by Lilian Darcy
‘I a p’incess,’ Bonnie said. She climbed onto Kit’s knee, wanting to put her own crown of mashed stems and petals on Kit’s head.
Kit hugged her warm little body impulsively. ‘Oh, you are a princess!’ she agreed.
She realised, suddenly self-conscious, that Federica was watching her, and flushed. She tried to hide her hot cheeks against Bonnie’s hair. Seconds later the older woman spoke.
‘Speaking of Gian,’ she said, too casually, ‘you and he got drenched the other night.’
‘Yes, he did,’ Kit answered. ‘But I was all right. He left me at the bus shelter, and came back with the car. We’d been for a walk in the park, by the river. Haven’t the council made it nice there now?’
She didn’t want to talk about that evening. Aunt Helen had had hopes, and it was obvious that Freddie had, too. She still did. The idea made Kit uncomfortable.
‘It was nice of Gian to ask me,’ she said deliberately. ‘But I’m starting to make friends now, and that will let him off the hook!’
On cue, the phone rang inside the house, and she jumped up to answer it. Probably for Aunt Helen, but if it was someone she could legitimately claim as a friend—her cousin Sandra, perhaps—she might avoid any more mention of Gian.
It was Emma.
‘Um…’ she said, ‘I was wondering if you’d like to see a movie this evening. Or something.’
‘Emma, sorry. I’m working, remember?’
‘Oh, damn, of course!’ She sounded a little tense and upset. ‘And you’re the third person I’ve tried! Lord, that sounded rude! I didn’t make a list with you at the bottom, Kit. I—’
‘It’s fine. Has something happened?’ she asked.
‘No. I mean, it’s silly…I was so happy she’d gone, but now I feel…’
‘Let down?’
‘Face to face with my own life. Not pleased with what I’m seeing. Wondering if Beryl was just a convenient excuse. I’m in a rut!’
Kit told Helen five minutes later, ‘I’m going to leave early and drop in on Emma on the way to work.’
Being honest with herself, she knew she wasn’t sorry to have a good reason for avoiding more time with Federica and Aunt Helen. Gian’s name would probably creep into the conversation again. Slyly. With the best intentions in the world.
Steeling herself to see him at work was one thing, but having his mother talking about him, oh, so, casually to her aunt, and in the same sentence as Bonnie, was something else entirely.
Emma met Kit at the door of a little weatherboard cottage in one of Glenfallon’s older streets. It was a lovely place, particularly the fine old garden, but it needed some work—an injection of energy and ideas, and a coat of paint.
Some of the rooms were bare or furnished lopsidedly, and Emma explained a couple of times, ‘Beryl had a desk here,’ or, ‘This was her room.’
‘Why don’t you rearrange the whole house?’ Kit suggested. ‘Go shopping. Paint. Even if you don’t feel ready yet. Do it anyway!’
Emma looked at her. ‘I could, couldn’t I?’
‘You should,’ Kit corrected. ‘This place is yours now. Your life is yours.’
‘My life is mine,’ Emma repeated, as if she hadn’t considered it that way before. Then she grinned. ‘My head’s starting to spin. You know, I nursed Mum when she got ill. Dad’s grief was terrible for a good while after she died, and I didn’t want to move out and leave him. I was in Sydney for a couple of years, getting some extra qualifications, but I always intended to come back to Glenfallon.’
‘People seem to do that.’
‘It’s a nice town,’ Emma agreed, then went on, ‘By the time I did, Dad had married Beryl and I got a flat, but six months later Dad got ill, and Beryl couldn’t handle it. So I moved back in. I haven’t had much time on my own. There’s always been some kind of a change on the horizon. Until now. I felt so empty this morning. But maybe it’s just a matter of…’
She trailed off, but the far-away look in her eyes was hopeful rather than brooding. She’d started to plan. A minute later, she asked, ‘Would you like an ice cream? I have a six-pack of really sinful ones in the freezer. Double-dipped chocolate.’
‘Sounds perfect!’
So they wandered around in Emma’s back garden, eating ice cream and talking about paint colours, and whether Emma would have to go all the way to Canberra or Sydney to get some good furniture, or whether the two furniture shops in Glenfallon offered enough choice. Kit was almost late for work.
‘Could you go down to A and E, Kit?’ asked Julie Wong, who was just about to go off duty. ‘They have a woman in there with heavy bleeding. Her husband’s with her. They think it’s a miscarriage, and apparently they’re pretty upset. The emergency department’s busy, while we’re quiet, so I’ll give you the rest of the hand-over report and you can head down.’
‘Sounds good,’ Kit answered. This was her first shift in charge of the unit, although she’d acted in this role many times in Canberra.
‘Actually, there’s nothing much to report,’ Julie said, and ran quickly through some notes.
They had one patient in labour, and another who’d delivered twenty minutes ago and would soon be taken through into the postpartum ward with her baby boy. Mary Ellen Leigh was handing this patient’s care over to incoming midwife Bronwyn Jackson. Within a few minutes, Kit could make her way down to the accident and emergency department, on the ground floor of the hospital’s main building.
Coming through an internal corridor, she glimpsed the crowded waiting room, a busy triage nurse and two clerical staff behind the desk. A couple of men sat there nursing sporting injuries, and several more adults waited in the uncomfortable chairs with bored, resigned expressions on their faces. A baby cried, a toddler sat listlessly on his mother’s lap and a pale little girl was led to one of the three paediatric beds.
An ambulance pulled into the bay outside, and Kit heard a woman’s voice saying tersely, ‘I haven’t got time. Deal with it, Gary.’
‘Sure, Dr Cassidy,’ a male voice replied, sounding angry.
‘Threatened miscarriage?’ Kit asked another nurse at the department’s central desk.
‘Um, yes, she’s up on the board, and on the computer. I’m not sure which room she’s in.’
Kit looked at the whiteboard, found the details and found the patient. She’d been put in the quietest room, at the end of one of the department’s three main corridors, which were set out like a capital letter E, and she was lying on her side with her feet elevated. Somewhere in her late thirties, with hair highlighted in dark gold to disguise greying threads, she had a disposable blue pad pressed between her legs, and tears running down her cheeks. Her husband held her hand.
‘Can you tell me what happened, Mrs Aspinall?’ Kit asked gently.
‘Well, I’d been having some very slight bleeding…’
‘Can we go back a bit? How many weeks pregnant are you?’
‘Ten, from my last period.’
‘No problems so far?’
Her husband laughed, but it was bitter rather than amused. ‘If you count six cycles of IVF as no problems.’
‘Well, no, you’re right,’ Kit agreed. ‘I wouldn’t call that no problems.’
She almost wanted to tell them, I’ve been through it, too. But, of course, the words didn’t come. There was a barrier in her throat which felt almost physical when it came to this subject, as if all the necessary words had rusted away. Gian was the only person she’d talked to about it in months, and her heart still dropped into the pit of her stomach when she thought back on that scene between them in the park.
Instead, she took a deep breath and asked, ‘But the sixth cycle did bring a confirmed pregnancy?’
‘Yes. We’ve known for six weeks.’ Again, it was Chris Aspinall who spoke.
‘I phoned Dr Di Luzio as soon as the bleeding started,’ Mrs Aspinall came in. ‘He’s been great so far.’ Her tone held reproach, as if Gian had somehow let her down. ‘But he said just to wait a
nd see. Plenty of healthy pregnancies have some spotting, apparently. But then this morning it was heavier. And redder. And after lunch I started cramping. There was lots of blood. Thick clots. As soon as the cramping stopped, we came in. We…brought part of it. The blood. And tissue. In a bag. In case it needed to be…examined or something. The flow’s eased off now, but…’
‘Where’s Dr Di Luzio?’ Chris Aspinall wanted to know.
‘I’m not sure,’ Kit said. ‘I’ll have a look at you now, OK? Let’s see if we can confirm what’s happening.’
She knew she sounded too wooden and stiff. She put on a pair of latex gloves, feeling the familiar coolness and slip of the cornstarch inside them. The light felt too harsh and bright. Mr and Mrs Aspinall still looked as if they didn’t really believe they were here, and that this was actually happening. It was too much like a nightmare.
Kit herself felt that in their position she might rather not have conceived at all.
‘If you could lie on your back now, Mrs Aspinall, and bring up your knees. I won’t use stirrups, but if you could just let your legs fall apart…’
A sheet covered Mrs Aspinall from the waist down. Slipping her gloved hands beneath it, Kit felt the cervix. It was slightly dilated, and she told Mr and Mrs Aspinall this immediately. They understood that it wasn’t good news.
Pressing her other hand firmly on Mrs Aspinall’s belly, she was surprised to feel the mass of the uterus. It was larger than she’d expected it to be, like a big orange and quite firm. This time, she wasn’t sure what to think or what to say.
As she slid her hands out, she saw a movement in the doorway. It was Gian.
‘Problem, Rebecca?’ he said. He was dressed in green surgical pants and a V-necked short-sleeved top, his arms bare and ropy with muscle beneath his olive skin. He had a blue disposable mask still flapping around his neck. He must have come straight from emergency surgery, and he hadn’t shaved this morning.
His dark eyes met Kit’s for a moment, and they narrowed a little. The two of them were both instantly aware of each other—aware of the emotional end to their meal three days ago, aware that this was only the first in an endless series of future encounters. The rawness of it would have to fade eventually, wouldn’t it? The awareness would fade. Kit would stop feeling his effect on her senses like a physical blow, and his eye contact like a sharp dart in her chest.
‘Seems to be,’ the patient managed in answer to Gian. Her voice was husky with threatened tears.
‘Kit, did you just do a check?’ Gian murmured.
‘Yes, and the cervix is dilated to one centimetre. The bleeding has tapered off markedly. The uterus feels like an orange.’
Their eyes met once more, but this time they were thinking about the patient.
Gian asked, ‘Can you describe the bleeding for me, Rebecca?’
‘Um, yes.’ She took a deep breath and went through it all. Again. Kit knew about that—going over the same details time after time, to different staff. Sometimes, she had simply wanted to yell, Can’t you just read it in the notes? I’ve said it twelve times, it doesn’t change, and it doesn’t get easier with practice!
But she knew there were reasons for the repetition. Sometimes a patient would remember something significant, or express something in a new way, which shed a different light on what was happening. And the patient’s own words fleshed out the dry facts contained in the notes.
‘I’m going to send you for an ultrasound, Rebecca,’ Gian said. ‘Just to get a fuller picture of what’s happening. Kit, if you could get a catheter in, and fill the bladder? I want a really good picture on this, and I’d rather not wait. I’m going to be back in surgery soon. I’ll order the scan now.’
He left the room, and Chris said, ‘Can you explain? I’m not sure what’s happening. What’s this for? Why a catheter?’
‘Because it’s quicker,’ Kit said. ‘I think Dr Di Luzio wants to look at the ultrasound himself, before he goes back into surgery.’
She got out a catheter kit and inserted the cannula without difficulty, then put in a litre of saline. The hospital’s imaging department wasn’t quite ready for Mrs Aspinall yet. Kit phoned up to the maternity unit to check that things were still quiet, then paged an orderly to wheel the bed.
She knew that the Aspinalls expected this to be simply a routine confirmation of what they already knew. She also guessed that if Mrs Aspinall hadn’t been one of Gian’s IVF patients he might have told her much more casually, ‘Go home and wait. You may still be pregnant. We’ll do a scan on Monday.’
With this couple, he obviously felt that they’d spent enough time on tenterhooks. And if there was a viable pregnancy still in existence, he’d want to do everything in his power to keep it that way.
The orderly arrived, and Kit told the couple, ‘I’m not sure if Imaging is ready for us yet, but we may as well wait there as here.’ She was paged back to her own unit just as Mr and Mrs Aspinall went in for the scan.
‘Have we got customers?’ she asked, when she’d greeted Bronwyn at the desk.
‘Yes, two within five minutes of each other, and my primie is ready to pop. One of the new arrivals is definitely in established labour. I think you’ll end up sending the second lass home. She’s not due for two weeks. I’ve put her on a monitor and she’s having contractions, but they’re pretty mild and not regular.’
‘Wishful thinking?’
‘I think so. This is her second, and the first one was big. She’s hoping for something earlier and therefore smaller this time. By the way, how did you do downstairs?’
‘I hope to find out, eventually. You paged me too soon!’
‘Sorry, but your new patients would probably disagree.’
Kit was on the phone to one patient’s GP with a progress report when Gian arrived, at around six. Again, he must have just emerged from surgery, and he looked tired. ‘I thought you might want to know about Rebecca Aspinall,’ he said, leaning over the high desk front.
‘Yes, very much.’
‘It was a miscarriage.’
‘Oh, no! When I felt that englarged uterus, I hoped—’
‘A miscarriage of one twin. The second twin is doing fine.’ He grinned. ‘There was a strong heartbeat, and visible movement on the scan. Kid was doing somersaults. We had two very happy parents.’
‘Oh, I bet!’ She felt the prick of tears, and hoped he wouldn’t see them.
‘It was great. I’ve suggested several days’ bed rest, just in case. They’ve been through the mill, trying to conceive. When a miracle like that happens, I feel like I’ve won an Olympic medal.’
Kit couldn’t speak, could only nod. Would have cried if she’d tried to open her mouth and use words. She could tell that Gian knew it.
‘Anyway,’ he said lightly, ‘good news has a ripple effect, don’t you think?’
He turned, pulling off the mask he’d once again forgotten about, and she finally found her voice.
‘Thanks, Gian.’
He turned back, leaned over the desk again. Bronwyn was coming out of her patient’s room. ‘You’re off at eleven tonight, aren’t you?’ he asked quietly.
‘Give or take a few minutes.’
‘Is that too late for coffee?’
‘I was drenching sheep all morning.’
‘I’ll take that as a “yes, it’s too late”.’
‘It’s more of a “no, it’s not a good idea”, Gian,’ she answered him helplessly. ‘The other night, didn’t we…?’
‘Yes, we did. But it felt…unnecessarily bleak, don’t you think? Unfinished, too. I’d like to tie off some ends.’
The phrase alarmed her. She imagined questions she didn’t want to answer, and platitudes she didn’t want to hear. He was only attempting to be kind. And if he began to talk of miracles, she might empty the contents of her cup over his head.
‘There are always loose ends in this life, Gian,’ she said. ‘Life’s…untidy. If we face each other, and shake hands, agree that w
e’re going to be great friends and that it feels fine, we’ll be pretending. I’d hate that. I’d rather have the honesty.’
‘And the mess?’
‘And the mess,’ she agreed.
He nodded slowly, and she realised he wasn’t going to argue. With an utter absence of logic, she found out how strongly she’d been hoping that he would.
CHAPTER FIVE
AS SOON as he had a chance to think about it, Gian realised he didn’t buy Kit’s reasoning on the issue of how to handle their inevitable future dealings with each other.
Sorry, but he just didn’t.
He didn’t go out to the farm that night, after finishing work, but took the short drive to his unit near the hospital instead. Although he knew he needed solitude, the place seemed too cold and empty. He took a shower, put on navy Chinese-style pyjama pants and a plain T-shirt, then wandered into his efficient little kitchen, hungry.
The meagre contents of his fridge didn’t excite him. Toast and a can of soup would have to do. He ate the toast out of one hand, and the soup out of a mug in the other, pacing between a TV show he wasn’t interested in and an electric kettle that wouldn’t boil. Some vital component inside it had apparently died. He boiled water for his decaf plunger coffee in a saucepan on the stove instead, irritated more than he should have been by the minor technical setback.
Thought about Kit, and what she’d said.
Honesty, and mess. No pretence of friendship. No coffee together, please, because talking wouldn’t help.
In his experience, women usually wanted to talk. A lot.
Kit didn’t, and he wondered why. He got the sense that she was running away from more than just the awareness and intuition between them, but perhaps that was only ego on his part. He knew his ego was healthy, as a successful man’s ego should be. It made him impatient, slow to accept defeat, stubborn about looking for possibilities and answers.
Equally, however, he didn’t want to push. Not yet. He’d wait a while.
‘I’ve got Janet McDowell on the phone, wanting to know if you can squeeze her daughter in this afternoon,’ Gian’s receptionist, Barb Throssell, told him. She spoke in an undertone, with her hand over the receiver.