Long-Lost Son Read online

  ‘You mean I’m practically falling out of it?’

  ‘Nah, it’s fine. Is there anything else I can lend you?’

  ‘I’ve borrowed a couple of things from Emily. I’m doing very well.’

  ‘Well, let me know, because I love seeing how my clothes look on other people! Must go. I hear Christina’s baby hasn’t read the right childbirth books.’

  ‘No, definitely taking an individual approach to the process.’

  Janey found Rowdy out of bed and playing with blocks on a bright square of carpet in the paediatric playroom. There was a little girl with him, about three years old, with a broken arm, a bandaged head and several dressings dotted around her body. They both had IV lines in their arms, tangled lengths of tubing getting in the way of their play, and drip stands like sentinels behind them.

  They played in silence, occasionally nudging each other for a block or laughing when a tower fell down. The stands and tubing and silence both children treated as completely normal, but Rowdy looked scared about the laughing.

  So peculiar, kids, the way they took things in their stride. They lived so much in the present, it had to be a protection for them against troubles that would overwhelm an adult. It was so hard to read what was troubling them underneath. Why was Rowdy scared to laugh?

  Janey gave him a quick kiss and a hello and sat down in a nearby chair. She didn’t want to spoil this, because it had to be good for him. He looked so much better. If she were his doctor she would OK his discharge tomorrow.

  But suddenly that idea was daunting.

  Tomorrow meant the future, and a whole lot of questions she and Luke hadn’t even tried to answer yet.

  Tonight, they had to talk, she knew.

  ‘Wriggle your toes, Christina,’ Luke instructed.

  ‘Can’t.’

  ‘Good. And can you feel this?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘This?’

  ‘No, lovely and numb, no sense of the contractions at all.’

  There was quite a crowd in the operating theatre. Joe held Christina’s hand and stroked the hair back from her face, muttering words of encouragement every now and then. Marcia and theatre nurse Jill did their bit with instruments and drapes. Georgie stood there with her hands deft and serious but her mouth acting as if they were all at a cocktail party. Luke kept an eye on various monitors and on Christina herself.

  ‘So we’re good to go?’ Georgie said. ‘Isn’t this lovely? Crocodile Creek medics having a party. Want me to tell you what I’m doing, Christina?’

  ‘You mean each layer of incision? Now I’m slicing into your uterine wall. Oddly, no!’

  ‘You are such a wimp!’ Georgie was, in fact, slicing into Christina’s uterine wall at that very moment, but Luke didn’t think the jittery patient had even realised she’d started the procedure.

  ‘I know I’m a wimp,’ Christina said. ‘It’s embarrassing. I should have a healthy clinical curiosity and switch to obstetrics the moment I’m back on my feet because the sight of my own innards has been so inspirational. I don’t think so!’

  ‘See, there’s a reason why we drape you all across the middle so you can’t see. Joe, how’s that hand she’s holding? Numb yet?’

  ‘Just get the baby out, woman!’ he said.

  ‘We’re getting the baby out. We’re almost there.’

  ‘You mean, you’ve been…?’ Christina couldn’t believe it.

  ‘As we speak.’

  ‘I can’t feel it!’

  ‘I think that’s what we want, dearie, in this situation. Or that’s what the instruction manual says…unless I’m on the wrong page.’

  ‘Georgie, stop!’

  ‘Ooh, yes, this is fun, I’ve found some knees. Might feel like you’ve got a bag full of fighting puppies on your stomach for a moment or two…Here we go!’

  As usual, it happened very fast in the end. Georgie already had the baby in her hands, a dusky pink, slippery little bundle with a crumpled face and a fine fuzz of silky black hair, getting ready to howl at the top of its lungs after a fast and deft bit of suctioning from its nose and mouth by Marcia.

  ‘Oh! Oh!’ Christina said. She’d felt the pull.

  ‘It’s a girl, Christina, Joe, and she’s beautiful,’ Georgie said. ‘Oh, listen to her!’

  Yep, nothing wrong with those lungs.

  Luke grinned, and then felt his throat tighten. He’d been present at Rowdy’s birth, which Alice had chosen to have at home in their London flat. The home birth had made him nervous. He wasn’t a big fan of the concept. He liked the philosophy behind it—of course birth should be the most positive experience possible, for both mother and child, and the father, too—but he didn’t like the absence of a medical safety net if something went wrong. He preferred hospital-based birthing centres, where ideally you got the best of both worlds. But he’d swallowed his doubts, and in the event everything had gone fine.

  It had been very different to this. Low lighting and music and scented oils, instead of the glare of the operating theatre, the rattle of the metal instruments and the chemical smells. And yet…did it really matter, underneath?

  Georgie had clamped and cut the cord and laid the baby on Christina’s chest. ‘Oh!’ Christina said again. ‘Oh!’

  She smiled and cried, her face rapt. She could have been in a primitive cave or an incense-scented room or almost anywhere, and her joy would have been just the same as this. Joe was grinning, his eyes shining with tears, too. The healthy-sized girl had stopped crying and looked quietly alert, with those muddy dark newborn eyes staring at the contrasts of light and dark and her little hands splayed out like pink starfish.

  ‘Oh, isn’t she fabulous? Oh, she’s so beautiful!’

  Luke checked his monitors and equipment, and thought that, really, in essence, this was no different to what he and Alice had had with their baby boy. The sense of love and wonder and enormous change. The instant perfection in those tiny toes, that silky head, those movements. Christina and Joe were captivated, bowled over, oblivious to everything else, and this healthy baby was already very deeply loved, and that was all that really counted.

  This was Day One, just the beginning, and this little family was off to a good start.

  ‘You might feel another bit of a pull,’ Georgie warned. She delivered the afterbirth, checked that everything was intact, and Jill took the placenta away to be weighed. Shortly, they’d weigh the baby and check her for any problems. Luke doubted there’d be anything wrong. Her left foot was a little crooked because of her odd position in the uterus, but that shouldn’t last, and could be corrected if it did.

  ‘Congratulations, Christina,’ he said. ‘And Joe. Does she have a name?’

  ‘Isabella Jane,’ they chorused together.

  ‘Just because we both like it,’ Christina said. She dropped her voice and spoke to her little daughter. ‘Don’t we, sweetheart? Hope you do, too. Oh, I love you, I’m sorry I complained about your foot. It’s a precious foot.’

  ‘We’d better take her for a while,’ Marcia said, after another few moments. ‘She has a busy schedule this afternoon, don’t you, sweetheart? She has to be weighed and measured and bathed.’

  ‘And her mummy needs a bit of needlework,’ Georgie said. ‘Her seams have split.’

  Christina laughed. ‘Georgie, you are awful!’

  ‘Careful about insulting your specialist while she has you flat on a table. I might use staples instead of soluble sutures, and then you’ll be sorry.’

  Luke shook his head and chuckled to himself. Then he thought about Janey and Rowdy, and realised that this was Day One for the three of them, too. His breath caught in his throat suddenly. There was so much to work out.

  ‘Mr Connolly says you saw him on Tuesday at the emergency clinic in Bellambour and there was nothing wrong with him,’ said Nurse Sarah Crisp in a tone that said, This is your fault, but I’m the one copping an unreasonable patient.

  Her reaction made Luke officially sorry tha
t he’d detoured through A and E on the way up to coax Janey away from Rowdy in the paediatric unit. He didn’t unburden himself to Sarah regarding his failure to check Mr Connolly out properly on Tuesday. He’d tried to contact the Connolly family by phone three times now, but with the cyclone damage they didn’t have coverage and he hadn’t been able to reach them.

  Still, it was his fault that the man was here now, apparently running a significant fever, with aches and chills.

  He knew it was his fault, but Sarah didn’t need a huge confession on the issue, not when Charles had told him categorically that he wasn’t supposed to be working today.

  So he attempted an approach that he rarely resorted to these days—a killer combination of arrogance and charm. Flashed the smile first then spoke, confident and breezy. ‘Sarah, thanks for that. You’re right. He’s going to be a difficult patient. You know the type. Let me take a look at him, and I’m sure we can work out what’s going on.’

  But he couldn’t do it any more.

  It sounded tinny and wrong to his own ears, and Sarah didn’t look impressed. He resisted the temptation to try harder and just let the subject go. He listened to Mr Connolly’s chest and ordered an X-ray, told the man’s daughter-in-law that he suspected pneumonia and then found Charles bearing down upon him. ‘Luke—’

  ‘Let me have this patient, Charles. It’s something I should have picked up on Tuesday, and I didn’t.’

  ‘Come and talk in my office for a bit.’

  ‘So you can tell me I’ve been working too hard? We hardly need your office for that!’

  ‘So we can get a timetable sorted out, and your priorities. I know you’re not going to leave the hospital in the lurch when we’re so strapped, but you do need to take some time off.’

  ‘I—’

  ‘For Janey and Rowdy’s sake, if not for your own. Do you know yet what’s going to happen with the boy? We tend to take the future of our waifs and strays pretty seriously around here. What happens after he’s discharged, as far as you’re concerned?’

  Someone walked past, ears clearly pricked to hear the latest news, and Luke dropped his voice. ‘Your office was a good idea.’

  ‘Mmm, yes, I thought it was,’ Charles answered mildly, with a twinkle in his eye.

  So I can still be a cocky young idiot, in some people’s view, Luke realised, and had a sudden flash of understanding about why Janey had found him so unbearable eight years ago. Two minutes later he found himself spilling half his soul across Charles Wetherby’s very nice antique desk.

  And Charles listened. He was a good man and he had a lot on his plate right now. The hospital’s administrator, Brian Simmons, whom no one much liked, had been away down south since before the cyclone had hit, and much of his workload was falling on Charles. Luke really had no right to expect such an attentive and empathetic audience but…yeah…he listened, and towards the end of it Luke found himself saying, ‘I don’t know if I’m the best person to have him. I’m his father. I love him.’

  Charles nodded. ‘I can see that. Isn’t that all that matters?’

  ‘But he doesn’t have a clue who I am, and I have no idea if I should tell him, because I have no idea what Alice might have said to him about me. She was inclined to—I mean, it’s the kind of thing I could see her doing. Telling him I was dead, or that I was a bad man, that I hated him and didn’t want him. She told Janey I didn’t want him. He seems to trust Janey. He knows who she is, at least, that she’s his auntie, and he’s happy about that. And she’s such a great person. Grounded.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve had that impression.’

  ‘And I want what’s best for my son. And maybe that’s—’ suddenly he was close to tears ‘—not me, Charles, if Alice has said all sorts of appalling things. After everything he’s been through, maybe the best thing for my child is to let him go to Darwin with his Auntie Janey, and I can come and visit occasionally as a family friend, and Rowdy doesn’t find out until he’s an adult who I really am. If that’s best…’

  ‘But it’s not what you want for yourself.’

  ‘No. But does what I want for myself count, though? At all? I’ve seen parents shamelessly use their kids for their own ends and it’s horrible. I won’t do that!’

  ‘You’d be a good father.’

  ‘How can you possibly know that? I don’t know it yet myself.’

  ‘Because only a good father would say what you’re saying. Is Janey settled in Darwin for good?’

  ‘I have no idea.’

  ‘Because if she’s not, then you can reach a compromise, or take things slowly. Live closer to each other, for a start. One or both of you can move. It doesn’t all have to be so black and white, Luke.’

  ‘Black and white, that was very much Alice’s style. I guess it’s become a habit…’

  ‘You’re not Alice. And Janey’s not Alice, as I understand it.’

  ‘No, she’s not.’ He couldn’t hide the heartfelt thankfulness behind the words, and he caught a curious glance from Charles.

  ‘Here’s what I prescribe,’ the older man said. ‘Go out to dinner tonight, the two of you, and talk. Find out what you’re both thinking.’

  ‘Dinner…’ Luke said.

  ‘The Green Dragon is open, in town. I recommend their Peking-style vegetarian dumplings.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Tomorrow, if I could possibly have you here at the hospital for a longish shift, I’d appreciate it, because I imagine Joe’s going to declare himself on paternity leave for at least the next twenty-four hours.’

  ‘Done.’

  ‘We’ll send Rowdy home to the doctors’ house in the morning for some time with Janey, and then on Friday the two of you should take him somewhere. Charm Island is still in business, I’m told, and the resort shuttle boat service is running. Take a picnic, spoil him a bit, talk to each other when you can, you and Janey, and see where you get to after that.’

  ‘What if—?’

  ‘See where you get to,’ Charles repeated. ‘There might not be any what-ifs by then.’

  Luke nodded, privately doubting. He had that old feeling, the one he’d had in London after Alice and the baby had disappeared—that if he didn’t do something heroic and physical and flashy and one hundred per cent proactive right this second, he’d actually explode, start yelling uncontrollably in the street and pulling out his hair, go stark raving mad.

  ‘Saturday is Gina and Cal’s wedding,’ Charles went on. ‘They insist they’re not postponing it just for a little detail like cyclone damage.’

  ‘Aren’t they having their ceremony on the beach?’ The lump in his throat had begun to get looser, thank goodness. It felt a little easier to focus on someone else’s problems.

  ‘Cal’s organising a clean-up crew,’ Charles said. ‘Walter Grubb is handling the catering, which frightens me slightly, but he says the missus is telling him what to do and it’s going to be a pit barbecue. It’s not your problem. All you have to do is show up.’

  ‘I have to do that?’ He hadn’t intended to go.

  ‘With Janey,’ Charles said gently. ‘And Rowdy. Think he might be quite interested in a pit barbecue…’

  ‘You might be right.’

  They smiled at each other, and the weight on Luke’s shoulders lessened a little further.

  ‘How’s he been?’ Luke moved a spare chair closer to Rowdy’s bed and sat next to Janey. She was watching his son sleep.

  ‘He’s been great!’ She frowned and added in an undertone, ‘For a kid who doesn’t speak. He played toys with a little girl on the play carpet for, gosh, over an hour. He looked good, Luke, and he tired himself out in a healthy way, and now he’s taking a nap. I’m just—’

  ‘Watching him,’ Luke finished. ‘Yeah.’

  They both did so, for about forty minutes, saying very little. It nourished something in Luke’s soul, just to see that breathing going in and out, and that little face relaxed in sleep. Nourished him to have Janey there with him, too. Wh
en a child looked this peaceful, you couldn’t believe there was anything really wrong with his spirit. If only Rowdy would speak…

  ‘Charles has a plan for us,’ Luke told Janey.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’m taking you to dinner at the Green Dragon tonight.’

  ‘Oh, you are?’

  ‘We need to talk, don’t you think? Easier if it’s somewhere quiet, with no interruptions and nothing else to do.’

  ‘That makes sense,’ she murmured, and didn’t argue, and as had happened when he had been talking to Charles, he felt a sense of the weight lifting from his tightly held shoulders.

  Janey was sensible.

  Good grief, he’d begun to value the fact that she was sensible!

  CHAPTER FIVE

  GEORGIE insisted on lending Janey a dress for that evening, but then Gina Lopez stepped in and said enthusiastically, ‘Or why don’t you borrow something of mine?’

  She and Georgie fought with some degree of animation over whose clothes would fit Janey best, and who had the most appropriate outfit on hand for a scintillating evening at the town’s venerable Chinese establishment. You would have thought that lending a temporarily homeless doctor some clothing was the must-do activity of the year. After a couple of minutes Janey began to foresee an escalation into mutual accusations of bad fashion sense and permanently wounded feelings.

  ‘Let me stick to Georgie’s wardrobe,’ she said, ‘because that’s what we’d already agreed. I appreciate it, though, Gina, I really do.’

  And she should possibly have considered the American doctor’s offer more seriously, because Georgie’s dressy outfits resembled her swimsuits in the skimpiness department. ‘Who knew your legs were that much longer than mine?’ Georgie muttered, surveying Janey’s appearance in a sheath-style dress with a splashy abstract flower pattern of dark blue on white.

  ‘It’s fine. My legs’ll be under the table.’

  ‘Not in the car, they won’t. They’ll be right there in full view, all four hundred inches of them. I hope Luke can keep his eyes on the road.’