‘Shoot?’
‘What would an analyst say? So, Ms Smash ’em Mary, you’re confessing to baby killing.’
And she smiled. He heard it and he almost whooped.
What was it about this woman that made it so important to make her smile?
Shoot, he’d said, and she did.
SHE GAVE IN.
She told him.
‘Okay,’ she said, and he heard weariness now, the weariness of a long, long battle. ‘I’ve told you that I’m a district nurse?’
‘Hence the drugs,’ he said. ‘Nice nurse.’
She smiled again, but briefly. ‘I’m currently suspended from work and a bit...on the outer with my family,’ she told him. She took a deep breath. ‘Okay, potted history. My mum died when I was eight. She’d been ill for a year and at the end Dad was empty. It was like most of him had died, too.
‘Then he met Barbie. Barbie’s some kind of faith-healer and self-declared clairvoyant. She offered to channel Mum, using Ouija boards, that kind of thing, and Dad was so desperate he fell for it. But Barbie has three daughters of her own and was in a financial mess. She was blatantly after Dad’s money. Dad’s well off. He has financial interests in most of the businesses in Taikohe where we live, and Barbie simply moved in and took control. She got rid of every trace of my mother. She still wants to get rid of me.’
‘Cinderella with the wicked stepmother?’
‘She’s never mistreated me. Not overtly. She just somehow stopped Dad showing interest in me. With Barbie he seemed to die even more, if that makes sense, and she derided the things I had left to cling to.’
‘There are worse ways to mistreat a child than beat them,’ he said softly, and she was quiet for a while, as the wind rose and the sounds of the storm escalated.
He thought she’d stopped then, and was trying to figure how to prod her to go further when she started again, all by herself.
‘School was my escape,’ she told him. I liked school and I was good at it. I liked...rules.’
‘Rules make sense when you’re lost,’ he agreed. ‘Sometimes they’re the only thing to cling to.’ Was that why he and Jake had joined the army? he wondered. To find some limits?
‘Anyway, I studied nursing. I became Taikohe’s district nurse. I now have my own cottage...’
‘With a cat?’ he demanded. ‘Uh-oh. This is starting to sound like cat territory.’
And she got it. He heard her grin. ‘Only Heinz, who’ll eat me when I die a spinster, alone and unloved.’ She poked him—hard, in the ribs.
‘Ow!’
‘Serves you right. Of all the stereotyping males...’
‘Hey, you’re the one with the wicked stepmother.’
‘Do you want to hear this or not?’
‘Yes,’ he said promptly, because he did. ‘Tell Dr Ben.’
‘Your bedside manner needs improving.’
‘My bedside manner is perfect,’ he said, and put his arm around her shoulders and tugged her closer. ‘I’d like some springs in this mattress but otherwise I can’t think of a single improvement.’
‘Ben...’
‘Go on,’ he said encouragingly. ‘Tell me what happened next. Tell me about the baby.’
There was a long silence. She lay still. Seemingly unbidden, his fingers traced a pattern in her hair. It felt...right to do so. Half of him expected her to pull away, but she didn’t.
Tell me, he willed her silently, and wondered why it seemed so important that she did.
Finally it came.
‘So now I’m grown up, living in the same community as my stepmother and my stepsisters and my dad. My dad’s still like a dried-up husk. The others ignore me. I’m the dreary local nurse who uses traditional medicine, which they despise. They put up with me when I drop in to visit my dad but that’s as far as the relationship goes.
‘But now they’ve started having babies—not my stepmum but the girls. Sapphire, Rainbow and Sunrise. Home births all. No hospitals or traditional medicine need apply. They’ve had six healthy babies between them, with my stepmother crowing that traditional medicine’s responsible for all the evils of the world. And then...catastrophe.’
‘Catastrophe?’
‘One dead baby,’ she said, drearily now. ‘Sunrise, my youngest stepsister, is massively overweight. The pregnancy went two weeks over term but she still refused to be checked. Then she went into labour, and a day later she was still labouring. She was at home with my stepmother and one of her sisters to support her. And then I dropped in.’
‘To help?’
‘I hadn’t even been told she was due,’ she said. ‘When I arrived I realised Dad was in Auckland on business but they’d taken over the house as a birthing centre. I walked in and Sunrise was out of her mind with pain and exhaustion. There was bleeding and the baby was in dire trouble. I guess I just took over. I rang the ambulance and the hospital and warned them but I knew already... I’d listened... The baby’s heartbeat was so faint...’
‘The baby died?’
‘They called her Sunset. How corny’s that for a dying baby? She was suffering from a hypoxic brain injury and she died when she was three days old. Sunrise was lucky to survive. She won’t be able to have more children.’
‘So that makes you a baby killer?’
‘I didn’t know,’ she said drearily, ‘how much my stepmother really resented me until then. Or make that hate. I have no idea why, but at the coroner’s inquest she stood in the witness stand and swore I’d told Sunrise it was safe. She swore I’d said everything was fine. I’d been the chosen midwife, she said, and my stepsisters concurred. Of course they would have gone to the hospital, they said, but one after another they told the court that I’d said they didn’t need to.
‘And you know what? My dad believed them. The coroner believed them. They came out of the court and Sunrise was crying, but my stepmother actually smirked. She tucked her arm in Dad’s arm and they turned their backs on me. She’s had her way after all this time. I’m finally right out of her family.’
Silence. More silence.
He shouldn’t have asked, he thought. How to respond to a tragedy like this?
‘My roller-derby team has asked me to quit,’ she said into the dark. ‘My dad—or Barbie—employs two of the girls’ partners. Some of my medical colleagues stand by me—they know what I would and wouldn’t do—but the town’s too small for me to stay. I’m on unpaid leave now but I know I’ll have to go.’
‘So you’ve come to the great metropolis of Hideaway.’ His fingers remained on her hair, just touching. Just stroking. ‘I can see the logic.’
‘I needed time out.’
‘What are you writing?’
‘Writing?
‘By the fire. While I was snoozing.’
‘That’s none of your business,’ she said, shocked.
‘Sorry. Diary?