by Dean Mayes
Morning light streaming through a living room window. Curtains billowing on the breeze. She brushed past him, hopping on one foot to pull on an expensive heel. Toast popped up from the toaster and she grabbed it. He handed her a lunchbox.
Hayden’s head tilted as fragments of conversation echoed. She snatched up the notepad and handed it over…
“I need you to fetch these items from the market.”
“But you know how clueless I am when it comes to feminine hygiene.”
“Don’t complain. I didn’t realise I only had a couple left when it started last night.”
Hayden sat up in the bed and attempted to turn, wincing as a fire-burst of pain blossomed in his side.
“Hey!” the nurse exclaimed, placing a hand on his shoulder. “Careful there, Doctor. You’ll do yourself an injury.”
Hayden lay back and leaned his head over towards the bedside cabinet. “Are my belongings there? My clothes? My wallet?”
The nurse finished resetting the IV pump, then she rounded to the cabinet, plucking a key from the pocket of her scrubs. “Your clothes were sent away to be cleaned. I think your shirt and jacket might have bitten the dust, I’m afraid. Your wallet and keys are here, though.”
She opened the drawer, retrieved Hayden’s wallet from inside, and handed it to him. “Here you go.”
He removed the probe from his finger and took the wallet as the nurse reached over and silenced the alarm on the monitor.
He opened it and thumbed through the contents inside. Pieces of paper, business cards, his credit and debit cards, driver’s licence. Old receipts.
The nurse couldn’t help a sly grin as she watched him. “A bowerbird, eh?” she remarked humorously. “Just like my fiancé. He keeps everything. He’s forever going through old receipts. Accounts for everything.”
Hayden continued his examination of the wallet’s innards. “Yes,” he murmured.
He stopped. His thumb and forefinger clasped a folded piece of paper.
A shopping receipt.
Teasing it out, Hayden set the wallet down in his lap and unfolded the crinkled receipt.
He studied it for a long moment.
Dated April twenty-sixth, it was a receipt from Kinschinder’s Market, Hyde Park—the local grocer near their house.
Hayden focused on the date at the top of the receipt. The nurse was watching him with increasing concern. His expression had gone blank and he was pale. Something had disturbed him.
She checked his vitals on the monitor. “Are you all right, Doctor?”
He looked up from the receipt.
“Androstenone 5,” he said, his voice monotone. “Sandalwood.”
She frowned. “I-I don’t understand.”
Hayden lowered the receipt to the bed. His grip on it relaxed and he lay his head back on the pillow. “Androstenone 5 has a sandalwood odour, faintly uri—”
He cut himself off before he could finish his sentence. No need to offend the young woman and her fiancé’s choice of fragrance with an obscure fact about women’s pheromones.
He sighed, leaning back into the pillow. “I’m sorry. It doesn’t matter.”
The nurse fixed him with a conspiratorial grin. “Perhaps those pain medications are working a little too well.” She adjusted her smile, imbuing it with the kind of empathy that was the signature of a fine nurse. “Perhaps you should rest,” she suggested.
Hayden offered her a smile. “Your perfume is lovely,” he said.
The nurse blushed again. “Aw, thank you.”
She turned away as a colleague approached her and the two began chatting.
Hayden picked up the receipt and held it before him.
THE FOLLOWING MORNING, HAYDEN WAS transferred from the ICU to a private room overlooking a pleasant garden. A large window afforded him an uninterrupted view and the sun shone through the glass, filling the room with natural light. Much to his surprise, he found he was grateful for this, more than anything, after the sterility and harshness of the ICU.
It was something he considered worth mentioning to his colleagues. But he remembered—
He wouldn’t have that opportunity.
Hayden reluctantly allowed the nursing staff to assist him to shower. As awkward as it was, he did appreciate it. This forced admission had enlightened him to the experience of being on the other side, of being a patient, and he appreciated the dedication of those caring for him. They were good people. Honest people.
Just like Walhalla.
In a place like Walhalla, honesty was easy to see.
As he sat on his bed, he fingered a loose thread of material on the blanket between his legs. That observation turned itself over and over.
Honesty.
The door to his room clicked open and Bernadette entered, carrying a pair of takeaway coffee cups.
Hayden turned.
She looked as though she’d stepped out of a photo shoot. Her hair was pulled back in a tight ponytail. Her make-up was impeccable. She wore a black turtleneck and trousers under a long coat, her stiletto boots. “Finally found a half decent café,” she said in a harassed voice. “Had to drive into Morwell, though. You’d think it wouldn’t be so hard to have good coffee in a hospital, wouldn’t you?”
He harrumphed as Bernadette set the cups down on the table and leaned over to plant a kiss on his forehead.
“You know, I thought it might be nice for us to get a new coffee machine when we get home,” she suggested with a smile as she sat down beside his bed. “We could, you know, consider it a present to ourselves. A fresh-start gift or…something.”
Bernadette’s voice trailed away when she noticed Hayden was looking down and away from her. An immense sadness seemed to have settled over him.
Detecting the shift, she tilted her head and reached out to touch his arm. “Hayden, what is it?”
He turned and gazed at her, searching for the right words. “Bernadette. I’m not coming home.”
Bernadette paled. Her lips parted and she shook her head. “What? Wh-what?”
Hayden reached across to the cabinet beside him and picked up a folded piece of paper. He handed it to her. Against an onslaught of confusion and disbelief, Bernadette took it.
“Do you remember that day, during the week before everything happened? Before James?”
Bernadette opened up the piece of paper, a shopping receipt.
Hayden continued. “We were at home. I had the day off and you asked me to go to the shops. You said you needed some things. You’d run short.”
“I-I don’t understand.”
Hayden offered a sad smile.
Reaching over the top of the receipt, he ran his fingers down the list of items to the bottom. It stopped at the second-last item. “You told me you were almost out of pads. That you were going to need more because it—your menstrual cycle—had started.”
Bernadette’s eyelids flickered and she began to shake.
“So you couldn’t have been pregnant,” Hayden said. “You told me you estimated conception at several weeks beforehand, when we had that weekend away. Remember?”
He let his words sink in. Bernadette remained silent. She fought against the threatening tears. Slowly, her expression shifted and took on a weary resignation.
“That child is not mine,” he said softly.
Bernadette’s tears spilled over. The receipt in her shaking hand fluttered.
He knew he had uncovered the truth. He should have felt anger or disgust. She had tried to trick him into raising another man’s child. That he wasn’t mad was unsettling, but the resultant sadness that overwhelmed him cancelled out any other emotion. Bernadette wept softly, still holding the shopping receipt in front of her.
“So what happened?” Hayden asked. “Did he reject you? Deny it was his?”
The weight of shock bore down and threatened to crush her. The metaphorical door Bernadette had fought so hard, for so long, to keep closed, collapsed open. There was no point trying to conceal t
he truth any longer.
“Yes,” she managed through quiet sobs. “When he found out, he panicked. Tore up our contract. Said he couldn’t allow a scandal to—to affect his political ambitions.”
She shook her head, the lie abandoned. “The b-business has suffered,” she continued, wiping at her eyes. “I’ve had to let Amanda go. Mum and Dad are furious with me. I had nowhere else to turn. I thought if I could just find a way to fix us, maybe we could—”
Bernadette looked down at her hands as she wrung them together, steeling herself for her next sentence.
“The ultrasound image. The date on it. I changed it. You’re right, Hayden. The baby isn’t yours.”
Her voice faltered and her shoulders slumped as she sobbed uncontrollably. “I’m so sorry.”
Hayden felt numb as he processed her words.
“Go home, Berni,” Hayden said, not unkindly. “Go and be with your family. Let them help you. You know they will. I can’t anymore.”
“Is there no chance for us?” She was pleading.
“We had our chance.” Hayden’s voice was a whisper. “But we were done a long time ago. We’ve just been marking time.”
Bernadette lowered her head to her hands and he allowed her to cry for as long as she needed to. The significance of this moment was not lost on him. This was it. While Bernadette had ended them, he had finished them.
Eventually, Bernadette wiped her tears and her sobs subsided. Slowly, she rose from her chair, shouldering her handbag. She tried to hold herself tall, straighten her shoulders, but the confidence and vivaciousness Hayden had always seen in her was gone.
They gazed at each other.
They were strangers now, he thought sadly.
“Do what you will with the house,” he said. “I’ll make arrangements for my things. I don’t want to make it any harder for either of us.”
Bernadette managed a grateful, but tortured, smile. “Thank you.”
She turned one final time towards the door, hesitating with her hand on the handle. “I’m so sorry, Hayden,” she said softly. “You didn’t deserve any of this.”
She opened it and stepped out. He heard the click of her heels fading away, becoming faster as she broke into quick strides.
She was gone.
THAT NIGHT, HAYDEN SAT ON the bed, one leg tucked underneath him, the other stretched out. On the bed lay two sheets of paper: the photocopied ultrasound photograph Bernadette had given him when she’d first arrived in Walhalla, dated July third, and a second, nearly identical photograph, printed on glossy paper, dated August the seventh. Annette and Max had stopped by earlier to spend the afternoon with him and to give him a printout of the email from Amanda Rischmiller that Annette had stumbled across on their laptop at the store. In it, Amanda explained that she’d seen the discrepancy between the original scan and the one Bernadette had asked her to copy for Hayden. She’d wanted to warn him. He’d have to thank her at some point, though it didn’t matter anymore. None of it mattered anymore.
That was a part of his past now.
There was a future he had to try and salvage.
He gathered up the sheets of paper, crushed them in his hands, and dropped them into a waste bin beside his bed. He stood up carefully and walked over to a robe hanging on the door, putting it on and looping the cord around his waist. He shuffled his feet into a pair of slippers and stepped out into the hall.
And he walked.
Down the corridor, turning around several corners, continuing on, a flicker of hope igniting deep inside him and growing steadily. Until finally, he approached a ward filled with bright colours, walls painted with fantastical creatures and animals.
Hayden approached a door and paused before he knocked. He waited a further moment before pushing the handle down.
Genevieve turned her head as Hayden peeked through the gap and her face lit up. She nearly leapt from under her covers as she held her arms out wide.
Isabelle sat up in her chair beside the bed, her expression a mixture of surprise and confusion.
When he smiled, her features twisted and she couldn’t stop her own lips from turning up. She kept her eyes riveted to him as he approached and sat down on the edge of the bed.
Genevieve hugged him gingerly, putting her arms around his neck and giggling with relief, her little voice bright with happiness.
He winced as his wound punished him, but he turned his head towards Isabelle and met her questioning eyes.
Finally, she said, “Are you all right? W-what is it?”
Hayden kept his voice low, even though he knew he didn’t have to. “The baby—it’s not mine. It’s not my child.”
Isabelle’s eyes grew wide and her smile broadened as the impact of the revelation struck her. She struggled to speak. “A-are you certain?”
Hayden drew Genevieve back and smiled broadly. “I’m certain, and I’m certain I’m not going back.”
Hayden reached across the bed and gathered Isabelle’s hand in his. He raised it to his lips and kissed it softly. Isabelle felt a pleasant wave of warmth wash over her. Genevieve issued a delighted squeak.
Drawing back, Hayden took in Isabelle’s beautiful face. “Would it be all right with you if I stuck around for a while?”
Isabelle grinned and she lifted her hand to his cheek.
“Absolutely.”
~ Epilogue ~
THE DOOR TO THE BAKERY SHOP OPENED, AND HAYDEN STEPPED OUT FROM INSIDE AND STOOD ON THE VERANDA. THE morning air was crisp and sweet as always, but subtle, warm currents mingled on the breeze as well, carrying the promise of a gorgeous summer’s day. A gentle breeze caressed the thick foliage all the way up the mountains on either side of him. The sky above was a brilliant blue, with white clouds floating across the western hillside, and while the sun had not yet completed its climb into view, the morning was bright.
He hefted the leather case in his hand, the case his father had made for him, embossed with its white cross and his name.
Dr. H. L. Luschcombe.
For the first time in what felt like a long time, Hayden was proud of that title.
The sound of a car’s horn issued from the bend in the road and Hayden turned to see the delivery van coming into view. Isabelle pulled into the driveway and cut the engine as Genevieve leapt from the cabin. The little girl waved and skipped over to Hayden, dangling Lily and Rameeka America in her hand. Setting his case down beside him, Hayden crouched to embrace her in a generous hug.
Isabelle rounded the rear of the van and strolled onto the porch, hands in pockets. She lifted the brim of her Pastoralist hat and Hayden rose to his full height. Isabelle stepped around Genevieve and wrapped her arms around Hayden’s neck. She kissed him long and slow.
“All set for your first day, Doc?” she quipped, drawing back from him and gazing at him.
“Think so.” Hayden grimaced. “We’ll have to see how it goes.”
Isabelle chuckled and stepped back, bending down to lift his case and hand it to him. “I think you’ll be wonderful.”
She kissed him again, her lips lingering on his, before she slid them across to his cheek, where she peppered him with more kisses.
Hayden laughed. “Better be off,” he remarked. “See you for dinner.”
The doctor and the baker smiled at each other one more time. Hayden rested his hand on Genevieve’s head and tousled her hair. He turned and stepped out from the porch and walked up the road towards the centre of town. He glanced back over his shoulder to see Isabelle and Genevieve waving at him. He waved back.
Could life be any better?
Hayden waved at the locals as he passed through the town centre, wishing them a good morning. He paused outside the general store as Max appeared from inside and handed him a freshly brewed coffee. They talked. They examined the chessboard inside the dining room of the restaurant and each made another move of their respective pieces. Hayden continued on.
At the Trembath Corner Stores, he acknowledged Amber Rillby,
who smiled and waved from the window of her little café as she served breakfast to an elderly couple. Margaret Parton greeted him as she swept the path in front of the post office. He passed the rotunda and the Star Hotel, following the road as it wound its way along the line of Stringer’s Creek.
The township was as tranquil this morning as it was any other.
He approached the cottage. It stood proudly above the roadside with its fresh coat of paint. His father would have been pleased. The garden was in full bloom, awash with colour and life. Several bees buzzed in the camellia bush. Mum would have loved to see this.
Stopping at the gate, Hayden touched his hand to a brass plaque mounted on the fence, checking to see if it was level.
H. L. Luschcombe, General Practitioner.
This was his little piece of Walhalla.
The End
Acknowledgments
The Artisan Heart has been a wonderful novel to write—one that couldn’t have been brought to life without the contribution and encouragement of a group of special people. Foremost among them is Michelle Halket, who took a chance on me almost ten years ago and has shepherded me through four novels. Jessica Peirce, one of the most amazing editors I’ve had the pleasure to work with. Her astute eye and handle on the romance I was trying to convey lifted this story to another level and she made me a better writer in the process.
Molly Ringle, the writer who I have most aspired to be like, who advised, supported and encouraged me from the get-go and read the earliest drafts of this novel and saw the loveliness in it. There is as much of you in this story as there is me, Molly.
Abbie Williams, Ashleigh Oldfield, Gemma Blackwell, and Georgina Penney, who all contributed wonderful advice on the raw story and helped me to wrestle a wonderful mess of words into something I’m really proud of.
To Barbara Hood and John Aldersea, whose encyclopedic knowledge of Walhalla helped me to shape the portrayal of the township and make it as much a character in the story as the human ones. To Ian Norton, who served as a template for Gregor and who offered some great perspectives on policing in the often isolated Gippsland mountains. To Yvonne Codner, who gave me some brilliant insights into Phillips Cottage and helped me to portray a building I’ve been in love with my entire life. To Alice Fraser, who gave me a voice when I had none and who encouraged me to think deeper about human nature and how we interact with one another.
