A Proposal Worth Waiting For

Too aware that he hadn’t moved further away, Miranda uncapped the Ventolin inhaler and attached it to the spacer, helped Josh get the other end of the spacer ready at his lips. ‘OK, ready to breathe out? Now…’

But Josh couldn’t concentrate and, even with the spacer, he mistimed the dose and took the spacer from his lips too soon. Miranda saw a puff like smoke as most of the drug escaped into the air.

Lauren Allandale was watching Josh’s struggle for breath and his clumsiness with the inhaler, as were a couple of other kids and a parent or two. The atmosphere was chaotic and claustrophobic. Another big group of tourists had just arrived, ready to check in for their flight, and the tour leader was yelling instructions to them in a language Miranda couldn’t identify. Korean? More stares arrowed in Josh’s direction.

‘Please, let me deal with this,’ Nick repeated, needing to lean close to keep a shred of privacy for his son. Miranda felt the warmth of his body, let herself meet his brown gaze for a moment and found it far too familiar. He wasn’t smiling. His expression was motionless, almost forbidding, and yet it stirred her and filled her with memories. Suddenly, as she’d feared all along, ten years wasn’t very much time at all. ‘You have other things to attend to. And he’s my son.’

‘You’re confident that you know what to do?’ She felt their fingers touch briefly as he took the inhaler and spacer out of her hands. Should she grab the equipment back?

‘For heck’s sake, I’m a doctor!’

‘I mean, the exact dosage. The frequency.’

‘Yes, I do,’ he told her shortly, shoving the equipment into Josh’s backpack. ‘The very first thing I’m going to do is take him somewhere quiet. We can’t get him focused and relaxed here. I saw signs for a parents’ room.’ He spoke to his son, turning a shoulder to shut Miranda out, whether through hostility or because she just wasn’t important at the moment she didn’t know. ‘Josh, come with me and we’ll get you breathing again, shall we?’ His voice sounded stiff and almost formal. ‘We don’t want you having to go to bed as soon as we get there. We want to get out exploring, right?’

Josh nodded, but his eyes were still wide with effort and fear. Fear of not being able to breathe? Or of something else?

‘When’s the latest we can get back here for check-in?’ Nick asked Miranda. ‘Twelve-forty? Don’t hold the group up, will you?’

‘Your baggage…’ she recalled. You couldn’t check in someone else’s bags, neither did Security take an innocent view of luggage left unattended.

‘I’ll wait with it,’ said Benita Green, the nurse who had come with the cancer kids’ group.

Miranda and Nick both nodded at the same time. ‘Thanks.’

Then Nick scooped up Josh and carried him off, the little backpack with its bright colours and cartoon motif swinging incongruously from one big male shoulder as he strode at a rapid pace through the terminal. Josh looked so light and small and vulnerable in his arms, his little body stiff and his shoulders lifting with his effort to breathe.

Nick found the parents’ room with no difficulty.

It was like most such places, a small, bland room whose main virtue was its quietness and lack of crowds. Josh’s breathing had continued to worsen as Nick carried him and he had to fight his own sense of growing panic.

What if he couldn’t get an effective dose? What if Josh’s habitual wariness around him made him unable to relax enough to throw off the attack? What medical equipment did the airport medical centre have? It was close by. They’d just passed it. Should Nick have gone directly there instead of attempting to deal with this attack on his own?

Was he in some kind of denial, as Anna had so often accused? Or was this trip to the parents’ room a piece of misplaced heroism on his part? Anna had accused him of that in the past, too. What if this whole precious, scary, miraculously out-of-the-blue week or more with his son was derailed at the very start by another hospital stay?

I want this. I want time with my son.

Even though it challenged his self-confidence on almost every level.

I want the two of us to defeat this asthma monster together, in the next ten minutes, to prove to both of us that we can. I want him to love me, and to know that I love him.

‘OK, this is better, isn’t it?’ he said to Josh. ‘Nobody watching.’

He dropped the backpack from his shoulder, grabbed the inhaler and spacer from where he’d flung them inside. ‘Now, show me how you do this. Show me your very best breath out and then a huge breath in, after you press.’

Josh pressed the inhaler, breathed in and out while Nick counted the breaths and kept a gentle grip on the spacer. His son still hadn’t spoken a word.

‘Good. That was great,’ he said, pushing encouragement into his voice. ‘Is that feeling any better?’

Josh nodded but still didn’t speak. Nick thought he detected a mild improvement but second-guessed the impression at once, as usual. Maybe it was only that the panicky look had softened a bit in a quieter atmosphere.

He had a powerful, gut-dropping need for Miranda to be there, remembering six years of her common sense and sweetness and warmth and diligence and brains, during lectures and tutorial groups and anatomy lab sessions, followed by that one intense night of her body in bed and hours and hours of talking. Remembering it all as if it were yesterday that they’d finished medicine together. Just those few minutes of talking with her near the check-in desk had brought it all back, as he’d somehow known for the past two years that it would.

But she wasn’t there, so he and Josh just had to wait, find some patience and some trust on their own.

And administer a second dose of Ventolin, Nick decided, as the first one wasn’t working the miracle cure he’d hoped for. Time was getting on, but if he pushed Josh to go back to the check-in desk too soon…

So how did they pass the time until the next dose? There were no toys in here, no windows, nothing. Just him and Josh, on their own together for the first time in how long…probably three months…waiting to see if he could breathe.

‘How about a story?’ Nick suggested, and heard his voice come out too hearty.

With a wheezy effort, not looking at him, Josh answered, ‘We have to…go back and…meet the others…and get on the…plane.’

His heart sinking, Nick checked his watch so he’d know when to give the next dose. ‘Not yet, little guy,’ he said, then mentally cursed himself for repeating the phrase Anna had frowned at.

It was a term of endearment, damn it!

Find another one, he decided. Whether she’s right or wrong, play it safe, take the line of least resistance, for Josh’s sake. And for his own?

It was what he’d been doing for far too long.

CHAPTER TWO

‘THEY’LL be closing the flight in twenty minutes, Miranda,’ Benita said. ‘What do you think has happened to Josh and his dad? They wouldn’t have just wandered into a shop to buy postcards?’

‘I’m getting worried,’ Miranda admitted. Nick and his son had been absent for fifteen minutes—enough time to administer the first dose of Ventolin and assess its effect. If it wasn’t working…

It often didn’t. Despite long-term treatment to develop Josh’s lungs, on top of a regimen of preventative action which Anna stuck to like a monk’s ritual, Josh’s sudden attacks had progressed three times in the past year to the point where hospital admission had been the only option.

If that happened now…

She felt a surge of disappointment on Josh’s behalf. He’d been looking forward to this trip so much. Possibly too much. Miranda had privately wondered if any place in the whole world could match the paradise of Crocodile Creek Kids’ Camp and Wallaby Island as they existed in little Josh’s energetic imagination.

He’d said to her at his last check-up, ‘There’ll be waterfalls and birds and lakes teeming with crocodiles, and rides and surf and the best food, and toys and campfires and singalongs, and I’m going to swim all day, except when I’m feeding the crocodiles. I’m not going in the water with them! They’re in a lake, they’re not in the ocean or the pool. And I think the lake is going to be purple. And fireworks. There has to be fireworks.’

And Miranda had smiled at him and nodded, ‘Purple, huh?’ And, of course, it was good that he was looking forward to it so much, but kids could make themselves sick with excitement, and then Nick had had to come on the holiday instead of Anna, which added a level of stress and uncertainty to the excitement, and—

‘I’m going to go and hunt them up,’ Miranda told Benita. ‘Can you handle things here, and guard Nick and Josh’s luggage? If I can’t get them to the check-in in the next twenty- five minutes at the outside, bad luck. We can’t have the whole group miss the flight because of two people.’

Even if one of them was one of her favourite patients, and the other one was…

Well, was Nick Devlin.

A very memorable ship passing in the night, practically scraping her all down the starboard side like the Titanic and its famous iceberg, and pushing her off course for far too long.

She hurried through the terminal, found the parents’ room and knocked on the door. ‘Nick? Josh? Are you still in there?’

Nick opened the door. He looked anxious, jittery and too light on his feet. He wanted action and control and to get on that plane now. Miranda was shocked at the way she could read his emotional state. No, not just read it, feel it as if it was happening inside her own body. As soon as he saw her, he gave a frowning glance at his watch and she knew what he must be thinking.