There was no need to tell her more. She knew what she risked.
So finally, hard-hatted and overalled, placed in a harness that spread her weight through her entire body and wearing a carefully packed medical pouch around her midriff, she was gently lowered through the hole.
The last thing she remembered seeing as she looked up at the people surrounding her was Jonas.
And his face was desperate.
‘Sam…’
The little boy was barely conscious. Em had been whispering to him as she descended, focusing on not touching the walls but also intent on not frightening the child into jerking when he realised she was there. He hadn’t responded. Now, though, she was within inches of him.
There was a ledge-about ten inches wide or so-on either side of his head. Em shone her torch down to see how Sam was held, and her heart sank.
How had he not slipped through? He was so far through now. One more slip…
There was his head, his hair still bright red and curly, but that was about all that was recognisably Sam. He’d scratched himself falling. His face was bloody and tear-stained, and as white as death.
‘Sam.’
His sightless eyes suddenly focused. He couldn’t look up but, seated in her harness above him, Em’s hand was on his head, gently running her fingers through his curls. Her voice was urgent.
‘Sam, even though I’m here now, you’re not to move an inch. In case you fall further. You understand, Sam?’
‘I…’ He gulped. ‘Yes.’ He was brave to the core. ‘I understand.’
‘But at least I’m here. I won’t leave you.’
‘Mum. Uncle Jonas,’ he whispered. ‘I want them.’
‘I want them, too.’ She forced herself to chuckle, and it echoed strangely in the darkness. ‘But they’re both too fat to come down.’
It was a terrifying experience, trying to hold herself still in the harness and talking into the dark. She had a floodlight on her cap, and the beam of light swung wildly as she looked about her. There was another small torch in her hand which she used to carefully examine Sam. ‘You have got yourself into a pickle, haven’t you.’
‘I’m…I’m scared.’
‘You and me both,’ Em said solidly. There was no use pretending. Sam was too intelligent a kid not to pick up on a lie when he heard it. ‘But we’re in this together, so let’s make the best of it.’
The best case scenario-the one they’d hoped against hope for when they’d lowered Em-was that somehow she could rig a harness around Sam so that he could be winched up.
It wasn’t remotely possible.
One arm was out of sight. The other hand had been forced up and was wedged at an odd angle between his shoulder and the wall. Em could see his wrist and hand but that was all. The extra width of his arm was what was wedging him. If he moved that hand…
He couldn’t. She was almost scared to touch him, much less try and gain a hold. She knew disaster would result.
They just had to play a waiting game.
If he started to slip, she told herself, she’d just grab him around the neck and that one hand and pull. She risked breaking his neck by doing so, but if he was going to fall it was the only chance he had.
Please, let him not slip.
‘Is this the arm that hurts?’ she asked, and touched his fingers with a feather touch.
‘Yes. It hurts so much. It just jabs and jabs.’ She didn’t need to examine him to know it was true. She could hear the agony in his voice.
‘I can help that.’ She forced her voice to be as matter-of-fact as possible. ‘Sam, I’m going to pop an injection into your neck. A pinprick-that’s all. It’ll make you feel really sleepy, but that’s OK. You can go to sleep if you want. The men are going to dig down to reach us and it’ll take ages so it’s better if you sleep. And the injection will stop the pain really fast. Do you think you can hold very, very still and not even wiggle when you feel the needle?’
‘I…I’ll try.’
‘Good kid.’
Great kid.
Please, let him not fall…
Em wished she could sleep herself.
Hour upon hour she waited. Sam slept and stirred and she comforted him. Over and over.
Once she knew she could reach his wrist, she called up to Jonas and he sent down what she needed to set up a saline drip. Somehow, and afterwards she could never figure out how, she inserted a needle into one of the little boy’s crushed arms, then hung the saline bag on the pouch at her midriff.
Please, let him not have any internal injuries, she prayed over and over again. His pulse was thready but that might be shock.
She hung on in the dark and there was no answer to her pleas.
If Jonas hadn’t been right there above her, she would have gone quietly crazy.
He talked to her. Over and over. He lay on the planking above her head and he talked her through every stage of what was happening. How they’d decided against drills because of the fear of vibrations in the unstable soil. How they were digging by hand-teams of men-every able-bodied man in the district seemed to be here now, taking turns to dig, to heave soil to the surface, to shore the new shaft, to chop timber for shoring…
It seemed everyone in Bay Beach was here. Lori. Shanni. Erin. Wendy. All her friends. They took it in turns to talk to her-Lori had even brought Bernard, for heaven’s sake, and she described him as frantic. Bernard? Frantic?
‘Well, he’s scratching his butt,’ Lori told her. ‘In Bernard-speak, that’s frantic.’
She smiled, but she couldn’t smile for long.
But always there was Jonas, speaking softly over everyone else.
‘Em, here’s Lori to talk to you. With your weird dog. And Nick. Nick’s been digging-you ever seen a magistrate with mud on his face? Em, Ray’s been here, demanding to dig. How many weeks after a bypass? I reckon he’s crazier than you are. I’ve told him he has to wait until you come up because I need another doctor if he’s going into cardiac arrest again…’
And sometimes there was just Jonas.
‘Em, I’m still here. We’re all still here. We won’t leave you.’
And then an even shorter message as the night grew longer and the darkness deepened. Over and over.
‘I won’t leave you.’
And then… ‘Em, I’ll never leave you.’
The discomfort was unbelievable. Em hung in her harness and kept her increasingly desperate vigil. Her hand ran through the little boy’s hair over and over again, the only contact with him that she dared.
It had been almost impossible to put in the saline drip. He’d jerked once and it had scared the life out of her. So now she monitored the drip, gave him pain relief as he needed it and kept in contact with him by touching his curls.
She was starting to need the contact with Sam as much as he needed it from her.
The walls were closing in on her.
As night fell, the light from the top of the shaft dimmed and died. The shaft seemed to close in still further.
‘Jonas,’ she whispered, and he was there. Of course he was there. He’d promised.
‘We’re down fifteen feet,’ he told her. ‘We’re moving faster than I thought possible. We’ll have you out by dawn, Em.’
She took a deep breath. ‘I need some light.’
‘You have your flashlight. Are the batteries dying?’
‘No… I mean up there. So I can see…you.’
Her voice trailed off but he had it in one. Claustrophobia was impossible to predict, and when it happened it was almost impossible to control.
‘Do you need to come up?’ His voice was harsh with anxiety.
‘No!’ No way. She couldn’t leave Sam. Firstly, to drag her up past that narrow passage would risk debris falling down on him, and to come down again would be impossible.
Her claustrophobia was something she had to control all by herself-and she had to control it.
‘I just need to see…the top,’ she said.
>
‘You will.’ And then Jonas’s voice rang out, curt with command, and there were suddenly floodlights playing over the top of the shaft. She could look up and see his face-his smile. He was shining the torch over his face so that he was no longer in the shadows, and she could see him clearly, even though he was so far away.
‘It won’t be long, Em,’ he told her, his voice willing it to be the truth. ‘We’re boarding up the new shaft as we go, and that’s what’s taking the time. We can’t move too fast or we risk a tragedy, but we’re going as fast as humanly possible.’
Twenty feet…
She could hear them-muffled shouts, swearing, snapping commands from the top.
Twenty-five feet, Jonas told her.
Thirty feet.
And then, finally, she heard faint, muffled and far-away noises through the dirt and rock by her side, and she knew they’d reached her level.
Still they didn’t come near. They were digging a good ten feet away from the side of her shaft. They would go deeper and then across.
‘It’ll take two more hours,’ Jonas said, and his voice was filled with confidence. It demanded confidence in return. ‘Can you hold on that long, Em?’
What could she give him but confidence in return?
‘Of course I can.’
At last, blessedly, there was the sound of scraping, and falling dirt, and a chink of light played up from under Sam’s chin. Someone was under him.
Em had gone past discomfort. Every muscle in her body had reacted at some time and now she was cramping and tired and desperate to go to the bathroom-but Sam was shifting and he mustn’t move yet.
‘No,’ she said sharply, and her hand held his hair, and stroked down to his chin. ‘The men have reached under us but they don’t have the planking in place yet to stop you falling. It’s still not safe for us to move, Sam, love. Can you hold on for a little more?’
He was drifting in and out of consciousness, but Em didn’t know how much of that was due to shock, how much to internal injuries and how much to the pain relief she’d given him. It’d have to be a combination. But what sort of combination?
Hurry…
‘They’re coming,’ she told the little boy. ‘They’re very near. You’ll soon be with your mum.’
As for Em, she knew what she was aching for.
She’d soon be with Jonas.
‘Got him.’
It was a shout of triumph and it came directly from underneath Sam. To Em’s astonished delight, Sam’s body was raised-not much, but a fraction as his weight was taken into someone’s arms from underneath, just enough for the man on the platform under him to chip away at the rocks wedging him fast.
Finally, Sam’s shoulders released their grip on the rock, but instead of plunging a hundred and fifty feet he was lifted gently into the waiting arms of the man who’d released him.
As the shaft was unblocked below her harness, Em was left staring down in incredulity at the laughing, blackened face of an unknown man, jubilant with triumph.
‘Is it OK if we take your patient, Doc?’ he asked. He hugged Sam to him, careful not to hold him any tighter than he needed, and reached up to take the saline bag from Em. He looped the IV line carefully so the whole arrangement was resting on Sam’s middle.
And that was it. ‘Come on, young man. We’ve made this shaft wide enough to get you out.’
With that, Sam was tenderly manoeuvred out through the side shaft, out of Em’s sight, and there was nothing left but for Em to be raised to the surface.
To Jonas.
Jonas suffered the diggers to help haul her to the surface, but that was all they were allowed to do. As she emerged into the breaking dawn light, it was Jonas who stepped forward and gathered her into his arms.
And he held her as if he’d never let her go again.
Ever.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
EM WOKE to the sound of the sea.
The hospital was built on a bluff overlooking the town and her bedroom faced the beach, just as it had at her grandpa’s when she was a child. Which was how she was feeling right now-like a child-as if all the adulthood had been shaken right out of her.
She lay there, still and silent, letting the events of the past twenty-four hours soak into her consciousness. Slowly. Taking it step by step, for fear of being overwhelmed.
There’d been the dread. The terror that Sam would fall, the fear that she couldn’t bear her own physical discomfort and the unexpected claustrophobia on top of it.
And then there’d been the relief of tension that had been so great that, on reaching the surface, she’d wept and wept, like an inconsolable child instead of a mature, dedicated doctor. So much so that after Jonas had made sure Sam was OK, he’d turned to her and ordered tranquillisers and bed, and he’d brooked no argument.
He’d wanted to carry her home himself. She’d seen that. But Sam had been his greatest need, and Em had pulled herself together enough to tell him to get his priorities right. As he had to. Chris, the doctor from down south, had arrived so, thank God, she hadn’t been needed to assist medically.
Which was just as well. She couldn’t have fought her way out of a paper bag, much less assist in treating Sam.
So here she was, alone in her own safe bed, and suddenly she was grateful for that loneliness. There were so many things crowding in on her-things she needed time to come to terms with.
Ghosts, she thought, suddenly-irrelevantly. With the sounds of the sea came the whispering echoes of the past-Grandpa and Charlie. They’d taught her to love the sea. They’d taught her to love Bay Beach, so much that she’d dedicated her life to being its doctor.
And now a tremulous hope was building and building that maybe the sacrifices she’d made were no longer necessary.
Jonas… What had he said?
‘I’ll never leave you…’
It was just something he’d said to allay her fears, she told herself shakenly. It had been said in the urgency of the moment.
It had been for comfort. Not the truth.
Robby… Think of Robby. She should get up and check on her baby.
Why wasn’t he here? Beside her? She glanced at her watch and blinked her surprise. Eight a.m. It looked like early morning outside, but it couldn’t be…
It was. She’d slept the clock around and then some.
But no one was here to verify it. Not even Bernard the dog. There was only the sound of the sea for company, but the need for solitude was over.
She needed more. Just as she put a hand on her covers, the door opened-and it was Jonas.
But this was a different Jonas. This was a Jonas she’d never seen before. He looked lighter, she thought. Younger. He looked like a man who’d had the weight of the world taken from his shoulders. His burnt red hair was bright in the morning sunshine, his green eyes twinkled, he looked clean and groomed and a thousand miles from the distraught man she’d seen the day before.
Her Jonas…
He peeped around her bedroom door, and his smile as he saw that she was awake broadened into a full-sized grin. Then, before she could say a word, he was across the room and she’d been taken firmly into his arms.
‘My Em.’
He held her close, his chest crushing her breast, and it was the action of a man who was claiming his own.
His heart.
She was dreaming. Wasn’t she?
She must be. ‘My Em…’ It was a dreamy whisper, wafting round and round the room, and the echo and its uncertainty made Em pull away.
That made her know she was awake. Heavens, she hurt. Every muscle in her body screamed in protest. Hanging in harness in the one position for so many hours had caused more bruising than she would have believed possible. She’d also hit the sides of the shaft on the way up.
Jonas had seen the wince and frowned swiftly in concern.
‘What is it? Something I missed? Em…’
He’d examined her as she’d emerged from the shaft, she remembered, but
only just. She remembered his hands running over her body as she’d sagged in his arms, checking, making sure she hadn’t crashed too hard against the wall on the ascent which had proved more difficult than the descent.
She’d swayed-she hadn’t been able to stop herself swaying when the urgency not to had been removed-and she’d hit the shaft sides over and over again. But to wait until they’d widened the gap where Sam had stuck so she could be lowered further and go out by the same route would have taken longer than she could stand.
No matter. She smiled her reassurance, and if her smile was wider than reassurance deserved, she couldn’t help it. This was only bruising. What was at stake here was far more important. What had he called her? ‘My Em…’
‘I’m fine,’ she lied, and looked up at Jonas though a dreamy mist. ‘What did you say?’
His gaze narrowed, and he looked confused. “‘What is it?’”
‘No.’ She was onto something important here, and she was holding on to it like a pit bull terrier. ‘Before that.’
‘Before that?’
‘You said “my Em”.’
‘So I did,’ he said, and there was a touch of triumph in his voice. He pulled her against him again and kissed the top of her hair. ‘I did at that. My Em.’
‘Mmm.’ This was definitely satisfactory. More than satisfactory.
‘Your hair has dust all through it,’ he said softly, kissing the top of her head. ‘I really, really need to unbraid it.’
‘You can chop it off for all I care.’
‘Emily!’ His voice was shocked, but filled with laughter. ‘Sacrilege.’ There was also something else in his voice, Em noticed.
Love?
And it was. He cupped her chin in his hands, and he looked deep into her eyes. ‘You know I want to marry you?’ he said tenderly. ‘You know that, don’t you, love?’
Her heart almost stopped, right there and then.
‘But you said that before,’ she whispered. ‘That you wanted to marry me.’
‘Yeah, but for all the wrong reasons.’
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