The Surgeon's Love-Child

by Lilian Darcy

  'I don't want to wait that long.'

  'I agree. But if you go with CVS, you need an obstetrician who's experienced with the procedure, and that means Sydney or Canberra. There's the added bonus of privacy,' he went on, after a short pause.

  She didn't argue the point. She did consider protesting his assumption that secrecy remained so important. They'd agreed on that two and a half months ago, but maybe it was time this changed.

  No. Not yet. Secrecy was important still, she revised after a few moments' thought.

  She didn't want the pressure of colleagues or friends or, heaven help her, Mom or Maddy asking about their plans. The future stretched a little further ahead in her mind now than it had done an hour ago. It went as far as the chorionic biopsy and the result, which would come around three weeks later once the tissue from the placenta had been cultured.

  Beyond that, her life was a fog.

  'We can finesse this a bit,' Steve was saying. 'I can write you the referral letter myself. I'd go with Ian Strickland in Sydney. He's very good. We'll make it a Friday, if possible, and stay overnight. Maybe the whole weekend.'

  'You keep saying we,' she accused lightly.

  'Yes.' He looked at her, his blue gaze very direct across the table. 'Of course I'm saying we. You don't think I'd let you go through it alone, do you?'

  She could have cried at that point. Managed not to.

  'Maddy's coming,' she blurted suddenly instead. 'My daughter.'

  Why had she added those last words? Of course he knew who Maddy was!

  'When?'

  'In two or three weeks. She called this morning to see if it was OK, but really she'd already made up her mind, with my mother to back her up. They're natural allies, those two.'

  'And is it OK?'

  'Yes, it's great.' She laughed, and added, 'It's wonderful, and I haven't got the remotest idea how I'm going to handle it.'

  'The very first thing you should do is phone her and make sure she doesn't plan an itinerary that clashes with the optimum timing of the test,' he said. 'As to the rest, worry about it later.'

  'I'm getting good at worrying about things later. Better than I want to be.' She looked down at her half-eaten plate of pasta, and this time the fight against tears was harder to win.

  The landscape on the Saturday morning drive up to Sydney hadn't changed much in three months.

  Although it was early winter now, native Australian trees didn't lose their leaves, and the weather wasn't cold enough to make the grass turn brown. If anything, the late autumn rains had made the landscape greener than before. The sky was still blue, and there was even some vegetation that was still in flower.

  Curled in the passenger seat of Steve's car with a pillow behind one shoulder and a mohair blanket over her knees, Candace felt dreamy and content as the pretty vistas unfolded. She was exactly at the eleven-week mark now, had begun to feel—cautiously—a little less nauseous, and was looking forward to this weekend away.

  Steve had booked the two of them into a bed-and-breakfast place at Cremorne Point on Sydney Harbour's northern shore, and tonight they were going to dinner near the Opera House, followed by a big, splashy musical. Tomorrow they would explore the Harbour and the city, on Monday she was scheduled for the chorionic biopsy with Dr Strickland, and on Tuesday morning Maddy would arrive.

  'Dropping off to sleep?' Steve asked as they swept around a wide curve of highway and saw the ocean and a string of coastal settlements in the distance.

  'Not really,' she said. 'Sleepy, but the view is too pretty to waste it by closing my eyes.'

  'Nice for some,' he teased. 'I have to watch the road.'

  'We can swap. You've trusted me at the wheel of your car before.'

  'We're not swapping.'

  He was still treating her like a fragile porcelain figurine, and since this was how she felt most of the time, she found it easy to give in to it and let him do it.

  Maybe that's why I don't want to sleep, she decided. This weekend might be precious—a precious memory— and I don't want to lose any of it...

  An hour later, they stopped at a beachside park in one of Sydney's southern suburbs on Botany Bay. Steve had packed a picnic lunch of thick, chewy ham and salad sandwiches on French bread, as well as tea and some buttered buns with lurid frosting of a very thick and sticky pink.

  'No, thanks!' Candace said with a shudder, when he offered her one.

  'May I have yours, too, then?'

  'Honestly, I've tasted these! If you said you needed them as a substitute for rubber cement, maybe, but to eat? Two of them?'

  He grinned. 'Can't call yourself an Australian if you don't like a nice wad of sticky bun on occasion.'

  'I don't call myself an Australian,' she pointed out.

  He shrugged. 'True.'

  A huge Qantas 747 jet lumbered down the airport runway, which jutted into Botany Bay less than two kilometres from where they sat at a picnic bench beneath bright green Norfolk pines. It gathered speed, engines screaming, and finally heaved itself off the ground, to rise steeply over the shallow water of the bay and wheel to the north-west, heading across the Pacific.

  Where was it going? Home, maybe. To America, where Maddy's bedroom in Boston was probably a mess of half-packed suitcases right at this moment.

  This time in two days, she'll be on the plane. This time in three days, she'll be here...

  'You can't wait, can you?' Steve said. He had followed her yearning gaze as she tracked the plane.

  'Reading my mind again?' she retorted.

  'Reading your face.'

  'What number look is this?'

  'Number two,' he answered in the blink of an eye. 'You think about her a lot, don't you?'

  'Of course!'

  'Why didn't you bring her with you?'

  Because she would have drastically interfered with the launch of my fling with you.

  Something told her very firmly not to follow this thought any further. It led into a wilderness of conjecture that was pointless to explore.

  'Maddy wanted to stay at home,' she said instead. 'Australia was a place in a movie, as far as she was concerned. Snakes and sharks, little wooden shacks in the middle of a treeless desert and men in crocodile-skin hats.'

  'Great!' He laughed. 'Remind me to hunt up my crocodile skin hat as soon as we get back.'

  'It wasn't a place to hang out with friends and start dating cute boys and get elected class president. I didn't push it I wanted to. But it wouldn't have been fair. And she's always been pretty independent. Going off to summer camp without a backward glance from when she was eight. Even when she says she's missing me, she's somehow speaking from a position of strength. No, this was...something I needed for me. Getting away like this. For her, too, I guess. I'll be a better mother when I get back.' A self-mocking laugh escaped her lips. 'Not so bitter and twisted—'

  She stopped abruptly.

  A better mother? A completely different mother. A single mother with a newborn baby. It didn't seem real. She couldn't picture it at all. So much so that she'd actually forgotten for a moment, while talking about Maddy, that she was pregnant. With this man's child.

  Steve was watching her, his body lazy, his mouth a little crooked and his eyes hard to read.

  'OK, what number look is this?' she challenged him, unnerved by his body language and by the movement of her own thoughts.

  'Don't know,' he answered casually. 'Haven't seen this one before. Ready to get going?'

  'Yes, because I think, actually, when we get to our bed-and-breakfast, I'll take a nap.'

  Suddenly she felt exhausted, and she'd had enough of the planes. The sight of them taking off and landing was dramatic and beautiful in this setting, but these big jumbo jets were a constant reminder that the world was a big place. Too big for a woman who was carrying a child with a heritage split in two by the vastness of the Pacific Ocean.

  She wasn't sorry when they drove off, went through a tunnel on the highway that actually ran ben
eath the airport runway and left the planes behind.

  *

  Their harbourside bed-and-breakfast turned out to be delightful. Antique furnishings, complimentary drinks and snacks, fluffy towels, fragrant linens and gorgeous water views.

  'It'll just be a little nap,' Candace promised when they'd unpacked.

  'No worries. I'll go for a walk, explore the Point and watch the ferries going past.'

  'Half an hour.'

  But she slept for two, and only awoke when he slid into bed beside her, without clothes. 'Couldn't keep away any longer,' he muttered. 'Is that all right?'

  'You know it is. It always is.'

  'I've been watching you for ten minutes, and you looked so good...'

  She turned into his arms and kissed his mouth softly, still unsettled about those planes and that vast ocean. She wanted to drug herself with his love-making and just forget everything else.

  He obliged with delicious tenderness, then they showered together and his slippery, soapy hands on her body—'All my favourite places, your hips, your stomach, your breasts...they feel even better these days...you're beginning to ripen, Candace'—seemed to promise that nothing else mattered but this, and now, and the two of them.

  They had dinner overlooking the Opera House and the ferry terminal at Circular Quay, then saw the show they had tickets for. It was light and sophisticated and very well done. The next morning, they breakfasted on a glassed-in terrace at their B and B, then caught the ferry across to Circular Quay and back out to Manly, passing huge cargo ships as well as a gleaming white cruise liner and dozens of colourful sailboats.

  The ferry crossed the gap between the harbour heads, rocking more in the rougher water, and they caught glimpses of the spectacular houses that fronted the Harbour, as well as wilder sections of rock and vegetation on the northern shore. At Manly they ate Lebanese falafel rolls and ice cream for lunch.

  In the afternoon, they explored the steps around the Opera House and the historic Rocks area, with its lingering flavour of the First Fleet's settlement over two hundred years earlier. That evening, they ate in Chinatown, then walked through Darling Harbour and caught a water taxi back to Cremorne Point. It zipped beneath the dark, awe-inspiring metal fretwork of the Harbour Bridge and skirted Kirribilli Point, where the two historic residences of Admiralty House and Kirribilli House sat grandly amidst their lush gardens.

  'It has to be the most beautiful harbour in the world,' Candace said, as they alighted from the water taxi at Cremorne Wharf and walked beneath huge Moreton Bay fig trees back to their B and B.

  'Sydneysiders certainly think so,' Steve said.

  'You think it has some competition?'

  'Hong Kong is pretty nice. Vancouver. New York.'

  'I didn't realise you'd travelled so much.'

  'I like travelling. I'd like to get to the US again pretty soon.'

  For a moment, with the mention of her native soil, they both teetered on the edge of pulling this casual conversation in a more important direction. Candace could feel it. She was holding her breath, waiting. The sense of expectancy, the sense that they were both thinking about it, trying to find the right questions, the right words, was almost unbearable.

  But then they reached the front door of the B and B, which was locked at this time of night. They couldn't remember which of them had the key, and the moment passed.

  At ten the next morning, Candace had her chorionic biopsy at Royal North Shore Hospital.

  She hadn't spent much time thinking about the process of the test itself. Obstetrics wasn't her area, and she vaguely thought that it involved going through the opening of the cervix in order to extract a tissue sample from the foetal side of the placenta. She did know that it would be done with the aid of an ultrasound scan, and had to drink and hold an agonising amount of fluid in order to create a clear image. The ultrasound waves bounced better off a full bladder.

  Fortunately, Dr Strickland was on time and she was soon lying on the table in the darkened room, next to the sophisticated scanning equipment. The obstetrician ran through some information which both Candace and Steve already understood—that the test could detect any one of hundreds of chromosomal abnormalities, most of them extremely rare.

  'Down's syndrome is the real concern,' Dr Strickland explained. 'And at your age...' he checked her notes briefly '...the risk of you miscarrying as a result of this procedure is approximately the same as your risk of carrying a Down's baby. Do you want to consider that risk a little further before you decide to go ahead with the test? Or consider what your decision would be if the test does reveal a problem?'

  Candace looked instinctively at Steve. He reached out and took her hand, and she was suddenly flooded with warmth. However uncertain the future might be, with their shared agreement that no commitment to each other had been made, at least he was here with her now, and giving all she could have asked for.

  'I think...' she began hesitantly, then was relieved when Steve took up her reply.

  'I think we've talked about it enough beforehand,' he said. 'We're both doctors. We're aware of all the issues. But it was good to have it spelled out again.'

  'We'll go ahead with the test,' Candace finished.

  Dr Strickland's ultrasound technician spread a clear gel on her lower abdomen, established a picture on the black and white monitor and keyed in some details on the keyboard.

  'There's the baby,' Dr Strickland murmured, as the technician slid the probe back and forth to find the best position. "Alive and kicking. Literally!'

  Steve and Candace were both silent.

  Awed?

  She was. Didn't know about Steve. She was watching the monitor intently, but felt the warm pressure of his hand as he gave her rather clammy fingers a squeeze.

  The technician took some measurements, expertly manipulating the probe and using the keyboard to change the scale of the image or freeze it.

  'The baby's size and development are both consistent with the dates you've given, Dr Fletcher,' Ian Strickland said, then added, 'Jenny, let's take a closer look at the spine, can we?'

  There was a silence, broken only by the click of the keyboard and the hum of the machine. 'Freeze that, can you?' the obstetrician said. 'Yes, there.'

  'What are we looking at?' Steve said, sounding a little edgy.

  Candace was feeling that way, too, now. She'd expected to move more quickly to the biopsy itself, although it was magic to actually see the baby like this. In another couple of months, she'd be able to feel all that kicking and tumbling the tiny foetus was doing. When she'd thought for so many years that she'd never again take part in the miracle of creating a life, it was amazing.

  'You said you were both doctors,' the obstetrician said. 'How familiar are you with this area of medicine?'

  'Not very,' Steve answered for them both. 'I guess we know the theory.'

  Candace's heart had started beating faster. Like Steve, she might not be an expert on foetal development and prenatal testing, but she was definitely an expert on the way specialists worded things to their patients when they weren't completely happy about what they saw.

  'There's a problem, isn't there?' she demanded.

  'Well, no, I wouldn't say that,' the specialist answered carefully.

  'Something's not right. Something's ambiguous on the scan,' she insisted, then realised that her protest, in a rising voice tone, was only delaying his explanation. 'I'm sorry,' she said. 'Just tell us.'

  'I'm looking at this measurement here,' he said, elbowing the technician aside politely and taking control of the keyboard and probe himself. 'The thickness of the skin in the neck area—the nuchal fold. Can you see it?'

  'We can see it,' Steve came in quickly. 'What about it? Hell, there is something, isn't there?'

  'Thickened skin in the nuchal fold, at this stage of development, can be an indicator of Down's,' came the blunt words.

  Candace's whole body grew hot, then ice-cold. Yes. Yes, she'd known that, but she hadn't t
hought about it in a personal context.

  Dear God!

  Her thoughts were ragged, yet crystal clear.

  I'll love you anyway... I'll keep you... I couldn't let you go...

  'An indicator,' Steve echoed. 'I'm not thinking clearly. Can you go through the facts on it?'

  'It's just that,' the obstetrician said. 'An indicator. There's a link. It's not definitive, by any means.'

  He gave them some statistics which to Candace were, frankly, total gobbledygook right now. Then he said that if they were in any doubt about having the test, this information might cement their decision.

  'We weren't in any doubt,' Steve said grimly. 'And we're not now. My brother and his wife had a Down's baby a few months ago and he died shortly after birth.'

  'That's tragic for them,' Ian Strickland replied. 'But there's no correlation.'

  'On paper,' Steve said. 'I know there isn't. Let me tell you, that feels completely meaningless at the moment! Emotionally, believe me, there's a correlation!'

  'I can understand that,' the obstetrician said.

  His manner was textbook perfect—controlled yet compassionate. Candace had spoken like that to patients herself when breaking difficult news. She suddenly realised, Lord, people must hate me sometimes! Must hate all of us, no matter how hard we try and how genuinely we care. It's in the nature of the job. I loathe this guy, and it's not his fault at all.

  Candace cleared her throat with difficulty. 'So it's just a matter of having the test and waiting for the result,' she said. 'There's no short cut to getting a more concrete answer on this?'

  Oh, for goodness' sake! I know there isn't! Darling baby, bouncing around on the screen, I don't want you to have Down's...

  'I'm afraid not,' he answered. 'We'll all have to wait.'

  'Can we get on with it, then, please?' Her voice was high.

  She felt Steve's hand squeezing hers, harder this time. His was clammy now, too. As a ludicrously mundane counterpoint to the new question mark over the baby's condition, Candace's bladder felt as if it might soon explode.

  The actual biopsy passed in a painful blur. Dr Strickland used a swab of numbing agent on the skin of her abdomen, and only then did she realise in some surprise, He's not going through the cervix after all. I'm out of date on that, or else they do it differently here.