His skill as a surgeon was undeniable, and while still at university he’d even considered making a career of it, but during their time in Africa he’d realised that his skill lay with people; with helping them, comforting them and, yes, healing them when it was humanly possible.
And it had fired his determination to return to the isolated regions of Australia—areas always crying out for doctors—where his patients would be people he would get to know and care about, not simply a person needing an appendectomy or a new knee.
Ellie caught up as she worked through the afternoon’s patients, so had seen the last one out when Chelsea returned, laden with bags and filled with excitement.
‘You should rest,’ she told the young woman as she locked the surgery door then walked up the front steps and along the veranda to the room Chelsea had chosen.
It had belonged to one of Andy’s sisters, and although Ellie had put fresh sheets on the bed in case of unexpected visitors, she’d done little in the way of redecorating, so it still had posters of old rock bands on the walls and a bookcase full of science-fiction books that the whole Fraser family had loved to read.
Ellie half-smiled, remembering how she’d felt an utter alien herself among people who knew a genre she’d never read as well as the Frasers knew sci-fi.
After depositing Chelsea’s few possessions, Ellie showed her the nearest bathroom, then led her into the kitchen.
‘You’ll probably remember that the kitchen is the centre of the house, it’s where we mainly live,’ she said, adding rather ruefully, ‘That’s when we’re actually at home.’
And living together... She had to talk to Andy!
She’d barely finished the thought when her cellphone buzzed in her pocket.
‘Can you come back up, Ellie? Jonah’s temperature has shot up, and his heart rate is ninety-five. I’m afraid I must have missed something and he could be heading into sepsis.’
‘I’ll be right there.’
She looked at Chelsea, new in town, still uncertain of her welcome, and crossed the room to give her a hug.
‘I hate having to leave you like this on your first day here but I have to go up to the hospital, and from what Andy said I could be a while,’ she said. ‘There’s food in the fridge, or you could walk up the road and get a burger and chips. The TV in the sitting room only has a couple of channels, but feel free to use it, and there are plenty of books around the place. Do you think you’ll be okay?’
‘Don’t worry about me,’ Chelsea assured her. ‘I sat up all night on the train and I’m exhausted. If it’s all right with you, I’ll just get a drink of milk and a sandwich and go straight to bed.’
‘Bless you,’ Ellie said. ‘But I’ll leave both my and Andy’s numbers and if you’re at all worried about anything, please phone one of us.’
‘I’ll be fine,’ Chelsea assured her. ‘I have stayed here before and I know my aunt and uncle were often called out at night. You go and do your work.’
But as Ellie walked swiftly up the road to the hospital, she couldn’t help thinking of the young woman alone in the big house, and wonder just what she was thinking, not to mention what Andy was going to make of it all...
* * *
She arrived to find Andrea, a senior nurse who had specialist anaesthetic training, already in Theatre.
‘I’ll need you to assist,’ Andy said, as Ellie walked in. ‘There’s gear set out in the ante-room, and Tony will help you scrub.’
Ellie took a deep breath. It wasn’t that she hadn’t assisted in operations before. It was part of their medical training, and they’d done a lot in Africa, but surgery had always made her feel anxious, as if she had no business having her hands in someone else’s body. It was impersonal, yet at the same time deeply moving.
Shaking away the thoughts, she changed, scrubbed her hands and arms and held them up for Tony to slide on the gloves. He tied an extra apron around her waist, and she was ready.
‘Will you enlarge the wound you made earlier?’ she asked Andy as she took her place beside him.
A quick headshake.
‘It was big enough, but I must have missed something.’
The tightness of his voice told her how stressed he was—stressed because he felt he’d somehow failed the boy.
‘There was nothing obvious,’ she reminded him, ‘and you didn’t want to interfere with his bowel by poking around under it.’
She paused then added, in a deep, terrifying voice, ‘Never touch the bowel.’
Andy laughed. Her mimicry of a lecturer they’d had in third year had always been good, and the words took him back to when, as students, they and their friends had used the words in more earthy ways.
It broke his tension and he opened the wound, holding it for her to clamp so he had a clear view.
‘Think about the barb,’ he muttered, and although she knew he was talking to himself, she understood what he was getting at. The barb could have pierced a muscle, tendon or even the bowel, and infection had developed in the second site.
But there was nothing obvious. Lecturer or not, he was going to have to touch the bowel.
He gently lifted the nearest coil of the large intestine, checking all around it for damage.
Nothing.
They irrigated the wound again, and closed it up, then all stood frowning at the monitor, which had no good news for them.
‘Hang on,’ Ellie said. ‘Didn’t someone say he was fixing a barbed-wire fence? Imagine what happened. The fence strainers broke, the loose wire would have flicked back, one barb would have pierced his skin. How far apart are the barbs on barbed wire?
‘Roughly a hand span.’ It was Andy who answered, catching on quickly to Ellie’s train of thought.
So some things hadn’t changed...
‘That means the next barb would be here,’ he said, measuring across the boy’s abdomen with his hand.
They all peered at the spot but there was no sign of damage to the skin, or any indication of infection.
‘Imagine him with clothes on,’ Ellie said. ‘Jeans, most likely, and low slung how the kids wear them these days. That barb would have hit the double layer of the pocket, possibly even a stud, so the next barb would be here...’ She used her hand to measure the distance, brushing Andy’s hand then glancing up, meeting his eyes above his mask—a flash of something as sudden and powerful as lightning flashing between them. ‘If the wire wrapped around him.’
They found the wound beneath their patient’s left hip, a tiny pinprick of a mark, surrounded by swollen, angry redness.
While Tony went for the portable X-ray machine, Ellie and Andy propped the boy on his side, careful not to touch each other after whatever it was that had flashed between them earlier.
‘From the size of it, it’s just an infection rather than another foreign object,’ Ellie said, and Andy nodded, although she could tell he was furious with himself for not checking more carefully earlier.
She opened her mouth to say, ‘You weren’t to know,’ but Andrea beat her to it.
Not that Andy would have found any comfort in the assurance. He prided himself on his physical examination of all patients, although earlier this morning the pinprick of a mark could have been all but invisible.
The X-ray showed no foreign matter in the wound, but Andy opened it up anyway. Clearing out the infection already there would lead to a quicker recovery for the boy.
* * *
‘Do you still hate it?’ Andy asked Ellie as they left the hospital an hour later. It was only when she didn’t reply that he looked around to find she’d halted, twenty or so paces behind him, and was gazing up at the night sky.
‘Still gets to you, huh?’ he teased as he walked back to join her, resting his hand on the small of her back as he had so often in the past. Often just a touch in passing, often a prelude—but he wouldn’t go there.
‘I just cannot believe how many stars there are. I know they are there, in the city and we just don’t see them for the other lights, but out here...’
She waved her arms around as if to encompass the beauty she couldn’t put into words.
‘And all yours,’ Andy said, wondering if she remembered his promise to give her the moon and the stars...
And looking at her, her clear skin luminous in the starlight, her golden-brown hair framing a face he’d always thought perfection, he wanted to take her in his arms again, take her back to that time, make her really his once more.
‘Did you ask me something?’
Her question broke the moment, although he knew the moment he’d felt had never been possible.
Thought back to his question.
‘Oh, I just wondered if you still hated surgery?’
She’d started forward but now paused again, turned back to him.
‘I’ve never really hated it so much as felt very uncomfortable. It seems so intrusive to be fumbling around inside someone else’s body.’
Ellie sighed, and shook her head as if to chase the thoughts away.
‘And speaking of bodies, I really need to talk to you about something that came up today. Shall we get a pizza and sit in the park to eat it?’
‘You’ve hidden a dead body somewhere, and need my help to bury it?’ Andy said, hoping the teasing words hid a sudden panic inside him.
Was she tired of their pretend marriage?
Was she leaving him completely?
Did she want a divorce?
Nonsense! he told himself. She’d mentioned bodies. It was something from work she wanted to discuss.
But the tension she’d aroused remained with him as he ordered their pizza, half with anchovies and half without, took extra paper napkins as they’d be eating in the park, and waited while Ellie chatted with the young girl behind the counter, blithely unaware of the torment her words had caused him.
Their marriage as a marriage might be virtually over, but could he live without the woman he loved?
The woman, he was fairly certain, who still loved him?
And could their marriage really be over?
He thought of the times when they’d tried to talk about it, as two intelligent people working out their differences. But the problem with loving someone was that you knew their sore and vulnerable spots—knew the words that would stab them in those places...
Worse still, you used those words as weapons.
So not talking had seemed easier, although Ellie deciding to make the move downstairs had left him feeling hollowed out inside. He was aware it could be a prelude to her leaving altogether for all she’d said they both needed their own space for a while.
Andy carried the pizza up to the park, which was deserted at this time of night, and set it down on a table, aware as he always was of Ellie’s warmth by his side.
But worry about this ‘talk’ now nibbled at his mind so, as he placed a piece of pizza—from the anchovies’ side—on a napkin, and passed it to his wife, he said, ‘Okay, talk. What’s up?’
Ellie turned, questions in her night-dark eyes, and he realised he’d spoken too abruptly.
‘Right!’ she began, apparently reading his anxiety in his face. ‘Chelsea arrived this morning—your cousin Chelsea—and she’s pregnant and wanted to get away from home and people who know her until after the baby’s born. Apparently both her parents are off somewhere and Harry’s been looking after her—’
‘Not very well, if she’s pregnant!’ Andy muttered. ‘Does he know she’s here?’
‘Apparently so,’ Ellie said, ‘although I will phone him when we get home to tell him she’s arrived safely. I tried earlier but his phone was switched off.’
‘But where’s her mother, for heaven’s sake? I know her father’s probably off saving whales somewhere, but her mum? And Harry’s what? All of nineteen, I imagine, and far more involved in his own life at university than caring for his sister. Of all the irresponsible—’
He realised he was yelling now and it really wasn’t Ellie he should be yelling at, but she simply smiled at him and said, ‘She’s off finding herself, apparently.’
‘Mad, they’re both mad, they always have been. How Dad and Ken can possibly be brothers beats me. And as for Jill, why isn’t she at home, looking after a kid who’s barely out of childhood? I would have thought teenage years were when young girls, in particular, needed their mothers around.’
‘She’s sixteen,’ Ellie told him, ‘and twelve to sixteen weeks gestation. A bit hard to be precise at that stage and she has a very slight build.’
She paused, and Andy wondered what worried her about the situation. Apart from it being Chelsea. Teenage pregnancy was far from uncommon these days.
Was she thinking of their arrival here in town—of the coincidence of her being sixteen weeks pregnant when they’d first begun their move to Maytown?
Andy watched as Ellie ate her slice of pizza, chewing and swallowing it before she smiled at him, then shrugged as if uncertain where to begin.
‘I can understand her turning to a boyfriend for comfort, with her parents gone, and that the pregnancy was an accident, but I didn’t want to push her to talk too much about the future.’
He saw the worry in the little crease between her eyebrows, and read it in her voice.
‘The thing is, Andy, we’ll take her in, I was sure you’d agree with that, but I wondered if she—if we...’
It was so unlike Ellie to be this hesitant over something that he reached out and took her hand, feeling her fingers curl into his, warm and sticky from the pizza but accepting his support.
‘I wouldn’t like your mum to find out about our marriage right now and be upset, which she will if I’m downstairs and you’re upstairs while Chelsea’s with us. I mean, it’s a bit like shouting it to the world.’
Her head lifted so she could watch his face as he considered it.
‘Easily fixed,’ Andy said, barely suppressing his delight because the top part of the house was desperately empty without Ellie in it. A cool, contained and even frosty Ellie was better than no Ellie at all.
If only he’d realised that before she’d made the move downstairs. He should have talked to her about feeling shut out; about his own pain, and how much it had frightened him; about feeling cast adrift after she left —
‘You’ll move back up? I’m still sleeping in Dad’s old room, so you can go back into Mum’s.’
She half smiled and he guessed that life in the downstairs flat hadn’t been entirely joyous either.
‘I didn’t take all that much,’ she said, ‘but, yes, I think that would be best.’
‘And Chelsea? Has she planned anything beyond escaping to Maytown for the period of her pregnancy?’
Ellie shrugged.
‘We barely talked, and right now she’s confused, and lost, and really needs to know she’s safe and loved and cared for. I do wonder about Jill going off like that when Chelsea is still so young. Do you think because her husband is always off somewhere, she felt it was her turn?’
Andy grinned at her.
‘Who knows what goes on in other people’s relationships?’ he said, and she responded with a small smile, turning her fingers so she could squeeze his hand.
‘Too true. Look at ours!’ she said with a smile.
The smile and something in her tone of voice suggested there was more hope than defeat in the words but before he could pursue it, Ellie was talking again.
‘Well, all we can do is be there for her. I can only help her with her pregnancy at the moment, and perhaps you and I can both talk with her about the future. About the baby, maybe—’
‘No!’
The word seemed to echo around the park, far too loud, far too
strong, far too emotionally charged...
Andy breathed deeply, counted to ten then another five, and regained a semblance of control over the dark fear that had seized him.
‘I know she’s family and I’m happy to take her in, but just what is going to happen to the baby when it arrives? Will you want to keep it, too? Is this your way of getting back at me for refusing more IVF? How long before you start thinking of it as your baby?’
Obviously, the counting hadn’t helped because he was shouting now. Ellie’s face looked white and strained in the gloom.
The silence that fell between them was somehow louder than his words, broken only when Ellie stood up and said quietly, ‘I was only thinking we might help her. Yes, take her in, she’s family. It’s up to her to decide about the baby but while she’s with us we might both be able to help her find a path ahead—at least begin to plan for her future.’
She stepped backwards away from the bench she’d been sitting on, and turned away, pausing only to say, ‘And it was our baby I wanted, Andy, not someone else’s.’
CHAPTER THREE
HOW HAD THEY gone from hand-holding to being back at war? From what had felt almost like old times to cold apartness?
Andy caught up with her as she stormed away, his long strides easily covering the ground he’d lost.
But getting past his careless words wouldn’t be as easy. There’d been no mistaking the raw pain in her voice, even months after they’d lost their baby.
‘I’m sorry,’ he began, wondering why the words sounded less meaningful than they would have if his arms had been around her, holding her as he whispered them into her ear.
But he did touch her shoulder, draw her closer, so he could look into her eyes.
‘Of course we’ll help Chelsea decide what she wants to do.’ He ploughed on, realising this wasn’t such a great idea as Ellie’s lips were right there in front of him, and so damn kissable.
He needed to take a deep breath and walk on.
He needed to walk and talk, not stop and kiss...
‘I imagine she’ll be at school during the day, and hopefully she can make some friends before the end of term.’
The Doctors' Christmas Reunion Page 3