A Family to Save the Doctor's Heart
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Marion Lennox
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CHAPTER ONE
‘MUM ALWAYS MAKES stew when we find fresh bull kelp. This’ll make heaps.’
Jenny stared at the heap of sodden seaweed the kids had hauled up from Kelpcutter’s Bay. It was oozing seawater onto the kitchen floor, and already starting to smell. They thought she should cook it? Really?
‘We’ll never get it fresher,’ Ruby yelled excitedly. ‘And there’s piles down there for the racks. Soon as the storm stops, we need to get the tractor out.’
And they were gone again, Sam, Ruby and Tom, twelve, eight and six years old respectively. Followed by Nipper and Pepper, their two kelpie-type mutts.
She should stop them. For two days now the weather had been wild. Who knew what sort of junk had been washed up? A good parent would have her children inside, home schooling, sharing educational children’s programmes, keeping them clean and dry.
Staying safe.
But safety was not on these kids’ agenda, and she wasn’t their parent. For these kids, safety seemed almost a dirty word.
When she’d watched them build a campfire in the backyard so they could bury potatoes to cook, she’d bitten back warnings, though she had insisted they light it further from the house. But when six-year-old Tom had spooned out the innards of his first spud, she’d lost it. ‘Be careful, you’ll burn yourself.’
The kids had looked at her incredulously and then ignored her. Tom had thus scalded his tongue when he’d bitten into the too hot potato. He’d cried, but he’d folded into himself, not wanting her comfort.
‘Dad says we gotta learn ourselves,’ twelve-year-old Sam had said briefly, and Jenny’s grief at the death of her brother and his wife had verged on anger.
There was no doubt that Chris and Harriet had loved their kids, but safety hadn’t seemed to be in their vocabulary. Self-sufficiency seemed to have been their mantra, but sometimes she wondered if it had verged on neglect.
That lack of concern had seen the family hiking to the far reaches of the island on one of the last hot days of autumn—‘Because the waterfall at the head of the river is the coolest place to be in the heat,’ Sam had told her. Then they’d pitched tents under one of the vast eucalypts that even Jenny knew were nicknamed by the locals as ‘widowmakers’. The massive branches were known to drop without warning, and Chris and Harriet were never to realise the appalling consequences of their actions.
They’d died instantly, leaving three bereft children. Sam, aged twelve, was still suffering the effects from a major infection—the boy had hiked five kilometres in bare feet to get help. ‘My shoes were in Mum and Dad’s tent.’ His voice had been a bare sob when rescuers had found him. ‘I couldn’t reach anything. I couldn’t reach Mum and Dad.’
And that was why Jenny Martin, twenty-nine years old, emergency doctor at Sydney Central, happily single, happily a city girl, was staring at a pile of fresh bull kelp, thinking with searing longing of the menus pinned to her fridge back in Sydney. Thinking of a takeaway Thai feast. Even a pizza would be great, she decided, and sighed, and then picked up the bull kelp and carted it outside, across the wind-blasted yard to hang on one of the long lines of drying racks.
No, she wouldn’t eat it—her sister-in-law had left the freezer loaded with cooked kelp and she wasn’t going there either—but it might as well make them some cash. Bull kelp had many commercial uses—pharmaceuticals, toothpaste, shampoo, dairy products... The kelp dried on these racks, and every few months a boat would arrive and cart the dried product away.
It was a living—just—but it wasn’t a living Jenny would ever have chosen for herself. She used the winch to heave the kelp over the racks, and then stood back and stared at it in dislike. Jenny Martin, highly qualified doctor, carting seaweed to make ends meet.
She couldn’t go on like this.
What choice did she have?
‘Jenny!’
And that brought her out of her reverie. Eight-year-old Ruby was screaming her name as she raced up the path from the beach, and she sounded terrified.
These kids pretty much lived their own lives. Jenny had come when Chris and Harriet had died, expecting to comfort, expecting...well, she wasn’t sure what. What she’d found were deeply traumatised kids, but kids who’d been raised to be fiercely independent. They didn’t want comfort, at least not from her. Sam had had to spend two weeks in hospital on Gannet Island because of the infection that had taken hold of his foot, but once he was home they’d gathered together into a self-reliant group.
Jenny was the outsider. An aunt they barely knew. An aunt whose role, they’d decided without discussion, was to be their adult base so their lives could stay exactly as they’d always been.
They couldn’t. She knew that, and she suspected the kids knew that too, but months later she was still trying to figure whether transplanting them to Sydney would break them. And break their future?
‘Jenny!’
She abandoned the kelp and ran. Ruby’s cry had almost been lost in the wild wind, but she’d definitely heard fear.
These kids didn’t call for her. When they cried into the night, they called for each other.
But now she saw Ruby, her tangle of red curls flying, her feet—in sandals now; there’d been some things Jenny had insisted on—barely touching the ground.
Jenny reached her, caught her shoulders, squatted and steadied her.
‘What is it? Ruby, it’s okay, I’m here. Tell me what’s wrong.’
For a moment Ruby couldn’t answer. She stared wildly at Jenny, and Jenny had visions of some new horror, some new tragedy. Why hadn’t she insisted on going with them?
But these kids knew Kelpcutter’s Bay far better than she did. It was their backyard, their playground. They all swam like fish. Chris had knocked basic water safety into their heads early and let them be, and they regarded their aunt’s qualms with bewilderment bordering on distress.
Marc, the physician on Gannet who’d cared for Sam, had taken her aside after he’d dropped in for a ‘home visit’ when Sam had come home from hospital. ‘Jenny, as far as possible you need to let ’em be.’ These kids have been raised like wild creatures. You’ll need to tame them, but if you move too fast you’ll cause more problems.’
All very well for Marc to say, she thought bitterly, but now...
‘Ruby, what’s happened?’
‘We’ve found...’ Ruby could scarcely get her words out. ‘Jenny, there’s a boat. It’s smashing into the rocks. And Jenny, we’ve found a man.’
