Melting the Argentine Doctor's Heart / Small Town Marriage Miracle (7 page)

His scowl deepened, but as the room had grown shadowy she could barely see his eyes, let alone read any expression in them.

‘I have no wife, no current lover, no—no
other
children. Satisfied?’

And with that he stalked out of the hut.

Why was he letting her upset him this way? Jorge asked himself the question as he strode towards the
clinic. Why had questions about his private life angered him so much?

He’d have liked to think it was because she was so insensitive she hadn’t considered how unlikely it was for a man who looked like him to find love, but that would be a coward’s way out. His visible scars were only reminders of the deeper ones—of the damage the explosion had left inside him, physically and mentally, of the darkness that had come upon him and the long struggle he’d had to come to terms with the man he was now.

He’d had women love him since the accident, he just hadn’t been able to love them back. And
that
was what had angered him! That the woman against whose love he’d measured other loves should ask such questions—that was what had hurt!

All was quiet at the clinic, the boy gone home, the place lit but only a nurse on duty for emergencies. He had no reason to linger there, although there was always paperwork, but back at his hut his daughter would be eating her dinner.

Caroline was waiting for the kettle to boil when he walked back into the hut. He looked across at her and some trick of the late afternoon light coming through the square hole in the wall that served as a window showed the depth of the scarring on his cheek.

Once again she longed to press her hand against it, while her mind raced through the likelihood of other scars, picturing them on his body—his beautiful body—not to mention the damage beneath the skin, physical and mental damage too terrible to contemplate.

Determined not to give in to the ache inside her, especially now Jorge had lifted Ella from the chair and had sat down with her on his knee to read the story to her, Caroline poured water onto the noodles and while she waited for them to swell and cool, she crossed to the stacks of books and pulled out the biggest of them, setting them down on a chair in the kitchen and putting her absorbent towel over them to protect them from spilled noodles.

‘When the story’s finished,’ she said to the pair in the armchair, pleased she sounded so calm when inside her mind and body emotions whirled in senseless twists and turns—pleasure at the domesticity of the scene in front of her, slight envy that Ella had adopted Jorge as a friend so easily, the agony of realising her love for him was still so strong and, worst of all, the stress of hiding how she felt.

He carried Ella into the kitchen and set her down on the raised-up seat.

‘Is she safe there?’ he asked, and Caroline felt a pang of sympathy for him. If
her
insides were in turmoil, how must his be?

‘She sits on books at home,’ she replied. ‘Fat telephone books.’

Ella was spooning noodles into her mouth, taking her time because she hated spilling any.

‘She’s a neat freak when it comes to eating,’ Caroline explained, but even as she said the words she realised that every tiny detail she revealed must cut deeply into Jorge’s emotions, that she knew these things about their
child while he’d been cut off from learning them as she’d developed.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said quietly, remembering she’d said it earlier, and now, as then, she wasn’t entirely sure what she was apologising for.

But he seemed to understand for he nodded, but not before she’d seen the pain in his eyes and read there his very real regrets.

‘Finished!’

Ella set down her spoon and looked at Jorge.

‘Ice cream now?’

Caroline had to laugh. She hoped it wouldn’t take too long for Jorge to learn not to say anything he didn’t want repeated in his daughter’s hearing.

‘Ice cream,’ he agreed. ‘We need to walk a little distance. Perhaps you would like to ride on my back.’

‘Piggyback?’ Ella asked, her delight at this idea obvious.

Caroline lifted her off the chair and settled her on Jorge’s back, then for one craven instant considered telling them to go without her. The togetherness of it all—the family thing that was happening already—was upsetting her in ways she didn’t understand.

But though she knew Jorge and would trust him with her daughter’s life, he was still a stranger to Ella, for all she’d taken to him.

She followed them out the door and into the dusk.

‘Look!’ he said, jerking her out of thoughts she didn’t want to have.

He was pointing west to the vivid colours splashed across the sky, the bare branches of a leafless tree
making a tracery of black patterns against the scarlet, pink and orange.

‘It’s beautiful,’ Caroline murmured. ‘We don’t look up enough, too busy looking where we’re going next to appreciate what’s here around us now.’

He looked at her and smiled, and the pain of her love for him all but exploded in her chest. Yes, his smile was a little lopsided now, and there was grey in the prickle of hair on his close-cropped head, but he was still Jorge, the man she’d loved.

Still loved.

She looked so beautiful, standing there looking at the sunset, that Jorge had to move away. To stay would be to fall in love again—if he’d ever fallen out of love with her. And while he might want her with every fibre of his being, he couldn’t saddle her with the man he had become—couldn’t trust that all she had to give him would be pity, for to be pitied by Caroline would surely kill him.

‘I
CE CREAM!’
his daughter reminded him, patting him on the head. He headed down the alley towards the main road where a small ice-cream cart usually stood at this time of the evening.

The van was there but it was the white pole on the pavement close by that attracted Caroline’s attention.

‘What is this?’ she asked, studying the side of it that had its message in the Toba language.

‘Walk around it. You will understand when you find the Spanish.’

‘“May peace prevail on earth”,’ she read. ‘How lovely. The other languages?’

‘One in Toba, one in Guaran'—Toba is a sub-language of Guaran'—and one in Italian, representing the cultures that have contributed to the development of the neighbourhood. There is another such pole near the National Flag Memorial. They are called Peace Poles.’

He had squatted down to allow Ella to climb off his back and now he lifted her so she could see the variety of ice creams available. Caroline was still walking around the pole, reaching out to touch the words painted on it.

‘We have to believe it will happen, don’t we?’ she
said quietly, and he remembered that there was so much more to her than her beauty—so much more that he had fallen in love with.

‘I’ll have choc’late,’ Ella announced, breaking into his thoughts, which was just as well. He ordered her ice cream and made sure he grabbed a handful of napkins to mop up any spills. He carried the ice cream for her across the road to a small park bench and when she’d settled on it, handed it to her.

To his surprise she was as careful eating ice cream as she was eating noodles, both messy dishes for a child, but the little pink tongue licked around the edge, never allowing a melting drop to trickle down the thick waffle cone. He was so fascinated by her actions he didn’t realise Caroline wasn’t with them until she joined him, a cone in each hand.

‘I didn’t know what you’d like so I went for coffee and strawberry. Which do you want?’

It was too domestic to be true—too huge a leap in his life—so it seemed as if he’d been transported to another place in time, another world where nothing was quite real. But he’d lived with pretence for a long time—pretence that he wasn’t in pain, pretence that his scars didn’t matter, pretence that he didn’t love—

No, he wasn’t going there.

‘Coffee would be great,’ he said, no pretence needed but guessing she’d like the strawberry.

She handed it to him and sat down beside her daughter—their daughter—and he saw immediately where the ‘neat freak', as Caroline had called Ella, had got her ice-cream eating techniques. For Caroline licked
just as neatly, turning the cone in her hand, catching any potential drip before it could cause a mess.

He stood and watched the pair of them, so different in looks, licking at their ice creams, his own melting so sticky liquid was running down his fingers.

This was definitely an out-of-body experience, a dream, but if it wasn’t, what next? There might be a temporary truce between himself and Caroline, but where did they go from here?

Anger, although tamped down, still burned inside him. It was where to aim it that bothered him. At fate? Too easy! At himself? Of course, this situation was, at least in part, his own fault for being so determined to return all her mail unopened.

But try as he may, he couldn’t help but direct most of the anger at her. She’d kept his child from him then staged this grand reconciliation scene. There had to have been another way to have done this! And how hard had she really tried to contact him?

‘Your ice cream’s melting all down your hand.’

He looked at her and realised
all
his anger should be directed at himself. At himself for still loving her.

Watching him standing there, looking down at her and Ella, the ice cream melting in his hand, Caroline felt a surge, not of love this time but of pity for him. To have had so much emotion dumped on him, a man, she suspected, who had avoided any emotional connections for the past four years!

‘It’s impossible to even try to absorb it all at once,’ she said quietly. ‘Let’s just take one day at a time. Can you tell me a little about the settlement and the clinic?

I know the people came from up north, but apart from that.’

‘Floods and mechanisation in agriculture in the north left a lot of the Toba people without homes or jobs. Why they came to Rosario I’m not sure, but they settled in this area, building, as you saw, basic shelters. At first the government’s reaction was to build affordable housing, but there was never enough. Now it’s different.’

She remembered things they’d spoken of in Africa, how giving people things—housing, food, clothing—was not as effective as helping them arrange it for themselves.

‘Enabling?’ she queried, using a word that had been coming into vogue back then.

Now he smiled and though her heart leapt she reminded herself it wasn’t personal. He, too, was remembering.

‘Yes, the government is taking that attitude,’ he told her. ‘They are trying to develop an environment where the people, using their own resources, can find solutions to their housing problems in particular. The government is there to offer resources and technical help, but the movement is being generated by the people themselves.’

‘And your work here is done?’

Ella had finished her ice cream and was nodding sleepily, but Caroline was reluctant to return to the hut where the four walls enfolded Jorge and herself in false intimacy. She lifted the tired child onto her knee, holding her gently, rocking slightly, knowing Ella would soon be asleep.

Jorge looked down at what could be a picture entitled
Mother and Child
and sadness overcame the simmering anger. He threw the soggy remainder of his ice cream into a bin, wiped his hands on the napkins, and returned to the bench.

‘I will carry her home,’ he said, and though he sensed Caroline wanted to protest, she stood up and handed the child to him. The little girl was heavy with sleep, and slumped against his chest, but the warmth of her body, the trust in the little arms that snaked around his neck, brought back the disturbance of feelings he’d had earlier when he’d seen her body and felt the connection between them for the first time.

The connection of blood!

Back at the hut, Caroline opened the door.

‘I should have looked properly earlier. Is the bed in the spare bedroom made up? If it is we can slide her straight into it. It’s not worth waking her to clean her teeth.’

Teeth-cleaning? For the first time in that momentous day it occurred to Jorge that there was more to fatherhood than falling in love with his daughter. He’d have to think about things like teeth-cleaning and a properly balanced diet—noodles and ice cream surely didn’t count—and then there’d be kindergarten and school and—

‘Bed? Made up?’ Caroline repeated, and he shook away the myriad questions that were threatening to swamp him. How
often
should she clean her teeth? After every meal? Every snack? And was kindergarten good or bad for little people?
He’d
gone when he was three.

‘It’s made up,’ he told Caroline, and followed her as she walked to the second bedroom, pleased he’d installed solar panels on the roof of his hut so she could turn on lights to see her way. She folded back the bed covers and he placed the sleeping child in it, pulling the sheet up over her then brushing the wayward curls off her face.

‘That’s her done till morning,’ Caroline said, leading him out of the room, although he’d have liked to stay and just looked at the miracle that had come into his life—no matter she had brought such troubling questions. ‘Most nights she sleeps right through, which is a blessing.’

He forced himself to leave the room, thinking maybe an early dinner would be the best idea. Caroline would be tired. She could eat and go to bed. Once again he thanked the heavens that he’d put in solar power. To have to eat with her by lamplight would have been too much to handle, for lamplight threw shadows as powerfully beguiling as a magician’s tricks.

In the kitchen, he found the makings for
carbonada—
dried beans instead of beef, but he had corn and pumpkin and some other vegetables for the stew. With some flatbread Juan’s wife had made only that morning, it would do for dinner.

He felt rather than heard her come out of the bedroom and not wanting to look at her again, even in electric light, said, without turning, ‘Did you see the shower out the back when you were exploring earlier? It’s fairly rudimentary but the water should be warm—I made my own solar water-heating system with a big rubber bag that sits on the roof of the bath-house. Test the water as sometimes it gets too hot, and don’t drink it—don’t even
clean your teeth in it. I buy it from a truck that comes around but although it’s meant to be safe I don’t trust it. Our drinking water comes in large plastic drums. You might have noticed one by the outside tubs.’