free. And right now. ‘Gussie—’
‘Elliot, darling, it’s just occurred to me that you might like some company when you go out to the airport to meet your daughter,’ Gussie continued, completely ignoring her. ‘I could easily get one of my staff to swop shifts with me—’
‘There’s no need,’ Elliot interrupted. ‘Jane’s already agreed to come with me.’
‘Has she?’ Gussie’s large brown eyes narrowed slightly, then she smiled again at Jane. And this time her smile most definitely didn’t reach her eyes. ‘My word, but you are proving to be a little godsend, aren’t you?’
Elliot thought she was. In fact, after a sleepless night spent tossing and turning, he was all too aware of how very kind Jane was being, but he wished Gussie hadn’t said it—at least not in that particular way. There’d been a very definite edge to her voice. An edge which had made him feel uncomfortable, and if he’d felt like that he was sure Jane did as well.
‘Gussie, I’m afraid, can be a bit overbearing at times,’ he said the minute the paediatric sister had gone.
‘That’s one way of putting it,’ Jane replied tersely.
He coloured. ‘She does mean well, though, even if it doesn’t always sound like it.’
Oh, Gussie had made her meaning perfectly clear, Jane thought tightly, walking over to the thirteen-year-old boy and his mother who had come through from the waiting room into cubicle 8.
Hands off—he’s mine. That was what she’d said, and there’d been no need. Gussie was welcome to Elliot. In fact, right now the paediatric sister could have had him gift-wrapped with a bow round his neck.
‘Your son’s had this pain at the top of his chest for the last three days, you said?’ Elliot said, once Jane had got the boy and his mother settled.
‘At first I thought David had simply pulled a muscle, playing basketball,’ the boy’s mother replied, twisting her hands together convulsively, ‘but when the pain didn’t go away—’
‘Keen on sport, are you, David?’ Elliot asked as Jane helped the boy off with his shirt.
‘Only basketball,’ he replied. ‘The other boys at my school prefer soccer, but basketball…Basketball’s the best.’
Gently Elliot pressed on the boy’s chest. ‘Does it hurt when I do this?’
The boy shook his head. Not musculoskeletal pain, then, Elliot decided, or the pain would have increased under pressure.
‘Do you have any other aches and pains anywhere?’ he asked, taking his stethoscope out of his pocket and smiling encouragingly at the teenager.
‘I don’t think so.’ David frowned. ‘Sometimes I get an odd feeling in my back, but that’s all.’
Elliot’s ears pricked up. ‘Odd in what way?’
‘It’s hard to explain. It’s…it’s a sort of ripping feeling. I’m sorry but I can’t really describe it.’
He didn’t need to. The minute Elliot placed his stethoscope on the boy’s chest he heard a distinctive whooshing sound. A sound similar to that he’d heard in much older patients with leaky heart valves. But surely a boy of thirteen was far too young for that?
‘Jane, could you get me an ECG reading, please?’ he murmured casually.
She nodded.
‘So, you play a lot of basketball, do you, David?’ he said as Jane deftly applied the sticky electrodes to each of the boy’s arms and legs, then across his chest.
‘His school thinks he could play professionally when he’s older,’ his mother replied, clearly torn between maternal pride and concern.
‘My height helps a lot,’ her son said quickly, shooting his mother the speaking glance all boys used when they were deeply embarrassed. ‘You don’t have to jump up so far to reach the basket when you’re as tall as me.’
And he was tall—almost as tall as I am, Elliot thought pensively. Rangy, too, with extremely long fingers, and suddenly somewhere in the back of his mind a memory stirred. A memory of something he’d read in a medical journal a long time ago, and he hoped to heaven he was wrong.
‘ECG reading normal,’ Jane murmured.
‘Chest X-ray, please, Sister Halden,’ he said, then turned to the boy’s mother. ‘Has your son always been tall for his age?’
‘Not when he was a toddler, but when he hit seven…’ She shook her head ruefully. ‘It costs me a fortune every time he needs new clothes and shoes. Nothing in any of the ordinary kids’ shops fits him, you see.’
Because he wasn’t an ordinary boy, Elliot thought sadly, when Radiology had processed David’s chest X-rays.
He had Marfan’s syndrome, a rare, inherited condition which caused the aorta—the major blood vessel leading from the heart—to become abnormally enlarged, and one of the first indications of the condition was that sufferers were always extremely tall as children with unusually long fingers.
‘Historians think Abraham Lincoln might have had Marfan’s, don’t they?’ Jane commented after the boy and his mother had been transferred up to the medical ward where further tests could be performed.
Elliot nodded. ‘Thank goodness his mother brought him in when she did. With that enlarged aorta, he could have had a heart attack at any time, but at least now we can give him beta-blockers to control his heart problems, and get him fitted with an orthopaedic corset before his spine starts to become deformed due to the weight of his bones.’
‘No more basketball for him, though, I guess,’ Jane sighed.
‘No. No more basketball,’ he answered, and wondered why he should find that thought so deeply depressing.
Oh, he’d always cared about the patients who passed through his hands, had fought tooth and nail to save many of them, but this young boy…
Perhaps it was because he seemed so very young, scarcely more than a child, despite his height. Perhaps it was because all of his dreams to become a world-class basketball player were now lying in the dust.
No, it wasn’t that, he realised. It had been the look of total devastation on his mother’s face when he’d taken her into one of their private waiting rooms to explain what was wrong.
David’s mother would willingly have given everything she possessed to spare her son pain. Would even have given her own life if he could have been cured. That was love. Real love. And he felt none of that for his daughter.
You don’t know her yet—haven’t even met her—his mind pointed out, and unconsciously he shook his head. It wasn’t as simple as that. Even if he’d wanted to be a father—and at the moment he certainly didn’t—he didn’t know how to be one.
He could do Lover. Oh, he could do a great Lover, provided there was no talk of long-term commitment. He could even do Friend. A sympathetic, willing shoulder for any woman to lean her head on if she needed it, but Father?
There
