“No,” I said. “Or—thanks, but—it’s my ... my husband out there.”
Matiu looked up from his work, and so did the nurse. “That’s good, then,” the nurse said. “I’ll go get him for you. What’s his name?”
Matiu had taken his arm out of me, at least, which was a positive development in my life. He was giving me an injection in a couple extremely sensitive spots, which made me jump, then taking a threaded needle from the nurse. Going to stitch me up where I’d torn, which wasn’t likely to be much of an improvement, pain-wise, but I didn’t care. I wasn’t hemorrhaging anymore, surely, or the atmosphere would have been much more tense. I was fine. Physically. “Max Cantwell,” I said. “He’s not a ... a visitor, at least he’s not mine. I think he’s a patient. He was in the ambulance while you were bringing me in. I need to know about that. I need to know about it now.”
The nurse exchanged a look with Matiu, and my blood ran, if possible, even colder. “What?” I asked. “Is he dead?”
Matiu didn’t stop stitching. He was cool, and no mistake. The opposite of me, because “cool” was the very last thing I felt. But then, how would you feel, if you’d seen the woman you suspected was having an affair with your husband being carried out of an ambulance, and had heard your husband calling her name, and they were both right here instead of three hundred fifty kilometers away? When you’d just had his baby? When you were hurting, and bleeding, and alone?
You might wish you were dead. If you weren’t me, that is. I was more wishing he was.
But then, I was a redhead.
Matiu
The next ten minutes were interesting, if by “interesting,” you meant “enraging.”
I was detached. I focused, and then I let go. That was the only way to do this job with compassion, but without burning out. It was why you didn’t treat people you knew, except when there was no choice. For example, when your former Year 10 maths teacher, an unsmiling taskmaster who hadn’t been much impressed with you at the time and had let you know it, turned up in Emergency on a night when you were the only doctor available, with something very embarrassing tucked up his backside. An occurrence that is much more common than the public realizes. “Don’t put it in if you don’t have a way to pull it out” is a life lesson some people insist on learning the hard way.
It hadn’t been a lightbulb, at least. Small mercy. A torch instead, switched on, which had generated some fairly creative humor around the place, the best of which was Galadriel offering Frodo the special light “for the dark places, when all other lights go out.” It still made me smile, but at the time, I’d maintained my poker face, because that was what you did.
Today, though, it was harder. When the fella came into the room with the nurse, limping, his right arm in a sling and his right eye swelling shut, I was still stitching Poppy up, which gave me an excuse not to look at him.
The nurse said, “You’ve got a little girl. Congratulations.”
Poppy said, “Max,” in the kind of a voice that tells a man he’ll be sleeping on the couch tonight.
Max looked hunted, as much as a bloke with a black eye could, and said, “I came as soon as I got your message.”
Poppy said, “But you had an accident.”
“I did,” he said. “Half out of my mind with worry, is why, but it’s all turned out OK. Everybody’s alive, and everybody’s going to heal. What a relief. And the baby’s come, eh. A girl’s fine. A girl’s good. And quick is better, I guess.”
He took her hand, which still had a few streaks of dried blood on it despite the nurse’s sponging, and she pulled it away. “Where was the accident?” she asked.
“What does it matter?” he said. “I’m here now. We’re both here. Where are the kids? Trust you to get yourself into that scrape. That’s drama, eh. One to tell the baby about later.” He laughed a little, and the nurse stared at him.
“Where?” Poppy demanded.
He didn’t answer, but the nurse did. “Pukehiki intersection,” she said. “Coming from Larnach Castle.” Perhaps not the most professional response, but she’d seen Poppy looking out for her kids even as she was giving birth. She’d seen the fear on her face, and the courage, too.
“Ah,” Poppy said. “Fifteen minutes from home. Who knew? Coming from Camp Estate, I’m guessing. Where we couldn’t go for the babymoon, because you had too much to get sorted with work before the baby. Where we made the baby, on that mini-break that you told me was a beautiful time. You told me I was your princess, and for once, that didn’t feel like a jokey dig. That night when you kissed my forehead and told me how glad you were that I was yours. Remember that? You promised me everything was going to be better now, and I thought you meant it. I thought we had a chance, and I just had to try harder, because being married to me isn’t easy, and there are two sides to every story. You liked it so well there, though, that you went back again. How is Violet? Hurt badly, is she? Violet Leung,” she informed me. “She’s a director at Max’s firm. Convenient, especially as he does import/export logistics, and she’s fluent in Cantonese and Mandarin. Very beautiful, and not one bit pregnant, which is so much more attractive, isn’t it? Long black hair, three of which I found in his car last month. By the time we were done with that conversation, Max had me apologizing to him. Chuckling about how I was hormonal and irrational, but he loved me for my passion.”
Max opened his mouth, closed it again, and looked at me wildly. I considered calling Security, but he didn’t seem violent. Poppy might be another matter, if she weren’t fairly well restrained right now.
“Violet’s arm is broken,” Max said. “And she’s hurt worse than that, because she was knocked unconscious, so she has concussion and who knows what else. I’m going to pretend you didn’t say all this, that you weren’t throwing out all these accusations just because I had an accident after a business meeting that you knew was happening. You’re drugged to the gills, and you’ve had a fright and a bad time, so I’m going to go find our baby, collect Hamish and Olivia, and remember that you’re my wife, I love you, and you need my support just now.”
“Give it up,” Poppy said. “You can’t get back from Christchurch in an hour, the Pukehiki intersection is on the road to precisely nowhere, and you aren’t wearing your wedding ring. Whoops. Where is it? In the glove box? In that designer toilet kit I bought you for your birthday, along with a black lace thong in an extremely small size that you’re keeping as a souvenir?”
Max did some more of his fish imitation, then said, “They had to remove it for the ... the collarbone.” There was no groove in the skin of his finger, and you didn’t have to take off a ring to set a collarbone anyway, so that one wasn’t true. “It’s cracked,” he went on. “The collarbone. Hurts like hell. Having you go off on me like this isn’t helping much, and what’s worse, it isn’t helping us. I know you don’t know quite what you’re saying just now, but maybe you should stop before you say something you can’t take back, or before I do.”
“Oh, it hurts?” Poppy asked. “I’m so very sorry.” I didn’t smile, but I wanted to. She went on, “The baby’s name is Isobel Rose. You can go say hello to her, and then you can go move your things out of the house. Or go sit with Violet. See if she wants a husband. Slightly used.”
“We’ll discuss it later,” Max said.
She tried to hoist herself up, and I pulled back just in time to keep from stabbing her with the needle in a place that would’ve put a crimp in her future sex life. I looked at the nurse and said, “Security,” at which she nodded, stepped away, took off her gloves, and took out her phone. Then I told Max, who’d be a good-looking fella without the black eye, with dark-blonde hair cut short and a good, if slim, physique, “Your wife hasn’t had much pain medication. There wasn’t time. This is upsetting her, though, and I’ll ask you to leave. She’ll be admitted as soon as I’m done, and she can decide whether she wants you in the room then.”
“I’m her husband,” Max said, a couple patches of red on
his cheekbones now.
“But I’m her doctor,” I said. “I’m in charge here, and her safety and comfort are all that matter right now. Please leave.”
“Come on, darling,” Max said, ignoring me. “The baby’s not going to be named Isobel. We discussed this. You’re angry I wasn’t here, and probably that I made the mistake of saying I wanted a boy, which I’m not saying now, because it’s fine, but you’re trying to pick a fight over it anyway. I couldn’t be angrier at myself, but then, we both thought we were weeks away, didn’t we? We’re both here now, though, safe and sound, and so is Charlotte.” He glanced at the pieces of placenta, made a face, and looked away.
“Her name,” Poppy said, “is Isobel.”
Which was when the security guard came in and took him away. Three minutes later, I finished my stitching, charted the whole thing, and headed off to the next patient. And did my best to regather my professionalism, my poise, and my famous detachment.
Not my fight. Not my family. Not my woman.
4
Somebody Else’s Everything
Matiu
One thing I knew for sure: When you thought, “What am I doing?” even as you were doing it, that wasn’t a good sign.
I finished my shift, did the handoff between the morning and afternoon teams, got out of my scrubs, took the very hot shower that was part of my end-of-shift routine, which helped me wind down and rid me of any pathogens that had hung about for a ride, and ... didn’t head off for that swim. Instead, I took the stairs three flights up to the Queen Charlotte Unit, checked in at Reception, was grateful that I wasn’t well known around the hospital yet, and, eventually, headed down the passage and into a four-bedded room in which one bed was empty, and two beds had their curtains open, revealing one dad sitting, elbows on knees, talking in low tones to the woman in the bed, and another dad fumbling to change a nappy to the tune of thin newborn wails, his movements suggesting that this was his first time doing it on a real live baby, and that he was scared.
And one cubicle, next to the window, where the curtain was all the way closed.
I gave myself a moment to come to my senses. It didn’t happen, so I knocked on the window beside the curtain and called softly, “Poppy? It’s Matiu Te Mana.”
A long moment. I thought, Asleep, and the rational part of my brain was glad of it. Then I heard, “Come in.”
I stepped inside, closing the curtain behind me. She was alone except for the baby, who was at her breast. A white hat over her curls, feet in little white socks, and the impossibly tiny body. Poppy was holding one of the baby’s hands as she nursed, and when she looked up at me, her expression was more serene than I’d have expected.
She said, “I’d be embarrassed, but you’ve already seen it all.”
I laughed. “Not what I expected you to say. And I’m not here as a doctor.” I cleared my throat, and the laughter was gone. “I need to make that plain. My part’s done, and I’m out of it. Just a visitor, so if you want me to bugger off, say so.”
Yeh, this was hardly an ethical quagmire at all. “Just checking on you,” I went on to say, “because of the family connection and the ... difficult time you’ve had. Always a bit awkward when you realize who you’re working on.”
“I didn’t care. I was just glad to see a doctor.” The baby had her entire hand wrapped around her mum’s index finger. The grasping reflex, but there was also no question to me that she knew her mother. The smell of her, and the sound of her voice. “She’s beautiful, isn’t she?” Poppy asked, her face and voice both so soft, they almost hurt to witness. “Or am I just another prejudiced mum?”
“I thought that myself,” I said, “when I first saw her. That she was beautiful.”
“Calm, too,” Poppy said. “Which makes no sense, if she was absorbing my stress hormones. I think they must just be born the way they are. What do you think?”
“Not my specialty. Obstetrics. Pediatrics.” I was smiling. There was no way I could have kept from doing it, and it was a good thing I wasn’t here as her doctor. My lack of distance was off the charts.
“You did well, though,” Poppy said.
“So did you.”
Her face changed. “Wrong decision, to try to walk here when my labor was going that fast. Wrong all the way. I couldn’t think what else to do, though. I’m feeling so lucky, and I’m feeling so scared, too. Much worse than I felt at the time, which is odd. Why do you get so scared after the fact? What’s the point? And do you want to sit down?”
“I’m pretty sure you made the best decision you could in the moment. After the fact—that’s the adrenaline leaving, that’s all. And your mind processing what it couldn’t, in the moment.” I sat in a visitor’s chair, and she lifted the baby from her breast, put her against her shoulder, adjusted her gown to cover herself, and started to pat her daughter’s back.
I wanted two things. I wanted to stroke her shoulder, to take her hand, and I also wanted to stand up again, access her chart, and see how she was doing. In other words, to put that professional distance in place again, even though I couldn’t be here as her doctor. She was still pale, her freckles standing out in sharp relief on her cheekbones and nose, and a tray sat on her bedside table, the apple juice and pudding cup untouched. I couldn’t tell what was under the metal hood covering the plate, but it smelled like cabbage, and I’d bet she hadn’t eaten it.
“How are your other kids?” I asked. “Did somebody collect them? I could ring Karen, if you need help.” My cousin Hemi’s sister-in-law, who’d just married Poppy’s brother, Jax. They were living up in Christchurch. Jax was in the military and not exactly flexible, but Karen would come. Poppy’s whanau would be necessary now. A woman couldn’t do this alone, could she?
I knew women did just exactly that every single day. It still felt completely wrong.
“My mum got them and took them home,” Poppy said. “We’re fine.”
“Your son was brave,” I said.
She smiled, but it was wobbly. “Hamish. He was. I hate that he had to be.”
“Nah.” I touched her shoulder. Lightly, in the reassuring way I’d touch a patient, and ... not. “You’ll talk it over with him, and he’ll feel better knowing he helped.”
“Was that what you were like as a kid?” she asked. “A helper?”
“Who? Me?” I laughed. “Nah. I was a cheeky bugger. Cocky, you could say. Full of myself. Can’t you tell?”
“I could before,” she said. “At the wedding. Not so much today.”
There was a lump in my throat, and it took a second before I said, “So. Baby’s dad is ...”
Why did I ask it? I was already on very thin ice here, and skating ever closer to that jagged hole.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’d say I don’t care, but clearly, I do. I’m wondering what happens if I go home and he’s still there, and I’m wondering what it’ll feel like if he’s gone. I can’t stand to see him, and I also know he’s the kids’ dad and he always will be, and that cutting off his testicles isn’t actually a valid option. Can’t be a mum from prison. I’m also wondering how I could be so stupid, but it doesn’t matter now, because I’ve been exactly that stupid, and it’s done. I need to call a lawyer. It’s bloody depressing to think about calling a lawyer from the maternity ward.” She looked down at the baby, and I guessed at some tears that were being held back. I also heard the gentle rumble of male voices from the beds around us, from men who couldn’t quite believe that they were dads, who were awed by what they’d just seen. Whose partners hadn’t had to give birth alone on a patch of grass.
I asked, “Got a dad yourself, haven’t you?” I knew she did. I’d seen him at that wedding. “And a brother, too. In this circumstance, a soldier could be useful. Special Forces, eh. He might cut off those testicles himself, save you the bother.”
“I’m sure that’s not in the ... Hippocratic Oath. For you to say.” Her eyes were closing. She had to be so tired.
I said, “He’
s a fool.”
The baby’s body shook, and she put a hand over her eyes.
I asked, “Can I take her?” and she nodded without looking at me.
My two hands were just about the size of Isobel, because she was a wee thing, and when I took her from her mum, cradling her head in my palm, she opened sleepy eyes and looked into mine again, the same way she’d done when she was born. Her pink petal of a mouth opened, and she yawned. I said, “Eh, little one. I’m boring, you’re thinking. Nothing to offer but a cuddle.” After that, I snuggled her up close, smelled her milky newborn scent, and patted her back. I knew how to do it. I was a doctor, I was Maori, and I had heaps of family.
Poppy lay there, her hand over her face, and Isobel lay, warm and solid and so small, against my shoulder. Both of them were meant to be somebody else’s everything. Why wasn’t that happening? And what was I going to do with the way my chest was tightening, the way my heart was expanding?
None of it was a good idea on any sort of level. But being here felt necessary, and leaving them alone felt impossible.
Poppy
I hadn’t cried this whole day, but I was doing it now. At the very worst time, too. What would Matiu think of me? Why did I care? More importantly, what was I going to tell the kids? What was I going to tell my parents?
That I’d failed. That I’d had everything, and I’d blown it all up. Funny, silly Poppy, scatty as always, making another colossal, comical mistake, being somebody’s cautionary tale. Living a lie.
Matiu was holding my baby, who was perfect, who was safe. My mum had my other kids, and they were safe, too, but I needed to talk to Hamish. I needed to tell my sweet, sensitive little fella how well he’d done, that nothing had been his fault. I needed to haul myself back up to my version of competence, to managing a life that was slipping away through my fingers, and I only had tonight to do it. Tomorrow, I’d be going home, and it would all be on top of me. No escape.
Stone Cold Kiwi (New Zealand Ever After Book 2) Page 3
