Just Breathe (19 page)

‘I’d love to but I’ve got that dinner with Ethan.’

‘Come over afterwards, if you don’t morph into a Roxburgh Girl.’

‘Like that’s going to happen.’

Dee’s eyes flew open. She gasped.
Exhaustion
.

After getting in so late from Arianne’s dinner, she’d reset the alarm for half an hour later than usual. Big circles with the right leg. Rest. Big circles with the left. Rest. One more day and the week would be over.

She made coffee in a haze and hung another one of Amanda’s outfits on the bedroom door to pick up later for the dinner with Ethan.

Patrick was at his door before she had a chance to knock.

‘How’s the neck?’

‘Not bad today but it’s only early.’

Her mobile rang. ‘Sorry, I was just about to turn it off.’ She fished around in her bag, checked the display and frowned. ‘Arianne?’

‘Dee, thank God.’ She was crying. ‘Howard’s gone. I can’t get him on his phone and … and … oh God.’

‘What do you mean gone? Did you have a fight?’

‘No, no, it’s the baby. I’m
bleeding
.’

The buzz of adrenalin snaked down Dee’s spine. Think, think. ‘An ambulance. Arianne, have you called an ambulance?’

‘No, I, um, it’s too soon.’ There was panic in her voice now. ‘I’ve got another six weeks to go and I haven’t finished the cot and there’s so much blood.’

‘Okay, honey, are you lying down? All right, just sit down right where you are and curl up on the floor. I’ll make the call and come right over. Just lie still, breathe slowly and keep talking to me.’

Dee gave Patrick the address and asked him to phone for the ambulance. She kept talking to Arianne as she raced back to the car. She had no idea what to tell a haemorrhaging pregnant woman but lying down seemed to make sense. Staying calm would help too. It would probably help Arianne as well.

There was no emergency van out front when she arrived at the school, so she wedged the doors open and ran to the third floor.

‘Arianne!’ she called as she ran in.

Dee followed the trembling voice to the kitchen and gasped. Arianne was curled on the floor in a nightie with a bright red stain in her lap. Her eyes were wide with fear. She held up a blood-covered hand, sobbing.

Dee flew to her side, wrapped arms around her shoulders and tried not to think about the coppery smell that filled her nostrils. ‘It’s okay, the ambulance is on its way. Let’s try to slow your breathing down. You’ll feel better if you can do that.’ Fighting back her own fear, she lowered her voice to a soothing meditative tone, rubbed gentle circles on Arianne’s shuddering
back, counting slow breaths.

A siren wailed into the street. Dee threw open a window to direct the officers up. While they attended to Arianne, she tried without luck to reach Howard. The poor guy would get a bunch of terrified messages from Arianne when he finally turned his phone on, so Dee tried to sound calm and positive and told him she’d meet him at the hospital.

She held Arianne’s bloody fingers in the ambulance, trying to put a short leash on the bad memories of her own trip to the emergency department. She hadn’t been inside a hospital ward since her discharge ten years ago. Now, as she walked through Emergency beside Arianne’s stretcher, the sterile, antiseptic odour that washed over her made her gag. It smelled of bandages and doctors and fear and pain. She squeezed Arianne’s hand and swallowed hard on tears.

A long hour later, Howard threw back the curtains, launched himself at the bed and held Arianne tenderly. Dee kissed them both, then walked outside, sat on a park bench and sobbed – for Arianne and Howard and their baby, and for the store of memories that had just been awakened.

‘Let’s make a list,’ Leon said. He had a day off and had picked Dee up from the hospital. They’d gone back to the yoga school to phone Howard’s students. It was all they could do to help at this point. Arianne’s condition was stabilised and, although the baby was safe at the moment, there was talk of a premature delivery if things got worse.

‘We should probably cancel his weekend privates and organise his schedule for next week. Who’s available to fill in at the school?’

Dee was staring at Howard’s diary but the words were a blur and her nerves were still jittering. Snap out of it, Dee, he needs your help. ‘Okay.’ She shook her head. ‘There’s Lucia, Penny, you and me.’

‘What about Pam?’

‘I’ve never seen her teach but we’ll need her if Howard’s out all week.’ She remembered the blood and hoped it wasn’t as bad as it looked.

Leon wrote down the names. ‘And what about tonight?’

She looked blank for a moment. ‘Oh, the demo. I don’t think we can cancel that. He’s already sold tickets.’

‘Howard was going to do a solo demonstration before he and I did the pairs routine. You’ll have to be him.’

Dee closed her eyes. Even though she’d been splashed over the TV for the last two months, the idea of performing to an audience made her muscles tighten with stage fright. It’d been stressful doing straightforward yoga poses in front of a couple of cameras and a handful of people – this would need massive concentration to achieve complicated and taxing postures and all in front of a crowd. But with both Howard and Arianne out, she was the only teacher with enough experience to do it. ‘Shit.’

They divided Howard’s phone list between them and agreed to meet back at the school for rehearsals between classes. It was going to be a long day. Just as well she’d already cracked open the adrenalin.

Half the ladies’ intermediate class was coming to the demo, and so was her Friday student Fran and the entire advanced group. Dee hoped to turn people away by telling them she was replacing Howard but it seemed to have the opposite effect. She told Arianne and Howard when she rang the hospital that it was a lovely show of support for them, which felt much better than the idea they wanted to check out the Health Life yoga girl in action.

The change of roles also complicated dinner with Ethan. She wouldn’t be ready to leave by
eight o’clock and more than likely she’d be sweaty, red in the face and in need of rest. She should have cancelled but, hell, it was Ethan. With the DVD and her new business contacts, there might not be many more nights out with him. She left a message at his office about Arianne, the demo and the bad timing, and hoped he still wanted to pick her up.

When she walked into the studio that night, she almost turned and walked out again. There were at least sixty people squished into the room, sitting on the floor, lining the walls, perched on tables. It was Nerve City.

Dressed in black pants and a singlet top that Graeme Paffe had given her to try out, Dee thought of Arianne and Howard, steeled herself and her anxiety and began a twenty-minute series of advanced poses. Leon joined her for a sequence of synchronised postures, then, skins slick with sweat, they moved into postures for pairs, using each other’s bodies for support.

As Dee dropped out of a handstand, Leon squatted beside her and whispered, ‘Are you okay? You feel like you’re tiring.’

She blinked, so immersed in the yoga that she had to force herself to consider the state of her body. It had been a long week, she needed a good sleep, another coffee and a decent meal, her arms were sore and her belly ached from being held tight. ‘I am but I feel good.’

‘Don’t look now but Ethan Roxburgh just walked in.’

The muscles in her stomach tensed some more. ‘I wish you hadn’t told me that.’

Avoiding the temptation to look, she pressed up into another handstand, felt herself wobble and dropped back to her haunches. Okay, Dee, you’ll hurt yourself if you don’t concentrate. She closed her eyes, counted off three deep breaths and felt herself sink into her yoga space, the place where the world disappeared, her mind turned inwards and her body took over.

Finally finished, Dee and Leon lay on their backs, covered in light blankets, and waited for
their muscles to settle. While Lucia took questions from the crowd, Dee wondered what Ethan was doing, what he was thinking. Wondered why she couldn’t tune him out as easily as everything else …

In the disorder created by sixty people taking their time to clear a small room, it was a while before Dee actually saw him. When she did, he was leaning on a window ledge, observing her from a distance, and the sight of him made her mouth go dry. She took a long drink from a bottle of water before joining him.

‘So that’s my real job. What do you think?’

His eyes took a brief tour of her shoulders, her arms, her hips and back up to her face. ‘Your body is amazing.’ He touched the tip of her chin and caught a drip of perspiration. The contact felt like a flash of heat from a furnace.

She pressed a handtowel to her face. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll shower before we go.’ Perhaps a cold shower.

‘There’s no rush,’ he said, following the path of the cloth down her throat as though it was the most fascinating thing he’d ever seen.

She pulled pins from her hair, loosening the knot and freeing the long strands. Ethan licked his lips, cleared his throat. ‘How’s Arianne?’

‘Not great. They don’t know what’s causing the haemorrhage. They’re just trying to stop it.’

They stood a moment, the conversation playing on in silence. She watched him and he watched her back. It felt strange and nice and awkward. She didn’t want to stop, wanted this particular topic to go on for hours, but she was conscious of being sweaty and red and she wanted to be closer to a Roxburgh Girl than a smelly old rag when they went to dinner. She
grabbed his wrist to check his watch, surprising herself at the familiarity and the intimacy of it.

‘Be back in five.’

‘I’m not going anywhere.’

Stripping off in the small bathroom next to the studio, Dee should’ve been exhausted – but she wasn’t. Exhilaration pulsed through her veins and not just from the applause. Ethan wasn’t shocked and he didn’t think she was a freak. He thought her body was amazing and his eyes said, ‘What Roxburgh Girls?’ There was a chance, an outside chance, she might get to press her lips to his, run her hands over his chest, wrap her legs around …

Take a breath, Dee, and stay in the moment. You can’t get disappointed there.

Stepping out of the cubicle, she rummaged through the contents of her basket. ‘Shit!’ She forgot to collect Amanda’s suit from the flat. The mish-mash of extra clothes she usually carried didn’t come close to the sensible black her sister insisted was appropriate for ‘meetings and anything else that might crop up’. Dee had told her she had enough to cover the ‘anything else’ scenario, to which Amanda scoffed and said, ‘So long as you’re expecting Ethan Roxburgh and his buddies to embrace hippie overnight.’ Dee pulled out a purple skirt, a tasselled scarf and a loose shirt. Bloody Amanda. Now she was terrified of her own wardrobe.

‘I’m inverted not introverted,’ Leon was saying when she returned. He was with Ethan and a group of regulars. The students laughed. Ethan still seemed to be waiting for the punchline. As Dee approached, he took in her outfit and smiled as though she was more amusing than Leon.

‘I had another, um, more conservative outfit for tonight but it’s been a complicated day and forgot to pick them up.’

‘That’s fine,’ Ethan said. ‘It’s pretty casual tonight.’

Fine? That was deflating. ‘It’d only take a second to change if you can drop past my place
on the way.’

‘No need. You look great. It’s the real you.’

He thought the real Dee was great?

‘Just a heads up before we get there,’ Ethan said as he drove. ‘We’re going to dinner with Bob Sheppard and Eli Lewis. They own a small manufacturing business on the South Coast that Roxburgh Holdings is about to purchase. We’ve been locked up in meetings for the last two days nutting out the deal, which we all finally agreed on this afternoon. So tonight’s like the handshake before the signature goes on the contracts next week. Any questions?’

‘Will there be a test before we go in?’ Dee asked.

‘Sorry. I’ve been consumed by this all week. Guess I haven’t switched off business mode yet.’ His straight face suddenly cracked a grin. ‘Although the yoga demonstration was a good short-term distraction.’

‘Pleased to help. What do they make?’

‘Component parts for surgical equipment.’

‘The perfect conversation starter. Do you have any brochures I can speed-read before we get there?’