got admitted more than once or stayed for a long time.
Like John Boy, who was still in the dayroom, circling the tree as he watched the fairy-lights sparkling. Eleven years old, John Boy had a progressive and debilitating syndrome that led to myriad physical challenges and his life expectancy was no more than fifteen to twenty years at best. If the cardiologists couldn’t deal with the abnormalities that were causing a degree of heart failure this time, that life expectancy could be drastically reduced.
Of mixed race, with ultra-curly black hair and a wide, white smile, the lad had been fostered out since birth but had spent more of his life in hospital than out of it and he was a firm favourite on this ward. With his frail, twisted body now confined to a wheelchair, John Boy had lost none of his sense of humour and determination to cause mischief.
Right now, he was making some loud and rather disgusting noises, his head hanging almost between his knees. Andy moved swiftly.
‘Hey, John Boy! What’s going on?’
John Boy groaned impressively and waved his hand feebly. Andy looked down and stepped back hurriedly from the pile of vomit on the floor.
‘Oh… no…’
A nurse, Carla, was climbing down the ladder she had used to fasten the huge star on the top of the tree.
‘Oh no,’ she echoed, but she was laughing. ‘Not again, John Boy. That plastic vomit joke is getting old, you know?’
Andy nudged the offensive-looking puddle with his foot. Sure enough, the edge lifted cleanly. John Boy was laughing so hard he had to hold onto the side of his wheelchair to stop him falling out and the sound was so contagious everybody in the room was either laughing or smiling. The noise level was almost enough to drown out the sound of Andy’s pager.
Still grinning, he walked to the wall phone and took the call. Within seconds his grin was only a memory and the frown on his face was enough to raise Carla’s eyebrows. She straightened swiftly from picking up the plastic vomit. She dropped it in John Boy’s lap, which caused a new paroxysm of mirth.
‘What’s up, Andy?’
But he couldn’t tell her. He didn’t want to tell anyone. It couldn’t be true, surely? He kept his eyes focused on John Boy instead. On a patient. An anchor in his real world.
‘His lips are getting blue,’ he growled. ‘Get him back to his room and get some oxygen on, would you, please, Carla?’
He knew they were both staring at him as he left the room. He knew that the tone of his voice had been enough to stop John Boy laughing as if a switch had been flicked off and he hated it that he’d been responsible for that.
But he hadn’t been able to prevent that tone. Not when he was struggling to hold back so many memories. Bad memories.
Oh… God… If this was really happening, why on earth did it have to happen tonight of all nights?
The emergency department was packed to the gills.
Andy entered through the internal double doors. Serious cases were filling the resuscitation bays. He could see an elderly man hooked up to monitors, sitting up and struggling to breathe even with the assistance of CPAP. Heart failure secondary to an infarction, probably. Ambulance officers were still hovering in the next bay where a trauma victim was being assessed. One of them was holding a cyclist’s helmet, which was in two pieces. The next bay had staff intubating an unconscious man. A woman was standing in the corner of the bay, sobbing.
‘I told him not to go up on the roof,’ Andy heard her gasp. ‘I didn’t even want a stupid flashing reindeer.’
The cubicles were next and they were also full. One had a very well-dressed woman lying on the bed, a crooked tinsel halo still on her head.
‘Can’t you do something?’ The man with her was glaring at the poor junior registrar. ‘She’s pregnant, for God’s sake…’
So many people who were having their Christmas Eves ruined by illness or accident. This would have been a very depressing place to be except for the numerous staff members. Some of the nurses were wearing Santa hats or had flashing earrings. All of them, even the ones having to deal with life-threatening situations, were doing it with skill and patience and as much good cheer as was possible. Andy caught more than one smile of greeting. These people were his colleagues. The closest thing he had to family, in fact.
He smiled back and reached the central station to find a nurse he’d actually taken out once, a long time ago. Julia had made it very clear that she was disappointed it had never gone any further and she greeted him now with a very warm smile.
‘Andy… Merry Christmas, almost.’
‘You, too.’ Julia’s long blonde hair was tied back in a ponytail that had tinsel wound around the top. ‘You guys look busy.’
‘One of our biggest nights. Have you just come to visit?’
‘No, I got paged. A baby…’ Andy had to swallow rather hard. ‘Query meningitis?’
Julia looked up at the glass board with the spaces for each cubicle had names and details that it was her job tonight to keep updated. ‘Doesn’t ring a bell…’
‘Brought in by a woman called Gemma… Baxter.’ The hesitation was momentary but significant. Would Gemma have gone back to her maiden name by now? She couldn’t have got married again. Not when they’d never formalised a divorce. Julia didn’t seem to notice the surname and Andy hurried on. ‘Someone called Janice called it through.’
‘Janice?’ Julia looked puzzled. ‘She’s on Reception. In the waiting room.’ Julia frowned. ‘If she’s got a query meningitis it should have come through as a priority. I hope she’s not waiting for a bed or something. Let me go and check.’
‘That’s OK, I’ll do that.’ He could almost hear the wheels turning for Julia now. She was staring at him with an odd expression.
‘Did you say her name was Baxter? Is she a relative?’
Was she? Did it still count if you were still legally married to someone even if they’d simply walked out of your life?
Andy had reached the external set of double doors that led into the waiting room. He spotted Gemma the instant he pushed through the doors. It didn’t matter that the place was crowded and it should have been hard to find anybody—his gaze went unswervingly straight towards her as if it was some kind of magnetic force.
The impact was enough to stop him in his tracks for a moment.
His head was telling him that it didn’t count. Their marriage had been over a very long time ago and there was nothing there for him now.
His heart was telling him something very different.
This was the woman he had vowed to love, honour and cherish until they were parted by death. He’d meant every single word of those marriage vows.
For a moment, Andy could ignore everything that had happened since the day those vows had been spoken. He could forget about the way they’d been driven apart by forces too overwhelming for either of them to even begin to fight. He could forget that it had
