way for a nurse who was due to give another session of clustered observations and medication.
‘How’s your baby doing?’ Tammy asked the loud woman, still pitching her voice low.
Again the woman ignored the cue regarding her own volume. ‘Oh, she’s great, she’s so beautiful! It’s so hard to see her like this!’ She burst into noisy tears. ‘But she’s coming off the ventilator tomorrow!’
Tammy led her farther away towards the corridor. The mother of triplets checked her babies’ oxygen saturation levels on the monitor. ‘Look, they’ve dropped,’ she said, low and angry, to the babies’nurse. Clearly she blamed the disruptive and self-absorbed presence of the other mother, and quite possibly she was right.
When Tammy came back, she patted the triplet mum—Alison Vitelli—on the shoulder and asked, ‘How’s Riley?’
‘Oh…the same, Dr Lutze says.’ She didn’t look as if she’d brushed her hair that day, and even her skin looked tired. ‘Tammy, can you, please, please, keep that horrible woman away from here?’
‘Well, she has a sick baby of her own.’
‘A thirty-two-weeker!’ Mrs Vitelli said angrily. ‘She keeps crowing about Rachelle’s progress, and how she’ll be graduating out of here in a day or two to the special care unit, as if we all care. As if any of us care! We would care, if she was nicer. But hasn’t she noticed how ill the rest of our babies are? I hope Rachelle does get better fast, because if her horrible mother is around here much longer…’ She trailed off into silent, desperate sobs, and Tammy hugged her and soothed her, stroking her back below the unbrushed tangle of blonde hair.
‘I know, I know,’ she murmured. ‘Try to tune her out, if you can. She’s not important. People can be insensitive sometimes.’
‘Just her,’ Mrs Vitelli sobbed. ‘I hate her! I really hate her! She’s appalling. And I’m going home tomorrow, and I don’t want to leave my babies…’
Tammy looked over Mrs Vitelli’s shoulder and caught Laird’s eye. She was still patting the woman’s back and making low, soothing sounds of agreement, caring—he thought—more than she really should. He read the questions in her face. Is this OK? Do you need me? How is Max?
He made a gesture that said, Stay with her till she’s feeling better, and Tammy nodded. ‘How about you go back to your room and get some sleep now, before morning, Alison?’ she said gently. ‘Your babies don’t need you to get this tired…’
It took Tammy several minutes to soothe Mrs Vitelli’s sobs away and persuade her that sleep was the sensible thing, then she came back to Max and noted the next set of figures in his chart. ‘Oxygen saturation is up,’ she said.
‘Hovering at 93 per cent,’ Laird answered. ‘CO2 is within range. I changed the settings a little, as you can see. So far he’s handling the sedation. And he peed.’
‘Wonderful! Adam hasn’t…?’
‘No, not yet.’
‘Let’s hope.’ She cast a practised eye over the monitors, checking the relationship between the various settings. Any time she came near the babies, something changed in the way she moved. She became even gentler, even calmer—but it was more than that. Laird couldn’t put his finger on it.
‘You must have managed a fair bit of practice with some of this stuff over at Royal Victoria,’ he said, curious to know just how lucky he might come to consider himself, professionally, that she belonged to Yarra Hospital now instead.
Beneath the blue halo of her cap, she grinned. ‘They even let us loose on real babies sometimes.’
Laird still hadn’t seen her hair. He had a horrible feeling he might not recognise her if he saw her in another part of the hospital, garbed in street clothes. Her colouring and features were average—Scottish skin, those amazing blue eyes, pretty-ish, from what he could tell, in a nursy kind of way. In his experience, women didn’t go into nursing if they looked like they could be models—which was probably to the benefit of both professions.
Keeping his voice low, he asked, ‘Why did you make the move?’ He waited almost smugly for some line about the fantastic reputation of the NICU at Yarra. He’d felt fortunate to win a position here himself, and intended to bring the profile of the place even higher as he worked his way into a more senior role.
‘It cuts seventeen minutes off my commute,’ she answered at once, without smiling.
He smiled in response, though, and conceded, ‘Question too personal for this time of night? OK. That’s fine.’
‘No, I’m serious.’
‘You changed hospitals to cut seventeen minutes off your commute?’
‘Seventeen minutes each way, four or five days a week, that’s more than two hours. You can get a lot done in two hours.’
‘I suppose you can. A couple of routine Caesareans, a good session at the gym, a DVD with a glass of wine.’
‘The vacuuming,’ she retorted. ‘Two casseroles ready to freeze. Three parent-teacher conferences and a stock-up at the supermarket. Nuclear disarmament, that could be doable in two hours, I reckon, if I really pushed. At least, it sounds easier to my ears than getting the garden in shape. And then there’s…sleep.’ She uttered the word with longing.
He laughed. ‘Those things, too.’ He belatedly registered the fact that she seemed to have three children and realised he was in the presence of a genuine dynamo—one of those women who’d explored the wild island of parenthood and survived intact.
Then one of Max’s monitor alarms went off, they both took it as a signal to get back to work, and he didn’t think anything more about her for the rest of the night.
‘Mum-mmee-ee!’ All three triplets cannoned into Tammy within three seconds of her arrival in the kitchen via the back door. Having braced herself for the onslaught, she withstood it, bent down, hugged three four-year-old bodies—two sturdy, one still a little smaller than his sisters, as he probably would be until puberty.
‘Leave Mummy alone, guys,’ said Tammy’s mother, who wasn’t yet dressed, just wrapped in a towelling robe over a floaty nightgown and boat-like slippers. What time had the kids woken her up? The crack of dawn, as usual?
‘It’s fine,’ Tammy told her. ‘I have seventeen extra minutes now, remember? Nineteen, if I get a really good run and hit all the green lights.’ She’d resisted leaving Royal Victoria for a long time, reluctant to lose the familiarity and the friendships, but the shorter commute had won out in the end.
‘Well, spend eight of them with the kids and the other nine on extra sleep,’ her mother drawled, as if she shared Dr Laird Burchell’s opinion of the value of seventeen minutes. She should know better! ‘You’re back there at three, aren’t you?’
‘And an eight-till-eight on Saturday. But then I’m off until Tuesday night.’ Tammy had been very firm with the hospital about not working daytime shifts on weekends.
Mum could come in from her garden flat at the back of the house and handle the kids when they were at school and pre-school during the day, or when they were asleep at night, but it wasn’t
