The Midwife's Courage (Glenfallon)

by Lilian Darcy

  He saw Megan Ciancio, with her walking frame propped in front of her, and realised that hers was the next file in the pile that awaited him. There were two more patients waiting as well. Fitting Tracie McDowell in without making himself very late would be a challenge. And he felt irritable. Not up to challenges today. He’d felt this way too often lately.

  Janet McDowell had always been pushy, an eager manager of other people’s time but perhaps, with seven children, she had to be.

  ‘Any idea why the problem’s so urgent?’ he asked Barb.

  ‘Severe abdominal pain. Tracie’s in tears, I think. Janet seems fairly insistent.’

  ‘Hmm.’

  ‘Panicking, almost.’

  Gian suppressed a sigh. ‘If she can be here in fifteen minutes. Otherwise, send her to the hospital A and E.’

  Seconds later, he regretted the concession. Abdominal pain? It probably wasn’t even his area, although Tracie had had some serious menstrual problems over the past couple of years, as well as surgery for a benign ovarian tumour. She had been a stoical patient, he remembered. If she was in tears, perhaps her mother’s instincts were right.

  ‘Always listen to the mothers,’ he muttered. It was a piece of time-honoured general practice wisdom that had proved itself in most doctors’ lives.

  Megan Ciancio made her slow way into his office. Her pregnancy was providing added challenges in her daily life, but from an obstetric point of view, all was well so far. Gian had some test results for her today, and all the news was good.

  ‘The baby’s fine,’ he said. ‘The ultrasound pictures showed healthy, normal development. No problems with size, nice placenta. And your alpha-feta protein screen was normal.’ He flipped a page. ‘I guess you already knew that. Normal blood sugar at this stage, though we’ll test you again for any signs of gestational diabetes later in the pregnancy.’

  ‘Ugh, more of that glucose drink, I suppose.’ ‘The colder it is, the better it tastes, supposedly.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you’ve even tried it, right?’

  He gave a guilty smile. ‘Well, no. Do you think I should, in the interests of knowing what my patients suffer?’

  ‘I’ll let you off. It’s not that bad, really. But yesterday…I was so nervous, having the ultrasound. The technician thought it all looked fine, but I wasn’t ready to believe her until I’d heard the same thing from you.’

  ‘Relax!’

  ‘Should I take lessons from you?’

  ‘You’re right. I’m being super-cautious with this, too.’

  His next two patients were quick and easy to deal with—a six-week postpartum check-up and a routine pre-operative consult with an older woman who was scheduled for a hysterectomy. Gian had just ushered her out when Janet McDowell and her daughter arrived—not within the prescribed fifteen minutes, he noted—and he only needed one look at the way seventeen-year-old Tracie was walking, clutching her mother’s arm, to understand what the problem was.

  It seemed equally apparent, however, that neither the patient nor her mother had the slightest idea.

  ‘She’s in a terrible state, Dr Di Luzio. The pain is coming and going. It isn’t the tumour grown back? Or that perithingy I’ve read about?’

  ‘Peritonitis? I doubt it,’ he answered grimly.

  ‘Her stomach feels hard.’

  He didn’t waste time ruling out the less likely options. He went with what his instincts told him. ‘Tracie, can you lie down on the table? I want to do an internal exam.’

  And he didn’t want to look like a fool if, by some faint chance, he was wrong. It seemed incredible that neither of the women realised the truth, but it wouldn’t be the first time. One touch of the flat of his hand on her hardened abdomen, where the muscles were bunching as she groaned, one practised assessment of the state of her cervix, and he was sure beyond doubt.

  Tracie was pregnant, and in labour, and close to full dilation—and there was a fair bit of denial going on in the McDowell family.

  He didn’t say anything. Not yet. Got out his portable Doppler machine and positioned the receiver right where he thought the baby’s heart should be. Tracie was generously built—’big-boned for her height’, Janet always phrased it, as well as calling it ‘a puppy fat problem’. The pregnancy was therefore well concealed, but no-one could hide the strong, rapid beat of a full-term baby’s heart. They all heard it as soon as he switched on the machine.

  ‘Oh, my sainted aunt!’ Janet shrieked. The youngest of her own children was only around three, and she’d heard this sound before, not so long ago. ‘That’s a baby! Tracie, how could you do this? Telling me it had to be appendicitis!’

  ‘But Mum, I—’ The teenager had gone white. ‘I’m not pregnant. I’d have known. You’re supposed to feel sick, and stick out like a basketball. Lauren Muncie did. I couldn’t be. It was only…Jase and I haven’t even exactly…’

  ‘Tell me the truth, Tracie. What did you and Jason do?’

  Gian tuned out the mother-daughter interrogation and reached for the phone. He had the maternity unit at Glenfallon Hospital on his speed dial, available at the touch of a button, and the touch of a button brought him Kit’s voice, cool and fresh and professional and familiar.

  He had hoped it would be someone else. Three weeks since their decision to step back from what had started between them, and he still couldn’t hear her, or see her, or even hear someone else speak her name without a painful twist of frustration and regret and awareness of missed opportunities deep in his gut.

  ‘Sending you a surprise package,’ he told her. ‘And I’ll be following shortly, because I don’t think there’s a lot of time, and I want to make sure things are OK with this one.’

  ‘A surprise package?’

  ‘For all concerned.’

  ‘Oh, OK, I get it. The stork’s bringing it?’

  ‘Something like that. So be on the look out for some friction, and a lot of shock.’

  He glanced at his patient and her mother, but they weren’t listening.

  ‘I didn’t know that was all it took,’ Tracie was saying. ‘Jase said it was OK. Safe. I can’t be having a baby!’ she wailed. ‘I can’t be!’

  This is going to be hard for Kit.

  Gian knew it. He’d seen it before with patients for whom getting pregnant was an interminable campaign. He tried to schedule his appointments so that infertility patients didn’t have to sit in the same room as radiant pregnant newlyweds, or sullen, I-don’t-want-this-to-be-happening pregnant teens.

  Kit handled it daily, without letting her turmoil show, and he wondered if it was a testament to her strength, her stubbornness or some other quality inside her that no one ever would have guessed how much it must sometimes hurt.

  He got to the delivery suite ten minutes after Tracie and her mother, and not one minute too soon. She was already starting to push, fighting against Kit’s attempts to calm her. ‘I don’t know what to do! Unhh!’

  ‘You’re doing fine. Just right.’

  ‘No, I’m scared. It feels as if I’m going to—Unhh!’

  ‘Yes, that’s great, Tracie.’

  ‘Oh-oh, what’s that? Oh, it feels—Is this the baby?’

  ‘Yes, the head is crowning, Tracie. That means we can see it. And the doctor’s here.’

  ‘This is just insane!’ Janet was muttering in the background. ‘I’ve got dinner to cook. Alan’s not home until six. Kim’s looking after Nicole and goodness knows what the boys are up to! How can she not have known? How could I not have known?’

  ‘Mu-um!’

  Kit took Tracie’s hand, while Janet supported her shoulders. Tracie’s face was red with effort, but the effort was paying off. Gian took possession of a wet, round little head, and the rest of the baby’s body rotated and slipped free on its own. It was small, only around two and a half kilos, or just over five pounds on the old scale, but perfectly formed.

  Within minutes, the cord was clamped and cut, the placenta was delivered intact, the
little girl was cradled in her young mother’s arms and the noise and activity and disbelief settled into an oddly precious interlude of peace.

  ‘She’s amazing!’ Tracie’s voice was awed, soft and rough with new emotion.

  ‘She’s perfect,’ Kit said.

  Janet still seemed stupefied. ‘I guess another baby’s not going to make a lot of difference round our place. Nicky’ll treat her like a little sister.’

  ‘I don’t know what to do, Mum.’

  ‘I do, love, with bells on. I’m not doing it for you, but I’ll teach you. I’ll help. It’ll be all right.’

  ‘It’s like she just dropped into my lap.’ Emotional sobs broke through in Tracie’s voice, like summer rain clattering on a roof, and she was laughing at the same time. ‘I thought having a baby was meant to be hard!’

  Kit had her back turned. She’d tidied some equipment and was scribbling notes. Gian watched her, could see just by the set of her shoulders that she was struggling with her emotions. A baby had ‘just dropped’ into this patient’s arms, while she’d wanted one so badly for so long, with no success.

  He wanted to hit her with a barrage of the questions she hadn’t let him ask three weeks ago. How long have you been putting yourself through this? Wouldn’t it be easier if you took some time out, and retrained? Aren’t you hurting yourself in a way you don’t need to? Hurting yourself more than your ex-lover did, or than I could, if we tested what we feel and it failed? Why do you do it?

  She pivoted, lifted her face and caught him. Flushed. Obviously knew exactly the direction his thoughts had travelled in.

  ‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘I’m OK. This isn’t new after all.’

  ‘No, but doesn’t it damage you a little more every time?’ he muttered.

  ‘It’s not your problem, Gian. This is why I don’t tell people. Why I can’t tell people. I refuse to make it into anyone else’s problem!’

  Her eyes burned, and he felt as if the genuine care he’d tried to express had curdled and turned ugly, clumsy. It wasn’t what Kit wanted. All she wanted was distance. His distance. He guessed that if she’d seen any other way to put distance between them, she would have used it. If she’d been able to deny the attraction, she would have done so.

  She felt it strongly, then. As strongly as he did.

  It all seemed like such a waste.

  ‘And we’re invited to afternoon tea at Freddie’s, Kit,’ Aunt Helen said as they swept the shearing shed. ‘We’ll have earned it by then!’

  It was a Wednesday in late April, the last of four days off in a row for Kit. She’d successfully kept busy on all of them. For the first two days, Emma had been off work, too, and they’d painted part of the outside of Emma’s house in an attractive palette of colors—rich cream walls, with a mix of dark, slaty blue and a warm peach for the elaborate wooden trim.

  It was a satisfying transformation, from peeling pale mint green to the fresh, pretty colours, and the shared work began to form the foundation of a friendship that Kit hoped would last.

  Emma had been busy on her own for several weeks before this, and the exterior of the house was now almost finished. She’d been working on the inside of the house as well, painting rooms, ripping up carpets, revarnishing floors and buying new furniture. She had created some new garden beds running parallel to the front path, too, and had planted them with spring bulbs.

  ‘I’m proud of myself,’ she had said to Kit yesterday, surveying her work as they sat on the veranda, with the autumn sun on their bare legs. They’d been eating pizza for lunch, straight from the box.

  ‘You should be,’ Kit had told her, through a mouthful of anchovies, olives and stretchy cheese. She swallowed. ‘You’ve worked like a dynamo, and it looks great.’

  The next day, Emma had been back at work, so Kit turned to the work of the farm, and helped her aunt with the sheep. It was good to go to bed exhausted. That way, she slept.

  The invitation to the Di Luzio farm should have come as good news. As Aunt Kit had said, by this afternoon they would have earned the break. But Kit had mixed feelings. Would Gian be there? Probably not. It was a weekday afternoon.

  Obstetricians kept odd hours, however. She couldn’t count on his absence, since she knew how much he tried to help his mother out with Bonnie.

  She had been silent for too long. Aunt Helen prompted, ‘You’ll come, won’t you? Freddie definitely included you. You’ve nothing else planned?’

  ‘No, it’ll be lovely. I like Freddie.’

  ‘She was so disappointed when Gian and Ciara divorced.’

  Kit blinked at the sudden change of subject. ‘Well, I’m sure,’ she murmured.

  ‘She was thrilled when he married an Italian girl—she was some kind of distant cousin, from Gian’s father’s side of the family—and Freddie bent over backwards to be a good mother-in-law.’

  ‘I get the impression that when it comes to bending, Freddie has a pretty strong and supple spine, too!’

  ‘Oh, exactly. She told me she’s wondered how much of it was her own fault. If she was trying too hard.’

  ‘I can’t imagine that had anything to do with it,’ Kit answered. ‘When a marriage breaks up, I think it’s usually just about the two people concerned.’ She added quickly, ‘What time are we invited for?’

  ‘Around four.’

  They stopped work at three-thirty, needing, as usual, to shower and change. Freddie already had the kettle on and scones just out of the oven when they arrived. The Di Luzio farm was gorgeous, and quite different in its atmosphere from Aunt Helen’s, although they were only two kilometres apart.

  Firstly, there were the Glen Aran Winery’s vines, marching in parallel rows away from the long, straight dirt road leading up to the farmhouse. The grapes had been harvested now, and the leaves were beginning to turn and fall, but at the end of each row there was a rose bush, and most of these were still blooming with untidy pink flowers.

  The farmhouse itself consisted of a tiny original wattle and daub cottage, now used as a storeroom and attached by a walkway, half-drowned in wisteria, to a brick house which had been rendered and painted a terracotta pinky-brown, so that it had a definite Mediterranean feel.

  There were nasturtiums and geraniums planted in an array of old bathtubs and washing-machine drums and olive-oil cans and wheelbarrows, and in a north-facing sun trap behind the house, sheltered by a high, vine-covered wire fence, there was the vegetable garden, clearly Federica Di Luzio’s pride and joy.

  Kit glimpsed the basil and tomatoes that Gian had brought over several weeks ago, as well as lettuces and yellow squash, pumpkins and raspberry bushes, spinach and onions, thick asparagus fronds and spiky artichoke bushes. There was probably more, only she didn’t have time to see. Freddie had used the whistling kettle and the smell of the scones to lure them inside.

  The kitchen was as bright and welcoming as the farmhouse’s exterior had been. As well as the scones, a wide pan of freshly made lasagne sat on top of the stove, ready to go in the oven in time for the evening meal. A big, old-fashioned wooden dresser held shelves of jarred tomatoes, dried herbs and braided garlic bulbs, as well as two wide Italian ceramic bowls filled with citrus fruit.

  Bonnie sat at the kitchen table, drawing with crayons and pencils and felt-tipped pens. She had a pile of scrap paper from her Uncle Gian’s office, and she was scribbling energetically on each one before consigning it to the pile of completed efforts, changing colours and beginning a new one.

  ‘I’m not sure that it’s art,’ Freddie commented, as she made the tea. ‘More like a factory assembly line. She produces thirty at a time. I don’t know what we’ll do when Gian’s old letterheads run out.’

  Kit sat down next to Bonnie, slid a sheet of paper towards herself and picked up a pencil. She drew a fairy princess, complete with crown, wand and wings, and wearing a petal-shaped gown. It was an amateurish effort, but Bonnie seemed enchanted all the same.

  ‘Would you like to colour it in?’ Kit sug
gested.

  Bonnie nodded and smiled, and went scribble, scribble, scribble on the fairy princess with a pink felt-tip pen. ‘Nuvver one?’ she said. ‘Pease?’

  After such a lovely ‘please’, Kit could only oblige, and now there were two people working the factory assembly line. She drew fairy princesses, and Bonnie scribbled on them, and Aunt Helen predicted, ‘You won’t be allowed to go home, Kit, or have your tea.’

  ‘She will be, if I put enough strawberry jam and whipped cream on Bonnie’s sconi.’

  ‘Sconi?’ Kit queried. It sounded like an Italian word, the way Freddie gave a lilt to it and lingered on the ‘n’, but she didn’t think it was.

  Freddie laughed.

  ‘It was the only Australian thing my mother ever learned to cook,’ she said. ‘My parents came out here from Sicily after the war, when I was five. Mama’s English was never very good, and she called them sconi. “Staio facendo sconi,” she’d say. “I’m making scones.” It sounded Italian, and plural, and a little bit like biscotti, and was easier for her to say than “scones”. I’ve called them that all my life, and I forget it isn’t a real word.’

  ‘It’s lovely,’ Kit said. ‘I’ll have two sconi, please.’

  ‘Have three.’

  ‘And I’ll probably call them sconi forever now.’

  ‘Definitely every time you come to our place, anyway.’

  The answer implied that Kit would be coming often. She wanted to push the idea away, only that would be rude, and anyway there wasn’t the opportunity, because she’d just heard the sound of a car pulling up outside, the squeak of its boot opening and footsteps approaching, and seconds later the kitchen door swung open and there was Gian, with his hands full of plastic shopping bags.

  ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Hi.’ He smiled, as if mainly because it was expected in this situation, then focused on what was spread on the table, as if seeking a safe subject. ‘Mum, you’ve made sconi.’

  ‘Untle Zian! Untle Zian!’ Bonnie said, bouncing on her chair.

  ‘Sit down and have some.’

  He shook his head, slid a glance quickly past Kit and said, ‘I only came to drop off the shopping. And tonight’s the night you want me to babysit, right? I’m not on call. Seven, was it?’