The Doctor Calling

by Meredith Appleyard

  ‘I’m going to get a glass of water. Do you want anything?’

  ‘Laura,’ he said and reached out, took her hand. ‘I need to apologise.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘For my earlier rudeness. For not being who and what you need me to be. You deserve the best.’

  ‘What I need is up to me to decide.’

  ‘I care about you, and I don’t want to hurt you.’

  ‘Well, you are hurting me. You’re a much better man than you give yourself credit for.’

  He expelled a frustrated breath, let go of her hand. ‘Like I’ve said before, I have nothing to offer you, Laura.’

  ‘You have yourself.’

  ‘I’m hopeless with relationships, I’ve ignored my family, hurt them, been the biggest disappointment to them.’ His voice cracked and he shifted in the chair restlessly. ‘Time’s running out and I don’t even know how to make amends, how to say sorry.’

  ‘And like I said before, Jake, you say sorry, just like that, and you mean it.’

  ‘It’s too little, too late.’ The words were muffled behind his hands.

  ‘It is how it is. You can’t go back, so make the most of the present.’ She meant the advice for herself as much as for him. ‘Do you want a drink, coffee?’

  She flicked on the verandah light, bathing them in its buttery glow. Moths appeared instantly out of the darkness.

  ‘No, thanks. Jess will want to go home soon. The boys have school tomorrow.’

  ‘I’ll come over in the morning and take Skip for a run.’

  ‘If you like. I brought him in because I know Dad likes to see him.’ He stood up, raked at his hair with his hand, almost like he wanted to pull it out. ‘The palliative-care nurse helped us move Dad into the hospital bed. He didn’t protest like I’d imagined he would.’

  ‘It’ll make it easier for him, and for you.’

  ‘The nurse showed me how to check the syringe pump with the morphine in it. Either Jess or I will be here from now on.’

  ‘If you have any problems with the pump, give me a call. And I can help out when I’m not working.’

  ‘Thanks. I’ll see you tomorrow.’

  ‘Goodnight, Jake.’

  They stood there awkwardly for a few moments, and when he’d made it to the edge of the verandah he swung around and said, ‘What about that bed you wanted me to help you shift? Do you want help to move it now?’

  ‘I’d love you to help me move it now, but you need to get back. We’ll make it another time, okay?’

  ‘How about Wednesday afternoon? Jess’ll be here and you won’t be working, will you?’

  ‘Not that I know of. Wednesday would be great. I’ll call you if anything changes. Thanks,’ she said.

  His face was shadowed and she sensed his longing, and his regret. It matched her own. Moments later the gate screeched on its hinges.

  ‘Milt?’ Laura tapped on the door. It crept open a few more centi­metres and she peered around the edge.

  Kaylene said he’d arrived about an hour earlier, while Laura was consulting. Catching up with him now would save her dropping in the next day: the conversation she’d promised to have with him wasn’t one for the telephone.

  ‘Can I come in?’

  ‘You’re practically in, you might as well come the rest of the way.’

  She hovered in the doorway until Milt waved towards the chair opposite his desk. She pushed the door closed behind her. Unlike Laura, he kept the desk between him and his patients.

  ‘You know you really are very much like your great-aunt Dorothy. She was tall and was always looking for the best in everyone. I hadn’t thought about her for years.’ He sat back and appeared as if he’d drifted off to someplace else. ‘What can I do for you?’ he said at length.

  ‘Linda, your wife, came to see me. At home.’

  Milt sat up straighter in the chair, his eyes narrowing. ‘And?’

  ‘She’s worried about you, Milt. She suspects you’re not well but you won’t talk to her and that worries her even more.’

  ‘And this is your business, how?’

  ‘You’re right, it isn’t any of my business, and I’d rather stick bamboo slivers under my fingernails than have this conversation, but she was very upset and I agreed to talk to you.’

  He picked up his pen and tapped it on the desk blotter.

  ‘I’ll make a deal with you,’ he said and Laura found herself instantly on guard. ‘You tell me why you took a break from medicine, and I’ll fill you in on what’s probably worrying Linda.’

  ‘I’m not sure that’s fair,’ she said.

  ‘It’s not, but then what about life is? Ask Claudia Samuels. Ask Neill Finlay.’

  ‘True.’

  Laura heard muffled voices, laughter, and then a door slammed. The staff had left. Milt tilted his head and she knew he’d heard them leave, too.

  ‘Well?’ he said.

  Laura fiddled with one of her diamond-stud earrings and then folded her hands tightly on her lap.

  ‘I had a breakdown,’ she said matter-of-factly. ‘Anxiety attacks. It happened while I was seeing patients.’

  In a few blunt sentences she went on to recount the life events that had culminated in her breakdown.

  ‘I had no idea. And Neill Finlay wouldn’t give anything away.’

  ‘Good for him, and I’m all right now. I was concerned when I came back to work, and there have been moments when I’ve wondered if I came back too soon. But generally, it’s all good. Now, it’s your turn.’

  He dragged at his jowls and then reached into the bottom drawer of his desk, handed her an envelope. She took it, opened it and slid out the sheets of paper. The further she read, the dryer her mouth became. When she’d finished reading she carefully returned the reports to the envelope and handed it back to him.

  ‘Milt, why have you kept this from your wife?’

  ‘I suppose I wanted to be sure about the diagnosis. And Linda’s been caught up with the new grandkids. Twins, you know. I didn’t want to put a damper on all that.’

  ‘Yes, but . . .’

  Milt shook his head slowly and Laura shut up. ‘It’s done. It was my choice, all right? Now I have all the information, I’ll tell her.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘I haven’t decided. Not keen on the surgery. They’re making breakthroughs with radiotherapy, though. And I need to have the MRI to see if there’re any metastases before I make any decisions.’

  ‘You need to tell Linda, Milt. She’s your wife, she deserves to know, and she should be part of the decision-making process.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ he said with a mock salute.

  She smiled. ‘I suppose you’ll need some time off work.’

  ‘I’ll need time off work for more investigations, and then treatment. If all else fails, I’ll need time off to die. It’s certainly not how I envisaged my retirement.’

  ‘No,’ Laura said softly, thinking this wasn’t at all how she’d envisaged this conversation. ‘What can I say, Milt? I know your plan was to cut down and then retire, and I can appreciate that you’d want to do that in your own time, not be forced out by illness.’

  ‘God knows I’ve broken bad news to enough patients over the years. It’s another thing entirely when the bad news is all about you.’

  Resignation chased despair across his craggy features.

  ‘Milt,’ she said. ‘When Linda visited she asked me what my long-term plans were. I said I didn’t really have any but there’s still heaps of work to do on Dorothy’s house.’ She looked directly at him. ‘What I’m trying to say is, I can stay here for the short term, if that’s what you want. I like working here, I like the community and I think they might like me. And I have several months of leave left before I have to make a decision about my job in Adelaide.’

  He sat for a few minutes and Laura waited. Then he looked at his watch, pushed himself to his feet. ‘That’s a generous offer, Laura. I need to think abo
ut everything, digest it all, talk to Linda and the kids.’ He rubbed the small of his back as he ushered Laura towards the door. ‘I’ll let you know as soon as I’ve worked out what I’m going to do,’ he said.

  ‘Is there anything I can do now?’

  Milt paused. ‘Yes, there is one thing. My specialist has pulled some strings and I can have the MRI Thursday. I was going to say no —’

  ‘Of course I’ll work for you on Thursday. I’d offer to do Friday as well but Neill is going downhill fast, and I want to be available for the family as much as I can.’

  ‘Life is full of cruel ironies, is it not?’ He closed the door behind her.

  Laura mechanically tidied her desk, shoved the stethoscope into her doctor’s bag and the lunch box into her shoulder bag, her mind going at one hundred miles an hour. Prostate cancer. Advanced prostate cancer. What was Milt’s prognosis? Had it metastasised already? And had she just offered to stay in Potters Junction while Milt Burns had more investigations and whatever treatment he needed?

  She dropped into the chair. Staying in Potters Junction for a while was okay. It was feeling more like home every day. The health-centre staff were lovely and the hospital staff were gradually accepting her. And she was enjoying the medicine. It was much more challenging and unpredictable – you never knew what you might have to deal with from one day to the next. At first it had been daunting but with a few successes under her belt she could feel her confidence building. Laura wondered if subconsciously she’d already made the decision to stay. It’s not like she was locking herself in forever. She would stay while it worked for her.

  What would Jake say about her decision? Did it matter? Heat and longing coursed through her. With a moan she propped her head on her hands. Their relationship . . . Her breath came out of her nose with a rush. Relationship! You could hardly call what they had a relationship. They’d been on one date, if dinner at the pub on a Sunday night was a date. And they’d kissed, once. But wow, the chemistry of that kiss!

  Over the weeks they had become friends. Reluctantly, tentatively. And now, with a flash of insight, she realised her feelings for Jake ran far deeper than friendship. Her pulse leaped and a surge of adrenaline tightened her stomach. She sat up straight in the chair. She’d fallen in love with him. Of course what Jake thought about her decision to stay on in Potters Junction mattered. The sad part was it probably wouldn’t matter to him. The phone on the desk beeped and Laura jumped.

  ‘Kaylene? I thought you’d gone.’

  ‘No, I’m still here. I just saw Doctor Burns leave. He walked right past reception, didn’t even speak to me. He looked —’ She paused. ‘Strange. He looked strange. Is everything all right?’

  ‘Kaylene, you’d need to ask him that.’

  ‘Right,’ Kaylene said, drawing the word out into a whole sentence loaded with meaning.

  ‘Now, did you want me for anything?’

  ‘Yes. Please ring the hospital.’

  It was one hell of a day for Laura, and it ended late after the RFDS had retrieved a farmhand who’d fallen backwards off the tray of a semitrailer and fractured his skull, and maybe some of his vertebra. When she’d first spoken to the RN, her heart had missed a beat. For a moment she’d imagined it was Jake and then with overwhelming relief she remembered he was home with Neill. She drove straight from the health centre to the hospital.

  Laura didn’t let herself relax for a moment until, after several hours with the patient, the retrieval team walked through the doors of A&E and took over. Spinal boards and Stiffneck collars were way out of her comfort zone, and she was the first to admit it.

  She came home, went straight to the bathroom and stripped off her clothes to take a much-needed shower. The phone vibrated on the bathroom cabinet as she stepped onto the bath mat. She swore, quickly dried her hands and picked it up.

  ‘You’re home.’

  ‘Jake. I just stepped out of the shower.’

  ‘Don’t tell me things like that. It’s better for me if I don’t know that you’re naked.’

  She laughed, tried to dry herself with one hand, nearly dropped the phone, then gave up and sat on the edge of the bath.

  ‘It’s after ten. How come you’re so late?’

  ‘We had an emergency at the hospital. The retrieval team came.’

  ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I watered the vegies and the pots on the back verandah earlier and helped myself to coffee. You know you really should hide your spare key in a better place.’

  ‘Thanks for doing the watering. I didn’t get to see Neill today. Please tell him I’ll come tomorrow.’

  ‘I’ll do that. I’ll talk to you tomorrow. And put some clothes on, Laura.’

  ‘Night, Jake,’ she murmured and disconnected. Her skin was flushed and hypersensitive as she finished drying off.

  It was lunchtime on Wednesday when Jess pulled into her father’s driveway. School broke up for the summer holidays on Friday and Jess was driving Sam and Mikey to Port Augusta on Saturday to do Christmas shopping, if all was well. That is, if her dad was still alive and it was okay for her to leave for a few hours.

  Darren had been phoning every night and they had actually started to talk, really talk. Last night he’d asked if he could visit on Christmas Day. Jess had said that she needed to think about it a bit more. And she had. It was all she’d thought about, listing the pros and cons in mental columns. It unnerved her that at the top of the ‘against’ list was the fact that she didn’t know how she’d feel when she saw him again. Darren was the person she’d loved since they were teenagers. They’d grown up with each other, learned how to be adults, how to be parents. All of this they’d done together. Now they were apart and it hurt.

  She opened the car door. It was stinking hot already and what was left of Neill’s garden wilted under the relentless sun. Jess grabbed Laura’s basket off the front seat – the one Laura had brought out to lunch filled with garden produce. Now it bore a carton of home-grown eggs, which was nowhere near enough to begin to repay Laura for what she’d done for Jess and her family. Potters Junction had been big-time lucky when Laura O’Connor had chosen it as the place to come to do whatever it was she’d needed to do. Jess hoped she’d stay and wondered if the way she’d seen her brother look at Laura would make him want to stick around, too. Jess sighed as she stepped up onto the front verandah. No point getting her hopes up, given Jake’s track record.

  She let herself in the front door. The double glass doors to the sitting room were closed and she could hear the whir of the air conditioner. When she entered and took in the room, its transformation into a virtual hospital ward, the reality of the situation hit her like a vicious punch. He father was dying.

  She gave him a peck on the head. ‘How are you, Dad?’

  ‘So-so, love. You?’

  Jess had to strain to hear him. She nodded, forced a smile. There’d be time enough for tears later.

  ‘I’m okay. Sam and Mikey are counting down the days to school holidays and Christmas. Where’s Jake?’

  ‘Jake’s right here,’ her brother said from behind her. ‘Dad doesn’t want any lunch. He’s had a drink. I’m going next door to help Laura move furniture.’

  Jess quirked an eyebrow. ‘I brought her basket back, and some eggs. Can you take them to her?’

  He picked up the basket. ‘How long have I got?’

  ‘How long do you need?’ Jess winked.

  He held up his phone. ‘I shouldn’t be long. Ring me if you need me.’ He gave Neill’s shoulder a squeeze. ‘Be back in a while.’

  The heat was fierce. The lemon tree had succumbed, no matter how much water he’d poured onto it. The few wizened lemons had fallen to the ground and were turning brown.

  Laura was waiting for him, the shed unlocked and the tools ready. She’d even dusted off the bedstead where it leaned against a rusting corrugated-iron wall. And in shorts and a tank top, she looked good enough to eat. She’d blushed w
hen he’d come through the door and he’d been about to make a comment about her being overdressed, when reality had slammed into him. No point wanting what you shouldn’t have.

  ‘Who helped you move the bed out here?’ he asked as they carried the brass bedhead into the house.

  ‘Neill did, believe it or not. Clearing out that room was one of the first things I did, and at that stage he was still up to helping me.’

  With an old towel for protection, they carefully leaned the bedhead against a freshly painted bedroom wall.

  ‘Is the old man deteriorating faster than normal?’

  Laura dusted her hands together and looked at him. ‘What’s normal? How it happens for one person is different from how it happens for someone else. Some people go kicking and screaming, others gently and accepting.’

  ‘Hmm, I’ll probably be one of the kicking and screaming variety.’

  ‘You never know, Jake,’ she said. ‘Come on, let’s get the rest of the bed inside so we can put it together. You’ll need to get back.’

  They hauled the remaining parts inside and together they assembled it. When they’d finished and Laura stepped back, her face suffused with pure delight, Jake’s heart wedged in his throat.

  ‘Wow! It does look so good. I knew it would. I can’t wait to get the new bed linen onto it.’ She turned to him, her blue eyes dancing with anticipation. ‘What do you think?’

  Jake tilted his head to the side, hands on hips. ‘Yeah, it does look good. I’m not a fan of brass beds but it suits the room. The floorboards came up well. You’ve done an amazing job, Laura. I’m impressed.’

  ‘Thanks. The mattress. It’s next door in the dining room.’

  They went and manhandled the double mattress into the refurbished room and onto the vintage bed frame. When the mattress was in place Laura sat down on the edge of the bed and looked around.

  ‘It’s slowly coming together. One room at a time.’

  ‘What happens when you finish? What then?’

  Laura flopped back on the bed, spread her arms wide, legs dangling over the edge, feet still on the ground. ‘Mmm, there’s still heaps to do, and with being back at work it’ll all go slower now.’ She pursed her lips, gazed at the pressed tin ceiling. ‘And I haven’t decided what I’ll do in the kitchen and wet areas.’