Long-Lost Son Read online

  ‘He has two of us,’ he said instead, speaking as plainly as he could, hearing the frequent catches in his own voice. ‘Never forget that. Never doubt it. I am here. I love him. I will do what it takes. Anything it takes. Every single day. I am his father. And I’m not going away.’

  They were the words—some of them—that he’d wanted to say to Rowdy himself the previous afternoon, but hadn’t been able to. And suddenly it was immensely healing and good and important to be saying them to Janey instead, because if they shared nothing else, the two of them, they shared a commitment to putting this child first.

  She lifted her head from his shoulder and looked at him. No, searched him, his whole face, in quest of truth. He met her gaze full on, knowing she wouldn’t be able to find even a trace of insincerity or hyped-up promises. He’d meant every word.

  Finally, after what must have been almost a full minute, she gave a tiny nod, pushed back from his chest, then turned to the button on the wall that opened the swing doors. ‘I want to see him.’

  He was as white as a ghost, his breathing seemed shallow, and he’d just finished throwing up into a pale green plastic kidney dish. His nurse whisked it away, then came back to note the volume on his chart. His restless limbs twitched against the sheets, which were already untidy.

  ‘Frankie Jay…’ Janey whispered. ‘Rowdy, love…’

  The nurse—an older woman, Luke didn’t know her that well—was getting ready to put in an IV. ‘I’ll do it,’ he told her, then wondered if that was a mistake. This was his son. Nobody liked to treat a patient they were this close to.

  But he did it anyway, concentrating fiercely on the little hand, finding a vein with his fingertip, sliding the needle in. The vein snaked away from the needle point and he had to try again. Rowdy must already be dehydrated, because his veins shouldn’t be this flat. He’d barely winced at the pain, brave little lad, but Luke knew it must have hurt.

  And would hurt again, with his second attempt.

  This time, thank goodness, he found the vein and taped the cannula in place, attached the tubing, set the flow rate, told the nurse what drugs needed to go in, and wrote it all down.

  Sitting in the chair beside Rowdy’s bed and holding his free hand, Janey watched every move Luke made. ‘How are you feeling, sweetheart?’ she whispered. ‘Please talk to us and tell us. No? You need to stay quiet? That’s fine…That’s fine…’

  What else could she say?

  Time passed, the way it did in hospitals. Uncomfortable and quiet and slow. She must have dozed for a while. Some movement beside Rowdy’s bed awakened her, but Luke seemed to have gone. Instead, there was a man she didn’t know, holding out his big hand for a shake and telling her, ‘I’m Dr Barrett. But make it Joe, won’t you? We have the result of Rowdy’s urine test.’

  ‘And…?’

  ‘Confirmed.’ He didn’t use the word ‘poison’ and Janey was grateful. Rowdy looked as if he was sleeping, but you could never tell, and he was scared and lost enough already. ‘Poison’ was a frightening enough word for an adult to hear, let alone a child. ‘We’ll keep testing to watch for a drop in the level.’

  ‘So you’re going to start…?’

  ‘Dimercaprol and penicillamine.’ He was working as he spoke, noting down the new treatment, preparing the drugs.

  ‘Where’s Luke?’

  ‘Getting you a wheelchair.’

  ‘I don’t need one. I’m staying here.’

  ‘Wrong,’ said Luke himself from the doorway, wheelchair in tow.

  ‘I—’

  ‘Unh-unh-unh!’ He came forward and touched the tips of his fingers to her mouth in a warning. ‘Do I have to tell you that you won’t be discharged tomorrow—actually, it’s today—if you’re looking like a wreck in the morning? He’s sleeping now. And he needs you to be fit when he’s discharged. I am taking you back to your room, Janey, where you will sleep until you wake up on your own—no six o’clock hospital breakfast—and about midmorning, or maybe noon, a whole clutch of doctors will check you out and pronounce yes or no. What do you want it to be?’

  ‘I want yes.’

  ‘Thought so. Need help getting into this wheelchair?’

  ‘No!’

  Why had he asked? He ignored her answer, bent down and raised the wheelchair footrests, lifted her to her feet, pivoted her round and held her elbow while she lowered herself. She wanted to say good night to Rowdy, kiss him and tell him she’d see him as soon as she could, but Luke was right. He was sleeping, and it was best to leave him undisturbed.

  As they wheeled their way toward the lift, she knew she was leaving half her heart behind in the paediatric section of A and E, where they were keeping him because so much of the hospital was in chaos. With some wards storm-damaged and out of action, and patients moved to wherever they would fit, the paediatric ward didn’t have a spare bed.

  Luke stayed with his son all night, watching every setback and every turn for the better. Rowdy was passing urine through the catheter the nurse had put in, which was good because lack of urine output could indicate that the arsenic poisoning was more severe. The fluid kept going in nicely, along with the dimercaprol, which would bond chemically to the arsenic and neutralise its effects.

  The purging brought on by the emetics Rowdy had been given should get the undigested arsenic out of his system so that the level didn’t increase. They’d test his urine again in a few hours.

  Meanwhile, there wasn’t a lot do except sit and watch, but somehow the weary passage of early morning hours seemed so precious and important. Making up for lost time. Healing all those terrible months and years of not knowing where his child was, of feeling Alice’s disappearance with their baby like a punch in the face.

  He still didn’t fully understand what had gone wrong, how they could have gone from giddy, effervescent happiness—shallow-rooted happiness, he’d come to think—to so much fighting and distance in so short a time, less than three years between when they’d first met and when Alice had walked out.

  Most couples did find that their relationship changed after the birth of a child. Was that where it had started? He remembered the day she’d come home from her new mothers’ group when Frankie Jay had been six weeks old, full of some terrible secondhand story she’d heard about infant inoculations gone wrong. ‘We’re not having him immunised, Luke. I won’t take that risk.’

  ‘So you’ll take the risk that he dies of diphtheria or whooping cough instead? Do you have any idea what the infant mortality rate used to be before those vaccinations were started?’

  ‘That’s right, Luke, hide behind the sterile façade of Western medicine straight away, without even hearing the facts!’

  ‘The facts? Have you actually looked at the facts?’

  They’d had a huge fight.

  But he knew that this had been the end rather than the beginning of the trouble.

  He couldn’t pinpoint the steps on the journey after all this time, but he’d learned that nothing could be quite as sour as dried-up chemistry, especially when you discovered that there was no respect or appreciation or shared understanding lying beneath it.

  He would have kept trying, but maybe Alice had been the one to see things more clearly at that point. The marriage couldn’t have been saved, and she’d known it sooner than he had.

  His thoughts swung back to the present, and he realised with a wash of horror that Rowdy probably still hadn’t had his immunisations. Look at his skin, all cut up and scratched. How could Alice have done it? How could she have taken him out there into the wilderness with no tetanus shots? He’d get one as soon as it was safe, and the other shots he needed, as soon as this first crisis was safely over.

  First crisis?

  Fourth. Fifth. Luke had lost count.

  Alice’s death, the bus crash, the cyclone…

  His little miracle, that’s who this precious child was.

  My miracle boy.

  Emotion overwhelmed him suddenly, and there in
the dark, quiet hospital, he just sat there and let the tears come.

  When Janey woke up, it was eleven in the morning, and she found Luke standing at the end of the bed. The sound of him coming into the room had stirred her out of sleep.

  ‘How is he?’ Her voice croaked.

  ‘He’s turned the corner.’

  ‘Oh, that’s wonderful. That’s so good.’

  ‘The arsenic level in his urine is down already, no more vomiting, he’s nicely hydrated now, good clear chest. I think he’ll be out of here tomorrow.’

  Don’t cry, Janey.

  ‘One thing I wanted to ask, though. Did you find any immunisation records among his and Alice’s things?’

  ‘No. And I don’t think they’d exist. She didn’t believe in it. I tried to argue the case, but—’

  ‘You too, huh?’

  ‘I probably didn’t argue hard enough.’

  Their eyes met, and for a moment Alice’s ghost stood between them, relishing all these lovely swirls of high emotion in the atmosphere.

  ‘I couldn’t deal with her, Luke,’ Janey confessed in a rush. ‘She exhausted me. I can’t live on that level. Everything so passionate, and black and white. She was one of those people who just can’t do life’s small moments. It’s all got to be huge. Even the way the two of you fell in love.’

  At first sight, when Alice had come to the hospital to meet Janey for coffee. Alice and Luke had been engaged within three weeks, and married a few months after that. They’d spent the first year of their married life in Australia, then they’d gone to London.

  ‘You can’t just have a nice chat to someone,’ she went on, ‘you have to open up your whole soul. You can’t just follow a vegetarian diet, you have to treat chocolate and ice cream and even cheese as if they’re poison.’

  ‘You can’t just get a nice, civilised divorce, you have to change your name, take your baby and disappear. I know.’

  ‘You loved her energy and her passion.’

  ‘Once. But her passion was the real poison in the end. Beneath it, there was nothing we shared. I’d never want a relationship like that again.’

  ‘I don’t want to dwell on the things that made her impossible.’

  ‘No. We have to think about Rowdy. His future. His wellbeing.’

  ‘Which will get a boost with a tetanus shot and his other vaccinations.’

  ‘And a bit more chocolate and cheese. Clean chocolate this time.’

  And whole milk, some good red meat and fresh fish, lots of the fruit and vegetables and whole grains he’d been brought up on and liked, and the odd exuberant overdose of ice cream. Strawberry and mango first off, Janey thought, piled high in a waffle cone. She wanted to spoil him rotten in all sorts of ways.

  ‘Hey, there are some doctors coming to see you in a minute,’ Luke said.

  ‘Sounds good. Can’t tell you how much I’m busting to get out of here. Although I…really don’t have too much of an idea what’s happening in my life beyond this afternoon.’

  ‘Give it time, Janey,’ he answered gently. ‘We’ve got a lot to work out. We’re not aiming to do it all by the end of the week.’

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE last thing Janey expected, when her discharge formalities had been completed, was that she’d be spending most of the rest of the day beside the pool. Luke wouldn’t allow her to hover over Rowdy at the hospital, and deep down, although she protested at first, she knew it was the right thing.

  They’d paid him another visit on their way out. He was looking a little brighter, sitting up in his bed and working on a jigsaw puzzle. It was hard to know how he felt about anything when he wouldn’t speak, but he’d seemed more cheerful, obviously relieved to be feeling better.

  Luke had said, ‘Listen, little guy, I need to take your Auntie Janey away for a rest, and I need to get some myself. Doctor’s orders. We had a cyclone here. I reckon you’d know something about that, right?’

  A small nod. No smile.

  ‘Well, we’ve all been working pretty hard, or else we got clonked on the head like your auntie did, and she needs to sit in the sun for a bit and get herself better. Get healed.’

  He nodded at that last word and got the little spark of questioning and hope in his eyes that Janey had seen once or twice before and wondered about. He suddenly looked as if he was desperate to speak—desperate to. Ask a question or tell them something of crucial importance or just yell.

  And yet no words came.

  She waited, smiled at him, squeezed his little hand between hers.

  Come on, sweetheart. Nothing terrible will happen if you say it. Just spit it out.

  But no.

  And now, half an hour later, here she was relaxing in a borrowed swimsuit by the pool.

  Watching Luke clean it.

  He’d already removed about ten buckets’ worth of leaves and other debris with a big net on a pole. He’d added some chemicals, cleaned out the leaf basket, pulled a plastic poolside chair from the shallow end, near the steps. Several chairs had been thrown into the pool before the cyclone, apparently, so that they wouldn’t get turned into missiles by the power of the wind.

  ‘I take it you’re not going to let me help?’ she said.

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Because I have to rest, right?’ She resisted the temptation to pull on the swimsuit to make it cover her better. Having spent the last three years dressing for Darwin’s perpetual summer, she knew that when you acted as if you thought your neckline was too low, it only looked worse. Style was eighty per cent confidence and a relaxed attitude. Alice had apparently understood this from birth, but it had taken Janey a fair bit of living to work it out.

  She had a few items of clothing rescued from the bus crash, but no swimsuit, just casual tropical shorts and tops which hadn’t yet been washed, and even though it was hot it felt good to get some air and sunlight on her skin.

  ‘And because there’s a science to it, you see,’ Luke said. ‘You probably don’t even know what floculent is.’

  ‘Did have the vague idea it had something to do with liver function.’

  ‘I’m speaking in the context of swimming pools.’ He poured in about a gallon of the stuff as he spoke.

  ‘Well, this swimming pool certainly has a lot of context. Green, scummy context, from this vantage point, not to mention the floating branches.’ She watched him lift another one out.

  ‘And at least five more pool chairs, I’m told,’ he said.

  ‘You’d need to be told. Even after everything you’ve taken out, I still can’t see to the bottom.’

  ‘But once the floculent has taken effect, I am reliably promised it’ll be crystal clear. Although I think there are a few other steps involved first. Waiting overnight and vacuuming or something. I’ve got all the instructions written down.’

  ‘So you don’t actually know anything more about the care and feeding of swimming pools than I do.’

  ‘Not a whole lot. But my learning curve is steep.’

  Just a throw-away line, with the grin to match, and yet it was true, she realised. All through their internship he’d been a quick learner—part of what had irritated her about him. No one should be able to make medicine look that easy!

  He’d flaunted it, too, had shown off his sharp mind. The times he’d referred to yesterday when he’d ‘saved her backside’, as he’d phrased it. She remembered those. He’d handled himself like a magician, conjuring the right diagnosis or the right procedure like producing a rabbit from a hat.

  ‘There you go, Janey,’ followed by his charm-laden grin.

  Through slightly gritted teeth, ‘Thanks, Luke.’

  ‘No worries. You would have got there eventually. Buy me a beer some time.’

  She sensed he didn’t show off any more. The past few years had changed him. He’d matured in ways she hadn’t expected. He’d needed a steep learning curve in deeper and far more personal areas of his life, and he’d responded accordingly. It had been rather a humb
ling learning curve for him, probably.

  She could imagine that for a man like Luke, it must have been a terrible shock and a bitter frustration to discover that his intelligence and charm couldn’t win him anything and everything he wanted—that life wasn’t nearly as easy and sunny and favourable to Dr Luke Bresciano as he’d once thought.

  Alice had been unforgivably cruel.

  But she was my sister, and I loved her, and I’ll never see her again.

  It was hard, such a mess. If you’d been angry with someone you loved, the anger didn’t always die when that person had gone. It simply had nowhere to fit, and just hung around. It got all mixed up with the grief, so you had that to grieve over, too—the fact that your anger wouldn’t let you go. As time went by, her heart would have to settle, surely, but right now…

  She had to blink back her tears.

  Luke removed several more branches, found the arm of another submerged chair and began to heave. His white T-shirt fitted snugly over his muscular frame and emphasised the tanned arms that a man of Italian extraction would have acquired effortlessly within a week of coming to Crocodile Creek.

  As always, by contrast, Janey had carefully slathered herself in sunscreen and moisturiser, under no illusions about what would happen to her skin at this latitude. It was the same in Darwin, if not worse. Partially shaded by the poolside umbrella Luke had unearthed from beneath the veranda, she positively gleamed with lotion from her collarbone to her toes, and yet she loved the heat.

  Thinking about his olive-skinned heritage, and wanting to distract herself from those circular thoughts about her sister, she asked on an impulse, ‘Your parents, Luke, how are they doing?’

  He hauled the newly rescued chair onto the pale sandstone of the pool surround and stopped work for a moment while it dripped in the sun. ‘Pretty well.’ Behind his sunglasses, she couldn’t see his eyes. ‘I only see them a few times a year. But we’re getting on a little better now.’

  Janey remembered that there’d been a rift. Mr and Mrs Bresciano hadn’t liked Alice. They’d let it show, and Alice had been angry and hurt. ‘If we’re not welcome under their roof, then we won’t go. See how they feel about that! Luke fully supports me. He’s furious.’