by Lilian Darcy
Hometime, Christina thought.
Collect her car and house keys from the main desk in the ED, where Joe had said he’d leave them, collect her car from one of the reserved staff spaces where he would have parked, and drive home.
Something to eat. Water the plants. Check for phone messages. Open her wardrobe and move the hangers along to fill the empty space where Joe’s shirts had been until today. While dealing with the wardrobe, decide what she’d wear for her low-key dinner with Brian on Thursday night, because she hadn’t done laundry for over a week and there might not be many clean options left.
She couldn’t do it.
She couldn’t go out with Brian, not even on the terms he’d proposed, not when the thought of Joe’s missing shirts had twisted inside her like a rusty knife-blade. She should never have said yes.
Turning, she went back into the hospital foyer and headed in the direction of the hospital administrator’s office. If he was still there, she’d tell him face to face. If he wasn’t, she’d leave a note.
His light was on, she found, and his door was open. Apparently he was still in the building somewhere. Not wanting to be discovered in the act of cowardly note-scribbling, she waited, and realised that Charles was still there also, in his office just beyond the thin, inadequately soundproofed wall.
He was on the phone.
‘Tell me why I shouldn’t despise you, Philip,’ she heard. ‘You had the perfect opportunity to end all this after Dad died. You told me you would. I thought you had. I never realised it had become so dire.’
There were some seconds of silence. Christina didn’t know what to do. She peered out into the corridor, but there was still no sign of Brian. Charles’s office door was tightly closed. She found a pad of sticky notes, tore the top one off, wrote ‘Dear Brian,’ and stood with the pen poised over the little yellow square while her mind stayed blank as to what to put next.
‘Your standing in the community?’ Charles said, in the adjacent office. ‘That’s—’ Silence again, then, ‘Yes, of course I accept my share of the blame. Dear God, we were kids, all three of us. Look, we’re going to do something about this, and we’re going to talk again. For now, you’re telling me you couldn’t have fathered this child but, to be honest, Philip, your word may not be good enough for me at this point.’
She couldn’t stay any longer, Christina realised. Charles was so private about his personal life and his family history. He would never be talking like this if he knew he could be heard. And she couldn’t write the note for Brian. The right, appropriate, carefully censored words just wouldn’t come, while tears—along with all the wrong words—threatened to come all too easily.
Dear Brian, I’ve realised I can’t go out with you on Thursday night. I’m still so in love with Joe that it feels like an illness. I’m hungry, but my stomach has shut down and gone queasy. I’m exhausted, but I know I’m going to lie awake all night. I know I’ve done the right thing, but in many ways that only makes it worse. Sorry. We’ll reschedule in three years, when I’m cured.
She crumpled up the yellow scrap with ‘Dear Brian’ on it, shoved it in her trouser pocket, slipped out of the office and faced the prospect of her empty home.
CHAPTER SIX
AS IT TURNED out, Christina’s house wasn’t empty.
Or rather, her wide front veranda wasn’t.
Joe was waiting for her, warm and solid, taking her in his arms as soon as she’d taken the steps that led up from the garden to the raised floor level. ‘Sorry if I scared you,’ he said.
‘You didn’t,’ she admitted. ‘I’d been thinking you might be here.’ She pushed him gently away and he let her do it. The warmth he’d created on her skin lingered there, however.
‘And I thought you definitely would be,’ he said. ‘I got a lift with Georgie Turner. She drove off and then I found a light on inside, but no one here.’
‘I left the light on this morning, in case I got back after dark. And, Joe, you know where I keep the spare key.’
Silence.
‘It didn’t feel right,’ he finally said.
And, yes, he was right, it didn’t, not after he’d given her back his own key to the house just that morning.
‘Well, I’m here now,’ she said on a slight edge. ‘It’s safe for you.’ She unlocked the front door and they went inside, their tension with each other more evident the moment they were in an enclosed space.
‘What, should I really just have let myself in, Christina?’ he asked, dropping his voice low. ‘I’m not living here any more.’
He prowled around the living room. They both did, too ill at ease to sit or do anything logical like eat or pour a drink. It felt so weird and wrong and impossible, the fact that she couldn’t just go up to him and hug him anymore, stroke his face. It slashed her confidence to the roots at one stroke. The rights you had over someone else’s body when you were together, the blurring of space—she just hadn’t realised it would feel so weird and so terrible when those rights were gone.
She was the faithful type. She’d known that about herself for years. Ending their relationship didn’t mean she’d switched off her feelings. She’d go on loving Joe Barrett for a long time.
‘Have you eaten?’ he suddenly asked.
‘Uh…’
‘Because you look pale. I haven’t either, but I bet I had more today than you did. Can we find something? Or get pizza, or something?’
‘I don’t want pizza,’ she answered quickly.
Pizza was too cosy, too casual and sexy. Pizza was what they’d done too many times before when they’d been tired. Pizza you ate with your fingers, leaning over the coffee-table, and you watched a movie together, you didn’t have some challenging ‘talk’ while dealing with strings of melty cheese. She loved watching Joe eat, because he had the perfect combination of mess and grace and relish, but she didn’t want to watch him eating pizza tonight.
She was still thinking about it when he disappeared into the kitchen. She followed him. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Scrambled egg on toast. We’ll bung some bacon in the sandwich press if there is any.’
He was using ‘we’ again. The really nice, casual ‘we’ that in the past had meant impromptu picnics on the carpet or fruitless fishing trips or lazy sessions in bed.
‘Tell me what you wanted to talk about, Joe.’
‘Not until I’ve got some food into you.’ He was already cracking the eggs into a bowl. He pulled a wooden chair out for her at the kitchen table. ‘Sit, OK?’
She did, but only because she’d begun to wonder how much longer her legs would hold her up, and whether her empty stomach would stay where it belonged. Time slowed and her willpower went walkabout. She sat there and watched him work and made no attempt to control anything about the situation.
He looked at her occasionally, as if to check that she hadn’t slumped onto the table, but he didn’t speak, just forked the eggs until the yolks and whites mixed, dropped bread into the toaster, heated the sandwich press and sliced the rinds off bacon.
‘How come you’re like this, Joe?’ she blurted out when the meal was almost ready. ‘So protective?’
‘Is that not masculine enough, or something?’
‘No, I didn’t mean that. The opposite, in some ways. A lot of way less masculine men than you just don’t know how to take care of anyone but themselves. My Dad.’ Her parents lived hundreds of kilometres south, on the Gold Coast. They’d never met Joe. Which said something. ‘I love my dad, but his idea of taking care of my mother when she’s tired is to tell her it’s OK if she’s ten minutes late getting dinner on the table.’
He shrugged. ‘Different generation.’
‘It’s not just that. You see, you never talk. Any time I give you a cue to tell me about your life at home, your childhood, what’s made you who you are, any of that, you head it off and turn it into a generalisation.’
‘I said I wanted to talk tonight, didn’t I?’ On the face of it,
it sounded like a belligerent, confrontational line, but it wasn’t when Joe said it. It still contained the same easygoing flavour, the tiny nuance of a tease. He put down the two plates of eggs and bacon on toast, and brought a jug of water and a carton of orange juice to the table.
‘Yes,’ she said aggressively, not feeling easygoing at all. ‘So talk.’
So talk.
Joe cut off an egg-piled corner of his toast and forked it into his mouth, buying time. He already knew that he wasn’t going to be any good at this. He’d spent too much time training himself in that direction. He didn’t believe that talking could change anything, and yet he’d been the one to suggest it. Nice contradiction, Dr Barrett! Why had he decided that Christina needed to know all of this stuff about his life?
To be fair, I guess, he decided inwardly.
Life hadn’t been all that fair to the Barretts, but this didn’t mean he had to continue the family tradition.
‘My sister has Treacher Collins syndrome,’ he said. He hadn’t planned such a dramatic opening line, but it had come out all by itself, prompted by the life’s-not-fair thing, probably.
‘Treacher Collins syndrome,’ Christina echoed, and he could see her flipping through a mental medical textbook. Had she hit the right chapter? Craniofacial anomalies? Yep, she was getting to it. It sat there in an alphabetical list, somewhere below Moebius syndrome and Nager syndrome and Parry-Romberg syndrome.
He helped her out, just in case she’d turned to the wrong page. ‘It’s genetic. Rare. One in ten thousand births. If it’s carried by either parent, it’s a dominant gene, so any child they may have has a fifty-fifty chance of having it, which may have implications for Amber down the track if she wants to have kids.’
She listened intently, nodding every now and then, narrowing her eyes, never taking them from his face. He could see how much she wanted his words to solve something, get the two of them back on track towards a shared future, but he knew it wouldn’t happen. She looked fragile suddenly, even though he knew how strong she was, and he wanted to hold her, feel that fabulous contrast between his bulk and her pliant grace.
‘And, of course, it can be a spontaneous mutation,’ he went on, struggling with the detail for a moment.
Was he hiding behind all this medical stuff?
Trying to scare her off with it?
Yes, definitely that.
‘On chromosome five, if you want to get technical. And that’s what it was in Amber’s case. No one else in the family carries the gene.’
He paused for breath, but he was ready to keep going, to answer her questions. He was pretty sure he knew what she’d ask and he had his responses ready.
Yes, unfortunately in Amber it was severe. Yes, with the characteristic undeveloped external ears, down-slanting eyes, absent cheekbones and eye-socket floors, and small, slanting jaw. Yes, she’d needed numerous surgical procedures and she still faced more. She’d almost died at birth when her condition had taken the medical staff by surprise. She hadn’t been able to breathe or feed normally.
Now Amber had a conductive hearing aid and a tracheostomy which was operative at night and capped during the day to give her a voice. A jaw distraction procedure was coming up, and after that they hoped she’d be able to lose the trach but didn’t yet know for sure. She might get an internal hearing device some time in the next few years.
And she was a great, terrific, fabulous kid, fifteen years old now, bright and articulate and creative, comfortable with herself, but, yes, she got stared at sometimes, she got teased, she got asked insensitive questions, and he was so proud about how she handled it.
As for how his mother and stepfather handled it…well, he’d get to all that next.
But Christina didn’t go in the expected direction at all. Instead, she jumped ahead so far and so fast that he was left open-mouthed with his head spinning. She put her knife and fork down on the plate on either side of her barely touched meal and pushed her chair back. Her ponytail swung like a horse flicking a fly, and her warm brown eyes were blazing.
And even while he was shocked by her reaction, he still had time to think how gorgeous and dynamic she looked.
‘That?’ she said angrily. ‘Something like that…you haven’t told me in two years…And you tell me now, as if it totally explains why we’re at this impasse with each other? It doesn’t explain anything, Joe! I’ve read about Treacher Collins. I’m a doctor.’
‘So you know it can be pretty serious.’
‘You’re hiding your sister just because of her facial deformity, the way people used to hide the family lunatic and believe they could never marry because there was a streak of insanity in the family? I don’t believe it! I don’t understand why you haven’t told me any of this in two years, and why you’re telling it to me now as if it explains…!’
She stopped.
Started again a few seconds later.
‘No. Actually, I do understand. And that makes it worse. A heck of a lot worse.’
Her voice broke and she rushed out of the kitchen, and he knew it was because she was too upset to stay. He could hear her gasping, angry sobs, and for a moment he was tempted to let her have it her way. Leave her alone, if she wanted to be left alone. Let her be angry with him, if that was what she believed about his motivations. It would define the end of their relationship more clearly.
But then he rebelled. He’d gone along with her ultimatum so far because he hadn’t felt that he had the right to do anything else. If he wasn’t promising a future for the two of them, then she had every reason to turf him over to the doctors’ house, every right to put her own needs first and keep her options open.
This time, though…
He couldn’t let her get it so wrong.
Rising from the table, he listened but couldn’t work out where she’d gone. The house seemed too quiet. Then he heard the back screen door flap and followed her in that direction. Standing on the veranda, he saw her prowling the back garden, where a streetlamp shining through from the next street gave everything the bluish-white hue of moonlight.
He went down the steps and confronted her angry, wounded expression. ‘Christina, it’s more complicated than you think.’
‘Listen to yourself say that! Whose fault is it?’
‘Mine. I know that.’
‘So change!’
He laughed tiredly.
Christina drawled, ‘I know. You just said it. It’s more complicated than I think.’
‘The reason I didn’t tell you is not because I was ashamed of Amber, if that’s what you’re thinking. Hell, no! I’m incredibly proud of her.’ He outlined the surgical procedures she’d had, the struggles she still faced. ‘And it wasn’t because I thought you’d be horrified about her either. I know you’re not like that.’
‘Then why?’
He sighed, facing the unpleasant prospect of finding the right words, picking his way through. ‘Amber’s birth destroyed my mother’s marriage to my stepfather,’ he began.
‘I thought they were still together.’
‘They are, but it’s only because neither of them trusts the other to do the right thing for Amber. My stepfather has a drinking problem. It was always there in the background, but it got worse after Amber was born. He makes an enemy of every doctor who treats her. He doesn’t trust my mother to “stand up to them”. And sometimes he’s been right. There have been a couple of times when, in hindsight, the wrong decisions have been made—like when they tried to take out her trach at one point, and had to put it back in because she couldn’t get enough air without it. New Zealand just doesn’t have enough doctors with enough experience of this condition.’
‘Your parents couldn’t have taken her elsewhere for another opinion?’
‘There isn’t the money. I’m putting in a lot to support them as it is.’
‘The New Zealand health system doesn’t cover all the costs?’
‘When you’re talking about expensive, ongoing procedures l
ike the ones Amber has had, and still needs, no health system covers all the costs. For a start, some of her surgery is regarded as cosmetic. Or elective, and subject to waiting lists, which mean the timing ends up all wrong. And some costs are impossible to quantify, like the fact that my mother can’t hold down a decent job when Amber has needed so much of her time. I know my mother would like to leave my stepfather. She married him when she was still in pieces over my father’s death, and she mistook his domineering for strength. She’s stronger herself now, but she believes that staying with him is best for Amber. Because of the way he alienates doctors, because his priorities for Amber aren’t always right, because of the money. She fights to maintain the partnership, even if it’s just on the surface. She doesn’t want to rock the boat.’
‘And neither did you, with me. You just wanted the R&R. You didn’t trust me enough to tell me any of this, because you thought that if you did, I might not stick around for the fun times you wanted from me. Do you know how much that hurts?’
‘Would you really stick around, Tink? Would you really take it on? Every cent that I save by working over here goes to my parents for Amber. To my mother, really. If I can make enough of a nest-egg to convince her she can afford to leave my stepfather, then that’s hers, too. Amber has such courage. I’m not going to let her down. She’s only just turned fifteen. I’m staying in Auckland, probably permanently and definitely until Amber is grown up and independent. I’m not moving elsewhere because if I wasn’t in Auckland, I think the family situation would blow sky-high. I don’t trust my stepfather’s intentions. I don’t trust my mother’s strength. I trust Amber absolutely, but she has enough on her plate just dealing with the surgery and the self-image. If I left…’ He shook his head. ‘Bad enough being here one week in four. If it wasn’t for the money…’
‘Money? I have money. My grandmother left me $60,000 as well as this house.’
He laughed. ‘That would have gone down well. Christina sweetheart, I love you, give me your inheritance so I can spend it on my sister.’
‘When people love each other—my God, Joe, you of all people should understand this—they take on each other’s lives, each other’s problems.’
