Christmas at Jimmie's Children's Unit (18 page)

She wasn’t in the little coffee shop in the foyer, nor in the canteen, so he ate a solitary breakfast, then made his
way not to the teams’ rooms but to the theatre, wanting to refamiliarise himself with the way Alex had it set up.

‘Oh!’

Clare was there ahead of him and she must have sensed his presence, for the startled expression burst from her lips before he was fully through the door.

Not that she was unsettled for long, greeting him with a smile—a very professional smile—and a cheery, ‘Good morning, Oliver,’ for all the world as if they hadn’t shared an extremely passionate relationship, albeit ten years ago.

‘Do you always begin this early?’ he asked, because two could play the calm and controlled game. She smiled again.

‘First-night nerves,’ she told him. ‘I’ve spent a lot of time here in the past week, but I’m still anxious about the machine, which is stupid as it’s exactly the same make of machine as I operated in the States. It’s just that—’

She stopped abruptly and he saw a faint colour appear in her cheeks.

‘Just that…?’ he prompted, hoping professional conversation would halt the disturbances in his body.

‘You’ll think I’m barmy, but to me the machines have personalities, maybe idiosyncrasies would be a better word, and until I get to know each one personally I won’t know what to expect.’

Clare watched him carefully as she explained her unease, and to her surprise, she caught no hint of a smile. In fact, Oliver was nodding as if he understood what she was saying.

‘You have so much to think about, with the responsibility for the respiratory and circulatory functions of the lungs and heart. I can understand you wondering if the machine has quirks you need to watch for. You’ve got the oxygenator, the pumps, the filters, the reservoirs and tubing, so many component parts that can go wrong.’

And now he smiled, sending tremors of remembered delight through Clare’s body, in spite of her determination to remain on strictly professional terms with him.

‘But have things ever gone badly wrong for you? Has there ever been a disaster you couldn’t overcome?’

She found herself smiling back at him, professionally, of course.

‘Tubes kinking, the membrane oxygenator failing, the machine turning off automatically when a clot or bubble gets into the tubes? I’ve seen most of the calamities that can happen, and had to cope with a few, but generally the machines, providing they are serviced regularly and checked before every operation, work brilliantly.’

Oliver heard the pride in her voice and recognised the dedication she had to her profession—speaking of which…

‘It still seems a strange choice for someone who had stars in her eyes and an established career as an actor.’

He saw her shoulders lift in a slight shrug.

‘Things happened, Oliver, that changed my goals. I’d done well in science at school, so a switch to that seemed logical.’

Which would have made sense, only her voice had tightened as she spoke, and he sensed a tension in her
body. Or was he fooling himself that he was still so attuned to her he could feel her emotion, sense that she’d told maybe not a lie but certainly not the whole truth?

‘Then perfusion.’

He shook his head, as much at his own imaginings as at her choice of career. But at least her smile was back—a bright smile now.

‘If I’d known how much I would love this job I’d never have bothered with anything else. What amazes me is that there are so many jobs out there that no-one even knows about. I mean, the career adviser at my school didn’t mention perfusionist as a career option. In fact, he’d probably never heard of it either. By chance, I met a perfusionist and that was it.’

‘So here you are.’ Nice, normal conversation; he’d be able to handle this. Always assuming the attraction he still felt towards her wasn’t obvious to everyone who came in contact with him when she was around.

She bent her head as she answered, presumably checking some component of the machine, and Oliver found himself studying her, once again imagining he could sense tension in her voice.

‘It can’t have been easy, handling training and a child.’

It was a throwaway remark, the kind anyone might make, yet he saw her tense. No sensing it this time; he actually saw her stiffen.

Why?

‘Mum helped out.’

Obviously that was the only answer he was going to get, so should he keep the conversation going?

Might as well; it was awkward enough as it was without silence extending between them.

‘How old is she?’

More silence, then Clare looked up at him.

‘She’s nine,’ she said, before returning to whatever she was doing, fiddling with the machine.

‘Nine? As in nine years old?’ he muttered as a rage he’d never felt before, not even when his real father had denied him, burnt through his body. ‘You’re telling me you were so desperate for a child you went from me to him, whoever he was? Or were you already seeing him? Cheating on me? Did he offer marriage? Is that what swayed you? And did he offer before or after you announced you were pregnant, eh?’

Clare had never heard such anger in his voice, yet this was hardly the time to refute his hateful accusations. He was about to operate on a vulnerable infant. He needed to be calm and composed, totally focused on the job, not struggling to comprehend the fact that he had a daughter.

What’s more,
she
had to be calm and composed as well! Later she’d get angry. Later she’d tell him…

Right now, she had to defuse the situation somehow.

‘It is none of your business what I did or didn’t do, Oliver, and right now I really need to get on with this.’ She looked up at him again, saw the harsh anger in his face and hated the contempt she read in his eyes. And though her own anger burned at the injustice of his words, she pushed it aside, adding calmly, ‘And you probably want to check out the theatre, although didn’t Alex say you’d worked with them before?’

For a moment she thought he’d reject the conversational shift, but when he nodded she knew she’d succeeded in tempering the tense emotional atmosphere in the room.

At least for the duration of the operation!

‘I
have
worked here before.’ Clipped, crisp words, but Clare knew he was turning his focus to work.

‘Do we know yet if we have a patient?’ she asked, pursuing professional conversation, although he was still unsettling her, prowling around the perimeter of the theatre, distracting her with his presence when she didn’t need distraction.

‘Last I heard about the TGA Alex listed yesterday was that he hadn’t arrived,’ he said, and this time his voice sounded more relaxed—
his
professional self taking over.

‘So we wait,’ Clare responded, determined to match his tone. ‘If Angus is as good at doing a switch of the great arteries as Alex seems to think, it will be exciting to watch him at work. Do you know any more about the patient?’

Oliver shook his head.

‘But you still have more contact with them than I do,’ she added. ‘I usually only get to meet patients when they come into Theatre, although with older children I sometimes do blood collection for autologous blood transfusions should one be necessary. My main contact with newborns is after the op if they go onto ECMO.’

Could she really be having this conversation with Oliver, when the echo of his accusations and the spectre of Emily hung in the room like twin thunder clouds?

‘Extracorporeal membrane oxygenation—of course, you’re in charge of those machines as well.’

‘Terrible necessities,’ Clare said. ‘Some babies need them post-op but they can do so much damage to the organs if we’re not really careful.’

She continued on about the problems the machine could cause, but Oliver had stopped listening to the actual words, hearing instead the confidence and professionalism in her voice, noticing the tension had lessened.

Maybe it had never been there. Maybe he’d imagined it!

Or maybe she was as good as he was at compartmentalising her life. It had taken him a mammoth effort, a few minutes ago, to block out the implications of the age of Clare’s child, but he’d done it, because the baby they were about to treat had to be his sole focus for the next few hours.

His pager buzzed against his belt and he glanced at the message.

‘Looks like it’s all systems go,’ he said, and heard Clare’s pager buzz at the same time.

‘Good luck,’ she said, smiling now, no hiding the excitement in her eyes. She was rising to the challenge that lay ahead, totally professional, the adrenaline rush in her veins lighting her up from within.

So why was he seeing black shadows hovering over her—the shadow of another man, another man’s child? Why was totally inappropriate anger festering inside him?

‘Good luck yourself,’ he said, blotting the dark clouds from his mind, repelling the anger from his body. In eighteen years of professional life he’d never allowed his work self to be distracted by outside issues and he wasn’t about to start now.

And the tension he was feeling at the base of his spine was because he was working with a new team, nothing else.

Other members of the team breezed in, inconsequential chat filling the air as people went about their allotted tasks while the atmosphere in the theatre seemed to tighten in expectation of the operation that lay ahead.

‘You’re opening?’ the circulating nurse asked Oliver.

In work mode now, totally focused, he nodded, then examined the instruments she’d laid out on a trolley. It would be his job to open the tiny chest, cutting through skin and the rib cage, using retractors to hold the ribs open and allow a clear field for operating.

‘Do you need a small suture?’ the nurse asked, and Oliver thought about what lay ahead. As he separated out the pericardium—the fine sheath of protective tissue that surrounded the heart—he would often take a tiny piece of it, and secure it to a spot in the baby’s chest, in case the surgeon needed it later to repair a hole in one of the interior walls of the heart.

The baby!

It seemed impersonal to think of him or her that way, but every one of them was very real to Oliver and every one he was involved in saving was special, even though his contact with them, at this stage, was minimal.

The baby!

His mind wavered for a moment—Clare’s baby, the one he hadn’t wanted, intruding—but only for a millisecond.

‘Leave a suture there—I’ll ask Angus when he comes in. I know from working with Alex that he always likes to have a piece of tissue in reserve.’

The nurse slipped the threaded needle onto the tray, while Oliver checked he had all he needed, shifting a
couple of instruments into an order he was used to, in spite of the fact he would rarely pick up an instrument himself.

‘Okay, folks, we have a baby to save.’

Kate Armstrong, the anaesthetist, erupted into the room, nodding and smiling at everyone, then stopping beside Clare to discuss drugs and dosages. Oliver studied the two women—Clare, tall and straight, Kate smaller, but with so much animation in her face she seemed more of a presence. Her vibrant red hair was wrapped in a scarf, but its energy seemed to escape so she had an aura of liveliness about her.

Yet it was Clare who drew his eyes, although he didn’t know this Clare at all…

He likes her. The thought came to Clare as she watched Oliver looking at Kate, and it niggled in her chest in a way it had no right to niggle, especially after the angry, hateful accusations he’d thrown at her earlier.

No, apart from whatever relationship he developed with Em, Oliver was no longer her concern. He could like whomever he cared to like, though for a moment Clare wished she had the same kind of lively personality Kate had—a personality that attracted men. Instead, she had a face and figure—outward things—that drew their attention.

The arrival of their patient put an end to any extraneous thoughts. As the nurses set the patient up for surgery, and Oliver, as the first assistant, began the simple part of the operation, Clare checked and rechecked her machine, watching the monitors, talking quietly to Kate from time to time, discussing the blood values they were getting.

But she watched Oliver as well, noticing how gently his hands touched the infant, how carefully he cut and opened up the little chest. She smiled to herself, remembering how much he’d loved his paediatric patients, back when they were together, how special he had thought each and every one of them.

Was that why she’d been so stunned when he’d said he didn’t want children? Although they’d never discussed the subject until she brought it up that fateful time, she’d always assumed, somewhere down the track, Oliver, loving children as he did, would want children of his own.

A
NGUS
arrived and the operation proceeded smoothly, Clare relieved for the baby’s sake when it was successfully completed. But her job wasn’t done, not with the baby still on a support system. She and Kate accompanied him to the small recovery room off the main cardiac PICU, Clare concerned about her first patient as part of this elite team, while Kate explained that she always wanted to see her patients come out of the anaesthetic. When Kate left for a moment to check something on the ward, Clare looked down at the little boy with tubes and monitor leads practically obliterating his small body.

‘They’re so vulnerable,’ she whispered to herself. ‘But so valiant.’

‘They are indeed! We do terrible things to their bodies and they come out of it so well.’

She looked up at his voice, still startled by it, still unnerved by the coincidence of Oliver being in the same team.

Unnerved, unsettled and, remembering his remarks in Theatre earlier, angry.

Definitely angry.

Very angry.

But when Angus came in to check on the patient, Oliver left.

‘Look, there’s no point in all three of us being here,’ Kate said, soon after. She waved her hand towards Clare and Angus. ‘Why don’t you two grab a coffee break—in fact, it’s past lunchtime. The canteen is good, and cheaper than the coffee shop on the ground floor. You know where to go?’

Why was Kate so keen to send them away?

Not that it mattered. Kate was right that they did not all need to be there. It was a very small room. Angus was apparently open to the suggestion, for he was already holding the door for Clare.

But it was Oliver she
should
be talking to. As hateful as his words had been earlier, she
had
to tell him! Not that she could tell him in a hospital canteen…

Although where
could
she tell him?

Was there an optimal place for telling a man he had a nine-year-old daughter?

‘Yes, I’m glad that first one’s over,’ she said to Angus in reply to his polite conversation about the op. But as they reached the canteen she knew she had to stop asking herself impossible questions about the Oliver situation and toss the conversational ball back to Angus.

‘I’m using the same machine, but did you find the set-up much different to the way you worked in the States?’

After that it was easy, normal conversation about work, but although Angus was a very good-looking man with dark hair and eyes and a soft Scottish accent that should be sending ripples up her spine, neither looking at nor listening to him did anything to her.

He was a nice man, she decided, a little reserved and without the magnetism that drew her to Oliver, but very nice all the same.

Magnetism?

Oliver?

Wasn’t her reaction to him—the physical attraction thing—just a hangover from the past?

And how could she even think of being attracted to a man who thought so little of her?

There were no ripples up her spine from Angus because she was totally spineless!

‘I really should go back,’ she said as, coffee finished, the conversation dried up. She needed to escape, preferably to a dark cave where she could hide out while she sorted out her life.

Or at least until she worked out how to tell Oliver her child was also his.

A week ago, life had seemed so simple, been such an adventure. She and Em coming back to Australia, setting up house, just the two of them, for the first time. Now everything had erupted into chaos.

‘Are you all right?’ Angus asked, and Clare realised she’d been twisting her table napkin so tightly it had curled into something that looked very like a miniature noose.

‘Nervous about the baby,’ she said, hoping her voice wouldn’t reveal her lie.

‘So, let’s check on him together,’ Angus said.

Together was good. She wouldn’t be on her own if they ran into Oliver.

Which they didn’t, although the baby—now named Bob—had his parents with him at the moment, so Clare
contented herself with sitting by the nurse on duty at his monitor, watching the information feeding out from all the paraphernalia attached to him.

Oliver didn’t reappear, which was both a relief and a cause of anxiety. She
had
to talk to him!

But just imagining that conversation filled her with such apprehension she found herself literally shaking. Bob was doing well and she had no excuse to hang around so she made her way to the team tea room, thinking another strong coffee might settle her nerves and, once they were settled, surely her brain would start working again.

No, that was the coward’s way out. Oliver wasn’t in the PICU, but he’d have an office somewhere in the unit rooms. On his first full day of work, he wouldn’t be seeing patients but he was likely to be in his office, reviewing files of children he would be seeing later in the week, patients he’d be taking over from the specialist who’d left the team.

Bypassing the tea room, and the meeting room next to it, Clare made her way down the corridor to where Becky, the unit secretary, had her office.

Was fate telling Clare not to do this now because Becky was absent from her desk?

Nonsense, the names are on the doors. You’ve passed Alex’s and Angus’s offices; Oliver’s is probably next. It wasn’t but it
was
further down the corridor. Dr Oliver Rankin!

Before she could lose her nerve as she had last night, Clare knocked and heard Oliver’s voice bid her enter.

He was sitting at a wide desk, files stacked in neat piles all over it. The light from the window behind him
threw his face into shadow, making any expression impossible to read, but just seeing him brought back the angry accusations he’d made earlier and the injustice of them made her own anger rise.

She was about to let fly—to just come out with the fact that Emily was
his
daughter—when he disarmed her with a smile.

And
an apology!

‘I had no right to speak to you as I did earlier,’ he said, standing and coming around the desk to where three easychairs were set up with a small coffee table in the middle.

Now
she could see his face, but although she studied it closely, she couldn’t read the motive behind the words.

Should she accept them at face value?

When he had her so churned up she felt she might be physically sick at any moment?

No way!

‘No, you had no right at all, Oliver,’ she said, quelling the nausea that clutched at her stomach. ‘But I haven’t come to talk about that—well, not about what you said. But yes, about Emily, my daughter—our daughter.’

The words were out before she realised it, and now hung in the air between them like graffiti letters on a big balloon.

‘
Our
daughter?’

Such steely contempt in his words and his eyes that Clare shivered, but Oliver had put her down once today; he wasn’t going to do it again!

‘Yes,
our
daughter,’ she snapped. ‘What with Christmas and being distraught over our break-up I didn’t realise I was pregnant until late January, and then I
tried to contact you but you’d left the apartment and your mobile number and email address had changed, and when I called the hospital they said you’d left but wouldn’t tell me where you’d gone. I phoned your mother but she wouldn’t speak to me, so I wrote to you at your mother’s address and, now I’ve met up with you again, I realise you must never have got the letters, although at the time I did wonder if you hated me so much you didn’t care about your child.’

The words came tumbling out so quickly Clare realised she must have practised them more often than she’d thought. Maybe in the dream state before she went to sleep some nights, when memories of Oliver had crept like whispers into her heart.

But now they
were
out she slumped into a chair, as if getting rid of them had stolen her strength.

Oliver looked at her, elbows on her knees, bent head held in her hands, an image that could be called despair.

Obviously he was thinking of how Clare looked because he couldn’t take in the enormity of what she’d told him, and thinking about something else was far preferable to trying to make sense of the blurted-out confession.

He had a child?

Her child was his?

A girl called Emily?

It was a nice name.

He groaned and took a turn around the room, unable to believe he’d had such an irrelevant thought at a moment of such magnitude in his life.

‘You wrote to me? Where?’

This wasn’t quite the issue either, but anger had begun to burn deep inside him and he had to get it out.

‘At the apartment and your mother’s house. I even wrote care of the hospital but it was returned. I wrote when I couldn’t contact you by phone or email, and I wrote again when Emily was born.’

Now some of his anger found a new target—oh, there was still plenty for Clare but right now it focused on his mother.

‘She must have destroyed the letters,’ he said, speaking to himself, hearing the tightness of his fury in his voice. ‘But you could have phoned her again, told her about the baby—’

‘Would she have passed on the information if she wasn’t passing on the letters? Maybe she already knew, maybe she’d read them before destroying them. She never considered me good enough for her son, so would she want a grandchild if I was the mother?’

Clare looked at him and shook her head, adding in an exhausted voice, ‘Anyway, it’s all irrelevant now. You didn’t know. I thought you did and I hated that you didn’t care. The point is that Em’s missed nine years of knowing her father, although I’ve talked to her about you, and now you—well, we, I suppose—have to decide where to go from here. Given that she’s just started at a new school and is boarding for the first time, I don’t want her upset.’

‘Boarding? You’ve sent a nine-year-old to boarding school? Didn’t I tell you what I thought of parents who dumped their kids in boarding schools? Don’t you remember me telling you how much I hated it?’

Once again Oliver was aware this was a side issue, but it was all he could manage as his mind was still
struggling to accept he was a father. Clare was standing up again now, and she touched his arm as she explained.

‘She’s a weekly boarder, so she comes home every Friday and leaves again on Sunday evening. Up until this year, Mum lived with us and looked after her when I was studying or at work, but I knew it was time Mum had a break—she’s got other grandchildren to fuss over. And Em’s mad for horses so this school is ideal as they can take riding lessons, and have horse camps during the holidays. My cousin Caitlin is a senior at the school and she’s keeping an eye on Em as well.’

‘Em!’

The name came out as a roar of pain or rage. Oliver wasn’t sure which it might have been; he only knew he had to move, to get away from Clare before he exploded and did or said something he might regret. He went back behind his desk, staring at the neat stacks of files he’d made on it, wishing his mind was as well ordered, instead of the churning, swirling mess boiling around inside his head.

He had a child, a daughter—Emily…Em!

Clare moved towards the desk, though warily, he thought, stopping out of touching distance, her arms wrapped around her chest as though she was cold, or maybe fearful.

‘I hated my name being shortened when I was at school,’ he snapped, and she stared at him as if she couldn’t fathom what he’d said, although more likely she was puzzled as to why he’d said it.

Join the club!

‘Oliver,’ she said quietly, ‘I know I’ve dumped a bombshell on you and you’ll need time to think about it, but we don’t have to talk about it any more right now.’

She reached out her hand as if to touch him across the table, to bridge the gulf that had widened between them, but anger still held sway within him and he turned away from the proffered hand, staring blindly out the window.

She
could
have found him!

She’d
chosen
not to!

And there was more to this than she was telling—the timing was just
too
suspicious.

He swung to face her.

‘
You knew you were pregnant
—that’s why you left! All that talk of it being a good time for you to take a break from your career, about how easy it would be to write you out of the show by sending you on an overseas holiday, then you could come back in later. You had it all worked out! When did you stop taking the pill? How far back had you planned this? Before Owen told me he wasn’t my father, or did you do it after that, knowing how I felt?’

The words were like a fist to Clare’s stomach and she flinched away from him.

But not for long!

‘It was not planned,’ she said, standing very upright and speaking with cold deliberation. ‘Nor did I know when we parted. There is just no way I would have kept something like that from you. I thought you knew me well enough to realise that.’

No response, while his face, with the setting sun behind it, might have been carved in granite so little did it reveal.

‘Anyway,’ she continued valiantly, though her heart was pumping wildly and her body shaking with the tension, ‘this is not about the past, and what did or didn’t happen, but about Emily and whether or not you want to be part of her life as her father.’

‘And you expect me to decide that now?’

The growled words seemed to Clare to contain a hint of menace, and once again her body flinched, but she stood her ground.

‘No, Oliver. I know you need time to assimilate this, and to consider things, but you must realise I had to tell you.’

Oliver stared at her for a moment longer, then turned away again.

Had
she been pregnant?

Surely it was too big a coincidence that she’d left him because he didn’t want children,
then
discovered she was pregnant! Far too big a coincidence!

And as for not being able to contact him. She
could
have found him.

His anger built again, then faltered as a cool voice whispered through the random thoughts cartwheeling through his head.

She thought she had.

Maybe.