A Bride and Child Worth Waiting For

‘Keeping ourselves only unto ourselves except for when we’re with Lily,’ Charles said.

‘You understand,’ she whispered, humbled.

‘We’re birds of a feather,’ he said.

‘Charles, I am sorry.’

‘Don’t be sorry,’ he said. ‘It was me who kissed you. I was overstepping the boundaries. It won’t happen again.’

Lily was asleep when they arrived at Cal and Gina’s. Cal heard the car and brought her out to them. She was slight for her age, a wiry, freckled imp with a tangle of brown-gold curls and a smattering of freckles, just like Jill’s. She woke as Jill buckled her into her car seat but she made no demur. She was accustomed to this. Even when her parents had been alive, their love affair with rodeos meant she was very adaptable.

‘Goodnight, sleepyhead,’ Cal said, ruffling her tousled curls before he stepped back from the car. Then he smiled at Jill. He lifted her ring hand and whistled.

‘Congratulations.’ He hugged her and kissed her on the cheek. Jill found herself flushing.

‘It’s nothing.’

‘It’s fabulous,’ he said. He looked into the car at Charles and grinned. ‘Congratulations to you, too.’

‘Thanks,’ Charles said. ‘But we’re only doing it for Lily.’

‘Right,’ Cal said, sounding dubious. He looked back into the car at their sleepy little daughter. She was wearing her favourite pink pyjamas with blue moons and stars, her curls were tied up—or they had been tied up—with a huge, silver bow and there was a smudge of green paint on her nose.

‘We did give her a bath,’ he said ruefully. ‘With CJ. And Gina did her hair.’

‘I’ll give her another one before she leaves tomorrow,’ Jill said.

‘You’re not coming across to the island for the opening?’

‘I’m in charge here.’

‘Alistair can take over. You know he’d like—’

‘I’m in charge here,’ she said flatly.

‘But you’re telling Lily tonight, right?’

‘Telling me what?’ Lily asked sleepily.

‘What we’ve been doing tonight,’ Charles said bluntly from inside the car. ‘Come on, Jill. I need to go back to the hospital before I go to bed. I have two patients I want to see tonight and there’s packing to do afterwards. We need to move.’

So move they did. They took Lily home and tucked her in as they’d done a score of times before this night and Jill thought, Where do we start?

Lily started for them. She snuggled into her little bed, checked that her toys—two teddies, one giraffe, a bull like her favourite real bull, Oscar, one duck and a doll with no hair—were all lined up in their appropriate places. Then she said, ‘It’s a really pretty ring. Did Charles give it to you?’

‘Yes,’ Jill said, and felt helpless.

‘Why?’

‘We’ve decided to get married,’ Charles said. ‘You know your uncle came today? He says he wants you to live with a real mother and father. For some reason your Uncle Tom thinks that we can only be a real mother and father if we’re married. Jill and I want to look after you until you’re old enough to take care of yourself. So we’ve decided to get married so your Uncle Tom will let us keep you.’

She regarded them both, her eyes wide and interested.

‘So you’ll look after me all the time?’

‘Yes,’ Jill said firmly. ‘If it’s OK with you we’ll sign papers that say no one can take you away from us.’ She took a deep breath. ‘And, Lily…if you wanted to call us…well, maybe you wouldn’t want to call us Mum and Dad. Your mum and dad were your special, real parents. But if you feel you’ll like to maybe call us something like Mama and Papa…’

‘Your names are Jill and Charles,’ Lily said flatly.

‘That’s right,’ Charles said, and he flicked a strand of Lily’s hair back behind her ear. ‘We’re Jill and Charles, or whatever you want to call us. And you’re Lily. But we’re family from now on. Right?’

‘OK,’ Lily said obligingly, and hugged her teddies and closed her eyes. ‘Goodnight.’

And that was that. A mammoth, life-changing decision converted to a few simple sentences. They returned to Jill’s living room and Jill felt deflated.

The door from her living room led through to Charles’s living room. This was what they did every night. They said goodnight to Lily. Charles wheeled through to his apartment. He closed the door behind him.

Contact over.

‘You know, we could knock this whole wall out,’ Charles said thoughtfully, and she stared at him.

‘What?’

‘This used to be an old homestead before the hospital was built. It was too big for me so I cut it into two apartments. But this room… It was the original sitting room. It had huge French windows looking over the cove. I had to sacrifice the windows to convert it into two rooms. We’ve knocked a door through. Why not go the whole hog, knock the entire wall down and put the windows back in? You know we almost always have the televisions on the same channel. Or we could have stereo televisions. Or,’ he said, warming to his theme with typical male enthusiasm, ‘one really big television.’

‘I might have known,’ she said tightly. ‘Boys with technology. Is this the entire motivation behind the proposal?’

‘Hey, you get an opal,’ he said, aggrieved. ‘I reckon I ought to get a big screen. How big do you think, if we make it one room?’ He hesitated. ‘A family room,’ he said cautiously. ‘Where we can be a family.’

‘But I need my privacy.’

His smile died. ‘I’m not talking combining bedrooms, Jill.’

‘No,’ she said, and faltered.

‘So marriage doesn’t mean watching telly together. It doesn’t mean family?’

How to explain that that was dangerous in itself? Closeness? Familiarity? She didn’t do it.

As it was, it sometimes felt too close. Lily popped back and forth between the apartments. She slept in her bedroom on Jill’s side, but if Jill was caught up at the hospital Charles would check on her. Jill would occasionally get home and discover Charles on her side of the beige door.

It shouldn’t matter. But she’d spent so long building her defences that to breach them now…

Kelvin was there. He was still in her head. A shadow, waiting to crash down on her. She should see a therapist, she thought dully, but then a therapist would tell her she was imagining her terror, and she knew she wasn’t.

She was risking enough with this marriage. If she could just keep it…nothing, maybe the sky wouldn’t fall on her head.

‘OK, we won’t knock down the wall,’ Charles said wearily. ‘We go on as before.’