Sydney Harbor Hospital: Ava's Re-Awakening
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Carol Marinelli
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Prologue
SHE would call him.
Ava Carmichael sat in her office at Sydney Harbour Hospital and stared at her phone, willing herself to pick it up and call her husband. She had just spent the best part of the last hour counselling a couple—telling them to talk, to open up to each other, that if they just forged ahead with communication then things would begin to improve.
As a sexual dysfunction specialist—or sex therapist, as everyone called her—Ava got to say those lines an awful lot.
Well, it was time for the doctor to take her own medicine, Ava decided, reaching out and picking up the phone and dialling in his mobile number. At the last moment she changed her mind, and hung up. She went back to twisting her long dark hair around her fingers—just unsure what it was she should say to him.
That she missed him?
That she was sorry?
Ava didn’t know where to start.
Her husband, James, had been away for three months in Brisbane. He had taken a temporary teaching placement at a school of medicine there, which was ridiculous. James was an oncologist and completely hands-on in his work. He loved being with his patients more than anything. Had it been three months of research, it might have made some sense—Sydney Harbour Hospital was cutting-edge and James kept himself right up to date, but James liked reading about findings rather than discovering them. He liked being with his patients and James, her James, wasn’t a teacher.
She smiled at the very thought.
The medical students got on his nerves.
He hated explaining his decisions.
He was a man’s man, a gorgeous man, her big honest bear of a man who would come home and flake on the sofa sometimes and moan because he wanted it to only be him in the room with his patient, especially when giving bad news.
‘It’s a teaching hospital,’ Ava would point out, lying on the floor, doing her Pilates. ‘They have to learn.’
‘Yeah, well, how would you like to have a couple of students sitting there watching when you’re trying to talk to someone about their bits not working?’ There was rather more to her work than that but he’d made a very good point, and he had made her smile too, especially when he checked his own bits were there for a moment, indignant at the very thought.
Well, there had been conversations like that one, lovely evenings that had been shared, talking easily about their day, their thoughts, them, but those evenings seemed like an awfully long time ago.
Yes, he loved his patients and they loved him back, and the real reason he had taken the position, they both knew, even if they hadn’t voiced it, had been because they’d needed space from each other—they’d needed those three months to hopefully sort out their heads.
James and Ava had been married for seven years, but had been together for ever. They had met at university and, quite simply, at the age of eighteen the awkward and rather shy Ava Marwood had discovered love. James had been twenty-one, good-looking, funny and the first person in her life, it seemed, who actually wanted to spend time with her. Like James, she was an only child, but unlike James, who had grown up with parents who adored him, Ava’s parents had made no secret she’d been an accident, an inconvenience really. It had been a parade of young nannies who had raised Ava—her parents had been far too busy with their lives, their careers, their endless extra-marital trysts, which, they’d both agreed, kept their relationship alive.
It had been a confusing, lonely childhood and then she had met James and her world had changed. Ava had found a whole new definition for love. It had been completely unexpected, thoroughly reciprocated and though they had their own friends and lives, there was no doubt they had met their match. Everyone thought them the golden couple and it had been golden for a very long while. A thirty-six-year-old James still made her toes curl just looking at him, and he had always made her laugh. And even if he wasn’t particularly romantic, it was a love that went so deep Ava had considered it invincible. But over the last two years their marriage had slowly unravelled. With each miscarriage Ava had suffered, they had grown further and further apart and now they were barely talking. In fact, if it weren’t for email they would hardly be corresponding at all.
Still fiddling with her hair, she looked at her computer and then went and reread the last email he had sent her.
It was just his flight details really, and all so impersonal it might just as well have come from Admin.
And then, loathing herself, she did it again—checked their bank account with suspicious eyes.
She saw the boutiques he had visited and couldn’t quite envision it—James, of all people, in male boutiques!
James, who got a wardrobe update each Christmas and birthday when she went and did it for him, had taken himself off to several trendy shops these past few weeks and from the amount spent he had been having quite a good time of it.
And what was it with all the cash withdrawals?
James never used cash or rarely, but now it was a couple of hundred dollars here, another couple of hundred there, and what was this weekly transfer? A few minutes’ research later she found out.
Her husband, who liked nothing better than to lie on the sofa and laugh at her doing her exercises, had, a couple of months ago, gone and joined a gym.
She didn’t know if she was being practical or being a fool to believe that James wouldn’t cheat. And things must be bad because she was even thinking of turning to her mother for advice!
Call him, Ava counselled herself. Call him now from your office. Because each night at home she went to call but couldn’t, and each night was spent in tears. Perhaps she could be more upbeat, logical and truthful if she sat at her desk.
More direct.
‘Hi.’ She kept her voice bright when he answered the phone.
‘Ava?’ He sounded surprised, well, he would be, she told herself, it was six-twenty in the evening and so rarely did she ring. ‘Is everything okay?’
‘Of course it is. Does there have to be a problem to ring for a chat?’
‘Er…no.’
She could feel his wariness, but she forged on. ‘Look, James, I know things haven’t been—’
‘Ava, can I call you back?’ He sounded awkward and James was never awkward. She’d timed the call carefully, knew that he wouldn’t be teaching now.
‘Is someone there?’ she asked, and there was a long silence.
‘I’ll call you back in ten.’
She sat trying to ignore the unsettled feeling in her stomach that was permanently there these days—he might have a colleague with him, she told herself, but that had never stopped him talking before. They were a very open couple, or had been; he wouldn’t give a damn if someone was around—and he wasn’t seeing patients so it couldn’t be that.
‘Sorry about that.’ He had called her back five minutes later.
‘Why couldn’t you talk?’
‘Just…’ She could almost see his wide shoulders shrugging the way they did when he closed off. ‘What did you ring for?’
‘Just…’ She shrugged her shoulders too.
‘Ava.’ She could hear his irritation. ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t talk before, but I can now—you just called at a bad time.’
‘Well, when’s a good time?’ she snapped. ‘I called you the other morning and you couldn’t talk then either…’ He had hardly been able to breathe. More to the point, he’d hardly been able to breathe! She’d rung him at seven and he hadn’t answered and she’d called him straight back, and he’d picked up then, trying to pretend he’d been asleep, but he’d been breathless. She knew he was having an affair, except she didn’t want to know it. Ava had always thought that their marriage ending was just about them—a private affair, not a real one.
She wasn’t stupid. They hadn’t slept together since God knows when, more than a year at the very least. As if James wasn’t having the time of his life in Brisbane. She was mad to think otherwise.
‘Do you want me to order a cake for your mum’s birthday?’ she asked instead.
‘Please.’
‘What about a present?’
‘I don’t know…just think of something.’ And that annoyed her too. Veronica Carmichael was a difficult woman; she and Ava had never really got on. A widow, James was her only child, and she was never going to like the woman who, in her eyes, had taken him away and, worse, a woman who couldn’t give her grandchildren. Ava had organised a small family gathering for Veronica’s sixtieth, which was next weekend, and would on Saturday go out and buy her something lovely for her birthday, something really beautiful. And she’d wrap it too, and then Veronica would unwrap it and thank James, and would go on and on about what a thoughtful son she had when, had it been left to him, there would have been a card bought on the way to her house and no party.
So she and James chatted for another thirty seconds about his flight home on Monday and then she hung up and stared at the view she loved. SHH looked out over Sydney Harbour and the sexual dysfunction centre was on one of the higher floors—the floor was shared with Psychology and Family Counselling. Nobody would ever get out of the lift otherwise, James sometimes joked when he came up to visit her some lunchtimes, though again, that hadn’t happened in a while. Still, every morning that she came into work Ava pinched herself at the view from her window, and she gazed out at it now, to the opera house and the Harbour Bridge, the blue of the ocean and the white sails that dotted it, and she waited for the view to soothe her.
Unfailingly it worked.
It really was a wonderful perk of her job.
* * *
It was the same view she looked at the next morning after another tear-filled night when Ginny, her receptionist, came in carrying a huge bunch of flowers from James.
‘Ahh…’ Ginny beamed and handed her the bouquet. ‘He’s so romantic.’
Ava knew at that point that he was having an affair. Knew that she wasn’t simply being paranoid.
Not once in the seven years they had been married and not even when dating had James sent flowers, not one single time. It just wasn’t him. What do I need to send flowers for? He’d shrug. I’ve done nothing wrong.
She read the card.
Miss you.
See you on Monday
James x
And she remembered a time, took it out from the back of her memory and polished it till she could clearly see.
It had been two, maybe three years ago.
Yes, three years ago and it had been their wedding anniversary and they’d both decided they were ready to try for a baby. Ava’s career had been in a really good place and she’d felt confident she could juggle work and motherhood far better than her mother had. James had bought her a ring, the large amber ring that she was wearing now, because, he’d said, it matched her eyes. And he’d taken her out for dinner, the perfect night, and they’d had the same old good-natured joke as they’d got back to the apartment and she’d moaned about the lack of flowers.
It hurt to remember and she tried not to, but the memory was out there, all polished and gleaming and allowing for total recall.
Tumbling in bed together, making love as they once had.
His big body over hers, his chin all stubbly, those gorgeous green eyes looking down, and she saw in that image what she hadn’t seen in a very long time. James was smiling. ‘Men only send flowers when they’ve something to feel guilty about.’
‘In your own words, James,’ Ava said, and looked at the flowers and wanted to bin them. If her window had opened she would have tossed them out there and then, except her window was sealed closed, and then in came Ginny with a huge vase.
‘Put them out in the waiting room,’ Ava suggested. ‘Let the patients enjoy them.’
‘Don’t be daft,’ Ginny said, and plonked them right there on her desk. ‘He sent them for you.’
And there they sat, for appearances sake, their sweet, sickly fragrance filling her nostrils, the violent colours perpetually in her line of vision. She wished they’d just wilt and fade.
Like her marriage.
