The Honourable Maverick / The Unsung Hero

by Alison Roberts / Kate Hardy

  ‘I wasn’t suggesting you were.’ The putdown sparked something that felt like rebellion. Didn’t he know by now that she was more than prepared to fight for what was right?

  ‘If I’m his father and there’s enough of a match to make my bone marrow compatible, then of course I’ll be a donor.’

  Sarah let out a breath she hadn’t noticed she’d been holding. This was precisely what she’d wanted to hear. So why was she left with this oddly unsatisfied sensation?

  ‘If—and it’s a mighty big if as far as I’m concerned,’ Rick continued, his voice low and intense. ‘If things do turn out that way and I’m a donor, then that’s the end of it.’

  ‘Sorry?’ Sarah wasn’t following.

  ‘I had no idea he existed,’ Rick said. ‘He’s nine years old. It’s a bit late to step into the role of being a father. So I don’t want Josh to be told. Is that clear?’

  Sarah’s mouth opened but no words came out.

  It was clear all right. But acceptable? That was something else entirely. If she called him on this, however, he might back off and he’d already agreed to being a potential donor. That was all that mattered right now, wasn’t it?

  One step at a time.

  It wasn’t the first time in their brief acquaintance that she’d had the impression Rick Wilson was a man used to getting what he wanted from life.

  He had taken her silence for acquiescence.

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘I’m glad we understand each other.’

  And with that, he turned and left. Mission accomplished.

  That spark of rebellion flared. Any kind of fan could easily see it flame into anger but Sarah had her own mission to deal with.

  Intravenous sedation had made Josh sleepy enough not to notice his bed being wheeled into the treatment room of the ward. Or even being rolled onto his stomach and having the skin around his lower spine swabbed with disinfectant and then covered with a sterile drape that had a square hole in its centre.

  Sarah positioned herself close to his head and took a small hand in hers.

  ‘All set?’ Mike was gowned and gloved. He had a syringe full of local anaesthetic in his hand.

  Sarah nodded. She focused on Josh’s face rather than watching the needle. She saw the crease on his forehead that let her know he was aware of his skin being pierced. The deeper frown and tiny whimper that told her the bone was now being frozen.

  Despite the sedation and all the local anaesthetic, the next part of the procedure was painful. Not that Josh would remember any of it, thanks to the medication, but Sarah would. The sleepy groans and embryonic sobs brought tears to her own eyes and she ended up having to sniff audibly.

  ‘You OK, Sarah?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Not much longer.’

  ‘That’s good.’

  It was probably just as well that Rick had backed away from any involvement with Josh at the moment. If he was watching this, he’d know exactly what was in store for him if it came to donating bone marrow. There’d be more than one puncture site, too, because they’d need a couple of litres of his liquid marrow. Josh only needed a tiny amount to cover the slides a technician was ready to prepare at the nearby trolley.

  Would Rick opt for a general anaesthetic? Hardly likely, given the small but significant risk. IV sedation like Josh had had? That also didn’t seem likely. He was a surgeon and having to abstain from making any important decisions or doing medical procedures might be a huge inconvenience. She wouldn’t be at all surprised if he opted to just tough it out with local and that thought was enough to make her shudder inwardly.

  She couldn’t do it. Of course, it would be his choice but it was a lot to ask of anyone. Except that if it came to that, Rick wouldn’t be just anyone. He’d be Josh’s father. His dad. And it was a small thing to ask if it could save his son’s life.

  Mike had finished aspirating the marrow. Now he needed to do the biopsy.

  ‘Almost done, short stuff,’ Sarah whispered. ‘You’re being a wee hero.’

  As he always was. He was such a brave kid. As if it hadn’t been enough to lose his mum when he was only six and have to go and live with an aunt he hadn’t seen nearly enough of. She wished she’d been there more for him when he’d been little but Lucy had gone back to their small home town after their mother had died and it had been her older sister who’d pushed her to stay in big cities and keep taking her career to the next level. Not to make the same mistakes she’d made.

  At least she hadn’t been a total stranger when tragedy had struck. Her love for Josh had been genuine but, even if she hadn’t loved him as her nephew, he would have captured her heart totally over the last year with his courage and resilience.

  ‘I’ll get better,’ he often reassured her. ‘Don’t worry, Sarah. One day I’ll be big and I’ll look after you.’

  Sarah had to sniff again. A nurse passed her a tissue and Mike looked up to give her a sympathetic smile.

  ‘We’re all done. Looks like a good sample. Not too much cortex.’

  ‘Great.’

  ‘We’ll head on up for the MRI before the sedation wears off. I’ll give him some pain relief, too. He’ll be a bit sore when he wakes up.’

  ‘He’ll be OK,’ Sarah said. ‘I don’t think he’s ever really complained after one of these.’

  Rick would be in even more pain after this procedure but he’d get over it soon enough and as far as he was concerned, that would be the end of his involvement. And…dammit, that really wasn’t acceptable, Sarah realised.

  ‘He’s an amazing kid,’ Mike was saying warmly as he pressed a gauze swab to the puncture site. ‘One out of the box.’

  So true. And if Rick was Josh’s father, he needed to spend enough time with him to see what an incredible person his son was. Everyone who knew this child fell in love with him. Josh deserved to know that his own father was amongst that number.

  If Rick thought he could make up for refusing to acknowledge his son merely by going through a medical procedure then he had another think coming his way, courtesy of her. This was what had been niggling at her ever since he’d walked off earlier. Where her anger was stemming from. He was dismissing Josh as a person without seeing how special he was. He should be proud to claim him.

  And surely Josh had a right to know who his father was? But how could Sarah tell him if there was rejection in store?

  One step at a time, she reminded herself, walking beside Josh’s bed on their journey to the radiology department for the MRI scan. She squeezed his hand, reassuring herself as much as the drowsy child. The next step couldn’t happen until the test results came through and that gave her plenty of time to think about exactly what that step should involve.

  The thirteen-year-old boy lay, white and still on a bed in the intensive care unit. Flanked by monitors, IV tubing, medical staff and two distraught-looking parents.

  The mother was crying again. The father put his arm around her. ‘He’s still alive,’ he said, his voice raw. ‘It’ll be OK, you’ll see. The doc knows what he’s doing. It’ll be OK.’

  He looked down at his son but the glance was brief. The sight was still too horrific. The swathe of bandages around the head. Eyes so swollen you couldn’t see eyelashes even, and then there was the awful bruising and a split lip to cap it off. He must be virtually unrecognisable even to his closest family.

  This was the kind of case Rick found particularly gruelling. A whole family torn apart because of a dreadful accident. Simon had been on his way home from school and had been knocked off his bicycle by a speeding delivery van. He had a badly fractured leg, supported by a slab of plaster and padded by pillows until the boy’s condition was stable enough for further surgery. It was much less of a concern than his head injury at this point in time. Right now, Simon was on a ventilator, unable to breathe on his own, and the surgery Rick had just performed held no guarantees for either survival or a good long-term outcome.

  Simon’s parents were a mess. Shocked and te
rrified but desperate to be with their son. This had to be every parent’s worst nightmare and Rick had seen it all too often.

  Was this why he’d never given serious thought to having a family of his own? He wasn’t totally averse to the notion like Jet was, but neither could he imagine embracing the concept as Max had done. He was somewhere between the two. The desire was there but still dormant. Weighed down, perhaps, by the legacy of his own childhood.

  Along with the logistics of attaining the state of parenthood, the motivation to deal with the downsides of parenting had made it all too easy to shove the whole concept into the ‘too hard’ basket and leave it there. And if it stayed in there so long it was too late to do anything about it, the whole issue might just quietly go away and he’d be able to take comfort in the thought that he couldn’t have really wanted it badly enough in any case.

  It was getting late by the time Rick left the ICU, but for a while he hung around the wards, reviewing his inpatients. He was reluctant to head home because it would mean a visit to his office to collect his keys.

  Had it only been a few days ago when he’d been less than happy with the company of his mates and had wanted time alone to get his head sorted? Now, when he’d had enough of himself, there was no opportunity to obtain the kind of company he needed.

  He’d assured Max that he would be absolutely fine. That Max couldn’t possibly postpone the week in Rarotonga that he and Ellie and Mattie had lined up for their honeymoon. He’d meant every word of it at the time, of course, but then he hadn’t known that Jet would receive a summons back to his elite army medical unit. A three-month stint that would see him involved in training exercises and deployment to any areas that might need the specialised skills of the unit. He’d left town yesterday, with his personal belongings in a backpack, his bike under cover in Rick’s garage and the satisfied gleam of impending adventure lighting his features.

  Rick had no one to talk to.

  About the rough day he’d had at work.

  Or about the envelope that had landed in his in-box this afternoon, seconds before the call to the emergency department where Simon had been waiting.

  He knew what was in that envelope.

  The DNA results.

  The slip of paper inside could be a passport to freedom but it could also be a life sentence.

  Being a father might not be a choice he had the luxury of making. It might be about to blindside him and, despite thinking he had found a solution that would work for everybody involved, he still had no idea how he was going to react if he discovered he really was Josh’s father.

  Maybe he didn’t need his mates around to talk to. He could almost hear Jet’s impatient voice.

  Only one way to find out, man. For God’s sake, just get on with it.

  With a grim smile, Rick dropped the set of notes he was holding back into the trolley and headed for his office.

  Minutes later, he was staring at his hands in disgust. He was a surgeon, for heaven’s sake. With a reputation he could be justifiably proud of. He operated on people’s brains and spines. Tricky surgery that required absolute precision and he’d never known his hands to falter. To tremble.

  They were damn close to trembling now, as he ripped open that envelope.

  CHAPTER THREE

  ‘DO YOU want the good news or the bad news first?’

  Josh rolled his eyes and sighed theatrically. ‘Gimme the bad news, then.’

  ‘You’re in for new treatment stuff next week.’ ‘More chemo?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Sarah was trying hard to sound upbeat but it wasn’t easy and she had to blink rapidly a few times. Josh was watching her.

  ‘That’s OK, I s’pose. Like last time?’ ‘Not exactly. They’re going to bring the big guns out this time and try and shoot all the cancer cells. You’ll get some radiation treatment as well as the drugs.’

  Josh’s eyes widened. ‘I’m gonna be radiated? Will I go green or start glowing?’

  Sarah grinned. ‘No. And don’t go expecting to get some superpowers or anything, either. It’s more like having a whole bunch of X-rays all at once.’

  Josh was a smart kid. He understood far more than most people gave him credit for and Sarah had always been honest with him. Not that she gave him every detail, of course, but if he asked a question, she told him the truth. Josh seemed to know how much information he could handle and, like many children who faced life-threatening disease, he had a wisdom way beyond his years.

  He put Sarah to shame, sometimes, with his acceptance of how things were. He understood death better than any child should. He wasn’t afraid of it but he loved life and instinctively made the most of every moment. Right now, however, he was having a flash of being just an ordinary little boy and his bottom lip jutted out.

  ‘Will it hurt?’ he asked in a small voice.

  ‘No.’ Sarah badly wanted to gather him into her arms but she knew better. Josh was getting well past wanting hugs or slobbery kisses. She often caught hints of the man he could become, in fact. Like now, as he squared bony shoulders and lifted his chin.

  ‘That’s OK, then.’ The glance he gave his aunt was steady. ‘Is that it?’

  ‘Not quite. You’re going to have a Hickman catheter put in again.’

  He’d had one before, in his first run of chemotherapy. The indwelling catheter would be inserted into a central venous line and stitched in place. It meant that all the drugs and blood products could be administered and samples taken without the pain or risk of infection that came from multiple puncture sites.

  ‘But I’ll be asleep when they do that, right?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Of course.’

  ‘Am I going to get real sick again?’

  It was hard to maintain the direct eye contact. ‘You might. They’ll give you stuff to stop you throwing up.’

  ‘Is this going to be the last time I have to do it?’

  ‘We’re all hoping so, hon.’

  ‘When is it going to start?’

  ‘Well, that’s the good news. Not for a few days and you’re allowed to come home until then. You get to choose whatever you want to do and we can go to the shops and get a supply of DVDs and books and anything else you want to bring into hospital with you.’

  ‘They’ve got tons of stuff here already. Will I be in this room again or can I go in with the other chemo kids? Oscar’s got ALL like me and he said there’s an empty bed in his room.’

  Sarah took a deep breath. The ‘good’ news had come and gone in a heartbeat. ‘You won’t be in this ward, Josh. You’re going to a special unit. You’ll have your own room and everything you need but it’s…’ Oh, God. How could she sound upbeat in telling him that he would be kept in strict isolation? For weeks? ‘It’s bug-free. To protect you from getting any kind of infection.’

  ‘But I’m better. I haven’t got a temperature or anything now.’

  ‘This treatment is different. You know how the bad leukaemia cells happen in your bone marrow?’

  ‘Yeah. That’s why they stick holes in my back. To get the marrow and look at the cells under the microscope and count them.’

  ‘This new treatment is designed to get rid of all the bad cells but it kills off the good ones as well. Doctor Mike will be able to draw you some nice pictures of what happens but it means that, for a while, you won’t have any bone marrow that does its job of making new blood or protecting you from bugs.’

  ‘And then what happens?’

  ‘They give you some new bone marrow. When it’s had enough time to get right into your bones and settle down, it’ll start making new blood. Nice, healthy blood.’

  Josh took that in, frowning with concentration.

  ‘So I’ll be fixed?’

  ‘That’s the plan.’ Sarah’s smile broke through as she took out that shiny, new hope to show Josh. ‘This is it,’ she told him solemnly. ‘The chance we’ve been waiting for.’

  ‘So you’ve found my dad, then?’

  Sarah’s breath caught. She
’d never told Josh that she was trying to trace his biological father. He’d never asked. As far as she’d known, he thought that the trip to the States had been so that he could go to Disneyland and the visits to a hospital and the doctor who used to live in New Zealand had been simply to look after him while they were away.

  Had he overheard something?

  Oh…Lord…Had he done more than play games on her laptop? Read her emails, maybe?

  ‘Who is he?’

  Still, words failed Sarah. Rick had made his wishes very clear on this subject. It wasn’t that she didn’t have the courage to defy him, more that she hadn’t been able to come up with any plan that didn’t involve Josh facing rejection, and she couldn’t bring herself to inflict emotional pain on top of the physical ordeal he was facing.

  ‘It’s OK,’ Josh told her kindly. ‘I already know.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s Max’s friend. The man at the wedding. Rick.’

  Sarah’s jaw dropped. ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘I heard you talking to Ellie. Promising that you wouldn’t say anything until after the wedding. And…you kept looking at him kind of funny. Kept watching him.’

  ‘Did I?’ Sarah felt helpless. How on earth was she going to explain this to Rick? She could hardly expect him to believe that Josh had figured it out for himself without her saying anything. He’d be furious.

  ‘How come he didn’t know?’ Josh asked.

  ‘That he was your dad?’

  Josh nodded.

  ‘It happens.’ This was more information than a nine-year-old should have to deal with. But Josh wasn’t any-nine-year old, was he? ‘A girl can get pregnant and have a baby but if she doesn’t tell the father and they’re not together any more, there’s no way for him to know.’

  ‘But he knows now?’

  It was Sarah’s turn to nod.

  ‘Why hasn’t he come to visit me, then?’

  Good question. As good as the very similar one she’d asked Mike Randall herself, not very long ago, when the oncology consultant had been the one to tell her the amazing news of what a close genetic match Rick had turned out to be for Josh. But Mike hadn’t been able to give her an answer and she had to be very careful with what she said to Josh.