Home to Turtle Bay

by Marion Lennox

  ‘We think so. Both legs were badly broken. Bridget was in traction for months, but now … She won’t accept that she might be able to stand.’

  ‘She lost…’

  ‘Both parents.’ Jack’s voice was clipped and, despite the dismay his words caused, I knew better than to enquire further. Not that I wanted to.

  ‘If I can help…’ I ventured and he gave a curt nod.

  ‘You already have. As I said, I’m grateful.’

  ‘It’s the least I can do.’ I even managed a sort-of grin. ‘I always do the least I can do.’

  He was looking at me strangely. ‘Now why don’t I believe that?’

  Maybe it was time to be honest. ‘For the same reason I don’t believe it of you, I guess. Where’s Bridget now?’

  ‘At home. With my housekeeper.’

  ‘Is she nice?’

  ‘Carrie’s the best.’

  ‘I’m glad.’ I kept right on smiling at him. He wasn’t responding and somehow I wanted him to. It was like a dare. Stupid or not, I wanted the laughter to return to eyes which looked permanently shadowed. He might smile, he might try to make life a joke, but I could see pain. There were things going on in this man’s life I had no idea of.

  There were things going on in my life I had no idea of. I needed to go and see Muriel.

  ‘I’ll leave you to your patients, then,’ I told him.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Stop thanking me. You saved Muriel’s leg—and you saved my turtle.’

  ‘Right.’ He gave a shamefaced grin. ‘Even if it did mean trespassing. I might even trespass again sometime.’

  ‘When you have the spare time,’ I said dryly.

  The grin faded. ‘I have all the time in the world,’ he said. ‘Far, far too much time.’

  I stared—but he was already striding away down the corridor.

  ‘Muriel?’

  Muriel was awake but she had no intention of responding. She’d attempted to make up her face. Her blonde bob was brushed into neat precision and she was wearing her prettiest negligee, but she still looked … defeated. Almost old. She didn’t turn her head when I slipped into the chair beside her and took her hand. Her fingers were limp in my grasp. Of course.

  ‘Things are great, Muriel. You’ve come through the operation really well.’

  ‘I’m not well. I’m alive.’

  ‘Um…’ I thought about that for a bit. ‘I didn’t know you wanted to be dead.’

  ‘Henry’s dead. Maybe I came all the way here so I could die in the same place he did. And you stopped me.’

  ‘Hey!’ That was hardly fair. I made a huge effort to be breezy. ‘If we hadn’t operated then you’d still be alive but your leg would be dead. That’d mean amputation. Think of all the shoes you couldn’t wear. Or maybe you’d have refused amputation. Gangrene would set in and you’d be dying inch by horrible inch.’

  Muriel blinked. ‘You mean I wouldn’t have died on the operating table?’

  ‘Only if I’d turned off the gas, and I’m not into losing perfectly healthy grandmothers.’

  ‘The clot could have moved to my heart and I would have died, just like that.’ She sounded almost wistful.

  ‘And you might have ended up with an amputated leg. The fates were on your side. Sorry, Grandma, this time you were meant to live.’

  Muriel flinched. Weakly. I stayed silent, watchful, as the tension dissipated a little.

  ‘Henry would have hated for me to have my leg amputated,’ she whispered at last.

  ‘If ever I met anyone who’s meant to be an intact angel, it’s you,’ I agreed. ‘You need full makeup, your very nicest couture gown, your wings preened and polished—the whole box and dice—before you meet St Peter.’

  She smiled—just.

  ‘Are you in pain?’

  ‘They gave me something a few minutes ago. They give me stuff even when I don’t want it. Jenny, I don’t want to stay here for six weeks.’

  Jenny. That made twice in one lifetime.

  ‘I don’t think you have a choice.’

  ‘Henry’s here.’

  ‘Henry’s dead.’

  ‘He’s still here. I can feel him.’ She shook her head in distress. ‘You know he needed me. Have the locals told you that? Have they told you why?’

  ‘Because he was injured? Yes.’ I paused. ‘You can’t undo the past,’ I said gently. There. My attempt at comfort. Not bad, considering.

  ‘It was all so horrible.’

  ‘Was that why you left him? Because of the burns?’ I couldn’t believe we were having this discussion. After all these years…

  ‘Do you think I’d have left him for anything else? And then Sonia…your mother … She made it so much worse.’

  ‘Sonia was here,’ I said. ‘My mother stayed here before I was born. The guy milking our cows just told me.’

  ‘Of course she did. To meet her father. She wanted to come. She was at me constantly about it, and finally I gave her the fare. But I was a fool. A fool. She hated his face. She wouldn’t stay in his house and she made everything even more dreadful. She was so full of noble intentions when she left. She couldn’t believe I’d deserted her father. After all, he was a war hero. In her imagination he was noble and I was totally heartless. The names she called me as a teenager … but how could I defend myself? Of course she thought she’d do better, but one look …’

  Had they both been cruel—Muriel and Sonia in turn? I cringed at the thought. No wonder Muriel was coping so badly with this place.

  ‘You need to sleep,’ I said, but there were tears slipping down her old lady face. More tears.

  ‘He expected you. Did you see that sign? The surfing school? That’s a sick joke. Pulling you in. As if he can ever have a family now. But he’s trying. And that young doctor … Dr McLachlan. So judgemental. He thinks I’m appalling. I’m sure he thinks what they all think. All of them. They hate me. I hate me.’

  ‘Muriel, stop it.’

  She gasped and choked, and I grabbed a tissue and tried to wipe her face, but she swiped my hand away.

  ‘Don’t touch me. Don’t!’

  That was how it’d always been, from the time I’d first remembered. Don’t touch.

  ‘Okay, but I’m staying for a bit,’ I said gently. ‘Go to sleep.’

  So, despite her protests, I sat. From the window I could see the surf on the distant beach. The hospital was high. You could almost see Henry’s farm from here.

  Once upon a time it must have been Muriel’s home.

  I could almost feel the ghosts of her past. She was back on her island and they were closing in on her.

  She was in pain but I couldn’t help.

  She wouldn’t want me to.

  ‘Jenny?’

  Muriel had been asleep for a whole ten minutes before a tentative knock on the door announced Jack’s arrival.

  Jenny? Had I told Jack to call me Jenny? It felt weird.

  But now wasn’t the time to be thinking of names. Jack’s face was rigid.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ His expression had me swinging into professional mode. I was reacting to the urgency in his voice as if it was mid-morning and I was back in my consulting rooms in Manhattan.

  He’d come right into the room now, giving the sleeping Muriel only a sideways glance. ‘Jen, I have no right to ask, but Mary McConachie … Clive’s wife … the guy who milks your cows? She’s haemorrhaging. I’ll lose her unless you help.’

  7

  slash n. a sweeping, fast change of direction down the face of a wave.

  I didn’t argue. I followed him down the corridor, or tried to. He was out of sight before I reached the first turn.

  An obstetric haemorrhage … Here! What sort of medical setup was this?

  Jack had no right to be delivering babies without backup. The idea was monstrous. There was apparently no paediatrician. No anaesthetist. Only Jack.

  Obstetrics is ninety-nine percent boredom, one percent panic. Most of the ti
me things go fine but it’s the one percent that women cover themselves for by booking into well-equipped city hospitals.

  Did he think he was a superhero?

  But this was no time for criticism. Deirdre, white with terror and trailing pink wool that showed she’d shoved her knitting into a pocket and forgotten it, was ushering me into the operating theatre where a few short hours ago we’d saved Muriel’s leg.

  Jack was already donning theatre gear. ‘Can you operate?’ he demanded. ‘I’ve done pre-op. I’ll go in if you can’t, but I hope you will.’

  ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘Mary’s a multigravida. Henrietta’s her fifth baby. I strongly advise expectant mothers to fly out to Sydney before they’re due, but Mary put it off until it was too late. Lots of the mothers here do. My grandparents, both doctors, offered an obstetric service of sorts, but with me alone it’s downright frightening. But they won’t see the danger and they won’t go. Mary delivered this morning. I wanted to fly her out on delivery, but she said it was all over, so what was the fuss? And now…’ He glanced across at the table where Janet was adjusting a bag of plasma. ‘This. With this amount of blood there must be a ruptured uterus. It’s the only way to explain it.’

  ‘I’ll scrub.’ I was asking no more questions. If he was right, if there was a tear in there, it could well be expanding with the force of the bleeding. No wonder he couldn’t wait.

  We might only have minutes.

  We might have less.

  Jack deferred to me absolutely. This time he was the anaesthetist, and I was the surgeon. As life-threatening as this was, I’d seen it before and knew what to do. I’d spent my early medical years in one of New York’s major birthing units, and by the time I’d completed my training I was being used as a troubleshooter.

  Yet I didn’t know the outcome. A ruptured uterus was something obstetricians dreaded. Luckily it was incredibly rare. It occurred mostly in women who’d had several children or who’d had caesarean births, then tried to deliver a child naturally. The rupture must have happened during the birth—a tear where the signs were disguised by normal after-birth bleeding. But then the bleeding increased. To this.

  We were losing her through blood loss.

  ‘I have four units of plasma on board already,’ Jack said. Mary was already deeply asleep when, gowned and scrubbed in record time, I approached the table.

  I nodded, moving fast. ‘If you’re right I’ll do a complete clearance. You have the necessary authority?’

  ‘You mean are we legal?’ Jack gave a laugh that wasn’t even close to containing humour. ‘Clive’s still in your dairy. I’ve sent someone to fetch him but we go in now.’

  It seemed we were to forget legal. There was enough to worry about without it. An emergency hysterectomy with this amount of haemorrhage called for all the skills we possessed.

  Jack was brilliant. I’d decided it this morning as he’d operated on Muriel, but I realised it even more so now. Mary had lost so much blood that the skill wasn’t only doing my specialist repairs and doing them fast. It was Jack’s job as an anaesthetist to keep her alive while I worked. Like me, Jack wasn’t a trained anaesthetist. He had to call on skills he must be hardly aware of.

  I couldn’t think of that. The moment the operation started, I had no space to think of anything but what was beneath my hands.

  But I was still acutely aware of him—acutely aware that I wasn’t fighting alone. I could hear his instructions for IV fluids. I could hear how he fought back as Mary’s heart faltered. Once I thought we’d lost her, as Mary’s heart missed two, three beats, and then somehow kept going.

  Deirdre, Janet and Fraser were all in the background, grimly silent, working as if their own lives depended on it. At some stage Deirdre’s knitting fell out of her pocket and it was kicked aside as if it was of no import.

  Nothing mattered except keeping this woman alive.

  There was so much blood. I had to work faster.

  Please …

  Somehow she continued to live. Somehow the tenuous balance continued to stay on the side of life. It was one of the fastest hysterectomies I’d ever performed. The blood loss had ceased but the fight was still far from over.

  Had we made it in time?

  I stood away from the table and was aware of stark silence. My commands had ceased and only Jack was still working. Beneath the mask, the woman’s pallor was ghastly. She had a mass of deep brown hair spilling out from under the theatre cap. There hadn’t been time to tuck it neatly under.

  I glanced back at the plasma bags. We’d replaced so much fluid. She’d be so anaemic.

  She needed cross-matched blood.

  ‘I’ve already put a call out for donors,’ Jack said.

  Covered. This man was good.

  ‘I think she’s stabilising,’ Janet whispered, her eyes on the monitors.

  They were still hardly daring to breathe. This amount of blood loss involved massive shock.

  Please.

  But the thin green line on the monitor kept rising and falling. I was completely focused on watching. I’d stripped away my gloves and was staring at the line as though I could personally make it rise and fall.

  ‘Reverse,’ I told Jack and he glanced in question before nodding. Right. Now was the time to cease the anaesthetic, to let Mary breathe by herself. If she would.

  And she did.

  Two minutes later the woman’s rasping breath filled the theatre. Blood was flowing through her veins—there was no more loss.

  Maybe luck had been on our side.

  ‘You realise we need more luck if we’re to get out of this without massive legal issues?’ I asked, as ten minutes later a haggard Jack stripped off his gown and let it drop to the floor. It lay in a crumpled, stained mess—along with Deirdre’s half-knitted booties. ‘You said you had no legal permission …’

  ‘Clive would do anything to save Mary.’

  But I was finding relief by venting anger. Behind us Janet and Fraser were wheeling Mary out into recovery. ‘Did anyone sign anything? For heaven’s sake, I’m not registered to work here. Grandma was one thing but this … We could be sued for millions.’

  ‘Is that what’s really bothering you?’ Jack turned to face me and I caught the wave of his absolute exhaustion. ‘If you’re so upset about being liable for millions, why did you operate?’

  I met his eyes square on and some of the pent-up anxiety—the rage—washed out. ‘There was hardly a choice.’

  ‘That’s right. Clive will understand. He’s not going to sue.’

  ‘People do afterwards. After the fear’s faded … when Mary realises she can’t have more children…’

  ‘This isn’t New York,’ he said, his voice gentling. Maybe he heard the rising hysteria and knew it wasn’t really the threat of being sued that was driving me. It was the culmination of so many things.

  ‘Jenny, they won’t sue,’ he said, firmly and surely. ‘If islanders sue me to the point where I can no longer practise, then when their kid gets appendicitis next week there’ll be no doctor. I made the call to operate. The decision’s on my head, not yours, and I’m the only permanent doctor. By suing me they’d be chopping themselves off at the knees.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Today you saved Mary’s life. That story will have spread all over the island about two minutes ago. You have no fear of being sued, Dr Kelly. What you do need to fear is being inundated with more island cooking than one doctor can manage.’ His wry smile broke through his exhaustion. ‘Though if you ask me what I fear most, a court full of lawyers or a fridge full of fish bakes, it’s a near thing. And now … you know your family is from the O’Connor side? You may have just healed a breach that’s been a hundred years in the making.’

  ‘A breach? I don’t understand.’

  ‘Henry’s mother was an O’Connor. That’s how he inherited the farm. You’ll be expected to sell. But now … now this. Well done you.’

  I shook my head. T
here was too much here to think about. The panic, the urgency and the veer towards hysteria faded. I looked up into his tired, smiling eyes and I felt myself saying the only thing that seemed important.

  ‘That was a good thing you did, Dr McLachlan.’

  ‘You did great, too.’ The warmth in his eyes was suddenly real and totally compelling. ‘You know that, Jenny. Mary would be dead without you and you were brilliant.’ He hesitated. ‘If you knew how much I need a colleague like you…’

  But then he raked his fingers through his hair and moved on. ‘Enough. That’s my problem, not yours. Meanwhile Fraser asked Bob Hendy—he’s a retired fisherman who lives close to your place—to find Clive and bring him in. Clive and the kids are here now. You want to come out and tell them they have a happy ending?’

  A happy ending. That was all this day needed. It’d had everything else. I looked up at him, still totally at sea, but…

  A happy ending.

  ‘Yes, please.’

  And Clive McConachie, still in his work clothes, muddy from the dairy and surrounded by his four kids, put his head in his hands and wept. His children regarded their father with horror, and, as Jack put his hand on the man’s shoulder and knelt to speak to him, I found myself alone with four children.

  All of them were terrified.

  In my hospital in Manhattan this wasn’t the place for the doctor. If there were children involved there’d be social workers, counsellors, people trained in handling such situations. If I saw such a setup I’d page a counsellor and back away, fast. Where was the counsellor here?

  The littlest boy was trembling. The older girl put her arms around him, but tears were streaming down her face as well. Their father’s sobs had them rigid with shock and fear.

  I was about to take a step backwards, but stopped myself. I do try hard to keep to myself. This situation was more terrifying to me than brain surgery, but even an ogre would feel sorry for these guys.

  Tentatively I put my hand on the older girl’s shoulder and she turned against me. Her face went into my breast and she sobbed. I sort of hugged.