Long-Lost Son Page 13

  ‘No, not that smooth.’

  ‘We’ll go with the right jugular.’ The large vein would take the rapid infusion of fluid that Sam now urgently needed. ‘Sam, we’re going to put in a drip needle to give you some fluid, OK? You’ll feel a bit of a sting, because I’m going to give you some painkiller through the needle first, but then it won’t hurt and it’ll be taped in place and it will make you feel a lot stronger and better. Barb, is there a microwave?’

  ‘You want to warm the fluids?’

  ‘Yes, please, if we can.’

  Janey adjusted Sam’s position gently, turning his head away so that he wouldn’t see Luke’s approach with the needle and tilting his head down slightly to distend the vein. Luke prepared the drugs and found the carotid pulse on the neck. The internal jugular would run parallel a short distance to the side. Janey couldn’t help watching the long, lean shapes of his fingers as he worked. Surgeons performed miracles with their hands, the way dancers performed miracles with their bodies.

  He injected the painkiller then, with the fingers of his left hand still marking the position of the artery, slipped the needle in half a centimetre away at an angle of forty-five degrees and kept up a gentle pressure.

  Janey saw the moment when he entered the vein, at about three centimetres’ depth. Blood came into the syringe, and he used his thumb over the hub of the needle to stop any air going in. He inserted the guide wire, removed the needle, loaded the cannula and pushed it into the vein, his movements fast and sure.

  Janey grabbed a blood-pressure cuff and when Luke had aspirated some blood from the vein to check its placement and connected the cannula to the infusion equipment, she put the cuff onto the bag of fluid and pumped it up tight to squeeze the fluid through the tubing and into Sam’s body as fast as possible.

  ‘OK, that’s great,’ Luke said. ‘That’s brilliant. Sam, you’re doing fine, and that’s the hard part over.’

  They hoped.

  ‘Need another cuff?’ said Barb.

  ‘Yes, let’s see if we’ve got some pressure now.’ They all held their breath. Eighty over forty. It had come up, but was still too low.

  ‘He’s getting seepage,’ Janey said. The new, spreading stain looked rusty pink against the pale blue, grey and cream pattern of Luke’s torn shirt fabric.

  ‘I don’t want to disturb the dressing. It’s too pretty,’ Luke said, for Sam’s benefit.

  ‘Second dressing on top?’ Barb asked.

  ‘Think so, at this point.’

  They heard voices outside, angry and upset and scared. Sam’s parents, and Josh. ‘I’ll go and talk to them,’ Janey said, while Luke and Barb began to put the second dressing in place.

  In the foyer outside the medical centre she found Sam’s mother sobbing and his father white-lipped, helpless and angry, with Andrew and Rowdy and Josh there, too. The boys had finished their ice creams and had sticky mouths.

  ‘They’re saying it was a bird,’ the father yelled. ‘How could a bloody bird have ripped open his whole leg? Why aren’t there any bloody warning signs? How can you have vicious, dangerous wildlife roaming around a family holiday resort, for heck’s sake? Are you people insane?’

  ‘We’re going to find the bird, Mr Marshall,’ Andrew said, trying to placate him.

  ‘Is he going to be all right?’ the mother sobbed. ‘Can I see him? Just tell me he’s all right.’

  ‘And shoot it on the bloody spot. And any others on the island.’

  ‘He’s doing well, Mrs Marshall,’ Janey said. ‘You’ll be able to see him very soon, once we have him sorted out with fluids and medication.’

  Luke appeared and was quickly introduced. ‘We’re getting him stable—he did lose a fair bit of blood,’ he said. He stood tall, his height giving a natural air of confidence and authority. The kind of man any parent would trust. Eight years ago he’d come across as cocky and arrogant and far too sure of himself. Now he was a man you’d lean on to the ends of the earth, and you’d feel safe all the way.

  ‘We have fluid going in, and he’s on oxygen,’ he continued. ‘There may be an internal injury to the spleen, although signs are that it wouldn’t be major. That’ll be checked out more thoroughly when he gets to hospital. We have a chopper on its way, and one of you will be able to go in it with him, Mrs Marshall. I’ll take you in to see him in a moment.’

  ‘Yeah, and what about the next kid playing on the nature trail? The bird has to be shot!’

  But Janey had felt Rowdy stiffen beside her. ‘Don’t shoot her,’ he said, almost in a whisper. His little hand came creeping into hers and his cheek pressed against her lower arm. ‘She was hurt and scared. The boys wouldn’t back away. She couldn’t help it. Cassowaries are endangered.’

  He looked crumpled and weary and defeated, immune to the healing powers of ice cream. She caught Luke’s agonised glance.

  ‘Let me handle things here for a bit,’ he said, stepping to within inches of her and lowering his head so that they couldn’t be overheard. She felt his body warmth and the effort of his iron control. Just wanted to rest against the rock-like strength of his body but knew she couldn’t. Not now. ‘I’ve got Barb. You have to talk to him, Janey.’ His voice shook. ‘I can’t bear to leave him in the lurch like this! For five years I didn’t know where he was, and now he needs me and I can’t be there. If it wasn’t for you, I don’t know what I’d do.’

  ‘Luke—’

  ‘Just go.’

  She nodded at him, took Rowdy’s hand and walked him outside, to where they could see a stretch of beach and the boat jetty and various holidaymakers enjoying their afternoon.

  ‘I don’t want them to shoot her,’ Rowdy said again. ‘I want them to find her and make her hurt leg better.’

  ‘I know you do.’

  Oh, lord, what should she say? Should she make a promise about Elke’s safety that might be impossible to keep? Or prepare Rowdy for the worst? Sometimes rogue wildlife had to be killed.

  ‘I don’t know if that’s going to be possible, love,’ she said in the end. ‘Maybe she hurt herself too badly in the cyclone. Sometimes when an animal’s been hurt it’s just not ever going to be well enough to take care of itself in the wild.’

  ‘Elke’s not wild. She can go back in the bird place.’

  ‘She might be too aggressive to catch safely. We’ll talk to Andrew about it in a minute. He seems good, doesn’t he?’

  ‘Yes. We could show him where she went into the bush, and follow her tracks, and they could get a vet and give her medicine and bandage her up like you bandaged Sam.’

  ‘Hey…let’s not think about Elke for the moment. You’re talking again!’

  ‘I had to, to warn those boys, but they wouldn’t listen. I didn’t want to. I wouldn’t have talked if I didn’t have to.’ Did he think she would be angry?

  ‘It’s fine, love. It’s fine. And it wasn’t so bad, was it? The talking? It felt OK, didn’t it? Nothing terrible—’

  But Rowdy wasn’t listening to this.

  ‘Where’s Mum, Auntie Janey?’ he cut in, as if he couldn’t wait another second to say it. His little voice trembled, and the trust and silent pleading in his eyes made them as big as saucers. ‘They took her away to a wonderful place, Raina said. To get better. Isn’t she going to be better and coming back soon? Nobody’s told me. I stayed quiet, quiet, quiet for as long as I could to help her heal. Isn’t it working yet?’

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  LUKE took Jason and Simone Marshall into the medical centre, stopping them just inside the door to say quietly, ‘He’ll need your reassurance.’

  Not your anger or your tears, please, for his sake, no matter how emotional you are feeling.

  How much should he spell it out? Mr Marshall still looked explosive, while his wife made no effort to hold back her sobs. Luke himself was struggling internally. He felt as if half his soul had gone with Janey and his son, only he couldn’t follow, and couldn’t let his emotion show. In microcosm, it was what h
e’d endured for five years while Rowdy had been lost to him, and the only thing that made it bearable was Janey.

  Not Alice. Janey.

  He lowered his voice a little further, and told the Marshalls, ‘He’s had a big shock and your attitude is very important at this point. We can talk later about whether the resort is to blame, and what that means in terms of action. For now, he needs to see you smiling.’

  ‘Yes, Jase, please?’ Simone laid a hand on her husband’s arm and gathered her own control with a huge effort. She had peeling, sunburned skin, making the lines of strain around her mouth crease tighter.

  Jason nodded and said gruffly, ‘As long as he’s OK. That’s all that matters.’

  Luke moved forward. ‘Sam, your mum and dad are here.’

  ‘We’re here now, mate. It’s OK. It’s OK.’

  ‘Love, oh, love.’ Simone kissed her son and stroked his forehead.

  Barb took Luke aside. ‘I’m afraid there’s more seepage coming through the dressing.’

  ‘Take another BP.’

  Seventy over forty, they found. It had dropped again.

  ‘We’re going to have to tie off the artery,’ Luke decided out loud. ‘He can’t afford to lose any more blood, and we can’t ship him out in this condition. Have you got what we need? Artery forceps? Clamps?’

  Barb nodded. ‘I’ll have everything ready for you.’

  ‘I’ll talk to the parents, get them to go back out. I would have liked to give them more time with him, but…’

  ‘But we need to do this, if we’re going to. And not in front of them.’

  ‘Yes.’ He had to deal with Jason and Simone Marshall’s stricken faces when he told them their son needed more urgent intervention, and they’d have to wait outside.

  Next, he washed and gloved up, knowing he’d need to move fast as soon as the artery was exposed. Once Barb had removed the old dressing and applied manual pressure, he swabbed the wound and found the end of the artery before blood filled the area and obscured it from view. He clamped it and that scary welling of blood stopped. Another swab cleared the area and he tied off the artery.

  Sam would need a good vascular surgeon in Brisbane, and possibly a laparotomy if they discovered bleeding from the spleen, but for now they’d done all they could. He re-dressed the wound and told Barb, ‘Bring them back in. They should be able to stay with him now until the chopper gets here.’

  A few minutes later Barb was able to report, ‘Blood pressure up to eighty-five over forty-two now. Oxygen sat at ninety-seven.’

  The sound of chopper blades cutting the air began to thrum in their ears.

  Janey sat beside Rowdy on the sand.

  Her jaw and eyes and throat ached and stung from tension and unshed tears. She couldn’t let herself cry, because her precious nephew—this sturdy, stricken little being—didn’t need tears from her right now. He needed the best words in the world, and she wasn’t sure that those words even existed. ‘But it just wasn’t enough,’ she said, ‘and the ambulance came too late, and so she died.’

  ‘She died in the ambulance.’

  ‘Yes, sweetheart.’

  ‘I knew she died.’ He sounded so bleak and defeated, confronted with the stark reality that his magical thinking had failed.

  Magical thinking.

  Should they have guessed, she and Luke? Should they have understood and known? He was only five. Death was such an abstract, impossible concept for him, even though he must have seen it in the bush many times—lizards and birds.

  I knew she died.

  He’d known it and not known it, both at the same time. Kids could do that, and even adults could sometimes. He had pinned himself heroically to those mixed-up concepts in his little mind and to the hope in his warm little heart. That if he stayed quiet, his mum would get better. That she’d gone to a wonderful place to get better, and somehow his desperate silence would move the necessary mountains and bring her back.

  But if he spoke, the spell would be broken.

  If he spoke, he’d have to ask the questions he desperately wanted to ask and hear the answers which he was so desperately afraid of.

  Because really, in his heart, he’d known…

  She held him, hoping that her touch might be enough, even though words just weren’t, wishing with all her heart that Luke was there. ‘But I’m your Auntie Janey, Rowdy,’ she whispered. ‘I’m your mum’s sister, and I love you, and I even look a little bit like her…’

  ‘You look quite a lot like her.’

  ‘Do I?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, I know it’s not the same as having Mum, but I will take care of you and we’ll go to Melbourne soon for a holiday, and you can see your grandma and grandpa, because they love you, too.’

  ‘Who are they, my grandma and grandpa?’

  Why didn’t you ever talk about us, Alice? Why did you always want to burn your boats and reject your own past?

  ‘They’re my mum and dad, and your mum’s mum and dad,’ she said.

  ‘I didn’t know I had them. And who’s Luke? Is he my uncle?’ He sounded cautious about it, just a little bit hopeful, she thought.

  ‘He’s—he’s a good friend. He’s someone who cares about you, too, very much.’ Because she didn’t think she could tell him the truth just yet, not without Luke himself there. It had to be his decision, not hers.

  ‘Are we going to live at Mundarri?’ Rowdy asked.

  ‘No, not there. Because I’m a doctor and I need to work in a town or a city, where there are more people to be my patients.’

  ‘So where?’

  ‘Somewhere good.’ She couldn’t tell him blankly that she didn’t know, couldn’t leave him on shifting ground when everything in his whole world had shifted so much already. She added, ‘We’ll think about it, and decide together. But I promise you, it’ll be somewhere good.’

  The sound of chopper rotors in the distance came to their ears and grew rapidly louder. It had come for Sam, and she knew she should get back to the medical centre to see if she was needed to help with the transfer.

  She told Rowdy, ‘You did a great job, trying to warn those kids about the cassowary. It wasn’t your fault that they didn’t listen. I think they were too scared.’

  ‘It wasn’t her fault either. She was hurt and she was scared, too. She didn’t know how bad it is to hurt a kid like that. She thought they were going to hurt her.’

  ‘I know, love.’

  ‘I want her to be healed. I don’t want her to die. She needs to mate with Fred and lay eggs. He’ll sit on them for her and they’ll hatch.’

  ‘You know all about it, don’t you? Is it the male that sits on the eggs?’

  ‘With cassowaries it is.’

  ‘We’d better get back and see how Sam is doing.’

  ‘When can we see how Elke is doing?’ He stood up and took her hand again, and the simple little gesture of trust almost broke her heart.

  I cannot let this child down. Ever.

  ‘We’ll ask Andrew,’ she said. ‘He’ll know what we can do.’

  ‘I want her to be healed,’ he repeated, and Janey wondered about the issue’s importance in his mind, if it was connected with Alice somehow—his own mother, and the female bird—and how much his trust in happy endings might be permanently damaged if the adults around him shrugged at Elke’s plight or went out and shot her in cold blood.

  She saw the helicopter touch down, its rotors blasting the surrounding vegetation in a mimicry of the cyclone’s recent destruction. Two flight paramedics emerged with a wheeled stretcher, and there was trusty Andrew, guiding them to the medical centre. She followed, but found that everything was under control, with Sam being shifted to the stretcher, covered in a light blanket, and with fluid and oxygen still going in.

  Luke reported, ‘We had to tie off the artery and re-dress the wound. He’s looking more stable now, blood pressure’s up, respiration’s slowed, but there may be a way still to go.’

 
; ‘Spleen damage?’

  ‘Won’t be surprised. Not huge, but something’s going on in there, I think. The leg’ll need some attention, and those other wounds. We gave them a swab and started antibiotics, but that was all we had time for. The mum’s flying with him, and the dad and Josh will pack up here, catch the boat over to the mainland and start the drive down tonight.’ He dropped his voice further. ‘How is he? Still talking?’

  She didn’t need to ask who he meant by ‘he.’

  ‘Oh, Luke, wait till you hear what’s been going on in his head…’ Her voice cracked. ‘But what’s urgent for him now is Elke, the bird. I want to ask Andrew if there’s a wildlife officer or a park ranger. If there’s any chance that she doesn’t have to be killed, and that a vet can work on that wound…’

  They went with the paramedics to the chopper, trundling along one of the wooden boardwalks that led between various parts or the resort, while Simone and Jason Marshall made confused plans. Which hospital were they going to? Where would he stop for the night along the way? What time did the boat run? Who did they need to phone?

  One of the paramedics—Luke knew him, apparently, he was based in Crocodile Creek, Rhys someone—said to them, ‘Looks like it was touch and go. Bloody lucky you two were here.’

  ‘Don’t even say it!’

  ‘Where’s the bird?’

  ‘That’s the next question now that Sam is stable,’ Luke answered. ‘Although as far as you guys go, I wouldn’t rest on your laurels during the ride.’ He told Rhys about the suspected spleen injury and the gashes they hadn’t had time to examine closely or treat.

  ‘Fill you in next time I see you,’ Rhys said.

  They loaded Sam aboard with impressive speed and efficiency while Janey, Luke, Rowdy, Andrew, Josh and Jason stood on the boardwalk at a safe distance and watched. Janey took advantage of the lull and told Luke about what Rowdy had said.

  ‘That’s why? Oh, lord…’

  The doors closed and the rotors whirred into life again, ready to lift Sam off into the blue promise of clear skies for flying and a major hospital down south.