‘How many days ventilated.’
‘Twenty.’ The answers to his spitfire questions were well known to her but his emotionless firing of them was irritating.
‘Which cube?’
‘Eleven,’ she said as they drew level with the central nurses’ station.
‘Chart?’
She handed the thick file to him but kept hold of it. He frowned. ‘Problema?’
‘Peyton is that friend of mine I told you about in the lift that day. She lost a baby, her husband walked out and she’s dealing with her daughter’s fragile health. McKenzie’s implant operation has been postponed three times in the last year and she’s supposed to go in next week for it and that probably won’t happen now so Peyton is… a little emotional at the moment. Just… I don’t know…’ She looked at his forbidding face. ‘Smile or something.’
Ignoring her jibe, he cut straight to the chase. ‘Implant?’
‘Sorry.’ Nat let go of the chart realising she’d left out a vital part of patient history. ‘Cochlear implant. McKenzie’s profoundly deaf.’
Unsurprised, he just nodded and said, ‘Are you coming?’
He didn’t wait for an answer and Nat followed him across to the cubicle. The harsh screech of the curtain as he snappedit back didn’t bode well and she castigated herself for irritating him just prior to seeing Peyton. But she needn’t have worried; he gave Peyton a gentle smile, his gaze flicking over a listless but awake McKenzie, before saying, ‘Hello, I’m Alessandro.’
Andsigned, it too.
Nat’s eyes bugged, as did Peyton’s. ‘Oh. You sign?’
He smiled and nodded. ‘In a fashion. I have an aunt in Italy, who’s profoundly deaf. I spent a lot of time there as a kid. She was like a second mother to me. My cousin Val, her son, is a renowned cochlear implant surgeon in London.’
Continuing to sign as he spoke without giving it conscious thought told Nat all that she needed to know about his level of skill with the language. Not that McKenzie cared or could probably even understand his mixture of sign language but it was evident signing was very familiar to Alessandro.
And that was just the beginning. Nat marvelled at the change in Alessandro when he was with a patient. He was great with McKenzie, getting her X-rayed, admitting her for intravenous antibiotics when the films revealed bilateral consolidation and quickly placing anIV. He was especially good with Peyton, chatting about sign-language differences and asking her about the scheduled operation.
He was like a different man. Involved. Animated. Connected. Now, if he could just be more like that at home she could walk out of their lives in a couple of months knowing it had all been worth it. Even if it meant having to go to bed every night with a fire in her belly and a buzz in her blood that wouldn’t quit.
On Friday, Nat was sitting on the quiet mat at crèche with Julian and another boy, Henry. She was trying to encourage afriendship between them. Henry was a nice kid who had been trying to engage Julian for a little while now with not much success.
It wasn’t that Julian didn’t like Henry – she could tell he did. But he still shied away from other kids, preferring to keep to himself or follow her around. Julian was more than happy to play and talk with Henry as long as she was there as well.
Henry had brought in some photos of his family holiday to New Zealand that someone had printed for him on paper and they were going through them. There was a beautiful shot of Henry and his mother. He was sitting in her lap, facing the camera. She had her arms crossed across his front, pulling his back in tight to her chest. She was looking down at him and Henry was looking up and laughing. A massive mountain gave the background some perspective.
Julian took the photo reverently. ‘Is that your mummy?’
He didn’t take his eyes off the photo and the look on his face was heartbreaking. It suddenly struck Nat that there were no photos of Julian’s mother anywhere. She’d been so distracted by the starkness of the never-ending white, so snow blind, she hadn’t even thought about that.
Goodness,hermother had practically set up a shrine to her father after he’d gone. Despite the fact that he’d deserted them. But she’d been determined to maintain contact, to keep his memory fresh for Nat’s sake.
Pity her father hadn’t tried as hard.
But there wasn’t even a framed picture for Julian to put on his bedside table. No family portraits hung on the wall. Come to think of it, not even Alessandro had pictures of the wife he so obviously mourned. Not in his office or his bedroom. It was almost as if she’d never existed.
Was it too painful for him to look at her? And why did the thought depress her so much?
She made up her mind to ask Alessandro about it tonight after Julian went to bed. It seemed to have become her role to ask the hard questions. To be the bad guy. It certainly hadn’t taken her long to realise that as much as Alessandro wanted to reach his son, he was still floundering and relied heavily on her to facilitate.
They both did. She was the referee and her ruling was final.
Alessandro seemed more than happy for her to take up where his wife had left off. Be some kind of substitute mother to Julian. And she knew that was about his grief more than shirking his duties, that he’d been knocked sideways and was groping in the dark. But she wasn’t living with them so Alessandro could hide from his son, to maintain his emotional distance.
She was there until her unit was built and, in the meantime, she was in Julian’s corner. He was a four-year-old child and, God knew, he needed someone in his corner.
