Melting the Argentine Doctor's Heart / Small Town Marriage Miracle (8 page)

He’d shut himself away again, Caroline realised as she returned to the bedroom and dug into her backpack for her toiletries bag.

Why?

Had putting Ella into bed upset him?

Did he fear
any
kind of sentimentality?

Yet earlier they’d shared the beauty of the sunset and she’d believed he’d opened himself up, just a little, to her. Was he closed off now because he feared a fleeting moment might break through whatever barriers he’d erected within himself?

She dug further into her backpack and found the long, loose cotton pyjama pants, black with yellow bananas on them, and the yellow T-shirt she wore with them. Good thing she hadn’t splurged on sexy lingerie.

The bath-house was out the back, he’d said, which meant she’d have to walk past him to go through the back door. Or she could go out the front and walk around, which would be plain stupid and a dead giveaway that he was affecting her far more than she was, apparently, affecting him. So deep breath, and here we go!

Another loud cry from outside caught her in mid-stride.

‘Jorge, Jorge!’

The desperation in the cry made Caroline drop her clothes and follow him through the door. A light above the clinic door showed a macabre scene, two small men,
supporting between them a third, all three seemingly covered in blood.

Jorge had reached the trio, speaking to them in what must be their native language, helping them into the clinic.

‘Only this man is injured,’ he said to Caroline when he realised she’d followed him. He was lifting the patient onto the table in the treatment room as he spoke, shooing the others out.

Caroline looked with horror at the man’s left leg, which was minus half a foot.

‘They’ve tied a tourniquet around his leg but he’s still losing far too much blood. I’ll get some fluid running into him then tidy up the main wound. If you could suture the cuts on his hands and arms, it would be a great help.’

‘But, Jorge, he needs a hospital,’ she objected. ‘There are hospitals here, five, I think I read, in the city and in the outlying areas as well. You can’t expect to care for him here.’

Jorge’s dark eyes glanced briefly at her.

‘Later!’ he said firmly. ‘I will explain later. In the meantime, if you will help, Juan will sit with Ella.’

Apparently taking her agreement for granted, he spoke quickly to Juan who’d appeared from out the back, then unlocked and opened the tall metal cabinet, waving his hand to show her it should contain whatever she might need. Knowing Jorge’s task was urgent, she searched for what she’d need herself. A couple of pairs of gloves, saline for flushing out the wounds, antiseptic for cleaning the skin around them, local anaesthetic and
sutures. She found a tray leaning against the cabinet and stacked the things she needed on it, then carried it to the head of the table, setting it down beside the man’s head.

His skin was grey—probably with pain as well as loss of blood—and she knew they had to work swiftly. But as she unwound the dirty cloth wrapped around his arms and hands she felt nausea rise in her stomach.

‘These are defensive wounds,’ she whispered to Jorge. ‘He’s been attacked.’

‘Just stitch him up.’ Jorge spoke quietly, calming her with his voice, and she remembered that first and foremost she was a doctor. It wasn’t her business how a patient came to need her skills, only that she must help him. This had been her weakness in Africa, wanting to do more to help the refugees they’d treated there. Yes, they’d been able to improve their lives in small ways and certainly improve their health, but she’d had to learn not to get involved in their struggle to return to their homelands, or to try to understand the reasons they had fled.

She wrapped a clean cloth around one of the man’s arms and concentrated on the other, swabbing the area around the deep cuts, shuddering as she imagined the axe or machete—what else could make such wounds?—cutting into the man’s flesh.

‘I’m giving him a general anaesthetic. It will be more effective as we’d need more locals than we have on hand. This is Lila, one of our nurses. She will watch him.’

Caroline said hello to the middle-aged woman who was placing a mask over the patient’s mouth and nose as
calmly as if a man minus a part of his foot was an everyday occurrence in the clinic. She had also, to Caroline’s surprise, produced a monitor and was attaching leads to the man’s bare chest so they could read his heart and lung movements as they worked.

‘Right to go,’ Jorge said, and Caroline saw him carefully pulling back the skin on the man’s foot, flushing the wound, preparing to cut away more bone so it wouldn’t protrude as the healing skin shrank.

She knew the horror she was feeling was probably reflected on her face so wasn’t surprised when Jorge’s next reminder was far harsher.

‘Go,’ he ordered, and she turned her attention to her own job, flushing the gaping wounds before carefully drawing them together, suturing the skin, aware, as she’d always been in Africa, that supplies were probably limited so she had to space the sutures close enough to hold the skin closed but not so close she wasted precious resources.

But as she worked, although ninety-nine per cent of her concentration was on her patient, that one per cent sped away, back to a street scene in Africa where, in Jorge’s company, she’d once recoiled from the sight of a badly maimed beggar. She’d tried to explain to Jorge that it wasn’t revulsion that had made her flinch but the helplessness she had felt at the fact that some scars and malformations couldn’t be fixed and how unfortunate it was that so much of a person’s self-worth was tied up in how he or she looked.

Had Jorge remembered that flinch as he’d lain in
hospital in France? Had he imagined she’d flinch from him? Did that explain why he’d pushed her away?

She finished with the deep wound at the base of the man’s thumb, probing first to see if there might be nerve or tendon damage, wondering at the same time if it had been the memory of her recoil—and his reading of it—that had determined Jorge to send the email.

‘All we can do is sew him up,’ Jorge said quietly to her, apparently looking up from his task to see her hesitation. ‘It is likely he will have it cut open again next week. See the other scars he has?’

So Caroline once again pushed the past back where it belonged and sewed, putting dressings over the wounds as she completed her stitching. She moved around the table and unwrapped the other arm, and began again, unaware of the passing of time until she was done, and Jorge touched her arm and she stepped back from the table.

‘Lila will clean up here and move him into our little ward and we have a night nurse who will watch over him and call if we are needed. I’ve given him a massive dose of antibiotics and have prepared morphine for him if he wakes in pain. We’ll go home and eat our dinner if it hasn’t completely spoiled.’

Caroline had stripped off her gloves and was using a wet cloth Lila had handed her to wipe her arms, but what she needed most badly was a shower.

Not to mention an explanation!

The shower took precedence.

‘Will dinner spoil more if I take five minutes for a shower?’ she asked, and Jorge smiled at her.

‘Could I deny it to you when you have helped me out this way? I, too, need a shower, but I can have one here. We’ll meet back at the hut.’

There had been absolutely nothing in his tone of voice to suggest that the idea of showering together, as once they would have done, had even flashed through his mind, but as Caroline made her way back to the hut she had a stupid longing for what might have been.

Except if he
hadn’t
ever loved her they probably wouldn’t still be together, let alone sharing a shower.

Jorge stood beneath the tepid water, running the soap over the puckered skin on his torso. Caroline had begun her journey back to Australia, frantic with worry over her mother’s diagnosis of breast cancer, when the rocket had hit their small hospital. He knew only what he’d been told of the accident, remembering nothing until he’d woken up in hospital in France, his body broken in so many places he’d wondered if it would ever heal. He’d been splinted and bandaged from head to toe, but not for long, the bandages being removed so he could be plunged into a bath where dead burnt skin was carefully peeled away.

This treatment had been agonising, but no more agonising than his decision to break up with Caroline. Uncertain not only whether he’d live or die, but whether he
wanted
to live or die, his one seemingly rational decision had been to send her the email that would keep her from rushing to his side at the first available opportunity. He’d told himself it was because he knew her mother needed her but he knew the motivating factor had been not wanting to see horror and revulsion in her eyes, not
wanting the burden of the pity he knew would be in her heart.

He turned off the water and dried himself, slipping on a loose T-shirt—all his clothes were loose these days, illness having stripped off the weight and physical labour replacing it with muscle—and a pair of
bombachas,
the baggy cotton trousers worn by horsemen and outdoor workers all over the country.

Now to face the woman who had brought such chaos into his life and such confusion to his mind.

She was already in his small kitchen area, stirring the mixture in the pot, wearing long, loose pants not unlike the ones he wore, only hers had bright bananas all over them, and on top she wore a faded yellow T-shirt.

‘Very fetching,’ he remarked, determined to keep the conversation light. Back when he’d mentioned showers so many memories had flashed through his mind he’d thought he might lose it altogether, but he was back in charge of his thoughts and feelings now—touching his own scarred skin usually had that effect.

‘What would they have been fighting about?’ she asked, moving away from the cooking pot as if ceding his right to be in charge. She perched on one of his chairs, propped her elbows on the table and rested her chin in her hands as she waited for his answer.

‘A bit of tin for a roof, perhaps a scrap of pipe one of them found, a woman? Who would know?’

‘I thought the other men, the men who brought him in, would have told you. You spoke to them for some time.’

She hadn’t changed much, Jorge realised. She’d
always questioned everything, especially things she probably shouldn’t question.

And persistent!

He’d forgotten how persistent she could be, although her arrival here should have reminded him. Once she got an idea in her head, she followed through with it. Back in Africa she’d pushed and worked and wound officials around her little finger until she’d been allowed to run her clinic for the women in the village near the refugee camp, only to have to leave it when called home to her mother.

‘Well?’

Yes, persistent!

‘I gather it was about a woman,’ he said, adding, ‘Isn’t it always,’ with considerable asperity, for his thoughts had led him back down paths he hadn’t wished to travel.

‘He was attacked with an axe or machete over a woman?’

She’d lifted her head, her eyes watching him more closely now, as if she might read a lie or evasion in his reply.

‘I suppose the other man just grabbed whatever was handy.’

‘But the hospital? You didn’t want to send him there.’

He turned the gas down under the pot and leaned against the small kitchen bench.

‘Sending him to a hospital would involve the police. These people have a fear of being locked away and they also do not fare well in a general prison population. They are small, and too fiery for their size. The settlement has
its own wardens—the two men who brought him to me are wardens—and they will deal with him and with his attacker in the appropriate way.’

Caroline shuddered at his words, although she knew Jorge wouldn’t condone further violence as ‘an appropriate way’. There was more to the story than Jorge was telling—perhaps more than he knew—but here she was, again wanting to probe deeper, to learn more, when it was, as he had used to say, none of her business. Only he’d always said it in Spanish,
Qué te importa,
so it sounded as if her query had been rude, his words a ‘stay out of it’ command.

Well, she’d stay out of local affairs—after all, it seemed as if she wouldn’t be here even for a full month. Where she’d be when Jorge left she wasn’t certain, but it would be somewhere near where he was. She hadn’t come all this way to give in easily. Besides, now he’d met Ella, Caroline was reasonably sure he’d want to get to know her.

Perhaps it was time to talk about the future. Surely she could do that without being told,
‘Qué te importa'!

‘You said you wouldn’t be here for much longer. Where will you go? To another squatter settlement like this in another city?’

He looked blankly at her, as if he hadn’t understood a word she’d said, but then blinked himself back from wherever he had been.

‘Home,’ he said, but there was little joy in the word.

‘Home to your father? He is ill?’

She sounded concerned but, then, she’d always been
empathetic and perhaps not having known her own father had listened avidly to stories of his. But Jorge had to answer her, and how to answer when he wasn’t one hundred per cent sure of his motives himself?

‘He is not ill—the very opposite—but he is not getting any younger and I feel not a duty to return but something pulls me back there. He gave so much of his time to me, bringing me up when my mother died, taking time out of his day to do it when he could have left it to Antoinette, that I feel the least I can do is give him a little of my time.’

‘Did you go straight home to his place from the hospital in France? Did you recuperate there? ‘

Caroline sounded interested enough for Jorge to explain further. Besides, talking about his father—about that time—took his mind off the other things he was feeling with Caroline here in his little hut.

‘I stayed until I could walk again and my internal wounds had healed. Then I came up here. My father understood my need to get away for a while, to rebuild myself, both physically and mentally, and he would accept my absence if I felt my work here was necessary—if there was no one else who would do it. But the article you must have read on the internet was old, and now I have the clinic operating, the government is happy to step in and staff it.’