MELODY CARTER went into true labour two days later. The baby girl was tiny but apart from that didn’t show any of the signs of prematurity. She gave her first cry spontaneously, breathed for herself with no sign of respiratory distress, had no difficulty feeding or passing urine. And though she was slightly jaundiced, Dr Chan, who examined her at birth, suggested she was closer to full term—maybe thirty-six or thirty-seven weeks gestational age.
Melody was a long way from recovery to her addiction, but she was following the regimen laid out for her, and she admitted she could have been wrong about the date of the baby’s conception.
Meg refused to think of all the reasons that could be offered for this confusion, concentrating instead on the girl herself, and the tiny daughter Melody was doubtful about accepting.
Mrs Carter was equally doubtful.
‘She sees herself having to bring the baby up if Melody gets back on drugs,’ Sam said, coming into the nursery to find Meg cuddling the fretful baby.
Her low birth weight could explain her poor sleeping habits but the paediatrician had warned them it was likely to be foetal alcohol syndrome.
Meg smiled at Sam—not in agreement but because, after a weekend of loving, it had become something she couldn’t control. See Sam, smile—easy as that. And it was getting harder to control the other reactions she had to seeing Sam—the pleasurable ache inside her body, the flush of heat remembering brought, the skittering of excitement across her skin.
‘You can see her point,’ she managed to reply, probably far too late for his smile had broadened. Having an affair with a colleague was proving every bit as difficult as she’d imagined it would be, but though earlier that morning he’d tempted her with the store-cupboard suggestion, they hadn’t, as yet, had to resort to it—the nights brought loving enough.
‘You getting clucky?’
He nodded to the baby in her arms, and she knew he was thinking her desire for a baby might outweigh what he claimed was her unrealistic attitude to love.
Oh, he’d thought about what she’d said, but argued she was wrong—his love for Meg had held through thirteen years apart—of course it would hold through anything life would throw at them.
Meg studied him as he took the tiny girl—unnamed because of the doubt Melody still felt. He examined her very gently and soothed her fretful cries with his fingertip across her temple.
Yes, she was getting clucky, Meg realised. Almost clucky enough to give up the dream…
But clucky enough to live without the love she needed?
Tough question.
Sam settled the baby in its crib, his arm aching with a need to stretch it around Meg’s waist, his body yearning for them to be standing arm in arm by the crib of their own child.
Damn the hospital grapevine. He put his arm around her waist and drew her close.
‘I do love you,’ he murmured, and she turned and flashed the smile that made his heart stand still.
‘I know you do,’ she acknowledged, and Sam knew they’d moved to another place in their relationship. A place where getting married might be closer.
But it was his insistence on marriage—his talk of it—that seemed to symbolise to Meg all that was wrong in his way of loving.
Puzzling over this, he dropped a quick kiss on her hair, caught the smile on the face of the nurse who walked in at that moment and, uncertain whether to be happy or embarrassed, headed back to his office.
Martin Goodall was coming down the corridor on his way to see Melody, who, in what seemed to be a recurring theme of faulty valves and heart murmurs in Sam’s life these days, had been found to have one. And suddenly Sam remembered a scrap of conversation that had bothered him the last time he’d seen Martin.
‘As well as working for you, was Mum seeing you for her heart?’
Martin was startled but recovered quickly enough.
‘She was. She had a heart murmur. Not bad enough to concern her when she was young but she needed to have regular check-ups.’
Martin bustled away, leaving Sam standing in the corridor.
Heart murmur—leaking valve? Surely he should have known that? Not as a child or teenager, perhaps, but later on—particularly once he’d started studying medicine!
Should she have told him, or should he have asked?
Was this what Meg meant about love not going deep enough?
More confused than ever, he remained where he was, thinking of his mother, of the news he’d heard only three months ago—the news that she’d had heart problems.
Not only heart problems, but a heart so degenerated by the work it had been doing it had been too late for an operation of any kind to save it.
No heroics, his mother had said, but there needn’t have been heroics if she’d been treated earlier.
If he’d known…
‘Taken root there?’ Coralie Stephens came sailing past. ‘How’s our baby? I guess that’s where you’ve been. Word has it you spend almost as much time in there as Meg does. Maybe the two of you should get together.’
The wink she gave told him the news of their relationship was all around the hospital.
He and Meg should get together?
When his mother had had what had most likely been a congenital heart condition and Meg had had a baby with heart problems.
Meg, who wanted children…
Meg, who had already lost one baby…
His car was in its usual position under the house but there was no sign of Sam when Meg came home, piping hot fish and chips calling to her from their wrapping.
He’d be on the beach. She’d take their dinner down there.
She went into her place to get a huge towel to spread on the sand, some wet towelettes for their fingers, and a bottle of cold water. Picnic ready, she made her way down to the beach, seeing a solitary swimmer heading back to shore.
She couldn’t swear to it. Maybe he’d swum along the shoreline and had just turned to come back before she saw him.
Would she ask?
She didn’t think so. For all their physical closeness there was still constraint hovering just beyond the edges of that togetherness.
‘Fish and chips,’ she called as he stood up and walked out of the water. He hesitated just slightly, then bent to get his towel, giving his body a perfunctory rub before walking towards where she’d spread the blanket.
‘This what you call your turn to cook?’ he said, sitting down but not as close as she’d expected.
‘You know my limit is tinned salmon on toast, though I can do eggs and bacon at a pinch, and have been known to throw together a good salad.’
He smiled, but not a Sam smile that made her heart sing little la, la, la notes up and down the scale.
‘Fish and chips are great beach food,’ he assured her, more Dr Sam than Sam the lover.
‘What is it?’ she asked, poking a chip into her mouth, though she knew she wouldn’t taste its delicious saltiness.
He took her hand, turned it over and pressed a kiss into the palm, carefully folding her fingers over it before he returned it to her lap.
‘Eat your fish and chips first,’ he ordered.
‘First? Eat before you throw some bombshell at me? What are fish and chips supposed to taste like when you’ve said something like that to me?’
This time he took both her hands.
‘I think you’re right about what you call the love thing, Megan,’ he said, his voice sounding so decisive she knew he meant every word. ‘What I feel, for whatever reason, isn’t what you need or deserve. No marriage, no affair, but for friendship’s sake, and because I love you as a friend, go ahead and make arrangements to start uni in the new year—first semester. I’ll fund it—no, you won’t take my money, I know—but there’d be no better use for some of Mum’s money than helping you achieve your dream.’
Meg stared at him, unable to take in the enormity of what had just occurred between them.
‘Here’s your hat, what’s your hurry? That’s what you’re saying, Sam?’ The words crept out past strangled vocal cords.
He didn’t answer, just stared out to sea.
She waited, counted waves, counted some more, then picked up a handful of chips and flung them at him, rising to her feet at the same time and racing from the beach.
Across the park, up the hill, panting for breath, running from pain, hating Sam so much she wanted to yell her rage to the sky.
He let her go, the damage done, his own pain suggesting he’d found out exactly what she talked about when she talked of deep-down love.
Benjie came back in for his treatment, and Meg was by his bed, talking to Jenny about Ben’s progress, when the alarm sounded.
The number flashing in the light-box above the door told her it was the nursery, and she knew it would be Melody’s baby.
‘There’s no apparent reason for it,’ Mike Chan was saying to Sam as Meg flew through the door.
She looked around. No crash cart?
‘You’re not resuscitating?’
She heard the accusation in her voice but couldn’t stop it.
‘We tried, Meg,’ Sam said gently. ‘Fingertip heart massage, oxygen—’
‘That’s all? No drugs? No defibrillation?’
‘She’s less than a week old, Meg. Shocking her isn’t an option. It’s too extreme for a neonate.’ He glanced up at the clock on the wall. ‘Time of death, ten twenty-one a.m.
‘You can’t do that! Just decide like that. We should try again—try drugs. We can’t just give in!’ Bright spots of colour now in Meg’s cheeks, and anguish in her eyes.
Instinct took Sam towards her. He grasped her arm with a firm hand and said, as gently as he could, ‘We can’t save her, Meg.’
The hectic colour faded, leaving her ashen grey, her body shaking as if she was about to collapse. He tightened his hold on her, fearing she’d faint—trying to get her away from the cot, away from the other staff.
But just as quickly as it had ebbed, her strength returned. She straightened, disengaging herself from his hold and walking away.
Acting as if nothing had happened—although her shaking hands gave lie to the pretence.
He caught up with her in the alcove and led her outside into the tropical gardens, to a seat beneath an old fig tree, its drooping branches hiding them from prying eyes.
‘I should be talking to Melody and Mrs Carter,’ she said, her voice muffled by tears. ‘Not falling apart like this.’
‘Mike Chan will talk to them and we’ll see them later.’
She didn’t answer, weeping quietly against his chest while his arms held her close and his head made silent promises he couldn’t—shouldn’t—keep.
At last she straightened, the pale skin blotched and streaked with tears. He took out his handkerchief and wiped it for her, then held her close again, rocking her in his arms.
‘I don’t think I cried for Lucy,’ she whispered. ‘Not properly. I was down in Melbourne on my own. I had to do things, sign things, organise a funeral, so I kept pretending everything was all right and pretending became a habit.’
She looked up and tried a feeble smile.
‘So I guess I didn’t grieve properly either and it was all bottled up inside me just waiting to come flooding out.’
She found her own handkerchief and blew her nose.
‘On you. I’m sorry. I know it’s not what you want.’
Sam heard the curses building like bubbling lava inside him, and barely kept them to a muted roar when they came out.
‘Don’t ever say that,’ he finally managed. ‘You and every part of you is what I want. Do you really think I only want the happy bits—the sex, the fun, the companionship? Do you think I don’t want to share your pain? To hold you when you cry? Do you really think I’m so shallow, Megan, that holding you like this would bother me?’
He took her face in his hands and turned it towards him.
‘You gave me one great gift a few days ago when you told me Lucy’s name. Letting me hold you while you cried was another gift, Meg. I love you. You must know that! You must know in your bones that my love is just as deep as yours!’
‘But…’
He gathered her close again, and held her to him, knowing exactly what she’d been unable to say.
And suddenly he knew, too. He’d been wrong, taking a unilateral decision not to tell her about the heart disease, instead making out she was asking too much of love.
‘I thought it best,’ he began. ‘Best if we just broke up. That way you’d get over me, finish medicine, find someone else to love and have your babies.’
She shifted in his arms, pushing away from his body so she could see his face.
So he could see her disbelief…
‘Best for whom?’
‘For you.’
‘Breaking my heart was best for me? Because you didn’t love me enough, you decided it should end?’
Would she understand?
‘Because I did love you enough,’ he said. ‘Because I finally understood the kind of love you wanted—-felt that kind of love for you. I thought it was the kind of love that should put the loved one first—before everything. But finding it—understanding it—came about because of something else I learned.’
He kissed her lips, cold and still damp from her tears, then straightened up and took her hands in his.
‘I spoke to Martin Goodall. Mum was seeing him for a heart problem all her working life. If she had a faulty valve way back then, I can only assume it was congenital. You wanted babies, Meg. You’d already had one baby with a heart problem. Could I father babies with you without risk of that happening again?’
She was frowning furiously at him, as if unable to believe what she was hearing.
‘You pushed me away, decided we weren’t meant to be together, in the name of love, for heaven’s sake—because you were worried our babies might have heart problems?’
He nodded.
‘Without telling me? Without talking about it? Without genetic testing? For all you know, your mother’s problem might have come from rheumatic fever when she was a child—nothing to do with genetics. And isn’t that what you did thirteen years ago? Pushed me away without an explanation, a discussion—anything? This is exactly what happened then. The decision was all yours! Taking control and throwing me out of your life as if I was nothing more than an old pair of jeans.’
Rheumatic fever? Why hadn’t he thought of that?
He was so busy feeling relief he missed what Meg was saying next, but from the look on her face it wasn’t something he particularly wanted to hear. She was still furious.
She stood up and glared down at him.
‘I think it’s a very good thing you decided, for whatever pathetic reason, we weren’t suited to each other, because two more stupid people I’ve never met. Babies! We’d be lucky to breed chimpanzees, and stupid chimpanzees at that!’
She marched away, not back into the hospital but towards the car park, escaping him as well as her memories.
She’d walk along the beach, he guessed. Maybe she’d cool off enough to talk some more.
Not likely!
He went back into the hospital to talk to Melody about the baby she hadn’t wanted.
She was sitting up in bed, alone in the single room, tears dribbling down her cheeks. Having passed Mrs Carter and Mike in the corridor, Sam knew she knew and he took her hand and sat beside her, letting her fingers cling to his.
‘I kept saying I didn’t want her and now she’s dead,’ Melody cried, lifting her other hand to her mouth and biting at her knuckles.
‘Not because of anything you said,’ Sam reminded her.
‘But because of what I did. Of how I was.’
Her anguish was so great Sam stood up and put his arm around her, holding her against his chest as he’d held Meg earlier.
Holding another young woman while she cried for another baby.
Then suddenly she straightened, grabbed a tissue and mopped her face.
‘That’s it, Dr Agostini. Oh, I know I’ve been going along with the drug protocol you’ve set for me, but in my heart of hearts I haven’t believed it would work—haven’t really cared if it did or didn’t. But say I had another baby—did this to it. No way!’
Her lips wobbled as if this new resolve wasn’t quite as strong as it should be.
‘It won’t be easy,’ Sam reminded her, ‘but there are excellent places you can go for help.’
Melody nodded, and even found a smile. ‘Mum knows every one of them, but this time it will be different. This time I’ll be doing it for me—and for the baby—not for Mum or to escape a jail sentence, or any other reason.’
‘That’s a great start,’ Sam agreed, ‘and if you need more incentive, by the time you’re clean I should be about ready to open a rehab centre up here. Would you like to come back and work there?’
Melody smiled her thanks then reached for the tissues again as all the brave talk of the future didn’t completely blot out the loss of her baby.
‘Don’t be afraid to cry,’ Sam told her. ‘Crying’s part of the healing process.’
She gave him a watery smile, and as Mrs Carter came back into the room, Sam had the strong impression that Melody might just make it.
He went back to his office, finished up some paperwork, then drove to the site of the new hospital. The architect was there, discussing final landscaping details with a contractor. With the painting nearly done, the place was looking great.
‘You’ll be opening right on time,’ he told Sam, leading him into the foyer to show him the new glass walls that had been put in place behind the reception desk. ‘When’s your manager due to start?’
Thoughts of Megan had pushed the details of the hospital completion out of Sam’s head, but he recalled his manager, who’d been in Sydney handling the ordering of all the necessary equipment, was due to arrive in the Bay this coming weekend and start work here the following Monday.
‘Great,’ the architect replied. ‘We’ll have his office all set up by then, and he can handle any queries we might have over the last few weeks.’
Sam accompanied the man around the building, approving of all that had happened since his previous visit two days earlier, then, leaving the man with a plumber in the staff washrooms, he walked back out the front to admire the healthy coconut palms that had been planted just that day.
‘It’s beautiful.’
Meg!
The words were still husky from her tears, but her face showed no sign of the emotional storm—storms—she’d suffered, although her cheeks held the pinkness of embarrassment as she forced herself to look him in the eyes.
‘Want to see inside?’ he offered, unsure exactly what was happening here but inwardly excited just to be near Meg again.
She nodded and he led her in, taking her away from where the architect and plumber were, showing her the day surgery rooms, then the main theatre, explaining how the design allowed for the necessary clean zones to prevent contamination.
‘Have you got a store cupboard?’ she asked, her voice shaking so much it was a wonder she got them out.
Sam had to smile, and he put his arm around her shoulders and led her into the scrub room. Closed the door and leaned against it.
‘Not a store cupboard but not much bigger. Will it do?’
Meg nodded her reply then studied him in silence, eventually shrugging her shoulders as she stumbled into speech.
‘I don’t know where we are, Sam. I don’t know if we even have a relationship any more. I’m lost. But I do know that I love you and that comes first. Before plans, or babies, or anything else. I don’t even know if you want to hear that, but I had to say it.’
Green eyes pleaded with him, but for what? Every instinct in his body told him to be careful—that this was potentially the most important moment in his life.
But Meg was lost and scared, so what could he do but take her in his arms and hold her close, pressing kisses on her hair as he fought for breath to say the words he had to say?
‘You didn’t know if I wanted to hear it? Of course I wanted to hear it, Megan. I love you so much, bone-deep, Meg. I know that now. But before I’d even told you how much, I did my best to ruin everything for both of us.’
He tipped her head back and kissed her properly on the lips.
‘But it’s still an issue, Mum’s heart problem, and we have to talk about genetic testing and all the practical things, but now I understand exactly what you meant—that love is about sharing as well as about loving. And sharing is about bad times—bad things—as well as good.’
He kissed her again and felt her mouth grow warm and her tongue tease along his lips.
‘I love you that way, Megan, and every other way. I love your compassion and your humour and the way you walk across the sand, shaking the sand off your toes the way the cat does. I even love your splashy swimming, and especially I love your sexy underwear, most of which is still living in my house.’
Another kiss, much longer this time, then he lifted his head to ask, ‘Come and live with it? Live properly with me? Marry me whenever, but shift out of the cottage and share my house as well as my life? Now?’
Meg kissed him this time, pressing her lips to his, while her heart sang with a new happiness—bone-deep!