How am I going to feel about seeing him?
For better or for worse, she was about to find out.
Nick paid off the cab driver, grabbed his duffel bag from beside the kerb and headed for the terminal. He’d promised Anna that he wouldn’t be late and he wasn’t.
Or almost wasn’t.
He’d had a sick-making fifteen minutes of panic at home about what he should be bringing for his son, and as usual he couldn’t deal with the strength of the emotion because it brought so much other stuff with it.
He had some snacks and a drink for the flight, a couple of picture books and the kind of cheap toy that a five-year-old kid could play with on an aircraft tray table, and Anna would have Josh’s asthma gear, of course, as well as his clothing, but…
Should he be bringing a proper gift? A camera, or snorkelling equipment? He already had Josh’s Christmas present, a substantial addition to his Lego collection. Should he bring that, make it a going-away treat, and get him something else for Christmas, which was still two months away? Or did that smack far too much of an attempt to bribe his son for love?
The decision paralysed him.
Yes, he, Dr Nicholas Devlin, MB BS FRACS, Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeon at Melbourne’s renowned Royal Victoria Hospital, who was normally able to make life- altering decisions in seconds if he had to, could not for the life of him decide how to handle the issue of his son’s gift.
He knew what Anna would say. ‘Oh, no, Nick, you didn’t!’
Inevitably, whatever decision he made, it would be drastically and utterly the wrong one as far as she was concerned. It was a pathological condition in their impossible relationship, and a basic tenet of her maternal faith, that everything he did with, or to, or for their asthma-stricken son, everything he felt, everything he planned and almost every word he said, was and always had been wrong.
Although this was probably not the major reason for their divorce, it hadn’t helped, and things hadn’t improved since.
OK, so since he couldn’t win no matter what he did, he’d go with his own convictions and not try to second-guess what she would want. Unless she asked directly, he wouldn’t tell her about what he had and hadn’t brought for Josh. The Lego could stay at home, and if Josh wanted to take photos or try snorkelling, they’d pick up what they needed on the spot.
Decision made.
Jaw squared.
Emotion pushed safely below the surface where it couldn’t get in the way.
Sorted.
By the time he’d thrown off the panic and the bitterness, remembered how to act like a surgeon instead of a powerless and frustrated non-custodial parent, and realised he hadn’t yet called for a taxi, a vital fifteen minutes had passed and he was running late.
He saw Anna’s pale, accusing face as he approached the check-in concourse. She must have been looking for him, scanning for his figure above the heads of the crowd.
And she wanted him to be late. He knew it. Later than this. Really, unforgivably, flagrantly, uncaringly late, so that she could tell people about it— ‘Can you believe he missed the flight? Josh had to go up on his own!’—and it would count as yet another black mark against his name.
‘What happened?’ she asked with angry accusation as soon as he came up to her, as if she expected at minimum a six-car pile-up on the freeway.
‘Taxi.’ He’d stopped making lengthy excuses long ago. Had stopped arguing, stopped appealing to her common sense and her notion of justice, stopped trying to get her to see how obsessively over-protective she was, and how much she shut him out of their son’s life. Maybe she was right to consider that he didn’t belong there, he sometimes felt.
Before he could get past her to greet Josh, Anna delivered a stinging, rapid-fire round of instructions about their son’s care and finished, ‘Nick, if you stuff this up, Josh has a miserable time, I will kill you!’
Ignoring the threat to his life, which his ex-wife found a reason to hit him with almost every time they spoke, he said through a tight jaw, ‘I’m not going to stuff this up. Why do you think I would?’
‘Because you never take his health seriously enough. Because you hardly know him, and he hardly knows you. He doesn’t trust you.’
‘And that’s my fault, is it?’ he added quickly, almost growling the words, ‘Forget it, forget it.’ They’d been through that one a thousand times. ‘Look, I know you’re not happy about this. But Josh and I will be fine.’ He took a deep breath and prepared himself to say the L-word. ‘I love my son, Anna, and don’t you ever, ever dare to suggest otherwise!’
‘Love isn’t enough,’ she muttered, turning away from him so that her face was screened by her well-cut fall of light brown hair. ‘Nowhere near enough.’
For her, it was a pretty generous concession, so he left the subject alone, said a stilted goodbye, and looked over at Josh, his stomach already sinking at the thought of what he might see in his son’s face.
Indifference. Dislike. Fear…
Anna reached their little boy first, of course. While Nick was still three paces away, she bent down and engulfed Josh in a huge, constricting hug as she prepared to say goodbye. She was actually shaking, Nick saw, as she let forth an intense stream of words close to his ear. Nick only caught a few words. ‘Don’t want…terrified…every single minute.’
Josh nodded. Was he wheezing? What the hell was Anna saying? That she was terrified?
‘And you’ll phone if there are any problems,’ she finished, beginning to stand so that Nick could hear her better. ‘Anything that’s making you unhappy.’
If Dad is making you unhappy, Nick heard in her tone. At least she managed not to say it out loud for once. He stepped forward. ‘Go, Anna,’ he said, more calmly than he felt. ‘Josh and I will be fine, won’t we, little guy?’
‘Don’t call him that,’ Anna snarled through the side of her mouth, and tore herself away, disappearing behind a noisy tour group before he could reply.
Hell.
He’d meant it as an endearment. If Josh was sensitive about being small for his age, Nick hadn’t known. But, then, how would he? Anna made it so difficult for them to spend any real time together, and she never willingly shared her insights about their son. If Josh was wary and distant, it was her doing, wasn’t it?
Or was it his own lack of perception that was the problem? His tendency to pull back when emotions grew risky and ran high? His reluctance to show his deepest feelings?
A wave of self-doubt washed over him and he stepped away, didn’t drop into a Josh-level squat as he’d intended and wanted to, didn’t pick up the colourful backpack with the inhalers and spacer and written asthma action plan inside, even though he could definitely hear that Josh was wheezing. And he didn’t put his arm around his son’s little shoulder in case Josh pushed him away.
This kind of self-doubt had been such a rare thing in his life until Josh’s birth that he still didn’t know how to handle it. He’d been taught to believe in himself, to act as if he was in the right even when he wasn’t, to keep the façade of strength and ego and self-control in place at all times, no matter what he might be feeling inside. He’d doubted himself at times,