THE NURSE'S RESCUE

by Alison Roberts

  ‘Hey!’ Joe was impressed. ‘You’re good at that.’

  ‘It’s a bit out of tune.’

  ‘I’m amazed it hasn’t rusted up inside. Can you play anything else?’

  Jessica started another piece but Joe shook his head. ‘No, I meant something I could recognise. Like a song.’

  Jessica smiled. She could play anything by ear if she could remember the tune. What had been on so loudly the day she’d arrived? Of course, how could she forget? She launched into a very creditable version of ‘Rock Around the Clock’.

  ‘Cool!’ Joe did a few fancy steps. ‘Can you dance, Ricky?’

  Ricky had never tried to dance in his life. Music was something you sat still and listened to with Nana. Joe held out his hand. ‘Come on, buddy. I’ll show you.’

  Jessica started the song again, looking over her shoulder to where Joe was now giving Ricky a rock ‘n’ roll dance lesson.

  ‘Hippety-hop, step! Hippety-hop, step. Good. Now hold my hand and I’ll spin you round.’

  Joe looked as though he knew what he was doing, but it was the sight of the two male figures—the huge one and the tiny one who was concentrating so hard on what his legs and arms were doing—that brought a lump to Jessica’s throat. Or maybe it was the fact that Joe knew how to dance. Or that he would automatically take the time to patiently teach a child. Her child.

  Jessica turned back to the keyboard. It was just as well she could play by ear because she would never have been able to read music through eyes as misty as hers had become. But they were happy tears and the lump in her throat melted into a warmth that sank right down to her toes.

  Joe Barrington was a wonderful man.

  It was really no surprise that she had fallen head over heels in love with him.

  CHAPTER SIX

  BEING a paramedic was no career for the faint-hearted.

  Some days it was tough enough to make Joe wonder if he had chosen the right job. Today had been the worst ever. Joe had never found himself in such a heart-wrenching situation in all his years of dealing with the death, mutilation and heartbreak life was capable of throwing at people.

  He’d had a bad feeling about this job from the moment it had been called in. A four-wheel bike accident on an isolated high country farm. The victim’s wife had gone looking for her husband when he hadn’t shown up for lunch. She’d found him pinned beneath the upside-down bike at the bottom of a stock water ditch, his head barely above water level and his leg trapped and broken. He was bleeding heavily and only semi-conscious. They would be lucky if he was still alive after the thirty minutes or so it would take the helicopter to reach him.

  Landing close to the scene was easy enough. Neighbours were gathering as well and Joe enlisted the assistance of a couple of farmers. They could do nothing until they got their patient out of the ditch. The local volunteer fire service arrived with the right equipment to cut free the metal bar impaling the victim’s thigh and Joe and his crew partner found they had a hypothermic and badly shocked patient to try and resuscitate.

  At least he was still alive. An oxygen mask and ECG electrodes were slapped on within seconds. Joe’s partner, Murray Peters, directed his efforts to controlling any further blood loss. Applying a pressure bandage around the impaled bar and securing the object to try and limit further damage was not an easy task for one person but Joe’s attention was on securing IV access and starting the fluid replacement that would be crucial to saving this man. It wasn’t until he had a wide-bore cannula in place and saline running through an open line that Joe started assessing their new priorities. A second line would be needed as soon as possible and he wanted to have a good listen to the victim’s chest even though his breathing appeared clear. The abdomen needed checking as well. Murray had a blood-pressure cuff on now and was beginning vital-sign recording. The helicopter pilot had requested the farmers’ help to get the stretcher ready and waiting.

  ‘We’ll need a backboard and collar,’ Joe told him. ‘We can’t rule out a spinal injury yet.’

  The group of locals seemed to be dispersing. A police officer had his arm around a distraught-looking woman Joe assumed was the injured farmer’s wife, and he wondered why she had not been with her husband on their arrival. He found out soon enough as they came closer.

  ‘We’ll find him, Jenny. He can’t have got far. He’s probably tried to get back to the house to find you and got lost in the gully.’

  ‘Who’s lost?’ Joe queried.

  ‘Ben.’ The woman was deathly pale and shaking. She stared at her husband as Murray fastened the Velcro straps holding the cushions on either side of his head. ‘Oh, God,’ she whispered. ‘Is he…?’

  ‘He’s badly injured,’ Joe confirmed. ‘He’s lost a lot of blood and he’s very cold but he’s hanging in there and his blood pressure has come up a little bit, which is good. We’re doing our very best and we’re going to get him into hospital just as quickly as we can. Do you want to come in the helicopter with him?’

  ‘Yes…But…’ The woman looked wildly over her shoulder. ‘But what about Ben?’

  The police officer noticed Joe’s frown. ‘Ben’s the son. He’s four years old. He was out on the bike with Bruce and he’s gone missing. We’re searching the area now.’

  Two of the men that were manning the fire engine were standing in the ditch, having decided to lift the bike clear with the help of a tow rope attached to their vehicle. Joe saw the mangled vehicle being dragged up into the paddock as he and Murray completed securing their patient to the backboard and then the stretcher. Bruce’s wife only had a minute or so to decide whether or not she would accompany them.

  But it was several minutes before they could take off with the critically injured farmer. And it seemed a lot longer. The last fire officer to clamber out of the ditch tripped on what he thought was a log caught in the mud. What he saw surface in the water brought a horrified silence to the scene. Ben hadn’t gone looking for his mother at all. He hadn’t been able to go anywhere. Trapped under the bike and held in the muddy bottom of the ditch, the small boy had drowned and there was nothing any of them could do.

  The flight back to the emergency department was the longest twenty minutes Joe had experienced but at least he’d had to function automatically, and trying to keep the man’s condition stable had been enough of a challenge to prevent too much thought about anything else. The handover in the department was harder and the short flight back to the helicopter base was almost unbearable. Murray was as silent as Joe. With five children of his own, his colleague had been deeply affected by the grim discovery of the accident’s second victim. He probably thought Joe wouldn’t really understand the impact of the tragedy and until recently maybe he would have been correct. Not that Joe had ever been short of sympathy when it was needed. He would have considered his response to the parents of paediatric patients to be empathetic at times but now he knew what it was really like to feel connected.

  And it sucked.

  Ben hadn’t been a small four-year-old. A sturdy farmer’s son, he’d been about the same size as Ricky. Had he once waited at the window if his dad was out without him? Had his face lit up with a smile that had said just how pleased he was to see him again? Had he helped his dad in the workshop? Found tools for him and listened with wide-eyed eagerness to words of wisdom about mechanical matters? Ricky did. And he’d listen with a big smile on his face when Joe took the time to tell stories about his car-racing days.

  Joe was planning to take Ricky out to meet his old mates at the track one day. He might persuade one of them to give the kid a spin in a hot rod. It gave Joe a lot of pleasure to imagine what the look on Ricky’s face would be if it happened. Ricky wasn’t even his kid and it was only a brief outing he was looking forward to, but Joe could begin to imagine what it would be like to be a real parent. It wouldn’t just be a day out they would look forward to. Ben’s parents had probably had dreams about him starting school—watching him play football, going to university or
maybe finding a fantastic daughter-in-law for them and producing grandchildren. The future had now been completely annihilated because of a stupid accident, and the aftermath felt unbearable. Joe had no idea how to deal with it.

  Normally, he would just leave work at work, go home, have a few beers, turn the music up loud and spend a few hours working on the Mustang. That wasn’t going to do the trick this time, however. Not just because he had visitors and wouldn’t be able to simply do what he wanted. It wasn’t going to work because, this time, it was different.

  Worse.

  At least he wasn’t going home to an empty house. Jessica would have a hot meal ready and a cold beer in the fridge. He’d be able to see what she’d been up to in the garden and have a conversation that would take his mind off these disturbingly black thoughts. And Ricky would be there. Maybe he’d be lying on the floor, racing his cars around the flowers with those happy, if somewhat ear-splitting braking and accelerating noises.

  But Ricky wasn’t lying on the floor. He wasn’t watching from the window either. He was waiting at the end of the driveway, hopping excitedly from one foot to the other and clutching a wad of A4 paper stapled down one of the short sides.

  ‘I can read now, Joe. I can read!’

  ‘No kidding, buddy. Must be a good school you’re going to.’

  ‘Come on, Joe.’ Ricky was waiting impatiently for Joe to collect his gear from the back seat. ‘I’m going to read you my book.’

  ‘Let Joe sit down first.’ Jessica was busy in the kitchen. ‘He needs a beer.’

  The beer had to wait. It was a bit difficult to try and reach past the child sitting on his lap and there was too much risk of slopping fluid on the precious papers spread in front of them on the table.

  ‘The car is blue,’ Ricky chanted. He turned the page. ‘The car is red!’

  The ‘cars’ were templates that had been very roughly coloured in, presumably by Ricky. The printing beneath the pictures was in large round handwriting and must have produced by a teacher. Joe wondered how long the project had taken. There were quite a lot of colours.

  ‘The car is pink! The car is yellow!’

  They got to the last page. An odd combination of colours decorated the vehicle outline and Ricky’s voice took on an even more pronounced tone of pride.

  ‘This is Joe’s car!’

  Joe had to clear his throat and his voice still sounded weirdly gruff. ‘That’s really cool, Ricky. Clever, aren’t you?’

  Ricky nodded complacently. ‘I can read.’

  ‘You know your colours, too.’ He’d got most of them right, anyway.

  Jessica sent him off to wash his hands for dinner. ‘He can’t really read it,’ she said apologetically, but her eyes were glowing with as much pride as Ricky had demonstrated. ‘He hasn’t got the basic skills like word identification or initial consonant sounds or even left-to-right eye movement.’

  ‘Sounded like reading to me.’

  Jessica’s smile lit up the rest of her face to match her eyes. ‘He understands that the words convey meaning. He can learn, Joe. He’s going to be able to read and write one day.’

  The smile felt strange after the afternoon’s absence of any similar expression, but it also felt good. A little of the day’s misery slipped from Joe’s shoulders. ‘That’s fantastic, Jess.’ Pride must be contagious, Joe decided, because he could feel it sneaking up on him as well. Not that any credit belonged to him. Or maybe it did—just a little. ‘I told you he was intelligent, didn’t I?’

  ‘So, what now, Jess?’ Dinner was over, the dishes were done and a bathed and powdery smelling Ricky had been posted into bed clutching his ‘book’ and a small red Porsche. As had become something of a habit in the last week, Joe was hanging around the kitchen instead of heading out to the workshop for an hour or two. Tonight, in particular, he felt like some friendly company. ‘What does the school think about Ricky after today?’

  Jessica noted the clean bench and the cup of freshly brewed coffee and sat down with a smile of thanks. ‘The staff were so excited. We had no idea Ricky even knew his colours. He played with one of the other children today as well. Not co-operative play exactly, but they were sharing the sandpit and Ricky didn’t throw sand or go off to rock in a corner like he usually does. They think it might take even longer for him to settle in enough to assess what he’s really capable of.’

  ‘That sounds promising.’ The idea that Jessica and Ricky might be here for a bit longer was great.

  Jessica nodded happily. ‘It’s the best thing that’s happened since Mum died, and it’s made me sure of the direction I want to go in now.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Jessica’s new confidence made Joe feel a trifle wary.

  ‘I’m going to keep him on at the school. They think there’s a possibility he could be integrated into a normal school before too long. They have special assistants for teachers that can be appointed to work with children like Ricky in normal classes. We don’t have anything like that in Silverstream.’

  ‘So you’re going to stay in Christchurch? Permanently?’ That wasn’t something that had occurred to Joe as a possibility. It was not an unpleasant surprise.

  ‘Oh, don’t worry.’ Jessica laughed. ‘You won’t have to evict us. I’m going to start looking for a house next week. I’m sure I’ll be able to find one I can afford.’

  ‘I’m sure you will.’ Joe was now imagining his house without Jessica and Ricky in residence and that thought was less pleasant. ‘Don’t be in too much of a rush, though,’ he advised. ‘You’ll want something nice—with a bit of a garden for Ricky to play in. And you’ll want something on this side of town. Close to the school,’ he added hurriedly, in case Jessica would assume he meant close to him.

  ‘Mmm.’ Jessica’s eyes were still shining as she sipped her coffee. Joe had never seen her look this happy. ‘And you know something else?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I might look into doing something I’ve always wanted to do.’

  ‘Which is?’

  Jessica dropped her gaze. She opened her mouth and then closed it again, giving Joe a fleeting and rather embarrassed glance.

  ‘Go on,’ he encouraged. ‘You can tell me.’

  ‘I’d like to train as an ambulance officer,’ Jessica admitted shyly. ‘And become a paramedic eventually.’

  ‘Really?’ Joe had had no idea that Jessica aspired to sharing his career.

  Jessica nodded. ‘Kelly’s been trying to talk me into applying. If I could make it work around Ricky then it’s something I’d really love to do. Kelly says there’s heaps of good day-care centres around.’

  ‘I’m sure there are.’ Joe felt piqued that Kelly already knew about Jessica’s ambition and was trying to help. Nobody had told him but, then, maybe he should have guessed by the way she was always so eager to hear about and discuss his day’s work. That had become a pleasant habit as well. In fact, over the last few days he’d found himself making mental notes to make sure he remembered the more interesting details to tell Jessica.

  He could help, too. If Jessica’s shifts were opposite his, then he’d have four days off when she was working. He could look after Ricky for her. Joe swallowed hard. Good grief! He’d better think twice before making any offers along those lines. It had a ring of commitment and permanence about it that pulled him up sharply. He frowned.

  ‘Are you sure it’s what you want for a career, though? It would be easy enough for you to get a nursing position at one of the hospitals in the city and you might prefer that.’

  ‘Oh, no.’ Jessica sounded definite. ‘I’ve wanted to be a paramedic ever since I did the PRIME course. The only part of my job now that I really love are the emergency response calls.’

  Some of the day’s bleakness returned to settle over Joe. ‘It’s not always exciting,’ he warned. ‘And sometimes it’s a lot tougher than you ever imagine it’s going to be.’

  Jessica’s face stilled. Large brown eyes were fixed on Joe. ‘Yo
u’ve had a bad day, haven’t you?’

  Joe looked away, startled. He’d thought he’d covered up his mood quite successfully. ‘What makes you think that?’

  ‘I could see it in your face when you got home,’ Jessica said gently. ‘And you didn’t eat more than half your dinner.’ She reached across the table and touched Joe’s hand. ‘I’ve been waiting till Ricky went to bed so that I could ask you what happened.’

  ‘Are you sure you want to hear about it? It’s not a very happy story.’

  She squeezed his hand lightly. ‘Of course I want to hear about it. If you want to tell me, that is. It’s OK if you don’t.’

  ‘I’d like to.’ And as soon as Joe said the words he knew that part of the day’s misery had been the thought that he couldn’t share that particular story with Jessica. That he’d have to lock it away inside and deal with it alone. What he needed, more than anything else, was to tell someone who would listen. And maybe understand.

  So Joe told her. The whole story. He didn’t even leave out his own reaction on the way back to base. By the time he’d finished, they both had tears rolling down their cheeks unheeded. No invitation was spoken but they both rose when Joe finally stopped talking and they simply held each other in a tight, wordless hug that lasted long enough for comfort to be given and received and for the tears to dry.

  Jessica caught hold of Joe’s hand as it slipped from her back. ‘Let’s find somewhere more comfortable to talk,’ she suggested.

  ‘I’ve talked enough.’ Joe felt embarrassed by his show of emotion. He hadn’t cried openly in front of anybody since he was six years old.

  ‘No, you haven’t.’ Jessica squeezed his fingers lightly. ‘I like listening.’

  It took courage to meet her gaze because Joe expected to find something he didn’t want to see. Like pity. Or that she thought less of him somehow. But what he saw in the depths of those brown eyes was something quite extraordinary. The kind of look that Jessica gave Ricky sometimes. It spoke of pride and acceptance and…love. Real love. Joe swallowed hard.