MIRACLE ON KAIMOTU ISLAND/ALWAYS THE HERO (21 page)

‘Medic needed. Outside the hardware store on main street. Man having trouble breathing.’

Another voice came on that sounded like Frank. ‘I’m five minutes away.’

Tom keyed the button on the radio. ‘We’re on to it.’ He’d let Abby go to reach for his radio but it wasn’t a problem. Her legs were steady now.

Jack was safe. He wouldn’t even see anything terrible because, by the time the slips were cleared and the children rescued, any bodies or badly injured people would be out of public view. There was nothing Abby could do to speed up his rescue so she could direct all her energy to helping Tom. And with the fear about Jack vanquished, she was aware of a new burst of energy, which was just as well seeing as she had to trot to keep up with him.

He wasn’t looking at her and seemed to be occupied in getting his backpack off without slowing down the pace. Was he still furious with her? Of course he was, but having a medical emergency to deal with meant that they wouldn’t be having any personal conversations any time soon.

The longer it took the better, as far as Abby was concerned. It was a conversation to be dreaded, that was for sure. Except, curiously, she was aware of a trickle of relief that the truth was out. The burden of guilt had been there from the moment she’d left the rescue base that day without having spoken to Tom, and it had grown, bit by bit, over the years. Grown faster in the last few weeks since Jack had started school because most of the other children had dads and he was starting to ask some pointed questions about why he didn’t.

Awareness of any personal sense of relief evaporated as they reached the USAR crew, who had rescued the trapped victim from the hardware store.

‘You know him?’ Tom asked Abby.

‘Of course. It’s Harley. Owner of the shop.’ Abby crouched beside the man and touched his shoulder. ‘Harley? Can you hear me?’

Harley’s eyes opened. So did his mouth and he tried to speak but he was struggling to breathe. Beside her, Tom was fitting the earpieces of his stethoscope but still looking up.

‘What the story?’ he asked.

‘Chest and leg injuries, from what we could see. He was under the counter but a steel beam had come down on top of that. Took a bit of digging out and his breathing seemed to get worse pretty fast after we pulled him out.’

Tom used the shears he carried clipped to his belt to cut clear what remained of Harley’s thick shirt. He listened to his chest for only moments. ‘Find the chest drain kit, would you, Abby? He’s got a tension pneumothorax.’

The chest injuries were allowing air to get into the wrong places, compressing Harley’s lungs. It could stop his heart functioning if they couldn’t relieve the pressure. Abby opened what she recognised as the airway roll in Tom’s pack and found the wide-bore needle she knew he would need. By the time he had a pair of gloves on, she had an alcohol wipe opened and ready for him to grab, as well as the three-way stopcock and tape that would be needed to complete the procedure.

‘Thanks.’ Counting down the rib spaces, Tom cleaned the area the needle would penetrate. ‘Can you check his leg injury and get a blood pressure while I do this?’

Abby used the shears to cut Harley’s trousers. ‘Femoral fracture,’ she reported.

‘I don’t carry a traction splint.’

‘It’s not mid-shaft.’

‘Okay. How ’bout starting an IV so we can get some pain relief on board?’

‘Sure.’

They were working in far from ideal circumstances with their patient on a plastic board in the rubble of his collapsed shop. Their resources were also limited and people around them were in a hurry to move on, so there was unspoken pressure, yet to Abby it felt as if she and Tom were working together as a smooth team. She reached around him to get what she needed from the pack and paused in what she was doing to comfort Harley when he groaned loudly.

Tom had punctured the space between Harley’s ribs and advanced the cannula far enough to release the pressure of the air filling his chest cavity. Almost immediately his breathing improved. Abby had the tourniquet on his arm and slid a cannula into place as Tom attached the three-way stopcock to the chest cannula and taped it into position. He might be busy with his own task but he wasn’t missing anything Abby was doing.

‘Nice work,’ he murmured, as Abby flushed the IV access now established in Harley’s arm. ‘Could you draw up some morphine?’

Of course she could. The praise was remarkably sweet and with Harley now in no immediate danger thanks to their intervention, she could feel proud of what she and Tom had just achieved by working together. She’d only ever done this kind of work in the safe environment of an emergency department. Was this what his job was like every day? Stressful procedures under trying conditions to save lives?

As soon as Harley was stable, arrangements were made to move him up to the hospital.

‘He should probably get a proper chest drain inserted before they fly him out,’ Tom said. ‘Either that or keep to a low altitude.’

The light was starting to fade noticeably by the time Harley was being taken away.

‘Take a break,’ one of the USAR team advised. ‘You’re not needed urgently right now and none of us know how long the night’s going to be.’

‘When did you last eat?’ Tom asked Abby.

‘I skipped lunch,’ she admitted. ‘I was a bit nervous about the big clinic I had on for this afternoon. And I didn’t eat much breakfast because I was a bit on edge about...about...’

‘Jack’s first school outing?’

‘Mmm.’

Tom said nothing more. Instead, he steered Abby away from the hardware shop. Away from the street, even, towards a small grassed area near the Fat Duck that had a child’s play area and a bench seat for supervising adults. He sat down and Abby had no choice other than to sit down beside him and eat the muesli bar he produced from a pocket.

‘Hardly ideal,’ Tom said wryly. ‘And I probably shouldn’t be taking the time for personal issues but if we’re on a break, I can’t see the harm. And I really do want to know. I think you owe me that much, Abby.’

Abby’s heart thumped. Was he going to suggest she was lying again? About Jack’s paternity, perhaps? That would hurt. Badly.

‘Know what, exactly?’

‘Why you didn’t tell me.’

They were sitting side by side. Close enough to touch but there was a gap between them. Abby stared straight ahead of her, her gaze fixed, unseeing, on the child’s slide. Where they were, and the emergency situation they were in the middle of, seemed to fade into the background. Abby mentally stepped back in time. To another situation that had been just as tense in its own way.

‘I did intend to,’ she said quietly. ‘I went to the hospital but they said you’d discharged yourself. Against doctor’s orders. They said you’d be at home, that it would be a couple of weeks before you were signed off as fit to fly, so I went to your apartment. When I found nobody was home, I decided you’d be hanging out at the base. Not the ideal place to break news like that but you hadn’t returned any of my calls.’

She heard Tom’s breath escape in an angry kind of hiss. ‘You never left any messages.’

‘Well...now you know why.’

‘No.’ The word was clipped. ‘I can’t say I do.’

Abby had to turn and look at him, then, because she didn’t understand. She encountered a dark and determined gaze. Tom was still angry. He wanted answers. And he deserved the truth, didn’t he? He was right. She owed him that much. A lot more, probably, because...he’d given her Jack, hadn’t he?

‘I don’t know why you didn’t wait. Why you didn’t make any more of an effort to tell me.’

‘It was because you were off on a mission,’ Abby said. ‘When your doctors must have told you it wasn’t a good idea after you’d had a punctured lung. It was then I knew I...I just
couldn’t
tell you.’

Abby had to bite her bottom lip hard to stop tears coming. Good grief, she seemed to be crying at the drop of a hat today. Emotional overload. How unfair was it to have so many huge things in her life crashing around her at the same time? She had no idea whether her little house was still standing or when she would get to cuddle Jack again. Seeing Tom after all these years would have been quite enough of a shock all by itself.

Cuddling Jack... Oh, Lord... The relief of hearing that he was safe was wearing off now. Abby was desperate to take her son into her arms and hold him tightly. So tightly he could never wriggle free and get into danger ever again.

Yet again she had to fight back tears. The physical activity on top of the totally shocking emotional roller-coaster she was on was taking its toll. Abby felt too exhausted to take any notice of the alarms ringing in her head as she crossed barriers that had been there for a very, very long time.

‘I never told you much about my childhood, did I?’

‘I know you lost your parents early and that you were brought up by your grandparents in a little country town.’ Tom turned his head to survey what had been Kaimotu village. Was he thinking that she’d come to a place like this because it had reminded her of where she’d been raised?

He was closer to the truth than he realised.

‘My parents were both mountaineers,’ she told him. ‘Famous for their achievements. They once did seven of the world’s hardest climbs in a seven-month period. They wrote a book about it....
Lucky Number Seven.
’

‘And that’s how they died? In a mountaineering accident?’

‘Yep. They both got swept away by an avalanche. Their bodies were never recovered.’

‘God, that’s awful. How old were you?’

‘Nine.’

Tom was looking at her. She could see the sympathy but she could also see a question mark. What did this have to do with her not telling him he was going to be a father?

‘I was really proud of Mum and Dad,’ Abby went on. ‘I absolutely adored them but as I got older I began to understand how dangerous their passion was. I’d beg them not to go. And when they did, which was at least once a year, I’d stay with Gran and worry myself sick that something bad was going to happen.’ Her voice wobbled and began to fade. ‘That they’d never come back...’

It seemed perfectly natural that Tom take hold of her hand and hold it. Squeeze it, even.

‘But...’ He stopped himself after the single word, but it was enough for Abby to realise he still didn’t get it.

‘You were off on a mission, Tom. You lived for the danger of your job—just like my parents lived for the danger of the mountains. You obviously still do. When I found out you’d gone out on a job that day, I suddenly realised what it would be like if I told you that I was pregnant. If you decided that you wanted to try and make things work, maybe. That you might want to be a father.’

She could feel the shock wave through her hand just before Tom released it abruptly.

‘
Might
want to be a father? What the hell is that supposed to mean? That I wouldn’t be prepared to take the responsibility? That I wasn’t capable of stepping up to the mark?’

‘No. It wasn’t like that. It was—’

‘What made you so damn sure I would have been a bad father?’

‘No.’
The word was even more vehement this time. Torn out of Abby. ‘The opposite of that. You would have been a great father. The best. Just like you were in everything you did.’

The best paramedic.

The best lover...

She had to make him understand somehow, because Abby knew this would be very, very important for trying to move forward from this. For all of them. She sucked in a deep breath as she felt Tom’s stunned silence as he processed her words. And suddenly—surprisingly—she felt calm.

‘Jack would have had a hero for a dad,’ she continued quietly. ‘Someone a little boy would grow up worshipping. And at some point he’d start to understand how dangerous that job was. He’d start getting scared.’

Tom was absolutely silent beside her. Abby was looking straight ahead again and she had the impression that Tom was doing exactly the same thing. That it was too hard for him to look at her as she spoke. She wasn’t finished yet, either. She had to keep going. Make him
really
understand.

‘He’d start to realise that all those unknown people who were sick or hurt were somehow more important than
he
was. That every time his dad answered the call to go to one of them, there was a chance that he’d never come back.’

Abby had to scrub at her face and sniff loudly. Where were these tears coming from?

‘I know what it’s like to live with that fear,’ she added brokenly. ‘I didn’t want it for my child. It was right then, when I found you’d gone off on a new mission when you hadn’t even recovered from getting hurt in the last one, that I knew I had to find somewhere my baby would be safe. And keep him safe for as long as I possibly could because...’

Because that baby had been a part of herself.

A part of Tom.

The man she loved with all her heart and soul.

It was on the tip of her tongue to let that spill out, too, but Abby stopped herself just in time. Tom didn’t need to know that. The consequences of him finding out he was a father were enough of a worry. She didn’t need to make it worse by making herself vulnerable as a woman as well as a mother.

‘Just because...’ she finished lamely.

Tom was still sitting there silently. Maybe he would have said something but the air around them was filled with the distinctive heavy sound of an approaching Iroquois helicopter.

The hard-core rescue personnel were going to arrive in droves now and the operation to save and protect the community of Kaimotu Island would move into a new, intense phase. They couldn’t stay sitting here in a quiet corner, ignoring what was really important right now.

And the four-wheel-drive vehicle that Mike had taken away to check the condition of the runway was coming back down the hill. At some speed, given the appalling condition the road was now in.

He slammed on the brakes when he spotted Abby and Tom sitting on the bench.

‘Thought you’d be back at HQ,’ he said. ‘You won’t have heard.’

Abby’s heart skipped a beat. Was this going to be news about Jack?