In the face of the shoe itself.
Because it did have a face, this shoe—a little orange clownfish face, cleverly painted on the worn sneaker to disguise the hole in the toe. Orange felt-tip pen, black markings made with something finer, maybe a laundry marker, and white edgings of correction fluid. Alice had always had a talent for drawing, and for improvisation …
‘It was her sister I knew,’ he’d said about Janey, in the A and E department, the night she’d been brought in. He hadn’t said, This patient’s my sister-in-law.
And it wasn’t Frankie Jay’s shoe, he told himself yet again.
It couldn’t be.
The mysterious silent kid could not be Frankie Jay.
Yet Frankie Jay’s aunt had been on the bus. She was lying in Crocodile Creek Hospital right now, asking about Luke—asking about a little boy, too?—but the shoe couldn’t belong to her nephew—my son—because the consensus around the hospital, from people who knew about such things, was that the shoe must belong to a four-year-old or thereabouts, and Frankie Jay would be turning six in just a few weeks.
Luke wouldn’t even recognise him, he knew.
He hadn’t seen him since he was three months old.
‘He’s coming in to see you now,’ Dr Wetherby reported to Janey.
Charles, she remembered. He’d asked her to call him that, and he knew she was a doctor herself. Charles Wetherby. In a wheelchair. Somewhat of a local legend, she gathered. He was the hospital’s medical director.
Her brain still felt fuzzy and disoriented, slow to process what was happening around her and the things people said, struggling to make sense of everything. But she kept trying, deeply anxious to return to full health, to get out of here, although she didn’t know where she and Felixx would go.
Felixx, who was coming in to see her now.
‘Georgie Turner’s bringing him,’ Charles continued. ‘Our obstetrician. She’s terrific.’
‘He’s been staying with her since the crash.’ She still had blanks in her memory, and forgot things she’d been told.
‘That’s right.’ Dr Wetherby was very patient. ‘She and Dr Carmichael risked their lives to find him and Max, right in the teeth of the cyclone. We’re all devoutly thankful that the four of them survived.’
‘How long have I been in here now?’
‘Since Saturday night. And now it’s Tuesday. You missed all the drama.’
‘Not all of it.’
Except that she couldn’t remember. She and Felixx had been on the bus that had slid off the road. There had been a landslide, triggered by the massive dump of rain that had heralded the cyclone, apparently. She remembered when they’d left Mundarri a few hours earlier, trying to get her waif-like, silent nephew to say goodbye to Raina and Maharia, but as usual he hadn’t said a word, just waved, taken Janey’s hand, stretched his small legs to climb the bus’s high steps.
And that was all.
After this, everything remained blank, and when she’d regained consciousness, she’d had to ask, ‘Where am I?’ like an accident victim in a bad movie, before she’d remembered finding Luke Bresciano’s contact details at Mundarri among Alice’s things. The second thing she’d asked had been, ‘Where’s Felixx? My—my little boy.’ Because, for the moment at least, he was hers.
‘Is he OK?’ she asked now, having been told at first that he was but not quite daring to believe it.
‘Well, we have a couple of concerns …’ Charles Wetherby said.
‘Is he speaking?’
‘No, he’s not, and we were wondering if there’s anything you can tell us about that. He doesn’t seem to have a hearing problem.’
‘He hasn’t spoken to me either.’
‘Since when, Janey?’
She frowned and tried to will the fuzz out of her brain. Since when? Since ever! But had she managed to explain …? No, that’s right. They would have assumed the obvious relationship, and she’d been too fuzzy to correct them. ‘He’s not my son,’ she said.
‘But I thought—’
‘He’s my nephew. My sister’s child. I don’t know him very well. She—They believe in alternative healing at Mundarri. I don’t know if you’ve heard of—’
‘Mundarri? Some kind of spiritual retreat, up in the rainforest?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Well, I do think there’s a place in our system for alternative medicine …’
‘I do, too, sometimes.’
‘But I’ve heard they have some odd ideas.’
‘Odd ideas that killed my sister.’ She sketched out the story as briefly as she could, sidetracked into an ambush of emotion before she could swallow it back, and even just that amount of effort tired her out. ‘I’m sorry, I’m a doctor myself. Right, yes, I did tell you that.’ Her head hurt. ‘As you say, I think alternative healing has its place, but—’
‘We’re both doctors, you don’t have to explain.’
‘Will I be discharged today?’ she asked, knowing the answer even before she heard it.
‘Not before tomorrow, I shouldn’t think,’ Charles said gently. ‘Should we postpone your nephew coming in?’
‘Oh, no, please. I want to see him! Let me just close my eyes for a minute …’
And the next time she opened them, not long afterwards, there he was, being ushered into the room by an attractive and very energetic-looking woman with bright red dangly earrings. She had a pretty impressive bruise on the side of her face, which Janey put down to the cyclone.
‘Felixx …’ Janey struggled to sit up, struggled yet again not to cry. She didn’t want to scare him any more than he’d been scared already by all that had happened, all the uncertainty, all that he’d lost. ‘Oh, sweetheart … Oh, darling …’
She held out her arms, but Georgie Turner had to nudge him forward. ‘Come and hug your Auntie Janey.’ Charles Wetherby must have explained their relationship to her.
At last he came, and she felt his warm little body. Had a momentary flashback to the bus. That’s right, he’d fallen asleep on her shoulder, so warm and trusting and relaxed. Now she wanted to hold him for ever, just for the reassurance that they were both alive, that she hadn’t let him down, that they were together, so everything would be all right.
But he pulled back.
Didn’t speak, of course.
Why didn’t he speak?
He looked scared. She could see him taking in the equipment—the drip stand and bag of fluid and cannula taped to her hand, the monitor reporting on her oxygen and heart, and the imposing side rails and wheels and crank handle of the hospital bed.
Alice, she remembered. He was scared because his mother had died, and now his Auntie Janey was ill, too.
‘I’m feeling so much better, Felixx,’ she said quickly. ‘Dr Wetherby says I can probably get out of here tomorrow. I’m sitting here going woo-hoo!’
On Felixx’s face the sun came out from behind a cloud. It was the only way Janey could describe it to herself. His smile spread wide, his eyes went happy, his tense little shoulders dropped and relaxed. He looked as if there was something else he wanted to say or ask, but didn’t know how. Or didn’t dare.
‘Were you scared I was really sick?’
He nodded, cautious about it.
Oh, hell, of course he had been scared!
‘Nah,’ she said, deliberately casual and dismissive. ‘Takes more than a few bumps on the head to knock me around. We’ll be able to check into a nice motel, and—’ She stopped.
Georgie was shaking her head. ‘No motels,’ she mouthed.
The cyclone, Janey remembered. As she hadn’t seen it or heard it or even seen the damage yet, she had to take it on trust and her foggy brain kept forgetting. None of the motels in town were currently open for business apparently.
She put on a bright voice. ‘Well, we’ll have to camp or something.’
‘If you’re not feeling well enough to travel yet, Janey, we can arrange something. There’s a big house—it
’s the original hospital building—where several of the doctors live, and we can usually find extra room.’ Georgie’s bright earrings bobbed as she talked. She looked like the kind of woman who could arrange emergency accommodation on an uninhabited planet if she had to. ‘We can lend you some clothes. Rowdy, here, was pretty happy to be reunited with his missing clownfish shoe, but his toes are getting squashed in those sneakers, so we’ve found him some new ones.’
‘You haven’t thrown the clownfish shoe away?’
‘Ooh, no, weren’t allowed to do that!’ Her face telegraphed the story. Rowdy must have clung to the shoe. Alice had painted the fish on it to hide the hole in the toe, Janey knew, and of course he wanted all the reminders of his mum that he could find.
‘Thanks,’ she said, her voice husky with tears.
‘To be honest, though,’ Georgie said gently, ‘getting back to the issue of where you’re staying, we’re encouraging people to evacuate if they can. Resources are pretty stretched. I think the Golden Palm will be up and running in a couple of days. It’s not exactly five-star, but they only had minor damage and they’re working on getting one block of rooms back into a fit state for guests. There’s the Athina, too, but that’ll be full. They’ve just had a big wedding. You’re from Darwin?’
‘I don’t know where I’m from right now.’ Janey closed her eyes. ‘The moon?’
The thought of finding a place to stay, tracking down Luke, presenting him with his son and saying something like, Do you want him? Alice said you didn’t, but she’s gone now, and I’m wondering if that might make you change your mind. After all, you are the only father he’s got …
Exhausting.
Too hard.
She’d asked someone about Luke, but maybe no one had passed the message on. Or, no, with services in the whole region so strapped, he’d be working around the clock, playing the hero.
He had a nice line in heroic behaviour. People loved the casual humour, the god-like reassurances and the warm fire in his amber-brown eyes, and immediately believed in him. She knew what he was like … or had known once … He wouldn’t be able to resist the opportunity to show off in all this chaos. Which was good, because she didn’t have the energy for their confrontation just yet.
‘Honey, we might take you back to play with Max, OK?’ she heard Georgie say. ‘Auntie Janey needs to rest for a while now.’
He stood there looking at her for a moment, frowning, giving off that same sense that he was about to speak, that the words were just crammed in his mouth bursting to come out, but as usual he stayed silent.
‘Bye, sweetheart,’ she managed, then the sleepy fog stole over her brain again, and hours passed.
The next time she woke up, her head had cleared, her stomach wanted food, her limbs were ready for a good stretch and altogether she felt about a hundred years better.
Until she became aware of the quiet masculine presence in the chair beside her bed—dark hair, strong shoulders, genuine, implacable fatigue written all over him—and realised it was Luke.
CHAPTER TWO
LUKE looked exhausted and stressed.
He had bloodshot eyes, hair yelling for a brush, even a streak of dried mud along his jaw. He looked older. There were some lines around his eyes and mouth. Janey hadn’t seen him in, what, seven years? No, just under six, if you counted photographs.
Alice had sent one from London shortly after Felixx’s birth—a casual shot of both parents and the tiny bundle of baby snuggled between them. Alice had looked tired, but Luke had glowed—the archetypical proud father. Just three months later, their marriage had shattered. Janey still didn’t know the full story, and what she did know had come only from Alice.
So how did you even start in a situation like this?
With ‘hello’ apparently.
Luke said it first, his voice low and tired and husky. Despite the changes in his appearance, he was still the man she remembered, dark and ferociously good-looking, with those trust-me-I’m-a-hero amber-brown eyes and a confident mouth that had rarely bothered to bestow its charming smile on Janey. She’d seen it quirked in annoyance or outright anger far more often.
‘Hello, Luke,’ she answered him. ‘It’s good to see you.’
His smile was strained. Good to see each other? Maybe. And they both looked wrecked. He carried his fatigue well, but she had no illusions about the appearance she must present after two days of unconsciousness in a hospital bed—and she’d never been the pretty one of the two Stafford girls.
‘It’s been a while,’ Luke said.
‘Too long.’
His face changed. The strong jaw suddenly looked harder. No charm in evidence at all. ‘Don’t put that down to me, Janey. Just don’t. I contacted you and your parents over and over, asking you to put me in touch with Alice, and you insisted you didn’t know where she was.’
‘We didn’t, then. She didn’t contact us for a couple of years.’
‘But you do now?’
‘It’s complicated …’
‘Explain, Janey. Pretend I’m completely in the dark, no idea what’s been going on for the past five and a half years with my wife or my son. Just pretend, OK?’ His voice dripped with harsh sarcasm on those last three words.
Oh, lord, their dealings were getting badly strained already, and she had some shattering news to impart!
I won’t do this, she vowed. I won’t make it into a battle or a litany of accusations, no matter how I feel about Luke, or how much truth there might have been in what Alice said! Felixx has endured enough, he doesn’t need his two closest living relatives to be at war with each other.
It wouldn’t have been Alice’s approach, she knew. Alice had loved the high drama of family arguments and taking sides and emotional manipulation. You became drawn into it, inevitably, because—like Luke—she had so much charisma, so much life, so much self-belief. The world always seemed a more interesting and dramatic place when she was around.
Had loved.
Had had.
Had seemed.
Luke must have seen something in her face. ‘I’m sorry. Shall we start again?’ he said.
‘Let’s.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he repeated. ‘I can’t do the small talk. Not in a situation like this. There’s only one thing I want to know right now. The child. The boy. He’s around four years old, people are saying. They’ve been calling him Rowdy, but you’ve said his name is Felix. So he’s your son. I had this stupid hope for a while that—’ He broke off.
The look on his face was that of a man still under torture. It shocked her, because she’d never seen him like this before, wouldn’t have said he had the capacity to feel life’s darker emotions so deeply.
He was the sunshine type.
‘Luke … Dear God, I thought you knew,’ Janey blurted out. ‘He is Frankie Jay. He is yours. Of course he is.’
She watched him try to stand then sit back down as if his legs had given out from under him. He looked totally bewildered. ‘But—Felix?’
‘Alice changed his name, and I’ve grown used to it. She changed hers, too, and both their last names. Alanya and Felixx Star. Felixx’s has a double X, which is—’
Ridiculous.
She stopped. Why give this detail now? The double X. Her opinion of it. Her brain still wasn’t working quite right. ‘He’s small for his age,’ she went on. ‘He does look like he could be four.’
Luke put his head in his hands for a long moment, hiding his expression. She wanted to reach out and comfort him with her touch, but didn’t think she had the right or that he’d want her to. The nakedness of his reactions kept surprising her, although she couldn’t have put into words what she’d expected instead.
More of a performance?
‘When they found your ID in A and E on Saturday night, I didn’t know why you’d been on that bus,’ he said eventually. ‘If it was anything to do with me, if it was just one of those bizarre coincidences, or if Alice had put you up to it for som
e reason … Hell, I can’t call her Alanya! Where is she? Was this her idea? Why bring him here now, after all this time, when she did so much—must have moved heaven and earth—to make sure I could never find either of them?’
‘Never find them? She said you didn’t want him! Or her. That you couldn’t handle fatherhood and wanted your bachelor days back. That you were the one who left.’
‘Which you instantly believed, of course.’ Suddenly, they were both gabbling, fast and furious.
‘Yes, because—’ She fought the swimming feeling in her head.
‘When was this?’ he demanded. ‘After my phone calls from London, or before?’
‘You’d said when we were working together—and you said it more than once—that you never wanted kids. And you certainly used to enjoy your freedom. Some men find they can’t deal with—’
‘No!’
‘Yes! When we were interns, those three months in the paediatric unit. We saw some heart-rending things.’
‘All right, I remember. I was twenty-six years old. That’s a young man’s response, Janey, pretty unthinking in some areas, far too black and white. I’ll never have to see a child of mine go through this, because I’m damned sure now that I’m never having kids. As for enjoying my freedom, that’s just how you would phrase it, isn’t it? The negative connotation. We all needed a bit of a release in those days. I changed. I loved Frankie Jay like—When was this? When did she say this? After my phone calls?’
‘After, when she came back to Australia.’
‘When you already knew how desperate I was to get in touch with her and see my son.’
‘It’s easy to say. Especially on the phone from half a world away. That you’re desperate to get in touch. It’s the expected reaction. Casts you in a heroic—’
He swore. ‘You thought it was just a performance? Hell, I knew you never thought all that highly of me marrying your sister, but …’ His lips had gone white. ‘We worked together. I saved your backside a couple of times, and you even returned the favour. There was a degree of respect between us. Professional respect, at least. I thought. But that’s what you think I’m capable of.’
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