The Surrogate's Unexpected Miracle

by Alison Roberts

  Her hormones were all over the place right now, weren’t they?

  And then she felt her cheeks flush. ‘I haven’t even said thank you,’ she said. ‘You saved Jamie’s life...probably mine, too.’

  It seemed as if Jamie had gone back to sleep but Luke didn’t put him back into the bassinet. He perched on the bed again, holding the bundle as if it was the most natural thing in the world to do.

  ‘It was my pleasure,’ he said. ‘The best job I’ve had since I came back.’

  So had they been just a ‘job’ to him? Just another case and one that would be remembered for snatching success from imminent disaster? Oddly, the disappointment felt crushing.

  ‘Back?’ Ellie was relieved to achieve a casual tone.

  ‘I’ve been working in Australia pretty much since I graduated from medical school. I’ve taken a three month locum here because I needed some time to sort my parents’ estate. And I was ready for a change so it’s a good time to take a break and reassess my future.’

  So he was a locum. And he was only here for three months.

  ‘I’ve heard about a couple of great positions already,’ he continued. ‘I’m tossing up whether I want to apply for the one in London or Boston right now. Both of them are in major trauma centres that deal with things you’d be lucky to ever see in Auckland.’

  The disappointment was still there, ready to roll in on another wave. How weird was that? Was it because he represented a link to the past? They’d been to the same school. They would know a lot of the same people in the area Ellie had grown up in. She’d already lost so many links to that happy part of her early life and it had seemed as if the last one had gone with Ava’s disappearance.

  She swallowed hard. ‘Yeah...I guess that’s exactly what I have to do now. Reassess my future.’

  A whimper from the baby prompted Luke to move. This time he transferred the bundle into Ellie’s arms. And then he caught her gaze. He didn’t have to say anything.

  She was holding her future.

  ‘Are you going to manage?’ he asked quietly. ‘Have you got family and friends to support you?’

  ‘No family,’ Ellie said. ‘But I’ve got some good friends. You’ve met Sue, in ED? Well, she’s organising an emergency baby shower. I don’t have anything. Not even a nappy...’

  She had to look away from that steady gaze. She didn’t want him to know how terrifying it was. In a day or two, she had to take this brand new little person back to a totally inappropriate inner city apartment where there was barely enough room for herself, let alone a baby and all the gear she was going to need, like a cot and a pram and stacks of nappies.

  She didn’t even know how she was going to pay the rent on that apartment...

  Luke was pulling a pen from the top pocket of his scrubs. He fished out a small notebook and ripped out a page.

  ‘This is my phone number,’ he told her. ‘If you ever need help, ring me.’

  Ellie’s eyes widened.

  Luke grinned. ‘No, I don’t usually do this for my patients. But you’re special. You’re an old bus buddy so we go way back, even if my memory’s a bit hazy.’

  Ellie pressed her lips together. Her memory was getting less hazy by the minute. She had noticed Luke every time he’d sauntered down the bus aisle past her seat. The bad boy who’d been expelled from every school he’d been to until he got to Kauri Valley. The angry kid who’d somehow morphed into the coolest one. The one that every girl had been desperate to be with...

  He put the scrap of paper on the top of her locker.

  ‘Want me to get someone for you? Do you need help with Jamie? Or some pain relief or anything?’

  ‘I think I’m ready to sleep,’ Ellie told him. ‘Jamie seems to be settled again. Could you put him back in the bassinet for me, please?’

  She watched as he carefully positioned the baby on his side and then tucked the sheet securely around him. There was nothing more he needed to do but he paused for a long moment—that big, artistic looking hand cupping the baby’s head so gently that the spikes of dark hair barely moved. Ellie could feel that touch herself and it felt as if it were cupping her heart.

  He was quite something now, this grown up bad boy.

  ‘Sweet dreams, little guy,’ Luke murmured.

  And then, with a smile, he was gone, letting himself out of Ellie’s room as quietly as he’d come in. He left the door slightly ajar and she could hear the muted sounds of a maternity ward on night shift. The distant cry of another baby. Soft-soled shoes going past in the corridor.

  Her baby was asleep and she needed to rest herself. It was the only opportunity she was going to get to heal and gather her strength for what lay ahead.

  Adjusting her body to find a more comfortable position, Ellie could see the top of her locker where that scrap of paper lay beside her water glass.

  He’d said they were ‘bus buddies’, she remembered.

  He’d said that she was special...

  He’d given her his phone number to use if she needed help.

  Not that she would, but having it there somehow made her immediate future look a little less terrifying.

  Ellie drifted into much-needed sleep unaware of the curve of her lips.

  She was special...

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE BABY WAS about six weeks old.

  A little girl, called Grace, but that didn’t stop Luke Gilmore being instantly reminded of Jamie Thomas.

  It had been more than two weeks since he’d delivered Ellie’s baby in such a dramatic fashion. It felt like a long time since he’d shared what seemed like a surprisingly intimate conversation, late that night in her room.

  He would never have recognised Ellie from that time in his past. What he had been prompted to remember was a girl with long blonde braids who had been too timid to interest him. The girl who wore the hats—Ava—used to stare at him but Ellie was also memorable for the way she avoided eye contact.

  She hadn’t been avoiding it the other night. Quite the opposite. When she had been telling him about the surrogacy arrangement that had gone so wrong and particularly when she’d explained how hearing the baby’s first cry had changed her for ever, she’d held his gaze with an intensity that had made him feel as if he was glimpsing a part of her soul.

  A courageous soul, he had realised. And a generous one.

  She’d been prepared to do something for a friend that went way beyond the normal boundaries of friendship. And she hadn’t been planning to raise a child on her own but was facing what could be a difficult future with such determination—and such obvious love for the baby she had now claimed as purely her own.

  He had to admire that.

  To admire Ellie.

  And, man...as he’d kept going back to that time together in his head—more often than he was comfortable with, to be honest—he realised that Ellie had matured into a very attractive young woman. Her hair was more honey than white blonde now and, thanks to her avoidance of eye contact, he’d never noticed how astonishingly blue her eyes were. There was a softness about her features, too, that he could imagine being the result of a timid, sensitive teenager gaining confidence with time.

  This baby who had just come into the emergency department of North Shore General was crying miserably. So was the mother who was holding her as the nurse, Sue, helped to settle her on the bed. The young father was hovering on the other side of the bed, looking stressed and helpless.

  ‘We thought it was just a cold,’ he told Luke. ‘But now she’s got this horrible cough and it sounds like she can’t breathe...’

  ‘Has anyone else in the family been unwell?’ Luke was looking carefully at the baby as Sue undressed her. The baby looked dehydrated but not feverish and, thankfully, there were no signs of a rash that could be meningococca
l.

  ‘I’ve had a bit of a cough,’ the father said. ‘Nothing major. Just one of those irritating dry coughs that won’t go away. I heard someone call it the “Hundred Day” cough.’

  Luke’s heart sank as he met Sue’s glance as she helped position the baby so that he could put his stethoscope on the tiny chest. For adults or immunised people, the ‘Hundred Day’ cough was an irritating bug. For babies like this, it could be the life-threatening bacterial infection of whooping cough.

  And, sure enough, the baby started coughing. It was too young to have the strength to produce the characteristic ‘whooping’ sound of gasping for air between the coughing spasms but they were severe enough to be causing a dangerous lack of oxygen and both Luke and Sue watched with deepening concern as the blue tinge to the baby’s face advertised a degree of cyanosis that was going to need urgent management.

  ‘See if we’ve got an oxygen hood in the department,’ Luke said to Sue. ‘And put out a call for an urgent paediatric consult.’

  ‘I’m going to take a swab,’ he told the mother, ‘and some blood tests but it looks very likely that she has pertussis—whooping cough. We’re going to need to admit her and keep her in isolation.’

  ‘Whooping cough?’ The mother looked terrified. ‘But that’s impossible. I had the booster vaccination that they recommend when you’re pregnant. They said that would help keep her safe until she gets her first shot next week.’

  ‘And it does help. You did exactly the right thing.’ Luke nodded. ‘Did everybody in your extended family get boosters, too?’

  ‘My mother did. I told Gerry that he should get one but...’ The woman glanced up at her husband, who was looking stricken. ‘I guess we kind of forgot...’

  ‘Work’s been crazy,’ he muttered. ‘And what with Serena having to give up her job, I’ve had to take all the overtime I could get.’ He turned away, putting his hand over his eyes. ‘Oh... God...is this my fault?’

  ‘The important thing is looking after little Grace, here.’ Luke was pulling supplies from the containers on the bench in this resuscitation area. A tourniquet, the smallest cannula available for IV access, tape and the connecting plug that would enable him to set up a drip. ‘We’re going to start her on antibiotics without waiting for the test results. And we’re going to try and improve her oxygen levels. You must have noticed the way she’s going blue with the coughing fits? That means she’s not getting enough oxygen and that can be dangerous.’

  Another nurse came in with the oxygen hood that Luke had requested.

  ‘We’ll get you to put Grace on the bed by herself, now,’ Luke said gently. ‘This looks scary but it’s just a plastic dome that will go over her head on the bed. It’s an easier way to provide extra oxygen than taping prongs into her nose.’

  It was clearly hard for the mother to hand her baby into the care of others and step back, out of touching range. Her husband put his arms around her as she sobbed.

  ‘Can we stay?’ he asked. ‘Is that all right?’

  ‘Of course,’ Luke said. ‘And I’ll tell you what we’re doing every step of the way. The first thing we need to do is to put a tiny needle into one of Grace’s veins. Given how small she is, it might need to go into a vein in her scalp, or her foot, but don’t be alarmed. It’s just the same as putting one in an adult’s arm.’

  The new nurse was staying to help Sue hold the baby as Luke began to work on starting treatment that would, hopefully, save this baby from the potentially life-threatening complications from whooping cough that were running through his head right now. Luke had seen babies develop pneumonia and encephalitis from this disease. He’d once looked after a baby in Intensive Care who had needed extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, even, where the blood was removed from the body to do the work of the lungs in the same way a heart-lung bypass machine worked.

  The sad thing was that this was a preventable disease but he could understand how the idea of having a booster vaccination had seemed unimportant to the father of this baby.

  With the cannula safely secured into a scalp vein, Luke had a moment of distraction with the automatic process of attaching the IV line and setting the drip rate of the fluids.

  Had Ellie had a booster vaccination while she was pregnant? How many visitors was little Jamie getting and was he in close enough contact with any of them to be in danger of having something like this passed on? A sideways glance at Sue, who was positioning the plastic dome of the oxygen hood over Grace’s head, prompted Luke to make a mental note to talk to her about it. Ellie had told him that Sue was a good friend of hers. She could, at least, pass on the warning that they’d had a serious case here.

  The paediatric team arrived and took over the care of Grace and her transfer to their intensive care unit but it wasn’t until much later in the evening, after dealing with a man having a heart attack and a motorbike accident victim with a serious leg fracture, that Luke had the time to grab both a coffee in the staffroom and to have a word with Sue, who also happened to be in the room.

  ‘How’s Ellie?’ The query was casual. ‘And Jamie?’

  Sue’s eyes widened. Was she surprised that he had remembered the name of one patient amongst so many? Or that he knew the name she had given to her baby? He concentrated on stirring his coffee. She would be a lot more than surprised if she knew how often he’d been thinking about them both since then.

  ‘She’s amazing.’ Sue’s expression softened into admiration. ‘I can’t believe how well she’s doing. She wasn’t supposed to be keeping this baby so she had nothing, you know? Not even a nappy. And she’s living in this tiny apartment that’s not much more than a bedsit.’

  The movement of Luke’s spoon slowed. He could feel relief softening his muscles. If Ellie was doing well maybe he could stop worrying that Jamie wouldn’t end up being put up for adoption. Or worse, going into the first of a series of foster homes...

  But then he found something else to focus on. Just how tiny was the apartment she was living in? He was rattling around in a huge old house all by himself. How unfair was that?

  ‘She hasn’t got any family to help, though, has she?’

  ‘How did you know that? Oh, yeah...I remember now. Ellie said that you’d been to visit while she was in hospital. That you knew each other from way back?’

  ‘We didn’t exactly know each other. We used to catch the same school bus, that’s all.’

  Sue nodded, glancing at her watch. ‘I’d better get back. Break’s over.’

  ‘You don’t know whether Ellie had a pertussis booster while she was pregnant, do you?’

  Sue paused. He could see her make the connection with the case they’d both worked on earlier this evening and her nod told him that she knew exactly what he was concerned about. If she was surprised by that ongoing concern, she didn’t show it.

  ‘I’ll check. You’re right. If the bug’s in the community at the moment, she needs to know.’

  ‘Anyone else that has close contact with the baby should get a booster, too. Like her boyfriend?’

  ‘Oh, she’s safe enough on that score.’ Sue was already heading for the door. ‘Being single was one of the reasons it was easy for her to make the decision to be a surrogate. And she certainly hasn’t had the inclination or opportunity to start anything since.’

  Luke finally took a mouthful of his rapidly cooling coffee.

  ‘Something up?’ One of his registrars came into the staffroom.

  ‘No...why?’

  ‘You’re looking worried.’

  Luke shook his head. ‘All good, mate. And it’s nearly home time. What would I have to worry about?’

  He abandoned the coffee and went back into the department. What would he have to worry about?

  It really wasn’t his problem that Ellie might be struggling to cope with limited resources and space
.

  That she didn’t even have a partner to provide more than intermittent assistance...

  It was highly unlikely that she would think of calling him if she needed help. As he’d explained to Sue, they hadn’t really known each other all those years ago, so why would she?

  She probably hadn’t even kept his phone number.

  * * *

  It was right there on her fridge door, half hidden by a smiley face magnet.

  Luke’s phone number.

  Ellie spotted it on one of her interminable circuits around the very limited space in her apartment, as she carried the unhappy bundle that was her baby. A baby who had been fed and changed and cuddled and should have been asleep more than an hour ago.

  She’d glanced at the fridge because she was hungry. Hungry enough to wonder if she’d actually remembered to eat at all, today. Oh, yeah... She’d used the last of the peanut butter on the last slice of bread, hadn’t she? The plan had been to walk to the nearest supermarket this afternoon to get some more supplies but it hadn’t quite happened. The washing machine, tucked under her kitchen bench beside the fridge, had simply stopped working and the repairman had arrived hours later than he’d promised.

  And then it was time to feed Jamie again. And give him a bath. She’d had to dip into the emergency supply of disposable nappies because none of the washing that had finally been done had had time to dry yet and Ellie could only hope that the grow suit he was wearing would last until the morning because everything else in her son’s meagre wardrobe was either amongst the new load in the washing machine or hanging over the bars of the laundry rack that filled the space between one end of her couch and the television in the corner of her living area.

  ‘Shh...shh...shh...’ She rocked the baby as she turned around, stepped past the plastic baby bath that had to get propped up against the kitchen wall because there was no room for it in the bathroom, passed the end of the couch that wasn’t obscured by the metal frame of the drying rack and took the ten steps available before she came to her bed.

  An unmade bed that looked astonishingly inviting. She could be asleep the moment her head hit that pillow. For an hour or two, anyway, until the small person in the bassinet that had replaced her bedside table woke up again. Even the prospect of being woken was enough for her heart to sink and the threat of tears to surface. This was all so much harder than she had expected.