by Lilian Darcy
She nodded, found the X-ray envelope, slid the pictures out and clipped them against the light-box on a nearby wall. She was painfully aware of Laird while she did it, and she could so easily read the studied way he avoided her eye, then helplessly caught it once or twice, making the air zing. If either the Parrys or Dr Goode noticed any kind of tension, she couldn’t tell.
What was he thinking? She wanted to touch him, throw herself onto him and tell him, I didn’t mean it. Don’t think. Just take me to bed again. Just look at me again the way you did this afternoon when I was talking to Alison. Tell me with those eyes of yours that you want me and I’m yours.
The two doctors looked at the X-rays together, Laird tracing his lean fingers over the confusing shadings of black and grey and white as he talked. ‘It could be a blockage, but I’m not prepared to make that diagnosis on the basis of a picture like this. He had a blood transfusion late this afternoon. His blood gases have improved…’ He trailed off.
The word ‘but’ hung unspoken in the air. Fran wiped her eyes with the tissues Chris passed her. He had an expression of powerless anger and pain on his face, while they both clung to every word the doctors said.
‘And there’s no sign of active infection?’ Dr Goode asked.
‘No, the antibiotics are a preventative, rather than a response.’
Dr Goode palpated the baby’s fragile, distended abdomen with gloved hands and an incredibly sure, delicate touch, then applied a warmed stethoscope and listened. He was in his early fifties, and gave off a calm authority and air of experience that the Parrys must feel and find reassuring. ‘I’m hearing some bowel sounds. If it’s a blockage, it’s not complete. Rest his gut, and let’s wait and see. It may resolve on its own.’
‘Mr and Mrs Parry, are you happy with that plan?’ Laird asked.
‘Is there another option?’ Chris asked.
‘Not really. Surgery would be a last-ditch measure.’
‘The reality is he’d be unlikely to survive it, let alone be helped by it,’ said Dr Goode. ‘There’s no point softening what we tell you on this.’
Fran nodded, her throat working.
‘Let’s go and see Max,’ Chris said gently to his wife.
But Fran shook her head and pushed him away. ‘I want to stay here.’ Her fists were clenched as if pure willpower would keep her baby alive.
‘Beautiful, Max needs us just as much. Don’t give him less because he’s healthier. Come with me and let’s just sit with him for a while.’
‘OK. All right.’ She nodded tiredly and he led her out of the unit, and Laird and Dr Goode departed, too, leaving Tammy alone with little Adam.
Twenty minutes later, he pooed.
‘And we’re thrilled about it, baby,’ Tammy cooed softly to him as she changed his tiny envelope of a nappy. ‘You wait until I tell your mummy!’
And Laird.
It was scary how much she looked forward to telling Laird, and how disappointed she was when she discovered he’d gone home without seeking her out, even to say goodnight.
He’s thinking. He’s giving us both some distance. It’s what you asked for, so trust it.
But trust, after a betrayal, was so scary and hard.
‘How about we make a deal, you and me?’ she told a briefly wakeful baby Adam, after Fran and Chris had gone home at around ten-thirty. They seemed to be feeling more cheerful after Adam’s encouraging bowel movement, and the NICU had gone quiet and dark for the night, with only one or two parents still slumped tiredly in uncomfortable chairs, and the frieze of ‘graduate’ babies just a blur on the wall.
‘No more backward steps, OK?’ Tammy said softly to the baby. ‘We’ll keep each other on track. You grow and get strong and remember to breathe right…and so will I. Is it a deal? I have too much to do in my life, too much else to think about, to let Laird Burchell mean so much, to spend so much of my time and effort fighting to trust him.’
CHAPTER TEN
‘I CANNOT get this hat to work!’ Tarsha said viciously, blinking back tears.
‘So try a different one,’ Laird suggested in a soothing voice.
Wrong answer.
So far today, Tarsha didn’t seem too impressed at how he was performing in his role of suave professional handbag. He couldn’t blame her. His heart wasn’t in it. His heart was with a copper-haired, sumptuous-bodied nurse who made his whole soul burn with questions that he couldn’t yet answer and didn’t know how he ever would.
‘Do you honestly think I have another hat just lying around that will match this outfit?’ Tarsha gestured at her slip of a dress in beige silk and lace, her tiny jacket and her barely there spike-heeled shoes. ‘And if you suggest trying a different outfit…!’
‘I think the hat looks great.’ His thoughts were miles away.
‘You’re not taking this seriously.’
Making the effort to focus, Laird told her, ‘Well, I did think the Melbourne Cup was more about horses than clothes.’
He almost had the impression that Tarsha wasn’t taking it seriously either, despite her anger. It seemed as if she was using the hat and his own thick-headedness about fashion as a way to vent other sources of stress. If that was the case, he knew better than to ask for a direct explanation. She’d get to the point if and when she was ready.
‘Are you kidding?’ she exclaimed. ‘I was so lucky to get the invites from L’Occidentale.’ Her whole demeanour suddenly changed. She pressed her lips together and took a deep breath. One beautifully manicured hand rested for a moment above her left breast. ‘But you’re right. It’s not important, is it? Not in the scheme of things. I don’t know what I’m doing today…’ She cast him a narrow, sideways glance and opened her mouth as if to speak again, then shook her head and sighed. ‘Let’s just go to the races,’ she muttered.
‘Take your time, Tarsha,’ he soothed her again, at a loss to know what he was dealing with here. ‘Check your make-up. I’ll wait.’ She seemed as highly strung as one of the thoroughbreds they were going to watch.
‘No. You’re right. I’ll leave the hat. It truly is not important,’ she said again, as if she really meant it.
As far as Tammy was concerned, there was absolutely no point in taking the Melbourne Cup fashion thing seriously.
She wouldn’t have gone to the event at all, under normal circumstances, but several friends had followed through on the threat they’d made this time last year, after she’d organised a Mini Melbourne Cup Party in the back garden for her own children and eight of their little mates, complete with hobby-horse races and dress-ups and colourful food. In Victoria, the Tuesday of ‘The Race That Stops A Nation’ was a public holiday, and there was no school.
‘Next year, Tammy, two of us are babysitting, and the other two are taking you to the races,’ Liz had said after the kids’ Cup party.
‘Which two of you are doing which?’
‘Whoever wins first and second in our Cup sweep today gets to stay home with the kids,’ Kelly declared.
So at nine-thirty in the morning a year later—i.e. today—Mel had swooped in and carried all five kids off to her place, where Bron was already setting up some games, and Kelly and Liz had marched Tammy into her bedroom to help her with her wardrobe.
‘I already have the hat,’ she told them helpfully, then watched them shriek in delight—or was it horror?—at the large, floppy-brimmed wheel of cream straw festooned with green organza ribbon, fake leaves and a ring of bright red plastic chillies. She and Sarah had had a lot of fun and hilarity putting it together on Sunday afternoon. For almost a whole half an hour, her heart hadn’t ached about Laird.
This morning, she was determined not to let her friends know how churned up she was feeling. They didn’t yet know that Laird existed, and she didn’t intend to tell them. Sarah might let something slip, she realised. Hopefully Mel and Bron would keep the kids too busy for an eight-year-old to think about it.
‘All right,’ Liz said calmly. ‘You really aren’t t
aking the fashion thing seriously. Now, what can we put with it?’
‘Well, my wardrobe is simply crammed with designer outfits, as you can imagine.’ Tammy laughed. ‘Take a look.’
Liz ended up driving back to her place to bring an armload of possibilities, and they settled on an elegantly floaty panelled skirt and a shoulder-baring silk camisole, neither of which was the same colour green as any of the three different greens on the hat, but, as Kelly said, it didn’t matter.
‘It’s more a symphony of greens,’ she decreed. ‘It works. Really shows off your figure.’
‘You mean it makes me look fat?’
‘Womanly, Tammy. The word is womanly.’
She decreed that the spare plastic chillies pinned artistically around the slightly-lower-than-Tammy-was-happy-with neckline of the camisole worked, too.
‘And the sash,’ Liz insisted. ‘The red silk sash.’ She tied it in place, puffing out the loop of the bow.
Tammy groaned. ‘Oh, I’m going to be so loud!’
‘Much more interesting than our drippy pastels.’
‘No, you both look lovely.’
‘So do you.’
‘In a loud kind of way. Like a big red apple hanging on a tree.’
And yet she felt like dressing loud today.
When in doubt, shout.
Or something.
Through the sheer audacity of wearing to the Melbourne Cup a whole orchestral, apple-hued arrangement of red and green with her copper-and-carrots hair and finishing the outfit off with scarlet shoes, Tammy could shut out the sound of that nagging, aching, vulnerable little voice inside her every time she thought about Laird, about trusting him—whether she dared to, whether there was any chance he’d come up with an answer to their future that wouldn’t hurt.
The outfit almost worked, too, until an hour after arriving, when, temporarily parted from her two friends, she saw Laird himself and the whole day suddenly changed, like a fierce storm sweeping in to cut down baking summer heat.
He stood just beyond the mounting yard, inspecting the horses before the fourth race. He was wearing a suit, so well cut it could have been Armani, with a flower in his lapel, and there was a gorgeously clad, elegantly thin, model-beautiful woman in a vintage couture dress and six-inch heels leaning intimately on his arm and smiling.
And Tammy felt ill.
Physically ill. Sick to her stomach, head dizzy and pounding, skin breaking out in a cold sweat, limbs gone weak. Oh, she remembered this! It was exactly the way she’d felt the day she’d come home to find Tom packing his things in their bedroom, when he hadn’t even told her yet that he planned to leave.
She stood there and watched Laird, appalled by the power and suddenness of her reaction. She couldn’t move. Her throat was choked. It felt like solid ground collapsing without warning beneath her feet, and it was horrible. Familiar and horrible. She couldn’t have spoken a word, even if Kelly and Liz had been standing right beside her, demanding to know what was wrong. The sounds of the crowd faded, and for a moment Tammy was afraid she might actually faint.
The woman smiled again. Laird nodded. The woman nudged his shoulder and pointed at something. They were together. That was all Tammy knew. Here she was in the flesh, the mythical woman Tammy had talked about to Laird when they’d argued over him sending cleaners in after the kids had been sick.
Thin, single and gorgeous.
She wasn’t an abstract possibility—the woman he should be going out with, the theoretical opposite to Tammy herself, the woman he would go out with one day, when Tammy herself was long forgotten—she was already real.
There was no room for anything inside her but the sheer, physical hurt of it. Betrayal like a knife thrust. Disbelief like an onslaught of white noise. Shock thundering through her bloodstream like the hooves on the track.
What a fool I am…
Trust? Where did trust fit in now?
She honestly hadn’t considered that she might have a rival so soon or, worse, that she might have had one all along. How long had these two known each other? For a while, judging by the way they were talking. There was something so casual and familiar about the woman’s hold on Laird’s arm, about the way he nodded at something she said without turning to look at her.
Tammy thought she had fully considered the harsh reality that Laird didn’t belong in her life. She’d told herself more than once that he should be going out with that gorgeous, thin, designer-dressed model she’d conjured up for him.
But, oh, she hadn’t really meant it!
And he is going out with her, said the evidence of her eyes, until her vision was blinded by tears, at which point all she could do was to stand there, blinking, waiting for her heart to recover the correct beat.
‘You’ll have to hurry if you’re going to put on a bet, Laird,’ Tarsha pointed out.
‘I won’t put one on this race,’ Laird said. ‘No clue about any of these horses.’
They all looked magnificent. Their rich chestnut and chocolate coats gleamed in the sun, their bodies moved with incomparable power and grace and you could see how highly strung they were, positively eager to prove their worth at top speed.
But how did you tell about their heart and soul? It was the question that consumed him. Whether you were considering horses or your own heart, how did you tell what mattered, what ran bone deep, what was lasting and important and real?
‘Most other people don’t have a clue about the horses today, and it’s not stopping them,’ Tarsha said with a smile.
‘True.’ Laird was briefly distracted by the flare of her sharp humour, which hadn’t been much in evidence so far today. He flicked his gaze briefly in her direction and grinned at her. She was a good person, a far cry from the stereotype of the bitchy model.
He wasn’t by any means a gambler, but it was a national tradition to put money on horses on Cup Day, as Tarsha had implied, and almost an act of treason not to. The whole of Flemington Racecourse was crowded with once-a-year punters.
‘So can we put on a bet and then go back to the marquee?’ she asked, cajoling him.
‘It’s your feet in those shoes,’ he guessed. ‘You want to sit down. My arm’s not doing enough, even though you’re practically dragging it from its socket.’
‘And I’ll attempt to schmooze some more and have another great big glass of champagne…’
She’d already had one, although it wasn’t yet much past noon. Laird was a little surprised. Tarsha drank roughly the same amount as he gambled—in other words, not much. She seemed to be putting on a performance today. Her smiles didn’t reach her eyes, beneath that shadowy confection of a hat, and a distant look appeared on her face whenever she wasn’t talking. What was going on? Whatever it was, he shouldn’t ignore what she wanted.
‘All right, we’ll go back,’ he said, turning with Tarsha’s arm still linked through his.
And that was when he saw Tammy.
Like an apparition manifesting in a magical way from a slightly obsessive corner of his thoughts, she was suddenly there, right in front of him, standing on the worn-out grass as if she’d forgotten how to move. She looked terrific, in a very Tammy way. Bright and fun and lavishly shaped, and not in any danger of taking herself too seriously. Not with those chillies on her hat.
She’d clearly seen him several minutes earlier but had been pretending very hard that she hadn’t. More chillies garlanded the ruffled neckline of her silk top, and he had to fight not to give a lingering, appreciative look down at her fabulous sumptuous figure, all curvy and generous and fine-skinned and a little more on show than usual.
And he was so instinctively, unthinkingly happy to see her—the sun seemed brighter, the race day atmosphere instantly more interesting and meaningful—that he didn’t understand what her problem was until it was far too late.
‘You’re here, too,’ he began. Not the most perceptive remark of his life, while his heart just kept on lifting like a hot-air balloon.
Tammy, Tammy, Tammy.
The tip of a chilli nudged the creamy slope of one breast the way his tongue had nudged the same spot the other night. His breath caught for a moment in his chest when he thought about it, but then he saw that she hadn’t smiled at him, still hadn’t moved, and her face and lips were white.
And then she spoke.
‘I—I—I can’t do this,’ she gasped. ‘I can’t bear it. I should have known.’
She fled before he could answer, turning and pushing through the crowd to disappear within seconds, while his thought processes moved like snails. She thought— Tarsha was standing there, dressed to the nines and dragging on his arm, and Tammy thought—
‘That’s her, isn’t it?’ Tarsha said quietly beside him, after the blood beating in his ears had begun to subside and understanding had dawned.
‘Yes, and she thinks—’
‘I could see what she thinks. What a royal mess we’re all in today!’
‘Oh, hell! Hell! She talked to me about it. The kind of woman I should be going out with. She thinks—’
‘Aren’t you going to go after her and set her straight? You look like death warmed up.’
He turned a stricken, unseeing look in Tarsha’s direction. ‘Would she believe me?’
Tarsha gave a tiny shrug, her mouth turned down, then said, ‘If it’s any consolation, I believe you. I never thought I’d see such a look on your face, Laird. Forget all the advice I gave you before about getting off lightly. You crazy man, I think you’re really in love with her.’
‘I know I am,’ he said bleakly. ‘I couldn’t possibly feel like this if I wasn’t. Lord, there’s no more doubt, no thinking it through, I just am. I love her. Oh, hell. I love her.’ He wanted to keep saying it, but he wasn’t saying it to the right woman. ‘Help me find her, Tarsh, so I can tell her and get this right for once.’
She touched his arm, way more in control than he was. ‘We’ll separate, and meet back at the marquee every half-hour.’
‘Every half-hour?’ He didn’t want to have to wait five minutes to get that stricken, wounded look off Tammy’s face, let alone half an hour or more.