entry into the world but with her little fat hands clutching the umbilical cord as if she was ready to take on whatever it had to offer her.
Certainly not a thirty-week baby, more like thirty-six, perhaps even full term.
Keanu reached out a hand to help Caroline and her precious bundle up from the floor, then took the child and passed her to her mother.
The look of love and joy on the woman’s face as the baby nuzzled at her breast brought tears to Caroline’s eyes.
Keanu was clamping the cord, ready to cut it, but the woman took the scissors out of his hand.
‘I do this for my babies,’ she told him, cutting cleanly between the clamps.
She passed the baby back to Caroline, who put her down gently on the table on a warm sheet Nori had taken from the crib. Carefully, she wiped the tiny baby clean, suctioned her nostrils and mouth, Keanu taking over for the Apgar score, then Nori produced another warm sheet and Caroline swaddled the little girl, whose rosebud lips were pursing and opening like a goldfish’s, instinct telling her she should be attached to her mother’s breast.
Yet Caroline’s arms felt reluctant as she passed the baby back, which was ridiculous.
As if arms even knew what reluctance was …
Nori led the woman to a comfortable armchair and said she’d take care of things from now.
Caroline made to argue but Keanu shook his head, just slightly, and led her out of the clinic.
‘The islanders have their own rituals for disposing of the placenta,’ he explained as they stood in the sun, feeling it warm on their skin after the cool of the air-conditioning inside. ‘Before the hospital the islanders had their own midwife—sometimes two—who cared for all the pregnant women. When you and Christopher were born, your father called for one of these women but it was beyond her ability to save either Christopher from injury, or your mother. Your father then decided that all women should have their babies on the mainland and when young women went to the mainland for training as nurses, the midwives stopped passing on their skills.’
‘But now?’ Caroline asked. ‘Seems to me someone having their sixth baby wouldn’t have got the dates wrong—and then there’s the baby who was in hospital when I arrived.’
‘Exactly,’ Keanu replied with a grin that made her stupid heart race. ‘Now they have the hospital and helicopter as back-up, I think they’ve decided with a little cheating they can have an island birth. In fact, one of the local nurses is over in Sydney, doing some advanced midwifery training. It might not be traditional midwifery but at least, when she returns, the island women will have the option of staying here.’
‘Which is wonderful,’ Caroline declared, smiling herself at the remembered feel of the little baby dropping into her hands. ‘So now?’ she added, feeling that standing in the sun smiling inanely was probably making her look like an idiot. ‘Can we go for a walk? It is so long since I was on Atangi, I need to get the feel and smell of the place back into my blood.’
Keanu swallowed a huge sigh.
He could hardly say no. The baby was fine and whatever was going on inside the clinic was islander business—and women’s business at that.
The problem was that the look on Caro’s face as she’d stared in wonder at the baby she’d caught had stirred all kinds of uncomfortable thoughts in his mind, and unease in his body.
He’d felt tension from Caro’s closeness the whole time they had been in the room and although he was professional enough to not let it affect him, now he wasn’t fully focussed on something else, the awareness had grown.
It was because of the notebook, and something to do with sitting on the rock and feeling her hurt when he’d pointed out the flaws in her idea—feeling her disappointment, although she was smart enough to know it would never have worked. Up until then, he’d been able to explain away his physical reactions to her by the fact she was an attractive woman—nothing more than normal physical reactions.
But this was Caro …
‘I can go for a walk by myself,’ she said, obviously sensing his hesitation.
Get over it, he told himself.
‘No, it’ll be an hour before Jack finishes his refuelling,’ he said to her. ‘Why don’t you wander down to the harbour while I go and see a couple of the elders about Alkiri’s funeral?’
She hesitated, and he wondered if she was feeling the same awkwardness that was humming through his nerves.
‘Come with me or I’ll come with you,’ she said quietly. ‘Let’s be friends again.’
He heard the plea in her voice and a faint tremor in the words caused a pain in his chest.
‘Can we just be friends?’ he asked.
Fire sparked in her eyes.
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Keanu, I don’t know that any more than you do. But there’s stuff that needs to be done, things we can do to help the situation here, so surely we can get over all that’s happened between us in the past and this inconvenient attraction business that’s happening now and work together to make things better.’
She paused, then added in a quieter voice, ‘Our friendship was special to me and, I think, to you. Maybe the reward for our efforts would be finding that again.’
He put his arm around her shoulders and drew her close although every functioning brain cell was yelling at him to keep his distance.
The lovely eyes he knew so well looked into his—wary and questioning.
‘Our friendship was the most important thing in my life, Caro,’ he admitted. ‘That will never change.’
She half smiled and shifted so her body wasn’t touching his—apart from his arm, which still rested on her shoulders.
‘Thanks,’ she said, and moved away completely, then in a tone that told him any emotional talk between them was done she added, ‘Let’s go and see the school first.’
But that was a mistake.
The first thing they noticed—everyone noticed—in the schoolyard was the huge old curtain fig tree, so called because air roots grew down from the branches, forming a thick curtain around the trunk.
And behind that curtain, like hundreds of children who’d attended the school over the years, they’d once shared a very chaste kiss. Her grandma had died and Caroline had known they’d both be off to mainland schools the following year, and for some reason—playing hide and seek most probably—they’d both ended up beneath the fig.
Not that an innocent kiss between a ten-year-old girl and a twelve-year-old boy meant much, but the memory sent a tingle up her spine.
‘All the kids are in school,’ Keanu murmured. ‘Should we?’
Of course they shouldn’t but she was ducking between the trailing roots right behind him, letting him take her in his arms, turn her towards him, and lift her head to his, to relive that first kiss.
In
