A Father by Christmas

by Meredith Webber

  Etty hesitated but Sophie’s mind had stalled at the prospect of dining with her boss every night and she couldn’t find the words to protest.

  ‘Of course,’ Etty continued, as if their silence had been acceptance of the plan thus far, ‘if you’re working late, Sophie, Thomas will be my first concern. I can still feed Gib when Thomas has gone to bed or, if necessary, Gib can fend for himself. He’s not bad in the kitchen.’

  Sophie finally caught up with the conversation.

  ‘I don’t need to eat with you two every night. I’m quite happy with my own company.’

  ‘I doubt there’ll be many meals we share,’ Gib told her, ‘given the situation at the hospital. If I’m not on duty or on call, then you will be, but I can understand you’d want some privacy, so can we leave it that if you’re at home Etty will prepare your dinner? And you’re very welcome to eat with us should you wish to, but we certainly won’t be offended if you don’t.’

  He doesn’t want this false intimacy any more than I do, Sophie realised, then told herself the little squirm of disquiet she felt couldn’t possibly be disappointment. Right now she had to sort out her own and Thomas’s lives, not get involved with a man. Particularly not a man who still lived with the memory of his dead wife!

  Etty poured two cups of coffee, passed them and the chocolate cake around, then excused herself to make some phone calls. Sophie sipped her coffee and tasted the cake—delicious—staring out the wide windows to the river and feeling unaccountably relaxed.

  ‘I usually go up to the hospital at eight on Sunday mornings,’ Gib said, the words quietly spoken so they barely ruffled the peaceful tenor of the room. ‘Is that too early for you?’

  Sophie turned towards him with a smile.

  ‘Apparently you’ve never lived with a three-year-old. Thomas’s day begins with the dawn chorus of the magpies and the cackling laughter of the kookaburras.’

  ‘So you never get to sleep in?’ He was leaning back in the armchair, his feet propped on the footstool, and his smile was as slow and relaxed as his attitude.

  But neither word came near to describing Sophie’s reaction to that smile—a reaction that ran swiftly along her skin and tightened the nerves beneath it, while her stomach quivered with an uncertain delight.

  Oh, dear!

  ‘I don’t mind not sleeping in,’ she managed to say, mentally whacking herself on the side of her head for her stupidity in putting herself in this position—not to mention the stupidity of being attracted to her boss. Was it because it had been so long since she’d been attracted to anyone that this was happening? So long since she’d had time to think about men in a man-woman attraction kind of way?

  ‘Good, then we’ll leave at eight, shall we? We can go in my car. Yui’s on duty so I’ll just check the unit then show you around the hospital—introduce you to the weekend staff and let you get a feel for the place.’

  ‘And little Andrew, how is he?’

  Safe question. Work talk was good. Maybe if they could keep it up, moving in wouldn’t be quite the disaster she’d been picturing.

  ‘We swapped him to a different diuretic. With the fluid in his lungs we didn’t want to take him off it altogether. He’s picked up amazingly in just one day. Was it ever written up, the case you knew of where there’d been a bad reaction?’

  ‘I…’

  She stopped, remembering the other case and when it had occurred—remembering Hil, six months pregnant, coming home with the news that she had breast cancer.

  ‘My boss asked me to do it, but…’

  Keep talking, she told herself, but she couldn’t. Her chest was tight, her throat closed up by a lump as big as Brisbane. Heaven help her! Why was this happening now? She’d been so good—so together—so why now, in front of her new boss, was she falling apart? Damn it all, she could feel tears leaking from the corners of her eyes. She lifted her hands and used the tips of her fingers to wipe them away, heart pounding as she tried to breathe normally.

  Gib watched the long, slim fingers with their pale, pared-down nails brush against her cheeks. He knew she was wiping tears away and knew as well she’d hate it if he mentioned it. Yet every instinct said to go to her, to offer comfort.

  ‘I didn’t get it done,’ she said eventually, while he remained rooted in his armchair, denying instinct, wondering what was happening to him that his chest should feel so tight. ‘Stuff was happening in my life back then. I should have done it because it might have saved Andrew suffering discomfort, not to mention his parents and the staff going into a panic over his condition. It might have saved all the other Andrews as well.’

  Stuff had been happening in her life? Fairly traumatic stuff from the tears. He wanted, quite unreasonably, to know what it had been—to know a lot more about this woman who had come into his life.

  But he could hardly ask…

  ‘Your boss must have known you hadn’t done it. He could have written it up himself, or had someone else do it. That was his job!’

  She was OK now, straightening at the rebuke he couldn’t keep out of his voice, but the rebuke wasn’t aimed at her but at the man or woman who hadn’t followed through on the writing of the paper.

  ‘I guess he had other things on his mind,’ she said quietly, then she switched the conversation to protocols they followed with pre-term births.

  Not a good conversational change as Gib was reminded of a baby he’d lost earlier this week.

  ‘We’ve a resus area set aside in one of the delivery suites and like to have a full team on hand when a baby is born pre-term or with an expected low birth weight. Less than thirty weeks or smaller than one kilogram, we intubate as a matter of course. We do external heart massage, using the chest-encircling technique for bradycardia, use epinephrine and atropine if necessary, generally manage hypotension with whole blood—all the usual things, but the big thing as far as we’re concerned is stabilising the infant before he or she leaves the delivery suite.’

  ‘I think the figures on neonates that have to be moved to special units before they get expert help prove just how beneficial immediate resuscitation is,’ she said, ‘and it’s great that all new maternity wards in hospitals with NICUs have facilities for us to work within the delivery suite. The old delivery rooms were so cramped it was nearly impossible.’

  Which led to talk of where she’d worked, both in Australia and for a short time overseas, but though she spoke easily and even smiled at him occasionally, the image of those long fingers, surreptitiously wiping tears off her smooth cheeks, stayed in his head.

  Thomas was swimming in the pool with Etty when they left for the hospital the next morning, Etty furnished with a list of his likes and dislikes, and orders to insist that Thomas wear his hat outside, no matter how much he objected.

  ‘You’re uneasy. Have you not left him with a sitter before?’ Gib asked, as they drove towards the hospital.

  ‘More uneasy for Etty. He’s exhausting.’

  ‘Knowing Etty, she’ll have him organised in no time. She’d have loved for us—’

  He stopped so abruptly Sophie glanced towards him, seeing the rather stern profile—high forehead, straight nose and stubborn chin—and the dark hair with silver streaks, curling into his neck where it still needed a cut.

  He turned as if her scrutiny had touched him and she saw dark blue eyes that held shadows of sadness too deep to measure.

  ‘Etty told me your wife died,’ Sophie said carefully. ‘Was she ill or was it an accident?’

  He didn’t answer, and Sophie wondered if she’d crossed some invisible boundary he’d prefer to keep erected between them. Then, just as she was about to introduce a safe work topic, he spoke.

  ‘She was driving up the north coast highway—hit a semitrailer. I’d like to think it was an accident,’ he said, so gravely Sophie felt a chill run through her body. ‘But unfortunately for my peace of mind, I think it more likely she took her own life. She had a form of manic depression—bipolar—controlle
d to a certain extent by drugs—when she took them.’

  The last phrase had been added under his breath and Sophie suspected she hadn’t been meant to hear it, but the pain in his voice throughout his explanation was the same pain she’d seen in his eyes. He must have loved her very much. Gillian, her name was—Etty had mentioned it…

  He turned the car into the hospital grounds then wound up and up on a multi-level car park.

  ‘There’s a parking space for you here,’ he said, as if their conversation had never strayed from work-related matters. ‘See, your name’s already painted on the board.’

  It was indeed, but Sophie’s thoughts hadn’t shifted quite as easily as his—or as he was pretending his had. She was still thinking of a woman in so much mental pain that driving her car into a semi-trailer had seemed the only way to relieve it.

  ‘The exit over there brings us straight onto the NICU floor, and the rooms where we see follow-up patients are here as well.’

  He led the way into an unfamiliar corridor.

  ‘Offices down this side—here’s the one you’ll have, although we haven’t liked to clean Pete’s stuff out of it. I’ll speak to him then get Marilyn onto it tomorrow. The next room is a general doctors’ room—consultants use it if they want somewhere to work while they’re here. On the other side, we have our own path lab and a small procedures room.’

  ‘I was reading about your neonatal cardiac surgical team—they have a separate unit?’

  Gib nodded, opening a door and showing her into a brightly decorated waiting room.

  ‘On the same floor but in the wing on the other side of the lift foyer. This is our suite—the waiting room, reception area, two consulting rooms and file room. We’ve a secretary, nurse and Marilyn, the receptionist. She’s the one who rules our lives, making sure we’re where we’re supposed to be and when. The secretaries come and go—they roster through the hospital secretarial pool—but Marilyn has been here since before I began work at the hospital and as that was as an intern, it’s a long time ago.’

  ‘How old are you?’

  Had she really asked that? The astonished look on Gib’s face matched her own disbelief that such a personal question had slipped out.

  ‘I’m sorry, that’s absolutely none of my business,’ she managed, but he’d stopped looking astonished now and was almost smiling.

  ‘But I know how old you are. It was on your job application. So why shouldn’t you know my age?’

  Sophie was thankful she wasn’t given to blushing. She was so hot with embarrassment she’d be tomato red all over.

  ‘I don’t need to—It was stupid—I was thinking—’

  ‘I’m forty-two,’ he said gravely, although the smile still lingered about his lips, visible also in the little crinkly lines at the corners of his eyes. ‘Does that make me an old man in your eyes?’

  A teasing question—nothing more—yet to Sophie there seemed to be a subtext she didn’t understand, as if he might not want her thinking him old.

  Or was she adding subtexts because of the way he affected her?

  ‘Hardly in your dotage,’ she assured him. ‘Though I noticed the pharmacy on the ground floor had a good range in walking sticks.’

  ‘Cheeky minx!’ he said, cuffing her lightly on the shoulder as they moved on down the corridor.

  He’s a nice man. The thought startled Sophie almost as much as her question had earlier. But he was, and so she smiled at him.

  Gib knew he should smile back, but his wedding ring was growing tight around his finger and his practical self was demanding to know how he’d got himself into this fix. Not only was he going to be working with this woman who looked so beautiful when she smiled, but she was living in his house! How had that happened?

  Because it had been so long since he’d felt attraction for a woman, he’d decided he was over it—that it had stopped happening for him.

  ‘Shall we continue our tour?’

  He must have been staring at her, for the smile had gone, replaced by a look of trepidation, and the question, when she’d asked it, had sounded forced.

  ‘I guess we should.’

  He held the door for her then led her further down the corridor, pointing out the various types of equipment they had on hand.

  The final room was a wash room, where they stood at adjoining sinks and scrubbed their hands and arms, before gowning up and stringing masks around their necks in case they were needed. Gib handed Sophie a couple of pairs of gloves, shoving some for himself into the pocket of his gown.

  ‘The unit was originally planned for six babies at a time, but was expanded to ten when we modernised it. At the moment we have nine. You’ve met Andrew, and the others are doing well, with the exception of little Mackenzie Kennedy. We picked up on possible NEC when her mother mentioned something about how well she was doing, and pointed to her fat little tummy.’

  Necrotising enterocolitis—Sophie thought about the insidious disease as she followed Gib to the sick baby’s crib.

  ‘Has she had to have part of her intestine removed?’ Sophie asked him, knowing that if only the inner lining of the bowel was affected it could regrow, but if a whole section of the bowel died it would have to be surgically cut out and the two healthy pieces joined together in a later operation.

  ‘Not yet. She’s really too fragile for surgery so we immediately went NPO—we use the Latin nil per os initials instead of nil by mouth in the unit—and now have her on IV nutrition and we’re suctioning her stomach to remove air and fluid.’

  He paused by a crib, set, as they all were, a good distance from the nearest one. Beside it sat a pale woman, her hand through the port in the crib wall, one finger poked into the baby’s unresponsive hand.

  Gib introduced Maria Kennedy, who nodded at Sophie in that semi-somnolent way exhausted parents often had.

  Sophie leant over the crib, seeing the tiny child spread-eagled on the warm mattress, tubes and monitors almost obscuring the fact this was a tiny human being. Then she looked up at Maria.

  ‘Does she react well to touch?’

  Maria looked surprised, as if doctors didn’t normally ask her that kind of question, but Sophie knew preemies were often stressed by touch, and had to grow used to it.

  ‘She seems to know I’m here if I put my hand near hers,’ Maria said, and although she spoke very quietly, Mackenzie’s translucent eyelids opened and blue eyes stared vacantly upwards.

  ‘Here, little girl,’ Maria said softly, and the baby’s eyes tracked slightly in her direction.

  ‘Well done,’ Sophie said, then realised she shouldn’t have sounded so chirpy for Maria was crying, tears streaming down her cheeks, a handkerchief pressed to her lips as she tried to muffle her sobs.

  A nurse was moving towards them, but Sophie was faster, putting her arm around the distressed woman’s shoulders and helping her out of her chair.

  ‘A room we can use?’ she murmured at Gib above Maria’s head.

  ‘This way,’ he said, and led them out, past the nurse and the other cribs, parents turning to watch their little procession.

  The quiet room was furnished with soft armchairs and a sofa, while against one wall a table held a steaming urn, cups and saucers, coffee and tea bags, and tins of cake and biscuits.

  Sophie urged Maria towards the sofa, then held the woman while she cried, waiting until the sobs subsided before offering a tissue from a box on the table beside the sofa.

  How many boxes of tissues a year would be needed in this room where parents with breaking hearts tried to come to terms with their new baby’s fragility?

  ‘Are you concerned that she’s sick?’ Gib asked, when Maria eventually lifted her head from Sophie’s shoulder and stared blankly around the room.

  A minuscule movement of the head—definitely negative.

  ‘Why don’t we all grab a cup of tea or coffee?’ Sophie suggested. ‘You might feel able to talk about things when you’ve had something to eat and drink.’

>   Another barely noticeable movement, but this time more nod than shake.

  ‘Tea?’ Sophie pursued, and now Maria smiled. It wasn’t much of a smile, but at least it showed her self-control was returning.

  ‘Coffee, two sugars,’ she said, but when Sophie moved to stand up and get it, Gib held up his hand.

  ‘Allow me. What will you have, Sophie?’

  ‘Coffee, please, no sugar, no milk.’

  ‘All you doctors live on coffee—I never understood why until this happened.’

  Maria’s voice broke on the last word, and Sophie reached out to hold her again.

  ‘You’re doing fine,’ she said. ‘Heaven knows, it must be hard enough to have a new healthy baby to care for, but having one who needs so much extra attention, it would scare the living daylights out of me.’

  ‘It’s all right while she’s in here,’ Maria said, turning fear-filled eyes towards Sophie. ‘Here there are monitors and tubes and nurses and doctors, but what happens when I get her home and something like this—this gut thing she’s got—happens there?’

  ‘We’ll still be here for you,’ Gib assured her. Any time, day or night, you can phone the number we’ll give you and a doctor or nurse that you know from the unit will be there to answer your questions or give you advice. If you’re really worried, you bring her straight back to the hospital and one of us will see her down in Emergency. She’s our baby too now. Part of our family.’

  Maria smiled at him but Sophie could feel the woman trembling and knew they hadn’t reached the crux of her concern. She thanked Gib for the coffee he set on the table in front of them and waited until Maria had sipped at hers before asking, ‘You do know we’ll keep Mackenzie here until her intestines are behaving properly and she’s feeding well, and breathing on her own. We wouldn’t send her home while she needs special help and expect you to cope with that alone.’