A Proposal Worth Waiting For

by Lilian Darcy

  ‘There is Nicholas Devlin,’ she said slowly.

  ‘Who? Oh, you mean Nick? Josh’s dad?’

  ‘That’s right. He’s a plastic and reconstructive surgeon at Royal Victoria Hospital in Melbourne.’

  ‘I didn’t even realise he was a doctor. He’s kept that quiet!’ Charles allowed himself a small chuckle.

  ‘It might get you off the hook. I’m sure he’d be willing, and he has a very good reputation. This is such a wonderful place, and all the kids are having such a great time. I’d hate future camps to get marred by complaints or legal problems.’

  Charles thought for a moment, then said decisively, ‘Ask him. We’re good at roping in stray doctors around here. Some of them even end up staying! While you’re hunting him up, I’ll clean out the wound and give Lauren a local, see if I can get the parents to be a bit more reasonable. Let’s get this done.’

  Miranda had a hard time ducking Mr Allandale’s onslaught of demands. ‘Dr Wetherby wants to talk to you first,’ she said, to keep him at bay. There was no point in mentioning Nick and his specialist skills until she knew whether he was willing and able.

  After some minutes of hunting, she found him returning from the beach with Josh, to get cleaned up for some quiet time before lunch. They both looked relaxed and—she hadn’t consciously seen this before—incredibly alike. Dark hair, big boyish grins, tanned feet that moved nimbly on the sandy ground and seemed to relish their lack of shoes.

  It was hard to break into their time together with a request for Nick’s professional help, but if he was the man she believed him to be, she knew he’d want to give it.

  ‘Of course,’ he said, once she’d explained. ‘But there’s Josh.’

  ‘There’s a session just starting in the pottery room. Would he like that?’

  Nick nodded. ‘That’s a good idea. Let me get him settled, and I’ll be with you as soon as I can.’

  Miranda heard raised voices as she came back up the ramp to the medical centre. Charles still spoke calmly, repeating his insistence that the helicopter service was not at their disposal, but the Allandales were both yelling in their attempt to argue their case.

  ‘Hasn’t our daughter been through enough?’

  Miranda knew from experience that they wouldn’t give up quickly. ‘I’ve found a specialist,’ she announced, before Dr Wetherby could repeat his quiet statement of the facts. The Allandales looked blank and suspicious, so she explained, ‘He’s a plastic and reconstructive surgeon at Royal Victoria Hospital. Nick Devlin.’

  ‘But he’s one of the parents.’

  She smiled. ‘We have a range of careers among our parents. A couple of them might surprise you! In this case, you couldn’t have done better than Josh’s dad.’

  ‘I’ve talked to him,’ Rick said. ‘He didn’t say he was a surgeon. We talked about chess.’

  ‘But he is,’ she assured them brightly, ‘and he’s willing to work on Lauren’s injury. You’re very lucky.’ She emphasised the statement. ‘It’ll be so much better to have it done promptly on the spot, and it won’t spoil her holiday.’

  As if still suspicious that she might be putting one over them, the Allandales nodded, looked at each other and exchanged a short series of whispered phrases. ‘As long as there’s no delay,’ Mrs Allandale said.

  ‘And if you’ll stand in on the procedure, Dr Carlisle,’ her husband added.

  ‘Of course, if you want me to.’

  Charles raised his eyebrows at Miranda as if to ask, Is this typical?

  Miranda spread her hands and shrugged. Yes, it was.

  Rick slipped outside and soon had his mobile pressed to his ear, visible through the medical centre windows. He was phoning some contact of his in Melbourne to verify Nick’s professional credentials, Miranda realised. Although the mistrustful action made her hackles rise, she accepted that she might have done the same thing if this had been her pretty and chronically ill teenage daughter. Like children, parents didn’t always know how to behave! Kirsty had followed her husband outside, after a murmured excuse, and now they were talking.

  Nick arrived just a few minutes later, walking with Beth. The latter told Charles, ‘I took her temp. It’s up a bit, but not much. Thirty-eight point three. I’ve given her the paracetamol and listened to her chest. There’s some congestion building up, but it’s probably viral so there’s not a lot we can do. She’ll shake it off in a day or two, she’s such a sturdy little thing.’

  He nodded. ‘I expect she will. Is she on her own again?’

  ‘I settled her on the couch with a book. She seemed happy. I can go back, if you like. She’s so at home here, she’ll run and find someone if she has any problems.’

  ‘That’s always what I’m afraid of, with Lily,’ Charles answered. ‘She could go out on the veranda in search of a tissue-box and strike up a lifelong friendship with the first person she sees, even if he had three heads and green teeth. No, I’ll go. My professional skills have been roundly rejected, so I’m a free man.’ He gave a wry grin and began to wheel himself towards the door.

  Nick had already moved in the direction of the treatment room, where minor surgical procedures could be performed. He had no idea that his qualifications were still being investigated. ‘Dr Stuart, can you give me a quick run-down on your set-up?’ he said to Beth, who followed him quickly.

  The Allandales came back inside and went directly to their daughter. ‘Everything’s going to be all right, sweetheart,’ Kirsty said.

  Meanwhile, in her hospital bed, Kathryn couldn’t keep up the pretence that her attack was out of control. She was breathing much better, and lay back quietly against her pillows, tired out by the recent drama.

  Miranda only had time to poke her head around the door, but bubbly, down-to-earth Grace was in attendance. They had an elderly man from the resort hotel in another bed, separated from Kathryn’s by a partition jutting part way across the room and curtains drawn along tracks in the ceiling. The gentleman thought Grace was gorgeous, with her bouncy hair and twinkly blue eyes and just the teeniest bit of flirtiness in the way she talked to him, and it was making him feel better by the minute.

  ‘I just want Daddy to come up here,’ Miranda heard Kathryn say in a very small voice.

  She went back to Nick and Lauren in the treatment room. ‘Keep the parents out, can you?’ he muttered to her. ‘I hate having interested parties looking over my shoulder.’

  ‘You’ll have me, if you don’t forbid it,’ Miranda muttered back. ‘They’ve asked if I can keep an eye on you.’

  ‘Wha-a-a-t?’

  ‘Don’t take it personally. I’ll pass you things. Can be quite useful, I can, when I want to be.’

  ‘More cheekiness, Dr Carlisle?’

  ‘I’m saving most of it.’

  ‘Good…’ He grinned at her and her heart melted.

  In the end, the procedure itself created no drama. Charles had already administered the local anaesthetic, cleaned the cut and put a temporary dressing in place. Nick took a moment to plan his work, but once he actually began it he moved with a delicacy and speed that Miranda knew her own fingers could never have matched.

  ‘We’ll give you an antibiotic, Lauren, so there’s no danger of infection. The stitches will dissolve on their own. I’ll take a look at it every day to make sure it’s healing right.’

  Lauren nodded. ‘Here?’ She’d taken the whole procedure calmly and patiently, with no complaints.

  ‘I don’t think we need to come here. We can do it on the beach, if you like.’

  She managed a grin—no mean feat for a girl with a numb chin. ‘That’d be good.’

  She might be spoiled, especially in the company of her parents, but she’d spent enough time in hospitals to be stoical about them—and at the same time very happy to avoid yet another visit.

  ‘Want to show Mum and Dad before we cover it up?’ Nick asked, and Lauren nodded.

  Miranda held her breath when the Allandales came in, but Nick e
xplained what he’d done to minimise scarring and earned their complete confidence and a gushing level of gratitude in about a minute and a half. ‘I don’t know what we’d have done if you hadn’t been here. Flown her to Brisbane in a chartered helicopter at our own expense. It would have been terrible,’ Kirsty said.

  When they’d gone, Nick said to Miranda, ‘Should I have suggested they donate the cost of a charter flight to the new medical centre instead?’

  She laughed. ‘Only if you wanted to stir them up. You were great. Nobody wanted it to turn into a major incident, but it was heading in that direction.’

  ‘Shall we go and pick up Josh?’

  He ran his hand down her arm in a private, intimate gesture that made her heart sing, and a voice of hope inside her began to say, It’s going to work out this time. It’s the start of something wonderful. It’s real.

  Then she smelt the sunscreen on his neck and remembered the way she’d always felt when she played with the kids on the beach…and the way she’d felt when beach time ended.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  ‘SHE was scared we were getting divorced!’ Julia shook her head, reliving her mingled bemusement and relief at getting to the bottom of Kathryn’s deliberately triggered and exaggerated attacks.

  ‘But those attacks were real.’ Miranda frowned. ‘The second one, in particular. How did she trigger it?’

  ‘Took the pillow slip and plastic cover off her pillow, the naughty girl, pressed her face into it and took several good big breaths.’

  ‘That’d do it, yes,’ Miranda agreed drily.

  It was the reason Kathryn’s pillows had a layer of plastic covering in the first place. No matter how thoroughly Julia might wash bedding and vacuum mattresses, any invisible dust, dander or mould spores trapped in pillows and upholstered seating triggered Kathryn’s asthma if these items weren’t covered in plastic.

  ‘We’re not getting divorced, I should tell you,’ Julia said.

  ‘What made her think it was a possibility?’

  ‘Oh, she put two and two together and it came out wrong. We had an argument last week, Bruce and I, and she overheard. Unfortunately, she didn’t hear the apology and compromise we reached at the end of it. And then he couldn’t come up here, and I guess she thought the work commitment was just an excuse. Meanwhile, her best friend’s parents have just separated, and she obviously thought that if it could happen to Megan, out of the blue, it could happen to her. I think we’ve sorted it out, now. I put her on the phone to Bruce and that helped.’

  ‘You’ll enjoy the rest of your stay much better now.’

  ‘I wish we were having the full two weeks.’

  Some people weren’t. Miranda would say goodbye to three of her patients on Sunday morning and welcome three different ones on Sunday afternoon, although the rest were staying through for a second week.

  The time had gone too fast. It was already Thursday afternoon, and Miranda expected that she or Nick would soon hear from Anna about her plans to fly up and take over Josh’s care some time over the weekend.

  ‘I want her mother to be managing badly. I want both her sisters to stay in Sydney and refuse to come down to Melbourne to help out,’ Nick confessed darkly as they sat on the beach. ‘Every hour that goes by without a phone call from her, I’m hoping it means she can’t work something out. I’m hoping the flights will be full or there’ll be a refuellers’ strike, or something. She told me last night that she’d phone some time today about her plans, but she hasn’t yet, for some reason, and I’m holding my breath. I want the extra week with him, and to hell with anyone else on the planet!’

  As usual, after he’d spoken his darker thoughts, he withdrew a little. While Miranda chatted with a couple of parents, he walked down to the water’s edge in brooding silence, as if replaying what he’d just said and regretting it.

  He didn’t need to.

  Miranda loved his moments of honesty and flawed humanity. People weren’t perfect. They gave her the jitters when they tried to be, because it wasn’t natural. It was one of the things she’d hated about her childhood—the fact that her loving parents had tried too hard, had sheltered her too much, had made everything too safe and nice.

  Of course Nick wanted another week with the son he was only just getting to know on a genuine, day-to-day level. She wouldn’t say no to an airline refuellers’ strike herself if it gave her another week of Nick’s company.

  By day and by night.

  And if he was so unequivocal in not wanting Anna to come up, then surely he couldn’t still have feelings for her.

  Slathering herself with insect repellent in preparation for an evening of wildlife spotting later on, with Wallaby Island park head ranger Ben Chandler and his two junior staff, Miranda knew she’d have to fight the temptation to eat beside Nick and walk with him later, too, instead of parcelling out her time to patients and parents.

  He understood, though. When she raised the subject as they lined up for spaghetti, he told her, ‘I’ll stick with Josh. You go wherever you need to go. Maybe later in our cabin…?’

  ‘Definitely later in your cabin.’

  But what was that saying about the best-laid plans…?

  Josh was wildly excited about going out at night wearing a head torch and tramping through the bush. ‘Where’s Lily?’ he asked, as he held out his plate to receive his meal. ‘Isn’t she coming? She has to come!’

  ‘No, Lily isn’t feeling well. She won’t be coming tonight. And Garf would scare all the creatures, so he has to stay in camp, too.’

  Nick had found out a little more about Lily. Charles Wetherby and Crocodile Creek Hospital’s Director of Nursing Jill Shaw were acting as foster-parents, and her permanent future was still up in the air. He had the impression that Charles wasn’t sure about his future with Jill either. They had marriage plans, apparently, but their relationship seemed to have been cobbled together for Lily’s sake, which didn’t sound like the healthiest of foundations.

  ‘Couldn’t she have her inhaler?’ Josh was saying. ‘Then she’d be OK.’

  ‘Not asthma, Joshie.’ He tended to assume that his own illness was a universal phenomenon. ‘She has a cold.’

  ‘Oh, OK.’ He hopped back and forth from foot to foot and the tangle of spaghetti almost slid off the plate.

  Nick had to anchor him in his seat over the meal with some stern words. ‘Eat, Josh. Sit properly on your backside, please, and eat.’ He hated saying it because it reminded him too much of his dad, and all those meals choked down stone cold, as a child, because he wasn’t allowed to leave the table without presenting a thoroughly cleaned plate.

  He hated saying it, too, because he hadn’t seen fear and uncertainty in Josh’s face in three days now, and if the sternness brought the fear back…

  It did.

  Not looking at him, Josh hunkered down over his plate and managed a few more reluctant mouthfuls of spaghetti bolognaise, but then he started only pretending to eat, pushing the strands of pasta around the plate and out to the sides and mashing them into shorter lengths so they would look like inedible scraps instead of real food.

  Nick’s father’s attitudes were hard to shake, even after so many years. Kids did waste too much food. Perfectly good plates of nutritious dinner got scraped into bins to leave room for piled-high dessert. Parents became worn down by the constant need to say no to junk food and grew too soft.

  ‘OK,’ he heard a mother sigh at the next table. ‘That’ll do. Yes, go and get your ice cream…’ She added half-heartedly, ‘But have some fruit salad, too.’

  The meals were good here, but it was hard to undo bad habits in a week or two. If getting kids to eat well had been hard in Nick’s father’s day, it was much harder now.

  Hard to build a whole new relationship, too. ‘Good grief, you’re not really eating it, Josh,’ he said in the end, far more sharply than he’d intended. ‘So stop pretending. You’re done.’

  Josh put his fork down. After several seconds—b
uilding up his courage?—he asked in a small voice, ‘Can I have dessert?’

  There was half a meal still there on his plate!

  ‘No, I’m sorry, not tonight,’ Nick made himself say. ‘If you’re not hungry for spaghetti, then you’re not hungry for ice cream.’ Even though it was ridiculously tempting to agree to the ice cream just for the pleasure of seeing Josh’s face light up.

  ‘Yes, I am,’ he insisted innocently. ‘Mummy says I have two stomachs. My dinner stomach is full, but my dessert stomach is still empty.’

  ‘Well, I’m afraid it’s going to have to stay that way.’

  Nick thought it was the right answer, but saying it was hard when all around them kids were coming back to the table with bowls of ice cream, fruit salad and jelly. He felt his non-custodial parent status like a dead weight—it was such a lonely role sometimes—and his deepening relationship with Josh like a fragile flower cradled in his hand.

  What would he have to do to crush it? Not much.

  ‘Does that mean I can leave the table?’ Josh was too excited about the night walk to mind very much about dessert.

  He wasn’t a huge eater at the best of times, and his size and his asthma and his lack of appetite formed a triangle of cause and effect that Nick hadn’t fully fathomed yet. If he ate better, would he fight the asthma more easily? If his lungs were clearer and bigger, would he feel hungrier?

  ‘Yes, OK, you can leave. Scrape your plate and put it on the trolley with the others.’

  Josh did so, looking too small as he stretched on tiptoe beside the scrap bin. Seconds later, he had joined a group of shrieking kids outside the dining room. One of them had a head torch on and was treating its beam like a light sabre, while the others ran back and forth in the darkness. ‘I caught you, Josh! I caught you in the beam! And you, too, Danny!’ Danny’s round head, bald from his recent chemo, shone pale in the light.