Saving Maddie's Baby

by Marion Lennox

  And then, before Keanu could respond, before another argument could be mounted, he grabbed Bugsy’s collar from the miner who was holding him.

  ‘Come on, Bugsy,’ he told him, looping the collar hard under his hand. Bugsy had obviously figured the direction to go. He’d gone straight to the injured miners, and then, reluctantly, it seemed, accompanied them to safety.

  ‘Come on, Bugsy,’ he told the dog again, and he was at the mine mouth, heading in before anyone could move fast enough to stop him.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ‘MADDIE?’

  She’d had to disconnect from Caroline to try and reach Hettie but it hadn’t worked. Hettie was manning the phone at the hospital and the line was continuously engaged. She grabbed the phone now, hoping it was Hettie, or, weirdly, hoping even more it was Josh.

  That’s crazy, she told herself. Just be grateful that you get reception down here, that you have any connection at all.

  It wasn’t Josh.

  ‘Keanu?’

  ‘Caroline’s trying to get a message to Hettie to clear the line so you can talk to her,’ he told her. ‘Meanwhile, progress?’

  ‘Things are stable. Nothing’s changed.’ She’d kill for a drink. The contractions were still steady at ten minutes. She ached. Malu was drifting in and out of his drug-induced sleep.

  Yes, things were stable.

  ‘Blood pressure?’

  ‘Mine or Malu’s?’ It was an attempt at humour but it didn’t work.

  ‘Both,’ he snapped, and listened as she told him.

  ‘That’s sounding okay.’ But there was serious tension in Keanu’s voice—deep tension—tension that told her something else was going on.

  ‘You’re about to tell me the sky’s going to fall on our heads? If so, it already has.’ She caught herself then and directed her beam upwards. ‘Actually, no. No, it hasn’t. Bad idea.’

  ‘Can you see any light at all?’

  ‘Um...no.’

  ‘We were hoping you’d be near a ventilation shaft.’

  ‘In which case we’d see light.’

  ‘Not if it’s blocked. No.’

  ‘So...’ There was still something he wasn’t telling her. ‘Anything else I can help you with?’ She tried to make her voice chirpy, sales assistant like.

  ‘You said you were feeling air.’

  Another contraction. She gasped and forgot the sales assistant act. Keanu just had to wait.

  ‘There is the faint whiff of air,’ she admitted as she surfaced again.

  ‘It’s blowing hard out here, straight into the mouth of the cave. You have the torch? Can you shine it at the rocks, look for gaps?’

  She shone. The torch beam simply disappeared into the dust and blackness.

  ‘I can’t see anything. Even if there was a way out, I could hardly wiggle. And not with Malu...’

  ‘So if we got someone in to you...’

  ‘No one’s to come in.’ She must have sounded shrill because Keanu didn’t answer for a moment and when he did he sounded deeply concerned.

  ‘Maddie?’

  ‘It’s just there’s still stuff...settling,’ she told him. ‘Can’t you dig us out from the top?’

  ‘We’re working on it. Maddie, you sound like you’re in pain.’

  ‘I’m not. I’m worrying. Keanu, no one else is to risk...’ And then she stopped. She knew Keanu well. ‘Someone’s already trying, aren’t they? Of all the... There’s no room in here. Drill a hole down. Get us out from the top. We can’t drag Malu out. There’s no room for a stretcher and there are rocks still falling. Burrowing’s impossibly perilous. I was an idiot to come in, but I’ve managed to keep Malu alive. There’s no point in me doing that if someone else dies.’

  Silence.

  ‘What?’ she said, feeling the weight of the silence. ‘What aren’t you telling me?’

  ‘It’s Josh,’ he said heavily. ‘And Bugsy.’

  ‘What the...?’

  ‘Bugsy went haring into the mine. He found the first two miners, the guys who were helping Malu when you went in. They came out, with him leading. It was almost as if Bugsy knew what he had to do. He got them to the surface but he was heading in again.

  ‘And Josh?’ She could scarcely breathe.

  ‘Josh has gone with him. We couldn’t stop him. The guy’s either a hero or an idiot and I can’t decide which.’

  ‘Idiot,’ she said, but only half of her meant it.

  The other half of her unashamedly wanted Josh.

  * * *

  Torches were almost useless in the dust. The cabled lighting that usually lit the shafts had obviously been knocked out by the fall. The floor was covered with rock litter. Josh wasn’t too sure where the roof was, and his torch beam seemed to disappear.

  He kept his hand on Bugsy’s collar. Bugsy was whining a little, but heading inward and down. He seemed to know exactly where he was going.

  If Josh hadn’t been holding him he’d have surged ahead. To Maddie?

  Who knew? But the fact that he’d found the two miners was an excellent sign. The mine branched out in half a dozen different directions a little way in from the mouth. The miners had been in the tunnel Maddie was in, so he had to assume that was where Bugsy was heading.

  To Maddie.

  He stumbled on a loose rock and dropped to his knees. Bugsy whined and turned and licked his face, then tugged again.

  ‘You need to go at my pace,’ he told the dog. ‘Four legs and half my height would be good.’

  He tugged. Okay, there was no use sitting around waiting to shrink or grow new legs.

  His phone went.

  What was it with communications in this place? All the way across the mountains there’d been no signal, yet here...

  Maddie. The name popped up on his screen as soon as his fumbling hand hauled his phone from his pocket. He almost dropped it in his haste to answer.

  ‘Hey.’ He tried to make his voice normal but the dust was too heavy. He ended up coughing instead.

  ‘You’re down the shaft.’ Her voice was dull, dread-filled.

  ‘Only a little way down,’ he told her. ‘Me and Bugsy.’

  ‘Well, turn yourselves around and go back up again.’

  ‘Bugsy won’t and I don’t know the way without Bugsy.’

  ‘Bugsy took the miners out. They knew enough to say “jeep” and she obeyed. The whole island knows “jeep” to Bugsy means head back to the jeep and stay there. You can’t have a dog trailing after you on every island emergency without a few ground rules.’

  ‘So if I say j—’ He stopped. ‘If I say the name of your car...’

  ‘Say it, Josh.’

  ‘We’re coming to find you. Me and Bugsy.’

  ‘You’ll kill yourselves and where will that leave us? The engineers will drill in from the top. It’s not so deep. They’ll find us.’

  ‘It’ll take days. Maddie, I’m disconnecting now. Bugsy’s eager to keep going.’

  ‘Josh, I don’t want this. I didn’t expect... You can’t risk...’

  ‘You know I always risk. It’s what I do.’

  ‘You’re trained to swing from helicopters and abseil down cliffs. You’re trained in emergency rescue. But for every single scenario you trained and trained. I’m betting not once have you ever trained to dig into a collapsing gold mine when even the experts are saying it’s crazy.’

  ‘I’m training now,’ he said briefly. ‘I’m coming, sweetheart.’

  ‘I don’t want you to die!’ And it was a wail. She couldn’t help herself. Her beautiful Josh...

  She loved him. She always had and she always would. He wasn’t marriage material. He’d never been her husband, not properly, and years ago she’d stoppe
d hoping for that, and yet she still loved him. The thought of him being down in this appalling place was unbearable.

  And then another pain hit. She whimpered before she could stop herself. She bit it off fast, but he’d heard.

  ‘What the...?’

  ‘I just moved on the floor. Sharp rock,’ she lied, and heard silence on the end of the line. ‘Josh, go home.’

  ‘Conserve your phone batteries, love,’ he told her. ‘Any minute now you’ll get to talk to me in person.’

  ‘I’m not your love,’ she repeated.

  ‘Go tell that to someone who cares. I’m coming in anyway.’

  * * *

  He was coming.

  She should be appalled. She was appalled.

  But...he was coming.

  ‘Help’s on its way,’ she whispered to Malu, but he was sleeping too deeply to hear.

  He needed more fluids. Would Josh be carrying fluids?

  ‘He won’t get here.’ She said it out loud, trying to suppress the flare of hope, of belief, of trust. ‘Okay, Bugsy made it to where the last rockfall took place but there was a rockfall.

  ‘It can’t be too thick.’ She was talking out loud to herself. ‘Those guys were with us when it started falling and they ended up safe on the other side.’

  She crawled across her little cavern to where the mound of fresh-fallen rock blocked the exit. At least, she thought this was the mound in the direction of the exit. It could be the one behind her.

  She was pretty disorientated.

  She was in pain.

  Forget the pain, she told herself, fiercely now. Concentrate on ways out of here.

  Ways Josh could get in.

  The rocks were big. The fall wasn’t packed with loose gravel, but rather a mound of large boulders.

  Dear God, they’d been lucky.

  Define luck.

  ‘We have been lucky,’ she said out loud. ‘If any of these mothers had hit us we’d have been squashed flatter than sardines.’

  They could still fall. Above her head was a mass of loose rock, and the shoring timber was cracking.

  Don’t go there.

  Was there a way through the rocks? Was she even looking in the right direction? She played her torch over the mass. There were gaps in the boulders—of course there were—but there were more boulders behind. To try and crawl through...

  ‘He’s an idiot to try,’ she said out loud. ‘Ring him again.’

  She knew it’d make no difference.

  And for the first time a wash of fear swept over her so strongly, so fiercely that she felt as if she’d be physically ill.

  Josh was out there.

  There was nothing she could do. She crawled back to Malu and put her head next to his on his makeshift pillow. She pressed her body hard against his. She’d done this before when he’d needed comfort.

  She was doing it again now but it was she who needed comfort. It was she who needed to escape fear.

  ‘He’s coming,’ she whispered, and she linked her hands under her belly and held. Her belly was tight, hard.

  Her baby...

  ‘He’ll come,’ she said, and this time she was talking to her baby, talking to someone she’d barely been brave enough to acknowledge as a separate being until now. Was this why she’d been dumb enough to rush into the mine? Because she’d hardly had the courage to acknowledge that this baby could be real?

  She’d lost one baby. Mikey’s death had left a huge, gaping hole in her life, and it had been a vast act of faith, a momentous decision, to try again. Once the decision had been made, she’d gone through the process of finding a sperm donor, the months of hope, the confirmation of pregnancy...

  But once that confirmation had come, joy hadn’t followed. Terror had followed, that once again she could lose the baby.

  She’d coped by blocking it out. She’d not bought any baby clothes. She’d hardly let herself think about it. It was as if by acknowledging she really did have a baby in there she’d jinx it. She couldn’t let herself believe that she could hold a little one who might live.

  But, belief or not, this baby had rights, too, and one of those rights was not being buried in a collapsing mine before he/she/it was even born.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered as another contraction started to build. ‘I’m so sorry I got you into this mess. And I’m even more sorry we’re depending on Josh to get us out.’

  * * *

  She was in labour.

  The thought was unbelievable. The knowledge was doing his head in.

  Somehow he had to put it aside, focussing only on keeping his grip on Bugsy. He was inching ahead, making the big dog slow. Staying safe. He’d be no use to anyone dead. He was taking no unnecessary risks.

  In labour.

  Who?

  Of all the stupid questions? Did he need to know who the father was?

  They’d kept in touch. Theirs had been a civilised divorce, born out of grief. Maddie had understood why he couldn’t stay married.

  She’d said she felt sorry for him.

  Why did that slam back now? That last appalling conversation as he’d tossed random stuff into his kit bag, ostensibly heading for a flood in Indonesia. The Australian government had offered help and Cairns Air Sea Rescue had asked for volunteers.

  Maybe a month, they’d said.

  They’d both known it would be longer. The pain of loss was so great Josh had curled inward inside. He couldn’t bear seeing his loss reflected on Maddie’s face. He couldn’t help her. He couldn’t help himself.

  ‘You’ll never heal by running away,’ Maddie had said sadly, and even then he hadn’t been truthful.

  ‘I’m helping others heal. That’s why I’m going.’

  ‘You’re hiding from the pain the only way you know how,’ she’d said. ‘But I can’t help you, Josh, so maybe it’s better this way...’

  And then she’d walked out because she couldn’t bear to watch him pack, and he was gone before she’d returned.

  The end.

  Who was the father of her baby? Why hadn’t she told him?

  This was important.

  They got in touch on Christmas and birthdays. Formal stuff.

  Babies weren’t formal?

  New partners weren’t important?

  He swore.

  And then he reached the rock face. The tunnel ended with a mass of fallen boulders and loose gravel.

  He raked the floor and saw evidence of the miners who’d been flung apart from Maddie and Malu. A tin canteen. He snagged it and opened it—sandwiches! Worth holding on to? If he could.

  If there was anyone to eat them.

  He stared at the massive rock pile. It was such a jumble—how could he ever get through?

  But Bugsy was nosing forward, whining, clambering up and over the first couple of rocks. He’d let him go—now he made a lunge and grabbed him before he got down the hole he was intent on investigating.

  Hole.

  Bugsy.

  Maddie would never forgive him if he risked her dog.

  But contractions... What choice did he have?

  He knelt and hugged the big dog close, and he knew what the choice had to be. If this was possible...

  Please.

  He hauled his coiled rope from his shoulder and tied an end to Bugsy’s collar. Then he carefully unrolled the rope so Bugsy felt no pull. It was a light line. It shouldn’t cause much friction.

  But the chance of a collapse...

  Don’t think it, he told himself. He couldn’t.

  He hugged Bugsy one more time, thinking of him all those years ago, thinking of Maddie’s joy when he’d put a warm, wriggling bundle of puppy into her arms.

  ‘I’ll lo
ve him forever,’ Maddie had said.

  Dared he risk...?

  How could he not?

  ‘We’re both risking,’ he told Bugsy, and he sat back and let the dog go. ‘For Maddie.’

  And one minute later Bugsy had crawled his way across the first pile of rocks, pushed his nose into a crevice—and then his whole body.

  He was gone.

  * * *

  Maddie lay in the dark and worried. A lot.

  He could be anyone and I’d be terrified, she told herself. If he was some unknown rescuer putting his life on the line to save her, she’d be appalled.

  But, then, no one else would have done it, and she knew it. To head into a mine shaft where the shoring timbers were collapsing, where the shaft was known to be unsafe, where a mass of rock was already blocking the way, was just plain lunacy.

  ‘Idiot hero.’ She said it out loud and Malu stirred beside her and she bit her lip.

  But still... ‘Idiot hero,’ she said again under her breath.

  But he’d be in his element. She knew that. Josh would do anything for anyone. He was brave, clever, fearless, giving...

  But not taking.

  If it was Josh stuck in the mine he’d be pulling down more rocks so no one could save him, she told herself, speaking under her breath. Josh being saved? Ha. No one saved Josh.

  That was the trouble. When they’d lost Mikey, the giving had been all one way. She’d sobbed and he’d held her but he hadn’t wept, as well. He’d held himself close.

  And then, when Holly had died, he hadn’t even let her hug him. She knew how much he’d loved his little sister, but he’d held himself rigid within his grief and despair, with no way of letting it out.

  I don’t need help. That was Josh’s mantra. How could he live like that?

  He did live like that, which was why she couldn’t live with him.

  I don’t need help?

  Yeah, if that was the case for her then she should be over at the rock face, reinforcing the rubble so no one could get through. She should be telling Josh that the moment he emerged into her cavern she’d toss rocks at him.