by Lilian Darcy
In fact, if you say the word, I've just woken up even more and I need not go back to my place at all...
Why this? Why now? Tara's departure had flattened his level of desire for more than a year. Why should it suddenly flare like this—like an illness—and attach itself to someone like Jo?
'I'll walk if the sun's out,' she said. 'I'll need the exercise, after that meal. Thanks, it was wonderful.'
'Yes, I thought so,' he said. 'We'll have to do it again. I mean, I have a bunch of asparagus and a packet of filet mignon in my fridge, thanks to the change in plan, and the asparagus won't keep. Neither will the cream. So...'
'I thought you weren't going to impress me.'
'That was your idea. That I wasn't, I mean.'
'So you were going to impress me?'
He bit the bullet and admitted, 'I did have an impressing-you type impulse over lunch, after our meeting, yes, and I acted on it in the supermarket. Could be disastrous...'
'Oh! Oh...' She laughed, and the sound was huskier than usual. 'How nice. How out of character.'
'Really?'
'Um, yes, out of character between you and me, don't you think? To go to that sort of trouble? Not generally, Rip. I'm not implying you're inconsiderate or— I don't know...'
Turning into her street, he felt her hand on his shoulder. She'd touched him there earlier, standing beside his car before they'd gone in search of Harry and his father. Then it had been a comforting, sympathetic gesture, but it felt a little different this time. Tentative. Questioning.
Do you like this, Rip?
Do you want me to do this?
Do you want me to do more than this?
He froze.
Yes, I very much want you to do this. And, yes, I want so much more than this from you tonight that I think I could explode if I got within twenty yards of a naked flame. But we're in partnership together, and for five years that partnership has run smoother and with less effort than my marriage ever did, and if we blow all that now by changing the ground rules between us... changing every thing... then what's left?
'Thanks,' he said, and took his hand off the wheel just long enough to lay it on top of hers for half a second and no more.
Her street wasn't a long one. It climbed towards a sloping ridge, and her house was situated just at the start of the climb. He indicated a left turn into her driveway, even though there was no other traffic at this time of night, and brought the car to a halt, still thinking about kissing her, still not knowing if he was going to do it, wanting to do it with every cell in his body, fighting with himself over it, wondering how it would feel and if it could possibly answer any of his questions truthfully.
Kisses could tell such massive lies.
If he switches off the engine, Jo thought, is that a statement of intent?
She held her breath without even realising it, until the engine had gone on humming in her driveway for a few more seconds. Rip's hand hadn't moved towards the keys dangling from the ignition. He hadn't leaned closer. He hadn't looked towards her dark porch with a hopeful expression on his face.
Carefully, she let the breath out, took another one and said, 'Thanks for a really nice evening, Ripley. For a man who's just given up smoking, you did incredibly well. I'm proud of you.'
Jo Middleton, you coward!
Yep, she'd made a strategic retreat to her role as concerned professional partner, after that small neck-sticking-out moment of bravery in touching his shoulder, down at the bottom of the hill.
But maybe the strategic retreat was wise rather than cowardly. She'd given him a pretty clear signal, and he was letting it go. Any red-blooded American male with even half of Rip's reasons to feel confident about himself wouldn't need any more encouragement than she'd just given him. She didn't need to hammer the point home and earn herself a more clearly spelled-out rejection.
'Proud of me?' he echoed.
'Yes. You know, like a cheer-leader. Go, team!' She made a fist in the air. 'Kick that habit! Beat that nicotine! I should do a dance routine for you in the driveway.'
Shut up now, Jo.
He'd grinned, thank goodness. Even in the darkness, his eyes glinted. She found their light magnetic, and was so close to snapping her cards—a thick double pack of them— right down in front of her, table or not.
Kiss me, Rip, go on. If I lean into you, won't you do it? Please? If I touch you again? Maybe lay my hand against the side of your face because I love the shape of your jaw— when did that start?—and I want to know how it feels.
Won't you switch off the engine and come inside with me, kiss me in the dark and take all the decision-making and all the courage into your own hands and not leave me with any choices to make? Can't you see that I'm not breathing?
'I've never seen you dance,' he said.
'Because I can't, so I don't.' And, please, don't make the word 'dance' feel so much like the word 'kiss'.
'I bet you could.'
'I'm not doing a cheer-leader routine for you, Ripley.'
'Hey, it was your idea...'
It was my escape hatch. This time I won't try to be clever, I'll just go with the car door instead.
She opened it, letting in a flood of ardour-dampening cold air that only made her want to snuggle closer to him. 'Changed my mind,' she told him lightly.
'The cloud cover is thickening, and there was snow in the forecast. I'll pick you up in the morning,' he answered.
'If the forecast is right, that would be great.'
Come half an hour early and I'll give you coffee and pancakes.
But she'd given up now, so she didn't say it. Whatever she thought she'd seen in him tonight, echoing the bewildering and sudden change in her own feelings, she either hadn't seen it at all or it had been a momentary madness in him, and it had gone.
During the following morning, they received a report by phone from Duchesne County Memorial on Harry Brown. As they'd tentatively predicted, the results on the bone-marrow aspiration and immunology tests pointed to idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura, and he'd begun treatment with immunosuppressant drugs. He'd had some further bleeding in his joints overnight, but no evidence of a haemorrhage in the brain. With the continued infusion of platelets, he should be out of danger now.
Jo and Rip admitted to each other that their sighs of relief went pretty deep.
Ripley spent his lunch-hour following tip possibilities for the practice's third partner. He made a string of calls, glad of the chance to keep his thoughts away from Jo. They'd been straying to her even when he hadn't given them permission to do so.
It was crazy.
Spring had a lot to answer for—all those changes in the air that Thornton Liddle had talked about a couple of days ago.
Jo had haunted Ripley's sleep the previous night, and though he would swear he'd only begun to think of her in this new and dangerous light less than forty-eight hours ago, it didn't feel that way. It felt like something he'd known about her inside himself forever.
Give yourself time, he told himself. Don't act like a teenager. Don't jump in with both feet the way you did with Tara. She was that kind of a person. Jo isn't. She needs you to play it as straight and steady as you can. She doesn't need you to make some wrong-headed mistake.
So he sensibly made phone calls to colleagues of colleagues and struck lucky on about call number nine, when he spoke to Dr Shelley Breck, whose number had been given to him by a mutual friend.
'She keeps in touch with quite a few people, she may know of someone, and I trust her judgement,' the friend had said. 'I'll let her tell you what she's doing these days.'
Ripley had been at medical school with Shelley and he'd always liked her, though they'd been classmates more than friends. She'd married young and gotten divorced in about their second or third year, which he'd assumed to be the result of the enormous pressure of their student workload.
He remembered her saying unequivocally at the time, 'When it's wrong, it's just wrong!' He didn't necessarily
agree with that, but her divorce made him feel as if they had something in common now, like war veterans who'd fought in the same battle, even when he learned that Shelley was well over the long-ago life hiccup now, and married to someone else.
Rip heard that Shelley and her husband Lloyd, a writer, had just adopted Lloyd's infant great-niece, after a protracted and unsuccessful quest to solve Shelley's infertility problems, which had been unresponsive to six cycles of IVF.
'So if you're calling because you want Alan Grover's phone number or something, then you've just gotten a way bigger information dump than you were looking for, haven't you?' Shelley finished, on a warm, open laugh.
'Why would I want Alan Grover's phone number?' Rip barely remembered the man, another student in their year.
'First name that popped into my head. Why are you calling, Ripley?'
He explained briefly, and Shelley surprised him by saying that she could well be interested in the partnership position herself. It was proving stressful to her husband's niece to be living so close to the baby she'd given up.
'Michaela wants some involvement, but she needs distance also,' Shelley explained. 'She's only sixteen, and none of this has been easy for her. Lloyd and I have been talking about a move.'
'You'd be interested in Vermont?'
'A change of pace from New Jersey, I know, but it's about the right distance for Michaela. She'll be able to come up for a weekend occasionally to see the baby, but She won't be involved on a day-to-day basis, distracting her from school.'
'It must have been a pretty big step for you to adopt close to home like that,' Rip said.
'A big step, but a win-win situation, we're hoping. Mickie wouldn't have given the baby up completely, but she would have struggled as a single parent. Her own mother, Lloyd's sister, is supportive but realistic. She has a lot on her plate and was pretty ambivalent about Mickie keeping Hayley. Meanwhile, Lloyd is having great fantasies about a rustic artist's studio and a slow-paced lifestyle, which we both expect to discover are totally naive once we actually settle on somewhere.'
'Vermont is pretty good at rustic and slow.'
'Having a job to slot right into is a big plus, too. I've only been filling in at my current practice for the past couple of months, and the regular doctor's due back any day. We can sublet our apartment and make the move right away. Should I fax you my resume and come up for a proper meeting? No, on second thoughts, one step at a time. Show your partner my resume and see what she thinks.'
Jo thought Shelley sounded perfect when Rip came into her office during a temporary lull late in the day to report the results of his telephone quest. 'Especially if she can laugh about her own naive view of rural life. I appreciate people who know how to laugh at themselves.'
She was trying to laugh at herself today—at how hot and jittery she became as soon as she saw Ripley, at how driving the short distance between her place and the practice in his car suddenly seemed like an interlude to treasure in her memory for weeks.
She'd replayed their conversation several times in her head during the morning, over lunch and through most of the afternoon, replayed his smile, replayed something she'd said that had made him nod and say, 'I totally agree with you.'
'Wait till you've seen her resume,' Rip said. 'She's faxing it up by tomorrow. If you still approve, I'll call her and arrange a time for her to come up.'
'As soon as she wants to, don't you think? Everyone seems ripe for a change in their lives this week.'
'Must be spring in the air. One of my patients said something—'
They both heard urgent sounds out in the waiting room at that moment—a dog barking, a child screaming, a half-hysterical mother—distracting Ripley so that he didn't finish. He opened Jo's office door and said quickly, 'What's up, Trudy?'
'My son,' gasped a woman's voice.
Following Rip from the room, Jo recognised the mother of yesterday's walk-in splinter removal, but she didn't have time to say hello or bring the woman's name to mind. Against the background of the toddler's shrieking cries and the six-year-old...of course, her name was Alice, Jo remembered... who was in tears now, too, as she begged Dotty to let the dog, Jeannie, stay inside, Alice's mother suddenly dropped to the floor in a full epileptic seizure.
CHAPTER FIVE
'Jo, you take the child and I'll take the mother,' Rip said. 'I think she got a good bump on the head just now when she fell. Dotty...or Jo...talk to Alice, see if we can make sense of this.'
'We should all talk to Alice,' Jo said, at the same time dropping to the stroller and trying to unwrap a drenched cotton comforter from the two-year-old boy.
It was cloudy and cold today, with snow flurries in the air. The sky already looked dark even though it was not yet five in the afternoon. Since this was the last week in March, spring had arrived according to the calendar, but you wouldn't know it outside.
Why did Mrs Grafton have Cody soaking wet like this? He was shaking and screaming. With cold, or something else?
Jo struggled with the stroller's safety straps. They were wet and slippery from the soaking fabric, and she couldn't get them undone. With Rip working over Nina, Cody crying, and Alice and Jeannie both hovering anxiously, the atmosphere didn't make it easy for Jo to focus on an unfamiliar task.
Alice was trying to explain something, but she was distressed and distracted and needed a clear question.
'Alice, honey, can you tell us why your mommy brought your brother in?' Jo asked. 'Why is he wet like this?'
Rip had knelt beside Nina Grafton, yelling to Trudy to grab pillows from the treatment room and to Dotty to call an ambulance. Mrs Grafton's body gave a series of rigid shudders and jerks, which he didn't try to restrain. There were three patients waiting, and they all looked appalled, uncertain whether to offer to help. After a few seconds it must have seemed obvious to them that the best thing to do was simply stay where they were, out of the way.
Listening to Alice, Jo narrowed her focus on the two children.
'Because Jeannie wouldn't go sit,' Alice said.
'Hang on, honey, let's get this clear. First, is your mommy epileptic? Does she have epilepsy, with seizures? Can you tell me?'
'Yes, she has stase-a-lepticus, she goes unconscious...'
'Rip?' she called across the waiting room. 'Getting some information for you here.'
'I'm hearing it, but I wish we had an actual history. She's still seizing. I can't get in there to check her ABCs or the severity of that bump. I wish we had Merril.'
'And Jeannie only knows to press the button for her, not if someone else has something happen to them.' Alice continued.
Jeannie, Jo registered. The dog. But not just the family pet?
'A button Jeannie presses that connects to a service which calls an ambulance for your mommy?' she asked the six-year-old.
'Yes, so Mommy was scared when Jeannie wouldn't go sit because that means a seizure's coming. See, Jeannie always knows first. Sometimes I know because Mommy sighs and makes a noise with her tongue, but not always. And I was in the basement with music on, so I didn't know until Jeannie was barking because she didn't want to let Mommy bring Cody in the stroller, to get here before the seizure.'
'Rip, are you listening to this? Are you following?' Alice was doing her best, but a clearer explanation was beyond her six-year-old verbal skills. This was getting too complicated.
'Think so,' Rip said. 'OK, she's limp now. I'm going to give her oxygen. She's not wearing a medical alert bracelet.' He spoke rapidly.
'She takes it off when she washes dishes,' Alice offered. 'She forgot to put it back on because of Cody.'
'Dotty, see if you can contact the right company and get them to pull up her details,' Rip said. 'She probably has protocols on file. Some kind of information anyhow. Do we have Mr Grafton's phone number?'
'Yes, in the little girl's file we started yesterday.'
'Call him, too.' He raised his voice and spoke to the waiting patients. 'I'm sorry, everyone.
It's obvious we have a slight emergency here. Probably don't need to tell you we'll be running a bit late.'
Jo had already turned her attention back to Alice and Cody, who was still screaming. It must still be only a few minutes since the family had arrived, but it felt like longer.
'Honey, now you must tell me. What happened to Cody?' she asked Alice.
'He pulled the kettle on himself when it was near boiling. It was on the hotplate on the front of the stove and Mommy didn't know Cody could reach that high. I think our stove in the other house was higher. She says she only has to turn her back for a second, now he's a Terrible Two, and he's into everything.'
'So he's burned?' Jo had gotten the safety straps unbuckled at last, having cursed her own fingers. Now she could unwrap the wet, padded quilt and lift Cody out.
Peeling away another wet piece of cloth—a soaked hand-towel—she could see for herself that his chest and shoulders were an angry red, and he was still screaming. Ideally, the burns should be cooled for twenty minutes. At a guess, around half of that time must have passed since Mrs Grafton had covered him in the wet cloth, but it was better to be safe than sorry. And how 'near' to boiling had that kettle been?
A quick but careful look told Jo that the critical areas of Cody's airway, face and hands had been spared contact with the scalding water, but even a mild, partial-thickness burn this extensive would be incredibly painful. No wonder his cries were challenging her eardrums, poor little man. A rough estimate of the burn area gave her a figure of around twenty per, cent of the body.
Should she start fluid replacement or leave that to the paramedics? They did have IV equipment here, although it was rarely needed. They also had a small supply of morphine, which Cody definitely needed for the pain...if she could calm him down enough to get in an IV line.
'Trudy, I need IV gear,' she yelled. 'I need morphine, and I need a foil blanket and hot packs. He needs more cooling on the burn, but I'm concerned about hypothermia. Dotty, get the dispatcher back on the phone and give an update, get a second ambulance on the road. I'm going to take him into my treatment room.'