The Doctor's Mistress

Being superfluous to Max’s puzzle-doing, Hayley felt less guilty about her continued awareness of Byron and his daughter. She had gone to the hospital to visit Tori and Mrs Black one more time, two days after the accident, and had given Tori a three-dimensional puzzle set, but Byron hadn’t been there at the time. The handovers she’d made in the A and E department since then had been made to other members of staff.

She’d heard some news of him, though, via another ambulance officer who had also known him during their high school years.

‘He’s started going out with Wendy Piper, who’s my wife’s GP,’ Paul Cotter had said. ‘Good luck to them, and I hope he likes horses!’

‘Dr Piper’s my GP too,’ Hayley had replied cautiously. In Arden’s compact health-care system, this meant that Dr Piper also worked at the hospital in certain capacities, including regular rosters in the A and E department. ‘But I hadn’t heard about her and Dr Black.’

‘Oh, she and my wife are friends as well. Rhonda’s agisting a horse for Wendy at the moment, too, so they meet up in a muddy paddock sometimes. Have a good gossip, I expect.’

Karen showed Tori where to hang her small pink backpack, where to put her piece of fruit and where the toilets were. Byron hovered just behind them, alert for any potential problem. Leading the little girl over to the puzzle shelf, the preschool teacher then said encouragingly, ‘Why don’t you choose one and your dad can help you with it?’

‘I’m good at puzzles. I love puzzles. I don’t need help, but he can join in,’ Tori corrected firmly.

‘Would you like to join in, Dad?’ Karen said, with a smile in her voice.

‘Love to!’

There! He’d also smiled now at last and it was amazing how much it changed his face. The warmth was something you could have heated your hands by. There was a generosity in it, too. Share my pleasure, it seemed to say. Love and loss weren’t the only emotions that touched this man through and through. Hayley found that she was smiling as well, although he hadn’t even looked at her yet.

Byron managed to find a space on the carpet that was big enough to accommodate his long legs and sat down, while Tori chose a puzzle. He caught sight of Hayley and they both said hello. Max noticed, and informed Byron, ‘Mummy’s on roster.’

‘Will she need some help?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Are you staying?’ Hayley guessed.

He shifted a little closer, and spoke quietly. ‘Yes, it’s probably not necessary, but her graft sites are still tender, and—Well, I just wanted to stay for her first day, that’s all.’

‘You can cut up the children’s fruit,’ Hayley suggested, ‘and then it won’t feel as if you’re just hovering.’

‘That’s a good idea.’ He looked relieved. ‘It’ll be good to be involved, at least this once. Mostly she’s going to be brought here and picked up by her home day-care mother.’

‘Is that working out well?’

‘Wonderfully well. She’s been going to Robyn’s for two weeks, and I’ve heard only glowing reports from both of them. I even,’ he confessed, ‘dropped in unannounced last week. You know, you hear stories about bad childcare...’

‘I know.’ Hayley nodded.

‘But Robyn had Tori and the other two she looks after, plus her own little boy, out in the sandpit, making roads and gardens out of twigs. All their sunhats were on, and she was making them a healthy snack. I felt like a heel for checking up on her in such an obvious way.’

‘Hadn’t you thought of an excuse for your visit?’ she teased.

‘No.’ He grinned wryly. ‘I’d squeezed it in between working out next month’s A and E doctors’ on-call roster and following up on a problem we’ve been having with some equipment. I had to take time off work because of Tori’s burns, and things have been hectic since I started back, so I just wasn’t thinking. Kicked myself for not at least handing over a spare pair of socks or something.’

‘Since the day-carer is a parent herself, she’ll understand.’

‘She did understand! Instantly! Might have been less embarrassing if she hadn’t! Doting father, caught red-handed in an act of flagrant worrying.’

Hayley laughed. Despite that fleeting look of anxiety as he’d entered the preschool, he seemed a hundred times more relaxed than he had been six weeks ago. More confident, too—confident enough to mock his own feelings. The softer, happier expression suited his face, and the confidence suited his voice. It was lazy, deep and rich, lacking the harshness of fear and agitation she’d noticed that day in February.

‘How is your mother?’ she asked.

His face fell a little. ‘She’s still in rehab, but progressing well. Taking a few steps with a frame. Saying a few words. Feeding herself, left-handed. It’s going to be a long road, and we haven’t made any plans yet, but she’s motivated and that’s a huge plus.’

‘It is,’ Hayley agreed.

‘Your mother looks after Max, you said?’ His interest seemed genuine, and she remembered that from the past as well. He probably wouldn’t have described himself as a good listener, but he genuinely was.

‘Yes, and Dad pitches in, too,’ she explained, ‘with bedtime stories when I’m on a late shift, and trips to the playground. I couldn’t manage a paramedic’s hours without them.’

Chris’s parents lived locally, too, but unfortunately they weren’t very interested. Even during her marriage, Hayley had never been very close to them.

‘They’re in good health, obviously,’ Byron said, still talking about Hayley’s own parents.

‘Very, thank goodness,’ she answered. ‘Dad’ll be sixty next year, but you wouldn’t know it.’

‘My in-laws are like that,’ he said. ‘Monica’s coming for a visit next week. Tori can’t wait, and I’m looking forward to it, too. She’s a terrific woman.’

There wasn’t much time to talk after this. The children packed away their puzzles and had group time and news. With a preschooler’s short attention span, these things didn’t last long. Then it was time for ‘activities’—all the craft and play tasks which were so important in building a child’s fine motor skills. Karen asked Byron if he could help one child at a time on the computer as they learned to manipulate the mouse and played a shape-matching game.

Hayley was fully occupied in writing names on paintings and pegging them out to dry, as well as helping Karen and her assistant in encouraging the children’s ideas and reminding them to take turns and share. She was still aware of him in the room, however, his deeper voice a low counterpoint to the high-pitched tones of children.

More aware than she wanted to be, if she was honest. He’d already betrayed the fact that any attraction on his part was reluctant. Not wanted. With Chris still talking on the phone about ‘getting back to what we had’, Hayley didn’t—shouldn’t—want this awareness either.

Next came a session of singing and drama, and Byron asked Hayley, ‘Where’s this fruit I’m supposed to cut up?’

‘There, on the sink in a bowl. Ask Karen about how to do it, because some things get peeled and some don’t, and there are particular ways she likes it cut.’

‘Who knew fruit was this complicated?’ she heard him mutter to himself at the sink a few minutes later, as she was wiping down the craft tables. She had to smile.

Yet he didn’t look nearly as out of place as many fathers she’d seen in a setting that was mainly the province of women and young children, despite his height and imposing build.

Chris, for example, didn’t always find the right tone. He tended to use a high-pitched, overly sweet voice, and say, ‘Wow! That’s incredible!’ a lot, when he didn’t really mean it.

‘It’s just a block tower, Daddy,’ she’d heard Max say to him once. ‘I can make much better ones than that.’

‘Talk to him like a person, Chris, for heaven’s sake!’ Hayley had lashed out at him one day.

‘OK, I know. I’m not used to it, that’s the trouble. Every time I see him, he’s grown. I never said I’d be good at this, did I? You sprang it on me. That’s why the whole thing fell apart. We weren’t planning on having kids for another five years.’

‘It takes two, Chris.’

‘Are you saying you weren’t the one who got careless?’ he’d answered, his voice rising.

That’s right, she remembered now. Her criticism had led to one of their worst arguments and, though she’d fought hard for her own point of view, she had to concede he had been right about some things. Unconsciously, she had got careless, hadn’t she? She’d foolishly thought that a baby wouldn’t be a problem for them.

Complicated. Love, parenthood, divorce. All of it was complicated.