‘Yes, yes, yes, but they won’t get here till it’s too late. They’re way out of town, on some other call. Jane thought of you. You’ve got to help us, please, please,
come on
!’
‘It’s all right…Joe, isn’t it?’ Fran said, recalling his name. Caro had said what a lovely family the Pelleris were, new to the town but fitting in well with everyone. Joe was a mechanic
at the local service station, Jane a stay-at-home mum with three children—a toddler and two boys.
It was only a hundred metres to the Pelleris’ house but Fran felt her heart rate escalating with sickening speed. A brain without oxygen couldn’t survive for long. Children might last a bit longer, but even if revived, it might only be the heart and lungs that functioned. The brain could be damaged or even worse—the child might be dead. The child some parents brought into the hospital was not always the child they took home.
Every second was vital.
Every second counted.
Every second hammered at Fran’s chest as she pushed through the garden gate towards the house.
Jane Pelleri was trying her best to do CPR on the baby in the family room just off the pool area, with the two little boys distressed and crying in the background.
‘Jane, I’ll take over now,’ Fran said in a calm, doctor-in-control tone, even though her stomach was roiling with doubts and fears that she wouldn’t be up to the task. This was no well-equipped A and E department. This was a family’s home with baby and toddler photographs on the walls, not lifesaving resuscitation gear. Fear gripped at Fran’s heart with cruel claws. What if she couldn’t do this? What if she failed? Her stomach churned with nausea, her skin broke out in a sheen of perspiration and her hands shook almost uncontrollably as she tried to assess the situation.
The child was on the very springy sofa, which had made the mother’s efforts at cardiac compression largely ineffective. Fran placed the infant, who looked about eighteen months old, onto her back on the carpeted floor, and tilted her head slightly back to open the airway. There seemed to be the
remains of a biscuit in the child’s mouth, which Fran swept out with her finger. The child was clearly not breathing and appeared cyanosed. Supporting Ella’s head, Fran covered the nose and mouth with her mouth and gave five puffs, then felt for a pulse over the inner arm, then the neck.
Either there was none, or her lack of recent clinical experience was letting her down and she just wasn’t sensitive enough to feel it, she thought as another pang of doubt stung her. She had to assume the child’s heart had stopped. Using two fingers, Fran gently compressed the child’s chest over the lower sternum, twenty rapid compressions for each couple of breaths.
Was that the right ratio? she thought in panic. It was higher in adults, lower in children and lower in infants.
Oh, God, what was the ratio?
Had her skills and training been punched out of her along with her confidence in A and E that day? Her brain became foggy with fear, dread and doubts. She couldn’t do this. She was failing. She was not going to be able to save this child. How would she face the parents? What about those two little boys? Oh, God, even the photos on the walls seemed to be staring down at her in accusation. You are a failure. You are no good at this. Look at what you have done.
Fran vaguely registered a siren sounding and it seemed mere seconds before Jacob Hawke was kneeling beside her, talking to her, but it was as if it was in a vacuum. She couldn’t hear him; she saw his lips moving but it was as if the sound had been muffled by her fear.
‘For God’s sake, Dr Nin,’ Jacob bit out roughly, finally shaking her out of her stasis. ‘Help me here. Keep her steady while I do the mouth-to-mouth.’
Fran blinked herself into action and held the child in position, watching in numb silence as Jacob determinedly worked at the breaths and compressions for what seemed like
hours, made worse by the howling boys and now hysterical mother. Had the child’s colour improved, or was it Fran’s imagination?
Unexpectedly, the infant coughed, then seemed to convulse. She vomited up some water, coughed again, and then started wailing, the colour of her face turning from lavender to cherry red.
In the distance another wailing sound could be heard, this one the reassuring whine of the ambulance approaching at speed.
‘Mummy-y!’ the toddler croaked over another cough.
‘Keep her on her side,’ Jacob directed the child’s mother. ‘She’ll be fine but she needs to go to hospital for a proper check of her airways and lungs.’
Fran sat back on her heels, her breathing hurting her chest as cautious relief flooded through her. Ella was alive. Ella was breathing. Ella was alive…
Jacob met her eyes, something in his ice-cold gaze ripping through her like shards of ice. ‘Everything all right, Dr Nin?’ he asked in a tone as arctic as his eyes.
‘F-fine,’ she said, using a nearby chair to pull herself to her feet. ‘I…I lost concentration for a moment…that was all.’
‘Yeah, well, it only takes a moment and it’s too late,’ he muttered in an undertone, well out of hearing of the distressed family.
Fran wanted to be angry at him but her nerves were still shredded. She felt as if her whole body was hanging in pieces, none of them connected to each other. She could barely get her legs to move. Her head was spinning so much she thought she might be sick, but somehow she pulled herself together for the family’s sake.
‘I don’t know how to thank you,’ Jane was still sobbing as
she cradled her daughter. ‘I don’t know how she got out to the pool. The gate was closed, I’m sure it was. I’m always so careful.’
‘It’s hard to watch kids all the time,’ Fran said, glancing at the two boys who were still looking shocked, huddled together in the corner of the room.
Once the ambulance officers arrived Fran filled them in with what had happened. The officers were not trained paramedics, just volunteers, but the older man called Jack seemed very competent and experienced as he handled the little patient.
Within a few minutes, both mother and child were in the back of the ambulance, heading for Wollongong Hospital for proper assessment and observation of Ella.
Another police car pulled into the driveway almost as soon as the ambulance had pulled out, and Joe gave Fran a worried look. ‘What are more cops doing here?’ he asked, placing an arm around each of his boys.
‘It’s pretty standard procedure in cases like this,’ Fran said, although personally she questioned the timing of it. The traumatised father and his young sons were obviously desperate to get in the car and follow the ambulance to hospital, but she understood from other cases she had dealt with the importance of ruling out any suspicious circumstances.
Jacob went over to the police vehicle and spoke to the officer on duty. The car backed out of the driveway a few moments later and Jacob came back up the path to where Joe and his boys were waiting with Fran.
Jacob exchanged a brief unreadable glance with Fran before he reached for Joe’s hand. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t get a chance to introduce myself earlier. I’m Sergeant Jacob Hawke.’ He smiled down at the boys. ‘Hi, guys.’ He bent down to their level. ‘What are your names?’
‘I—I’m Joey and he’s Romeo,’ the older of the boys said.
‘Those are great names—Italian, right?’ Jacob asked, glancing at the father for verification.
Joe nodded, his throat rising and falling over a tight swallow. ‘Sergeant, I think it would be best if we talk in private. I don’t want the boys to be upset any further.’
Fran stepped forward. ‘I’d be happy to fix the boys a juice or something,’ she said, and turned to them.
‘How about it, Romeo and Joey? Can you show me where Mummy keeps everything?’
The little boys led the way to the kitchen where Fran poured them both orange juice and gave them two chocolate-chip cookies apiece. After a while their dark brown eyes began to lose their haunted, hollow look and they even started to chat about their favourite toys and games.
After half an hour the boys’ father came in, followed by Jacob. ‘Thank you again, Dr Nin, and you too, Sergeant,’ Joe said. ‘I know Jane already thanked you both but you really did save our little girl today. If there’s anything, and I mean
anything
, we can ever do for you, just let me know. It goes without saying you won’t be charged a cent if you need your car serviced at my workshop, Dr Nin. Just book it in any time.’
‘Thank you, Joe,’ Fran said, feeling every type of fraud. She hadn’t saved Ella, that had been Jacob, and both of them knew it. The family had been too upset to notice and had just assumed as she was a doctor that she was responsible for the miracle of bringing their precious daughter back to them. ‘That’s very kind of you but I was only doing my…er…‘ she flushed and hated herself for it ‘…what I’ve been trained to do.’
‘We should let you get on your way to the hospital to be with your wife and daughter,’ Jacob said to Joe, and then,
turning to face Fran, asked, ‘Would you like a lift back to your sister’s house?’
Fran considered refusing but her leg was still throbbing from her hundred-metre dash earlier, and she was also concerned about how long Rufus had been locked in the laundry back at the house. ‘Thank you,’ she said, brushing her hair back with her hand. ‘That would be great.’
After saying farewell to the Pelleri boys and their father, Jacob led the way out to the police vehicle, opening the passenger door for her and standing patiently as she eased into the seat.
He waited until they were on their way before he spoke. ‘When was the last time you performed resuscitation on a child?’
Fran stiffened in her seat. ‘Look, it was tough in there, OK? The family was hysterical and there was no resus gear at hand. I’m not used to working at the coalface like that. I’ve been in a high-tech city teaching hospital all my working life.’
Her words hung in the ensuing silence, each one of them making her feel even more disgusted with her incompetence under pressure. She of all people should have been able to handle an emergency, no matter what equipment was at hand. She could just imagine what Jacob was thinking: she was a stuck-up city slicker who couldn’t stop a nosebleed without a trauma team on hand for back-up. He was very probably right, Fran thought with another wave of disgust at herself.
‘It could so easily have gone the other way but it didn’t,’ Jacob said after a moment. ‘Small communities like this don’t cope well with tragedy. It affects everyone.’
Fran bit her lip as those terrified little boys’ faces drifted into her consciousness. ‘Yes…I know…’
Jacob glanced across at her. ‘It seems one of the boys left the gate unlocked. The mother turned her back for a minute, the father was occupied elsewhere and suddenly the family was a minute or two from tragedy.’
Fran looked at him, her forehead creasing. ‘That’s not going to be made public, is it? About one of the boys leaving the gate unlocked?’
He drew in a breath as he turned into the Atkinses’ driveway. ‘As you are probably aware, whenever there is a case of drowning or near-drowning the police are required to attend and submit a media report in the interests of public education to make the community safer for children. So many parents are unaware of the dangers of leaving children unsupervised or the laws regarding adequate fencing around pools.’
Fran felt her body tensing. ‘You didn’t answer my question,’ she said. ‘Joey is only six years old, Romeo only four. It would be morally reprehensible to name and shame either one of them for something that was just an unfortunate accident.’
He killed the engine and turned to look at her. ‘I am confident the incident was not a result of parental neglect or insufficient supervision. When Joe and I inspected the catch on the gate we found it to be faulty. It sometimes locks, it sometimes doesn’t. If it is anyone’s fault, it is the manufacturer’s. The Pelleris have only been in Pelican Bay a few months. The pool and the fence surrounding it were only installed a couple of weeks ago.’
Fran felt her shoulders come down in relief. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to bite your head off but those little boys…well, it would destroy their childhood to be blamed for something like that.’
‘Speaking of little boys,’ he said as he unclipped his seat
belt, ‘how is your sister? I heard she was rushed to hospital earlier today and gave birth to twins.’
‘She’s doing really well, although the babies have to stay in the neonatal unit for a while,’ Fran said. ‘I’m not sure what their names are yet. That was still under discussion last time I spoke to her.’
‘That’s great news,’ he said. ‘They’ll make wonderful parents. They seem a nice couple.’
‘They are,’ she said. ‘Nick is a lovely man. My sister is very happy.’
There was a small silence.
‘So…how about you?’ he asked.
Fran felt her fingers tighten in her lap. ‘What about me?’
His light blue gaze bored into hers. ‘Are you currently involved with someone? A boyfriend, fiancé, husband?’
She looked at him, conscious of her face heating under his scrutiny. ‘I’m not sure why you’re asking me such personal questions. Tell me something, Sergeant, does every newcomer to town suffer the same interrogation from you?’
His lips twitched but it still couldn’t be called a smile. ‘Not the dating sort, huh?’
She pulled her mouth tight. ‘Actually, I am not the sort of person to talk about personal details with complete strangers,’ she clipped back.
She shoved open the passenger door, throwing him an icy look over one shoulder. ‘Thank you for the lift.’
His mouth took on that mocking slant that annoyed her so much. ‘I take it someone like me broke your heart.’
‘Actually, he was nothing like you,’ Fran said. ‘And he didn’t break my heart. He was—’ She stopped, suddenly realising how cleverly he had manipulated her into revealing far more than she wanted to reveal.
‘He was…?’ he prompted with a hook of one brow.
She clamped her lips together and swung her legs out of the car, but the weakness in her left leg made her stumble.
Jacob tried to reach her from inside the car but she pitched forward and landed heavily on the gravel driveway. He bit back a stiff curse and leapt out to go to her aid.