The Children's Doctor and the Single Mom

by Lilian Darcy

  Wow, Tammy.

  The way you kissed me. The way the restaurant lighting shone on your hair. The way you laughed every time those gas jets went off and we saw the flames billowing up into the night and felt the heat. The way you juggled those plates back and forth.

  Your breasts.

  Bouncing.

  Making you embarrassed because you were wearing the wrong bra.

  I loved the feel of you in my hands, all that silky, scented fabric and skin, so soft and curvy and giving…so giving.

  She didn’t think to hold herself back. There was no illusion of sophistication to mask her carefully concealed self-doubts. Tammy’s self-doubts dangled from her sleeve, her kisses weren’t a performance at all, and her reaction to him hiring the cleaners wouldn’t be a performance either.

  Brittany, the strongest of the surviving two Vitelli triplets, was going home today, and Tammy was helping Alison to prepare for her discharge. The little girl was still on oxygen and would need frequent check-ups to look at her heart, her lungs, her eyes and her general development, but she’d begun to feed well and was putting on weight daily.

  Consulting about another tiny patient nearby with a paediatric heart surgeon he’d called in, Laird couldn’t help listening to every word.

  ‘I’m so nervous,’ Alison said. A friend had spirited her off to the hair salon yesterday and she looked better, fresher, with those dark roots gone. She’d begun to take care of herself just a little bit better, which gave Laird confidence that she’d take care of Brittany and still manage to come in to see Harry.

  Tammy gave her shoulder a squeeze. ‘Good! I’d be worried if you weren’t,’ she said calmly, as she completed some notes.

  ‘I couldn’t eat breakfast.’

  ‘Nature’s way of telling you that it’s totally daunting to be taking a premmie home from hospital for the first time. But it’s not a one-way street, Alison. If you need to, if you have any doubts or concerns at all, you’ll bring her back.’

  ‘Oh, I hope not! Oh, I so don’t want to have to do that!’

  ‘Of course not, and that’s why you’re going to tell me right now if there’s the tiniest thing you don’t understand about the oxygen equipment, or anything else. You have no smokers in your house, right? None who make regular visits?’

  ‘No, thank goodness. If we did, I’d send them outside.’

  ‘You have the phone number of the NICU on speed dial.’

  ‘I have a reliable thermometer, I have frozen breast milk for if she’s too tired to suck.’

  ‘Harry’s going to need more of the frozen milk soon. Dr Burchell upped him to ten mils this morning.’

  ‘Oh…see? I hadn’t caught up with that. I’m so busy thinking about Brittany. How are we going to manage, with one baby here and one at home?’

  ‘What help do you have at home?’

  ‘Mum’s coming again tomorrow, staying for six weeks and longer if we need her to. She’s very keen to help, but she says she’s forgotten everything she ever knew about babies.’

  ‘Good,’ Tammy told her firmly. ‘That’s what you want. The ones who think they remember it all are the dangerous ones. You don’t want her slipping three tablespoons of port wine into Brittany’s bottle because that’s what mothers did when you were a baby.’

  Alison looked appalled for a second, then realised that Tammy was joking. The wicked look in those blue eyes gave it away. Laird could have told her that.

  ‘Seriously, though,’ Tammy said, ‘it sounds as if she’s willing to learn about Brittany’s needs, and that’s good.’

  ‘She’ll be good with Harry, too. We named him after Dad…’ Alison grew tearful and Tammy hugged her. Laird resolutely moved his head thirty degrees so that the two women and the baby no longer featured in his peripheral vision.

  ‘Unusual defect, so I’m bringing in Michael Begley from Royal Victoria, and I’m thinking we’ll do it tomorrow,’ he heard. ‘Provided you think she’s strong enough.’

  He snapped into focus quickly, put Tammy out of his mind for the moment and told the other man, ‘That’s sooner than I’d envisaged. I’d like to get this little girl’s weight up another couple of hundred grams first.’

  ‘Is she putting on weight? With her heart working this hard?’

  ‘She is. It’s slow, but she’s a fighter. Look, if it seems like she’s not progressing, we’ll have to rethink. Is Begley available over the next two or three weeks?’

  ‘I’ll have to check. I know he’s away in the second half of November.’

  ‘You wouldn’t feel confident tackling this without him?’ They’d looked at the test results and scans together. Like most surgeons, Eric Van was energised by the prospect of tackling something new, but he wasn’t the kind of man to overestimate his own abilities.

  ‘Confident, yes, eager, no,’ he said. ‘If I can say to the parents, look, this is a very rare defect, but we have a surgeon coming in who’s seen a very similar problem before…’

  ‘Makes sense,’ Laird said. ‘So our job is to get her strong enough before mid-November.’

  ‘That’s how I see it, yes.’

  Half an hour later, Laird found the card from Tammy in his pigeonhole. It was a nice card, in an aqua envelope labeled Laird, showing a tranquil tropical beach scene. He flipped it open.

  ‘Dear Laird, thank you so much for smoothing out my week in such a wonderful way! Mum was bowled over, and so was I. You didn’t have to! Please don’t do it again! But I’m so grateful for your doing it this once. Every time I go into the bathroom or look through those sparkly windows, my spirits lift. Once again, thank you, Tammy.’

  He found her in the break room, gulping a cup of tea and a milk arrowroot biscuit far too fast. She’d let down her hair in order to redo it—it often worked too loose during the day—and she had the stretchy piece of black elastic around her wrist ready for the tightly scraped ponytail she would make once she’d gulped the last of her tea.

  Laird wanted to yell at her, and he must have projected the fact in his body language, because her blue eyes went wide and she put the tea down on the countertop with a bump. She opened her mouth to speak—her lower lip glistened enticingly from the tea—but he didn’t give her time.

  ‘I didn’t want you to write a bloody card about it,’ he said.

  He knew he was coming on too strong, but…hell! He’d kissed her on Friday night and he knew she’d reacted exactly the same way he had—wanting more, shocked at the intensity of one semi-public kiss—but she kept wilfully misunderstanding what that meant, what he meant, and what he wanted.

  Well, what did he want? asked the treacherous part of him that channelled Tarsha’s well-meant opinion.

  Oh, hell, he couldn’t ask himself those questions now!

  Tammy lifted her chin, and lifted her shoulders, making those delicious breasts push more firmly against the bland fabric of her surgical blues. ‘It’s good manners, isn’t it? I wanted to say thank you.’

  ‘So you should have said thank you. Not written it on a pretty card. Not in that dismissive way.’

  ‘Dismissive?’

  ‘Distancing. So polite. And brittle. It wasn’t you, Tammy.’

  ‘You’re such an authority on me?’

  ‘I think so,’ he said quietly, stepping closer. He wanted to touch her, but wasn’t yet in reach, and anyway this was the break room. Nurses or parents or visitors looking for a glass of water could show up at any moment. He kept his voice low. ‘I’d like to be an authority on you. I like everything I know about you so far.’

  ‘Except the fact that I write polite thank-you cards,’ she reminded him. She folded her arms across her chest, the defensive pose belying the hectic pink in her cheeks. He loved that pink. It told him a lot.

  ‘Except that one specific polite thank-you card,’ he corrected her. ‘You do it on purpose, this way you misunderstand me. You’re talking about good manners—you used them like a shield with that card, Tammy. The manners, the misu
nderstanding. They’re both shields. Deliberate shields. That wasn’t a one-off, the other—’

  ‘I don’t want you to keep sending cleaners,’ she cut in. ‘Or any other kind of favour. I just don’t.’ She waved her hands at him for a moment, then pressed them against her hot cheeks.

  ‘I don’t mean the cleaners, you crazy person, I mean dinner, I mean spending time with you, taking you out to the vineyard with the kids, spoiling you a bit.’

  His hands itched to touch her—to push that wild, bright hair back from her neck so he could kiss her there. He wanted to cool her cheeks with the brush of his mouth and breath, wanted to hug her until she laughed and fought for air, wanted to whisper in her ear a long, sinful list of all the ways he desired her.

  ‘It seems like charity,’ she finished, the words so far from where his thoughts had travelled that he almost didn’t understand them.

  ‘Taking you to dinner?’

  ‘Sending cleaners. I’m not the kind of woman you should be going out with, Laird. I’m just not.’

  ‘So tell me what kind of a woman is that?’

  ‘Someone thin and single and gorgeous,’ she listed so fast he barely caught the words.

  ‘Sending cleaners brings us to this?’

  ‘Yes, because a single, gorgeous, childless woman wouldn’t need a cleaner. She’d have one, or she’d clean her own place in half an hour a week, because single women on their own don’t get things dirty.’

  ‘Can we please not talk about the damned cleaners any more? Let alone about this single, childless woman of yours who doesn’t exist. I’m trying to ask you out again!’

  ‘Even though you’re yelling at me’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘Why do you want to go out with me again?’

  ‘Because you make me crazy. In all sorts of ways.’

  ‘And that’s how it works? A woman makes a man crazy, so he asks her out?’

  ‘Sometimes, yes.’ His voice rose again, despite his attempts to stay low key and in control. ‘Don’t you know that?’ Oh, lord, this was frustrating! ‘Sometimes that’s exactly how it bloody works!’

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  ‘I WANT to have dinner with you again,’ Laird said, visibly attempting to curb his impatience. ‘This time, when your kids hopefully won’t get sick—poor little munchkins, I do know it wasn’t their fault!—so we don’t have to rush you home. Just a simple dinner, focused on the two of us, no distractions. Is that too much to ask?’

  ‘I’m sorry about the other night,’ Tammy answered, struggling to get past the fact that he was almost yelling at her, that he’d hated her card, and yet he still apparently, for some mystifying reason, wanted to see her again.

  Was he right when he’d said just now that a man and a woman making each other crazy could be the most telling indication of what they felt?

  She wanted to see him again, too, but that was a lot easier to understand, and a lot scarier.

  Fight this just a little bit, Tammy Prunty!

  ‘So…when?’ he demanded.

  ‘I can’t just do dinner,’ she said, instead of what she wanted to say, which was, Yes, yes, yes.

  ‘Not just dinner? What do you mean?’

  ‘It’s not fair to Mum. It’s so hard to persuade her to take time for herself.’

  ‘Now, why does that sound familiar, I wonder?’ he muttered.

  ‘I know. I’m the same. I do realise that. But they’re my kids. I’m the one who should be driving myself into the ground, not my sixty-two-year-old widowed mother.’ She took a deep breath. ‘I want to see you…’ Having said it, she immediately felt three times as vulnerable, yet managed to stay firm, on one point at least. ‘But dinner has to be the reward at the end. If we’re going to do something together, it has to be a day out somewhere with the kids, so Mum has the whole place to herself for a while, and dinner and having her babysit for us comes afterwards.’

  It was a test.

  Laird probably recognised the fact as clearly as she did.

  If he wasn’t willing to stump up enough of his free time to spend a few hours with her children, getting to know them…putting up with them, as would no doubt be involved for at least some of the time, as they were normal human children, not angels…then she needed to say no to dinner and put a stop, right now, to the frivolous, impossible idea that this craziness between them might go somewhere or mean something.

  ‘Where shall we take them?’ he said. Bravely.

  Without hesitation, Tammy replied, ‘The zoo.’

  The zoo was always…well…a zoo. Five very individual children did not all like the same animals, or like them to the same degree.

  Ben was a total animal nut, but with a four-year-old’s tendency to live in the present, he couldn’t envisage that if he loved looking intently at the elephants for fifteen minutes, he’d probably love looking intently at the giraffes and monkeys just as much. He had to be dragged and cajoled and bribed from one viewing area to the next, while Lachlan was the exact opposite and ran from enclosure to walkway to viewing platform and would have covered the whole place in half an hour and been ready to go home, if the other kids hadn’t slowed him down.

  Meanwhile, Laura and Lucy only liked cute animals. Kittens. Ponies. Sarah had begun to develop a certain age-appropriate interest in ponies also, but had a warm enthusiasm for creepy animals as well, preferably the kind without legs.

  Tammy, meanwhile, had no tastes or preferences whatsoever. Mothers of large families learned not to, because it only complicated things further. She just wanted there to be no fighting between them all.

  And once you factored in snacks, and lunch, and water bottles, and hats, and sunscreen, and tired legs, and the issue of whether she should take the now-battered double-seater pram, which two triplets at a time just managed to still fit into…

  ‘If you’re serious,’ she told Laird, ‘I’d suggest the zoo.’

  ‘This is not just a test, is it?’ he said, indicating that he’d indeed read her mind a minute ago. The light in his grey eyes was both exasperated and amused. ‘It’s a gruelling six-hour exam!’

  They arranged it for the following Saturday.

  The weather forecast co-operated with a prediction of full sunshine, although this meant it might get uncomfortably hot for several hours in the middle of the day. Laird arranged to drive to Tammy’s, from where they would proceed to the zoo in her battered second-hand seven-seater minivan—for which she didn’t apologise, because she’d gained a firmer grip on herself now, thanks to mental pep talks for several days. As Laird had divined, this was a very serious, very important exam, and if he couldn’t deal with the humble nature of her minivan, then he wasn’t going to score a passing grade.

  Hmm. No sense making the whole thing too tough on an otherwise promising student, however.

  After lying awake in the night, worrying about the strong possibility of there being empty muesli bar packets and old notes from school lying crumpled on the minivan floor, Tammy got up at six and cleaned the whole thing before any of the kids woke up.

  Although the disappearance of camouflaging dirt did then serve to emphasise the scuffed seating and exterior dents and scrapes, the debris-free floor and polished chrome and glass were nonetheless an improvement.

  At the zoo, the seven of them felt like a family.

  While she often earned stares from strangers when out with the kids on her own—what was any woman doing by herself in public with such a large family?—the looks she received today were significantly more smile-laden and forgiving. What cute triplets! What a distinguished-looking dad they had! And look at the way he kept abreast of Lachlan’s impatient whirl from zebras to wombats to snakes, and steered him cheerfully back to Tammy and the others! Distinguished and hands on.

  ‘Should I try and rope him in more firmly?’ he asked her at one point, not as if Lachlan was being a brat but as if Laird himself scrupulously wanted to do the right thing.

  ‘It’s tough,’ Tammy a
nswered. ‘He’s a good little lad, but he’s just not as interested in creatures as the other four. He’s more of a building and engineering type. I went with the majority preference, so he’s the one who’s hard done by.’

  ‘How about we go for a carousel ride? Would he like that?’

  ‘They’d all love it.’

  ‘You, too?’ He grinned at her.

  ‘There have to be a few perks for being a parent! Yes, I’ll have a ride.’

  So they all did, even Laird. The triplets were old enough now to have a horse each, as long as Tammy rode her own wooden mount close by. The children were grinning and laughing, which made her grin, too, sharing their pleasure.

  ‘You were joking about the perks,’ Laird told her when they stepped down from the ride, all feeling a little dizzy. ‘But you’re right. It is a perk. Recapturing the innocence, or something. I hadn’t realised how good that would feel.’

  ‘Recapturing the wonder,’ she suggested.

  He nodded. ‘That’s it. The wonder. Hmm, and the nausea, too. Woo, I think my stomach must be empty.’

  They ate a sandwich lunch bought from one of the zoo kiosks and juggled the children’s wants and needs successfully until after four o’clock. The reptiles for Sarah, the animal nursery for Laura and Lucy, the scientific details Ben needed about every creature they saw, and the running around that Lachlan wanted to do. On the way home, all three triplets were tired enough to sleep in the car.

  Laird had made a dinner booking for seven o’clock, and Tammy thought he’d go off and grab a couple of hours of breathing space and sanity before he picked her up again, but he insisted on coming into the house.

  ‘I have to get dinner organised for Mum,’ she warned him bluntly, because if he imagined the two of them sitting on the back veranda, sipping cool drinks with little paper umbrellas in them for the next hour, he was very wrong.

  ‘So I’m on entertainment duty?’

  ‘You could go home. Or you could cheat, and put on a DVD.’

  ‘Might be able to come up with something better than that.’