A Nurse in Crisis

by Lilian Darcy

  Rebecca has made that only too clear, but I knew it anyway. For her it might be the fortune-hunting issue. For me it’s something different, but it’s just as strong. Stronger!

  I wanted equality between Marsh and myself. Not some political interpretation of that word, but simply the knowledge that we were both coming to the relationship freely, with an equal amount to give.

  Oh, yes, in this case, money matters, and I don’t have any, and I have to deal with it on my own, learn to live with what I do have and attain a true sense of independence for the very first time in my life!

  If I don’t, if I just use the fact that Marsh has money as an easy way out of my own problems, then our relationship will inevitably be built on exactly the same foundation as Alan’s and my marriage was, and I just don’t want that a second time! I don’t. For all sorts of reasons.

  ‘I expect she can.’ Aimee answered Marshall’s assurance about Rebecca more calmly and easily than she felt. ‘But, to be honest, I think she’s right to be shocked. We—we’ve jumped into this too soon, Marshall.’

  She saw the alarm in his eyes and ploughed on. Better to get it over with!

  ‘I—I’m sorry,’ she stammered, appalled by how hard it was, by how attractive was the picture in her mind of what might have been. ‘This is my fault. I should have thought about it more carefully before I—well, before I let my—physical needs…dictate the pace.’

  Oh, lord, this was almost impossible! She stared down at her hands, twisting convulsively together, the way her body and his had twisted together last Friday night. The memories flooded in, every one of them emotional and wonderful. The words he’d used, the way he’d made sure every touch was welcome and right. His abandonment, there in the darkness, as they’d joined together. His tenderness afterwards, and the trusting way he’d slept in her arms.

  Say it right, she coached herself. Be as truthful as you can without giving him a reason to challenge it. Don’t let him think if he argues…or takes me into his arms…I might change my mind. Because I might! And that can’t happen. I’d never be able to hold my head up again as I faced myself in the mirror each day.

  ‘What are you saying, Aimee?’ Marsh questioned quietly, and she heard the friction in his throat. He’d abandoned his breakfast preparations, but hadn’t yet put down a butter knife. It hung uselessly in his fingers. ‘This seems a little sudden, and I’d…like to make sure I’ve understood.’

  ‘It isn’t sudden,’ she blurted. ‘What we started was sudden, and I think it was a mistake. I don’t want an involvement with you. I’m not looking for something like this in my life…I can’t.’ She had to harden her voice to keep the tears back, and it came out quite harshly. ‘I shouldn’t have let it get this far.’

  He was too much of a gentleman to show his hurt. Too much of a gentleman, and too sensitive, in the best way a man could be, to argue with her.

  ‘Thank you for telling me what you feel, then,’ he said. ‘For telling me straight away. Thank you for your honesty. I appreciate…’ he cleared his throat ‘…that you didn’t…simply stop returning my phone calls, or something.’ He tried to laugh, but didn’t quite succeed.

  ‘No, well, I—’

  ‘No hard feelings. Sometimes these things don’t work out. Sometimes people don’t know what they want until they try it.’

  ‘Thank you for—’

  ‘No, I—’

  Neither of them had the slightest idea what they were trying to say any more. Every inch of Aimee’s skin was burning, and Marshall had turned to the toaster, from which a transparent plume of blue smoke was now rising.

  ‘Damn!’ he said, more to himself than Aimee. ‘It doesn’t pop up half the time these days. Place is falling down around my ears!’

  ‘I’ll go and open up the surgery. Would you like me to take those files Rebecca left on the hall table?’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘I’ll see you shortly, then,’ she said.

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘Thank you for—’

  ‘Aimee!’ There was agony in his voice now, and his shoulders were set stiffly. He still had his back to her so she couldn’t see his expression. The kitchen smelt of burnt toast. She could imagine his face, though, and the same expression would have been on her face, too, if she hadn’t been controlling it so rigidly. ‘For heaven’s sake, will you stop now? Stop thanking me? It’s fine, all right?’

  ‘I’m sorry, I—’

  ‘And apologising. Please…’ He took a jagged breath and started again. ‘Please, just go!’

  She did, without another word.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ‘PHONE for you, Aimee. Can you take it now?’ said Deirdre, one of the practice’s four part-time receptionists, just before lunch. ‘It’s your daughter.’

  ‘I’ll pick it up in the treatment room,’ Aimee said, crossing the corridor. She’d been shelving some newly arrived supplies, and had no more patients to see before lunch.

  In the treatment room, she closed the door then snatched up the phone. ‘Sarah?’

  But Deirdre hadn’t put the call through yet. A few seconds later, there was a click and an impatient, ‘Hello?’ at the other end of the line.

  ‘Yes, it’s me, love,’ Aimee said.

  ‘Oh, Mum, good!’

  ‘You’ve had the ultrasound, and seen Dr Gaines?’

  ‘Yes, he came and looked at the scan while I was having it. We didn’t have to go to his office. We’ve just got home.’

  She sounded shaky but not tearful, calmer than she’d been yesterday, and her explanation was almost too lucid, too clinical.

  ‘The technician measured the amniotic fluid,’ she went on. ‘It’s an estimate, really, not a measurement. They plot the distance from the baby to the wall of the uterus in four different spots, and then average it out to get a result in millimetres. You probably know this.’

  ‘Some of it. Tell me anyway.’

  ‘That gives them this thing they call…Oh, hell, what is it?’ Her superficial control began to break down. Aimee heard Jason’s voice in the background. ‘That’s right,’ Sarah went on. ‘The amniotic fluid index. Sounds like something that should be on the stock exchange, doesn’t it? Anyway, the normal range is ten to twenty-five millimetres.’

  ‘And what are you?’

  ‘Thirty-eight.’

  ‘Too much.’

  ‘Dr Gaines says they’ll monitor it. It’s not necessarily significant. I’m going to have a scan every two weeks. If it gets worse they may have to drain it. But they don’t want to because that might trigger labour, and it’s too soon. So they’ll hold off as long as they can. By the way, we decided we might as well find out the sex after all. It’s a girl!’

  ‘Oh, love, how wonderful! That’s what you were hoping for, isn’t it?’

  ‘It was. It still is. I suppose. I would have loved a boy, too. Right now all I care about is that things are OK. Dr Gaines says I’m supposed to rest a lot.’

  ‘And that’s all?’

  There was a pause. ‘No. It’s not all. He’s concerned because he couldn’t see the stomach on the ultrasound. The baby’s stomach.’

  ‘Yes…’

  ‘It should have partly filled, you see, because babies swallow amniotic fluid in the womb.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘And then the stomach should show up nicely on the scan. But this time it didn’t. He was very calm, Mum.’

  Sarah wasn’t. Not underneath. Aimee wasn’t fooled about that for a second.

  ‘And so I honestly don’t know,’ Sarah went on. ‘Perhaps Dr Gaines knows exactly what’s wrong and he’s not prepared to tell us.’

  ‘Doctors aren’t usually like that these days,’ Aimee soothed. ‘If he knew something definite, he’d tell you.’

  ‘No, well, it was all maybes. He says there might be a problem with the oesophagus. That the baby can’t swallow. She can’t swallow.’ Sarah laughed shakily, and added as an aside, ‘Feels funny, suddenly, k
nowing the sex.’

  ‘I never did, with the three of you.’

  Sarah returned to her report. ‘Because of a blockage, or maybe a growth, which they would deal with surgically after the birth,’ she said. ‘As soon as the baby was strong enough. It’s…I can’t imagine it. Surgery. On my baby. So small. But Dr Gaines just keeps talking in possibilities.’

  Her voice had risen now. Aimee heard Jason in the background again, and added her own reassurance.

  ‘That’s all he can do, love,’ she said. ‘Just do as he says, and take it easy.’

  ‘I’m going to. I’ve—I’ve made a decision actually. Well, Jason agrees. I’m going to leave work.’

  ‘You mean resign?’

  ‘Yes. I hadn’t planned to. I mean, I’ve been researching child-care centres, I was going to go back to work full time six weeks after the birth, like a career superwoman. You know, proving myself for the sake of all womankind. But…Oh, you haven’t got time to hear this now.’

  Aimee assured Sarah that she did. She’d barely had breakfast, and now she was late for lunch, but her appetite had fled hours ago during her painful conversation with Marshall in his kitchen, so it hardly seemed to matter. Sarah didn’t manage to articulate her feelings very clearly, but Aimee understood.

  ‘It might have been different if the pregnancy had been easy,’ Sarah said. ‘But it isn’t. It hasn’t been, all along…and it’s made me realise…anything can happen when you have a child, and I don’t want to be in a situation where I can’t take extra time for my baby if I need to. Only the thing is, Mum, financially…’ That word again! Aimee already hated the very sound of it. ‘We took out our mortgage on the assumption we’d have two incomes. I mean, we’ll manage…I can do part-time work probably, if I have to, but—’

  ‘You won’t have to,’ Aimee said quickly. ‘Of all things, that’s not something I want you to worry about!’

  And she told Sarah about the true ownership of the Woollahra house, what Alan had wanted—which she herself was determined to respect, no matter what it cost her, although she didn’t say any of this to Sarah—and that if the children all agreed, she was ready—indeed, determined—to sell.

  The house was miles too big for her, she finished firmly, and she was ready for a change.

  Outside the treatment room, on his way between his office and the practice’s little kitchen, and then back again with his sandwich and his tea, Marshall heard the changing emotions expressed in Aimee’s voice—anxiety, love, enthusiasm, determination—and wondered what they all meant.

  He didn’t allow himself to listen to the words. In the most encouraging of circumstances, he wasn’t an enthusiast for eavesdropping, and it would be unconscionable to do it now.

  But, oh, he would have liked to!

  Her announcement this morning had come at him like a charging bull in a serene, flower-filled meadow, totally unexpected and every bit as unwelcome. He’d had no inkling that she wasn’t as serious about what they’d begun to build together as he was. Now he had this horrible and, no doubt, all too stiff-necked male need to look for clues to the matter, as if this were one of the detective novels he read occasionally, and somewhere there was a key to a mystery.

  He chided himself. Why couldn’t he accept the situation at face value? Wouldn’t he expect a woman to, if their positions were reversed? But all the rationalising and inner arguing in the world didn’t do a thing for the aching and pulling of his heart.

  He’d begun to love Aimee Hilliard, and he didn’t know how he was going to stop.

  ‘Oh, look, it’s a lovely place,’ the well-groomed real-estate agent, Monica Farwell, said. ‘There are the problems with the roof and the driveway and the back fence, which will bring down your price somewhat, and the bathroom and kitchen need modernising. But most people buying into this area want to renovate in any case. I could see a deck off the dining room, I could see an extension to take advantage of the northern sun. It’s just possible you might squeak in a square inch of harbour view, which, of course, is gold in Sydney.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Aimee had to say. ‘I don’t think the house is quite high enough.’

  ‘No? Oh, well…’

  The agent clicked about in her high heels, measuring the rooms with a special electronic laser device and scribbling the figures down. Aimee had already explained that she’d like a quick sale, if possible, and had been persuaded that an auction was the way to go, ‘with pre-auction offers considered’, Mrs Farwell had suggested.

  ‘It’ll be snapped up,’ she’d also said, ‘and at a price you wouldn’t have dreamed of ten years ago.’

  She’d offered to show Aimee other units to buy, and hadn’t quite hidden her surprise at Aimee’s firm statement that she would be renting.

  ‘Well, it does make sense to take it slowly, rather than rushing into a new purchase,’ she had said, ‘but ultimately you’d be mad not to.’

  Aimee had let that go. There were many things she was learning to let go. Like Marshall’s quiet comment last Friday, ‘You’re selling your house, I hear. Not thinking of moving away?’

  ‘No. Just down-sizing to something smaller.’ That was all she’d allowed herself to say.

  It was Monday evening now, just a week since she’d spent the night at Marshall’s place, sleeping off her migraine, and the house would be open for exhibition this Saturday. She desperately wanted to move quickly with it all, get the upheaval over and done with, relieve Sarah’s money worries at least, and burn her own boats so that she wasn’t ever weakly tempted to believe she’d been wrong to tell Marshall what she had.

  Thomas and William had both agreed to the sale, and were pleased about the financial nest-egg for their future. Studying for his doctorate in zoology, and still away in Queensland, Thomas was relieved, over the phone, at the thought of being able to get through his three remaining years of study without taking out more student loans. William was talking about investments in a hazy yet determined manner.

  Because Aimee had been so careful to present the plan in an upbeat, enthusiastic way, and because the three children all assumed her own financial future to be very comfortably taken care of, none of them had asked any awkward questions or suggested giving any of the sale’s proceeds back to Aimee, and she wouldn’t have accepted the money if they had.

  She hadn’t enjoyed the past week at work. It was strange how she hadn’t realised the full importance to her of Marshall’s presence at the practice, and how pleasantly it had coloured each day.

  Did I feel like this about him from the beginning, then? she’d wondered helplessly. Before I even realised it? Perhaps I did. Even that first day at my job interview, I remember…She’d come away from it with a slightly flustered and very alive feeling which she’d put down at the time purely to the prospect of landing a good and permanent job.

  By the end of the previous week, she’d been exhausted by the effort of relating to Marshall in the courteous, professional way they both wanted, and she wasn’t quite sure how she would manage to keep it up. He’d behaved impeccably, but would that all end with her having to leave the practice? The possibility loomed like a grey cloud, twinned with the cloud of worry over Sarah’s baby.

  ‘I have everything I need for the leaflet now,’ Mrs Farwell said. ‘And we’re agreed on the price you’re hoping for. We did the paperwork the other day. All set, then!’

  ‘Lovely,’ Aimee said automatically.

  Ten days later, on a Thursday in mid-August, the week after Marshall’s run in Sydney’s annual City to Surf race—he’d placed in the top thousand runners, he’d announced in a satisfied tone last Monday morning—she’d accepted a pre-auction offer for the house. She’d also agreed on a settlement date and begun to pack, though she hadn’t yet begun looking for a place to rent.

  She hadn’t had time, and her cash flow was in an alarming state. One credit card was teetering on the edge of its limit, another was mounting in charges daily as the tradesmen’s bills cam
e in for the cosmetic work she’d had done on the house. She’d already scaled down her estimate of the monthly amount she could afford to pay in rent.

  On the other hand, the boys were pleased at how smoothly everything was proceeding, and still hadn’t asked any awkward questions. Thomas was miles away in body, and William appeared to be miles away in spirit at the moment. In his case, Aimee suspected a serious case of blissful first love. Preoccupied with his own changed financial circumstances, Pete hadn’t expressed any concerns. Sarah was the one who might have questioned the speed of it all, but she was in no fit state to think beyond the constant discomfort of her own body and the specialist’s concerns about the health of the baby that grew inside her.

  The news following another ultrasound that morning wasn’t good. Marcus Gaines still couldn’t find any evidence that the baby was swallowing normally and filling its stomach, and Sarah’s amniotic fluid index was now up to fifty millimetres.

  Jason phoned the news to Aimee at lunchtime, and reported, ‘They’re going to try and drain off some of the fluid, but we’re pretty scared. Apparently, it could trigger labour, and she’s only at thirty weeks. The thing is…’ he laughed jaggedly ‘…if they don’t drain it and the pressure builds any further, it could trigger labour anyway.’

  ‘Are they going to keep her in overnight?’

  ‘Yes, or a couple of days,’ he said, then added distractedly, ‘I have to go. They’re ready to start and she wants me there.’

  ‘Of course.’ Aimee’s voice fogged. ‘I’m thinking of you both, Jase. You have all my love. And so does the baby.’

  After she’d put down the phone she had to stand with her back to the waiting room for several minutes, trying not to cry and wishing she’d had the sense to take the phone call somewhere private, rather than snatching up the receiver here at the desk as soon as Bev had told her Jason was on the line.

  At least the place was quiet—no patients, and most of the staff away buying their lunch or doing errands. She’d just finished her own pre-lunch tidying before Jason had phoned. She’d been about to make a trip to the bank, but that could wait. She didn’t want to deal with it now. As for lunch, she had a sandwich in her bag, but it didn’t appeal right now.