by Becky Wicks
‘I see,’ said Freya. ‘You can’t talk about it, of course.’
He tensed. He’d told himself to keep his distance, to keep his family’s issues private, but they were a team above anything else, now more than ever. He didn’t just want her to trust him now, he needed her to, as a colleague, even if she’d never be anything else. He couldn’t have her thinking he didn’t trust her.
‘It’s my dad, Freya. I haven’t told anyone here yet...’
‘Your dad?’ Her voice was softer, worried. ‘Lucas, what’s happened?’
The door swung open slowly. Ruben was back. ‘We’ll talk, I promise, but not here,’ he managed quickly, right as Freya tore her eyes from Lucas’s and hurried to assist a tear-stained Anne Marie back towards the couch.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THE NEXT DAY Freya lugged a box of clothes down the three flights of stairs, past the now cleared-out kitchen on the lower floor and into the street. It just about fitted into her bicycle basket, even though most of it was bulging over the sides and spilling over with Anouk’s sweaters and shoes.
‘I’m going to the shelter again,’ she explained to Liv. The phone was still pressed precariously to her shoulder and she fumbled with her headphones.
‘Again?’ Liv sounded suspicious. ‘Let me guess, this has something to do with your heart surgeon?’
‘I just have to drop some things off. And, yes, I will talk to Lucas if he’s there. It’s hard to talk at work about private matters, as you can imagine.’
‘Private matters? You have private matters with Lucas now, do you?’ Liv was teasing her.
‘We barely get any time one on one, when we’re not with patients and their families,’ she explained as she started making her way on two wheels along the cobbled streets in the direction of Inloophuis.
‘One on one, hmm...’
‘I think he wants to tell me something important,’ she confessed.
‘I’m sure he does...’ Liv trailed off with a laugh, and Freya felt her nerves fray even further, taking a left along the canal. ‘You seem very invested for someone who’s always so...’
‘So what?’
‘So anti having a man in her life.’
Freya cringed. Was that how she really came across?
‘So listen.’ Liv was getting down to business. ‘You told me to come up with some dates for my flight. Did you get the email I sent with my options?’
‘I did. Joy’s going to help me get the room ready for you. It won’t be too much longer now.’
Liv tutted and blew air through her lips. ‘Fine. I guess we’re getting there slowly, but you’re still way too busy for your own good, Freya. Is Joy a new friend of yours?’
‘She works at the hospital.’
‘You haven’t talked about a girlfriend in a while. Does she know you’ll be packing your bags soon, never to be seen again? Does Lucas know that?’
‘Very funny. I’ll speak to you later. Enjoy your night!’
‘I have a date,’ Liv cut in excitedly. ‘He’s an artist. I’ll let you know how it goes. We all know artists are cheap, though, not like your heart surgeons...’
‘I’m really glad you’re moving on, Liv. Bye!’ She hung up, narrowly missing a dog walker with her front wheel.
Liv certainly knew how to push her buttons. Freya started thinking about the job in Vietnam again. Maybe she should think about applying. The start date was early in the new year but there would be interviews and a site visit first...and then she’d have a deadline for starting another exciting new adventure.
She held up a hand to the lovely lady at the flower stall, who recognised her and waved back. That was definitely still her intention—to leave. Wasn’t it?
‘No tulips today, Freya?’ the lady called as Freya passed, dinging her bell over the precarious box in her basket. She was packing up her stall for the night, stacking buckets by the roadside.
‘I’ll be back for some tomorrow!’
She’d taken tulips to the consultation room most days since she’d started at the hospital. Lucas always stopped to smell them, as if he was trying to gauge if they were real...
She caught herself.
Lucas.
They’d talked about the kiss at least. He’d said it wasn’t why he hadn’t been at the hospital for over a week.
It wasn’t just a box of shoes and sweaters that was propelling her forward tonight, she forced herself to admit. It was the prospect of seeing him, talking to him. He had finally started to open up and she hoped that whatever the problem was with his father, it wasn’t too serious. She feared it was, though, and that it could be the reason he’d been so hell bent on her mending her relationship with her mother.
At the shelter, Lucas was chopping carrots like a pro on a giant red chopping board. The kitchen at the end of the huge dining hall was buzzing with action, and the air was rich with the comforting smell of tomatoes and garlic. It made her stomach growl.
‘Doesn’t he look cute in an apron?’ Kate said on her way past with a raw carrot to nibble on.
Lucas did indeed look cute in his denim apron. He was wearing jeans and a burgundy striped T-shirt that showed off his muscled arms. Even sexier was the fact that he seemed to be in full control of a group of nine volunteers, ordering them to chop and sieve and stir a series of bubbling pots and sizzling pans.
‘Hey, Freya.’ He put his knife down when he saw her. Everyone turned to watch as he slid the door open at the serving hatch and made his way out to her. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘I bring gifts,’ she said, dropping the box on the end of one of the long steel tables. She caught the eye of the guy she’d seen here before, the guy with one arm and the military tattoo. Martijn. He winked at her, like he knew something she didn’t, then winced for some reason, turning back to the sink, where he was rinsing lettuce in a colander.
Lucas had stopped in front of her, his six-foot-something frame blocking the bustle in the kitchen. He seemed to be unsure of how to greet her. In the end he lowered his head and dropped a sideways kiss against her left cheek, and the move left her throat dry and her stomach swooping again.
‘You kept your promise. Thanks for this.’
‘There’s more where that came from,’ she said, avoiding the intensity of his blue eyes. She could still feel his hands in her hair, and hers cupping his glorious backside as they’d kissed furiously. They’d totally broken the vacuum cleaner in a fit of passion and suddenly she felt an uncontrollable urge to kiss him again, properly, in private, where they couldn’t be interrupted.
‘So, what are you cooking?’ she asked, when she realised they were still standing there staring at each other with everyone trying to pretend they weren’t watching.
‘Tonight is spaghetti night. We add whatever veggies get dropped off—nothing goes to waste on my watch. Do you want to help?’
Freya allowed herself to be led to a space at the worktop, next to Lucas. Before she knew it she was clad in a matching apron, spreading butter over what felt like a thousand white baguettes, ready to be made into garlic bread. The high ceilings didn’t do a lot to help the temperature. Lucas swiped the back of one hand across his forehead. Hot, to say the least.
Lucas gave orders to the team every now and then, crossing items and duties off a giant whiteboard on the wall by the industrial refrigerators and dishwashers. He seemed to know just what he was doing, and she enjoyed the happy chatter all around her, even if it was mostly in Dutch. It took the edge off being alone with Lucas.
‘So, you started telling me something about your dad,’ she said quietly. ‘Is everything OK? I wasn’t even sure if you’d be here tonight.’
‘Every Tuesday,’ he said. ‘I’m here without fail.’ He glanced around him and put down his knife, wiping his hands on his apron. His expression was sombre now. ‘But, yes, I was with hi
m when I was on leave. Well, I was looking for him, actually.’
‘Looking for him?’
Martijn let out a cough over by the sink. It was so loud she sprang from Lucas’s side, realising now that she’d stepped even closer to him to talk. Her bare arm brushed his in her T-shirt and she shivered at the slightest contact, goosebumps spreading up her forearm. Why on earth did he have this effect on her?
‘Are you OK, Martijn?’ Lucas was looking at the guy in concern, over her head. Martijn had his one hand pressed to his chest.
He said something in Dutch. ‘Indigestion?’ Lucas replied. ‘You haven’t even eaten anything yet! Go sit down, man, if you feel bad.’
Martijn shrugged, winced again slightly, but carried on rinsing things with one hand under the giant hose of a tap.
‘Stubborn fool,’ Lucas muttered, and Freya smiled, noting the German Shepherd sitting patiently by the door to the dining room with his tongue lolling out, sniffing the air. Martijn’s dog.
‘So, yeah, we had to look for my dad. He was gone for three whole days. My mum’s now under strict orders not to let him have the car keys any more, which is tough as they’ve always had so many social obligations, even more since Dad retired.’
‘Why can’t he leave?’
There was a long pause.
He has Alzheimer’s,’ he said finally.
Freya’s hand found Lucas’s arm. Her fingers curled halfway around his biceps. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘It’s getting worse. Initially, he was diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment. Then we got the updated diagnosis of Alzheimer’s. Mum thought he was just becoming a little forgetful, and Dad thought he was just a bit foggy, till he filed a paycheque in one of her cookbooks. Fast forward to last week. He got into the car and drove without knowing where he was going. Then he got there and forgot to come back.’
Freya swallowed. She could tell by the look in his eyes that he was devastated. She’d been too wrapped up in her own thoughts, especially after that encounter in the storeroom. At one point she’d even entertained the thought he might have taken leave just to avoid her! How egotistical was that?
‘I don’t want the team to know,’ he said resolutely, turning to her. ‘Not until they really need to.’
‘But they’d all understand. They respect you, they admire you. They’d totally appreciate the need to be with your family right now, if it’s taking time off that you’re worried about.’
‘It’s not just that,’ he admitted, piling chopped carrots into a huge silver bowl. ‘We both know we need to focus while we’re at work, Freya, there’s a lot at stake right now. My dad has the family around him, we’re a tight-knit unit.’ He paused a moment, swiping his forehead with the back of his hand. ‘Even though Simon, my brother, still wants to put him in a home. It’s the first time we’ve had a serious disagreement in years, but he knows I’m right. Dad needs to stay with Mum as long as possible—they’d both go crazy without each other.’
Freya picked up her knife again. It sounded like his parents were still very much in love. ‘I can’t imagine losing someone slowly to a disease that steals your memories,’ she said. ‘To think I try so hard sometimes to block so many memories out.’
‘I think we all do that,’ he admitted quietly.
An almighty clatter from behind them made them both spin around. ‘What the...?’
Martijn was on the floor, clutching his chest, surrounded by chopped-up lettuce that had fallen from the giant bowl. Shadow was barking and leaping at the serving hatch, trying his hardest to get to him. ‘Martijn!’
Lucas was on his knees in a heartbeat. Freya dropped beside him, rolling him over to his side. Martijn was trying to speak, streams of Dutch that Freya was sure were incoherent, from what she understood anyway. ‘Everyone back,’ she heard Lucas yell. He called an ambulance while she placed Martijn’s head on a folded towel, and the shocked crew in the kitchen scattered.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
LUCAS GRABBED A pair of kitchen scissors from the hook on the wall, but Freya took them from his hands. ‘I’ll do it.’
He switched to being Martijn’s head support as her hands worked efficiently, quickly, cutting at his T-shirt. It was the navy-blue one he’d given the man himself.
‘Stay with us Martijn,’ he urged, but Martijn’s eyes fluttered shut.
Nausea started to claim his stomach, which up until a few seconds ago had been growling with hunger for home-made spaghetti.
‘He’s breathing, but it’s shallow.’ Freya had switched to medic mode. This was it. The worst-case scenario he was supposed to be prepared for, but wasn’t. His hands worked on autopilot alongside Freya’s, tipping Martijn’s head back, double-checking for a breath, even an alcohol-soaked one, as was Martijn’s wont.
‘His heart rate’s slowing,’ he heard himself say. Somewhere in the background someone was gasping and sobbing. Freya rammed her hair back into a ponytail. ‘The paramedics are on the way.We need the defib.’
‘We’re running out of time.’
He forced himself back into the zone he’d been talking about not so long ago to an audience in the podcast recording studio. He entered that zone every time a parent put their child in his expert hands in the OR. Focus. Focus. Not so easy when it was someone you knew, though, lying at your mercy in a critical state. The calm and centred stillness was eluding him now.
‘We have to start CPR,’ He was surprised that his authoritative tone conveyed no hint of what he was feeling inside.
It felt like hours passed in slow motion as he pumped Martijn’s chest, feeling the rest of the room slip away, even as the heat in the kitchen threatened to choke him. ‘Come on, man, breathe!’
A trickle of perspiration slid down his temple. Freya’s brow was glistening too, but she ignored it. She was the one in the zone now. She was helping him as much as Martijn, but they seemed to be losing the fight.
Her hand landed steady on his shoulder. ‘Let me,’ she said, and he shifted aside, almost skidding on some lettuce as she took over the compressions, urgent, yet measured at the same time, as if she’d done this hundreds of times.
Suddenly it hit him. He hadn’t met half the people she had, or been in half the situations she had, places with barely any medical care or equipment. Now he was glad of it, in awe of her skill. His heart was a painful, heavy lump in his chest.
Come on, Martijn, you’ve already survived so much. You’re not going down because of a stupid heart attack now, are you? he thought desperately.
Somewhere in the distance a siren began to wail. He felt like he was dreaming, watching Freya’s hair tumble down around her eyes as her ponytail came loose. He took over from her on autopilot, another set of compressions, but Martijn’s lifeless body was already draining of colour. Two halves of his one-time favourite T-shirt were draped like tattered curtains on the floor on either side of his torso, where Freya had scissored it off him.
Why hadn’t he seen the signs?
‘Cardiac episode.’ Lucas stood as the paramedics raced down the aisle of the dining hall towards them with a stretcher. He knew one of them, a guy called Jan. ‘He’s not responding to CPR. He said he had indigestion, and that was it.’
‘No,’ Feyola called out from the other end of the room now in her trademark bright magenta dress. This was the first time Lucas had noticed her tonight. ‘Earlier, in the communal area, he said he felt weak. I thought he was just drunk again.’
Martijn’s body was clear, apart from the shock pads the paramedics were now applying to his exposed chest. ‘We did several rounds of compressions,’ Freya explained, and he felt her hands clutching one forearm as she tried to urge him backwards, their duty done. It was no longer up to them to try and save Martijn. But he couldn’t move further away than a few inches; his eyes and feet were glued to the scene. Why hadn’t he seen the signs? He’d been with Mart
ijn for two hours already, making jokes, trying to take his mind off his own family issues. Now this.
‘Lucas, they’re doing all they can for him.’ Freya’s hand found his now, and he observed the scene from a distant place outside his body as his friend’s heavy chest rose and fell with each burst of power, like it was nothing but a useless sack of potatoes.
‘Come on, man,’ he urged again out loud. Shadow was still barking. Somewhere at the other end of the dining hall Fayola and Kate had gathered the guests and volunteers, and several people were whimpering.
‘Go again,’ the paramedic yelled. Shadow whined helplessly and his heart broke. The dog knew something was very wrong.
‘There’s no response.’ Jan shuffled around Martijn’s body on the cold, hard floor. Freya flicked several leaves of lettuce aside with her feet, in some effort to preserve the homeless man’s dignity.
Someone stood to attend to a pot of pasta that was boiling over, while someone else turned off the tap that Martijn had switched on moments before he’d keeled over.
‘I can’t believe this,’ he muttered in Dutch. Freya’s fingers tightened in his. He didn’t have the capacity to speak in English right now, but her hand was like a lifeline, rooting him to her side, and to normality. He knew in an instant that if she wasn’t here he might just crack open and then she’d see the full extent of his emotions...
He didn’t even want to think about it.
The paramedics were yelling at each other now. More shocks were administered to Martijn’s chest and still Lucas gripped her hand, realising he was actually praying, pleading to a God he rarely even thought about, let alone spoke to.
‘There’s nothing more we can do. He’s gone. I’m sorry.’
Jan’s words echoed around his skull as if they were coming from miles away. He felt hot and cold at the same time, staring at Martijn’s bearded face turning pale. His lips were an eerie grey, almost blue. Just moments ago the guy had been winking at Freya, chopping a lettuce. What the hell...?
