The Children's Doctor and the Single Mom

by Lilian Darcy

  ‘Then you understand!’ Mrs Thornton said with feeling.

  The nappy felt very light. You became pretty skilled at estimating urinary output by the weight in your hand. Dry, versus slightly wet, versus nicely soaked. This one felt dry.

  ‘When did you last change him?’ she asked his mother.

  ‘Oh, it would be a couple of hours ago. What’s the time now?’

  ‘Almost seven-thirty.’

  ‘That late! In that case, it’s about four hours since I changed him.’

  ‘Was he very wet then?’

  ‘The nurse weighed the nappy. Just a few mils, she said. I think she wrote it down.’ She didn’t ask if the low output could be a problem, but Tammy could see she’d gone on the alert.

  ‘Let’s get you into a new one, little man,’ she murmured to the baby, wondering if this could be the source of Mrs Thornton’s nebulous worry. He shouldn’t be dehydrated. There was no obvious distension in his lower abdomen. And newborns often didn’t pee very much at first.

  Still…She took his temperature, although he wasn’t due for it, and found that it had gone up a few points—38.1 degrees Celsius. He was officially febrile now, and fever in a premmie newborn wasn’t something you ignored.

  She found Dr Burchell at the far end of the unit, studying the notes of a baby girl with a serious heart defect, and told him, ‘I’m not sure if this earns me that coffee you mentioned…’

  ‘Good coffee, right? Freshly brewed, in a china cup.’

  ‘That’s the one…Could there be a kidney problem? He doesn’t seem to be putting out much urine.’

  ‘Newborns don’t.’ Dr Burchell’s mind was clearly still on the heart baby, whose blood gases were getting worse.

  The tiny girl needed surgery, Tammy knew, but she really wasn’t strong enough. They’d wanted to get her weight up higher, but it was going in the opposite direction, and her little body was exhausting itself getting that tiny, damaged heart to work.

  ‘He’s five days old,’ Tammy persisted, even though she understood Dr Burchell’s tight face and the frustrated way he paged through the notes and looked at the heart baby. He wanted to focus on the more serious case. ‘He’s started feeding. And his temp’s over 38.’

  OK, she had his attention now. Hopefully he wouldn’t ask how much over 38 degrees. His grey eyes—a deep, liquid grey—fixed themselves on her cap, narrowing with something that was probably annoyance, and she wondered if bits of her hair were making an unauthorised escape bid. They often did.

  ‘You’re thinking there’s a partial blockage, and he’s having urinary reflux?’ he asked. Grey eyes, but possibly with some chips of green in a different light, Tammy mentally revised.

  ‘Giving him an infection, yes, that’s what I’m wondering.’

  He was already looking back down at the heart baby. ‘Look, we’ll do an ultrasound. Rule it out.’

  Rule it out.

  His faith in her diagnostic skills clearly wasn’t high. It didn’t look as if she was getting that coffee any time soon.

  ‘Thanks, um, Tammy,’ he added.

  ‘No worries,’ she told him cheerfully, and went back to her charges, prepared to think no more about it.

  Eleanor had returned from her break and was gently urging Mrs Thornton to have a relaxing shower. Little Cameron’s next nappy would probably weigh twice as much as a dry one, and Tammy would feel like an idiot for her rash diagnosis.

  Yeah, that would be good.

  She had a nagging suspicion that the kilos on her butt, the zeros in her bank account and the five kids at home might not be quite enough to keep her safe from a man like Laird Burchell. Tall, broad-shouldered, lovely neck, not a hint of a receding hairline, intelligent and caring and capable…and then there were those deep, perceptive eyes.

  He was—if you had time to take notice of such things—gorgeous. If he decided she was an idiot, therefore, so much the better.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE sprawling acreage of the Yarra Valley Garden and Landscape Centre on a Sunday morning was one of Tammy’s favourite places when she’d really, seriously, drastically run out of ideas and energy at home, didn’t want to spend much money, and when the playground down the road had earned a moaning chorus of, ‘But we’ve been there three times this week.’

  Mum was taking a break today, leaving her little flat behind Tammy’s house temporarily empty. She deserved it about five times over, and had gone to Tammy’s brother’s place in Healesville for a barbecue lunch and a peaceful afternoon. His two boys were quiet lads in their late teens, and his wife—Tammy’s sister-in-law Jeannette—was a terrific person and spoiled Mum rotten. She would return refreshed, and probably bearing leftovers.

  The kids had a good time at the garden centre, and Tammy was able to get some time alone, even though it was only in her thoughts. But when you’d spent over an hour letting the kids chase around the big glazed pots and orchard trees and ornamental fountains, or playing name-that-flower games, or swinging your four-year-old triplets on the swings in the designated kids’ area, you really owed it to the garden centre management to buy a plant.

  Tammy always found it a terrible hardship to have to buy a plant.

  In a more perfect world—a world where counting every penny occupied a much smaller portion of her time—she would have bought at least twelve.

  That kaffir lime tree, for example. Or a pair of those cyclamens in bright lipstick colours. Some drought-tolerant grevilleas or bottlebrush. A lemon-scented eucalyptus. Oh, and herbs. She loved herbs.

  She decided on a little punnet of lemon thyme, and accepted that five ice creams on sticks would have to be added to the bill. The spring sunshine had grown quite hot, and the kids were getting hungry and thirsty. The ice creams would reward them for good behaviour, and tide them over until she could get them home and make some lunch.

  In the herb section, she saw a familiar figure—Laird Burchell, the last man on earth she would have expected or wanted to see here, with the possible exception of her ex-husband—and unfortunately he saw her before she could veer in the direction of the summer annuals and get out of his way.

  He was wearing jeans, a blue polo shirt, a pair of scuffed work boots and a broad-brimmed Akubra hat, which made him look like a farmer. There was an air of relaxed satisfaction hovering around him that she hadn’t seen on him in the NICU.

  Some doctors played with their investments during their time off.

  Dr Burchell apparently preferred to play at being a man of the land.

  He came up to her with arrow-like directness while she stood there with garden-centre potting mix leaking out of the holes in the bottom of the lemon thyme punnet, dirtying her hands. In the background Ben knocked over a standard rose bush, and Tammy hoped she’d get a chance to set it upright again before either the garden centre staff or Laird Burchell realised that Ben was hers.

  ‘Convenient, seeing you here,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, is it?’ She smiled.

  ‘I owe you a coffee.’ He’d completely skipped hello.

  She understood at once. ‘You mean something did show up on Cameron Thornton’s ultrasound?’

  ‘I sent him down late last night, but you’d gone by the time he came back. There was a marked dilatation in the left kidney, suggesting a significant ureteral obstruction. He’s on antibiotics, and we’ll do a pyeloplasty on Monday. Mrs Thornton is not even trying to resist telling me that she told me so.’

  ‘Well, we did take a while to trust her intuition. She’s allowed to be smug.’

  ‘But I’m hoping you’ll resist telling me that you told me so, if I make good on the coffee deal.’ He gestured behind him to the garden-centre building, where there was a pretty café section overlooking the greenery.

  He meant coffee right now, Tammy realised.

  Well, you could get it here in paper cups, to go.

  ‘No paper cups, right?’ he said, as if reading her thoughts and challenging them. She remembered her jo
king insistence that it had to be good coffee, in a china cup.

  ‘That is, if you want to,’ he added, just as a man who could conceivably have been her husband picked up a punnet of parsley and one of basil and moved in Tammy’s direction.

  ‘Would you rather get it over with?’ she teased, letting Dr Burchell think what he liked about her relationship to the herb hunter—who wasn’t her type at all.

  She would have a latte, she decided, and she could sip it on one of the garden benches out the front, while the kids ate their ice creams. She’d tell Dr Burchell he didn’t need to stay and keep her company. He could buy his pair of matching maidenhair ferns, or whatever, and go home to put them on his glassed-in townhouse balcony.

  Meanwhile, Lachlan was trying to help Ben to set the rosebush straight. There was only a little bit of spilled soil on the ground, thank goodness. But the thorny branches of the fallen rose caught in the next rosebush as Lachlan pushed it too hard, and three of the bushes fell in a heap. They’d outgrown their pots and were top-heavy. ‘Sorry, Mummy,’ he mouthed, wincing.

  Oh, dear! Oh, no! Now all five children were attempting to sort out the rosebushes, and Tammy could see the green overalls of a garden-centre employee approaching behind them, ready to yell.

  ‘It’s going to take more than coffee,’ she said quickly to Laird. ‘That’s if you do mean now.’

  ‘More than coffee?’

  ‘Um, it’s going to take five ice creams as well.’

  ‘Five ice creams?’

  ‘I mean, I’ll pay for them, obviously, but you’ll either have to leave at once, which I’d advise because the Prunty family is about to get into trouble, or you can sit and watch the ice creams get all over my children’s— Excuse me.’

  Before the fourth and fifth rosebushes could fall, she raced to the scene of rose devastation and managed to restore order, with only one resulting thorn scratch on her hand and one abject ‘Sorry’ to the garden-centre person, who did not look as if he had ever met a child, let alone had any of his own.

  He checked meticulously and pointedly for damage, and Tammy revised her estimation of his previous experience.

  He had met children before.

  He ate them regularly for breakfast.

  ‘Which ones are yours?’ Laird asked, beside her. ‘The kids, I mean.’

  ‘Oh. Which ones? Of those? All of them!’

  ‘All five?’

  ‘Yes.’ Was he turning pale? She wouldn’t blame him. People often did.

  ‘I somehow thought it was three,’ he murmured.

  ‘No, it’s five.’ She held up the correct number of fingers, just to drive the point home.

  ‘You said something about three parent-teacher conferences the other day.’

  ‘Three four-year-olds, one pre-school teacher.’

  ‘Triplets!’

  ‘You’ve turned pale.’

  He really had.

  And we’re looking at each other a bit more often than we should be, and holding the looks for too long. It’s weird.

  ‘Five kids, including triplets,’ she went on. ‘That’s why I need five ice creams. I’m not making you pay through the nose for my diagnosis of the Thornton baby by eating all five myself, I promise.’

  ‘And you’re on your own with them. In a garden centre. Five of them.’ Was he horrified or impressed? She couldn’t tell. ‘You don’t have your husband here with you, or—?’

  ‘They’re pretty good, usually. They love it here.’ She added awkwardly, ‘And I’m divorced,’ because the husband-like herb man had wandered off and lost his usefulness as a decoy.

  Although why she should have wanted Dr Burchell to think that she was still married, she wasn’t sure.

  Yes, she was sure. Extra kilos, tight budget, five kids, being an idiot, plus the presumption on his part of her possessing a current flesh-and-blood husband. In some situations, a sensible woman needed all the protection she could get.

  He looked at the kids. ‘Wow.’

  ‘I know. The triplets were pregnancy number three. Naturally conceived. Bit of a shock for all concerned.’

  ‘I bet.’ He smiled, almost tentative about it. Tammy had the impression that, like the garden centre man, he hadn’t met many children other than the fragile newborns he worked with and seemed to care about so much. But he definitely didn’t eat kids for breakfast. ‘Of course I’ll get them ice cream,’ he said heartily. ‘I still think you’re brave, bringing them here.’

  ‘Your lips say brave but your face says crazy,’ she joked. ‘Sometimes, though, I go crazier staying at home.’

  I’m the one who’s crazy, Laird decided.

  He hadn’t really been obliged to resurrect the offer of coffee at all, let alone here and now, with kids and plants and ice cream. He could easily have avoided her eye, or said a brief hello in passing, or made a very plausible assumption about the matrimonial status of the man browsing through the herbs only a few feet away, and Tammy Prunty would quite acceptably have heard about Cameron Thornton’s hydronephrosis on her next shift.

  They would both have been off the hook.

  And yet he’d pushed the issue, and let himself in for what might be a tedious or embarrassing half-hour. How long did it take children to eat ice cream? He had no idea.

  He had a funny relationship with kids. Understood almost everything there was to understand about tiny premmie bodies, then waved goodbye to them as they graduated out of his care and only saw them again when proud parents brought them in weeks or months or years later to show off how they’d grown and changed. They were unrecognisable by that point, of course.

  He responded to the looks on the parents’ faces more than to the kids themselves, and had been wondering lately if he’d ever experience that kind of love himself.

  If he wanted to.

  If he’d be any good at it.

  What kind of woman he’d choose as his partner in such an adventure. It was an adventure, he considered, as much as any more outwardly dramatic activity such as rafting down the Amazon or donning a parachute and jumping from a plane.

  Somehow, Tammy gathered her brood and with three redheads and three goldy-brown ones glinting in the sun, the Prunty family made its way just ahead of Laird to the café, where he learned how insanely and irrationally difficult it could be to get five kids to make up their minds about what kind of ice cream they wanted.

  The two little girls were cute, rather overshadowing their smaller triplet brother. The other boy was lively and the eldest girl very bossy, in a mother’s-little-helper kind of way. At around eight years old, he guessed, she was probably starting to be genuinely useful, when she wanted to be.

  Tammy chose a latte, while Laird asserted his masculinity with a double short black. ‘Have something to eat, too, if you’re not having ice cream,’ he invited her.

  He’d started to understand just how hard she must work, between her responsibilities at home and her demanding role as a nurse in the NICU, and he wanted to spoil her—which was unnecessary, because she must have plenty of other people in her life to do that. She had such a warmth and vividness about her, she couldn’t be short of friends.

  He expected her to say no to the suggestion of food, the way Tarsha would have done. With zero reason, Tarsha was watching her weight. And Tarsha would certainly consider that Tammy should be watching hers, but apparently she wasn’t.

  And thank goodness she’s not, his body suddenly said.

  Those smooth-skinned curves were wonderful.

  ‘Ooh, yes!’ she said enthusiastically, and chose a berry friand. Adding belatedly with a contrite, embarrassed look, ‘Oh, but are you having…?’

  ‘Yes, definitely. I’m starving.’ He wasn’t, but hated the idea of embarrassing her. ‘Now, where do you want to sit?’

  ‘At a table where the kids can go and drip ice cream onto the paving stones outside, and I can watch them at the same time.’

  ‘So, this corner one, on the deck?’

&n
bsp; ‘Perfect!’

  He began to appreciate the presence of the kids after a few minutes.

  Any time this began to feel anything like a date—which it most emphatically wasn’t—Tammy would deflect the awkwardness with some instruction along the lines of, ‘Lick the bottom of it, Ben, before the chocolate slides off.’ She could interrupt her conversation with Laird in mid-sentence, and pick up again exactly where she’d left off, without the least apparent difficulty.

  His head was soon spinning.

  Her head gleamed in a shaft of sunlight.

  And he had a weird, unexpectedly emphatic thought that he’d like to get her alone some time, at a proper restaurant, without the kids, so he could actually take in what she was saying, and the way she was saying it—cheerful, direct, with humour and thoughtfulness mixing like colours swirling in a kid’s painting.

  ‘Couldn’t manage without Mum.’

  ‘Do they see their dad much?’ he asked.

  ‘No. He kind of…’

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m getting too personal.’ Why? He didn’t usually, with someone he didn’t know well. Somehow, though, he felt as if he did know her.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she said, lifting her determined chin. ‘He cut himself off, that’s all. Opted out. So, no, they don’t see him. The triplets barely remember him. It’s…yeah…not what I would have chosen for them.’

  Her face darkened for a moment, and Laird sensed a lot about what she wasn’t saying—the anger and betrayal she must have felt, the sense of hurt and shock and loss, the fierce protectiveness she felt for her children, who had a father who didn’t care. He had to push away a violent spurt of anger towards the man, though he didn’t even know his name. You didn’t need to know someone personally to recognise that level of appalling behaviour.

  But she added decisively, ‘In some ways it’s easier that he’s not around.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘It is.’ Even firmer, convincing herself as much as him, he could tell. ‘I know where I stand, not like a couple of women I know—Help him, Sarah, can you?—who can never rely on their ex-husbands taking the kids when they’ve said they would—No, wipe his chin, there, that’s right—or bringing them back on time, or remembering where their soccer games are.’ She smiled suddenly, sat up straighter, pitched her voice a little higher. ‘Hey, though, did you see the new perennials they have in? Gorgeous! The bees are going crazy over the lavender in flower.’