One Baby Step at a Time Page 13
‘You’re supposed to understand I’m her mother,’ Serena said, and Nick, his heart sinking, knew she saw Steffi as nothing more than a pawn in whatever game she was currently playing.
‘And?’ he prompted, not wanting to say too much, not wanting to let the anger building inside him loose anywhere near his daughter.
‘That’s all. You must realise that in family law disputes the judge almost always gives custody to the mother.’
‘You’re saying you want her?’ Nick demanded, his stomach in knots at the thought of having a legal fight for his daughter. ‘You want to be part of her life? Always, or just until she gets in the way of your career?’
Serena lit another cigarette from the stub of the one she’d just finished, and blew a lazy plume of smoke into the air.
‘What do you want, Nick?’ she asked, and Nick, although now he was wondering about it himself, answered her.
‘I want us to be a family,’ he said. ‘I think that’s the least we can do for Steffi. She didn’t ask to be here, but now she is, let’s see if we can give her the best possible life, which, to me, means two parents.’
‘I only ever had my mother, and you had no one but your grandmother,’ Serena reminded him.
‘And look at the mess we both made of things,’ Nick snapped. ‘Why do you think I want two parents for Steffi?’
‘I won’t accept such nonsense. I’m successful, you’re successful, but I get your point, I just don’t get living in that God-awful place up north. If you want to play happy families with me and Steffi, you’ll have to play here.’
It would be best to be here, Nick conceded in his heart. Far away from Bill and the threat to his equilibrium that she now represented.
‘There’s Gran...’ he muttered, but so tentatively Serena had no trouble laughing off his feeble objection.
‘You could fly up twice a month to visit her,’ she said. ‘Even take the child.’
The child?
Was he wrong to be thinking of Serena as the mother figure in his family if she didn’t love Steffi?
‘Do you love her?’
The question erupted out of him—far too loud and far too abrupt.
Serena smiled the serene smile he knew she practised so it matched her name.
‘I’m her mother, aren’t I?’ she responded, telling him absolutely nothing.
* * *
He slept on the couch, took Steffi for walks around traffic-busy streets, talked to Alex and Dolores, his life in limbo.
Because he wouldn’t share Serena’s bed?
He’d asked himself the question, suggested perhaps everything would fall into place once he did, but something held him back—something more than a few errant kisses up in Willowby. It came down, he decided, to Serena’s attitude towards Steffi. She showed no interest in her child, never stopping to play with her, to touch her, to hold her in her arms and cuddle her.
And slowly it began to seep into his family-obsessed brain that perhaps the mother, father, child scenario wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be. Well, he’d always known that, known the divorce statistics and the prevalence of single-parent families, so why had it seemed so important to him?
‘I’ve booked a table at Fiorenze for tonight,’ Serena announced, coming out onto the deck where he was watching Alex and Steffi build a tower of blocks. ‘Alex and I are off tomorrow, so this will be our last chance to talk.’
‘Tomorrow?’ Nick repeated, looking from Serena to Alex, who simply shrugged.
‘Tomorrow!’ Serena repeated.
Nick knew he must look as stunned as he felt. The previous talk had been of a departure ten days away.
‘You mean we’ve got one whole day in which to work out the rest of our lives?’ he demanded.
‘And one night,’ Serena added, smiling in such a way he knew she’d planned this carefully. A candlelit dinner at a place where they’d eaten often in the past, then home, slightly tipsy, to fall into bed together.
Maybe it would work...
He’d barely had the thought when she added, ‘You’re more than welcome to stay on here—it would give you time to find us a bigger apartment.’
Nick closed his eyes and counted to ten, determined not to explode in front of Steffi. He realised now that Serena’s mind had been made up from the start, which was why she’d cut off any discussion about their future. For some obscure reason—just to have a man around?—she wanted him back and was happy to have ‘the child’, as she called her daughter, included in the package. Tonight, in Serena’s mind, he’d fall back into her bed and the matter would be settled.
She’d disappeared before he’d regained enough control to follow her and insist they talk—off to buy a new dress for tonight, according to Dolores.
He slumped down on the couch, knowing he’d been too weak, too tentative, trying to do what was best for everyone without upsetting any of the parties.
Well, maybe not best for everyone but best for Steffi.
Sick of the chaos in his head he flicked on the television and stared blankly at the screen, only slowly coming to the realisation that every channel was showing the same thing—a mine, miners trapped, mine rescue teams already on site. The disaster was here in Australia—Macaw.
Macaw was near Willowby...
CHAPTER TWELVE
‘DOLORES, PACK UP all Steffi’s things, we’re going home,’ he yelled, beginning to stuff his own gear into his bag then realising he’d need to book a flight.
Impossible. Every journalist in Australia was trying to get to Willowby—
‘Dolores, can you drive? Have you got a licence?’
‘Of course, Dr Nick, you know that, but why, what is wrong?’
‘We’ll have to drive, no chance of a flight. We’ll take turns and stop overnight somewhere on the way—we have to think of Steffi.’
Serena arrived home as he was stacking all their gear in the hall.
‘What’s this?’
‘I’m going home—there’s trouble—I’m needed there.’
She looked at him for a long moment then said, ‘It’s that woman Bill, isn’t it? It’s always been Bill!’
And on that note she stormed away, slamming the bedroom door for must have been the twentieth time since his arrival.
It wasn’t until he was out of the city, on the freeway, heading north, that he had time to consider what Serena has said.
It’s always been Bill!
Had it?
No, he was certain that wasn’t the case. Until he’d come back to Willowby he’d never thought of Bill as other than a friend.
So why had the attraction flared so quickly?
‘I don’t know,’ he muttered, waking Dolores up from a light doze then being unable to explain exactly what it was he didn’t know.
* * *
Because Bill had done some of her training at Macaw and knew it well, and possibly because, in the stressed situation, the recue organiser didn’t realise she was a woman, she was one of the two chosen to go down the escape shaft to follow the miners through to where the three missing men might be trapped.
Excitement and trepidation churned inside her as she followed her partner down the ladder. Her brother Dan had told her that the ladders were checked every day so although this one seemed to move away from the wall a little, she kept faith in it.
‘Two more levels to go,’ the miner at the bottom of the shaft told her, and Bill touched him on the shoulder in thanks and sympathy, knowing how much he must want to be doing more to help his mates but sticking to his job in the whole operation right there at the bottom of the ladder.
The next shaft was darker and they turned on their lights so it glowed like a vertical tunnel with a train coming through. One more shaft and they were on th
e level of the fall, bright lights ahead showing them where the men were working.
‘We’ve opened up a small passage over the top of this fall,’ one of the miners explained, ‘but we can’t get the communication probe through.’
He looked at Bill, the least bulky of the four people in the shaft.
‘Reckon you can crawl up there and push it through.’
‘I’ll just drop this gear,’ she said, and ignored the ‘Crikey, it’s a woman’ comment from the second miner, leaving her partner to explain she was one of the top members of the mine rescue team. Clad just in her overalls and with a tiny mike attached to her shirt just below the collar, she was ready.
One of the men hoisted her up and she clambered into the small space the men had cleared, slowly edging her way forward, following the fine metal tube that was the probe, glad to see bolts in the stone above her that told her the roof of this part of the tunnel was safe.
The going was so slow she sometimes wondered if she was moving at all, but eventually she could see the end of the thin wire.
The probe had stuck on a rock that projected from the wall and she had to manoeuvre the tube around it, and keep feeding it forward. The opening she was in grew narrower and she knew she wouldn’t be able to follow the probe, but a shout as she pushed it further and further told her it had reached the trapped men.
* * *
Berating himself all the way, Nick drove north. How stupid had be been to think a family could work without love? How stupid had Bill been, too, now he came to think about it!
Berating Bill for her stupidity was easier than thinking of her endangering herself in a mine accident, or trapped underground, or—
He’d think of numbers. He could reach Brisbane in ten hours, twelve allowing time to stop and rest and eat and let Steffi have a run around. Another ten—or twelve—and he’d be home.
He pressed the speed dial on his phone for the fortieth time and got the out-of-range message from Bill’s mobile. He thought of phoning Bob but common sense told him it was better he didn’t know what Bill was doing—not while he was driving.
Dolores drove as calmly and competently as she did everything else so he could sleep while she was at the wheel.
It was tempting to keep driving but, no, working in the ER he knew too well the risk of an accident when driving for too long. They’d stop, eat, sleep and go on refreshed. Tomorrow they’d be home.
Home!
He didn’t dare dwell on Bill, on where she was or what she might be doing, he just knew he had to be there, to be close to wherever she was...
* * *
Bill could hear the excitement in the voices ahead of her, but although their words would be clear to those at the other end of the communication probe, they were jumbled coming through the rock to her.
She tried to work out differences in the voices, certain there were two, but three? She wasn’t so sure.
‘I’m coming out,’ she said into her mike and, carefully, she began to edge backwards, knowing there would probably be other things she’d have to shove through to the men. Squirming backwards over stones wasn’t fun, and it took far longer than she’d taken going in. Time ceased to exist but in the end she managed, knowing she was almost out when someone caught hold of her boots then guided her feet to footholds on the rocks.
‘All three safe,’ one of the miners told her. ‘You did good,’ adding, ‘for a girl,’ but smiling as he said it—the smile a bigger thank you than words could ever express.
She sat now, knowing the rule to rest when you could, while the men listened to the probe and began to plan the next move.
‘How big is the gap, do you think?’
Her rescue partner came to sit beside her and Bill replayed her journey in her head.
‘There’s a rock jutting out from the wall that had stopped the probe and from what I could feel with my hand in that area, there’s maybe a gap the size of a small water pipe. Once I got the probe through there, it wasn’t impeded in any way. It reached the men about a metre past that small gap.’
‘Small water pipe?’
He shaped his fingers to show her the circumference he was imagining and she agreed he’d got it right.
‘Could it be widened?’
Bill closed her eyes and looked at a mental image of the rock jutting out in the light from her helmet, at the rocks around it, one exceedingly large one right at the top.
‘Not without a great deal of trouble,’ she replied.
‘Well, we’ll make do with what we’ve got,’ her partner said. ‘You willing to go back in?’
‘Of course, but if you’re getting pipe sent down, get that flexible stuff that will bend a bit around obstacles. I can use a guide wire to push it through, like the one the probe had.’
Technicalities kept them busy, messages going back and forth for hours until it was time for Bill to crawl back into the narrow space again, this time pushing the pipe in front of her, the pipe that might prove a lifeline for the miners if they were trapped there for much longer.
* * *
He had to know!
Having spent the night in a motel just north of Brisbane, they were on the road again at dawn, and Nick finally cracked and turned on the radio. He knew Dolores would have watched the drama on the television in her room at times during the night, but he’d been resolute in not watching anything that might stop him sleeping.
‘It is bad, Dr Nick,’ Dolores said. ‘It is why we’re going home?’
‘Yes.’
One word was all he could manage, the news that rescuers had reached the eleven men in the safe refuge should have cheered him, but it had been followed by the information that members of the mine rescue squad were three levels underground, still trying to get to the other three men, and that had dried the saliva in his mouth, certain Bill was there—three levels underground...
Drive carefully and steadily, he told himself as he switched off the radio and turned Steffi’s nursery rhymes back on, singing along to ‘One little, two little, three little ogres’ and wondering why nursery rhymes, like most fairy-tales, were unnecessarily grim.
Steffi, however, loved it, and after they’d done monsters and goblins he had to turn off the next song and keep singing, coming up with other creatures like bunyips and yetis that they could include in the song.
‘Miss Bill, she sings this song too,’ Dolores said, and Nick felt his stomach clench.
How stupid had he been to even consider Serena might want to be a mother to their child! Serena, who hadn’t once cuddled her daughter, let alone sung her a song.
They stopped by a park and got out to let Steffi play awhile, Dolores buying sandwiches and fresh bottles of water, heating Steffi’s bottle in a café across the road, promising Steffi a proper cooked meal once they reached home.
‘No more of this bottled stuff,’ she told the little girl, who didn’t seem to mind what she ate any more than she objected to a two-thousand-kilometre car ride.
Dolores drove and he tried to sleep, but the closer they got to Willowby the more anxious he became. In the end he phoned Bob.
* * *
The tube was harder. It caught on things and bent the way she didn’t want it to go, not that she could see where she did want it to go. She reached one arm as far forward as she could, scraping it, even through her overalls, against the jutting rock but needing to find the obstacle that lay ahead.
Loose dirt.
Dirt was easy.
Dig it out.
Glad she was wearing gloves, she dug and scraped, pulling the dirt back towards her body, tucking it under herself then digging and scraping again.
Behind her she could hear the anxiety building, someone trying to push the tube further into her tunnel, although she wasn’t ready for it.
* * *
They were within four hours of home, late on the second day of their mammoth journey, when they heard that the eleven men, one seriously injured, would shortly be brought to the surface of the mine.
In an unemotional tone the reporter announced that rescue attempts were continuing for the three other miners.
‘And that’s all?’ Nick demanded of the radio, because by now he knew, from Bob, that Bill was down that mine.
‘She will be safe,’ Dolores assured him. ‘The one thing Bill is is sensible so she won’t take any risks.’
‘Oh, no?’ Nick muttered, and drove on.
* * *
The tube went through.
Bill heard the shout of delight then felt it move beneath her as they tugged it further into their small area of dubious safety.
Now to get out so things could be fed through the tube. Water and eventually food going in, information about the situation in the tunnel coming out. The probe was good for communication but if the engineers in charge of the rescue needed a diagram of the area and some indication of the placement of the rock fall, the men could supply it.
She began to edge backwards, harder to do now because of the tube and the dirt she’d shifted back.
Harder to do because she was tired.
Nonsense! You’ve been a lot tireder than this on night duty and still kept focussed on your work.
She edged a little further, inching backwards, body cramped and aching, praying that any moment someone would grasp her boot and she’d know she’d made it.
* * *
Nick dropped Dolores at the apartment, carried up all their baggage, then, not bothering to return the hire car, drove straight to the mine.