A Doctor's Christmas Family
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Meredith Webber
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CHAPTER ONE
ESTHER SHAW stood on the footpath outside the multistorey building, checking the street number against the piece of paper she held in her hand. Dark, angry clouds boiled overhead, turning late afternoon into an early dusk. The hot, humid air was heavy with the threat of rain, and though the sodden earth and brimming creeks she’d witnessed as she’d walked threatened renewed disaster if it rained again, she wished it would come to bring even a temporary coolness.
She looked up at the building. In a city virtually flattened by a vicious cyclone less than a fortnight earlier, it was amazing to see this solid structure standing so tall. This apartment block and the hospital stood like two monoliths in this area—symbols of man’s power over the forces of nature.
True, the hospital had lost some sheets of roofing iron and windows had been blown in, but the architects, engineers and construction workers who’d built it had done their job well, making sure the hospital didn’t buckle under the pressure of the worst tropical cyclone the north Queensland city of Jamestown had ever experienced.
The same building crew had built this apartment block—she’d learned that from the admin officer who’d given her the address—and had obviously done as good a job as the damage was only superficial.
‘Sorry you’ll have to bunk in with other people,’ the woman had said, ‘but anyone with a roof and at least a few walls left standing is taking in those left homeless and others, like you, who’ve come to help. The army evacuated most non-essential inhabitants of the city within a couple of days, more than ten thousand, but people keep trickling back. Even if they haven’t got a house, Jamestown is still home.’
Esther had understood more about the calamity as she’d walked the five blocks from the hospital to the apartment building. Everywhere in the scene of devastation, crews of civilians and army personnel were loading debris onto trucks. Huge old palm trees were dying on the ground, their round bundles of roots suggesting the fierce winds had torn them right out of the earth. Telegraph poles, snapped in half, lay like giant matchsticks wherever they’d been flung. And everywhere tattered streamers of tinsel and torn, wet, mouldering decorations reminded her that Christmas was only three weeks away.
Christmas! The season of loving and giving. The joyous season of the year.
Not for Esther, it wasn’t—not any more. For her it was a time to be got through, a time to resist memories which, if she let them, would weaken, and ultimately, destroy her.
If she let them.
She thought instead of the people of Jamestown, whose Christmas plans had been swept away in a night of fury and terror less than a fortnight ago. How were they handling the advent of the festive season, when their houses were in ruins and their dreams and hopes dashed into the ground?
Everywhere she looked were reminders of what the people of the city had suffered. Here and there a house, presumably built since the building code for cyclone-prone areas had become more stringent, stood as a reminder that these had once been suburban streets, where neighbours had gossiped while their children had played football or cricket in the now leafless park across the road.
‘The apartment is owned by the hospital so you’ll find most of the tenants are doctors or nurses,’ the admin woman had told Esther. ‘See the building manager in the ground-floor apartment, she’ll tell you where to go from there.’
Anxious to get settled and more anxious to get rid of the suitcase she’d been towing behind her through the debris-littered streets, Esther dragged her suitcase up the ramp leading up to the front door.
It opened automatically, relieving her of one worry. She knew from the information she’d studied on her flight north that large areas of the city were still without power, and carrying her case up any number of flights of steps had not been an appealing prospect.
She was about to knock on the door of the ground-floor apartment when she noticed an envelope on the floor near her feet. FOR THE DOCTOR ARRIVING FROM BRISBANE it read, the message printed in bold black capitals. A piece of sticky tape on the top edge suggested it had once been stuck on the door, but no doubt the humidity, which was making Esther’s clothes wet and clammy, had negated the tape’s ability to stick.
Hoping she was the only doctor arriving from Brisbane today—or at least the only one who’d been directed to this building—Esther opened the envelope and slid out the note.
‘Sorry not here,’ it read. ‘Son injured in clean-up work. Had to go to hospital. Mrs Jackson on fifth floor expecting you, she’ll be home all day.’
Mrs Jackson!
In spite of the heat and the suitcase and the heavy tiredness travelling had induced, Esther found a smile at the coincidence.
She’d once been Mrs Jackson. Not that she’d called herself that—sticking to her maiden name for career purposes—but officially, that’s who she’d been—Mrs William Wyatt Jackson the Third.
Or had it been the Fourth?
Her mother-in-law—ex-mother-in-law—would have been able to tell her, but her ex-mother-in-law was on the other side of the ocean, ably running most of the social events in the exclusive enclave of wealth she inhabited in the lush, green countryside not far from Atlanta.
Funny how most people in the world saw Washington as the centre of power in the universe, while for Esther, at least during her marriage to Bill, the real centre had been in that gracious, beautiful house in the rebel South!
The elevator, summoned while her mind floated like a lost balloon above the past, pinged its arrival, and the doors slid open. Esther dragged her suitcase inside, pressed the ‘5’ button, then, as if pricked by a sharp memory, the balloon burst, and the thoughts she’d been trying to avoid since she’d seen the name Jackson were there, in bold, black, block printing, in her head.
She wondered where Bill was. Still in Atlanta? Had he kept their house? Probably. After all, it had been his home before their marriage. And he wasn’t a sentimental man, not one to be dwelling on the past. So he wouldn’t see her ghost as he walked through the rooms, or hear a baby crying piteously in the sleepless hours of the night.
Did he think of her, as she did of him, so many times a day? Did he think of her occasionally?
At all?
Probably not, she decided. Bill’s main focus had always been his work. A brilliant and dedicated scientist, he’d been confused—really the only word—by the attraction that had flared between them. Not that confusion had stopped him doing something about it. Oh, no, he’d pursued that attraction as he pursued his viral mysteries, with a single-minded determination that had had them married within a month of meeting…
The elevator doors once again slid open, indicating she’d arrived at her destination.
But Bill wasn’t the kind of man to brood over the past. Too sensible, too pragmatic. He’d been like that in the lab. An experiment would go wrong, and while Esther would weep and wail and gnash her teeth, not quite literally, Bill would shrug, accept it and start all over again.
The doors began to close, and Esther, realising she was lost in the twisting maze of memory, shook herself free of the past, jabbed the DOOR OPEN button and finally exited the elevator.
There was only one door, directly opposite where she stood. The apartment apparently took up the whole floor.
‘Swish!’ she said out loud, because meeting new people always made her nervous, and when she was nervous she always talked to herself. ‘Must be the penthouse. No wonder they’ve room to take in strays.’
The feeble conversation wasn’t making her feel any better so she knocked and breathed deeply, hoping to quell the racing heartbeats thudding in her chest.
She’d spoken to other children raised in foster-homes, and knew they shared this strong feeling of apprehension and dread when meeting new people. Too often they’d stood in front of a stranger’s front door, clutching the case officer’s hand, hearts beating erratically as they’d prayed whoever opened the door was going to like them.
Please, let these people like me, was a silent prayer that still echoed in Esther’s head when she met strangers, although she was now secure and confident enough to know it didn’t matter any more.
‘Tell that to my heart!’ she muttered, as she heard locks being turned, and knew the door was opening.
But if her heart had been behaving erratically before the door opened, it was nothing to the pandemonium in its next reaction. It raced, then faltered, and just as Esther was sure she was going to pass out on the doorstep, the frosty tones of Mrs William Wyatt Jackson the Second—or was it the Third?—snapped her back to consciousness.
‘Do not faint on the doorstep, Esther,’ she ordered. ‘I couldn’t possibly do anything to help and it would be a very bad experience for Chloe to see a grown woman collapsing on the floor.’
Enough awe of this woman remained embedded in Esther’s subconscious for her to obey, so she clutched at the doorjamb and remained, more or less, upright. She blinked her eyes to make sure she wasn’t hallucinating, but Gwyneth Jackson remained clearly delineated in Esther’s field of vision after the blink. And she wasn’t sure you could hallucinate voices…
‘What are you doing here?’ Gwyneth was demanding. ‘If you’re hoping to see William, that’s too bad. He’s at work—he’s always at work. We’ve had a cyclone in case you didn’t know. The city’s in ruins.’
The ‘Please, let them like me’ prayer had definitely not been answered the day Esther had first met Gwyneth Jackson, and nothing, she realised from the woman’s frosty tone, had changed since. Gwyneth had nurtured plans for her son to marry Marcie Regan, daughter of her oldest friend, and not only had a usurper upset these plans and stolen her son—but it had been a foreign usurper at that. Gwyneth had never been at pains to contain her disappointment, and the ‘plain speaking’ she claimed to admire had verged on outright rudeness.
But Esther was no longer an insecure and easily cowed young doctor, head over heels in love with the woman’s son, and to prove it she unclamped her fingers from the doorjamb, wondering briefly if she’d left indentations in the wood, stiffened her spine and met Gwyneth’s cold blue eyes with fire in her own dark orbs.
‘I know about the cyclone. I’ve been sent here to help. I was told at the hospital I’ve been billeted here, but if it’s inconvenient, I’m sure they can find me somewhere else.’
She may have sounded brave, but inside she was a mess. If Gwyneth was in Jamestown then there was every likelihood Bill was also in the region. This had struck Esther almost as soon as she’d set eyes on the woman, even before Gwyneth had confirmed it with words, because only some need to be with her darling William would have been enough to separate Gwyneth from her lovely home.
But thinking about Bill, about the possibility of him being in the same country, let alone the same state—the same city—would have brought on a panic attack of such massive proportions, Esther refused to give it brain room.
Not now, in front of his mother. Facing up to Gwyneth Jackson required every bit of mental fortitude Esther possessed—and then some. Divine intervention might help but she didn’t hold out much hope. It had never helped before. Angels might swoop from the sky to rescue other mortals from calamity, but Esther’s life had been remarkably free of angelic deliverance.
‘I doubt the hospital will be able to find you somewhere else,’ Gwyneth responded, not opening the door wide enough for it to be a hospitable gesture. ‘According to William every staff member with a roof over his or her head is billeting at least one person, some more than one if they’ve room. But it’s utterly unsuitable that you should be here. I’ll phone the hospital. They can send us someone else. Swap you over.’
Like a parcel sent to the wrong address, or like returning something you didn’t like to the store, Esther thought, but before she could think of something to say—preferably something adult and effective—Gwyneth shut the door, leaving Esther and her suitcase in the hallway.
Exhausted, as much by emotion as by the effort of getting to Jamestown following a frantic midnight plea from her boss in the epidemiology unit at the medical research lab, Esther sank down on the floor, rested her back against the wall and closed her eyes.
Which was where Bill, emerging from the lift perhaps only seconds later, found her.
‘Esther?’
Disbelief made his normally gruff voice much higher in tone, but the curl of an accent around the soft syllables of her name, sent almost forgotten tingles of excitement twitching along Esther’s nerves.
She opened her eyes and stared up at the man she’d thought she’d never see again. He looked terrible! Exhaustion had left his skin grey beneath the stubble on his cheeks, while his eyes, darkly shadowed, were sunk deep under his dark brows, the blue irises dull in streaky, bloodshot whites.
‘Oh, Bill!’ She sighed his name, pushed to her feet and held out her arms, offering, with that universal gesture of support for anyone in trouble, the solace of a hug.
‘Poor man,’ she murmured, as his tall, well-muscled body slumped against hers, his arms closing around her back in such a natural gesture it was as if they’d never parted. ‘Has it been very dreadful? Don’t you have enough extra staff now to be getting some sleep? Are you taking the whole burden of this disaster on your own shoulders? Haven’t you learned yet to share the load?’
Familiar scolds—she’d used them to him so often when work had been at crisis point, it was like an echo of time itself.
Familiar, too, was the feel of his body against hers. The way hers fitted so neatly to his despite a disparity in their heights.
Then familiar responses, as if her body was still programmed to respond to his—
The door opened, and Gwyneth’s horrified explosion of ‘William!’ broke them apart.
Bill stepped back, looked down into Esther’s eyes and dredged from some inner resource a tired smile.
‘Don’t tell me,’ he said. ‘You’re the epidemiologist Brisbane’s sent. To misquote Humphrey Bogart, Of all the epidemics in all the hospitals in all the world, you had to turn up here. I thought—I’d heard you were working in Africa.’
Absurdly pleased Bill should know—or even have wanted to know—where she was working, Esther explained.
‘I’m not long back from Africa and Humphrey Bogart wasn’t pleased to see the woman he was talking about—I would have thought you’d at least be pleased to have some help.’
‘Yes,’ he said, but he was frowning as he said it, so it didn’t carry much conviction.
He continued to frown, while his mother was rattling on about impossibilities.
Esther stopped being pleased about anything. She’d recovered sufficiently to know the situation was impossible of course she should find another billet—but the attitude of the Jacksons, both mother and son, had riled her, and being fighting mad was better than being thrust back into childhood terrors by Gwyneth, or remaining weak-kneed over seeing Bill again.
And she definitely shouldn’t have hugged him no matter how heart-breakingly exhausted he’d looked!
Esther turned to Gwyneth.
‘Did you phone the hospital? Is there somewhere else I can stay?’
Gwyneth’s scowl told her the answer.
‘Apparently not,’ she said, the frost in her voice thick enough to chip off and add to drinks.
‘There’s no reason for you to stay somewhere else,’ Bill declared. ‘The admin people have more than enough to do without shifting billets around the place. Come on in, Esther. We’ve plenty of room.’
Gwyneth walked away, her stiffly upright posture showing exactly what she thought of that invitation, but there was no further argument. Bill lifted Esther’s suitcase and pushed open the door.
The delighted cry of ‘Dada’ coincided with Esther’s first sight of the child, and this time, she was sure, her heart stopped beating altogether. A coldness, colder even than the frost in Gwyneth’s voice, stole through Esther’s body as she stared at the chubby little form, standing on unsteady legs, clutching at a coffee-table with one hand for support while the other hand waved a greeting to her father.
A normal person, Esther realised later, when some synapsing had started happening again in her brain, would have looked around for the child’s mother, thinking how awkward the situation was going to be. A normal person would have understood Gwyneth’s panic that Esther should be billeted on them.
But Esther couldn’t take her eyes off the child, who now held up both dimpled arms to her father and, without the table’s support, promptly collapsed back onto the soft padding provided by a thick towelling diaper.
Bill’s child.
Bill had a child.
A girl child—as the one he’d lost had been.
The one she, Esther, had lost.
Heart, mind and body filled with pain, she stood staring transfixed at this living embodiment of the ghost that haunted her dreams.
Bill said something—moved past her—but he had never been insensitive, so when he lifted the little girl into his arms and turned, showing her off to Esther, introducing her, ‘This is Chloe. Chloe, this is Esther, who’s an old friend of mine,’ Esther put it down to tiredness, not a desire to deepen the pain she was feeling.
‘No!’ The word slipped out—an anguished cry of denial—before Esther could stop it.
She looked around the room, desperate to escape, but it was her childhood all over again. Inside the strangers’ house now, seeing in the couple’s eyes that they didn’t want a skinny, tangle-haired, dark-eyed waif of a child, yet knowing she’d have to stay because there was nowhere else to go.
‘There’s nowhere else, is there?’ she said bleakly, and collapsed into a boneless heap on the couch, childhood habits sufficiently strong for her to keep her feet and knees tidily together so she took up as little space as possible.
She thought past the child. In fact, she shut the child away in a very distant brain cell. In her past, it had always been the woman who’d decided, and the woman, in this case, was not Bill’s mother—who was obviously here visiting her grandchild—but Bill’s wife.
Even thinking the words—thinking of him belonging to someone else now—hurt her heart, but it was her mind that was more bothersome. She couldn’t get it to work, couldn’t get it giving orders, though somewhere in her subconscious she knew she had to move—to get out of this apartment.
Go somewhere!
Anywhere!
Then Bill was there, the child gone, his arm around her shoulders.
‘I’m sorry—totally insensitive—blame tiredness—blame anything! I wouldn’t have hurt you for worlds, you know that, Esther. It was my joy in her—she’s my link to normality—I didn’t consider…’
The panicky urgency in his voice as he rushed through his explanation and apology told her more than the words themselves did. He meant what he was saying, while his arm around her shoulders offered more comfort. It was warm, slightly heavy—nice heavy.
She couldn’t leave it there.
Not even for another comforting second.
Neither could she be weakened by his sympathy—or let him think it was the baby who’d upset her…
She spun away, and turned to face him.
‘I can’t stay here, you moron,’ she raged. ‘And you should have realised that before bringing me inside,’ she told him, the words blunt and uncaring though her fingers ached to touch his face, to smooth the lines of weariness away from his cheeks. ‘No matter how civilised we all try to act, it’s not something your wife—’ her tongue tied itself around that word but she managed it in the end ‘—should have to go through.’
She was silently congratulating herself on her coolness when he blew away her argument.
‘I don’t have a wife,’ he said. ‘At least, I don’t think I do.’
The words didn’t make a lot of sense, but even the vague gist of them made Esther frown at him.
‘But you’ve got a baby,’ she reminded him. ‘And you can’t not know if you have a wife or not. Wives aren’t things you just misplace, or accidentally lose track of.’
‘I lost track of one,’ he said quietly.
The weary smile that accompanied this statement, and the effect even a weary smile had on her long-dormant hormones, reminded Esther there were extreme personal reasons for not staying which should take preference over a misplaced possible wife.
And there was the baby…
She stood up and lengthened the handle on her suitcase again so she could tow it.
‘I’ll go. Yours can’t be the last vacant bed in Jamestown.’
‘Only half my bed’s vacant,’ Bill said, the smile less weary now, generating the faint glimmer of a twinkle in his bloodshot eyes as he made the feeble joke. ‘But we do have what must be the last spare, habitable bedroom in the city. Ma’s sister—remember Mallory?—has been here, originally for a fortnight but unable to leave because of transport difficulties after Hugo. Not knowing anyone else in Australia, she didn’t want to go with the evacuees, so she stayed on. She flew out this morning when the airport reopened to light traffic.’
He’d stood up as he’d explained this and bent to take the suitcase away from Esther, saying, ‘At least stay tonight. If for no other reason than I’m too darned tired to even think about what else to do with you. We’ll sort something out in the morning.’
He was making sense.
One night wouldn’t hurt her.
She’d go to her room and stay there. There’d be no need to see the child…
Bill’s child.
She almost gasped at the pain even thinking the words caused. It was like a giant vice, grasping her heart and squeezing as if to extract the very last drop of blood.
‘This way!’
Bill had carried her case across the living room and was standing at the entrance to a short hallway.
Reluctantly, Esther moved towards him. This wasn’t the worst thing that had happened in her life, she reminded herself. Losing her parents when she’d been four—that had been bad, though she could barely remember it. Being moved from her favourite foster-family less than a year later. Losing the baby—no, she wouldn’t think about that.
Losing Bill?
She wouldn’t think of that one either, but right now, even with the worst of the worst happenings in her past flashing like instant nightmares through her mind, she couldn’t pick out anything much worse than this.
‘Own shower and toilet through that door on the left. The doors open onto the balcony, but I’d ask you to keep them closed when you’re not in the room. I know Chloe can’t climb yet, and she certainly couldn’t fit through the railings, but my knees go watery thinking of her out there on the balcony, and though she’s still only crawling, she can get away faster than a speeding bullet if whoever’s minding her turns away.’
He spoke in a very matter-of-fact way but Esther understood his fear for the baby was very real. He would never have mentioned her otherwise.
But he could hardly keep her hidden if Esther remained in his home, and while Bill might be sensitive to her feelings, Gwyneth certainly wouldn’t be.
‘Don’t think past tonight!’ she told herself, when Bill had departed, muttering something about calling her when dinner was ready.
Not thinking of the future was another lesson learnt in childhood. One night was good—if the people in the house let you stay one night and you didn’t do anything wrong, maybe you could stay another night.
Not that you want to stay another night in this household, Esther reminded her grown-up self as she sifted through the suitcase for something clean and cool to put on.
She showered, washing the tangles of travel out of her hair, then wrapped herself in a towel while she combed out any knots. The tap on the door startled her, but it was what Bill had to say that really threw her.
‘I’m going back to the hospital—we’ve had another admission. I don’t suppose you’d like to come.’
‘Surely there’s someone else who can go,’ she raged at him, pulling open the door and staring in disbelief at his exhausted face.
‘You don’t have to,’ he said quietly, and it took a moment for the words to make sense.
‘I don’t mean me, I mean you. Of course I’ll go, but you should be in bed. Look at you, I doubt you’ve slept for days. Fat lot of use you’ll be to patients if you run yourself into the ground.’
She paused, but as her protest awoke no immediate reaction—in fact, he seemed to have gone into a trance—she rushed on.
‘Anyway, I can do whatever has to be done for the patient. I’m a doctor first and foremost. Go to bed, Bill, I’ll go to the hospital.’
Bill heard the conversation but couldn’t work out how to reply. He’d been too mesmerised by the way the whiteness of the towel made the smooth tanned skin above it seem darker by comparison, to make sense of the words.
Too dazed by this sudden reappearance of Esther in his life and, in spite of sheer exhaustion, too jolted by the effect just seeing her again was having on him.
The same effect seeing her the first time had…
The image was vivid in his mind, etched there as if with acid. A slight, slim, waif of a girl-woman, with huge dark eyes that had looked fearfully at him, as if fearing he might turn her away. Yet there’d been something in her stance, a doggedness, and enough determination in her soft set mouth to tell him she’d not only stand up to whatever it was she feared but take it on, fight it, vanquish it.
And he’d wanted to fight it with her, to stand by her side, or, better still, fight her dragons for her—protect her, nurture her, keep her safe from her fears for ever.
It had been a bizarre reaction and he’d waited for it to pass, but it hadn’t…
‘Go, I have to dress.’
She put her hand on his chest and gave a little push and, obedient to instinct more than anything else, he stepped backward and she closed the door.
He was tired. Probably too tired to function properly, but he had to see this patient. Cyclone Hugo had already killed too many people, Bill was damned if he’d let the aftermath kill even more.
‘She can’t stay here. You know that. If Marcie hears she’s here, she might take Chloe from you. You know how vindictive Marcie can be. I can’t believe Esther turning up like this. She’ll ruin everything again!’
His mother’s voice, shrill with a panicky kind of fear, was probably loud enough for Esther to hear, so Bill interrupted the laments.
‘Marcie didn’t want Chloe,’ he reminded her. ‘And how could Marcie possibly hear Esther was here?’
His mother didn’t answer, though a defiant tilt of her chin told him all he needed to know.
‘You’ve been in touch with her? You’ve kept in touch?’
He couldn’t believe it, but the chin tilted a little higher and his mother finally replied.
‘She’s Chloe’s mother. She’s entitled to know how her daughter’s getting on. She phones occasionally—I have to talk to her, don’t I?’
Bill sighed. He could argue that Marcie wasn’t entitled to anything, having left Chloe the day she’d been born, but he knew his mother had always loved Marcie, and though she was disappointed at her behaviour in abandoning Chloe, the fondness lingered. To Ma, Marcie was still redeemable.
He tried another tack.
‘Esther’s a top doctor and we need her here,’ he said bluntly, but hopefully politely. Inside he was feeling anything but polite. Was Ma right? Could Marcie be vindictive enough to take Chloe from him, simply because Esther had reappeared in his life? Through no fault of his, mind you—no plotting, no devious plans—nothing more than one almighty, cyclonic coincidence!
Surely not. Not even Marcie could be so vicious.
‘Need her here in Jamestown maybe,’ his mother conceded, her words dragging him out of his spiralling dread, ‘but not in this apartment. It’s no good for Esther either. You saw how she reacted to Chloe. It must have brought back all her own guilt in losing your first child.’
‘Esther had an accident,’ Bill said, carefully controlling the hot acid of anger burning in his stomach. His mother would have to be the most insensitive woman ever born! ‘A terrible, tragic accident. There is no guilt in accidents, Ma, and you know it.’
‘Tell that to my conscience,’ a quiet voice said, and he looked away from his mother to see Esther standing there. She was wearing jeans, cut off at calf-length, and a plain white shirt. Her dark silky hair hung loose around her shoulders, curling softly in places as it dried. While he watched, she raised her arms and swept it back into a loose ponytail at the back of her head. Slight, slim and upright, head tilted in defiance against a world that had seemed against her since childhood, she met his eyes unwaveringly.
She had never looked more beautiful.
‘Only you can tell your conscience that,’ he said, but his words were drowned out by hers.
‘Gwyneth’s right, Bill. I can’t stay here. But right now let’s get our priorities straight. Right now we need to see the new patient, and as I’ll be at the hospital, I’d like to see the others as well.’
She walked towards the door, turning back, at the last moment, towards Gwyneth.
‘But I promise I won’t stay,’ she said, ‘so there’s no need to make an Esther doll and start sticking pins in it. I won’t be much use up at the hospital if I’m limping around the place or suffering some mysterious stomach ailment.’
