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‘Bless you,’ Mrs Challoner said. ‘I’ll be there as soon as I can.’
Bless you.
What a lovely thing for someone to have said, Emma thought as she made her way back to Ebony to assure her that her mother was on the way.
Two words—but enough to reassure Emma too. This mother would stand by her child and probably bring up her grandchild.
And for a moment she wondered what it would have been like to grow up with a mother.
She shook the thought away. Dad had done his best to be both mother and father to her, and as far as she was concerned he’d done a damned good job.
But would her boys grow up and wonder what it might have been like to have had a father?
Should she get serious about finding a father for them?
Somehow that task seemed slightly distasteful now.
It was all Marty’s fault…
* * *
Marty had finished with the students and was back in Ken’s shack, flying out in his own chopper on what should have been time off. The old man had prided himself on keeping it clean, but he’d probably been failing for some time, and Marty wanted to make sure it was as spruce as Ken would have had it in the early days.
Yet walking in brought memories of Emma—of her closeness as they’d sat waiting for the old man to die, of her softness later when they’d found relief from the trauma that came with any death, back at his house…
He cleared and cleaned almost maniacally, aware his burst of energy was a way of not remembering. And when he was finally happy that Ken’s little home looked as it had when the old man had been younger, he went out into the bush, picking red gum tips and yellow bottlebrush, dark green fig leaves and some trailing creeper.
He arranged them all in a big old coffee can, just as Ken had done, and set them in the empty fireplace. They’d dry out there, and still look good—a dried arrangement, Hallie had told him they were called.
He checked the cleared area around the shack for rubbish and loaded it all into the chopper.
Then he walked towards the little creek that gurgled and splashed its way down the mountain, and sat on the log where he had sat at least a dozen times with Ken, listening to his stories of the bush, picking up a lot of the older man’s ideas about life and how to live it—about being true to oneself, and owing nothing to any man.
And love?
Thinking back, he couldn’t remember discussing love with Ken, although he’d been there often as a teenager when love—or more probably lust—had never been far from his thoughts.
‘What would you have said, Ken?’ he asked of the man who was no longer there.
But try as he might, Marty couldn’t imagine what Ken’s response would have been, and as the creek had nothing to tell him either, he walked back to shut the door of the shack and took himself, reluctantly, back to Braxton.
Reluctantly because he was off duty and being off duty gave him more time to think, and while he might now be out of the shack and his memories of Ken’s life, the fact remained that he’d had unprotected sex with the one woman in the world he would hate to hurt.
Maybe it would be okay…
She was looking for a father for her boys, so she was probably on the Pill…
Surely she was on the Pill?
Yet, somehow, he was pretty sure she wasn’t.
Emma was too organised, too methodical, to look beyond going out with any possible candidates in her quest. She was conservative, would take it slowly, not rush into anything—
Which meant she’d go on the Pill when she was ready to commit to a man, not take it all the time just in case.
Concentrate on flying, he told himself, but he knew he could fly this little toy in his sleep.
Nevertheless, he did concentrate, more to block out the other thoughts, and he landed at the base, carried the rubbish bags to the skip, cleaned out and refuelled the chopper, and even gave it a wash.
‘Too much time on your hands?’ Dave called to him. ‘You can help me do a stocktake, then while I clean out the chopper you can take the list to the hospital and bring back the stock.’
No way! He was avoiding the hospital.
Only surely Emma wouldn’t be there—not after pulling an all-nighter.
And he did need something to do.
* * *
Emma had sent her patient up to Maternity, put staples into the split head of a teenager, and dug a bead from the nose of a kindergarten kid.
Deciding, as she wasn’t supposed to be on duty that day, she could have a cup of tea, she escaped to the tea-room, desperate to have a think.
Why hadn’t it occurred to her earlier?
Why did she have to wait until a pregnant teenager came in before she considered her own situation, and the fact that she’d had unprotected sex with the one man in the world she shouldn’t have?
