скачать книгу бесплатно
‘We don’t have parents. Just a stepfather.’
Just a stepfather.
Why did that make her freeze?
The wave of nausea that swept through her was as vicious as it was dumb. Her past was just that—past—and it had no place here, now. Somehow, she managed to fight back the bile rising in her throat, to haul herself together, to become the responsible person these boys needed.
She needed a plan.
She needed a responsible adult to help her.
Her phone was inside. Where had she put it? Somewhere in the muddle of unpacked goods?
She daren’t let Kit’s arm go to find it herself. He was too big for her to pick up and carry. He was also looking increasingly pale. Had these kids been left on their own?
‘Where’s your stepfather now?’ she asked, and stupidly she heard the echoes of her dumb, visceral response to the word in her voice.
‘At work,’ the eldest boy told her.
‘Is there anyone else here?’
‘Christine’s inside, watching telly.’
‘Then fetch her,’ she ordered. ‘Fast. Tell her Kit’s hurt his hand and he’s bleeding. Tell her I need a towel and a phone. Run.’
‘Can you just put a plaster on it?’ the older boy asked. ‘We don’t want to tell Christine. She’ll tell Tom.’
‘What’s your name?’
‘Marcus. And this is Henry. Please don’t tell. If we misbehave, Tom’ll make us go back to our grandparents.’
‘You haven’t misbehaved. The ball broke my window, not you,’ she told him. She’d tell him anything he liked to get help right now. ‘Marcus, this cut is too big for a plaster. Kit needs Christine. I need Christine. Run.’
He shouldn’t have left the boys with Christine. Normally Tom Lavery used his next-door neighbour, Rose, as childminder. Rose was in her seventies, huge-hearted, reliable. The boys loved her, but this morning she’d fallen and hurt her hip. It was only bruised, thank heaven, but she needed rest.
This weekend was also the annual field-day-cum-funfair at Ferndale, two hours’ drive across the mountains. For the isolated town of Shallow Bay, the Ferndale Show was huge. Practically the entire population took part, with cattle parades and judging, baking competitions, kids’ activities. As Shallow Bay emptied, Christine, Rose’s niece, had become his childminder of last resort.
‘Worrying?’ Roscoe, Shallow Bay’s hospital nurse administrator, was watching Tom from the far side of the nurses’ station. Tom was supposed to be filling in patient histories. Instead he’d turned to the window, looking down towards the cottage.
‘Go home and check,’ Roscoe said. For a big man—make that huge—Roscoe was remarkably perceptive. ‘You’ll be writing Bob up for antacids instead of antibiotics if you’re not careful.’
‘I’m careful.’ He hauled his attention back to his job. ‘Christine can cope.’
‘As long as there’s no ad for hair curlers on telly. You know she’s a dipstick,’ Roscoe said bluntly.
Roscoe’s smile was half hidden by his beard, but it didn’t hide the sympathy. ‘Go home, doc,’ he told him again. ‘I’ll ring you if I need you, and I’ll drop these charts off for you to fill in after the boys go to sleep tonight. I wish you could be taking the boys across to Ferndale, but hey, you have another doctor here on Monday. All problems solved, no?’
No, Tom thought as he snagged the next chart and started writing. It was all very well for Roscoe to say he could do these tonight, but if he fell behind in his paperwork he’d never catch up.
Another hour…
But he glanced at the window one last time. The boys were capable of anything.
For what was maybe the four thousandth time over the last two years he thought, What have I let myself in for?
How long’s for ever?
And then his attention was diverted. There was a car speeding up the track from the bay. A scarlet roadster. A two-seater.
Tom’s cottage was one of only three down that road. Few people used it except for Tom, Rose and Rose’s occasional visitors.
And the new doctor? He’d been told she’d collected the key from Reception a couple of hours back. Poppy, the junior nurse who’d given her the key, had been frustratingly vague when asked for a description. ‘Quite old, really,’ she’d said, which in Poppy’s twenty-two-year-old eyes meant anything over twenty-three. ‘And ordinary. Just, you know, dullsville when it comes to clothes. Didn’t say much, just took the key and said she’d be at work at nine on Monday. She drives a cool car, though.’
If this was it, it certainly was cool, a streamlined beauty, the kind of car Tom used to love to drive—in another life.
So this would be Rachel Tilding, the new doctor, the latest of the Lavery Scholarship recipients, here to pay her dues with two years’ service. He imagined she’d be heading to the shops to buy supplies or a takeaway meal for dinner. He should drop over tonight to say hi.
But tonight he didn’t have his normal backup of Rose, who was always ready to slip over and mind the kids whenever he needed to go out. He could scarcely go over bearing wine and casserole and say, Welcome to Shallow Bay. Plus, he was dead tired. If he had the energy to make a casserole there’d be no way it’d leave his house.
He sighed and started to turn back to the desk—but then he paused. The car had turned off the road and was heading down the hospital driveway.
He could make the driver out now. The woman seemed slight, fair-skinned, with brown curly hair tumbling to her shoulders. Leaning against her was a child.
A child with his arm raised, caught in some sort of sling. An arm which was bright crimson.
Kit!
Running in hospitals was forbidden. From training it was instilled into you. No matter the emergency, walking swiftly gets you there almost as fast, with far less likelihood of causing another emergency.
Stuff training. Dr Tom Lavery ran.
She’d collected this gorgeous little car three weeks ago and she still practically purred every time she looked at it. Two years of internship, living in hospital accommodation and being constantly tired, meant that she’d spent practically nothing of her two years’ wages. The condition of the scholarship which had funded her training meant she was now facing two years of ‘exile’ in the country. This car would be a gift to herself, she’d decided, to celebrate being a fully qualified doctor with her internship behind her. It’d also be something to remind her of the life she’d have when she could finally return to the city.
She’d driven it to Shallow Bay with a beam on her face a mile wide, blocking out the thought that she’d had to hire a man with a van to bring her possessions, as nothing bigger than a designer suitcase would fit in with her.
But now she wasn’t thinking of her car. She had a child in her passenger seat, a little boy so white she thought he was about to pass out. She’d put as much pressure as she dared on his arm, slinging it roughly upward before somehow managing to carry him to her car. Her cream leather was turning scarlet to match the paintwork. Any minute now Kit could throw up. Or, worse, lose consciousness.
Please, no. She loved this car but if she had the choice between vomit or coma…
‘Hold on, Kit,’ she muttered. The decision to get him to the hospital rather than calling for an ambulance had been instantaneous. He still had glass in his hand. The blood he’d lost was frightening and the hospital was so close…
‘I want Tom,’ he quavered.
Tom? His stepfather? That was the name the kids had used. And Christine? The overblown, overpainted woman had emerged from the house, taken one look and fled back inside, saying, ‘I’ll ring Tom.’ So much for practical help. Rachel had hauled off her own windcheater and used that as a pressure bandage and sling.
‘Tell Christine—and Tom—I’ve taken him to the hospital,’ she’d told his terrified brothers, and then she’d left. There was time for nothing else.
‘We’ll find Tom,’ she told Kit now, as he slumped against her. ‘But first we need to stop your hand bleeding. We can do this, Kit. Be brave. Isn’t it lucky I’m a doctor?’
The sight that met him as he emerged from the Emergency entrance was horrific. All he could see was blood. And one small boy.
For a moment he felt as if his legs might give way. Kit’s face, his hair, his T-shirt, were soaked with blood. The T-shirt was a treasured one, covered with meerkat cartoons. Tom couldn’t see a single meerkat now, though. All he could see was blood.
Kit.
‘Mate, you’re doctor first, stepdad second.’ It was Roscoe, placing a huge palm on his shoulder as they both headed for the car. ‘Right now, Kit needs a doctor.’
The words steadied him but only a little. He reached the car and hauled the door open.
Kit was leaning heavily against the driver. Had she hit him? A car accident? What…?
‘Lacerated hand.’ The woman’s voice cut across his nightmare, her voice as incisive, as firm as Roscoe’s. ‘From a broken window. No other injury, but severe blood loss. I suspect there’ll still be glass in there. His name’s Kit and he’s asking for Tom.’
‘Kit.’ His voice sounded as if it came from a long way away. Kit was struggling to look at him, struggling to focus. ‘T-Tom…’ he managed—and then his eyes rolled back and he lost consciousness.
Kit!
It was Roscoe who took over. For those first appalling seconds—and it must only have been seconds—Tom froze, but Roscoe’s voice boomed across the entrance, calling back into the Emergency ward behind. ‘Trolley,’ he boomed. ‘IV. Blood loss, people. Move.’
And then as Barry, their elderly hospital orderly, came scuttling out with the trolley, and Jenny, their second most senior nurse, appeared with the crash cart, Tom recovered enough to scoop Kit out of the car.
Somehow Tom’s years of training kicked in. Triage. Look past the obvious. Get the facts and get them fast.
The woman had been wedged between Kit and the driver’s door. She looked almost as gory as the child. Thirtyish. Jeans. Long shirt, bloodstained. A smear of blood on her face.
‘Are you hurt yourself?’ he managed.
‘No,’ she snapped, hauling herself out of the car. ‘Just the child.’
Jenny had the crash cart beside him. With this amount of blood loss, cardiac arrest was a terrifying possibility.
‘I’m a doctor,’ the woman said. ‘Rachel Tilding. Who’s senior here?’
She was asking because he wasn’t acting like a doctor. Roscoe, Barry, Jenny all looked in control. Not him.
He made a huge effort and hauled himself back into his professional self. Terror was still there but it was on the backburner, waiting to surface when there was time.
‘IV,’ he managed, laying Kit on the trolley. The little boy’s hand had been roughly put in a sling to hold it high.
A doctor…
What had she done to Kit?
‘It’s only his hand.’ She was out of the car now, moving swiftly around to the trolley. ‘He smashed my window with a cricket ball, then reached in to try and get it.’
Only his hand…but this amount of blood?
‘Straight to Theatre?’ Roscoe demanded.
‘Yes,’ she snapped back at Roscoe. ‘I’ll help if there’s no one else. I don’t know about parents. I didn’t have time to find out. Just this Tom…’
‘I’m Tom,’ he said heavily. ‘I’m his stepfather. He’s my responsibility.’
‘Stepfather…’ She glanced at him in stupefaction. ‘What sort of a…?’ And then she collected herself. ‘No matter. Kit needs a doctor, now.’
‘I’m a doctor. Tom Lavery.’
‘What the…you’re working as a doctor and employing that…that…’
She obviously couldn’t find a word to describe Christine. Neither could he. Maybe there wasn’t one, but he and Christine were obviously grouped together. Dr Tilding’s look said Tom’s position in the hierarchy of life on earth was somewhere below pond scum.
‘Never mind,’ she snapped. ‘You can give me all the excuses in the world after we’ve seen to Kit’s hand. Let’s get him to Theatre. Now.’
CHAPTER TWO (#ucad55449-3032-5a02-9b46-2a01ae315e94)
AND THEN THINGS reassembled themselves. Sort of. This was a small country hospital but it was geared for emergencies, and many emergencies involved rapid blood loss.
Kit had lost so much that cardiac arrest was still a real possibility. Treatment of his hand—apart from stemming the bleeding—had to wait until that threat was past.
And in Rachel he had a godsend. She was an angry godsend, judgemental and furious, but she was a doctor.
Maybe he could have coped alone—maybe—but he was acting on autopilot. A part of his brain seemed to have frozen. The sight of one little boy, unconscious, a child he’d learned to love, had knocked him sideways.
It was an insidious thing, this love. It had crept up and caught him unawares, and loving came with strings. He couldn’t care for these kids—and love them—without his heart being wrenched, over and over again.
It was lurching now, sickeningly, and after that one incredulous look, that one outburst of anger, Rachel had subtly taken control.
As he went to put in the IV line his hand shook, and she took the equipment from him. ‘Get the monitors working,’ she told him. ‘I’ll take over here.’
The cardiac monitors… He needed to set them up. He did, with speed. A shaking hand could manage pads and monitors.
‘Pain relief and anaesthetic,’ she said. ‘Do you have an anaesthetist?’
‘There’s only me,’ he told her.
‘Two of us, then,’ she said curtly. ‘Or one and a half if you’re emotionally involved. But I’m trusting you have a good nursing staff.’
‘The best,’ Roscoe growled, and she nodded acknowledgement. This was no time for false modesty and she obviously accepted it.
And then Kit’s eyes flickered open again, fighting to focus. Falling on Rachel first. Terror came flooding back, and Rachel saw.
‘Hey, we found your Tom,’ she told him. ‘And here he is.’ Her anger and her judgement had obviously been set aside with the need for reassurance. She edged aside so the little boy could see him. ‘Kit, we’re going to fix your hand. The bleeding’s made you feel funny, and I know it hurts, but we’re giving you something that’ll make you feel better really fast. Tom’s just going to test your fingers. Will you do what he tells you?’
And she stepped back, turning to the instrument tray, setting the scene so Kit could only see Tom.
She was impelling him to steady. She was pushing him to do what he had to do.
He had to focus and somehow he did.
