‘So you’re another doctor with the Remote Rescue Service.’ She frowned. ‘Hamish. The paediatrician?’
‘Yes, ma’am.’ He gave a rueful smile. ‘Or I’m the best we can supply in the paediatric department. I have a post-grad qualification in paediatrics, as well as my accident and emergency training.’
Great. That was another small weight lifted from her heart. All the time she’d been out here she’d been conscious of the tiny baby she’d left back at base, and now they had someone with paediatric training to take over. ‘You’ve seen Lucky?’
‘I have,’ he told her. ‘He’s looking stable. I’ll be heading back there fast to spend some more time with him. But you and Cal and Emily seem to have done a fine job. He has a fighting chance.’
‘I would have thought you’d have stayed while Em came out,’ she said, puzzled, and he grimaced.
‘Em’s in Theatre with Cal. He needs the best anaesthetist we have. Christina and Charles are with the two kids who arrived by road. That means we’re right out of doctors-apart from Alix, our pathologist, who’s just recovering from chickenpox. And we’ve even pulled her out of bed. So we had to take a chance on Lucky. Grace is specialling him. I came here. Sometimes in this place there’s not enough skill to go around and you need to make a hard call.’
‘I guess,’ she said, thinking bleakly of the number of times she’d had to leave her own son as she was leaving him now. As she’d have to walk away from Cal. So many choices…
Think of something else, she told herself fiercely. Anything.
‘Do you know Cal well?’
‘Cal’s a friend.’
‘I didn’t think Cal had friends.’ Why was she asking this, she wondered, in the midst of this horror? But the boys they were transporting now were the least injured. They were heavily sedated and they both had parents gripping their undamaged hands, as if that link alone could keep them safe. There was time and space for the two medics to talk.
And surprisingly Gina found she wanted to talk. In truth, she was desperate to talk. Anything but face the horrors of the night.
Anything but Cal?
But she’d asked.
‘Our Cal certainly keeps to himself,’ Hamish was saying. He cast an assessing look across at their patients but it appeared their respite could continue. ‘But… Gina, there’s things going on that I’m not understanding. I was barely back in town for two minutes before I was told you’ve produced Cal’s son. Cal’s son! Would that be right? Have you done that?’
‘Yes. But I’ll take him away again,’ Gina whispered. ‘I just wanted Cal to know he was alive. You don’t think I’m intending to cut in on his precious independence, do you?’
His eyes grew thoughtful. ‘You know,’ he said softly, ‘it wouldn’t be such a bad thing if you did.’
‘He’s getting along fine without me,’ Gina snapped. ‘He’s got a relationship with Emily.’
‘Has he, now?’ Hamish sent another assessing look across at their patients but both boys were breathing deep and evenly and there was no need to worry. One of the fathers had his head on his son’s hand, as if love alone could bring him through. ‘I wasn’t aware that he had such a thing,’ Hamish said softly. ‘And I know both Emily and Cal very well. Cal doesn’t have a relationship with anyone.’
‘But I thought… On the day I arrived here I found him…cuddling Emily.’
Hamish thought about that for a bit. ‘Emily’s fiancé has just walked out on her,’ he said at last. ‘He’s saying he wants space, but in reality he’s found another woman. Em knows in her heart what’s happening, no matter how much she’s denying it. If Cal was cuddling Emily, I’d be guessing that it was just Cal picking up the pieces.’ He hesitated. ‘You know, picking up the pieces is what Cal’s best at,’ he remarked thoughtfully. ‘It’s what to do with them afterwards where he doesn’t exactly shine.’
Gina blinked, and stared. Astonished. ‘You’re a paediatrician,’ she said slowly. ‘Not a psychiatrist.’
‘Everyone does everything at Crocodile Creek,’ Hamish told her, giving her a rueful smile. ‘There’s no such thing as delineation of roles. If we need a psychiatrist then I’ll be one. And I do consider Cal a friend. Even if it is a bit one-sided, if you know what I mean.’ He cast her a long, questioning look. ‘And I’m imagining you know very well what I mean.’
They fell into silence again. So much had happened in the last few hours. This sort of life-and-death drama always left her drained, Gina thought wearily, and tonight was no exception. She was exhausted. In a few minutes they’d land and they’d be thrust back into the hospital atmosphere where there’d be surgery to perform, appalled relatives to counsel and treat, Cal to face…
This was her two minutes to catch her breath and look squarely at her future.
She couldn’t. Cal…
‘I don’t know what to do,’ she whispered, and Hamish had to lean forward to hear. ‘I don’t know how to break through that barrier.’
‘It’s one heck of a barrier,’ Hamish told her. ‘You know his family history.’
‘I know what I’ve been allowed to know.’
‘He’s been betrayed by just about everybody in his life. It’s a miracle he’s a functioning human being.’
‘He’s not a trusting human being. So that makes him…’
‘Dysfunctional?’
‘Maybe,’ she whispered. ‘Yes.’
‘Then how far are you prepared to go to get him functioning again?’ Hamish asked, and Gina stared at the metal-plated floor and shook her head.
‘Not far at all. I’m just here to tell him of the existence of his son.’
‘You know, I doubt that,’ Hamish said gently. ‘I’ve known you, what-for about fifteen minutes? And even now, I doubt that very much.’
She’d been right when she’d assumed the hospital would be in chaos. The casualty entrance was mad.
Gina stood between the two stretchers that had just been wheeled in and took three deep breaths, trying for triage, trying to get some sort of priorities formed in her head. Grace appeared in the doorway, looking just as frazzled as she was feeling.
‘Where is everyone?’ Gina demanded.
‘Both Theatres are occupied,’ Grace said briefly. ‘Karen’s intracranial pressure is life-threatening. She has signs of a blood clot in association with her fractured skull and Cal’s drilled a burrhole to try and reduce pressure. Melanie has a collapsed lung and Christina and Charles are working on her. Alix is looking after path. needs and blood supply. That’s taken our full complement of doctors, except you and Hamish. Hamish, you need to check on Lucky. I came out to see if you needed any help here.’ She gazed around the mess that was the emergency ward. ‘I guess you do, huh?’
‘I guess we do,’ Gina said, mentally saying goodbye to the rest of the night. What a day. What a nightmare! ‘I guess we all do.’
They worked for two hours straight. Evacuation in the morning would see the compound fractures taken to Cairns for attention by orthopaedic specialists, but meanwhile blood supply had to be ensured, adequate pain relief had to be given, wounds had to be stitched. With only paramedics and nurses to help her, Gina had three incredibly sick and traumatised kids in her care. To say nothing of their parents.
But somehow she coped, and when Charles finally arrived to take over she was able to greet the medical director with a faint smile of reassurance.
Charles’s face twisted as he looked around the room. She had each patient settled and ready to be transferred to the wards-or to a flight out. Their appropriate relatives were settled with them. The inappropriate relatives or the onlookers who were simply there for drama had been sent home.
‘Is everything OK?’ he asked.
‘I’ll go through the case notes-’
‘There’s no need,’ Charles told her. Christina appeared in the doorway behind him and the complement of doctors had suddenly grown to three. Charles spun across to the desk and lifted the folders she’d
started out at the crash site. ‘Christina and I can take over here.’
‘Lilly?’
‘She’ll be fine,’ Christina told her. ‘We’ll fly her out for plastic surgery tomorrow morning but she’s stable.’
‘And… Karen…?’
‘That’s your next job,’ Charles said grimly. ‘I’m sorry, Gina, but I can’t let you go to bed yet.’
‘You need help with Karen?’
‘Karen died twenty minutes ago,’ Charles told her. ‘Cal and Emily worked with everything they had, but they failed. Cal’s just talked to her parents.’ He hesitated. ‘Gina, when things like this happen, Cal withdraws. He’s out in the hospital garden right now, and he needs someone.’
She stared at him, appalled. ‘What are you asking? I don’t… I can’t…’
‘Yes, you can,’ he told her, and his voice became stern. ‘You’ve thrown a hell of a shock at our Cal this afternoon. The least you can do is mop up the mess.’
‘It’s nothing to do with me.’
‘Who are you kidding?’ he said roughly. ‘But you choose. Go to bed or go and see if you can get through to Cal. But if you go to bed now…well, I don’t see how you can.’ He stared around the room and his face grew even more grim. ‘There are things that all of us can’t walk away from. You know that as well as everyone here.’
CHAPTER FIVE
SHE should go to bed. She’d do more harm than good if she approached Cal now, she thought, and CJ needed her. She made her way resolutely across to the doctors’ quarters, avoiding the garden, sure that she’d made the right decision.
CJ wasn’t in bed. Instead, there was a note pinned to his pillow.
Dear Dr Lopez
CJ couldn’t sleep and he seems a bit upset. We’ve got a new puppy at our place. Me and Mr Grubb are in the little blue house over the far side of the hospital and hubby’s just come over to tell me the pup’s making a fuss. So I thought I’d take CJ home. I’m guessing he and the pup might sleep together in our spare bedroom. I asked Dr Wetherby and he reckons you’ll be busy till late and us taking the littlie will give you a chance to sleep late tomorrow-but come over and get him if you want him back tonight. Or telephone and we’ll bring him straight back. I’ll let you know if he frets.
Dora Grubb
So CJ didn’t need her, Gina thought as she stared down at the letter. This was a note written by a competent woman who Charles trusted. CJ would be overjoyed to be asked to sleep with a puppy.
But where did that leave her?
She wanted to hug CJ, she thought bleakly, acknowledging that her ability to hug her small son in times of crisis was a huge gift. But to wake him now, to wake the Grubbs and the puppy as well, just so she could be hugged…
Grow up, she told herself, and tried to feel grown-up.
She glanced at her watch. It was three in the morning. She should shower and slide between the covers and sleep.
She knew she wouldn’t sleep.
Damn, she wanted CJ.
Cal was… Cal was…
Go to bed!
She took a grip-sort of-and walked over to pull the curtains closed. Then she paused.
Cal was down at the water’s edge. The shoreline was two hundred yards from where she was standing but his figure was unmistakable.
He was just…standing.
So what? she demanded of herself. She should leave him be.
But he was Cal. She stared down the beach at his still figure and she felt the same wrenching of her heart that she’d felt all those years before. It was as if this man was a part of her and to walk away from him would be tantamount to taking away a limb.
She’d had to walk away before, she thought dully, for all sorts of reasons. And she’d survived.
But CJ was safely asleep and there was nothing standing between herself and Cal.
Nothing but five years of pain, and a desolate childhood that had destroyed his trust in everyone.
He’d never get over it, she told herself. He was damaged goods. Dangerous.
But still she couldn’t walk away. Not now. There was only so much resolve one woman was capable of, and she’d run right out of it.
She opened her door and she walked down to the beach to meet him.
He sensed rather that saw her approach. What was it about this woman that gave him a sixth sense-that made him feel different, strange, just because she was on the same continent as he was? he wondered. She was walking along the beach to reach him and he braced himself as if expecting to be hit.
She’d hurt him.
No, he’d hurt her, he thought savagely. She’d been pregnant and he hadn’t been there for her.
He would have been there if she’d said…
Liar. He would have run.
‘I’m sorry, Cal,’ she said gently behind him, and he flinched. But he didn’t turn.
‘What do you want?’ It was a low growl. He sounded angry, which was grossly unfair but he was past being fair tonight.
Maybe she sensed it. She sounded softly sympathetic-not responding with her own anger.
‘It’s been a dreadful day, Cal. To have CJ thrown at you, and then copping such deaths…’
‘I couldn’t save her,’ he said savagely into the night. He’d left his shoes back on the dry sand and rolled up his jeans before he’d come down the water’s edge. The water was now washing over his feet, taking out some of the heat but not enough. Still he didn’t turn and Gina came and stood beside him and stared out at the same sea he was seeing. She was wearing jeans and T-shirt and sandals, but she didn’t seem to notice that she was wading into the shallows regardless. Neither did he. ‘I worked so damned hard and I couldn’t save her. Of all the useless…’
‘You can only do so much, Cal. You’re a doctor. Not a magician.’
‘The pressure was too much,’ he said, picking up a ribbon of kelp that had washed against his legs and hurling it into an oncoming breaker. It didn’t go far. He walked further into the waves to retrieve it and then hurled it again. ‘Did you know we actually split her skull, trying to save her?’ he demanded. ‘We drilled a burrhole, but the whole brain was so bruised we realised the pressure was killing her. So we split…’
Gina was beside him-but not too close. They were up to their knees in the surf and the rolling breakers were reaching their thighs. She didn’t touch him. They were standing three feet apart, and she was staring out to sea, and he knew that she was seeing what he was seeing. A dying child.
‘That’s heroic surgery, Cal,’ she said softly. ‘Performed as a last-ditch stand in a hopeless case. But it was hopeless. You can’t blame yourself when something like that doesn’t work. Medicine has limits.’
‘Yeah.’
She took a step closer and laid a hand on his arm. He flinched.
‘Don’t.’
‘Don’t touch you, do you mean?’ she asked. ‘Cal, that’s what you’ve been saying for years. You’re so afraid of people being close.’
‘What do you know about what I’m like now?’
‘Hamish says your friendship with Emily is platonic,’ she murmured softly, and her hand stayed on his arm, whether he willed it or not. ‘He says you’re still driving people away.’
‘I didn’t drive you away.’
‘No?’
‘Gina-’
‘OK, let’s leave it,’ she told him, her voice softening in sympathy. But instead of removing her hand from his arm, she linked her fingers through his and tugged him sideways. Cal had such shadows but he’d earned them the hard way. For him to move past them must be a near-impossible task. ‘Let’s leave the lid on it.’
‘What are…?’ She was tugging him through the shallows. ‘Where-?’
‘Cal, there’s one thing I have learned in the last few years,’ she told him, still tugging so he had no option but to follow. ‘Reinforced by stuff like tonight. And that’s the reality that you can’t spend your life dwelling in the shadows of what’s gone. If you do that, then you might as
well finish it off when you lose the ones you love. But I only have one life, Cal. I intend to make the most of it.’
‘So what’s that-?’
‘It means I’m going for a walk in the moonlight,’ she told him, refusing to let him interrupt. ‘CJ’s safe with Mrs Grubb and the new Grubb puppy. This water is delicious. It’s a full moon and it’s low tide. We have miles of beach all to ourselves and there’s no way either of us is going to sleep after today’s events. So let’s walk.’
He stopped. Firm. Planting his feet in the shallows. Holding himself still against the insistent tug of her hand.
‘I don’t think that’s a good idea.’
‘I think it’s a splendid idea,’ she told him, sounding exasperated.
‘I don’t want to get close to you, Gina.’
‘You know, I have news for you,’ she told him, linking her arm through his and keeping on tugging. ‘You’re the father of my son. You’re here now. You don’t want to get close? Cal Jamieson, you already are.’
He was walking. Gina started down the beach through the shallows, and Cal let himself be tugged beside her, and as he relaxed and started to walk without being tugged she knew she’d achieved a significant victory.
He’d always taken deaths personally, she thought. It was one of the things she loved about him. Most doctors developed personal detachment from patients, but she’d never seen that in Cal, no matter how hard he fought to find it.
He’d never succeeded in personal detachment. Except in his personal relationships.
Except with her.
But for now he was walking beside her, fighting the way he was feeling about her and about CJ, and at least that meant that he wasn’t internalising Karen’s death, she thought. The hours after such a death were always dreadful. Going over and over things in your mind, wondering what else could you have done, what you’d missed…
She could distract him for a little while, she thought, and if by doing so she could distract herself from…things, great.
His Secret Love-Child Page 9
