Long-Lost Son Read online

  The cassowary fled into the bush, and Janey was amazed at how silently it managed to move through the dense undergrowth, and how quickly it was lost to sight. Within seconds, it had disappeared.

  Janey reached Rowdy and gave him a quick, fierce hug, feeling that awful, guilty wash of relief that her child was safe, even though someone else’s wasn’t. She’d seen it in parents in hospital emergency rooms, and now she understood. ‘Oh, sweetheart!’

  He was sobbing. ‘I told them to back away. I told them to stay quiet and back away, but they wouldn’t listen.’

  Oh, lord, he was talking! He was talking!

  ‘Sam, are you OK? Sam! Sam!’ Josh, the younger brother, was sobbing, too.

  Luke had dropped to the ground beside the boy. ‘The bird’s gone, Sam, it’s OK,’ he said, sounding clear and calm and strong. If anyone could give an injured child confidence, it would be Luke. ‘It’s over now.’ He threw another couple of words over his shoulder to Janey. ‘He’s hurt.’

  Badly, she knew from his tone. She already knew it from the bleeding, although neither of them had wanted to say it in front of the three kids. And they had no equipment with them.

  ‘Femoral artery,’ Luke finished.

  Arriving beside him, she saw that he’d already rolled Sam into a better position and thrust his hand against the wound to stop the bleeding, which would prove fatal within minutes if it wasn’t checked. There were already frightening amounts of blood on the ground, soaking Sam’s clothing and splotched on Josh as well. Sam’s shorts and T-shirt were both badly torn.

  ‘I’ll check airway and breathing.’ She knew Luke would have to keep his hand where it was for at least ten minutes, and that his muscles would be screaming and stiff from the awkward action by the end of it. She could see the uncomfortable posture he’d had to take up.

  They couldn’t even think of moving Sam or going for help yet. ‘Sam, Josh, I’m a doctor,’ she told the boys, ‘and so is Luke here, so you’re going to be OK. We know exactly what to do so, Sam, sweetheart, try and answer my questions. Can you do that?’

  He must have been terrified. Must still be terrified at the sight of so much of his own blood staining the dirt, ebbing away. They had to keep him calm and reassured if they possibly could, and Rowdy and Josh, too. The two younger boys had moved to sit slump-shouldered in the shade of a bush at the side of the path, silently watching.

  And Rowdy had spoken.

  Luke looked in his son’s direction and swore harshly under his breath, before muttering to Janey, ‘I want so damn much to find out—’ He stopped.

  ‘I know. But we can’t. This is more urgent.’

  ‘I know that. Hell, I do, but…’

  Their eyes met, reflecting shared anguish and frustration, and she felt the same intense relief and rightness as she’d felt last night beside the pool at the fact that the two of them were there together, that this was Luke, not anyone else in the world. The past didn’t matter any more. The fact that he’d been Alice’s husband. The fact that he didn’t remember their long-ago kiss. The fact that they’d spent half the night in each other’s arms. There was only now.

  ‘Sam, first, are you having any trouble breathing?’ she asked the boy. ‘Show me a nice deep breath.’

  He drew one in, but stopped before he’d filled his lungs, and said thinly, ‘It hurts.’

  She caught Luke’s glance again, and knew he’d be running through the same possibilities that she was. If one of those shockingly forceful thrusts had broken some ribs which had punctured his lungs…How would they cope with pneumothorax and respiratory arrest here?

  Janey laid her hands on his chest, and said, ‘Keep breathing, Sam, just normally.’

  ‘You’re doing great,’ Luke came in. ‘I’ve stopped the bleeding in your leg now, but I’ll have to keep my hand here for a while longer, OK?’

  ‘OK…’

  ‘Boys, we need to do a bit of work on him before we get him back to the resort and ready for airlifting to hospital, so you must help by sitting patiently. Rowdy, have some of your water, and see if Josh wants some.’ Rowdy nodded and began unzipping the day pack.

  ‘Josh, are you guys with your parents? Are you staying on the island?’

  ‘They’re in our cabin,’ Josh said. ‘Having a rest.’

  ‘OK, we’ll talk to them as soon as we can, but for now stay with us, all right?’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘Can’t feel anything broken,’ Janey told Luke.

  ‘Rising equally on both sides?’

  ‘From what I can feel.’ Which was good, as far as it went, but she would have liked a greater degree of certainty. ‘If we had a stethoscope…’

  ‘We can’t move him yet. Where does it hurt, Sam?’

  ‘Everywhere. My leg, my stomach…’ His voice was shaky but clear, which meant his airway was clear, too. That was a plus.

  ‘I’m going to take a look at you now,’ Janey said. ‘I’m going to lift up your shirt. How about you close your eyes and just rest?’

  She had to clamp her mouth shut over a hiss of breath when she saw the claw marks across Sam’s body. There was a big, red, bruising welt at the top left of his abdomen, just nudging his lower ribs, and then a gash raking down and getting deeper until its final disastrous hook into the top of the thigh.

  A couple of shallower gashes crossed the deeper one at a slight angle, and there was another nasty wound lower on his thigh, from which blood still trickled slowly. She palpated his abdomen and he whimpered and moved his hands defensively when she got to that upper left quadrant, beneath the blotchy welt.

  ‘That’s where it hurts most?’

  ‘Yes. Badly.’

  Luke looked at her again, and they were both thinking about injury to the spleen. Sam was white as a ghost, almost green. She took his pulse at the neck, and found the rapid rhythm she’d expected—about 120 beats a minute.

  ‘Can you find a radial pulse?’ Luke muttered.

  She moved her fingers to Sam’s wrist, and reported after several seconds, ‘Yes, just. It’s faint.’

  ‘We need to get him to the medical centre. They have one. I saw a blue and white cross on that map.’

  Kids were different to adults. They compensated well for blood loss initially, and then crashed catastrophically later on, if you didn’t get in fast with oxygen and fluids.

  ‘We need to make a pressure bandage,’ she answered, not a retort but a recognition there was more to be done before they could move him. She pulled her T-shirt over her head, thankful that she still had Georgie’s swimsuit on beneath it. She began to fold the fabric into a pad.

  Luke flicked his gaze away from the sight of the valley between her breasts, and she felt the heat of their shared awareness and emotion once more, before it fled in the face of the urgency of what they had to do. He asked Sam, ‘Can you wiggle your fingers and toes? Any pins and needles?’ Could that gash to the thigh have gone deep enough to compromise movement and nerves?

  Sam’s answers were the ones they wanted to hear, but his voice sounded much weaker.

  ‘I can’t move my hand away yet,’ Luke said.

  ‘Can you rip up my shirt while I’m wearing it, Janey, without moving us around too much?’

  ‘I’ll try.’

  ‘Use your teeth, if you need to.’

  She did need to. The woven cotton fabric was new and strongly stitched. Kneeling beside him, she lifted the lower edge of the shirt away from his body and bent to grit her teeth against it, near the side seam, aware of his hot, tanned skin just inches away.

  She smelt sunscreen and salt, and saw the stretch and knot of his muscles. In any other situation she would have wanted to press her lips to his body and taste him, run her fingers all over him, the way she had last night. She couldn’t remember ever wanting a man this much before—this simply, this physically. It felt as natural as breathing, as solid as gravity, some kind of chemical shift in her that related in a weird way to all the old irritatio
n.

  Maybe it hadn’t been pure irritation, eight years ago, at all…

  They’d kissed on Wednesday night, they’d made love in Luke’s dark bedroom with Rowdy just down the corridor, and now they were working together like two pieces of well-oiled machinery, and all of it just felt so inevitable she didn’t even have a name for it.

  The fabric ripped up the side as she pulled, then she had to use her teeth again to get it to rip parallel to the hem, her knuckles and cheeks bumping against his smooth, strong back several times as she worked. ‘Sorry about this, Luke.’

  ‘It’s fine.’ Gritted teeth. His arm must be knotting from the unrelenting pressure he had to keep against Sam’s thigh.

  Janey ended up with three bands of fabric, each about ten centimetres wide, while Luke wore half a shirt. ‘That’s great,’ he said. ‘Let’s do this now.’

  They pressed her folded shirt into the wound and bound it tightly with the strips of Luke’s shirt. He pulled the remnant of the garment from his body, his muscles and smooth tan on show, and deftly ripped some final pieces to fasten the pressure bandage more securely.

  Sam was way too quiet. Whimpering faintly. Eyes closed. Sweaty and still that deathly greenish-white. He’d lost a lot of blood before Luke had been able to act to stop it and he could be bleeding internally. They needed to get oxygen and fluid replacement in place urgently now, because despite the reassurances they’d given him—and had been right to give, because the worst thing you could do was let someone know how serious their injuries were—if he went into irreversible shock, he would die.

  ‘I’m going to carry him back along the trail,’ Luke said. ‘It’ll buy us a few minutes’ more time. Janey, go on ahead as fast as you can. We saw that helipad. He’ll need an airlift down south. And I saw a couple of those electric buggy things that the resort staff use. Try and—’

  ‘I know. I’ll find someone. I’ll bring transport.’ She didn’t mess around, just rose and began to sprint back down the trail.

  Rowdy scrambled to his feet, too. ‘Wait, Auntie Janey…’ He followed her, and if he wanted to come with her, she wasn’t going to leave him behind. Oh, lord, he was speaking at last, and they’d had no time to talk about it or think about it or even give him a decent hug!

  She grabbed his hand and pulled him along, hearing Luke say to Josh behind her, ‘Come on, mate, we’ll be a bit slower.’

  Thank goodness Rowdy was a little wild bush kid! Despite his small size and all he had been through recently, he was fit and strong and could keep up. They were both panting by the time the first of the resort buildings came into view, and her lungs burned.

  One of the resort buggies went trundling round the back of the aviary and she chased after it and yelled at the uniformed staff person at the wheel. ‘We have a seriously wounded child back on the trail. We need help!’

  The buggy slowed, stopped, reversed, turned, came trundling back. She explained, fighting her breathlessness. ‘He got attacked by a cassowary—’

  ‘Hell! Elke!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It must have been Elke.’ The man swore again. ‘Get in.’

  He reached out to pull on Rowdy’s arm, and helped them both into the storage well behind the vehicle’s one pair of seats. The passenger seat was crowded with gear. Janey sat Rowdy on her lap, because there was nothing to keep him from falling out through the buggy’s low, open sides.

  They shot back down the trail while the man explained, ‘There are no cassowaries in the wild on Charm Island. But we had a pair in the animal park, hoping to get them to breed in June or July. Half the aviary went in the cyclone. We lost almost all the birds, escaped or killed. We found Fred, the male cassowary, but we couldn’t find Elke. We were starting to think she hadn’t survived.’

  ‘Well, she did, and she’s up in the rainforest, and she’s hurt and she’s incredibly dangerous,’ Janey told him. ‘The boy has some serious injuries, femoral artery bleeding, and he’s going into shock.’

  The man swore again. ‘Where’s the bird now?’

  ‘Disappeared back into the forest. Scared off, or in pain.’

  ‘We have to find her, or she’ll hurt someone else. But they’re so damned hard to find and catch!’

  ‘I want to think about this casualty first. Do you have a two-way radio? He’ll need the air medical service, and I really hope you have a well-equipped medical centre at the resort! Is your helipad back in action?’

  ‘Yes. I’ll call it in right now.’ He seemed organised and on the ball. Steering with one hand, he put the walkie-talkie to his ear, pressed a button and spoke. ‘We have a code six on the mountain trail, John. Repeating, that’s a code six.’

  Seconds later, Janey heard a crackling response but couldn’t make out the words.

  ‘There,’ the man said.

  ‘That’s enough?’

  ‘Code six. Require emergency medical evacuation by air off the island.’ He looked a little shaky and green suddenly. ‘I’ve never had to call one in for a kid before. And it’s lucky we’ve got the medical centre. We used to send people over to Wallaby Island in our motor launch for anything more than a cut finger, but their centre got demolished by Cyclone Willie. My name’s Andrew, by the way.’

  ‘I’m glad you have your systems in place, Andrew.’ She gave Rowdy a reassuring squeeze on her lap, desperately wishing she could take some time out to talk to him about what had happened. Not yet. They couldn’t do it yet. And she needed Luke.

  ‘We should reach them soon, right?’ Andrew asked.

  They both saw Luke and the two boys at that moment, ahead on the trail. Luke’s strides were still long and smooth as he tried not to jolt his fragile cargo, but he’d begun to stagger beneath the boy’s weight. Sam must weigh twice what Rowdy did. The muscles in Luke’s calves and upper arms had knotted tight. The pressure bandage must be holding, thank goodness, or he would have stopped.

  Andrew pulled the vehicle to a halt and unceremoniously dumped the equipment from the passenger seat onto the trail—tools and a tarpaulin, from what Janey could see. ‘Stay in the back, guys,’ he told her and Rowdy. ‘Mate, you’ll have to squeeze in, too,’ he said to Josh, who was gasping, breathless and tearful. It was crowded, but they managed. Janey put one arm around the shaken younger boy.

  Luke climbed in, cradling the injured Sam in his arms. ‘Can’t feel a radial pulse any more,’ he said tersely to Janey. And added then to Andrew, ‘What medical facilities do you have here?’

  ‘There’s a medical centre with a nurse, pretty new. I’m sorry, I can’t tell you exactly what they have and don’t have on hand.’

  ‘We’ll manage. It’ll be half an hour before the chopper can get here.’ Maybe longer, Janey knew. Again, Luke didn’t want to talk about worst-case scenarios out loud. If the chopper was already out on another call… ‘Sam, you’re going to be fine, OK? You’ve got two doctors taking care of you, and more on the way. Josh, you said your mum and dad are at your cabin?’

  Andrew cut in, ‘What number is it, mate, do you know?’

  ‘Twenty-two,’ Josh said.

  Andrew got back on his radio, his other hand swinging the steering-wheel smoothly. They were almost back at the resort. ‘Code nine to cabin twenty-two, and bring them straight to the medical centre.’

  ‘Code nine,’ Luke echoed.

  ‘Notifying relatives of an illness or injury.’

  ‘Who thought this up?’

  ‘The boss. Used to be a mess, crackling radios and messages getting mucked up all over the shop. Want to guess what code one is, the one we need most often?’ he drawled.

  ‘Send a cleaner with a mop,’ Janey came in promptly.

  ‘You got it.’ The moment of humour came as a short-lived relief to the tension.

  ‘You’re doing great, Sam,’ Luke said. ‘Just keep breathing for me. Just relax, and don’t move. You’re going to be fine.’

  They reached the main building, the buggy scooting to within inches of
the entrance, and Janey saw what had to be the medical centre through a door to the left. They left Josh and Rowdy in Andrew’s care. ‘Ice creams?’ he mouthed at Janey, and she nodded, before hurrying inside behind Luke and Sam.

  There was a nurse in attendance, comfortably built, in her forties, unflappable, and she didn’t need to be told how serious Sam’s injuries were. She took one look at him and began pulling equipment into place at once.

  ‘I’m Dr Bresciano from Crocodile Creek Hospital,’ Luke said. ‘And this is Dr Stafford, who’s in general practice in Darwin. Luke and Janey.’

  ‘Right.’ The nurse nodded. ‘That’s lucky for all of us.’ She added casually, ‘You must know Dr Wetherby.’

  ‘Charles. He’s great. It’s hard to reconcile what he achieves with the fact that he’s in a wheelchair.’

  The nurse nodded, and Janey knew that Luke had passed her subtle check of his credentials by his use of the medical director’s first name and knowledge of his circumstances. They got Sam onto the examining table and set up an oxygen supply, using a non-rebreather mask at fifteen litres a minute.

  Janey used a stethoscope to give his breathing a more thorough check than she’d been able to out on the hiking trail, and couldn’t find any evidence of broken ribs, a punctured lung or other respiratory problems. But his heart rate and breathing were still far too fast, and his oxygen saturation had dropped to 94 per cent. They didn’t have much time.

  The nurse— ‘Barb,’ she’d told them in a quick aside—attempted to take a blood-pressure reading, but shrugged and shook her head. The pressure had dropped too low, which meant a dangerous level of blood loss and shock.

  Sam needed urgent IV access, but it was a catch-22 situation. His circulation had shut down too far for them to find a vein. Luke tightened a tourniquet around the boy’s arm, but there was still nothing. ‘Janey, what do you think?’ he asked in a fast undertone. ‘Cut-down or central vein?’

  ‘Central vein. He needs this done fast, Luke.’

  ‘I think so, too.’ Their shoulders bumped together. ‘Unless you’re really smooth on cut-downs?’