A Miracle for the Baby Doctor

by Meredith Webber

  Or didn’t want to acknowledge?

  ‘Now, should we drive or walk? It’s up to you. The walk down is beautiful because you look out over the town and the sea, but coming back up the hill isn’t fun if you’re tired after your flight.’

  Fran took his words as a challenge. Tired after her flight indeed!

  ‘I hope I’m not so feeble I can’t manage a flight and a walk up a hill all in one day,’ she retorted, trying in vain to remember just how high the hill they’d driven up earlier might be.

  Ha! So she’s got some spirit, this sophisticated beauty, Steve thought, though all he said was, ‘That’s great.’

  They set off, up past the hospital, along the ridge that looked out over a peaceful lagoon with small islands dotted about it.

  ‘I love this view,’ he said. ‘You’re looking down at the centre of Port Vila, and out over a few of the smaller islands. Some of the other islands in the group are much larger than this one, but Vila, or Port Vila, the proper name, is the capital.’

  He continued his tourist guide talk as they walked, pointing out the smart parliament building, telling her of the cyclone that had hit just east of the town a few years back, and the earthquakes the island group had suffered recently.

  ‘Yet people still live here—they rebuild and life goes on?’

  She turned towards him as she spoke, obviously intrigued.

  ‘It is their home,’ he reminded her, and she nodded.

  ‘Of course it is.’

  ‘And your home? Has it always been in Sydney?’

  Normal, getting to know you talk, yet it felt more than that. Something inside him wanted to know more of this woman who’d come into his life.

  ‘Always Sydney,’ she replied.

  They were heading downhill now, traffic thickening on the road as they came closer to the waterfront.

  ‘And you?’ she asked, moving closer to him as they passed a group of riotous holiday makers.

  ‘Sydney, then a little town on the coast, Wetherby, then Sydney again. It’s complicated.’

  She smiled at him.

  ‘Like the pelican?’ she teased. ‘Seems you’ll have a lot to tell me over dinner.’

  Was she interested or just being polite?

  Not that it mattered. He might be attracted to this woman but everything about her told him she wasn’t a candidate for a mutually enjoyable affair and anything more than that was still a little way down his ‘to-do’ list.

  Not far down but still...

  He returned to tour guide mode, pointing out various buildings, and soon they were down at the waterfront, and she stopped, looking out over the shining water.

  ‘It’s a beautiful setting for a town, isn’t it?’

  ‘It is indeed,’ he agreed. ‘It’s one of the reasons I never mind coming back here.’

  ‘The people being another?’ she said, and he turned towards her and smiled.

  ‘Of course!’

  He led the way along the boardwalk built out over the water’s edge towards the restaurant in a quieter part of the harbour. But a cry made them both turn. A group of Japanese tourists was talking excitedly and pointing down into the water, crowding so closely to the edge they were in danger of falling in.

  Steve ran back, Fran following more slowly, arriving in time to catch Steve’s shirt as he threw it off and stepped out of his sandals, before diving into the inky depths beneath them.

  ‘Ambulance!’ he yelled when he resurfaced, before diving back down out of sight.

  Fran turned to one of the locals who’d joined the group, and said, ‘Ambulance?’

  He nodded, holding up his cell phone to show he was already on it.

  Which left Fran free to push back the excited onlookers and beckon the burly local who’d phoned the ambulance to come and join her.

  Steve’s head reappeared, a very dark head beside it.

  ‘If you can lean over, I think I can pass him up.’

  The breathless words weren’t quite as clear as they might have been, but Fran understood and she and the local man lay down so they could lean forward towards the water.

  With what seemed like superhuman strength, Steve thrust the slight form of a young man upwards, to be grabbed by the stranger next to Fran, then Fran herself.

  Together they hauled him up, with a couple from the tourist party helping to lift him clear. Fran waved the crowd away again and rested their patient in the recovery position, while Steve swam towards some steps fifty yards away.

  Fran cleared the young man’s airway and felt for a pulse. Not even a faint one!

  Rolling him onto his back, she pinched his nose and gave five quick breaths, then changed position to begin chest compressions.

  Steve arrived as she reached the count of thirty, so she let him take over the compressions while she counted and did the breaths. The ambulance siren was growing louder and louder as it neared them but they kept pumping and breathing until, finally, the young man gave a convulsive jerk, and Steve rolled him back into the recovery position before he brought up what seemed like a gallon of sea water.

  He was breathing on his own, though still coughing and spluttering, when the ambos arrived to take over.

  Fran and Steve stood together as the lad was strapped onto a gurney and loaded into the ambulance, and it was only when his shorts brushed against her that she realised he was still wet.

  And somewhere in the chaos she’d lost his shirt.

  Fortunately a backpacker appeared, holding the shirt and Steve’s sandals.

  ‘You two made a good team,’ he said. ‘No panic and straight into action. Done it before?’

  Steve shook his head.

  ‘Instinct,’ he explained.

  ‘And a bit of medical knowledge,’ Fran added, feeling unaccountably pleased by the young man’s words.

  After handing over the shirt and sandals, the backpacker offered Steve a pair of board shorts.

  ‘Might not be your style, mate, but better dry than wet,’ he said cheerfully. ‘You can keep them. I’m heading home and I could use a bit more space in my backpack.’

  Obviously pleased by the offer, Steve stripped off his wet shorts, revealing a pair of lurid boxer shorts.

  ‘Staff joke,’ he explained as he pulled the dry shorts over them, then finished dressing with his shirt and sandals.

  He turned to Fran, his arms out held.

  ‘So, teammate, I might not be quite the picture of sartorial excellence you expected to be dining with, but will I do?’

  ‘Definitely!’ she said, then wondered why she felt there’d been a double meaning in her answer.

  They finished the walk to the restaurant in companionable silence as if their brief response to the young man’s drowning had somehow drawn them together.

  ‘This is wonderful,’ she said, as the waiter seated them at an outside table. ‘And across there?’

  She pointed to a small island with a row of thatched huts along the water’s edge.

  What she’d really wanted to know was how the young man might be faring, but common sense told her to leave that little interlude alone and not to make too much of it.

  ‘One of many resorts,’ he explained. ‘Vanuatu’s a tourist destination now. But that island over there, tiny as it is, has been settled for a long time. One of the colonial governors had a house there, and bits of it remain.’

  ‘And it’s only accessed by boat?’

  Steve nodded. ‘Look, the little boat is crossing now. It’s about a five-minute trip but it does make that resort seem a bit special.’

  A waiter interrupted them with menus and offers of drinks.

  ‘Light beer for me,’ Steve said. ‘Fran?’

  ‘I’d like a white wine, just a glass,�
� she told the waiter, who then rattled off a list of choices.

  ‘Pinot Gris,’ she said, getting lost after that in the list. And by the time their drinks arrived, they’d settled on their meals—steak for Steve and swordfish for Fran.

  ‘Cheers,’ he said, lifting his glass. ‘And here’s to a pleasant stay for you in Vanuatu. Hopefully you won’t be called upon to save any more lives, although I must say you handled the situation enormously well.’

  ‘Anyone would have done the same,’ she said, ever so casually, although the compliment pleased her.

  She touched her glass to his bottle, and echoed his ‘Cheers’ then took a sip of the wine, and nodded appreciation.

  It was all Fran could do not to gulp at the wine.

  Somehow, it seemed, the simple act of working together to save the young man had formed a bond between them.

  Or maybe that was just her imagination! Running riot because the walk to the restaurant had set her nerves on fire?

  The walk had certainly been fascinating, Steve pointing out special places, telling stories of the early European settlement, but it had been his presence—the nearness of him as they’d walked side by side—that had unsettled nerves she’d forgotten she had.

  Oh, she’d been out with other men since her divorce, but none of them had made something—excitement—thrum along her nerves.

  Maybe there was something in the richly perfumed tropical air—a drug of some kind—that heightened all the senses.

  Or maybe seeing his broad, tanned chest, water nestling among the sparse hairs on his sternum, had stirred long-forgotten lust!

  Or maybe she was just tired.

  That was the most logical explanation for all these weird fancies...

  But she didn’t feel tired! She felt...alive.

  ‘So, tell me about the pelican,’ she said, to take her mind off nerves and feelings.

  Steve grinned at her and she realised her question hadn’t entirely worked because her nerves twitched in response to that grin.

  ‘Local people know we’re a clinic, but because we’re not part of the hospital, they’re not entirely sure what we do. Consequently, stories get around. We’ve had people calling in for physiotherapy and even marital counselling, but the pelican was a first.’

  A real smile this time lit up his dark eyes, and pressed little smile lines into the corners of them.

  ‘These two boys, about ten, I’d say, arrived dragging their go-cart behind them.’

  He paused.

  ‘You know go-carts—little boxy things on wheels that kids build themselves? They’re great here because of the hills, though how some of them haven’t been killed I don’t know.’

  ‘If they’re going down a hill like the one we walked down, with the traffic, it would be suicidal. But anyway I know go-carts or at least the theory of them.’

  ‘So the kids had this pelican in their go-cart. They’d found it near their home not far from the waterfront, and it appeared to have been hit by something—maybe a car. It had an injured leg and wing on one side and obviously couldn’t fly and possibly couldn’t walk as it sat quite contentedly in the cart.’

  ‘And you don’t do pelicans at the clinic?’ Fran teased, drawn into the story by Steve’s obvious involvement with the boys and the bird.

  He smiled again, and she refused to acknowledge her physical reaction.

  Perhaps she was tired.

  ‘The problem was that the vet’s place is halfway round the island and although it’s only a small island, it was too far for the boys to drag their cart.’

  ‘So you offered them a lift?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Put them, the cart and the bird in the old vehicle and probably broke any number of road rules getting them there so I could get back to the airport to meet you.’

  Their meals arrived and their conversation paused, pleasing Fran as it gave her the opportunity to study the man across the table from her.

  Surreptitiously, of course...

  He was good-looking, though not in a plastic film-star kind of way—more manly, somehow, with good facial bones and strong features.

  Tanned, but of course working here for several months of the year would ensure a year-round tan, with a few flecks of grey appearing in his dark hair. Just strands, here and there, though they obviously didn’t bother him.

  But it was his smile, even his half-smile, quirking up at one corner of his mouth that sent the tingles down her spine.

  Oh, for heaven’s sake, you’ve just met the man, and you don’t believe in love at first sight.

  Not that it was love, only attraction.

  But she didn’t believe in that either...

  ‘So, growing up?’ she said, deciding talking was far better than mulling over her reactions to the man. ‘Sydney, and you mentioned...?’

  ‘Wetherby!’

  He said it as if the place was special to him, so she pursued it, wanting to keep a conversation going, but also wanting to know more about this man who had set up a clinic in this place and drove small boys and pelicans to vets.

  ‘Wetherby?’ she said.

  Steve knew what she was asking, but did she really want to know?

  And did he really want to talk about his childhood?

  Usually not, but with this woman?

  Maybe.

  ‘Wetherby is a very small coastal town where, as one of my foster sisters always said, nothing ever happens.’

  ‘Foster sisters?’

  ‘My parents died when I was eight.’

  Memories of that time flicked across his mind like images on a screen. The sheer disbelief that suddenly he didn’t have his beloved mother, his laughing, boisterous father...

  ‘How terrible for you.’

  He looked at Fran across the table and knew she’d meant it. She’d known pain herself, he’d read it in her eyes earlier today, when they’d been discussing the IVM...

  ‘It was hard. I’d been left with my nanny while they flew to America, to get me, they’d said, a brother or sister. At that age America is the place where movies come from so it seemed perfectly reasonable that you could pick up a child there as well. It was only later, with Hallie’s help, that I pieced it all together.’

  ‘Hallie?’

  They’d finished their meals and pushed their plates to the side, and Fran was watching him over her glass as she sipped at the last of the wine.

  ‘There was a foster home in Wetherby, and I honestly believe I won the jackpot, being sent there. Hallie was the housemother—Hallie and her husband Pop ran the place and somehow melded a mob of very divergent types into a family.’

  Fran was frowning at him now, but no less lovely when she frowned.

  ‘Had you no relation who would take you?’ she asked, and he pulled his mind from his companion to go on, feeling a need to explain.

  ‘I was the only child of only children, and it was because they’d both hated being only children that my parents were going to the US. IVF was fairly well established here but whatever problem my mother had, had prevented it working for her. My father flew so it must have seemed the natural thing for them to do—head off in search of someone who might help.’

  ‘Such desperation,’ Fran said quietly, ‘but at least they both wanted the child they were seeking.’

  He studied her for a moment, sure there was something behind the words, but before he could ask, she’d prompted him again.

  ‘Go on.’

  The gentleness in her tone led him back to the past.

  ‘To answer your first question, I did have relations—I had a grandmother, my father’s mother, and a grandfather on my mother’s side—but neither of them were really capable of looking after me, even with the nanny. The obvious answer, to th
em, was boarding school.’

  ‘At eight?’ Fran queried, and Steve’s answering nod told her it had not been good.

  ‘I hated it,’ he said simply. ‘Fortunately, a close friend of my mother’s saw the state I was in, and arranged for me to go into foster care, with the proviso I spend my Christmas holidays with my grandparents. They lived in adjacent houses, my parents having grown up together, and both of them had housekeepers who could look after me for the short time I was with them.

  ‘But Wetherby was where you spent most of your time?’

  ‘I lived there until I left to go to university, by which time my grandfather had died and my grandmother had gone into a nursing home. I sold my grandfather’s house and bought an apartment in Sydney.’

  ‘But kept the other house?’

  He grinned at her.

  ‘Well, the house was still my grandmother’s, but it was also the house where I’d lived with my parents. It is a house made for a family, and I knew that’s what I eventually wanted, so even after my grandmother died I kept it, and leased it out until I needed it.’

  ‘And you need it now? You live there? With your family?’

  ‘No family yet,’ he told her, ‘but, yes, I live there.’

  ‘So you’ve come home,’ she said, smiling at him, making all the attraction he’d felt from the moment he’d first seen her come rushing back to life within his body.

  Really, this was just too much.

  It was madness.

  They were both here to work.

  Holiday romance?

  Even as the words whispered in his head he knew that wouldn’t work.

  Not with this woman.

  She was, as Hallie would have said, a keeper. Although the first woman he’d thought had been a keeper had thrown his engagement ring at him and disappeared from his life.

  Then and there, he’d decided to work through his list and wait until he’d achieved it all before he settled down with marriage and children. He smiled as he thought of that list, the original now so tattered he’d had to paste it into a book to prevent its total disintegration.