Emma kept following.
They emerged to a scene that made Emma blink.
The children were gone—all of them. The bus driver, the truck driver, the injured teacher—they were gone, too. They must have been ferried away from the scene at some time while the bus had been in the process of being stabilised. There were two steel cables running from the bus’s chassis to the trees on the opposite side of the road.
Since those cables had been attached, they’d been safe.
What else?
Kyle was still there. His tiny, blanket-covered body lay to one side and there was a fireman sitting beside the stretcher. Just sitting. As if he’d sit however long it took. No matter that there was nothing to do. The man’s stance said that he was simply here to guard. To begin the grieving for the loss of a tiny life.
Once again Emma felt tears welling behind her eyes.
‘Not yet,’ the man beside her said, and she blinked.
He knew what she was thinking?
‘I’m fine,’ she muttered, and he smiled, albeit a shaky one.
‘I know you are. You’re great.’
There was a stretcher waiting, with Helen hovering. They lay laid Suzy down with care. The morphine had taken hold now and she was drifting in a haze of near-sleep.
‘I’ll take over now,’ Devlin said, moving to take over her grip on the ballpoint, but Emma shook her head.
‘I know how it should feel,’ she told him. ‘I have it right where it should be. I’m hanging on until we get to a proper theatre with proper equipment. And a surgeon. Tell me there’s a surgeon at Karington.’
‘That would be me,’ he said gravely.
That would be him.
Her eyes met his. A surgeon. She had a surgeon right here. The relief was so great it made her dizzy all over again.
‘Well, hooray,’ she managed. ‘So what are we waiting for? Let’s find you a theatre and a scalpel and something to replace this blasted pen. But you’re not removing me from it except by scalpel.’
And twenty minutes later she was finally, finally able to step away.
Not only was Dev O’Halloran a surgeon, he was a surgeon with real skill. Inserting a tracheostomy tube into a wound that was massively swollen, where the cut was jagged and rough, where there was too much bleeding already and where the patient was a child with a trachea half the size of an adult’s…It was a nightmare piece of surgery that Emma couldn’t imagine doing. But, then, she couldn’t have imagined using a ballpoint casing and a pencil sharpener to perform similar surgery. It seemed that on this day anything was possible.
Devlin’s surgery worked. Finally, finally the tube was in place. Emma’s ballpoint casing was just an empty piece of plastic abandoned on the tray, and she was free to step back from the table.
They’d used a local anaesthetic. Anything else would have been too risky with the breathing so fragile. But Suzy was so shocked and so groggy with the morphine that she didn’t register as Emma stepped back.
‘Give the lady a chair,’ Devlin growled, and one of the nurses pushed a chair under her legs.
Emma sat.
Her legs felt funny, she thought.
Dev was still working, closing the wound, doing running repairs to the ravages of the little girl’s face.
Preparing her for the trip to Brisbane where a skilled plastic surgeon could take over.
She needed to get out of there, Emma decided. Dev had skilled nurses to help him. He no longer needed her.
The smells of the theatre were making her feel ill. She was accustomed to them. They shouldn’t…
‘Excuse me,’ she said, and pushed herself to her feet.
‘Go with her, David,’ Devlin said urgently to one of the nurses.
‘I’ll be fine,’ she muttered.
But she wasn’t.
No matter. She made her jelly legs move.
Ten minutes later, after as nasty a little interlude in the bathroom as she could imagine, she emerged a new woman. Or almost a new woman. She’d washed her face, splashing water over and over until she felt that she was almost back to reality.
What was she about—almost passing out in Theatre?
It was hardly surprising, she told herself. Students did it all the time, and even more experienced theatre staff did it more often than they liked to admit. The trick was to hold it back until you were no longer needed.
She’d done that. She should be proud of herself.
She wasn’t.
She swiped some more cold water onto her face and stared into the mirror.
What had she done? Realisation was only just dawning.
She’d risked her baby.
The sight of those cables when she’d climbed from the bus had made her feel sick. She hadn’t realised. When she’d climbed on board she’d thought at some superficial level that the bus might slip, but she hadn’t considered it as a real possibility. It was only now as she thought back to the huge cables and thought of what might have been…
Her hand dropped to her swollen belly and she flinched.
She’d taken a gamble. She’d won, but such a gamble.
Maybe she wasn’t such a new woman. Maybe she’d better splash some more water.
Finally she took a deep breath and went to face the world again. In the waiting room there was a man and a woman—farmers? They looked up as she emerged from the washroom, and their faces reflected terror.
Oh, help. They’d be Suzy’s parents, Emma thought. They’d seen her go into Theatre with their daughter, and then they’d seen her rush out to the washroom. Ill.
Two plus two equals disaster.
‘Hey, it’s fine,’ she told them, rushing to take that dreadful look from their faces. ‘Everything’s gone brilliantly. Suzy’s breathing’s stabilised and Dr O’Halloran is just fixing the dressings. She’ll need to go to Sydney to have her face repaired by a plastic surgeon, but even that doesn’t look too difficult. I’d imagine you’ll have a Suzy with a couple of scars—but that should be the extent of the damage’s all. Honestly.’
The couple visibly restarted their breathing process. Their combined faces sagged in relief.
‘But you…’
‘I’m pregnant,’ she said, trying to make her voice cheerful. ‘I’m really sorry I scared you, but pregnant women throw up all the time.’
Their faces cleared still more. ‘Oh, my dear…’ the woman faltered, and Emma suddenly decided against medical detachment. She bent over and hugged her.
‘I know,’ she whispered. ‘It’s been dreadful but now she’s safe.’
‘We’ve just seen Kyle’s parents,’ the man—Suzy’s father—said heavily. ‘He’s the only one dead. We’ve been lucky, but they…’
‘The nurses won’t let them see him.’ Suzy’s mother pulled herself out of Emma’s arms and she sniffed. ‘But you…you’re a doctor.’
‘I am.’
‘Helen—the ambulance officer—said you saved our daughter’s life.’
‘I was in the right place at the right time,’ she said softly, but Suzy’s mother had something else on her mind. Her daughter would make it.