‘He’s sleeping on a camp stretcher on the floor in Emily’s room,’ Charles had told him a few minutes ago. ‘Has been for the past two nights. I guess you really have been bedding down in the A and E department.’
‘Yes. When I’ve slept at all.’
The whole town was in chaos. With the bus crash and cyclone barging in on their wedding reception three nights ago, Emily and Mike Poulos should have been miles away on their honeymoon by this time but instead they’d stayed to help. They’d had no choice in the matter, and it might be days longer before they could easily be spared and before regular commercial flights resumed.
The short snatches of time that Emily and her new husband did manage to spend together, they spent over at the Athina Hotel, in a room that was too rain-damaged for real hotel guests, with its sodden carpet ripped up, but quite acceptable to a couple of battle-weary doctors who happened to be newly married and madly in love.
Which meant that Emily’s room had been available for Max and Frankie Jay.
I am not calling him by the name Alice used when she stole him away.
‘Although I’m not sure what he’d be doing right now,’ Charles had continued. ‘Eating, probably. He’s developed quite an appetite since we got hold of him.’
And when Luke tiptoed up the steps and into the big communal kitchen with his heart thudding right up in his throat, there he was. His son. Eating an enormous hamburger with everything, half of which—fried egg, beetroot slice, grated carrot, pineapple ring and cheese—was sliding out the sides and back onto the plate.
Frankie Jay had beetroot juice and burger bun crumbs smeared all over his face, and was tackling with serious attention the issue of how to get the fallen bits of hamburger filling back into his mouth. Via reinserting them into the bun? Or should he take a more direct route?
Luke simply stood and watched, totally overwhelmed, seeing bits of himself, bits of Alice and Janey and four grandparents and finally just the new, unique being that wasn’t bits of anybody else but was just Frankie Jay. Dark hair, brown eyes, scratches and mosquito bites on his skin, freckles across his nose, wiry little limbs.
Georgie saw him in the doorway first, and she must already have been briefed by Charles as she raised her eyebrows in a question that said, Shall I let him know you’re here?
Luke shook his head, wondering if the whole medical community—in fact, the whole town—knew by now that this was his long-lost son, and the owner of that forlorn little shoe. He’d kept to himself a fair bit since coming here. His shattered past would provide fascinating fodder for gossip. The thought stripped him raw, when he didn’t know how any of it was going to work out.
Georgie nodded and stayed silent, and they both watched Frankie Jay eating. Only when his plate was cleaned of every last bun crumb and tomato sauce smear and lettuce shred did he look up. As if wondering about dessert. Hadn’t Alice fed him up in the rainforest? No wonder they’d all thought he was only four years old, he was tiny! And, though wiry, he was thin.
‘Had enough, Rowdy?’ Georgie said cheerfully.
Rowdy?
That’s right. He hadn’t been speaking.
Why hadn’t he been speaking?
So they hadn’t known his name, the medical personnel who’d rescued him and checked him and brought him in, and the nickname they’d given him had apparently stuck. Luke found he quite liked it. It took care of the adversarial relationship in his own mind between Felixx and Frankie Jay, and provided a compromise that everyone could live with, at least for the time being.
Rowdy looked towards the doorway and saw him at last, then nodded slowly in answer to Georgie’s question. He’d had enough to eat was the impression. Well, maybe. Because if the word supper happened to be mentioned a little later on, he wouldn’t say no…
‘Hi, Rowdy,’ Luke said to him. He couldn’t believe it was such a quiet moment when there should be trumpets sounding or a huge orchestra reaching a crescendo. In the back of his mind he realised it was no accident that so few people were around. Charles and Georgie had engineered this whole scene by sending everyone else away.
To protect my child? Or to protect me?
Both, he decided, and was grateful. It was good of them. Not something he had the right to expect when he’d kept so much to himself since he’d come to Crocodile Creek. Janey wouldn’t believe that the charmer with the major ego from Royal Victoria Hospital could have morphed into such a workaholic loner.
‘This is Luke, Rowdy,’ Georgie said. ‘He’s…’ She threw him a panicky look. What did Rowdy know?
‘I’m a friend of your Auntie Janey,’ Luke supplied.
Rowdy smiled. Apparently he liked his Auntie Janey.
‘I’ve just been to see her.’ An image flashed into his mind of the way she’d looked against the hospital white of her pillow. Vulnerable yet calm. Lips a little dry. Eyes huge and shadowed. Never anywhere near as beautiful as Alice, but a lot more grounded and with an intelligence she could never hide. ‘She’s still pretty tired, but she’s doing a lot better.’
Rowdy pressed his lips together and nodded, and you’d have thought from his expression that Janey’s recovery was all down to him, that possibly the entire universe would end if this one kid didn’t breathe in the right way, or wipe his plate clean with the correct licked finger, or something. He had an air of crushing responsibility about him, and the pleasure of the hamburger was apparently already too far in the past to be of any help.
‘Hey…’ How did you reach out to a kid who didn’t speak. Why didn’t he speak? How did you create a bond, and trust, and a relationship?
Luke felt completely at sea. He’d been holding himself back for so long, he just wanted to unleash his emotions right now, on the spot. Crush his child in his arms. Say all these fervent, dramatic words.
I love you. I would die for you. I have missed you every single day. I taught you to laugh, do you know that? I used to blow raspberries on your tummy when you were three months old, and you used to gurgle and gurgle and laugh and laugh…
But he knew he couldn’t.
What the hell should he do instead?
He turned back to Georgie, helpless and close to tears. ‘I…uh…’
‘Hey, shall we head outside for a bit before it gets dark?’ she said cheerfully to Rowdy, who stood up at once. The weight on him seemed a little lighter again, but his silence was just as complete. She told Luke, ‘We had a team clearing up around the pool area yesterday, so the kids would have somewhere to play. The whole town is doing it—creating tiny pieces of order in the chaos. The beach is still a mess, the sand half cut away and covered in debris, and the surf is brown.’
He grabbed her arm just as she was about to follow Rowdy outside. ‘I don’t know what to do, Georgie.’
She stopped in her tracks. ‘You mean about the momentous reunion?’
‘Yes.’
‘Momentous isn’t what he needs, I don’t think.’
‘I know it isn’t, but what is there instead? It’s momentous for me, and I’m having a hard time getting past that to what else I could—’
‘Just…child care. Fun stuff. Minute by minute. Throw him a ball. Read him a story tonight. We have kids’ books here. Take it slow. We can’t swim yet, unfortunately, because the pool’s still full of debris and muck and chairs.’
‘I’ll clean it out tomorrow,’ Luke said. It was a resolution and a promise. He knew he hadn’t made himself a full part of the Croc Creek medical community in the months he’d been there. This felt like something he could grab hold of, something concrete that he could do. For Rowdy. For his fellow doctors. For himself.