Marion Lennox - To the Doctor - A Daughter

‘As far as I know, nothing.’

‘She’s been abandoned,’ Donna chirped in from behind. She’d accompanied Nate across the road to the hospital and stood waiting-still bearing his dinner suit. ‘And we need to go to the Jazzfest.’

‘Of course you do. But…did you say abandoned?’ And then Jane lifted away the blanket covering the baby’s head and her breath sucked in with astonishment. Her eyes flew from the baby’s head to Nate’s and then back again.

Gemma was right. He’d never be able to disown this baby, Nate thought grimly. And the news would be from one end of the valley to the other by the morning. Dr Ethan’s baby, abandoned in Terama.

‘Just look after her for me for the night,’ he told Jane wearily. ‘I need to sort out a few things-in the morning.’

‘I’d imagine you do.’

His eyes flashed anger. ‘There’s no need to jump to conclusions.’

‘No?’ Jane was in her mid-forties. Nate was thirty-two so Jane was certainly not old enough to be his mother-but she sure acted like it.

‘No!’

‘Whatever you say, Dr Ethan.’ She hugged the baby close. ‘Oh, aren’t you just delicious? Looking after you will be pure pleasure.’ She waved Nate and Donna away. ‘Off you go, and enjoy yourselves. And then come back to one gorgeous baby.’

How the hell was he supposed to enjoy himself after that?

Nate somehow managed to respond to his friends and he tried to eat his dinner but only half his mind was on what he was doing. Or less. Maybe less than ten per cent of his mind. The rest was back in the children’s ward with a baby called Mia.

And maybe…maybe part of his mind was travelling up the highway toward Sydney, with one very weary doctor called Gemma and a little boy called Cady.

Oh, for heaven’s sake, he couldn’t worry about them. He had enough to worry about with Mia.

His daughter.

The knowledge went round and round his heart, insidious in its sweetness.

He should be panic-stricken, he thought, and a part of him was. The other…the other part remembered how his tiny daughter had felt snuggling into his chest. The way her fingers had curled around his. The feel of her soft curls under his chin…

Mia. His daughter.

And Gemma…

She was still in his thoughts. Try as he might, he couldn’t stop thinking about her. She’d looked too damned tired to face the highway to Sydney.

He should have insisted she stay the night.

She’d be sacked if she stayed. What had she said? She’d used all her sick-pay entitlements and then some.

She’d taken on so much!

He could guess how it had been, he thought grimly. She’d coped with the responsibilities of a dying sister and her two children.

She’d handed over one. He should be angry.

He couldn’t be angry. Whenever he tried, he kept thinking back to the feel of Mia against his chest and the anger dissipated, to be replaced by something that was akin to wonder.

He had a daughter.

And finally he could bear it no longer. He pushed away his half-finished plate of food and gave Donna an apologetic smile.

‘I’m sorry, Donna, but I need to go.’

She was astonished. ‘But you haven’t been called and the dancing hasn’t even started.’

‘I need to go back to kids’ ward.’

‘To the baby?’

‘To the baby. Yes.’ He took a deep breath and accepted reality. ‘To my baby.’

She stared at him in amazement. ‘You’re not going to keep it?’

‘If I can. Yes. I think so.’

Her lovely eyes widened in astonishment. ‘You surely can’t be serious?’ And then another thought hit her. ‘You don’t expect me to help, do you?’

‘No, Donna, I don’t expect that.’

‘I don’t think I’d be very good with babies.’

‘That’s fine.’

‘And you really want to go?’ Her lips pouted in displeasure. ‘Go on, then. If you must. There’s plenty of other men to dance with and to take me home.’

He knew that. Damn, he knew.

Maybe he was being stupid. He wavered, just for an instant, and in that instant the buzzer sounded on his belt. He lifted his cellphone and saw who was calling. The hospital charge nurse.

‘Jane?’

‘Nate, you’d better come. I need you here now.’ She sounded rushed and that was all she had time for. The phone went dead before he learned any more.

Mia? Was there something wrong with Mia? His feet were taking him out the door before his phone had been clipped back on his belt. What was wrong?

When he had a call there was always tension-but not like his.

His daughter…

But it wasn’t his daughter. It was Cady.

‘I don’t know what’s wrong.’ Gemma was beside herself. She was sitting in Emergency looking as sick as the child in her arms. ‘He’s just… Nate, he’s hardly conscious. I thought it was weariness but this is much more than weariness.’

Nate was still in his dinner suit. He looked handsome-absurdly handsome-but Gemma didn’t notice. She didn’t see Nate the man. She saw Nate the doctor, and the doctor was what she needed most at this moment. A doctor with skills. Please…

‘Tell me what happened.’ Nate’s voice was curt and decisive, cutting through her fear. Or trying to. She might be a doctor herself but this was her beloved Cady and her medical judgement couldn’t surface through her terror.

Somehow she forced herself to be calm. To give Nate the facts.

‘We stopped a few miles down the road. I wanted to get a little distance between us…between the baby and us…before we ate. And Cady was really, really quiet but I thought, well, it was his little sister we’d just left. And we’d grown so fond… Regardless of what I told you…’

She was almost incoherent, Nate thought. She was hugging the little boy to her as she spoke and their faces were a matching chalky white. Jane had pressed Gemma into a chair and was taking Cady’s blood pressure. She’d called Nate as soon as she’d seen Cady. The dance hall was only a few hundred yards from the hospital so he’d arrived there in minutes.

Nate listened to the fear in Gemma’s voice. He stooped before them, lifting the boy’s wrist and feeling his racing pulse. His breathing was deep and gasping-as if it hurt.

‘OK, Cady, we’ll have you feeling better in no time,’ he told the little boy, sensing the rigid fear in the child’s body. Obviously there were things happening that Cady didn’t understand.

Neither did Gemma. ‘OK, Gemma, just take it slowly,’ he told her. ‘Calm down.’ His voice insisted she do just that. ‘Tell me what happened next.’

She hiccuped on a sob. ‘He said he couldn’t see. He said everything was fuzzy. And then…he was violently ill and now he’s limp…’

‘OK.’ This could be a number of things. The tension of the past hour had fallen away now to be replaced with a different sort of tension. Nate was back in medical mode and nothing else mattered. What was happening here? What did he have? One limp kid?

Meningitis? Maybe it was, and he could tell by the fear in Gemma’s voice that that was what she was terrified of.

Okay. Worst case scenario first. Rule of thumb-look for the worst and work backwards.

‘There’s no temperature,’ Jane told him, showing him the thermometer. ‘High blood pressure. Rapid pulse. But no temp.’

OK. Breathe again. That should rule out meningitis.

But Cady certainly looked sick.

The child was thin, Nate thought, sitting back on his heels and really looking. Taking his time. He’d learned in the past that unless airways were threatened, such examinations were important. So he took the child in from head to toe-examining him with his eyes instead of his hands.

What did he have?