A Proposal Worth Waiting For

by Lilian Darcy

  ‘I’m going to put in a drip right now,’ she said. ‘He may not tolerate corticosteroids orally, although we’ll try.’

  ‘Aminophylline?’ Nick asked.

  ‘Not yet. Antibiotics pretty soon, though, as a precaution, because of that ash in his lungs.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘Nebulised salbutamol, IV salbutamol and adrenaline if he needs it.’

  ‘Why wait on the aminophylline?’

  ‘Because his heart didn’t like it last time, so we’ll avoid it if we can.’

  ‘He’s reached this point before?’

  ‘Worse, actually.’

  ‘Anna never told me…’

  ‘You were away at a conference.’

  ‘Don’t make me the bad guy, Miranda.’

  ‘I’m not.’ She turned away from him, to the tray of IV equipment Janey had brought.

  The strength ebbed from Nick’s legs without warning, hard on the heels of the realisation that he was arguing about past events in his marriage with a woman he, yes, loved…just say it, Nick, even if it doesn’t make sense, don’t mess around with complexities tonight, you love her—still—always…while his son was fighting for his life.

  He sat beside Josh’s bed and took his little hand. ‘Dad’s here, Joshie.’ He spoke calmly, pinning himself to hope and trust—the trust he had to have, as a doctor, in the power of medicine, the trust he had to have in his own ability not to mess this up. ‘Dr Carlisle is going to get you breathing again.’

  The words felt too pointless so he stopped saying them, and just sat there thinking, I love you, I love you, I love you, over and over as if Josh could feel his thoughts through their joined hands.

  And Miranda, too? Did she know, without words, how he felt?

  She swabbed alcohol over the back of Josh’s hand and looked for a vein, but her first attempt with the needle failed and Josh winced and whimpered a tiny, breathless whimper, while Miranda herself made a sound of distress. She tightened a strap across his upper arm and swabbed the crook of his elbow instead. ‘This looks better. We’ll get it.’

  And this time the needle went in at her first try. Deftly, she slid the cannula along the vein, taped it in place, attached the plastic tubing, and the medication began to run in through the port, joining the saline dripping from the bag suspended on a stand nearby. The neat, quiet way she worked nourished something inside him.

  No fuss.

  In the context of Josh’s health, Nick was so sick of fuss.

  He took Miranda aside as soon as she had a moment to spare. ‘Tell me about his heart, that other time.’

  ‘It was already beating too fast, and the aminophylline made it beat faster.’

  ‘That’s the explanation you’d give to a layman, not to another doctor!’

  ‘Nick, this isn’t something I want you to worry about now. But all right…’ She reeled off a more technical answer, laced with figures and abbreviations. ‘Did that help?’

  ‘Hell knows,’ he admitted honestly. ‘If…if none of this works, Miranda…’

  ‘It will work,’ she said crisply. ‘We’re treating it as critical and, based on past attacks, he’ll respond. Please, don’t make Anna’s mistake and let him see how worried you are.’

  ‘You’re right,’ he muttered. ‘Hell, you’re right.’ The sense of powerlessness gripped him again and all he could do was sit there and wait and hope.

  It was such a long night.

  Nick sat beside Josh for six straight hours, watching his son’s numbers slowly improve—blessedly without the need for the next level of medication. Once the clock’s hour hand hit midnight, he began to doze a little, only to snap awake again every few minutes with his attention instantly riveted to his son or the monitors.

  Josh’s heart rate slowed, his blood oxygen level went up, that painful, exhausting effort of the accessory chest muscles eased and his son’s sleep changed from near-coma to something much more nourishing and natural. Josh was totally exhausted. He wouldn’t wake up any time soon.

  ‘He’s looking a lot better,’ Miranda said softly.

  ‘You’re still here?’ His voice creaked. ‘I thought you’d gone.’ He’d been aware of her presence and that of a couple of staff, as well as the regular observations and lines in Josh’s notes, some background conversation in low voices, responses to a patient call button because they had a couple of other patients in the four-bed room next door.

  ‘I was just grabbing some tea,’ she answered. ‘You’ve had nothing, Nick. Janey’s telling us both to go back to our cabins and get some sleep.’

  ‘You should.’

  ‘So should you. Have you phoned Anna?’

  He swore.

  No, he hadn’t.

  ‘She’ll think it was deliberate,’ he said.

  ‘And was it?’

  ‘Partly. Half. Yes. Yes, it was. She was supposed to phone me today. She didn’t, I don’t know why, and I thought about phoning her, I kept thinking about it, and thinking, No, not yet.’

  ‘It’s late. What do you want to do?’

  He was too tired for anything other than naked honesty. ‘I want to be with you…’

  ‘Me…’ She tilted her head, folded her arms across her chest. The movement softened her shoulders and lifted her breasts and he felt a stirring of desire that jarred him in this context, even though at the same time it felt right.

  ‘Could we take a break?’ he said.

  ‘Oh, please, yes…’

  ‘My mobile’s in my cabin. She’ll have left messages.’

  ‘Right.’ Miranda gave a short, jerky nod and took a breath. ‘You’ll phone her now?’

  ‘Let me see what messages she’s left. She’d have wanted to fly up here tonight if I’d told her about this earlier.’ He thought for a moment, and added, ‘No, she’d never have made it in time, even if I’d called her from the beach. She’d have caught the first flight in the morning, though. I—I know at some level my not phoning—forgetting to and resisting it and putting it off—was deliberate. Freudian.’ Nick laughed cynically at his use of such a word.

  ‘Oh, Nick…’ Miranda whispered in a tight voice.

  ‘I wanted to see if it was better for Josh that way. If he panicked less. If he did better with me around. I didn’t want her rushing in and shutting me out. Oh, hell, why do I always tell you this stuff?’

  He closed his eyes, appalled by his own mixed motivations, then felt Miranda’s hand soft and warm on his arm. ‘Let’s talk,’ she said quietly.

  CHAPTER NINE

  MIRANDA had a quiet word with Janey and Marcia, then she and Nick left the medical centre and took the cool, silent walk across to his cabin. He didn’t touch her, and she somehow knew he needed to deal with Anna’s probable phone messages first, before they talked or did anything else.

  Did he still have feelings for her, or was her presence in so many of their conversations about something else?

  And then maybe he wouldn’t want to talk, in the end. Maybe those walls would come back up and he’d push her away. She could see all the possible bad endings leading off into the night, but still she walked beside him because something in her heart—and in his?—didn’t allow her to do anything else.

  He went straight for the mobile phone on the kitchen bench-top once they were inside. ‘Yes, she called. Several times.’ He read a text. ‘Wants me to phone as soon as I get this, no matter how late it is.’

  ‘Does she mean that? It’s nearly three in the morning.’

  He shrugged. ‘I’d better take her at her word.’

  ‘You’ll tell her about Josh’s attack?’

  ‘From any angle, it seems the right thing to do. I should have done it hours ago, as soon as we got to the medical centre. I shouldn’t have put it off. There’s no excuse. She’s his mother.’

  But he was still fighting the idea, she thought. He certainly didn’t want to talk to her. His body was knotted tight as his thumb worked the numbers on the phone. He listene
d for a moment, then reported, ‘Switched off or out of range.’ He waited, then delivered a stilted message. ‘It’s Nick. Call back as soon as you can, any time. I got your messages.’

  He flipped the phone shut and shoved it into his pocket, turning to Miranda as he did so. He had a helpless expression on his face that at once made her want to go up to him, kiss him, say all the right things—if she only knew what those were, if only she knew whether he wanted to hear them.

  But she didn’t know, so she waited, and Nick spoke instead. ‘I’m wiped.’

  ‘So let’s sit.’

  ‘I want to go back to Josh soon.’

  ‘He’s sleeping. If he wakes up and wants you, Janey or Marcia will let you know straight away. Let me make you some hot chocolate or something. Do you have any?’

  ‘In the kitchen, on the bench,’ he said vaguely. ‘Josh would live on the stuff if he was allowed to.’

  She nudged him in the direction of the couch and he laughed and told her, ‘I’m as helpless as a baby. You’ll have to undress me next.’

  ‘Well, I always like doing that…’

  He laughed again, then added, ‘Holding yourself together is bloody tiring!’

  ‘So stop the holding.’

  ‘Yeah? How’s that done?’

  ‘Starts with the hot chocolate and a woman in your arms.’

  ‘Has to be the right woman.’

  ‘True.’

  And the right woman is me…I think, I want…but there’s a long way to go yet…

  She made two mugs of hot chocolate in the microwave and brought them over to the couch, where they sat and sipped in silence. She somehow knew it was better to wait for him, not to bother him with questions or words he might not want to hear tonight.

  I’m not sure where we go from here, Nick. We told each other I love you ten years ago. I think we’ve discovered all of that intensity again this week, but can we really push through everything that’s in the way?

  ‘Do you know, my father’s business went belly up eight months before he told us?’ Nick said, when she was still following the implications of what had never, not for a moment, been simply an end-of-exams one-night stand, or, this week, a holiday fling.

  The direction that his thoughts had taken surprised her into saying, ‘You haven’t told me anything about your father.’

  ‘No. Well.’

  ‘You get your reticence from him?’ she teased lightly.

  ‘Come here.’ He held out his arm to pull her close to him on the couch. Two empty mugs now sat on the coffee-table in front of them.

  She went, having no choice about it. There was a night-follows-day inevitability about everything she felt for Nick Devlin, and if she was ever going to fight it, now wasn’t the time.

  He held her as if he needed her down to his bones, turning to bury his face against her neck, wrapping his arms tight, breathing against her body, twisting her so they were locked together. ‘My dad was such a brute,’ he said, his voice rusty and reluctant. ‘But he was harder on himself than on any of us. I still believe some of the things he taught us, and it’s so hard to know what to keep and what to discard. I do keep too much to myself. I am too scared of really getting close. I’ve never hit Josh, but—’

  The words startled her into speech. ‘Your father hit you?’

  ‘He believed it was the right thing to do. I don’t think he liked it. He administered it, you know? Like medicine. Planned and measured doses, on appropriate body parts, for selected offences. But he punished himself, too. Hell, did he ever punish himself! For eleven months, when I was sixteen, he struggled with the downturn in his business, not telling a soul—not my mother, not his employees—getting deeper into debt, putting together these doomed strategies to bail the company out, hiding paperwork, doing everything in secret because it wasn’t a man’s role to talk or seek help or share burdens. He shouldered everything on his own.’

  ‘I expect those planned and measured doses of his got bigger and more frequent, though.’

  Silence. ‘Yes. That obvious?’

  ‘From the outside.’

  ‘So you’re saying I shouldn’t credit him with any courage? That he was taking out his failure on us as much as on himself?’

  ‘Oh, Nick, I wouldn’t presume to make those kinds of judgements. Not without knowing more.’

  ‘And, of course, he couldn’t keep it to himself forever. The whole thing came crashing down and he lost the business. Even then, he managed not to tell us until there was no choice. He ended up working the cash register at a garage for the last three years of his life, ringing up money for petrol and oil changes. He felt the humiliation and failure of it every minute of every day, but he didn’t talk about that either. He put up this angry, resentful wall so thick that I don’t think my mother could ever say to him, “You’re still a man in my eyes.” I don’t think they ever said that they loved each other. Not even when he was in the cardiac unit with his life hanging by a thread.’

  ‘He didn’t make it, did he?’

  ‘No, he died before they could get him stable enough for surgery.’

  ‘Were you there?’

  ‘No. By the time my mother phoned from the hospital…’ His voice went husky and trailed off. ‘I got there half an hour later. Practically cried on a nurse’s shoulder. I was nineteen. She was like you, a bit. Warm. Her heart in her eyes.’

  ‘Oh, Nick.’

  ‘Your—your parents are both still alive, aren’t they?’

  ‘Yes,’ she answered, seeing his desperate attempt to drag the conversation away from himself, away from the starkness of what he’d already said. She suspected he wouldn’t succeed—that there was a lot more—but gave him what he wanted, the safety of hearing her share some vulnerability, too. ‘They’re in their seventies now. Trundling around the country in a caravan.’

  ‘Are you close to them?’

  ‘I am. They’re lovely. I was an only child, though, and they were already in their late thirties when I was born. They worried a lot. They didn’t even want me to have a pet in case it died and broke my heart. It was a bit claustrophobic sometimes. I wanted…’

  ‘More freedom?’

  ‘More people to laugh with. More people to love.’

  That was the word that made the seismic shift.

  ‘Oh, lord. Oh, hell. That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? Love. I—I expect Mum might have tried to say it—I love you, to Dad—but he wouldn’t have wanted to hear it from her.’

  ‘No? Not even when he was so ill?’

  ‘I honestly think his heart attack came from the pressure of feeling he’d failed in the real world and having no other measure of his own worth than that kind of financial success. And no outlet. For anything. Raising three sons didn’t count, maintaining a marriage didn’t count, all the years he had supported us, paid for private education, kept us in a comfortable house—none of that counted.’

  ‘Why are you telling me this now, Nick, do you think?’ she whispered. He was still holding her and she could feel the tension in him, still as tight as stretched wire after the long night of vigil over Josh’s asthma.

  ‘Because every time I catch myself echoing his behaviour, staying silent instead of talking, shouldering things alone instead of sharing…sharing so much with you this week, and years ago has felt—’ But he broke off, picked up where he’d been going before. ‘You know, yelling when I shouldn’t, being strict and angry with Josh when maybe he needs something different and I’m being blind to it—I think about Dad and I have this mix of anger and pity and regret…’ His voice cracked again. ‘He died when there was so much left that I hadn’t said…and that he hadn’t said…and that we probably wouldn’t ever have said, either of us, even if he’d lived another thirty years. And that’s so sad and so wrong.’

  He sobbed against her body, big, shuddery, rusty sobs that he couldn’t control and that came from so far down inside him Miranda knew they’d taken him totally by surprise, even thou
gh she’d seen them coming for a while. Through that desperate little digression about her parents. For hours, in hindsight, ever since Josh had started wheezing on the beach and Nick had felt so powerless.

  ‘It’s all right. It’s OK,’ she whispered.

  You just had to say it, no matter how inadequate it was.

  It’s OK, because I’m here.

  Which was pretty arrogant, if you thought about it. Did she really have any power at all to help him? Was she at all important?

  She kissed his tears away before they fell, and the shudders stopped and the sobs ebbed until he was quiet. ‘Nick…?’ she ventured.

  ‘No.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘You’re going to—And I don’t want it. Questions. Commentary.’

  ‘That’s not…’ Fair.

  Pointless to say it. She had no expectation that he’d be fair, when he was already reeling and numb with shock at having made himself so vulnerable.

  ‘I just want to feel you and taste you and kiss you and forget,’ he said. ‘Can we do that, instead, Miranda? I’m…glad you’re here.’

  Even this, she knew, was a huge admission, huge progress.

  ‘Yes, we can do that,’ she whispered, and barely got out the words before his mouth found hers.

  He didn’t kiss her like a vulnerable man, he kissed her with a strength and certainty that made her stomach flip and the blood beat in her ears. He claimed her body with every touch, his fingers brushing across her tightened nipples through her clothing, his weight pressing against her. He muttered her name, over and over, and even though he didn’t tell her he loved her, she believed that he did.

  She had to believe it.

  On any other night, it would have gone much further, with Nick leading the way, grabbing her and pulling her towards the heights. They would have ended up in bed together in the dark within minutes, their bodies pressed skin to skin, setting each other on fire with their hands and their mouths. Miranda wanted it. Her body throbbed for it. But she didn’t think it wasn’t going to happen.