The Surgeon's Secret Son

by Rebecca Lang

  When she came out of the change room Joel was waiting for her, lounging with apparent nonchalance against the opposite wall.

  'I want to apologize,' he said immediately, straightening up, before she could get away. It was obvious to him that she had been crying, though she had washed her face twice. When she cried, her face always became blotchy and her eyelids swollen. He looked at her with a certain compassion that made her want to cry again.

  'All right,' she said with a shrug, while a sobering sadness came over her. 'So much between us always seems to come too late, doesn't it, Joel? Like an apology. I feel totally washed out, and all talked out as well. There seems nothing more to say.'

  For so long she had wanted to be with Joel, had fantasized about him, and now the reality was here, difficult to cope with, this hard, implacable man. Vaguely she wondered whether she was on the edge of a mental breakdown, after the years of being strong. The sadness she felt now was like a physical thing, weighing her down.

  'Could we go out for a drink?' he suggested. 'There's something I want to talk to you about. It's important.'

  'No,' she said wearily. 'I want to get home. I'm desperate to sleep, and I have to pick up Alec from my parents' place. I want to spend the evening with him.'

  'Could I help?' he offered, as they walked to the entrance lobby. 'Could I pick up Alec for you, while you go on home and get something to eat?'

  She shrugged, curiously emotionally dead, and she did not look at him. 'That would be all right,' she said in a monotone. 'I must get some food inside me. I'll call my mother to say you're coming.'

  'Good,' he said. 'I'll see you before too long.'

  Sitting in her car in the parking lot, she called her parents' place on her cellphone to let them know that Joel would be picking up Alec. It was a good thing she didn't have to go, as her mother would quiz her about looking upset.

  Once at home, having petted the dogs and let them out, she headed straight for the kitchen work area, moving around automatically, in a daze. Something quick and easy was what she wanted, would make extra for Joel, as she knew he had not eaten, while Alec would have been fed by her mother.

  All at once, everything seemed so complex, when she desperately wanted to simplify her life. From now on, she vowed, she wouldn't expect anything of Joel, she would just live from week to week as far as he was concerned. She would just get on with her life, as she had done before she had known that he would come into her life again. Yes, that was the way to go on, she decided as she searched the kitchen cupboards for that quick and easy meal that she had been thinking of.

  A carton of organic vegetable soup came to hand and she tipped the contents into a saucepan, then took a salad out of the fridge that she had made the day before and beat up some eggs for two omelettes. Cooking was always relaxing, she found, as was the pleasant silence of the house and the totally accepting love of her two dogs, who were now looking at her with adoring eyes, their tails gently waving in anticipation.

  'Yes, I am going to feed you,' she said indulgently, fancying that they could tune in to her depressed mood and were being extra gentle and patient with her.

  They were incredibly sensitive to mood, picking up nuances of gesture and body language, tone of voice and so on. Cherry gave her an affectionate 'smarl', a sort of grin for which Dalmatians were famous, a drawing back of the lips, a wrinkling of the snout and baring of the teeth. In spite of her depression, Nell gave back an answering smile, a sense of peace tempering her mood.

  'What would I do without you two?' she said. 'Food coming up.'

  Alec hugged her when he came in, and she clung on to him, kissing him fiercely as though she had not seen him for a long time. 'Hi, Mum,' he said. 'I've had supper, and Dad has offered to help me with my homework.' He said 'Dad' in a very proud way, as though he was getting used to the word, and Nell felt an odd mixture of relief and despair.

  'If that's all right with you, Nell?' Joel said, coming into the kitchen behind Alec. Although he seemed a little wary of her, the scene in the coffee-lounge might, apparently, never have happened.

  She wondered what he was playing at, or was he just putting up a good front before Alec? Maybe he still didn't trust her. She wasn't so sure about his motives after the anger she had seen on his face at the hospital. Perhaps he thought she would try to keep Alec from him. If so, he didn't know her very well. Even though she might have twinges of jealousy, she would never do that. There was irony in the fact that she had taken pains to let Alec know, from a very early age, that he had a father, had spoken his name, had his photographs in the house.

  She shrugged. 'If Alec needs help, that's fine...for a while,' she said. 'There's food.' She indicated the hot food on the stove and the salad on the kitchen table where she had laid two places, arranged so that she was not opposite him and did not have to look at him if she did not want to.

  'Thank you very much. I appreciate it,' Joel said.

  'I'm going upstairs to look, up something on the computer,' Alec said to Joel, 'until you're ready.'

  Nell and Joel ate in silence, an awful tension between them, which she wanted to break but did not know how. The hot soup was making her feel better physically. What she needed now was to sleep for at least twelve hours.

  When they had finished their main meal and she had brought a bowl of fruit over to the table, she felt compelled to speak.

  'It isn't going to work between us, is it?' she said quietly, so that Alec would not hear, that strange, sober, depressive feeling still on her, as though she would never laugh again. Perhaps it was the act of having struck Joel in the face that had somehow unhinged her—that, coupled with John's proposal. She wasn't sure. Joel's angry words had shocked her, too. All she knew at that moment was that she'd had enough.

  'I don't know,' he said, 'to be honest. I have to talk to you. Maybe after Alec's in bed?'

  Nell shrugged. 'All right,' she said. 'For the future, you and Alec can work out something between you about what you want to mean to each other,' she said, surprisingly making up her mind as the words came out. 'It doesn't have to be my decision. After all, he's old enough to have a say in how his own life is conducted.' It cost her something to say that, giving away some of the love and loyalty that her son had reserved just for her. 'I'm not one of those women who use a child to manipulate situations. I don't expect you to do that either.'

  'I didn't think you were.'

  'You surprise me.'

  'What are your plans for a summer holiday?'

  'We'll be going away to an island cabin with my parents—it belongs to them—just before Alec has to go back to school.'

  'Nell...' Joel put a hand on her arm and she jerked away from him.

  'Don't,' she said.

  'Go and have a sleep,' he suggested. 'I'll clear up here, then help Alec with his homework. Then maybe we can talk.'

  Leaving him to it, Nell went into the sitting room, shut the door and almost collapsed on the sofa. It was so good to lie down, to put her feet up, her head on a soft cushion. In spite of the turmoil in her mind, the sleep of exhaustion came over her almost instantly, a very welcome oblivion. As she drifted off, she acknowledged that it was good to have a partner in parenthood. If that was all she was going to get, so be it. From that moment she was giving up straining to find a way. The way would come to her eventually, or not at all.

  CHAPTER TEN

  A touch on her shoulder woke her up.

  'Alec's asleep.' Joel said, bending over her. 'Homework done.'

  'Oh...' Nell sat up, smoothing her tangled hair away from her face.

  'Thank you for doing that.'

  'It's the least I could do,' he said.

  Nell bit back a retort that he had done an about-face from his angry stance at the hospital. 'What do you have to say to me?' she said. 'We might as well talk here.'

  Joel sat down at the other end of the sofa. 'What I have to say will give you the reason why I disappeared from your life all those years ago,' he said,
leaning forward, letting his hands dangle between his knees, perhaps in an effort to force himself to relax. 'The reason I didn't tell you earlier is that I did not want to burden you, one, and, two, I didn't want you to feel sorry for me. Also, I wanted us to have a chance to get to know each other before what I have to say could come between us and influence anything.'

  Again, that strange feeling of something like dread came to her, the feeling she had had when she had seen him at the conference, pale and tired.

  'What is it?' she said.

  'When I was doing burns training in Montreal,' he said, 'when we were still writing to each other, I became ill. Because of that illness, I decided it was time I stopped communicating with you, as there could not be any future for us. That's when I sent the Valentine card saying goodbye.'

  Nell nodded.

  'I had cancer,' he said abruptly, looking up to meet her eyes. 'I was diagnosed with testicular cancer.'

  'Oh...' Nell put a hand up to her mouth, feeling as though her heart would stop. 'Oh, Joel, I'm so sorry.'

  'To tell you the sequence of events,' he went on, speaking in a matter-of-fact way, 'I stored sperm in a sperm bank, then I had an operation to remove one of my testicles and some of the lymph nodes in the groin.'

  'Oh,' she said. 'I never imagined anything like that. Perhaps I should have.'

  'Why should you?' he said. 'We both had something to hide from each other. 'Ironic, isn't it? Maybe if we'd both been up-front from the beginning, things would have been better for both of us.'

  'If I really had been nineteen,' she said, stunned and plunged into sadness by what he had said. 'I didn't dream...'

  'Why should you have?' he said. 'Even though it's a disease of young men, it isn't something you necessarily think is going to happen to you, in the sense that you're looking out for it.'

  'No...' Again, she wanted to weep.

  'I decided to stop contact with you,' he went on, 'because I didn't want you to think I was trying to have some sort of claim on you.'

  Nell stared at him. 'That was the main reason I didn't tell you about the pregnancy,' she said. 'It's ironic, isn't it!' She got up to sit next to him, putting a hand over his. 'What a pair.' The anger, frustration and depressive sadness that she had felt earlier was somehow consolidating into a sense of bitter regret .over wasted time. 'We could have helped each other.'

  'I didn't want you to feel any sort of obligation to me. The last thing I wanted was for you to feel sorry for me...I dreaded seeing a look of pity in your eyes. You were so young. It was probable that what you felt for me would not last. You see, I would never have known whether you were with me because you wanted to be, or whether you pitied me.'

  She squeezed his hand. 'I wouldn't have done that,' she said. 'After all, I told you a few lies because I desperately wanted to be with you.'

  'Yeah, but for how long?' he said soberly, looking at her with keen eyes. 'I assumed that you would just grow up, would become immersed in your career and outgrow our relationship.'

  That was, she acknowledged reluctantly, a fair and sensible assumption. 'That could have happened, but it didn't,' she said. 'I missed you like hell.' What an understatement that was!

  'And now?' he asked. 'You said that you still love me, now that I look old, tired and sick. I wish I could trust that...not that it's necessarily going to make any difference.'

  'I find that it doesn't make any difference to me— what you've just told me,' she said truthfully, still wanting to weep, his news like a physical blow. 'Are you... are you all right now?'

  'I seem to be, so far,' he said. 'There hasn't been any recurrence. There was no tumour in the lymph nodes, thank God.'

  'And the future?' she said, her voice tremulous. 'I don't know much about testicular tumours. I should, but I don't, other than what I learnt in medical school.' She felt sick, with an apprehension that made everything else that was happening in her life seem petty.

  'With luck,' he said, 'there's apparently no reason why I shouldn't live out a full life span. On the other hand, this is a very difficult thing to live with. No one else can really understand... any one who hasn't had their life threatened.'

  'Joel...I wish I had known at the time,' she said brokenly. 'All those years.'

  'I didn't want to burden you.'

  'But it wouldn't have been a burden,' she protested.

  'Yes it would have, at your young age,' he said. 'When you're diagnosed with a potentially fatal disease you go instantly into another world as soon as you're given the diagnosis...it takes seconds only. You go from the world of the well to the world of the unwell...and not just the ordinarily unwell. You go to a world where you can never take anything for granted again, not your life, your health or the surety of a future.'

  They sat on the capacious sofa, holding hands. Nell swallowed several times to dispel the constriction of emotion that gripped her throat, fighting not to cry. Joel put an arm round her shoulders, pulling her against him.

  'Meeting you again has been bitter-sweet,' he said. 'Not least because I often feel emotionally dead from the neck up. When you're told you have cancer you go into a parallel world, from where the door of the one you left behind will forever remain closed. That's the best analogy I can think of to describe it. If you had been older I might have told you. Friends, family, loved ones can't really understand, however much they care for you,' he went on, 'because it's something that you have to experience yourself to understand.'

  'You make it sound so lonely,' she whispered.

  'It is,' he said. 'For most of us, our own death is an abstract concept and, believe me, with this thing you feel the touch of your mortality. From the beginning, I've tried to guard against anything that smacks of self-pity.'

  'I wish I had known,' she whispered, more to herself than to him.

  'Hence the brush-off,' he said. 'I tried to do it in a civilized manner, so you didn't think I had anything against you. I hoped you would get the message from the Valentine card that I still loved you. My illness precluded any sense of permanence.'

  'Don't say that. You're young.'

  'Now I don't know what I feel. I can't pretend that it hasn't changed my life. Although I can still sire babies, so I've been told, I shall never marry. I couldn't lumber a woman with that...couldn't lumber you, Nell.' Although he spoke steadily, Nell detected an underlying bitterness.

  'Why would it have to be like that?' she managed to say. 'If...if someone loved you, it would be all right.' He knew that she loved him, she had said so, with no qualification.

  'Easy to say,' he said harshly. 'A woman would have to take on the burden of not knowing. I am quite contented with my life as it is. My work absorbs me. Having a son is an added bonus that I never expected.'

  'What about us now?' she said.

  'I don't know, Nell,' he said wearily. 'I don't know.'

  'Do you love me?' she got up the courage to say.

  'I don't know. All I know is that I'm jealous of John. I want to punch his teeth in when he looks at you as though he's some sort of predator and he wants to eat you.'

  At any other time she might have laughed and maybe been flattered, but now all she felt was a sobering sense of dissonance.

  'Maybe you'd be better off with John as a husband,' he said.

  'No...never. It makes no difference to me, Joel.'

  'I live from day to day. That's enough for now,' he said.

  'How shall I tell Alec?' she asked, still wanting to weep.

  'Don't tell him,' he said quickly. 'Please, don't tell him.'

  * * *

  Later, after Joel had gone home and she lay in bed with her eyes straining into the darkness, her mind felt as though it were a jumble of voices, all vying to be heard, a clamouring of discordant sound. Although she told herself time and time again that what they needed was to be kind to each other and have time to heal, a cold fear held her in its grip.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Over the next week, Ida Rowley passed a parti
cular crisis point in that the fever that had spiked in her for a few days had been brought down by a course of a different broad-spectrum antibiotic, decided on according to results of tissue biopsies. Nell and John had had many consultations about her.

  Nell was relieved to find that John's attitude to her had not changed. If anything, she detected an added gentleness in his stance. Perhaps, she speculated, Joel had recently told him about his diagnosis of cancer.

  On Thursday the burns team, including the senior residents, held a conference about several of the more seriously ill patients who had been in the explosion at the synthetic rubber factory. Each staff member expressed an opinion about how each case should continue to be handled, in light of recent and ongoing developments.

  These opinions were extremely useful, especially if a case was difficult to handle, with several possible approaches. While several more minor burns cases in the unit had been discharged home, those who had not been in the factory, there were several others who were going to be with them for a long time.

  When the conference was over, Nell headed for the door, to be intercepted by John. 'Could I see you in my office for a few minutes, Nell?' he asked quietly.

  'Sure,' she said, seeing out of the corner of her eye that Joel had paused and was watching them. His interest in what she was doing bothered her. It appeared that he did not feel there could be anything permanent for them, yet he did not want anyone else to be interested in her either, or so it seemed to her.

  There was an incongruity in his attitude, even though she was striving to understand how he had arrived at that attitude, in light of his illness. After all, it had been years ago now. Now, with her newfound ability to withdraw, she just felt she could let it go, let it all flow over her. The sense of deep empathy that she felt for Joel fitted in with her new sober mood.

  Over the past few days her mood had lifted a little, but not that much. Vaguely, she was aware that she seemed to have reached some sort of crisis point, at which past and present had come together in an explosive mix. The hectic pace at work had contributed to that.