A Christmas Miracle

by Amy Andrews

  ‘I noticed Oscar’s sternotomy scar on the beach today.’

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  TRINITY BLINKED AND her heart skipped a beat as she stared at him. Nothing like throwing a hand grenade to ruin the ambience. ‘Oh.’

  She’d seen it so often she didn’t really see it at all any more. Except when he was in hospital battling lung infections and the scar stuck out horrifyingly white as he struggled for breath.

  ‘I assume he had some congenital heart condition?’

  Trinity hesitated. ‘Yes.’ She took a swallow of the beer and fixed her gaze on the distant stars.

  ‘I hope you know you can talk to me, Trinity.’

  His voice was soft and sincere. Calm. As if he were talking to a frightened animal that might scarper at any moment. She wasn’t frightened though. Not of telling Reid. She was just so used to not telling people, actually opening up about it was surprisingly difficult.

  Of course, there were plenty of people who knew about Oscar’s condition—most of them medical. Also a handful of strangers—parents of sick kids—she’d met over the years whenever Oscar had been an inpatient. The bond formed with someone who was living the same nightmare encouraged those kinds of confidences.

  And the school too, of course.

  But she didn’t tend to talk about it as a general rule. Especially not to people she didn’t know well. She hadn’t wanted it to draw attention to Oscar as being different or remarkable. Flying under the radar was what she’d perfected.

  A bit of that old tension slid into her bones as she contemplated opening up. She took a deep breath. ‘He had Tetralogy of Fallot.’

  There was a pause. ‘I see.’ She could feel his gaze lasering into her profile. ‘TOFs are pretty routine cardiac repairs these days. Lots of great paediatric cardiac surgeons out there. Were there complications?’

  The tension oozed from Trinity’s bones at his matter-of-fact reply. Reid probably knew more about TOF than she did and not having to explain that the condition consisted of four different cardiac defects and what that meant physiologically was a relief. It still didn’t stop the rise of hysterical laughter spilling from her throat. TOF repairs were routine enough but Oscar’s case had been somewhat complicated.

  ‘You could say that.’

  ‘Yeah. I thought that might be the case. Why don’t you start at the beginning?’

  Trinity had a choice now. To gloss over the details and move on. Or open up. Reid had taken her and Oscar in, given them a roof and an income and hadn’t pried into the circumstances of her life and she was surprised to find she wanted to tell him.

  Maybe it was because he’d never pushed. Maybe it was his medical knowledge. Maybe it was their fledgling friendship.

  Or maybe it was the funny sensation in the centre of her chest today as she’d watched him hold Oscar in the ocean.

  Whatever. She wanted to tell him.

  ‘Oscar was born at twenty-six weeks.’

  Reid whistled. ‘Okay. That explains his size.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Was the TOF diagnosed via ultrasound prenatally?’

  Trinity shook her head, the rush of guilt she always felt about her lack of prenatal care as keen as ever.

  ‘No. I...didn’t know I was pregnant until I was about sixteen weeks and then...’ God. Then she hadn’t known what to do. ‘I was nineteen. I was living on the streets. I didn’t really know what to do except I knew I had to get my act together because I did not want that kind of life for Oscar.’

  ‘Do you mind me asking why you were on the streets?’

  Trinity hesitated. This conversation wasn’t about her but she supposed it was only natural that it would go there. She was surprised to find she wanted to tell him about that as well.

  ‘A dysfunctional home life. Parents caught in an intergenerational welfare cycle who spent most of their money on things like booze and cigarettes and the pokies and spent the rest of their time fighting and wrecking whatever hovel we were in at the time. Lots of police call-outs. Then they’d break up and there’d be a whole conga line of new boyfriends or girlfriends before they got back together again. School was a godsend but my parents usually felt their hangover needs were greater than my scholastic ones so I missed more school than I attended.’

  Trinity stopped, aware she was talking too fast as she plucked the events of her youth out of her brain from the macabre carousel going around and around. She took another sip of her beer, staring at the stars. It was easier to tell when she wasn’t looking at him.

  Especially the next bit.

  ‘And then when I was seventeen my mum’s latest boyfriend decided he wanted to try a threesome. With her. And me. She was okay with that...but I wasn’t.’

  Trinity was pleased for the cover of night as her face blazed. That conversation still made her cringe to this day. The way he’d leered at her as if she were the cherry on his pie still made her skin crawl. Reid didn’t say anything, for which she was grateful. He just sat and listened, his foot rocking the chair.

  ‘So I walked away. Actually I ran away and never went back. I hooked up with Brian, a guy I knew from having met him in courts and cop stations on and off over the years because of our parents. He was a few years older than me and had had it worse. He’d been in and out of the foster system for years. He was living on the streets but he welcomed me with open arms, showed me the ropes.’

  A tendril of the fear that had gripped her in those first few days she’d been alone curled around her gut and Trinity paused for a moment.

  Reid must have sensed it because he drew in air between his teeth and said, ‘Tough life.’

  It wasn’t trite or judgemental, just a statement of fact.

  ‘It’s not for the faint-hearted,’ Trinity admitted, finally looking at him. Their gazes locked. ‘But it was more harmonious living on the streets with him than it had ever been under my parents’ roof. There’s a whole homeless community out there and I know it’s screwed up but for the first time in my life I felt like people cared about me. That they actually gave a damn.’

  He nodded and she felt as if he really understood. ‘Is that where you learned to fight?’

  Trinity laughed at the unexpected question. ‘Yeah. One of the guys we knew was some kind of ex-black-ops dude. I learned enough from him to get by.’

  He stroked his beard and the sound became a physical caress down her body. He took a swallow of his beer. ‘So... Brian’s Oscar’s dad?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is he...around? Involved at all?’

  ‘No. Bri died a couple of months after Oscar was born.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  His voice had deepened and the resonance of his sincerity was like a physical force. ‘Don’t be. He was stoned and apparently playing chicken with a train. I loved him but he always did have a bit of a death wish.’

  The wince on Reid’s face said it all. ‘He was a pot-head?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  It hadn’t bothered Trinity that Brian was high seventy-five per cent of the time. Not before she was pregnant. But after—it had mattered a lot.

  ‘Have I shocked you?’

  ‘No. Not at all.’ He half turned on the chair to face her. ‘I went off the rails a bit in my teens. Divorced parents, shipped between two warring parties, a string of new partners who all wanted to be my friend.’ He waved his hand in the air dismissively to indicate the usual stuff. ‘I was angry...ran away. Fell in with the wrong crowd. Got into some petty crime, was in trouble with the cops a bit. My parents disowned me. It was Pops actually who took me in, turned me around.’

  Reid had been into petty crime? It wasn’t that hard looking at him to imagine him being on the wrong side of the law. He looked as if he belonged in an outlaw motorcycle gang. But knowing hi
m was a different matter. The big, motorbike-riding, tat-covered, bearded man was the opposite of how he appeared.

  ‘That was very good of Eddie.’ Any extended family Trinity owned had all been cut from the same cloth as her parents.

  None of them had wanted her either.

  ‘I hadn’t had much to do with him at that point. My father and he didn’t get along very well but my grandmother had died a few years before and he needed somewhere to put his love and attention as much as I needed love and attention.’

  Trinity nodded. ‘That sounds like Bri and me.’ He’d taken her under his wing as much for himself as for her.

  ‘You were with him?’ Reid asked gently. ‘When he died?’

  ‘No. We’d already split by then.’

  ‘You’d split?’

  She nodded. ‘He wanted me to get an abortion. He didn’t want to waste any of his precious pot money on a kid. It was him or the baby.’

  ‘Ah. I see.’

  ‘I went there,’ she said, dropping her gaze to her beer bottle, picking at the label absently. ‘To the clinic. That’s where I found out how far along I was. They did an ultrasound. And, of course, at sixteen weeks I couldn’t just get a pill and be done with it. But that was okay because I’d seen him on the screen, this little skeletal creature scuttling around, sucking his thumb and... I knew I couldn’t do it.’

  ‘They didn’t pick up the TOF on that ultrasound?’

  ‘No, it was mainly just for dates. I was supposed to go at nineteen weeks for a proper one but I was couch-surfing and trying to find a job and sort my life out and, frankly, scared out of my wits and I told myself I’d go later for another check-up, towards the end, but...’

  ‘You went into premature labour.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s okay. They’re often not picked up on ultrasound anyway.’

  A block of unexpected emotion welled in her chest and lodged in her throat. ‘It’s not okay. I should have taken better care of myself. Of him. It was...irresponsible.’

  ‘You weren’t to know. There was nothing they could have done antenatally anyway.’

  ‘I could have done something.’

  He shrugged. ‘Maybe knowing about it might have helped with forward planning but—’

  ‘No,’ she choked out, interrupting him, the beer label half shredded. ‘I mean I could have prevented the TOF if I’d known about Oscar earlier.’

  He frowned and shook his head very slowly, his gaze fixing on hers. ‘Trinity...it’s a congenital defect. It happened when Oscar’s heart was forming. There’s nothing you could have done about that.’

  She shook her head. ‘It was my fault.’

  It was the one phrase she’d never dared speak out loud and now she had. If she’d hoped there’d be some kind of catharsis, some lightening of her burden, she was badly mistaken.

  ‘I fell pregnant in winter,’ she said, her voice husky, her heart heavy, her emotions sitting in a giant tangle in her gut. She returned her attention to the label. ‘It’s cold on the streets in winter. We’d been drinking cask red wine to help keep warm. I mean, I never drank much, nowhere near as much as others. Maybe a couple of glasses every night and I stopped when I found out I was pregnant...immediately. But I’ve Googled it.’

  She shut her eyes. It was a hard thing to admit that a substance she’d put in her body had caused Oscar’s condition. That she was responsible for his malformed heart.

  ‘Trinity.’

  His voice was low, vibrating with compassion. She sucked in a breath. ‘They say drinking alcohol can affect the formation of the growing foetal heart and—’

  ‘Trinity.’

  She peeped at him through her fringe. He moved closer, the chair rocking a little. Sliding a finger under her chin, he raised it until she was looking him square in the eye. She shivered at the compassion warming his blue gaze.

  Or maybe it was his touch.

  ‘They don’t know anything definitively.’

  Trinity desperately wanted to believe that. ‘But—’

  ‘The foetal heart is pretty near formed by six weeks,’ he interrupted again. ‘TOF is not a common condition. A lot of women don’t even know they’re pregnant until then. You want to guess how many of them are blissfully drinking unawares during that time? There’d be a helluva lot more TOF if booze was the causal factor, don’t you think?’

  Trinity hadn’t thought of it like that before. Of the bigger picture. Of the many women who’d drunk alcohol while pregnant with absolutely no ill effects on their babies. She’d just read it online and been instantly paralysed by guilt.

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘A risk factor is just that. It doesn’t mean that’s what caused Oscar’s condition. They. Don’t. Know.’ He whispered the last three words, taking the time to emphasise each one, staring deep into her eyes, as if he was willing her to believe.

  For the first time in five years she actually did.

  She doubted the guilt over his condition would ever completely disappear. As a struggling single mother, Trinity had found that guilt lay around every corner. But Reid had given her perspective.

  She swallowed. ‘Okay.’

  ‘Yeah?’ He cocked an eyebrow.

  Trinity gave a half-smile. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Good.’

  He smiled and released her chin. He didn’t shift away though and she was hyperaware of her body’s reaction to his nearness. Of his finger imprint under her chin, of the dark shadow of his beard and tats, of the way his T-shirt fell against his belly.

  The long stretch of his thigh.

  Every cell in her body seemed to be undergoing a chemical reaction. Melting down.

  ‘So,’ Reid said after a beat or two, turning back to face the night, ‘he was born at twenty-six weeks with a TOF? I’m guessing that complicated things rather a lot.’

  Trinity struggled to gather her wits and pick up the threads of what they’d been talking about before they’d become sidetracked by their own life stories.

  ‘Ah...yes.’ She took a sip of her beer to cool the heat of her body.

  ‘What did he weigh?’

  ‘Eight hundred and twenty grams.’

  ‘Oh.’ He glanced at her. ‘Under a kilo.’

  ‘Yes.’ The fact she didn’t have to tell him that premmie babies under a kilo had much poorer outcomes was a relief. ‘Obviously he had tiny lungs, which weren’t helped by the severe pulmonary stenosis from his condition. Worst the specialist had seen apparently,’ she said, her tone derisive.

  ‘Hell. He really had the odds stacked against him, didn’t he?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she said with a self-deprecating smile. ‘This is why I look old and haggard.’

  He snorted. ‘You don’t look old and haggard.’

  She blushed at his quick dismissal, his compliment rushing dangerously to her head. ‘You thought I was older than twenty-four,’ she accused, keeping her voice light.

  ‘I said you acted older.’ He grinned at her. ‘Different thing entirely.’

  Trinity’s breath hitched at his grin and the fact that she returned it. Why was he so damn easy to talk to?

  ‘So how old was he when they did the repair?’

  ‘He had a shunt initially as a stopgap measure until he grew big enough to have the surgery, but he was five months, two months corrected age, before he was big enough and well enough to have the full open-heart surgical repair. He was in the NICU for one hundred and eighty days.’

  He whistled. ‘That sounds incredibly stressful.’

  ‘It was.’ Trinity shuddered. How she’d got through it she had no idea. ‘There were so many hairy moments. It seems he takes after his father in the dicing-with-death department.’

  ‘So what did you do while he
was in the NICU all that time?’

  She blinked. ‘Nothing. I stayed with him. I couldn’t leave him.’ Her gaze met his; she needed him to understand. ‘Plus it was a solution to my housing problem. They have units at the hospital for long-term families. They weren’t anything flash but it was like a palace compared to what I was used to. They charged a nominal rent so I was able to save some of my government money for use when he was finally discharged.’

  He gave an incredulous half-laugh. ‘Did no one guess you’d come from the streets?’

  ‘Nope.’ She shook her head. ‘I became really good at pretence and flying under the radar. I used my parents’ address and told them I still lived at home with my mum, who was house bound with crippling agoraphobia. They knew I wasn’t with Oscar’s dad any more but I was there and engaged in Oscar’s care. I was sane and stable. I didn’t cause waves or rock any boats. I...became part of the furniture, I guess. They knew me. Well, they knew the kind of person I was anyway. That I was a good mother and that Oscar would be in good hands and that’s what mattered.’

  ‘But...’ he angled himself in the swing to face her again ‘...you could have talked to social services. They would have hooked you up with all kinds of support. You could have put down for public housing.’

  Trinity shook her head. ‘The wait list is years.’

  ‘But you’d have been fast-tracked if they’d known your situation.’

  She was stupidly touched by his earnestness. ‘And in the meantime the authorities know I’m not able to provide for my son and they take him off me?’ She shook her head. ‘If they’d found out I’d been homeless and I had no idea where I was going to live if Oscar was ever well enough to go home, I’d have never seen him again. And I wasn’t risking that.’

  The one thing Trinity and people like her, who grew up in the kinds of places she had and who’d lived on the streets, had been conditioned to mistrust, was social services. It might have been wrong but it was deep-seated and compelling.