by Lilian Darcy
Another contraction came and she pushed again, dissipating too much of her energy in groaning. Emma came in close to help Chris hold her, and coached, ‘Down, Janelle. Push down. Don’t let it come up through your throat. You’re doing great. The baby’s almost here.’
‘Fantastic, Janelle,’ Pete said. ‘We’ll have the head on the next contraction.’
He had to take an awkward position himself to catch the baby.
‘Legs further apart if you can, Janelle,’ Emma said. ‘Chris, if you could support her lower down?’
Janelle pushed again, more efficiently this time, and the head squeezed free. Pete checked that the cord was clear and rotated the shoulders. Janelle panted desperately, and as soon as the next contraction began she gave another push and a little boy was fully born. He cried at once and fought Pete’s attempts to suction out his nose and throat.
The new parents were both in tears. Emma clamped the cord as Janelle slumped forward onto the bed. ‘Oh, a boy!’ she said. ‘A beautiful boy! This is amazing!’
‘You’ve done really well, Janelle,’ Pete told her. ‘Would you like us to help you onto the bed, now, and you can hold him?’
For the next ten minutes, Janelle and Chris were oblivious to everything but baby Lachlan, while Pete waited for a final spate of mild contractions and delivered an intact and good-sized placenta, which Emma took for weighing.
‘Tiny tear,’ Pete said to her quietly. ‘I’m not even going to stitch it, because in that position, it’ll heal better on its own.’
‘You won’t be late for dinner after all,’ Emma commented.
‘Dinner?’
‘Oh, nothing. Mary Ellen thought Janelle might go slower than this and you’d miss your meal, that’s all.’
Pete didn’t answer for a moment, but Emma felt his eyes upon her, making her heat up as if she were under a barrage of operating lights. ‘I guess you’re eating at the hospital,’ he finally said.
‘I only came on at three,’ she answered. ‘I’ll grab a break once mum and bub are settled in post-partum.’
‘I’d…uh…I mean, I often grab something in the cafeteria, but tonight I have to pick up the girls.’
‘Right.’ She hesitated, then asked before she could rethink the wisdom of the question, ‘How’s it all going, Pete?’
‘Taking its time. Limping along. Claire is going to put the house on the market. She definitely wants to study in Canberra next year. I can’t stand in the way. It’ll be too good for her mental and emotional health for me to block the idea.’
‘But it won’t be good for yours.’
‘She’s planning to take the girls so, no, it won’t be good for mine.’ He tried to smile, but failed miserably. ‘I don’t want them to go. If the move to Canberra looks permanent, I’ll probably look at selling up and relocating there myself. So much for our garden!’
Emma touched his sleeve. Such an inadequate gesture of support, but it was all she could give, and any sense that the time might soon be right for a second chance between them evaporated like morning mist.
CHAPTER TEN
GIAN DI LUZIO and Kit McConnell were getting married this afternoon. Pete had cleared his schedule as far as possible, but there was always the danger of running behind and finishing late.
His senior receptionist, Angela Meredith, had already presented him with a couple of patients she thought he would want to squeeze in, and she’d been right. Angela had good diagnostic instincts. He saw one of the squeeze-ins and sent the man straight off to hospital with suspected heart trouble, then had to spend longer than scheduled on another patient, whom he’d wrongly anticipated would be routine.
The waiting room looked more crowded every time he went out to pick up his next file. Then came a few easy cases. The three-year-old with the rash didn’t have impetigo. Forty-five-year-old Sarah Lessing’s mole did look nasty, but only because it had got scratched recently. It didn’t need a biopsy. Next, a middle trimester prenatal visit took just a few minutes.
The waiting room didn’t look so frightening any more. Then Angela’s alert diagnostic instincts came into play once again and she intercepted him, with her hand held over the mouthpiece of the phone, before he called in his next patient.
‘Claire,’ was all she said, in the carefully neutral undertone she always used for his ex-wife now.
Claire often phoned him at the surgery, and almost always on the subject of the girls, but she usually picked her moments better than this. She usually needed time to talk, too, or she wanted to get out of a prearranged interval with the girls.
‘I can’t take them this weekend after all,’ the story would go. ‘Can they stay on with you? Mum’s got a gastric upset, and the real-estate agent has scheduled three sets of people to come through the house.’
She’d put their marital home on the market and applied for a full-time course in Canberra. He hadn’t come to terms with this last reality yet—that Jessie and Zoe would be living four hours’ drive away in just a few months’ time. Instead, he had put off any concrete plan for a move of his own, and always agreed at once to any proposed change of plan for the day, only too glad to spend more precious hours with his daughters and avoid yet another packing of their well-travelled overnight bags.
This phone call today, when he had a good friend’s wedding to attend a few hours from now, was one of the few occasions when he wouldn’t welcome taking the girls.
‘I’ll take it inside,’ he told Angela, and she nodded and switched the call through to the phone in his office.
‘Help, Pete!’ Claire squealed into the phone as soon as he spoke her name. ‘Zoe fell off the climbing set and she’s done something to her arm.’
‘Broken?’
‘I—I don’t know. She’s just holding it against her body and crying. She won’t show me. I think it must be, but I can’t see, and I’m all shaky.’
‘Can you drive?’
‘Yes. Yes, I can do that.’ She took a deep breath. ‘I have to calm down a bit, don’t I?’
‘Bring her in, and I’ll take a look.’
‘It was all my fault. I wasn’t—’
‘Don’t think about that now. Just get here as soon as you can.’ He looked at his watch. A quarter to four. If she hadn’t got around to making Jessie and Zoe an afternoon snack yet, and that was likely…‘Grab a couple of muesli bars for them, Claire.’
‘I don’t think I have any.’
‘Something, then. Something quick. Cheese sticks? Banana? Cake?’
‘I—OK. Yes. There must be something.’
‘Something quick,’ he repeated, then could feel her getting frazzled down the phone. She didn’t think ahead, and then panicked at small, practical suggestions like this. He shouldn’t have said anything. He almost barked at her, Forget it! But he didn’t want her to feel inadequate, so he told her more gently instead, ‘If you don’t have anything to hand, don’t worry. Just come straight in.’
He fitted in two more patients between ending the call and seeing Claire and the girls walk through the door. Jessie had a big bag of corn chips in her hand, and was feeding the odd one to Zoe, in between swallowing handfuls of them herself. Zoe obviously felt too miserable to be hungry.
As Claire had said, she cradled her arm against her body like an injured animal, and still had tears of pain running down her face. Pretty convinced that the arm was indeed broken, Pete took all three of them straight into his office.
‘Now, where does it hurt, darling?’ he asked.
He expected her to point to an area between wrist and elbow, where most children’s arm fractures occurred, but instead she touched her shoulder. ‘Up the top,’ she said.
The humerus? An unusual break. It would need the confirmation of an X-ray, but even if it was broken, this particular kind of fracture couldn’t be put in a cast, short of encasing Zoe’s entire shoulder and half her chest in plaster.
A broken humerus could be an indication of non-accidental injury. He didn
’t suspect that in this case, and wouldn’t have believed it without absolute proof, but he had to ask. ‘How exactly did it happen, Zoe?’
‘I was playing on the climbing set.’
‘In the garden at Mummy’s?’ He knew Claire’s answer to this already, of course.
‘Yes.’ Zoe nodded. ‘And my foot got caught when I jumped down, and I was hanging, then I fell on my arm.’
He felt a wash of relief that he fought to keep from showing. He hadn’t suspected Claire. She could be vague and diffident and disorganised with the children, yes, but never cruel or hot-tempered. All the same, Zoe’s convincingly clear-eyed and simple account, so different from the coached and rehearsed stories he’d heard from frightened abused children a couple of times in his career, took away a terrible, illogical fear.
‘It’s all my fault,’ Claire said.
He touched her arm. ‘I’m sure it wasn’t.’
‘I was inside the house, talking on the phone. I wasn’t watching them.’
‘You can’t sit and stare at them constantly while they play, at their age. The garden’s safe from any obvious dangers. This was just one of those things. You’ll have to take her up to the radiology clinic across from the hospital for an X-ray, but I’m going to go with what I suspect and put it in a sling now. That’ll ease the pain, and I’ll give her some paracetamol as well.’
He looked at Claire. She was shaky and pale.
‘Angela will make you some tea. Jess, do you want to watch me make a sling for Zoe’s arm, or will you go and play toys in the waiting room?’
‘Play toys,’ Jessie said.
‘I’ll sit with her,’ Claire said promptly. She just didn’t function well in this kind of situation.
Zoe had stopped crying. ‘Is it not hurting so much now?’ he asked her.
‘Not so much,’ she answered.
‘That’s because you’re holding it nice and still, and the sling and the medicine will help, too.’
‘Will I have to have an injection?’
‘No, sweetheart, and the X-ray won’t hurt either.’
He drew up a dose of liquid paracetamol in a plastic syringe and Zoe sat obediently still while he squirted it into her mouth. It had a strawberry flavour, and most children liked it enough to refrain from fighting and spitting it out.
He buzzed through to Angela, and asked her to make Claire some tea, with milk and sugar, then folded a big square of gauze into a firm sling and gave Zoe an orange lollipop from the secret stash of bravery awards in his desk, kept for just such occasions as this.
He sent her out to lick it in the waiting room, while she watched her sister play. She had become much more cheerful already.
Meanwhile, Angela had her hand over the mouthpiece of the phone again, and that this-is-a-call-you’ll-want-to-hear-about look on her face.
All right, what now? The waiting room had begun to resemble a peak-hour city train station again.
‘Hit me with it, Angela,’ he said. ‘What emergency is this?’
‘No, you’ll like this one,’ she answered. ‘It’s Rebecca Childer. Alethea is home from Royal Children’s, and doing well.’
‘That’s great!’
‘Rebecca is wondering if you’d like to see the baby this afternoon if she brings her in. Apparently you’d told her ages ago that you wanted to see her as soon as they got back. She sounds…’ Angela searched for the right word ‘…keen.’
‘Does she?’ He caught his receptionist’s sub-text. Don’t say no. ‘Tell her, yes, I’d love to see Alethea.’
Only I’d rather it wasn’t this afternoon.
Angela smiled, satisfied. Just who was in charge here, anyway? Pete wondered briefly.
‘Claire, can we talk?’ he said to his ex-wife, and she must have read an ominous meaning into his words which he hadn’t intended, because her face went tight and her nod was a jerk of tension, as if she were a puppet and an unseen hand had just pulled a string.
When the two of them were shut in his office, he tried to stay positive and reassuring, but he had that crowded waiting room out there, and Rebecca on her way in with her fragile little heroine. He just didn’t have a lot of time for this.
‘Now, they’ll have to take the sling off again for the X-ray, of course,’ he said. ‘I’ve written out the form, and booked her in. Four-fifteen, which is…’ he looked at his watch again ‘…soon. But at this time of day, they’re probably running a bit late.’
Aren’t we all?
‘They’ll help you put the sling back on,’ he continued, ‘but you may have trouble with it over the next few days. Kids can’t keep still. It’ll work loose, or something. You can buy shaped slings at the pharmacy, and I’d suggest doing that today, because you’re bound to need it. You can also pick up some over-the-counter pain medicine that’s a little stronger than what you’d have at home. Talk to the pharmacist.’
Nothing too onerous in any of that, he thought, and looked at her, waiting for a nod, or a question, or—
‘I can’t do this, Pete,’ she said.
‘Yes, you can,’ he coached her patiently. ‘She’s stopped crying. She’s OK.’
‘No. I mean all of it.’ She waved her hands. ‘I’m not good with them. I never was. I’m supposed to be, because mothers just are, and I’ve been trying. I kept thinking if we could sort out our marriage, at least you were around, too, but we couldn’t manage that in the end and—Today seems like the last straw. I hate this! How terrible would it be if I don’t take them to Canberra with me when I move? If I left them here with you?’
Her face was tight, pleading for reassurance and agreement. Her hands were screwed up so tight that her nails had to be gouging into her palms, and her knuckles were white. It had cost her so much to say this, and to understand her own feelings in the first place.
How terrible would it be?
A sudden crystal clear light flooded the whole landscape of Pete’s life. His marriage. Claire. The girls. His agonised sense, lately, that he ought to move to Canberra, too. His failed attempt at a relationship with Emma, which still ate at him every time they met.
And he thought, Of course! Is this why it’s been so hard for Claire to come up with a consistent plan? It is! This has been a huge part of the problem all along! She’d been impossibly torn between what she thought she should feel, and what she really did feel, and she hadn’t been able to admit it, even to herself.
‘It wouldn’t be terrible, Claire,’ he answered, his voice rough with urgent sincerity. ‘It’s probably the best decision you could make, the absolute best, and a courageous one, too.’
‘I want to see them, have them for holiday visits, phone them and send them presents and put their paintings on my fridge and boast about them to my friends and all of that,’ she answered, fast and shaky, as if she still had to convince him. ‘But I just can’t have them. I panic. I do it wrong. I’m not good for them, and they’re not good for me in the long run. They need to live here, with you.’ She blinked tears from her eyes.
‘We’ll talk about it some more when I’ve finished for the day,’ he told her gently. Mentally, he waved goodbye to Gian’s and Kit’s wedding, doubting he’d get there at all. ‘We’ll meet at your house and give them an early meal in front of a video while we get the practical stuff sorted out. I think this is the best decision you’ve made, Claire, and I support it fully.’
‘I just couldn’t admit it to myself.’
‘Because mothers aren’t supposed to feel that way. Mothers cop too much flak!’
‘Half the time from themselves!’
‘Things are going to seem clearer for both of us now.’
‘Tell me again about what I have to ask for at the pharmacy. Write it down.’
‘No, tell you what, I’ll phone Trevor White—you know, the pharmacy in Hill Street, on the way to your place—and he’ll have the right sling and the right medicine ready for you when you get there.’
‘Thanks, Pete. Thanks for everyth
ing.’
Claire and the girls left for the radiology clinic. Pete saw another patient, and then a series of cooing exclamations just beyond his office door told him that Rebecca and her baby had arrived. He went out, and the first person he saw in his waiting room was Emma.
She hadn’t caught sight of him yet, because she was too busy cooing at the baby in Rebecca Childer’s arms, but Angela met him with a beaming smile.
‘You’ve organised quite a reunion,’ he drawled at her.
He wasn’t angry. Not really. But he’d geared himself up for seeing Emma at the wedding, not here. Claire had just dropped a bombshell on him which they hadn’t had time to talk through, and he probably wasn’t going to make it to the wedding now. It left him feeling…out of step somehow.
He hadn’t even glimpsed Emma this week, hadn’t spoken to her at any length since Lachlan Hancock’s birth, and didn’t want an unsatisfactory five minutes with her now. He wanted much more, or he wanted nothing. He thought, without having time to think, that Claire’s decision might have opened a whole new world of possibilities, but did Emma still want any of them, after more than six weeks of awkwardness and silence? And was he at the point where he could ask?
He didn’t want to get this wrong. The time they’d spent together weeks ago no longer seemed quite real, after the distance and sense of failure that they’d endured since.
‘Yes, well, Susan brought Rebecca and Alethea in, of course, so she’s here,’ Angela said. ‘And then Rebecca had said to me over the phone that if any of Alethea’s nurses wanted to see her and were around, she’d love them to come in, too. I didn’t want to disturb you again, and I was sure you wouldn’t mind, so I made a couple of calls, and here we are.’
She waved an arm around and he saw Sue North and Jane Cameron as well, flanking Emma on each side, although he hadn’t even glimpsed them till Angela had mentioned ‘nurses’.
‘Nell Cassidy’s still caught up at the hospital, unfortunately, although I did phone her, too,’ Angela added.
‘Dr Croft!’ Rebecca exclaimed, and Emma looked up at once, giving him an uncertain smile that caught at his heart and tore strips off it. He wouldn’t be surprised if she’d moved on in her heart. He’d given her so little—so little shared time to remember, so little of the future to count on.