He was still in the background. He was still dropping Bonnie off at her apartment every morning, but he wasn’t staying. In, out, gone.
She tried not to mind. She and Bonnie recovered together. They slept. They took gentle walks along the beach. They sat in the morning sun and shared ice cream, and they treated themselves with care.
They’d both rather that Sam was with them. Zoe only had to look at Bonnie when she heard footsteps approaching—how fast her big head swivelled and the way she sort of drooped when it wasn’t Sam—to know how much Bonnie loved him, and she tried not to, but she felt exactly the same.
The ghosts were yelling she was crazy, crazy, crazy.
‘You’re never satisfied,’ she told them. ‘What do you want me to do? Be cosseted for the rest of my life? Is that what you want?’
They didn’t answer. Ghosts made lousy communicators. They were all accusation and nothing else.
Sunday was the hardest. She wasn’t fit enough for a surfing lesson; she knew she wasn’t, but Sam was going anyway, taking Bonnie with him. He dropped in to pick up Bonnie’s flags and trampoline bed.
She watched them go and she felt...desolate.
* * *
He surfed and he thought of Zoe.
How could he stop caring?
He couldn’t. He just...couldn’t. Emily’s death had hit him too hard for him to stand back and take risks.
Everyone took risks. He knew that. For him to say Zoe shouldn’t work with kids who might be infectious had been over the top. He knew that, too. He should say it to her, but it wouldn’t make a difference. It nearly killed him that she’d caught pneumonia and he knew that the next time she was in harm’s way he’d react exactly the same.
How to stand back and let the woman he loved take risks?
He’d crowded her, he’d scared her, but it was Zoe’s problem as well as his, he thought. He cared too much and she didn’t want care.
Catch 22. There was no solution but to surf.
He didn’t go far out. He was too aware of Bonnie lying on her trampoline bed, surrounded by Zoe’s crazy flags.
The flags made him smile.
Zoe cared.
The perfect wave swept up behind him and he missed it.
He swore and rolled one eighty degrees so he was lying under his board rather than on top of it. He stayed underwater until it was necessary to surface if he was to breathe. He surfaced spluttering, hoping he’d vented enough spleen, but his spleen wasn’t vented.
He missed another wave.
‘How can I love her and not care?’ he demanded of the universe, but the universe didn’t answer. In his experience it rarely did.
Impasse. There was no solution at all.
CHAPTER NINE
WORK WAS A welcome relief. It was great to be back on the wards, Zoe thought, even if ward work came with sympathy that the promising affair between Zoe Payne and Sam Webster seemed to have fizzled out.
She met him occasionally on the ward. They greeted each other as warmly as both could manage, aware that every eye was on them, but it was strained and by Wednesday Zoe was starting to wonder if she should request a transfer to one of the adult wards. Somewhere a paediatric cardiologist was unlikely to visit.
But then she wouldn’t see him at all—and that hurt.
Everything hurt.
‘What’s happening with Bonnie?’ she asked as he finished examining a little boy who’d been admitted with rheumatic fever, who’d recovered but was showing signs of heart strain.
‘She’s back on the wards, too,’ he told her.
‘Back?’
‘Her day job while I work is spending time with patients who need her. There’s an old lady in the trauma unit. She and her husband were in a car accident three weeks ago and her husband died. Bonnie’s asleep on her bed. Hospital rules say basket on the floor even for companion animals but no one’s shifting Bonnie.’
‘That’s lovely,’ Zoe whispered. ‘Bonnie’s awesome.’
‘She’s not the only lady who’s awesome,’ Sam said and left, with her staring after him.
How could she not want him to care? Was she out of her mind?
But the memories of the smothering were too strong, too real for her to put them aside. She could cast herself on his chest right now, she thought, and the webs of care would go round her again and she’d wake up feeling strangled. She knew she would.
And yet she felt terrible. Her family may have smothered her during her years of illness but at least they’d been there. They were still there, she told herself, but it didn’t help. Why did she feel so gut-wrenchingly, desolately alone?
‘Katie Foster’s wet her bed,’ her colleague Hannah told her, cutting across her chain of bleak thoughts. ‘And she’s mortified. Strain does bad things to kids. You want to read her a story while I change the sheets?’
‘Of course,’ Zoe said, and went to read to a mortified Katie, but while she did she thought...
Strain did bad things to kids.
Strain was doing bad things to her.
* * *
Wednesday night and she was going nuts. After work she walked on the beach near the hospital but it wasn’t enough. There were too many tourists, too many people, not enough space for her thoughts.
On impulse she took her car—it only took three attempts to start—bought fish and chips and headed out to the Seaway to eat them.
It’d be lovely out there. This late midweek there’d only be the odd surfer.
That surfer might be Sam, but she carefully put that thought aside. If it was Sam she could sit in the sand hills and watch from a distance. He didn’t have to know she was there.
He wasn’t there. She seemed to have the beach to herself, except for a couple of kids far along the beach. She settled on a sand hill and ate her fish and chips and thought how Dean would have told her off for eating fatty food, and she ate a few more chips in his honour. And then she thought of Sam and she defiantly ate a few more.
‘I don’t want anyone caring,’ she said out loud, and it sounded stupid. It was stupid. And bleak.
She wouldn’t mind compromising.
But Sam wasn’t interested in compromising, she told herself. It was all or nothing. He wouldn’t even want her nursing kids who might have a cold. Huh!
Kids.
She glanced along the beach to where the kids were playing, and she thought...hang on. Where were they?
They’d been just there.
Just...just...
She stared a bit longer and saw sand sliding down. Masses of sand.
Dear God.
A car was pulling into the car park just above her. She glanced wildly round and it was Sam, lifting Bonnie out of the passenger seat.
‘Sam!’ Her scream was so loud it was like it cut the beach. ‘Sam...the kids have dug into the cliff again and it looks like it’s come down on them.’
* * *
Sam was heading to his evening surf but he’d been having trouble looking forward to it. Bonnie’s great head was on his knee and the Labrador seemed to pick up his moods—when he was sad, so was she. He had the radio up loud, trying to gear himself up with a corny Elvis song, but Bonnie wasn’t fooled. She was heaving sighs as if she was thinking exactly what he was thinking.
Where’s Zoe?
He was being dumb. All he had to do was back off in the care department and they could have fun. But...
‘Come on, Sam, don’t be a wuss, the surf’s fine.’ They were the last words he’d heard from Emily and they echoed through his head every night of his life.
Don’t be a wuss, the surf’s fine.
Risk.
He couldn’t bear it, he thought savagely. He couldn’t bear watching Zoe, knowing that so
mething could happen, knowing she could be snatched away. And to watch her and pretend not to care...it was enough to make a guy go nuts.
He needed to surf. He needed to do anything rather than think of Zoe.
He climbed out of the car, reached in to lift Bonnie down—and a scream came from the beach below.
‘Sam... The kids have dug into the cave again and it looks like it’s come down on them.’
Zoe!
He put Bonnie back into the Jeep and slammed the door.
He ran.
* * *
The council had bulldozed the overhang, making it safe—unless you were a kid who knew there was a cave hidden behind the bulldozed sand and you’d decided to dig back in and find it. And now...it looked like a whole slab of the foreshore had caved in, on top of whoever was inside.
Zoe had started running even as she’d screamed. She reached the collapsed section before Sam, and by the time he got there she was already hurling herself at the sand, scraping great swathes of it away using her looped arms as a scoop.
‘They’re in there,’ she gasped as Sam reached her. ‘I saw them. I think it was the same boys we saw...’
‘You’re sure?’
‘They were just here. I was throwing chips for the seagulls and then...and then they weren’t here any more.’
‘H-help.’ It was a faint, muffled cry, really muffled, but it had them pausing, staring at the mound of collapsed cliff, trying to figure where...where...
‘Stay absolutely still,’ Sam yelled. ‘Tug your shirts over your mouths and noses and don’t move. Not one muscle. We’re coming but it will take time. Do not move!’ He was scooping at the sand, using Zoe’s method but with ten times more strength. Sand was being shoved aside with a force Zoe hadn’t thought possible.
‘We need a spade,’ Sam threw at her. ‘Zoe, stop. We need help, and it’s up to you to get it. See the lifesaver station? It’s empty and locked apart from weekends. It’s up on stilts so you need to swing yourself up. The windows are barred, the whole place is locked, but the base is made of plywood. Kick it in and get spades, and masks and oxygen. Go. You have a phone? Use it while you run. Ask for fire services—they have the heavy moving equipment—but ask for ambulance back-up. The Seaway Spit, south of the car park. Got it? Go?’
He was digging deeper as he clipped orders, deeper, deeper, and Zoe looked at the mass of slippery sand around and above him and gave a sob of fear.
‘Go,’ he snapped, and she went.
* * *
She screamed into the phone for emergency services, and somehow she made herself coherent enough to be understood. ‘Two kids buried by cliff collapse at South Seaway Beach. Bring digging equipment, men, medics.’
How far did they have to come? Oh, God... She ran with the image of partly collapsed cliff hanging over Sam’s head. Why wasn’t she with him?
She was following orders.
The deserted lifeguard tower was a high yellow cube on stilts, with steel grates over the windows. The door was eight feet from the ground. A ladder hung underneath, firmly locked so no one could tug it down.
She wasn’t great at breaking locks and she didn’t even consider it. Instead, she jumped and clung, monkeylike, to the first strut. She thought, You can do this, Zoe, and before her sensible side told her no way, she swung herself harder, up to the next strut, then up and onto the platform so she was somehow balanced on the thin, unwelcoming doorstep.
Inside there’d be spades and masks and oxygen. Sam had said there would be. There had to be. Sand collapse must be something these guys would be equipped for.
The door was padlocked. The grilles were immovable. Kick in the plywood, Sam had said, so that’s exactly what she did, and she kicked harder than she’d ever kicked in her life. She heard—and felt—her toe give an ominous crack but she was through. The plywood splintered and she could haul pieces clear, enough to wiggle inside to find what she wanted.
God bless lifesavers. There seemed a place for everything and everything in its place. It took her a whole twenty seconds to grab what she needed from the carefully labelled cupboards.
She shoved everything out through the hole and let it fall—she could hardly climb with shovels and oxygen cylinders and masks. She worried fleetingly about tossing oxygen but she hardly had a choice. Equipment hit the sand and she hit the sand seconds after it.
Her toe told her it was broken. She told it not to whinge. She grabbed her booty into one huge armful and ran again.
All the while thinking Sam...
And two kids. She was thinking two kids, it was just that Sam was there, too, and this was Sam and she was feeling...
Sick, empty, terrified.
So she ran and searched the beach in front of her—and he was gone.
Gone?
There was only a swathe of freshly collapsed sand.
The last of the cliff above had come down.
Oh, God...
But as she neared the collapse...a hand surfaced above the sand, and then...then a head, coated by a shirt. He hauled the shirt away and coughed and shoved sand from his face.
Sam! It was all she could do not to scream. He was waving to her to hurry and she couldn’t run any further, her lungs were about to explode.
‘Masks?’ he yelled, before she reached him. ‘Oxygen?’
She was there, staring hopelessly at what was before her. There was so much sand above Sam. It could still slip.
‘They’re in here and they’re alive,’ he snapped, as she reached the foot of the mound. ‘There’s a scooped-out spot that’s letting them breathe but I can’t haul them out without bringing the whole mass down. Hand me the masks and canister.’
‘Sam, come out.’
‘Start digging from the edge and don’t put any pressure on the top,’ he said abruptly, and reached out, sand coated, buried to his shoulders, grabbing what he needed. ‘Is help coming?’
‘I... Yes.’
‘We need manpower and care and luck. Dig from the left, Zoe, and make them take care. It’s up to you to make sure they don’t stuff it.’
He shoved a mask across his mouth, swiped his eyes, checked the oxygen canister—and then, unbelievably, he ducked down again. The sand seemed to ooze over his head and he disappeared from sight.
‘Sam!’
‘Dig,’ came the muffled response, and then nothing.
* * *
She dug from the side like a woman possessed, but the amount of sand was massive. She’d made no headway at all before the emergency services arrived—fire, police, ambulance. She gave them stark facts, she was put aside and the big guns went to work.
It wasn’t brute force—it couldn’t be. They still had to use care but there were men here much better with spades than she was. Even though they could no longer hear anyone, the assumption was that there was a cave somewhere inside that mass of sand, that three people were alive in that cave, and there was no way they were going to bring the whole thing down. A guy arrived from the council, an engineer with a truckload of shoring timber. That stopped the sand slipping back down where they’d dug.
‘They’ll be using every ounce of energy to breathe,’ the fire chief told her. ‘If they have masks and oxygen and they’re not crushed, they have a chance. If they have sense—and if Dr Webster’s with them he’ll give them sense—they’ll lie stock-still and not touch their masks. To shift a mask to yell could mean catastrophe. So don’t give up hope, girl. We’ll reach them but we need to do it with care.’
She had to leave them to it. It was the hardest thing she’d ever done but there was only room for about six men to dig and they wanted the strongest, the burliest, and Zoe didn’t fit the job description.
She backed off. She went and let Bonnie out of the car then sat on the sand and hugge
d Bonnie and watched until her eyes ached.
Bonnie stared, too. It was as if she knew.
People were coming from everywhere now as the news spread. Callie came rushing down from the car park, still in her white coat with her stethoscope swinging. She stopped short when she saw Zoe. She stared at the mass of caved-in sand and she, too, slumped to the sand and hugged Bonnie.
Zoe hardly noticed. She had eyes only for the diggers.
The cops were putting up a line of yellow plastic tape, keeping onlookers out. The search was getting methodical.
The boys’ parents arrived, distraught and hysterical. The cops had to restrain them from throwing themselves at the cliff.
Oh, God, how long had it been? Twenty minutes? More?
‘They must have gone right into the cliff,’ the fire chief said grimly. He was overseeing operations right by where Zoe knelt with Bonnie and Callie. By rights he should ask them to go to the other side of the tape but they weren’t moving and he wasn’t asking. ‘We’re reaching the end of the soft sand—they must have burrowed right in behind. That’s good but it also makes our job harder. There’s so much stuff that can still come down.’
Zoe gave a sob of fear and clung harder to Bonnie. Bonnie shoved her big head into her armpit and seemed to hug back.
Callie hugged them both.
Waiting. It was the hardest, hardest thing.
She thought suddenly of her parents, of all those years in waiting rooms, waiting for the news of their daughter’s health.
Worrying. Frantic with fear.
She’d known at a superficial level but not like this. Dear God, to love someone and have to wait...
She loved him. She loved Sam. She loved him with every ounce of energy she had within her.
He’d said he was falling in love with her.
She’d pushed him away because he cared.
She cared so much now she was going crazy. She was dying inside, every minute killing her as the spades dug in, as the timbers were put up so they could dig in a few more inches, as the moments ticked by...
Gold Coast Angels: A Doctor's Redemption Page 15
