Twins for Christmas (3 page)

‘C
HILDREN
 
?’

The colour in Rory’s face was draining, but Kate’s gaze didn’t falter.

‘Twins,’ she confirmed.

‘Kate?’

Judy’s voice was coming from behind the curtain screening the cubicle, but something had clicked for Kate. Something important.

‘It’s in your family, isn’t it?’ She didn’t give Rory time to respond. ‘You have a twin. That’s why your mother keeps calling you Jamie.’

‘Kate?’ The curtain was twitching now, but Kate was still watching Rory. Seeing the pain that darkened his eyes to an impenetrable black.

‘Had.’
 
His voice was so low and raw the words were almost inaudible. ‘He died. A long time ago.’

‘Kate? We need help in Resus 1. I know you’re supposed to be on light duties, but are you up for it?’

‘Of course.’

Judy’s glance turned to Rory. ‘Dr Foster asked me to bring you, too, if possible, Dr McCulloch. It’s a Code Red.’

Meaning that this was a crisis. They had more serious cases than they could safely handle with the staff they had available.

Rory shook his head.

‘We can find someone to sit with your mother. Now that she’s started antibiotics there’s not much more we can do for the moment.’

‘No,’ Rory said aloud. ‘I can’t help you. I’m sorry.’

Judy stared with the same incredulity Kate had experienced only a minute ago. She flicked Kate a ‘what on earth is going on?’ kind of look, but couldn’t linger.

Neither could Kate. But neither could she let Rory get away with dismissing his moral responsibilities like this. He’d taken an oath when he became a doctor. One that Kate considered if not sacred at least equal to the kind of obligation and responsibilities that came with becoming a parent. If he could ignore that oath and the patients that needed him in a situation like this, what sort of father was he going to make to her children?

It simply wasn’t good enough.

‘There are children out there,’ she breathed. ‘Frightened, injured children who thought they were going back to the only home they know to put their Christmas presents under their tree. They need help.
 
Your
 
help.’

It was more than pain in his eyes now. More like agony.

‘You don’t know what you’re asking, Kate.’

‘Yes, I do.’ Kate was already moving. She took a quick glance over her shoulder. ‘And if you can’t do it, you’re not the man I thought you were. And you’re certainly not a father I thought my children could be proud of.’

The sharp stab of discomfort in her chest as Kate walked out of the cubicle felt remarkably like a piece breaking off from her heart.

Or the death of a dream she’d never quite been able to relinquish.

I
T TOOK LESS THAN
 
thirty seconds to get from the cubicle Mrs McCulloch was occupying to the resus bay where she was needed. Ahead of Kate was the job she was trained to do. A job she loved. The complicated and often challenging task of assessing and stabilising the condition of injured or sick people. Trying to reduce suffering. Saving lives.

The pull towards that duty and the desire to perform to the very best of her ability was a powerful force.

But Kate could feel a pull from behind her as well.

A link to the man she was walking away from in disgust.

A voice as compelling as the cry of the injured children was inside her own head. Telling her she was wrong.

Reminding her…

Strange how thirty seconds was long enough for a series of impressions to flash through her mind with such clarity. Or maybe not so strange. So much editing had been done to those memories they were now condensed into a single image that was far more than a picture. It could touch her senses and capture her emotions even when she was wide awake.

Every step Kate took seemed to trigger a new image. Another sense. Following one from another. But the first was an image printed on her heart that never failed to stir something painfully poignant.

The way he had been sitting that night. Alone. On that bench in the little park that was halfway between St Bethel’s and her small apartment.

The sight of a lone man late at night should have frightened Kate. It had—but she hadn’t been afraid for her own safety. She had been alarmed because she’d recognised Rory, and for him to be sitting there like that, so alone, was so completely out of char ac ter she’d known something was wrong. Terribly wrong.

Rory McCulloch was never alone. He was a man who played as hard as he worked. A man who could make anybody laugh and feel good about themselves. At least smile if a day or a job had been particularly distressing.

His philosophy on life was so well-known someone had printed a card and put it on the noticeboard outside the staffroom. It had Rory’s photograph on it and below was the caption:
 
Life is short. Eat dessert first.

Time away from work was all about life’s ‘dessert’ for Dr McCulloch. It was time to recharge one’s batteries by having fun.

He wasn’t having fun right now. Kate could see that by his solitude and by the body language in shoulders slumped enough to suggest the weight of the world was too much. By the look in his eyes when she got close enough, having veered from her path without hesitation.

A look of…defeat?

Asking if he was all right was such an obviously redundant question that Kate said nothing at all. She sat down beside him and took his hand, and just sat there. Listening to the ragged edge to his breathing. Hearing the oddly thick note in his voice when he finally spoke.

‘You should go home, Katie. It’s very late.’

Nobody else ever called her Katie. It didn’t suit the person she was at work. The efficient, competent nurse she was proud of being. She had thought he might have seen something nobody else had seen about her. Something attractive. A quiet little dream that had been a pleasure all on its own.

He needed someone tonight, though. She could see it and hear it, and she was the one who was there and, dear Lord, she wanted to be the one to help.

‘Come with me,’ she said simply.

‘Why?’

‘Because you need a friend.’

Amazingly, when she’d tightened her grip on his hand and stood up to move he’d come with her. They hadn’t talked, and that had made Kate all the more aware of other sounds. Their shoes on the pavement. The creak of the steep stairs that led to her bedsit. The scratch of her key in the lock. The click of the lamp beside her bed as she switched it on so that she could see Rory’s face to help her try and find words to ask what was wrong so that she could offer comfort.

‘Don’t ask,’ he’d said softly. ‘Please, Katie. Don’t ask.’

It was actually easy to give comfort without knowing what it was for, because it was an expression of love. Unconditional.

The images that flowed from that point were ones Kate could easily suppress if she wasn’t alone. They were too private and too precious.

The taste of that first kiss.

The smell of Rory’s skin.

The touch of his hands and lips.

Her breath escaped in a soft sigh of submission. The pull was too strong.

Kate was almost there, on the other side of the depart ment. Ready to focus completely on the people who needed her now. In the present. She just couldn’t stop herself taking one last peek into the past.

To where Rory was, once again, sitting alone.

Except he wasn’t.

He was right there, a step behind her, and he still had that look of grim determination on his face. He walked right past her into Resus 1, where there were two new patients crowding the area.

Braden Foster was bent over a small boy who was on one of the beds.

He nodded at Rory, who stepped towards the other bed onto which ambulance staff were transferring a grey-haired woman who had to be Mary Ballantyne.

‘Tell me about this patient,’ he instructed a paramedic.

‘Kate?’ Braden Foster caught her glance. ‘Could you give me some cricoid pressure here, please? We need to intubate this lad.’

Her focus was narrowed to just one of the patients occupying this area set aside for major trauma, but Kate was aware of Rory in the same room. Aware that he’d stepped through some kind of personal barrier to be here.

For her? For his children? Because of what she’d said?

It didn’t matter. He was here, and her heart had been right not to let her believe the worst about him.

He was still the man she thought he was.

The man she loved.

T
HIS WAS A NIGHTMARE
.

Not quite his worst, but only because he was tasked with treating the older female patient tucked into the corner of the area and not the little boy who was the primary focus of concern.

He could still hear the alarms going off on the monitoring equipment, however. Hear the tension in the voices of the staff dealing with the emergency.

‘Oxygen saturation dropping.’

‘Blood pressure’s dropping.’

‘Heart rate’s irregular. Ectopics increasing.’

‘I need some suction, here. Can’t see a damn thing.’

Focus, Rory told himself. Shut it out. You don’t have to take responsibility for that patient. Look after the one you’ve got.

On first glance it didn’t look good. Strapped to a spinal board, the woman was wearing a neck collar, and her face was largely obscured by blood and an oxygen mask.

‘Facial injuries,’ the paramedic had informed Rory. ‘This is Mary Ballantyne and she’s seventy-two years old. She was driving the mini-bus and thinks her face hit the steering wheel as they went over the bank.’

‘Are you having any trouble breathing, Mary?’

‘By dose is blocked.’

‘Keep breathing through your mouth for the moment.’ Rory turned back to the paramedic. ‘Was she knocked out?’

‘I don’t think so.’ The paramedic had a hint of a smile. ‘GCS was fifteen on arrival. Mary was trapped, but still trying to organise everybody else—including the emergency services.’

‘I’b fine,’ came a surprisingly strong voice from the bed. ‘Get be out of this ridiculous con trap tion. I need to look after by children.’

Rory smiled at the feisty tone. He leaned closer. ‘I’m Rory McCulloch, Mrs Ballantyne. I’m the doctor who’s going to be looking after you.’

‘Get on with it, then, young ban,’ his patient directed. ‘And call be Bary. Everyone else does.’

Mary’s nose was still bleeding. Rory pulled on gloves as the paramedic lingered to pass on all the information they had gathered so far.

‘All she’s complained of is a sore nose and nausea, which is probably due to the amount of blood she’d swallowed by the time we got her out. She denied any cervical tenderness but, given the mechanism of injury, it seemed prudent to immobilise her spine.’

‘Let’s get that nose packed,’ Rory directed. ‘I don’t want her losing any more blood. I’ll get a line in and we’ll hang some fluids. What’s the blood pressure now?’

‘One-fifteen on sixty,’ a nurse relayed.

Not too bad, considering. ‘Do you have any medical history I should know about, Mary?’

‘No.’

‘No problems with your heart or blood pressure or breathing?’

‘I get a bit of angina. Nothing buch.’

‘Any chest pain at the moment?’

‘No.’

‘I’m going to loosen this collar and check your head and neck, but I don’t want you moving just yet, OK?’ Rory was surprised to see just the flash of a twinkle in the pale blue eyes watching him. Was Mary actually weighing up whether she would co-operate or not?

‘OK,’ she agreed.

Rory smiled. He could see beneath that twinkle. He could see the fear that her condition might prevent her doing what she desperately needed to do, which was to look after all the children she had chosen to take into her care. The trust being put in him was one he would do his utmost to honour. He admired what this woman was doing with her life, and how she was coping with a potentially disastrous situation.

He would do whatever he could to help her, and it was a privilege to be in a position to do so. He’d missed this part of medicine more than he had allowed himself to admit.

‘We need X-rays,’ he ordered moments later, having checked for obvious injuries to Mary’s head and neck and found nothing. ‘C-spine, chest and pelvis. The sooner we can clear Mary, the sooner we can untie her.’ They couldn’t use the overhead X-ray facilities in this trauma area because they were over the bed the boy was occupying. ‘Is X-ray free?’

‘Yes,’ a nurse responded. ‘Helen’s just gone through to the plaster room.’

‘Let’s move Mary, then.’

There was huge relief in being able to issue the instruction. He could move away from what was happening in here. An intubation attempt to secure the airway of a child that had clearly failed.

‘Bag him,’ Braden Foster was ordering. ‘I need a guide wire, Kate. We’ll have one more try.’

Rory almost managed to escape. The bed Mary was on was being wheeled through the door and he was following. Relieved to be moving. Confident that a broken nose was the worst of Mary’s injuries and that she was in no immediate danger.

It was Braden’s voice that caught him.

‘Rory?’ The tone was quiet—a warning all by itself. ‘I need you.’

He had to turn. To face the concern he knew he would see in his colleague’s face. The fear that he was losing his young patient.

God, he knew that fear. He had lived with it every day he had been a practising doctor. Statistically, it was a ticking bomb. You couldn’t be a specialist in emergency medicine without losing the battle to save a paediatric patient at some point.

It hadn’t happened to Rory, but the fear had finally crippled him. Would have destroyed him if it hadn’t been for Kate. And he could feel even before his gaze moved the way Kate was looking at him.

There was a plea in her eyes. She knew how much he didn’t want to do this. Maybe she knew he was convinced he
 
couldn’t
 
do it, because there was also encouragement in that steady gaze. A belief in him.

You can do this
, her gaze told him.

For just a heartbeat he could feel it again. The memory of her touch. The feeling that he
 
was
 
worth the space he took up on the planet because this woman felt that way. The seed of strength he had taken with him to the most distant corner of the planet he’d been able to find.

He couldn’t let her down.

Facing that fear again
 
was
 
his worst nightmare, but he had to step into it. He had to
 
try
. He owed Kate that much, at least.