Long-Lost Son: Brand-New Family

There were massive, beautiful trees, once lush with enormous canopies and huge branches hung thickly with epiphytes, but now reduced to trunks with a couple of stick-like branches poking up, their greenery lying in a shredded mulch on the ground and already beginning to rot.

Close by the highway, huge weeping figs lay one after another on the ground, their root systems exposed, as if a giant hand had been pulling roadside weeds. Telephone poles leaned drunkenly, with their wires trailing in muddy pools.

They passed a house set back about fifty metres from the road—a typical old-fashioned Queenslander up on wooden pylons ten feet from the ground. Its front veranda and wall had been torn off and lay in a crumpled heap nearby, while its neat interior was open to display like a doll’s house.

And the crops. Totally flattened. Sugar cane, bananas, pawpaws, with the farmers’ ruined houses set in the middle of the destruction.

‘What about the animals?’ Marcia whispered again. ‘The birds…’

‘I know,’ muttered Luke. Cassowaries, sugar gliders, tree frogs, possums, parrots, tree kangaroos, paddymelons, pythons, butterflies…The list went on, endangered species and common ones, predators and prey. Where would they find food and shelter now? ‘But it’s the people we have to think about.’

He slowed to a crawl behind an evacuating family in a loaded down minivan towing a trailer piled high with their belongings and covered with a badly tethered blue plastic tarpaulin. They probably had relatives somewhere down south, who’d promised to put them up until they could get back on their feet, make some decisions, sort out their finances.

‘People help each other,’ Marcia pointed out. ‘Animals can’t.’

‘Nature is cruel,’ Luke answered, sounding cruel himself, although he didn’t mean to be. ‘Marce, we’re all pretty much in shock. Close your eyes and get some rest while we drive. Don’t let it get to you so much, when we’re so strapped as it is.’

‘Oh, put up a few nice defensive walls?’ She smiled to soften the statement.

‘What’s wrong with walls?’ he said.

He knew what she must be thinking—that he must know all about walls. He hadn’t asked any of the right questions about Janey Stafford. But he couldn’t risk giving anything away. He couldn’t bear to. His absurdly leaping hopes, all the anger and distrust, those irritating memories he still had of the time eight years ago when he and Janey had been colleagues.

She’d disapproved of him, and she’d let it show, even before he and her sister had fallen so wildly in love. She’d thought he was a lightweight, and that he relied on charm and networking to get what he wanted. In hindsight, there could have been some truth in all of that. He’d led a pretty charmed life until he’d married Alice Stafford.

Now Janey was asking for him. Which surely meant she must have come to Crocodile Creek to see him. And why would she have done that, unless…?

The shoe tortured him.

The stupid little shoe that Susie Jackson’s sister Hannah had taken on as a personal quest, since arriving from New Zealand for Mike and Emily’s wedding and getting caught up in the drama of the cyclone.

Who did the shoe belong to? What age of child would it fit? There had been two children missing following the bus crash up in the rainforest, they now knew—Georgie’s little half-brother Max, aged seven, whom she hoped would be living with her permanently from now on, and the other boy that Georgie and Alistair had rescued from their hiding place in an old gold-mining shaft, whom Luke hadn’t yet seen. The one who didn’t speak, so they didn’t even know his age or his name.

He knew Susie pretty well after his five months in Crocodile Creek, as a hospital physiotherapist and an orthopaedic surgeon tended to have a fair bit to do with each other professionally. She and Hannah were twins. Identical.

And there had been something quite disturbing about all this concern for a child’s forlorn shoe coming from someone who wasn’t Susie Jackson but who looked exactly like her. He’d had to hold himself back, pretend to a lack of concern and questions that had probably made him look cold in the face of everyone else’s concern.

In the face of the shoe itself.

Because it did have a face, this shoe—a little orange clownfish face, cleverly painted on the worn sneaker to disguise the hole in the toe. Orange felt-tip pen, black markings made with something finer, maybe a laundry marker, and white edgings of correction fluid. Alice had always had a talent for drawing, and for improvisation…

‘It was her sister I knew,’ he’d said about Janey, in the A and E department, the night she’d been brought in. He hadn’t said, This patient’s my sister-in-law.

And it wasn’t Frankie Jay’s shoe, he told himself yet again.

It couldn’t be.

The mysterious silent kid could not be Frankie Jay.

Yet Frankie Jay’s aunt had been on the bus. She was lying in Crocodile Creek Hospital right now, asking about Luke—asking about a little boy, too?—but the shoe couldn’t belong to her nephew—my son—because the consensus around the hospital, from people who knew about such things, was that the shoe must belong to a four-year-old or thereabouts, and Frankie Jay would be turning six in just a few weeks.

Luke wouldn’t even recognise him, he knew.

He hadn’t seen him since he was three months old.

‘He’s coming in to see you now,’ Dr Wetherby reported to Janey.

Charles, she remembered. He’d asked her to call him that, and he knew she was a doctor herself. Charles Wetherby. In a wheelchair. Somewhat of a local legend, she gathered. He was the hospital’s medical director.

Her brain still felt fuzzy and disoriented, slow to process what was happening around her and the things people said, struggling to make sense of everything. But she kept trying, deeply anxious to return to full health, to get out of here, although she didn’t know where she and Felixx would go.

Felixx, who was coming in to see her now.

‘Georgie Turner’s bringing him,’ Charles continued. ‘Our obstetrician. She’s terrific.’

‘He’s been staying with her since the crash.’ She still had blanks in her memory, and forgot things she’d been told.

‘That’s right.’ Dr Wetherby was very patient. ‘She and Dr Carmichael risked their lives to find him and Max, right in the teeth of the cyclone. We’re all devoutly thankful that the four of them survived.’

‘How long have I been in here now?’

‘Since Saturday night. And now it’s Tuesday. You missed all the drama.’

‘Not all of it.’

Except that she couldn’t remember. She and Felixx had been on the bus that had slid off the road. There had been a landslide, triggered by the massive dump of rain that had heralded the cyclone, apparently. She remembered when they’d left Mundarri a few hours earlier, trying to get her waif-like, silent nephew to say goodbye to Raina and Maharia, but as usual he hadn’t said a word, just waved, taken Janey’s hand, stretched his small legs to climb the bus’s high steps.

And that was all.

After this, everything remained blank, and when she’d regained consciousness, she’d had to ask, ‘Where am I?’ like an accident victim in a bad movie, before she’d remembered finding Luke Bresciano’s contact details at Mundarri among Alice’s things. The second thing she’d asked had been, ‘Where’s Felixx? My—my little boy.’ Because, for the moment at least, he was hers.

‘Is he OK?’ she asked now, having been told at first that he was but not quite daring to believe it.

‘Well, we have a couple of concerns…’ Charles Wetherby said.

‘Is he speaking?’

‘No, he’s not, and we were wondering if there’s anything you can tell us about that. He doesn’t seem to have a hearing problem.’

‘He hasn’t spoken to me either.’

‘Since when, Janey?’

She frowned and tried to will the fuzz out of her brain. Since when? Since ever! But had she managed to explain…? No, that’s right. They would have assumed the obvious relationship, and she’d been too fuzzy to correct them. ‘He’s not my son,’ she said.

‘But I thought—’

‘He’s my nephew. My sister’s child. I don’t know him very well. She—They believe in alternative healing at Mundarri. I don’t know if you’ve heard of—’

‘Mundarri? Some kind of spiritual retreat, up in the rainforest?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Well, I do think there’s a place in our system for alternative medicine…’

‘I do, too, sometimes.’

‘But I’ve heard they have some odd ideas.’

‘Odd ideas that killed my sister.’ She sketched out the story as briefly as she could, sidetracked into an ambush of emotion before she could swallow it back, and even just that amount of effort tired her out. ‘I’m sorry, I’m a doctor myself. Right, yes, I did tell you that.’ Her head hurt. ‘As you say, I think alternative healing has its place, but—’

‘We’re both doctors, you don’t have to explain.’

‘Will I be discharged today?’ she asked, knowing the answer even before she heard it.

‘Not before tomorrow, I shouldn’t think,’ Charles said gently. ‘Should we postpone your nephew coming in?’

‘Oh, no, please. I want to see him! Let me just close my eyes for a minute…’

And the next time she opened them, not long afterwards, there he was, being ushered into the room by an attractive and very energetic-looking woman with bright red dangly earrings. She had a pretty impressive bruise on the side of her face, which Janey put down to the cyclone.

‘Felixx…’ Janey struggled to sit up, struggled yet again not to cry. She didn’t want to scare him any more than he’d been scared already by all that had happened, all the uncertainty, all that he’d lost. ‘Oh, sweetheart…Oh, darling…’

She held out her arms, but Georgie Turner had to nudge him forward. ‘Come and hug your Auntie Janey.’ Charles Wetherby must have explained their relationship to her.

At last he came, and she felt his warm little body. Had a momentary flashback to the bus. That’s right, he’d fallen asleep on her shoulder, so warm and trusting and relaxed. Now she wanted to hold him for ever, just for the reassurance that they were both alive, that she hadn’t let him down, that they were together, so everything would be all right.

But he pulled back.

Didn’t speak, of course.

Why didn’t he speak?

He looked scared. She could see him taking in the equipment—the drip stand and bag of fluid and cannula taped to her hand, the monitor reporting on her oxygen and heart, and the imposing side rails and wheels and crank handle of the hospital bed.

Alice, she remembered. He was scared because his mother had died, and now his Auntie Janey was ill, too.

‘I’m feeling so much better, Felixx,’ she said quickly. ‘Dr Wetherby says I can probably get out of here tomorrow. I’m sitting here going woo-hoo!’

On Felixx’s face the sun came out from behind a cloud. It was the only way Janey could describe it to herself. His smile spread wide, his eyes went happy, his tense little shoulders dropped and relaxed. He looked as if there was something else he wanted to say or ask, but didn’t know how. Or didn’t dare.

‘Were you scared I was really sick?’

He nodded, cautious about it.

Oh, hell, of course he had been scared!

‘Nah,’ she said, deliberately casual and dismissive. ‘Takes more than a few bumps on the head to knock me around. We’ll be able to check into a nice motel, and—’ She stopped.

Georgie was shaking her head. ‘No motels,’ she mouthed.

The cyclone, Janey remembered. As she hadn’t seen it or heard it or even seen the damage yet, she had to take it on trust and her foggy brain kept forgetting. None of the motels in town were currently open for business apparently.

She put on a bright voice. ‘Well, we’ll have to camp or something.’

‘If you’re not feeling well enough to travel yet, Janey, we can arrange something. There’s a big house—it’s the original hospital building—where several of the doctors live, and we can usually find extra room.’ Georgie’s bright earrings bobbed as she talked. She looked like the kind of woman who could arrange emergency accommodation on an uninhabited planet if she had to. ‘We can lend you some clothes. Rowdy, here, was pretty happy to be reunited with his missing clownfish shoe, but his toes are getting squashed in those sneakers, so we’ve found him some new ones.’

‘You haven’t thrown the clownfish shoe away?’

‘Ooh, no, weren’t allowed to do that!’ Her face telegraphed the story. Rowdy must have clung to the shoe. Alice had painted the fish on it to hide the hole in the toe, Janey knew, and of course he wanted all the reminders of his mum that he could find.

‘Thanks,’ she said, her voice husky with tears.

‘To be honest, though,’ Georgie said gently, ‘getting back to the issue of where you’re staying, we’re encouraging people to evacuate if they can. Resources are pretty stretched. I think the Golden Palm will be up and running in a couple of days. It’s not exactly five-star, but they only had minor damage and they’re working on getting one block of rooms back into a fit state for guests. There’s the Athina, too, but that’ll be full. They’ve just had a big wedding. You’re from Darwin?’

‘I don’t know where I’m from right now.’ Janey closed her eyes. ‘The moon?’

The thought of finding a place to stay, tracking down Luke, presenting him with his son and saying something like, Do you want him? Alice said you didn’t, but she’s gone now, and I’m wondering if that might make you change your mind. After all, you are the only father he’s got…

Exhausting.

Too hard.

She’d asked someone about Luke, but maybe no one had passed the message on. Or, no, with services in the whole region so strapped, he’d be working around the clock, playing the hero.

He had a nice line in heroic behaviour. People loved the casual humour, the god-like reassurances and the warm fire in his amber-brown eyes, and immediately believed in him. She knew what he was like…or had known once…He wouldn’t be able to resist the opportunity to show off in all this chaos. Which was good, because she didn’t have the energy for their confrontation just yet.

‘Honey, we might take you back to play with Max, OK?’ she heard Georgie say. ‘Auntie Janey needs to rest for a while now.’

He stood there looking at her for a moment, frowning, giving off that same sense that he was about to speak, that the words were just crammed in his mouth bursting to come out, but as usual he stayed silent.

‘Bye, sweetheart,’ she managed, then the sleepy fog stole over her brain again, and hours passed.

The next time she woke up, her head had cleared, her stomach wanted food, her limbs were ready for a good stretch and altogether she felt about a hundred years better.

Until she became aware of the quiet masculine presence in the chair beside her bed—dark hair, strong shoulders, genuine, implacable fatigue written all over him—and realised it was Luke.

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