his action plan off the top of your head?’ Nick asked in her ear.
Miranda felt rather than saw him. He’d squatted down to Josh’s level, just as she had done, and his well-muscled upper arm bumped her shoulder while his backside rested on his heels. She caught the faint waft of some very pleasant male grooming product. Aftershave or shampoo, or maybe just plain old soap.
He didn’t wait for her answer. ‘Because I do. You have other people to take care of. Let me handle this.’
‘Everyone else can wait,’ she answered, not sure if he understood the urgency. He must surely realise that the attack was being exacerbated by Josh’s mix of anxiety and over-excitement.
Too aware that he hadn’t moved further away, Miranda uncapped the Ventolin inhaler and attached it to the spacer, helped Josh get the other end of the spacer ready at his lips. ‘OK, ready to breathe out? Now…’
But Josh couldn’t concentrate and, even with the spacer, he mistimed the dose and took the spacer from his lips too soon. Miranda saw a puff like smoke as most of the drug escaped into the air.
Lauren Allandale was watching Josh’s struggle for breath and his clumsiness with the inhaler, as were a couple of other kids and a parent or two. The atmosphere was chaotic and claustrophobic. Another big group of tourists had just arrived, ready to check in for their flight, and the tour leader was yelling instructions to them in a language Miranda couldn’t identify. Korean? More stares arrowed in Josh’s direction.
‘Please, let me deal with this,’ Nick repeated, needing to lean close to keep a shred of privacy for his son. Miranda felt the warmth of his body, let herself meet his brown gaze for a moment and found it far too familiar. He wasn’t smiling. His expression was motionless, almost forbidding, and yet it stirred her and filled her with memories. Suddenly, as she’d feared all along, ten years wasn’t very much time at all. ‘You have other things to attend to. And he’s my son.’
‘You’re confident that you know what to do?’ She felt their fingers touch briefly as he took the inhaler and spacer out of her hands. Should she grab the equipment back?
‘For heck’s sake, I’m a doctor!’
‘I mean, the exact dosage. The frequency.’
‘Yes, I do,’ he told her shortly, shoving the equipment into Josh’s backpack. ‘The very first thing I’m going to do is take him somewhere quiet. We can’t get him focused and relaxed here. I saw signs for a parents’ room.’ He spoke to his son, turning a shoulder to shut Miranda out, whether through hostility or because she just wasn’t important at the moment she didn’t know. ‘Josh, come with me and we’ll get you breathing again, shall we?’ His voice sounded stiff and almost formal. ‘We don’t want you having to go to bed as soon as we get there. We want to get out exploring, right?’
Josh nodded, but his eyes were still wide with effort and fear. Fear of not being able to breathe? Or of something else?
‘When’s the latest we can get back here for check-in?’ Nick asked Miranda. ‘Twelve-forty? Don’t hold the group up, will you?’
‘Your baggage…’ she recalled. You couldn’t check in someone else’s bags, neither did Security take an innocent view of luggage left unattended.
‘I’ll wait with it,’ said Benita Green, the nurse who had come with the cancer kids’ group.
Miranda and Nick both nodded at the same time. ‘Thanks.’
Then Nick scooped up Josh and carried him off, the little backpack with its bright colours and cartoon motif swinging incongruously from one big male shoulder as he strode at a rapid pace through the terminal. Josh looked so light and small and vulnerable in his arms, his little body stiff and his shoulders lifting with his effort to breathe.
Nick found the parents’ room with no difficulty.
It was like most such places, a small, bland room whose main virtue was its quietness and lack of crowds. Josh’s breathing had continued to worsen as Nick carried him and he had to fight his own sense of growing panic.
What if he couldn’t get an effective dose? What if Josh’s habitual wariness around him made him unable to relax enough to throw off the attack? What medical equipment did the airport medical centre have? It was close by. They’d just passed it. Should Nick have gone directly there instead of attempting to deal with this attack on his own?
Was he in some kind of denial, as Anna had so often accused? Or was this trip to the parents’ room a piece of misplaced heroism on his part? Anna had accused him of that in the past, too. What if this whole precious, scary, miraculously out-of-the-blue week or more with his son was derailed at the very start by another hospital stay?
I want this. I want time with my son.
Even though it challenged his self-confidence on almost every level.
I want the two of us to defeat this asthma monster together, in the next ten minutes, to prove to both of us that we can. I want him to love me, and to know that I love him.
‘OK, this is better, isn’t it?’ he said to Josh. ‘Nobody watching.’
He dropped the backpack from his shoulder, grabbed the inhaler and spacer from where he’d flung them inside. ‘Now, show me how you do this. Show me your very best breath out and then a huge breath in, after you press.’
Josh pressed the inhaler, breathed in and out while Nick counted the breaths and kept a gentle grip on the spacer. His son still hadn’t spoken a word.
‘Good. That was great,’ he said, pushing encouragement into his voice. ‘Is that feeling any better?’
Josh nodded but still didn’t speak. Nick thought he detected a mild improvement but second-guessed the impression at once, as usual. Maybe it was only that the panicky look had softened a bit in a quieter atmosphere.
He had a powerful, gut-dropping need for Miranda to be there, remembering six years of her common sense and sweetness and warmth and diligence and brains, during lectures and tutorial groups and anatomy lab sessions, followed by that one intense night of her body in bed and hours and hours of talking. Remembering it all as if it were yesterday that they’d finished medicine together. Just those few minutes of talking with her near the check-in desk had brought it all back, as he’d somehow known for the past two years that it would.
But she wasn’t there, so he and Josh just had to wait, find some patience and some trust on their own.
And administer a second dose of Ventolin, Nick decided, as the first one wasn’t working the miracle cure he’d hoped for. Time was getting on, but if he pushed Josh to go back to the check-in desk too soon…
So how did they pass the time until the next dose? There were no toys in here, no windows, nothing. Just him and Josh, on their own together for the first time in how long…probably three months…waiting to see if he could breathe.
‘How about a story?’ Nick suggested, and heard his voice come out too hearty.
With a wheezy effort, not looking at him, Josh answered, ‘We have to…go back and…meet the others…and get on the…plane.’
His
