The Children's Doctor and the Single Mum

‘I suppose you can. A couple of routine Caesareans, a good session at the gym, a DVD with a glass of wine.’

‘The vacuuming,’ she retorted. ‘Two casseroles ready to freeze. Three parent-teacher conferences and a stock-up at the supermarket. Nuclear disarmament, that could be doable in two hours, I reckon, if I really pushed. At least, it sounds easier to my ears than getting the garden in shape. And then there’s…sleep.’ She uttered the word with longing.

He laughed. ‘Those things, too.’ He belatedly registered the fact that she seemed to have three children and realised he was in the presence of a genuine dynamo—one of those women who’d explored the wild island of parenthood and survived intact.

Then one of Max’s monitor alarms went off, they both took it as a signal to get back to work, and he didn’t think anything more about her for the rest of the night.

‘Mum-mmee-ee!’ All three triplets cannoned into Tammy within three seconds of her arrival in the kitchen via the back door. Having braced herself for the onslaught, she withstood it, bent down, hugged three four-year-old bodies—two sturdy, one still a little smaller than his sisters, as he probably would be until puberty.

‘Leave Mummy alone, guys,’ said Tammy’s mother, who wasn’t yet dressed, just wrapped in a towelling robe over a floaty nightgown and boat-like slippers. What time had the kids woken her up? The crack of dawn, as usual?

‘It’s fine,’ Tammy told her. ‘I have seventeen extra minutes now, remember? Nineteen, if I get a really good run and hit all the green lights.’ She’d resisted leaving Royal Victoria for a long time, reluctant to lose the familiarity and the friendships, but the shorter commute had won out in the end.

‘Well, spend eight of them with the kids and the other nine on extra sleep,’ her mother drawled, as if she shared Dr Laird Burchell’s opinion of the value of seventeen minutes. She should know better! ‘You’re back there at three, aren’t you?’

‘And an eight-till-eight on Saturday. But then I’m off until Tuesday night.’ Tammy had been very firm with the hospital about not working daytime shifts on weekends.

Mum could come in from her garden flat at the back of the house and handle the kids when they were at school and pre-school during the day, or when they were asleep at night, but it wasn’t fair to ask her to babysit regularly on weekends in daylight hours when they were all home or shuttling around to soccer and swimming.

Not when there were five of them.

Not when the army had transferred Tom to Darwin two years ago, giving him the excuse he’d been looking for, for the past five years, to cut himself off from their lives. He hadn’t seen the kids since the Christmas before last.

The money he sent as part of their divorce settlement was just regular enough and just generous enough to keep Tammy from taking him to court, but was nowhere near enough to cover what five children and a hefty mortgage really cost. With a generous gift from Mum, she’d managed to buy out his share of the house, but had nothing in savings now. They lived from pay cheque to pay cheque.

So, yes, physically, Tom had been gone from their day-to-day lives for two years. Emotionally, he had been absent since the day he and Tammy had found out that her planned third pregnancy was going to deliver three babies instead of one, following the births of Sarah and Lachlan who had then been aged four and two.

She and Tom had been formally divorced for three years.

Sometimes she still found it hard to understand how he could have done it, how his panic at the prospect of triplets could have brought such an ugly, self-absorbed side of him to the surface. How much had he simply been looking for a good excuse to bail out? How long would their marriage have survived even without the triplets?

Don’t go there, Tammy, she told herself. Not when you’re this tired.

She’d been angry and deeply wounded by his betrayal for a long time. Mostly, she was over it now. Sometimes, though, on a bad day—on the way home from work at close to midnight or when the money was stretched so tight she expected something to snap—yes, she took a backward step and got angry again. It was like what parents said about the NICU. A roller-coaster ride. Three steps forward, two steps back.

‘How was work, anyway? An easy night, I hope,’ Mum asked.

‘I wouldn’t recognise an easy night in the NICU if it jumped up and bit me. But we managed to get two fragile little twins through their first six hours. I’ll have my fingers crossed for them all day.’

‘You won’t,’ Mum retorted. ‘Because you’ll be asleep.’

‘True.’ She yawned, aching for her bed the way some women ached for a lover.

Her mother decreed, ‘Someone else can cross their fingers.’

‘Sounds good.’ She thought about Dr Burchell again. He might cross his. He seemed to care. Well, neonatology wasn’t a field you went into if you didn’t.

She had a sudden flashback to the time he and she had spent getting Max stable in the delivery room, bending their heads over the little boy, reaching past each other. He’d looked at the baby with a kind of intensity that had almost generated heat, and there hadn’t been a moment where she could have doubted his skill or his attitude.

‘Going to eat something before you sleep?’ Mum asked.

‘Nah. Not hungry.’

‘You’ll fade away to a shadow.’

‘Yeah, right!’ She patted her backside, principal storage facility for the extra kilos she’d packed on over the past few years. They were her best friends, those kilos. They wouldn’t let her down. They would be there for her through life’s ups and downs, solid and real, keeping her very, very safe. After all, what man would even think of getting close to a woman with five kids, no money and this much padding on her frame?

I am not on the market, the extra kilos said on her behalf, which meant she could focus on what really counted.

Making ends meet.

Being a good mother.

Getting enough sleep.

‘I’ll just make their lunches, then head upstairs.’ She yawned, wondering what was still in stock on a Friday, the day before shopping day. Any biscuits left? Any fruit? Her stomach rebelled. She was way too tired to think about food.

‘I’ve already done their lunches.’

That brought her close to tears. ‘Oh, lord, Mum, what would I do without you?’ They hugged each other, and Tammy could almost feel through Mum’s body heat all the things she wasn’t letting herself say about Tom.

Ten minutes later, with the alarm set for two-twenty that afternoon when a couple of weeks ago she’d had to set it for two o’clock, she sank into sleep.

CHAPTER TWO

LAIRD WAS late getting to Tarsha’s elegant townhouse in Kew to pick her up for their Friday night date.

Little Adam Parry had given them a scare this evening. Alarms going off. The wrong numbers rising or dropping on his monitors. Laird had had to spend an extra twenty minutes at the hospital on his way to his evening out, adjusting medication doses and ventilator settings, and answering several anguished questions from the parents.

Chris and Fran Parry had wanted the kind of certainty that he couldn’t truthfully give them, and yet it would be disastrous if they sank into hopelessness. There were some parents who detached themselves from their baby emotionally if they thought it wasn’t going to live, in a desperate kind of defence mechanism that they didn’t consciously choose. But premature babies needed their parents. The sound of a mother’s soothing voice could raise their oxygen saturation when it dropped in the presence of medical staff. Even when they were so tiny, they seemed to know when they were loved, and to respond.

He’d found himself looking for the Tammy nurse several times during his visit to the unit, as if she might have been able to bail him out with the Parrys, phrase things better than he could himself, help the couple find the right balance between love and hope and realism. Someone had mentioned her name, but apparently she was on her break and he’d left again before she returned.

Tarsha greeted him at her townhouse door in a cloud of expensive perfume, her model’s figure immaculately clad and her flawless face beautifully made up as always, to make the most of her dark hair and brown eyes, but when he leaned forward to kiss her—cheek or mouth, he hadn’t made up his mind—she pulled back and he saw that she was tense.

‘What’s up?’ he asked her.

‘Nothing…’

‘Come on, Tarsh.’

‘We’ll talk about it at the restaurant.’

‘We’ll talk about it now.’

‘Must we?’

‘Yes. Have some pity for a weary man with fraying patience and don’t play games.’