall.

I have never moved that fast in my life. I snatched my pants off the chair and dove into the MRI room, and I want you to picture it, a 54-year-old man hopping on one sock with his slacks bunched in his fist, boxers flapping in the breeze. The elevator doors rolled open down the hall and I pressed myself flat against the magnet housing like I was hiding from a bear.

Beth, meanwhile, did not even move. She just picked up a chart from the desk and held it up and said, in a completely normal voice, "No, that's the wrong patient, check the binder," like she'd been mid-conversation the whole time. And whoever it was, some tech from upstairs by the sound of the footsteps, went the other way toward the stairwell and never even looked down our hall.

Silence again. Then Beth leaned around the doorframe of the MRI room and looked at me. I was still flattened against the machine in my socks.

"You should see your face," she said. "You look like a kid caught stealing cookies."

"Nine seconds," I said. "I did nine seconds. That counts."

"It doesn't count. I was counting. You interrupted my count."

"An elevator dinged, Beth. A man can't count through an elevator ding."

She laughed so hard she had to put her coffee down on the floor, which tells you something about how the night was going. Then she straightened up and looked me over, and I mean looked, boxers and socks and bare chest under the flickering light in the MRI room doorway, and she didn't laugh anymore. She just tilted her head a little.

"OK," she said. "OK. You did it. Mostly. Nine out of ten seconds. I'm a fair woman, I'll call it done. No coffee runs. And you're not boring, Lawrence Engel. Congratulations, that was the bravest stupid thing I've seen in twelve years of nights."

"Thank you. Can I get dressed now?"

"No," she said.

"No?"

"No, because here's my problem. You did a dare. Now I owe you a dare. Fair is fair, and I'm about to prove I'm just as bold as I act." She crossed her arms. "So. My dare. But I pick it."

I stood there in my boxers and realized my heart was doing something I didn't want to name. "I'm listening."

"The ultrasound room," she said. "Lights off. Monitor on. I sit in the chair by the window. You stand in the hallway where the window is dark and watch me," she said it plain, like reading a lab result. "I'll touch myself. Through the scrubs at first. You watch from the doorway. That's the dare. You in?"

I opened my mouth. Nothing came out for a second, which is a bad look when you're already standing around half naked. Two months of talking, real talking, about her breakup and my eight years alone and why we both liked the quiet of nights, and the whole time I'd been hoping for something and not letting myself hope it. And here it was, handed to me at two in the morning next to a humming magnet.

"You sure?" I finally said. "Because that's a lot more than ten seconds."

"That's the point, old man. Oops. Habit. That's the point, Lawrence." She smiled, but her ears had gone pink, and I liked that she was nervous too. "Yes I'm sure. Are you sure?"

"I'm sure."

"Then go stand in the hall. And put your pants back on first, you'll distract the window."

I got dressed fast, hands not quite steady on the belt, and she went into the ultrasound room and shut the door most of the way. I took my place in the hallway where she'd told me, by the dark window on the left, exit sign glowing green way down at the end like a night light. Inside, she killed the overheads and the monitor woke up, and the room went that deep blue gray that machines make, and she was a shape in the chair with the light behind her.

"Can you see me?" Her voice came through the cracked door.

"I can see you."

"Good. Don't come in yet. Doorway only. I mean it."

"I'm in the doorway."

"Then watch."

She started slow. Both hands resting on