Long-Lost Son Read online

  Luke shook his head, wondering if the whole medical community—in fact, the whole town—knew by now that this was his long-lost son, and the owner of that forlorn little shoe. He’d kept to himself a fair bit since coming here. His shattered past would provide fascinating fodder for gossip. The thought stripped him raw, when he didn’t know how any of it was going to work out.

  Georgie nodded and stayed silent, and they both watched Frankie Jay eating. Only when his plate was cleaned of every last bun crumb and tomato sauce smear and lettuce shred did he look up. As if wondering about dessert. Hadn’t Alice fed him up in the rainforest? No wonder they’d all thought he was only four years old, he was tiny! And, though wiry, he was thin.

  ‘Had enough, Rowdy?’ Georgie said cheerfully.

  Rowdy?

  That’s right. He hadn’t been speaking.

  Why hadn’t he been speaking?

  So they hadn’t known his name, the medical personnel who’d rescued him and checked him and brought him in, and the nickname they’d given him had apparently stuck. Luke found he quite liked it. It took care of the adversarial relationship in his own mind between Felixx and Frankie Jay, and provided a compromise that everyone could live with, at least for the time being.

  Rowdy looked towards the doorway and saw him at last, then nodded slowly in answer to Georgie’s question. He’d had enough to eat was the impression. Well, maybe. Because if the word supper happened to be mentioned a little later on, he wouldn’t say no…

  ‘Hi, Rowdy,’ Luke said to him. He couldn’t believe it was such a quiet moment when there should be trumpets sounding or a huge orchestra reaching a crescendo. In the back of his mind he realised it was no accident that so few people were around. Charles and Georgie had engineered this whole scene by sending everyone else away.

  To protect my child? Or to protect me?

  Both, he decided, and was grateful. It was good of them. Not something he had the right to expect when he’d kept so much to himself since he’d come to Crocodile Creek. Janey wouldn’t believe that the charmer with the major ego from Royal Victoria Hospital could have morphed into such a workaholic loner.

  ‘This is Luke, Rowdy,’ Georgie said. ‘He’s…’ She threw him a panicky look. What did Rowdy know?

  ‘I’m a friend of your Auntie Janey,’ Luke supplied.

  Rowdy smiled. Apparently he liked his Auntie Janey.

  ‘I’ve just been to see her.’ An image flashed into his mind of the way she’d looked against the hospital white of her pillow. Vulnerable yet calm. Lips a little dry. Eyes huge and shadowed. Never anywhere near as beautiful as Alice, but a lot more grounded and with an intelligence she could never hide. ‘She’s still pretty tired, but she’s doing a lot better.’

  Rowdy pressed his lips together and nodded, and you’d have thought from his expression that Janey’s recovery was all down to him, that possibly the entire universe would end if this one kid didn’t breathe in the right way, or wipe his plate clean with the correct licked finger, or something. He had an air of crushing responsibility about him, and the pleasure of the hamburger was apparently already too far in the past to be of any help.

  ‘Hey…’ How did you reach out to a kid who didn’t speak. Why didn’t he speak? How did you create a bond, and trust, and a relationship?

  Luke felt completely at sea. He’d been holding himself back for so long, he just wanted to unleash his emotions right now, on the spot. Crush his child in his arms. Say all these fervent, dramatic words.

  I love you. I would die for you. I have missed you every single day. I taught you to laugh, do you know that? I used to blow raspberries on your tummy when you were three months old, and you used to gurgle and gurgle and laugh and laugh…

  But he knew he couldn’t.

  What the hell should he do instead?

  He turned back to Georgie, helpless and close to tears. ‘I…uh…’

  ‘Hey, shall we head outside for a bit before it gets dark?’ she said cheerfully to Rowdy, who stood up at once. The weight on him seemed a little lighter again, but his silence was just as complete. She told Luke, ‘We had a team clearing up around the pool area yesterday, so the kids would have somewhere to play. The whole town is doing it—creating tiny pieces of order in the chaos. The beach is still a mess, the sand half cut away and covered in debris, and the surf is brown.’

  He grabbed her arm just as she was about to follow Rowdy outside. ‘I don’t know what to do, Georgie.’

  She stopped in her tracks. ‘You mean about the momentous reunion?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Momentous isn’t what he needs, I don’t think.’

  ‘I know it isn’t, but what is there instead? It’s momentous for me, and I’m having a hard time getting past that to what else I could—’

  ‘Just…child care. Fun stuff. Minute by minute. Throw him a ball. Read him a story tonight. We have kids’ books here. Take it slow. We can’t swim yet, unfortunately, because the pool’s still full of debris and muck and chairs.’

  ‘I’ll clean it out tomorrow,’ Luke said. It was a resolution and a promise. He knew he hadn’t made himself a full part of the Croc Creek medical community in the months he’d been there. This felt like something he could grab hold of, something concrete that he could do. For Rowdy. For his fellow doctors. For himself.

  ‘Big job.’ Georgie sounded sceptical. ‘It’s pretty gungy.’

  ‘I want to.’

  ‘I’d better dust off a bikini, then.’ She grinned, then disappeared onto the veranda for a moment and brought out a big red ball. ‘Here. Catch.’

  With Georgie effortlessly starting the game, Rowdy was soon involved, throwing back and forth to Luke. He smiled, ran to retrieve dropped catches, followed instructions, once even laughed. But he said not a word, and that was hard. The game fizzled out after about ten minutes, and Georgie’s pager went off.

  ‘Rats! If this is that bloody Henderson baby, deciding to be born…’

  Yep, apparently it was.

  ‘I’ll have to go, guys…’

  ‘Where is everybody anyway?’ Luke asked. It was getting dark now.

  ‘At Christina and Joe’s, having been told to eat their hamburgers somewhat faster than Rowdy did, and then we hustled them off. We thought—’

  ‘I know what you thought. And thanks.’ He dropped his voice. ‘But it leaves us in a bit of a hole at this point, because…Would he stay with me, on our own?’

  ‘You’re a friend of Auntie Janey’s. Does he trust…?’

  ‘He doesn’t know her that well either, but you saw his face when I said I was her friend. She counts for something, in his mind.’

  ‘I’ll get Alistair and Max to come back. You won’t be on your own for long. He can get into his pyjamas and brush his teeth and there’s a bookshelf in my room with those kids’ books. I’m getting the impression he likes anything about trains.’

  Rowdy had disappeared while they’d been talking.

  They found him inside a few minutes later, in Emily’s room, crouched by his camp stretcher and wolfing chocolate.

  ‘Oh, sweetheart! You could have told us if you were still hungry!’ Georgie said, stricken by the sight. He ate like a stray animal, as if he didn’t know where his next meal was coming from. ‘There’s plenty more to eat in the kitchen.’

  Rowdy looked scared and frozen, like a rabbit caught in the headlights of a car.

  ‘Told us?’ Luke said quietly.

  ‘I treat him as if he talks, in the hope that soon he actually will,’ she answered, even more quietly. ‘We’ve taken a good look at him. There’s nothing physiologically wrong. And he communicates. Doesn’t usually initiate much, but nods or shakes his head, points.’

  ‘He’s so thin.’

  ‘They have a vegan diet at Mundarri.’

  Luke swore. ‘It’s hard enough for an adult to get a balanced intake that way, let alone a child. From the look of him, I’d say they didn’t do enough.’

  ‘H
ere, we’re letting him eat what he wants so far. Don’t want to turn him into a junk-food addict, but his protein and calcium and iron intake could certainly use a boost, and a bit of fat. For this week, chocolate is a health food.’ She took a closer look. ‘At least…Hmm, not sure about this chocolate.’ She said to Rowdy, ‘Where did you get it, sweetheart?’

  Luke followed her deeper into the room, and they both bent down to Rowdy, who instinctively hid the chocolate in his hands.

  ‘Show me?’ Luke said gently.

  He opened his son’s fingers, to find the last couple of battered-looking, dirt-encrusted squares, then picked up the piece of torn wrapper he saw on the floor. It was soaking wet, as was the plastic bag it had apparently been stored in. He also found grit and clay and chocolate crumbs.

  ‘Oh, shoot!’ Georgie said. ‘This is from Saturday night. The supplies Charles packed for us. We left it with Rowdy and Max, Alistair and me, when we had to wait out the worst of the storm. It’s been through a cyclone, down a mineshaft and up in a chopper. Where have you been keeping this, Rowdy? Hidden here under the bed? You didn’t have to do that! This is all dirty and gritty from the mineshaft, we should have thrown it away. You can tell us when you’re hungry, OK, lovey. I know, you don’t like talking, but you can rub your tummy or point to the fridge. Eating isn’t something we need to do in secret, my sweetheart! Never, never!’

  She took the last few squares of chocolate out of a sticky but quiescent little hand, gave him a quick, reassuring squeeze and stood up.

  ‘I really need to go,’ she said to Luke. ‘I’ll phone Alistair on my way across and he’ll be home with Max in a few minutes. Find a story to read, and don’t give him a hard time about the chocolate.’

  ‘You think I would?’

  ‘Sorry. Bossiness gets to be a habit.’

  ‘Thanks for it, Georgie. You’ve…helped tonight.’

  So she left, and Rowdy didn’t seem to mind, and Luke found a Thomas the Tank book, suggested pyjamas, teeth-brushing and toilet, then sat on the uncomfortable edge of the camp stretcher while Rowdy tucked himself under the thin summer sheet and they read about naughty trains.

  And it was OK. It was good. They’d made a start.

  Max arrived in the middle of it and heard a second story. Both boys yawned. Alistair appeared back in the doorway and said, ‘Lights out, I think.’

  No protests.

  ‘Night-night, guys,’ Luke said.

  And that was it. His first evening with Frankie Jay, aka Felixx, aka who knew what else, aka Rowdy.

  No dramas. Taking it one step at a time.

  Pretty good, on the whole.

  Until he got woken up at midnight by the commotion coming from Max and Rowdy’s room.

  CHAPTER THREE

  ‘SHE’S asleep,’ Janey heard, in her doorway.

  The room was dark, and the patient in the next bed was just a humped shape who didn’t stir. It must be very late. She tried to rouse herself enough to call out that she wasn’t asleep, but the voices had already passed along the corridor. They must have met up with someone else at the far end. She caught snatches of words.

  ‘Out of nowhere…’

  ‘What Rowdy ate, but Max seems fine…’

  ‘Don’t want to set her back, but she’s the closest thing to a parent…’

  ‘Paediatric bed when we’ve…’

  She struggled to sit up and make sense of what she’d heard. She couldn’t, except to realise that it had something to do with her.

  And Rowdy.

  That name was going to stick.

  It had stuck in her heart, because she so much wanted him to be a rowdy, noisy, boisterous kid, just to show that he knew how to. It was so frightening, his silence. She knew something had to be deeply wrong.

  Something’s wrong.

  And not just because her nephew didn’t speak.

  I have to find out.

  She pivoted her legs off the edge of the bed. Fortunately one of the side rails was down, because she didn’t think she could have climbed over it. OK, now, drip stand. Handy things, they were. She held herself to it for support and pushed onto her feet, made some shuffling steps towards the electrical socket where it was plugged in, had to untangle the orange cord from around her buzzer and TV control and gather it into the little plastic loop on the stand, so it didn’t trail on the floor.

  She’d been out of bed twice that day. The first time she’d progressed all the way to the chair that sat four feet from her bed, then back again. That evening they’d taken out her catheter and she’d managed a bathroom visit.

  But she’d had help.

  This time she didn’t.

  ‘They are discharging me tomorrow, come hell or high water, so I’d better be able to do this!’ she muttered. And as she took each tentative step, still clinging to the drip stand, the light-headedness subsided and she felt steadier.

  At the end of the corridor the knot of people still stood, talking. Luke saw her first, and she didn’t take in who the others were. ‘Janey!’ He strode in her direction at once.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘You shouldn’t be out of bed.’

  ‘Is it Rowdy? I heard—’

  ‘He’s been vomiting. I’ve just brought him in. But you shouldn’t be standing here like this.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Downstairs, in A and E.’

  ‘What are you thinking is wrong? To bring him in just because he’s vomiting…’

  ‘Let me grab you a wheelchair.’

  ‘I don’t need one. I want to get out of here tomorrow, so I’d better be able to walk down a level corridor without dramas! Take me down to A and E and tell me what’s going on.’ She dragged on his arm, aware of its warm, bulky strength, and he relented, leading her towards the lift.

  ‘Joe Barrett’s with him,’ he said.

  ‘I haven’t met—But I’ve heard the name.’

  ‘New Zealand doctor. Christina’s husband. You wouldn’t know her, either. It’s not important right now. Rowdy’s showing some other symptoms, that’s our concern. Restlessness, headache, dizziness, chills, cramps.’

  ‘Flu,’ she guessed. ‘A gastric bug?’ What else might it be? She tried to think like a doctor, but couldn’t do it right now when it was this little boy, almost her own. ‘He’s having such a horrible, horrible, time. Has anyone else—?’

  ‘No, that’s the thing. It’s just him.’

  They went down in the lift. She caught sight of a clock on the ground floor. One in the morning, no wonder she felt disoriented. If I let it show, they won’t let me out of here tomorrow. They’ll keep treating me like a patient, and I need to be the healthy one, for Rowdy.

  ‘What are you thinking, Luke? You’re not telling me.’

  They reached the heavy swing doors that must lead into the A and E department and he stopped, faced her and stood close. ‘We found him eating some chocolate this evening. Georgie had several bars with her when she and Alistair found Rowdy and Max down the mineshaft, and she gave it to them for emergency rations. The boys ate half of it, but Rowdy hid the rest, and we didn’t know. The wrapper was sodden and filthy, and the chocolate itself was covered in clay and grit.’

  ‘I don’t think he’s ever eaten chocolate in his life. Alice was too strict about food. Way too strict.’

  ‘Well, he’s making up for it now. He was like a stray dog when we found him in his room, Janey.’ His voice cracked suddenly, and he’d made a vivid, disturbing image in Janey’s mind. ‘Wolfing down this filthy stuff as fast as he could get it into his mouth, grit and wet wrapping and all.’

  ‘Upset stomach…’ She felt a little better. A bit of damp, dirty chocolate. He’d be fine. Miserable for half a day, but soon fine.

  ‘No, that’s not what we think,’ Luke said. ‘Those old mineshafts are a mess of half-dug holes and piles of tailings. They processed some of the gold on the spot. The soil’s contaminated. We think it could be arsenic poisoning.’
r />   Janey’s knees buckled and Luke had to catch her before she fell. He felt the ridge of plastic from her IV line against the inside of his arm, the tied tapes at the back of her gown, and then the gap—those gowns never met properly behind—the warm gap and the smooth skin of her back. He rested his jaw against the top of her head. Her hair was silky and dark and fragrant, even after several days in hospital.

  ‘We’ve taken a urine sample for testing,’ he said. ‘Meanwhile, we’re going to treat it as confirmed. Gastric lavage, saline cathartic. If we get a positive result on the urine—they’re pushing the testing on that through as fast as they can—we’ll start dimercaprol for two days then penicillamine, as well as treatment for dehydration and pulmonary oedema and anything else we need to.’

  ‘Haemodyalisis,’ she said.

  ‘Hopefully not, because we’re not equipped for that here. He’d have to go south. I’m sure it won’t be that severe. It won’t be. It won’t. This is acute, not chronic, and it developed fast and clear-cut because he’s so small and we’ll get it out of his system just as quickly.’

  The words were a prayer, a threat and a promise all in one, and they both knew it. She held him more tightly, burrowed her forehead against his shoulder, and he felt her warm breath and the vibration of her muffled voice against his shirt. ‘This is not fair. This is just not, not, not fair! He’s been through so much already, Luke! I can’t bear it. And I don’t know if I’m…enough. You know? Enough for him. When he’s lost his world.’

  She began to cry, shuddering sobs that shook her body all the harder because she tried to swallow them back and make them stop. Luke knew why. She wanted to be strong, and to prove to everyone that she was strong so they’d let her take care of Rowdy, instead of being stuck away in a hospital room of her own.

  She somehow thought it was still just the two of them—she and Rowdy. She didn’t trust or realise how much of a commitment Luke had made in his own heart. She still thought he was giving a performance.

  He couldn’t spare the energy to be angry about it now.