The Surgeon's Love-Child

by Lilian Darcy

  'Is he going to be staying while I'm here?' Maddy ploughed on, ignoring Candace's plea for understanding and her attempt at a coherent, honest explanation^ 'Am I going to have to listen to the two of you? Whistle or sing or stomp my feet before I enter a room in my own house in case a parent of mine is getting physical in there with their new squeeze? God, I hoped I was getting away from that when I came out here!'

  'I—don't—know!' Candace yelled, and burst into tears.

  Maddy swore through her teeth, then held out her arms awkwardly. They hugged. Candace apologised, felt she should be handling all of this better but didn't know how.

  'I mean,' Maddy went on, her voice now full of the appeal that betrayed how close she still was to childhood, 'do you really have to get married again, or be in another relationship, or whatever? Grammy never married again.'

  'Grammy was sixty-four when your grandfather died,' Candace pointed out gently. 'I think that makes a difference, don't you? And "never" is a big word. It's only been four years.'

  'I guess,' Maddy conceded. It was a token. 'Just don't spoil my vacation, OK? I've been so looking forward to this.'

  'I won't spoil your vacation,' Candace replied in a tone of controlled patience, then wondered if she had the right to make such a promise when she had no idea how she was going to fulfil it.

  * * *

  'So, how'd it go?' Steve said, without moving his lips.

  'Not great... Hi, Marion! You're quiet in here today.' Candace had to switch tone and mood suddenly at the older woman's approach.

  'Don't jinx it!' answered Marion Lonergan, the sister in charge of the accident and emergency department at the hospital.

  'OK, that's me caught up on notes,' Steve said, dropping his pen on the A and E office desk. 'If they can't get him up to the ward, Marion, let me know, OK?'

  He handed a patient file back to Sister Lonergan.

  Candace smiled automatically, not taking any of it in. She wasn't interested in this patient, an emergency admission. She just wanted to talk to Steve with a degree of privacy. Perhaps it had been crazy to even attempt it in the middle of the A and E department. He was on call in here today, while she was in between the first and second patients on her own surgical list.

  'She was hostile, or what?' Steve asked, returning to the subject that concerned them as soon as Marion Lonergan had left the small office.

  'Hostile,' Candace confirmed. 'Selfish. Kind of "Why do I have to be inconvenienced?" sort of thing, but she had a point. Kids of her age find this stuff hugely embarrassing between people over the age of about nineteen. She has to deal with Todd and Brittany at home, and she hates it. She wants to live with my mother when she goes back, and I'm starting to think it's a good idea. She and Mom adore each other. I should have thought about how we were going to handle it, but then the issue of the baby came up and...' She felt a familiar lump swell in her throat.

  'Should we take a break, then?' he suggested.

  Candace's stomach dropped.

  'A break,' she echoed stupidly.

  'If you're concerned that it will be difficult for her,' he explained in a helpful tone.

  'Right. Yes. I understand.' She leaned her splayed fingers on the desk and sat down slowly, battled not to betray the way her legs had suddenly drained of strength. 'Yes, I guess that's the easiest thing.'

  'I mean, your mother is coming in two weeks and I imagine you might find it even harder to deal with her—'

  'Yes,' she repeated, cutting him off. 'I take your point. Yes. Let's take a break.'

  'Rather than having to sneak off and make excuses. We've both been doing enough of that as it is, wanting to keep this private from our colleagues.'

  'Yes! I'm not arguing, am I? It makes sense. Stop bombarding me with reasons, Steve!'

  'Sorry.'

  'God, why are we always apologising to each other these days?' she hissed in an undertone, lurching to her feet and stumbling for the door.

  He didn't follow her. Perhaps he was afraid they'd create too much of a scene. Perhaps he had another reason. She didn't know.

  Back outside Theatres, she picked up the phone, pressed some buttons at random, with the heel of her hand holding down the disconnect button—fortunately no one was watching—and said brightly to the dial tone, 'Yes, I'll hold.'

  Then she sat with the buzzing phone against her ear and yesterday's newspaper blurring in her vision, simply buying time. Time to regain control enough to go on with surgery. She had three more procedures scheduled this morning. The nurses were still cleaning up Theatre One after the last patient and preparing for the next, but he was here waiting on a stretcher already, and it wouldn't be long before she was needed.

  I can't! I didn't want Steve to say that!

  Take a break? Now? When our baby might have Down's, and I have to suffer through maybe nearly three more weeks before we know? I need Steve. We need each other, don't we? Obviously he doesn't think we do, or he would have bent over backwards to find a way to ride it out together until Maddy and Mom leave.

  Lord, I wanted the two of them here so much.' I was so thrilled to see Maddy and now, already, I'm wishing she was gone. Counting the days. No! I don't want Maddy gone, I want both of them. Her and Steve.

  Damn it, you fool, you've fallen in love with him, haven't you?

  The realisation entered her mind as if it had been spoken by someone else.

  I'm in love with him.

  I wasn't ready for it at all, but it's happened anyway. Is it just because I'm carrying his baby? No, it's not. I would have felt it anyway.

  And now we're not going to see each other—not in any way that counts—until Mom and Maddy leave.

  If then.

  Maybe this is his way of breaking it off. He's easing me out of it by talking about taking a break until Maddy leaves, but once that happens, he'll deal the final blow.

  All at once, everything in Steve's behaviour over the past few days crystallised into a new, meaningful picture that she hadn't picked up on before. His silence and his aura of preoccupation. The expensive piece of jewellery he had given her.

  She wasn't wearing the gold bangle today, because she was operating. It sat in its box in her top drawer at home, lovingly placed there last night when she'd taken it off before bed. She had been so thrilled and warmed about the gift, and only now realised that she'd subconsciously interpreted it as a love token, a sign of their shared tribulation, a symbol of all the things that were too hard, for both of them, to put into words.

  But perhaps it wasn't that at all.

  Not a love token. A prelude to goodbye. Something to sweeten the pill, because Steve had realised he couldn't handle it any more. She was going to be on her own...

  'You poor thing, are you still on hold?' Robyn Wallace said, coming over to the desk to write up the current recovery patient's chart.

  Candace jumped and realised that the dial tone was still buzzing in her ear.

  'Oh... Yes... I'll have to try again another time,' she said feebly, and broke the connection.

  Her next patient had been wheeled in, and they would be ready for her as soon as she'd scrubbed.

  But she had forgotten that this wasn't Steve Colton on anaesthesia today. Steve had been right. Colin Ransome was slow. Used to the anaesthesiologists she worked with in Boston, with many years of specialist expertise under their belts, she had to fight not to snap at him and the atmosphere in Theatre One was much more tense than usual.

  'Are you feeling all right?' Doreen asked her at one point.

  'Fine. Just tired. I was so thrilled about Maddy arriving, I hardly slept last night,' she lied glibly, then wondered how many more lies she'd have to tell, to how many more people, over the coming weeks.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  'So, what can I do for you today, Andrea?' Steve asked.

  It was an effort to focus on his work at the moment. He was racked with guilt and longing, and didn't know how to make it go away. A part of him wanted to run a mile.<
br />
  If this is what Matt means when he tells me I need to 'get serious', he can keep it for himself! If this is part of the job description, then I'm woefully underqualified. Who needs to feel this way, day in and( day out? It isn't fun! From the beginning, something told me to tread carefully with this one, only I didn't do it. Not really. Now I'm in deep enough to drown...

  To drown in Candace's tired, pain-filled eyes. To drown in her trembling body, in the cool sweetness of her voice, in their rambling, teasing conversations.

  And it doesn't feel good. What I'm feeling at the moment just doesn't feel good.

  'I'm moving to Sydney,' Andrea Johnson was saying, as he forced himself to focus. 'Just thought that after what happened in March, I should have a thorough check-up first.'

  'Yes, that's sensible.' He remembered her emergency surgery for appendicitis, and the benign tumour that had been removed instead. He read the details in Candace's handwriting in Andrea's notes. 'You'll need to find a good GP in Sydney once you're settled. I can recommend a couple of names.'

  'I don't know whereabouts I'll be living yet,' she said. 'It's all a bit of a leap in the dark.'

  'You don't have a job to go to?'

  'No, but with my computer skills it shouldn't be difficult.'

  'Let's have a look at you, then.'

  He ran through the usual things. Her blood pressure was fine, nice and low at 110 over 70. Chest and heart sounded good. Clear lungs, healthy heart rhythm and pulse. He asked her a couple of general questions, then did a pap smear, and she was a young, confident woman who wasn't put off by his gender, during what some women considered a horribly intimate procedure.

  With a patient's lower body concealed behind a sheet and with most of the work done by feel, Steve found pap smears to be just part of the routine. He chatted a little to help her relax, warmed the speculum with his hands and obtained the cell samples without difficulty. Then he dealt with the slide, disposed of his gloves and left the treatment room so that Andrea could get dressed again.

  When she reappeared, he said, 'We should just run through a couple more things. You've had no trouble with your incision as it's healed?'

  'It itches sometimes, but that's all. My sister Carina says hers does, too. Only, of course, she has a baby to show for her scar, so everyone's a lot more sympathetic and interested!'

  She laughed, but it was a rather bitter sound. Steve waited and, sure enough, there was more.

  'That's why I'm moving to Sydney,' she went on.

  'Because of Carina, and people fussing over the baby?'

  'Because I'm sick of putting myself through it. It's my fault. I know that. Carina's OK. She doesn't mean to rub it in my face that she's got a husband and a baby and all that, but...' She trailed off, then shrugged. 'You know, I just want to get away. Go somewhere where I don't have to feel like this.'

  'Yeah, I know what you mean.'

  Better than you realise. I'd like to go somewhere where I don't have to feel like this, too.

  Guessing that she might regret giving away too much, he went on in a different tone, 'Give the front desk a ring early next week for the pap-smear result. Do you have any other health concerns at the moment?'

  'No, I feel fighting fit. If this move works out—'

  'Yes, good luck with it. Maybe I'll hear from Carina how you're doing.'

  After Andrea had gone, Steve worked his way through a steady stream of patients for the rest of the day and left his practice just before six, feeling exhausted. Totally exhausted. Not physically, which he always considered to be a healthy feeling, but mentally. Emotionally. And it was only Monday!

  A week since Candace's test. Another two weeks before they could reliably expect the results. Five days since he'd suggested taking a break.

  Was that for her or for me? he wondered as he took a jog along the beach in the dark after he reached home to try and pound out some of the frustration. I thought I was thinking of her, but maybe I'm kidding myself. Maybe I just can't handle the guilt...

  He hardly felt the cold foam of the waves around his feet and calves, hardly saw the cliffs and the houses, looming against a clear, starry sky, or the pieces of tangled, scrubby bush. He ran until his lungs ached sharply, and his bare ears were almost numbed by the salt wind.

  The guilt.

  It had been his contraceptive which had failed. Should he have told her at the time that he'd sensed something wasn't quite right, that he'd suspected a tear in the paper-thin latex? He hadn't been sure. If it had been a tear, it had been a tiny one. What did you do? Put the thing under a magnifying glass? So early in their relationship, he hadn't wanted to be neurotic about it.

  And it was his family's recent experience which had cast such a dark cloud over the ambiguous picture of the baby on the scan. Down's syndrome was a challenge to deal with as an abstract possibility, but for many families there was a positive outcome in the end. He knew Helen and Matt would have made it work if their baby had lived. But little Robbie had been too weak to survive, and it brought all those abstract questions into stark focus.

  I yelled at her about it, he remembered, when she asked what I thought about testing. I told her of course I was thinking about Matt and Helen and Robbie, made her think about them, too.

  He slowed to a walk, his chest heaving, and bent forward with his hands on his knees for a moment to catch his breath. His lungs felt half-frozen, and his ears began to ache at once as feeling returned painfully.

  Just ahead, the lights of the houses blinked through the gnarled shapes of the banksia trees like the rhythmic blink of the lighthouse on a distant headland to the north. The wind had freshened, and the trees were swaying, cutting back and forth through the beams of warm yellow.

  He knew which lights belonged to Candace's house. She was economical about light herself, and kept a room dark if she wasn't in it. Maddy was apparently more careless. Every room was lit up, and the place beckoned like a siren's cave.

  He might have liked Maddy if he'd had a chance to get to know her. She was at the prickliest of stages, and would remain there for a couple more years before her perspective matured. She was a factor to consider—a factor that Candace was, no doubt, considering obsessively.

  He almost went up and hammered on their door, but then thought better of it. They'd agreed on 'a break'. His word, but he was sorry he'd used it now. Candace hadn't even phoned, and he just wanted to hear her voice. Hell, so badly! It needn't be a long conversation. Just to touch base, say to each other, 'I'm still alive.'

  Well, of course, he knew she was still alive! He was seeing her in surgery tomorrow.

  But he hadn't meant that to be their only contact. He'd meant taking a break from sleeping together, from spending their time with each other, so that Candace wouldn't have to deal with Maddy's teenage sensitivity on the issue of adult sexuality at a time when she particularly wanted things to run smoothly with her daughter.

  Yes, I was thinking of her, he realised. But now I'm thinking of me. I miss her far more than I want to...

  'I'm going to use mesh. Look, this area on the opposite side is pretty weak, too. That's recent. There's no sense in pushing it back in here only to have it pop out the other side in six months' time. Or six days, when he has a good cough! You're doing fine, Mr Gatto,' Candace told the unconscious patient, 'but we're going to have to talk about your job.'

  The patient's weight and habits, too, Steve observed. Arno Gatto had clocked in at 143 kilograms this morning, and Steve was dosing him accordingly. Mr Gatto had taken an unusually long time to close his eyes and sink into the oblivion of the anaesthesia.

  He worked at a local lumber yard, in a job that involved frequent lifting, but this didn't mean he was fit or healthy. He was a heavy smoker, and from the smell of his hair, even through his disposable cap, he hadn't completely stopped before the surgery as Candace, his GP, Peter Moody and Doreen Malvern, during the pre-admission clinic, would all have advised him to do.

  'Hang in there, everyo
ne, we'll be taking a little longer than expected,' Candace said.

  'What's up?' Peter himself was assisting with surgery, and he seemed a little tense and jumpy, as if he was wondering if the pre-admission check-up on his patient had been thorough enough.

  'We have a hernia textbook here,' Candace answered lightly.

  'A textbook hernia?'

  'No, I said a hernia textbook. What's that line from Oklahoma! about "bustin' out all over"?'

  Steve grinned, and couldn't wipe the expression off his face. He shook his head and looked back at his monitors. Despite everything that was going on, Tuesday was still the best day of the week as far as he was concerned.

  Candace had relaxed in surgery over the past few months. Not too much. Nothing out of character. She still didn't want music or gossip or anything that distracted from her focus, but she made almost every procedure interesting, and there was something almost artistic in the way she moved. Her neat hands, the way she bent her head, the uncurling of her wrist as she reached for an instrument.

  The tight, pale gloves emphasised the grace of the gesture, and Steve often caught himself watching her hands far too intently.

  'What are you going to do?' Peter was asking.

  'I'm going to illustrate the proverb "A stitch in time saves nine'' and deal with the weakness on the other side, too. Will he handle it, Steve?'

  'On current indications, yes, and that's certainly what pre-admission suggested, isn't it, Doreen? Peter? Strong as an ox, aren't you, Mr Gatto?'

  .'That's what I told you, Dr Fletcher,' Peter said. 'But I think Mr Gatto takes that a bit too much for granted. He gets away with a lifestyle that would have killed a lot of people years ago, don't you, Mr G.? I wonder if he cut down on his smoking at all?'

  'Pat, better tell them outside that we won't be done in here before...' Candace glanced at the clock '...noon, I'd say. Mr Gatto, we're going to give you a nicotine patch and chest physio and extra abdominal support after this. Can't have you coughing all my stitches out, can we? That would give new meaning to what my daughter says about coughing when she has a chest infection.'