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‘Do you think I’d charge?’ His voice was suddenly strained but he had his back to her, putting on the kettle at the little sink behind Rhonda’s desk. ‘You’re family.’
Family. She stared blankly at his broad back, at the tanned and muscled arms emerging from his crisp, white short-sleeved shirt, at the stethoscope dangling casually from his back pocket.
He oozed competence. He oozed caring.
He was a family doctor. This was what he did. There was no reason for her to want to well up and demand a hug and turn his shoulder into a sodden mess just because he’d said the word ‘family’.
She wouldn’t.
But she needed him and the very thought had her terrified.
So she sat on, silent, trying to keep her thoughts in check.
Tom spent time making tea, checking how she had it, measuring sugar, stirring for maybe longer than it needed, as if he sensed she needed time to get herself together. By the time he set the mug into her cupped hands and tugged a chair up before her so he could sit down and face her, she had the stupid tears at bay again. She was under control—or as under control as she could be after the appalling news of two days ago.
‘Now.’ Tom was smiling at her, his very best patient-reassuring smile, a smile she recognised as one she’d practised as a new doctor. Family or not, she was clearly in the category of new client who may or may not have something diabolical going on.
There was a box of tissues on the side bench. He swiped it surreptitiously forward—or not so surreptitiously as she noticed and she even managed a smile.
‘I won’t cry on you.’
‘You’re very welcome to cry if you want. I wouldn’t have minded it you’d cried on me four years ago. That one meeting and then you were gone...’
‘To England,’ she told him. ‘I couldn’t stay here. Paul’s mother blamed—’
‘Paul’s mother is a vituperative cow,’ he said solidly, and Tasha thought of Deidre and thought she couldn’t have put it better herself.
‘She thought I should have stopped Paul trying to climb.’
‘No one could ever stop Paul doing what he wanted to do.’
‘You knew him?’
‘Not much. My mum was happy for me to meet Paul but Paul’s mother...not. When Dad moved on from Deidre as well, it made things even more complicated. Dad was a serial womaniser. My mum coped okay—she got on with her life—but Deidre stayed bitter. She fought Dad’s access to Paul every inch of the way. Dad cared about both Paul and me, but with Paul he ended up sidelined. As we got older Paul and I used to meet a bit. We’d have a drink with Dad occasionally, but after Dad’s death we lost touch. Tasha, you need to drink.’
‘What...?’
He took her cupped hands in his and propelled the mug to her lips. ‘Tea. Drink.’
She drank and was vaguely surprised by how good it tasted. When had she last had tea?
Come to think if it, when had she last eaten?
Great. Collapsing would help no one.
Neither would coming here. She should face this herself.
She couldn’t. She needed... Tom.
‘So tell me why you’re here?’ he asked.
She’d come this far but she didn’t want to tell him. She didn’t want to tell anyone.
Telling people made it real. It couldn’t be real. It had to be a nightmare.
‘Tasha, spill,’ Tom said, in that gentle voice that did something to her insides. It made things settle. It made the battering ram in her heart cease for a moment.
Though of course it started up again. Some things were inescapable.
‘My baby...’ she started, and Tom sat back a little and eyed her bulge.
‘Close to term?’
‘I’m due to deliver next week.’
He nodded, as if it was entirely sensible that a close-to-term pregnant woman had decided to drive to Cray Point just to see him.
She should keep talking.
She couldn’t.
‘Do you have a partner?’ he asked tentatively when she couldn’t figure what to say next. ‘Is the baby’s dad around?’
And finally she found the strength to make her voice work. ‘The baby’s father is Paul.’
‘Paul...’
‘He left sperm,’ she managed. She’d started. She had to find the strength to continue. ‘That last climb...I was so angry with him for going. There’d been two landslides on Everest, major ones. The Sherpas were pulling out for the season, as were most of the climbers, but he still insisted on going. Then he came home that last night before he left, laughing. “I’ve got it sorted, babe,” he told me. “I’ve been to the IVF place and left sperm. It’s all paid for, stored for years. If worst comes to worst you can have a little me to take my place.”’
She paused, searching for the words to go on. ‘I think it was a joke,’ she said. ‘Maybe he thought it’d make me laugh. Or maybe he was serious—I have no way of telling. But I knew...I waved goodbye to him and somehow I knew that I’d never see him again.’
She tilted her chin, meeting his look head on. ‘I was almost too angry to go to his funeral,’ she told him. ‘It was such a stupid, stupid waste. And then Deidre was in my face, blaming me, making nasty phone calls, even turning up at work to yell at me. So I left for England. You know I’m a doctor, too? I took a job in the emergency department in a good London hospital and I decided I’d put Paul behind me. Only then...then I sort of fell in a heap.’
Tasha shrugged. How to explain the wall of despair that had hit her? The knowledge that her marriage to Paul had been a farce. That her judgement was so far off...
She remembered waking one morning and thinking she was never going to trust again, and the thought had been followed by emptiness. If she couldn’t trust again, that excluded her from having a family. A baby. The thought had been almost overwhelming.
‘So you decided to use the sperm,’ Tom said, as if he was following her thoughts, and she felt a surge of anger that was pretty much directed at her naïve self.
‘Why not?’ she flashed. ‘Paul left it to me in his will. I could bring our baby up knowing the good things about Paul, feeling like it knew its dad. It seemed better—safer—than using an unknown donor, so I decided I’d be brave enough to try.’
And then she hugged her swollen belly, and the tears at last welled over.
‘I wanted this baby,’ she whispered. ‘I wanted her so much...’
Wanted. Past tense. The word was like a knife to her heart. She heard it and tried to change it.
‘I want her,’ she said, and her voice broke on a sob, but there was no changing what the scans had shown.
And Tom leaned forward and put his hands over hers, so there were four hands cupped over her belly.
‘Has your baby died, Tasha?’
And there it was, out there in all its horror. But it couldn’t be real. Please...
‘Not yet,’ she managed, and his grip on her hands tightened. I wonder if this is the way he treats all his patients, she thought, in some weird abstracted part of her brain that had space for those things. He was good. He was intuitive, empathic, caring. He’d be a good family doctor.
A good friend?
‘If anything happened to me, Tasha, I reckon you could go to him.’
Paul had been right, she thought. For just about the only time in his life, Paul had been right.
Oh, but laying this on him...
And he was a Blake. He even looked like his brother.
‘Tell me,’ he said, and it was an order, calm and sure, a direction she had to follow no matter how she was feeling. And she took a deep breath because this was what she’d come for. She had no choice but to continue.
‘My baby’s a girl,’ she whispered. ‘Emily. I’ve named her Emily after my grandma. I had to come back to Australia to access Paul’s sperm. I’m Australian and I have Aussie health insurance so I stayed here during my pregnancy. I’ve been doing locums. Everything was fine until the last ultrasound. And they picked it up. She has hypoplastic left heart syndrome. The left side of her heart hasn’t developed. That...that’s bad enough but I thought...well, the literature says there’s hope and there are good people in Melbourne. With the Norwood procedure there’s a good chance of long-term survival. I hoped. But two days ago I went for my last visit to the cardiologist before delivery and the ultrasound’s showing an atrial septal defect as well. And more. Nothing’s right. Everything’s wrong. While she’s in utero, she doesn’t need her heart to pump her lungs, so she’s okay, but as soon as she’s born...’
She took a deep breath. ‘As soon as she’s born the problems will start. The cardiologist says I need to wait as long as possible before delivery so she’s strong enough to face the faint possibility of surgery, but I’m not to hope for miracles. He says she’ll live for a little while but it’ll be days. Or less. The defect is so great...’
Strangely her voice was working okay. Strangely the words didn’t cut out. It was like the medical side of her was kicking in, giving her some kind of armour against the pain. Or maybe it was simply that the pain was so unbearable that her body had thrown up armour of its own.
Tom’s face had stilled. He’d be taking it in, she thought, like a good doctor, taking his time to assess, to figure what to say, to think of what might be the most helpful thing to say.
There wasn’t anything to say. There just...wasn’t.
* * *
Hypoplastic left heart syndrome...
He’d never seen a case but he’d read of it. He’d read of the Norwood procedure, a radical surgical technique giving hope to such babies, but with an atrial septal defect as well...
His hands were still gripping Tasha’s. They were resting against the bulge that was her baby, and he felt a faint movement. A kick...
In cases like this there usually weren’t any outward signs during pregnancy. A foetus only needed one ventricle. It didn’t use its lungs to get oxygen to the body, so while it was in utero there was nothing wrong.
If the experts were right, Tasha was carrying a seemingly healthy baby, a little girl who’d only survive for days after she was born.
This woman was a doctor. She’d have gone down every path. Her face said she had, and she’d been hit by a wall at every turn.
‘Transplant?’ he said, still holding her hands, and he thought maybe it was for him as well as for her. He had a sudden vision of his half-brother as a child, a tousled-haired wild child, rebellious even as a kid. A bright kid who’d tumbled from scrape to scrape. Paul had done medicine, too. Their father had been a doctor so maybe that’s why it had appealed to both of them, but the moment Paul had graduated he’d been off overseas. He’d helped out in some of the wildest places. He’d been a risk taker.
And now he was dead and his baby was facing the biggest risk of all. Being born.
A transplant? Without research it sounded the only hope.
‘You must know the odds,’ Tasha said flatly, echoing his thoughts.
He did. To find a suitable donor in time... To keep this little one alive until they found one, and then to have her fight the odds and survive...
He glanced up at Tasha’s ravaged face and he thought, Where are your friends? Where are your family? Why are you here alone?
And something inside him twisted.
He’d been a family doctor for ten years now. He loved the work. He loved this little community and when his patients were ill he couldn’t help but be personally involved.
But this woman was different.
She was his half-brother’s widow and as such there was a family connection. Her story was heartbreaking.
And yet there was something more. Something that made him want to loosen the grip on her hands and gather her into him and hold.
It was almost a primeval urge. The urge to protect.
The urge to take away her pain any way he knew how.
Which was all getting in the way of what she needed from him, which was to be useful. She was here for a reason. She didn’t need him to be messed up with some emotional reaction he didn’t understand.
‘So what can I do for you, Tasha?’ he asked, in a voice he had to force himself to keep steady. ‘I’ll help in any way I can. Tell me what you need me to do.’
She steadied. He could see her fighting back emotion, turning into the practical woman he sensed she was.
She let go his hands and sat back, and he pushed back too, so the personal link was broken.
‘I need an advocate,’ she told him. ‘No. Emily needs an advocate.’
‘Explain.’
She had herself under control again now—sort of.
‘I’m only part Australian,’ she told him. ‘My dad was British but Mum was Australian. I was born here but my parents were in the army. We never had a permanent home. Mum and Dad died when I was fifteen and I went to live with my aunt in the UK. That’s where I did medicine. Afterwards I took a job with Médecins Sans Frontières, moving all around the world at need, which is when I met Paul. Paul owned an apartment here so Australia was our base but we still travelled. I’ve never stayed still long enough to get roots, to make long-term friends. So now I’m in a city I don’t know very well. I’m about to deliver Emily by Caesarean section and straight after her birth I’ll be expected to make some momentous decisions.’
She faltered then, but forced herself to go on. ‘Like...like turning off life support,’ she whispered. ‘Like accepting what is or isn’t possible and not attempting useless heroics. Tom, I don’t trust myself but Paul said I could trust you. He spoke of you with affection. You’re the only one I could think of.’
And what was he to say to that?
There was only one answer he could give.
‘Of course I’ll be your advocate,’ he told her. ‘Or your support person. Tasha, whatever you need, I’ll be there for you. You have my word.’
‘But you hardly knew Paul.’
‘Paul’s family and so are you,’ he said, and he reached out and took her hands again. ‘That’s all that matters.’
* * *
