by Amy Andrews
‘Yep. Sure can.’ Lola leapt up from her chair in the staffroom, eager to throw her body and mind into a full, busy shift. And she was excited to be the nurse looking after Emma on her last day on the unit.
Everything since the transplant had gone swimmingly well and Lola was thrilled about Emma’s transfer. Two months was a long time to be on the ICU and all the nurses had grown fond of Emma and her lovely supportive family.
For so long it had been touch and go and to see her leaving the unit with a new heart and a new chance at life was why Lola did what she did.
‘Hey,’ Lola said as she approached Emma’s bed to take handover from the night nurse. The background noise of beeping monitors and trilling alarms and tubes being suctioned formed a comforting white noise that blocked out the yammering in her brain.
‘Hey, Lola.’
Emma’s voice was still husky but she beamed at Lola. She’d lost weight, was as weak as a kitten and looked like she’d been in a boxing ring with her smattering of scars, nicks and old bruises, but the sparkle in her eyes told Lola everything she needed to know. Emma’s spirit was strong, she was a fighter. And she was going to be okay.
‘I’ll just get handover and then we’ll get you all ready for your discharge to the ward.’
‘Now, those are some beautiful words,’ Emma quipped. The small white plaster covering her almost healed tracheostomy incision crinkled with her neck movement.
Lola took handover. It was short and quick compared to the previous weeks that had required twenty minutes to chronicle all the drugs and infusions and changes as well as the ups and downs of the shift.
‘How did you sleep?’ Lola asked a few minutes later as she performed her usual checks of all the emergency equipment around the bed.
Emma may be leaving in a few short hours but certain procedures were ingrained for Lola. It was important to know everything she might need in an emergency was here, exactly where it was located and that it was in full working order.
Patient safety always came first.
‘Wonderfully.’
Lola laughed. ‘Somebody should have warned me I was going to need sunglasses today to block out the brightness of your smile.’
‘I am pretty excited about leaving this dump,’ Emma said with a smile.
Lola sighed and clutched her chest dramatically. ‘People never want to stay.’
Emma grinned. ‘I’ll come back and visit.’
Lola grinned too as she put a stethoscope in her ears. ‘Make sure you do.’ She placed the bell on Emma’s chest and listed to her breathing. A patient assessment was performed at the start of every shift.
‘You want to know what I got for Christmas?’ Emma asked as Lola removed the earpieces. ‘Besides a new heart?’
Lola cocked an eyebrow—Emma was vibrating with excitement. ‘Of course.’ Hopefully it’d help take her mind off what Hamish had got her. The little glass jacaranda tree had caused a shedload of problems.
Emma held up her left hand and wiggled her fingers. The oxygen saturation trace on the monitor went a little haywire because the probe was on that hand but that wasn’t what caught Lola’s attention. A big, fat diamond ring sparkled in the sunshine slanting in through the open vertical blinds covering the windows.
‘Barry asked me to marry him and I said yes.’
Lola blinked as the refraction shone in her eyes. Damn it, was the whole world conspiring against her at the moment?
‘Crikey.’ Lola kept her voice light and teasing as she took Emma’s hand and inspected it closely, her heart beating a little harder at the expression of pure joy on her patient’s face. ‘Did he rob that bank he works for?’ Barry was a teller at a bank in the city.
Emma laughed. ‘I’m afraid to ask.’
Lola smiled as she released Emma’s hand. ‘Well, I’m thrilled for you. If anyone deserves a bit of happiness it’s you.’
Emma held her hand out to admire the ring, wriggling her fingers slightly to get a real sparkle going. ‘To think I was never going to do this. Marriage and all that stuff.’
Lola had turned to grab a pair of gloves from the windowsill behind so she could remove the arterial line from Emma’s wrist, but she stopped and turned back. ‘Oh?’
Maybe this was why she felt such an affinity for Emma? She too didn’t want to tie herself down.
‘Yeah.’ Emma dropped her hand to her stomach. ‘Baz and I have only been going out for ten months and he’s asked me twice to marry him now but I always felt like I was a bad bet for a guy. Why would I inflict a woman with a dodgy ticker on someone I supposedly loved without an easy out for him? Better for him to just be able to walk away, for us both to be able to when things got tough.’
‘I see.’
‘Barry’s kinda hard to shake, though.’ Emma grinned. ‘He was determined to stick around. To show me that he was here for the long haul as well as the short haul if that’s the way it panned out.’
Lola nodded. ‘He’s been very dedicated, Emma. He was here every day.’
‘Yeah, I know. But even with my new heart...well...’ Emma grimaced. ‘The potential for complications is real, right? Rejection, infection, complications from medication...and how long will it last till I need another one? But when he asked me yesterday morning to marry him, all that just fell away and love was all that mattered.’
A lump the size of Emma’s bed lodged in Lola’s throat. Isn’t that what May had essentially said last night too? If Lola didn’t know better, she’d say the universe was trying to tell her something.
Just as well she didn’t go in for all that spiritual crap.
‘Sure, my life’s potentially shorter than that of other women my age and it might not all be smooth sailing, but none of us are guaranteed a long life, are we? I mean, I don’t know how old my donor was but he or she didn’t get a say in their life coming abruptly to an end, right?’
Lola nodded. It was still a miracle to her that they’d managed to pull off having a donor and a recipient on the same unit without either being aware of the other.
‘Life’s short, I know that better than anyone, so why shouldn’t I get to live my life fully? Like other people? To love like other people. To share my life, no matter how long it is, with someone else? And I think I owe that to my donor. To live my life fully. Why should I restrict myself to a half-life?’
A half-life. Just as May had said last night.
‘Of course you do,’ Lola said, a little spooked that Emma appeared to be channelling her great-aunt. ‘You deserve all the good things, Emma, and I think it’s exactly what your donor would have wanted.’
Emma smiled and grabbed her hand. ‘So do you, Lola.’ For a second Lola’s heart stopped—maybe her patient actually was channelling Aunty May—but then Emma glanced around the unit at the general hubbub. ‘All the nurses do. You’re freaking angels.’
Lola gave her usual self-deprecating smile. ‘Okay, well, there’s no time to shine my halo at the moment.’ She squeezed Emma’s hand before withdrawing it, all business now. ‘I’ve gotta spring you out of here.’
Emma nodded and sighed and went back to looking at her engagement ring.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THERE WAS A knock on Lola’s door later that afternoon. She’d just shoved the ice cream in the freezer and ripped into a chocolate bar. She might as well have one of those too if she was about to consume a one-litre tub of ice cream, right?
The knock came again and she put the bar down with an impatient little noise at the back of her throat. ‘Coming.’
Her pulse accelerated as she walked towards the door—what if it was Hamish? She had no idea what his plans were for his last week. Was he coming back? His stuff was still all here, or was he going to move in with Grace for his remaining time?
She felt sure if it was him he’d probably just use his key but maybe,
after their words yesterday, he didn’t want to intrude uninvited. Her heart did a funny little giddy-up at the thought. It’d only been twenty-four hours but she missed his face.
It wasn’t Hamish.
It was the police. Two of them—a man and a woman, both in neat blue uniforms and wearing kindly expressions.
Lola frowned. ‘Can I help you?’
The woman introduced them. ‘Are you Miss Fraser?’
‘Yes, that’s right...’ Although she felt rather stupid being called ‘miss’ at the age of thirty. ‘Lola.’
‘You are the next of kin for a May Fraser?’ she clarified.
The hair on Lola’s nape prickled. ‘Yes. She’s my aunt. My great-aunt.’ Lola had been down as May’s emergency contact for the last ten years. ‘Is something wrong?’
Had her aunt fallen on that black run and broken something? Her leg? Or a hip? She was going to be really cranky with herself if she had. But then something worse occurred to her. The police didn’t usually come around just to tell someone their loved one had been injured in a foreign land.
But...what if it was more serious than that? What if there’d been an avalanche? A surge of adrenaline flew into Lola’s system.
‘Could we come in?’
The question was alarming. ‘Please just tell me here.’ Because if they could tell her here, whatever it was, on the doorstep, then it couldn’t be too bad, right?
Lola didn’t notice the barely perceptible exchange of glances that passed between the two police officers. ‘I think it would be better if we came in, Lola,’ the male officer said gently, his smile kind.
Oh, God. Dread burrowed into her veins and the lining of her gut and the base of her skull but Lola fell back automatically to admit them. Once they were sitting, the male officer took up the baton and delivered the news she’d been expecting.
‘I’m sorry to have to inform you, Lola, but your Aunt May passed away earlier today.’
Every cell and muscle in Lola’s body snap froze. Aunty May was...dead? The pounding of her heartbeat rose in her ears as tears sprang to her eyes, scalding and instant.
May was dead.
‘Did she...have a skiing accident?’ Lola wasn’t sure if it was the right thing to ask but her mind was a blank and it seemed logical given what she knew about May’s whereabouts and her intended activity.
‘No.’ The woman took over now as if they were some kind of grief tag team and for a second Lola thought how horrible it must be to deliver this kind of news as part of your job.
Lola had sat through many end-of-life conversations in hospitals, holding the hands of distressed and grieving people. But this? Out of the blue like this? Everything chugging along then bam! Strangers on your doorstep.
‘She was found in her bed,’ the woman continued. ‘She didn’t turn up to meet some people she was going to go skiing with and they raised the alarm. Hostel staff entered her room to find her still in her bed. At first they thought she was sleeping but they couldn’t rouse her. She’d died some time during the night in her sleep.’
Lola shook her head. Died in her sleep. No. Whenever she’d imagined her aunt’s death it’d been her doing something adventurous when she was ninety-seven.
Going out with a bang, not a whimper.
‘But... I was just talking to her yesterday.’ Which was a stupid thing to say given her medical background—she knew how quickly and unexpectedly death could come knocking. ‘She was fine. Are you sure?’
May’s words from the phone call came back to her now and Lola shivered. They’d spooked her a little yesterday but even more so now. May’s insistence that Lola promise her to give love a chance felt like some kind of portent today.
Was that only twenty-four hours ago?
Had her great-aunt known she was not long for this world?
Goose-bumps feathered Lola’s arms at the thought.
‘Yes. I’m afraid so.’ The man again with his gentle voice. ‘It’s been confirmed by all the appropriate officials.’
‘Could it have been...some kind of foul play?’
It seemed like a bizarre thing to ask but no more bizarre than her bulletproof aunt dying in her sleep.
The police officers took her question in their stride. ‘The local authorities say that your aunt was lying peacefully in her bed wearing her sleep mask.’
Lola almost laughed at that piece of information. May used to collect the sleep masks from airlines and swore by them as an antidote to jet-lag. She’d never travelled without one.
‘There’ll be an autopsy, of course, but they’re expecting to find natural causes.’
Lola nodded, the medical side of her brain already making guesses. It had probably been a massive stroke or a heart attack. It wouldn’t have been a bad way to go, a quick death, taking her in the night. But the thought May had died alone was like a knife to Lola’s chest.
It would have been the way her aunt would have wanted it—dying as she’d lived—but Lola wished she’d been able to hug her one last time and she thanked the universe for that phone call yesterday. She was grateful for the time they’d spent chatting, for having spoken to her beloved aunt one last time.
Even if May’s words hadn’t sat easily on Lola’s shoulders.
The officers talked more about procedures and passed over some pamphlets regarding relatives who died overseas. ‘Is there someone we can call for you, Lola? Someone who can be with you now?’
Hamish.
His was the first name that popped into Lola’s head and a tidal wave of emotion swamped her chest. Her fingers curled in her lap as she thought about the solid comfort of his arms around her, about him holding her, keeping her together while her insides leaked out.
But she couldn’t. Not after their argument. Grace came to mind next but as she had lied to her best friend about sleeping with her brother and ignored six phone calls from her in the last twenty-four hours, she didn’t feel able to suggest that either.
Of course, Grace wouldn’t care about any of that in the face of this news. But Lola wasn’t exactly thinking straight at the moment.
‘Um, no.’ She shook her head. ‘I’m good. I’m fine.’ Her mouth stretched into a smile that felt like it had been drawn on her face in crayon.
‘We don’t like leaving people alone after this kind of news,’ the male officer said. ‘Especially at Christmas.’
Between the events of yesterday and working today, Lola had forgotten it was Christmas. ‘It’s okay. Really. I’m a nurse, I work at the Kirribilli in ICU. I’ll be fine.’
That information seemed to relax them both.
‘I’ll ring my mum,’ Lola assured them. ‘May is her aunt. And we’ll go from there.’ She smiled more genuinely this time, realising that her last attempt had probably frightened the hell out of them. ‘I’ll be fine, I promise.’
They left with her assurances but the last thing Lola felt like right now was talking to her mother. She would ring her—in a while. Right now she felt too numb to use her fingers, to use words. She needed time to wrap her head around the fact she was never going to see her favourite person in the whole world ever again.
Lola sat on the couch and fell sideways, pulling her legs up to her chest. Tears pricked at her eyes. May was gone. No more Christmas Day phone calls. No more postcards. No more random drop-ins. No more National Geographic-like pictures or entertaining foreign swear words or endlessly fascinating anecdotes from her travels.
May hadn’t just been some distant, eccentric great-aunt. She’d been Lola’s family. She’d been the one who had understood her when no one else had. She’d been Lola’s sounding board, her shoulder to cry on when life in Doongabi had seemed like it would never come to an end, and had championed her desire to travel and see the world.
Lola realised suddenly she was already thinking of May in the past tense and
pain, like a lightning bolt, stabbed her through the heart with its jagged heat, stealing her breath. The first tear rolled down her cheek. Then the next and the next until there was a puddle.
And the puddle became a flood.
* * *
Hamish stood indecisively outside Lola’s door much the same as he had almost two months ago now. Nervous and unsure of himself. He’d been furious when he’d walked out yesterday and while he’d calmed down significantly, he was still a little on the tense side. He couldn’t remember ever knowing a woman he wanted to shake as badly as he wanted to drag her clothes off and kiss her into submission.
He got it, she was used to keeping her relationships in a box, one where she made all the rules and had all the control.
But to not be open to something more? Something different? Something deeper?
Something better?
It was ironic that Lola had left Doongabi partly because everyone she’d known had been stuck in their ways and yet she was proving to be just as immovable.
He knocked, wary of his reception. Not knowing if she was even home. He knew she’d worked an early shift today, which meant she’d normally be home by now, but maybe she’d made other plans.
And what was he going to say if she was home? What was his plan? Hamish knew what he wanted. He wanted to come back here for his last remaining days. Back into Lola’s house and her bed and her life and make plans with her. Plans about how their future might work out. It wouldn’t be easy to come up with something they were both happy with but he knew they could do it if they put their minds to it.
If they both committed.
But if Lola didn’t want any part of a future with him? Could he live here for the next week and pretend he was okay with her decision? Pretend he wasn’t dying a little each day?
Whatever...they needed to have a conversation which was why he’d come now and not earlier when he’d known she’d be at work. They’d both had twenty-four hours to mull over what had gone down yesterday and he could sit and brood and look obsessively at the picture he’d taken of her that day with jacaranda flowers in her hair, or he could confront her.