A Proposal Worth Waiting For Page 13

  One parent said, ‘Shouldn’t we get them to be quiet and stop running?’

  Someone else answered, ‘They’re kids! It’s what kids do. And I can’t remember the last time my guy felt good enough to run!’

  Miranda was eating at another table tonight, after she’d warned Nick that she needed to spend more of her public time with the other parents. ‘I’d hate it if people began to make comments.’

  As would he, but he missed her talent with his son. No, forget Josh, he just missed her—her company, her smile, the way she smelled.

  And she would somehow have managed to deliver the no-dinner-no-dessert message without his own sternness, Nick felt. She’d have smiled as she said it, with a mix of firmness and cheerfulness that he couldn’t deliver naturally and couldn’t fake either.

  The mild father-and-son altercation was over now, but it had left an eddy of uncertainty that stayed with him as the park rangers drove up, introduced themselves, handed out extra torches and divided the night-walk participants into three groups. He and Josh ended up in Miranda’s group mainly because that was the direction Josh ran in when the kids were finally asked to settle down.

  Settling down was a bit of a stretch. Josh wasn’t the only kid to be over-excited. There was shrieking and scuffling and giggling and hopping up and down.

  ‘So do you want to see some animals tonight?’ Ranger Ben asked.

  A loud chorus of, ‘Ye-e-s!’

  ‘Tree kangaroos?’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘Sugar gliders?’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘Crocodiles?’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘Well then, you’ll have to…be quiet!’

  At which point Josh and some of the other littler ones tried so hard to stifle their giggles and still their restless feet that they almost forgot to breathe.

  Ah, yeah, breathing…

  Fifteen minutes into the night walk, the attack built with a speed Nick hadn’t seen at first hand since before his and Anna’s separation. They were on the beach about half a kilometre from the main camp and just about to turn away from the water onto a forest trail when he first discovered Josh was having problems. He’d been darting around with a cat’s curiosity, examining everything he found, trailing a piece of driftwood through the sand, and it was great, but then…

  Ben was telling them about shearwaters nesting in the sand dunes. ‘Some people call them mutton-birds because the early settlers used to think they tasted like mutton.’

  Several of the kids still had to be shushed from time to time, and a couple of them were panting after running along the beach in loopy circles like puppies instead of listening to Ben. Others milled around on the edges of the group, stopping to examine a shell or wandering up towards the dunes at the top of the beach to kick up the loose sand.

  Inevitably, Nick drifted into Miranda’s company. They weren’t talking much, but even just to walk along a beach beside her in silence gave him a unique, multi-stranded pleasure that he couldn’t quite believe…and a kind of vertigo when he considered the implications. Forget those. He loved the smooth sheen on her bare legs in the moonlight, the casual swing of her ponytail, the way she broke the silence with a murmured comment meant just for him.

  Josh appeared out of the darkness. ‘Dad, I want my inhaler.’ He’d circled back from another short foray up the beach, and his voice sounded strained and thick. The front of his shirt was speckled with something that Nick didn’t have time to examine.

  ‘Right here, Joshie.’ He took off the daypack he was wearing and crouched down on the sand at Josh-level while he unzipped it. ‘You OK?’

  He wasn’t. Why even ask?

  ‘I think I ran too much. And then I was—’ wheeze ‘—trying too hard—’ wheeze ‘—to be quiet.’

  ‘No problem. Here we go.’ Nick pushed the mouthpiece of the inhaler into the rubber sleeve on the spacer.

  ‘And then…’Josh added slowly, then stopped. He appeared to be gathering his courage.

  ‘What happened, Josh? Don’t be scared to tell me. Please.’ So it was still there, then, the fear and reluctance, beneath the bond they’d begun to establish this week…

  Nick felt a spurt of self-disgust at his own naivety. Of course it was still there! You couldn’t defeat five years of damaged history in a few days, and when you were the parent, it was up to you to keep pushing. With Miranda nearby, at least he didn’t feel as if he was pushing totally alone.

  ‘Come on, Joshie.’ He gentled his voice and touched his son’s shoulder.

  ‘I found…someone’s fire still warm…’Josh wheezed, ‘and I was poking…in the ash…with a stick. It all came up suddenly…in my face…and I breathed.’

  ‘Oh, hell,’ Nick muttered. That was the speckled stuff on his shirt. White ash. It dusted his face and hair, too, and even his eyelashes. Oh hell…hell! ‘Why on earth did you—?’ He stopped and bit his anger back, mentally coaching himself.

  Let it go. Don’t mess this up.

  There was no point in issuing recriminations. Josh was only five. Sometimes kids didn’t think.

  And Nick hadn’t even seen. Not the fire, or Josh going near it. He’d been looking at Miranda instead. Now, too late, he saw the ring of stones and heap of grey ash and black coals up the beach behind them towards the dunes. A couple of beer bottles, too, and the discarded piece of driftwood Josh had used to poke the ash.

  Damn! This was his fault!

  The fact made him feel even worse about how close he’d come to yelling at his son in the middle of an asthma attack, with his son’s doctor standing right by. Miranda. Where was she? Still with the group, he saw, answering a question from a parent. Hell, he couldn’t claim her now…

  At the edge of his awareness, he vaguely heard Ben say, ‘We’re going to head into the rainforest next.’

  And one of the other rangers was telling a child, ‘No, hey, don’t touch that, it’s dead.’

  And he didn’t care if the group left them behind.

  ‘OK, ready, Josh?’ he said.

  But Josh took the mouthpiece of the spacer away when Nick tried to put it to his lips. ‘I feel sick. I breathed ash.’

  ‘I know, but let’s try your inhaler before we think about that.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Joshie, we have to.’

  He gave a small nod, but again waved the spacer away when Nick tried to put it to his mouth. ‘Not yet.’ They sat there for a moment, the sea washing in the background, while Josh struggled against nausea, and breathed and wheezed, still insisting every time Nick tried to get a dose of bronchodilator into him, ‘I can’t.’ Finally, he managed several ineffectual puffs, but they had no visible effect.

  Nick found a bottle of water in his daypack. ‘Try this.’ He gave Josh the bottle. ‘Can you taste the ash in your mouth—is that the problem? Is that what’s making you feel sick and making your breathing go tight?’

  Josh nodded. ‘Tastes bad.’ He took some water and spat it out, took some more and gulped it down, pausing twice between mouthfuls to breathe. His condition was getting worse, his reactions more panicky. He had to accept the inhaler, even if he didn’t want to. ‘Just do it, Josh! Come on!’ The sharp words came more from fear than anger, but his son couldn’t know that.

  Josh tried, then leaned over the sand and lost the small amount of dinner he’d had an hour earlier. Nick’s stomach knotted tighter with guilt. Should he have listened to Josh and waited longer to try the inhaler, or had he been right to push? Whatever the case, he shouldn’t have yelled about it.

  Suddenly, Miranda was there. ‘I saw you drop back from the group. I’m sorry, someone was talking to me and I couldn’t get away.’

  Nick looked up the beach and discovered the others disappearing behind the dunes and into the forest. ‘Have we been sitting here—?’

  ‘A few minutes, that’s all. Six or seven, I guess. I told Ben not to wait. The other kids have settled down now. Ben is good with them. One of them
just found a dead shearwater. Josh, how are you doing, sweetheart?’

  ‘Joshie, we have to try again with the inhaler.’ Nick looked up at Miranda again. ‘He breathed in a whole lungful of ash. Someone had a fire here this afternoon.’

  ‘Without a permit, I would think.’

  ‘Apparently.’ He fingered some of the stuff on Josh’s shirt. ‘It’s so fine, finer than dust. Hell!’

  Josh nodded at Nick and this time reached willingly for the inhaler, whether because the nausea had now subsided or the squeezed chest had grown worse, Nick couldn’t tell. He looked as pale as the sand. Paler. And so heartbreakingly little and thin.

  ‘Remember how we do this, Josh,’ Miranda coached him. ‘You know. Hold it to your mouth, and one, two, three. That’s better…’

  But Josh shook his head. His breathing wasn’t better.

  Nick saw the accessory chest muscles coming into play with the kind of effort common after heavy exertion—the muscles between the ribs, across the chest and below the sternum. You saw it in runners or cyclists at the end of a long race, but you didn’t want to see it in an asthmatic child at rest.

  ‘I don’t like sitting on the beach like this,’ he muttered to Miranda. Josh was too strongly focused on his struggle to breathe to listen. ‘We’re, what, ten or fifteen minutes’ walk from the medical centre by now?’

  ‘About that. And I don’t have much equipment with me. Only my stethoscope, in my daypack. I want to have a listen to him.’ She swung the pack off her shoulders and pulled the stethoscope out. ‘Joshie, let’s try some more puffs to make you feel better, before we get moving.’

  More breaths, more counting, more puffs.

  But if they had an effect, it didn’t show.

  Miranda listened with her stethoscope in several places, her face carefully not telegraphing to Josh what she thought. ‘Medical centre,’ she said. ‘Play it safe. I have my mobile, I’ll call them, see if someone can send one of those golf buggy things.’

  ‘This seems to be building faster and much worse than the one he had at the airport on Sunday.’

  ‘I think so, too.’

  ‘That ash. I should have seen what he was doing. I’ve been trying not to wrap him in cotton wool this week.’ The way Anna did, far too much. Damn it, Anna wasn’t relevant now. ‘But maybe I’ve gone too far the—’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she cut in. ‘Save it. It’s not your fault.’

  Anna wouldn’t agree.

  Nick knew that as well as he knew his own name, but didn’t have time to think about it. He did think about the fact that she hadn’t phoned yet with news of her plans, then realised he’d left his mobile in the pocket of his other shorts. Hell! Still, the last thing he wanted was to get her on the line now and listen to her litany of recriminations. He’d call from the medical centre when Josh’s attack had begun to settle down.

  ‘Let me carry him,’ he said. ‘Joshie?’

  Josh held up his arms at once. His nostrils were flaring with every attempt at a breath, and as they made their way back along the beach, Nick could barely hear him wheezing. He’d forgotten how terrifying that was. The wheezing was bad enough, but when Josh’s lungs were too constricted to give off any whistles or rales at all, it was even scarier.

  ‘Don’t…hold me…so tight.’

  ‘I’m trying not to.’ His hold was as loose as he could make it, low around Josh’s hips and well away from the muscles he needed for breathing, but Josh reacted against anything that felt like further constriction.

  And Nick was almost running now. Miranda had spoken some rapid phrases into her mobile, which, thank heaven, had still been in range. ‘They’ll be ready for us,’ she told him. ‘The hotel is sending a buggy up, but we might get there first.’

  She kept up with him, the buggy didn’t appear in time, and they reached the medical centre after several minutes of thigh-burning effort. As they came up the ramp, Nick had a second fleeting thought that he should phone Anna to tell her what was happening.

  Should he? Or would it be better for her not to know until the crisis was over? More importantly, would it be better for Josh? He had a flash of rebellious certainty that Josh’s first serious asthma attack without Anna wailing and wringing her hands over him would actually do all three of them good.

  And yet he knew Anna wouldn’t thank him for keeping her in the dark. This was her son…

  A moment later the immediacy of Josh’s attack took over and the question was pushed from his mind.

  The doctor and nurse working the twelve-hour overnight shift tonight were people neither Miranda nor Nick had yet met, although he had a vague awareness that they’d been at the beach bonfire the other night. The doctor introduced herself as Janey Stafford, and the nurse was Marcia someone. Her last name fled from Nick’s head as soon as he heard it and he didn’t take his eyes off Josh long enough to look at her badge.

  He felt his usual temptation to pull rank, the way his father would have done: ‘I am a first-class passenger…I have paid a premium for this service…I am the sole proprietor of this company.’ Those blustering phrases had been a regular feature throughout Nick’s childhood, until he was sixteen, and it had killed his father when he’d been unable to use them any more.

  Literally killed him, Nick sometimes thought.

  His own repertoire of bluster would have been slightly different, although it amounted to the same thing.

  I am a senior surgeon…I have been published in eight different medical journals in the past two years alone…I probably out-earn you by a six-figure margin.

  But he never said any of those things. He swallowed them back no matter how much they burned to spill out, even in a situation like this when his heart was beating too fast and his own breathing was almost as shallow as Josh’s, because in his experience that kind of bullying backfired and you always paid.

  ‘Just get him oxygen and a nebuliser and get him breathing.’ He wasn’t ordering, he was begging.

  Neither doctor nor nurse stalled. ‘Yep, into a bed, little guy,’ Dr Stafford said. ‘Let’s fix you up nice and fast.’

  She whipped out a stethoscope, but Miranda said, ‘Can I? Do you mind? He’s my patient at home. I had a listen on the beach, I’ll know if there’s been any change.’

  ‘Of course. I’ll take a back seat.’

  ‘You know what I’ll need for him.’ She already had her own stethoscope in her hand. ‘Can we take him through to a bed right now?’

  ‘Yes. Take one of the last two on the left. We have paediatric equipment on hand by those beds.’

  Nick forced himself to stay out of their way, to be Josh’s father instead of a doctor, even though every instinct inside him said it wasn’t enough. ‘Feeling safer now that you’re here?’ he asked him quietly.

  Josh nodded, but it was token. ‘Want water.’ The words were feeble, barely counting as speech. Nick wouldn’t have known what he was saying if he hadn’t already guessed that his son’s mouth must be painfully bitter and dry.

  ‘Can we get him some water? He wants to rinse his mouth again.’

  He could barely manage to get it in his mouth, and spat it out at once in favour of his struggle for breath. He was tiring fast, working those accessory muscles harder, wearing them out to little effect.

  Josh thought of hospitals as good places—places that helped him to breathe again—but the struggle for air was so immediate and the body’s panicked response so primal and physical, he wouldn’t relax on the strength of a promise. He needed the reality, the oxygen going into his lungs, the medication opening those constricted airways.

  He’d begun to look blue around the mouth.

  ‘You’re OK, Josh. You’re fine.’

  Where were some better words? Josh wasn’t fine, he was already approaching exhaustion, drowsy and confused, eyes closed, all effort poured into the struggle for air, showing all the signs of a critical attack. He mouthed something vague that Nick couldn’t make out.

 
Not Monday? Not Mummy?

  What had he said? How much did he wish that Mummy was here? Mummy with her soft, familiar body and her warm voice, instead of this Dad person Josh hadn’t spent enough time with, who had laid down the law over dinner and dessert, who’d tried to shove the spacer into his mouth when he hadn’t wanted it, and who was much better at digging sand tunnels than at giving hugs.

  Lord, he should call Anna, he knew he should, but he hated the idea.

  ‘You’re going to be fine,’ he repeated, making the promise to himself as much as to his son.

  Miranda and Janey had the nebuliser ready, but it wasn’t yet hooked up. According to the pulse oximeter clipped to Josh’s finger, his blood oxygen level was hovering at eighty-eight per cent, when anything below the high nineties started to raise concerns, and below ninety indicated a critical attack. His heart rate was markedly fast. They had to get an improvement in his condition soon.

  Nick cracked.

  ‘Listen, Dr Stafford.’ His voice was harsh enough to hurt his own throat. ‘I’m not sure if you know this, but I’m a surgeon—plastic and reconstructive—at Royal Victoria Hospital. I work with some of the best people in the damned country.’

  He saw Miranda’s quick, covert glance in his direction but couldn’t read it. Right now, he didn’t care what she thought, didn’t care about the lingering, unresolved anger against his father, or anything else. He just wanted some power and control in this situation, and to find a belief that his presence was good for Josh.

  ‘I bailed you lot out today,’ he went on, ‘with some work on a patient’s face that no one here could have done as neatly or as fast. I expect the best treatment in the world for my son, and I’ll know immediately if I’m not getting it. That’s not a threat, but you can bet your life it’s a promise! Get him breathing again. Just do it.’

  Damn, damn…

  Why did I do that?

  ‘We’re doing it, Dr Devlin,’ Janey said calmly. ‘Josh, you know how this works, don’t you, sweetheart? Just breathe as normally and steadily as you can.’

  But he was too far gone to respond. The breathing had to come from his body’s reflexes at this point. Miranda was watching him, assessing his response. What was she thinking?