Heidi was sitting up in bed when I found her room, and a woman who could only be her mother was brushing her hair.
They both looked up as Henry and I walked in. Heidi beamed at me and said, “Mum, this is Andrew.”
I smiled at Heidi and then turned to her mother. “Hi, I’m Dr. Andrew Maynard, and this is my son, Henry. I just dropped in to see how Heidi was going.”
Heidi held up her splinted arm, showing an impressive set of sutures, and Henry said, “Wow, can I see them?”
Heidi held out her arm proudly. “Thirty-six stitches on the outside, sixty-five on the inside.” Henry’s eyes grew wide and he leaned over to peer at the sutures. Next to chest tubes, he liked sutures best, and while I kept him well supplied with chest tubes, having shown him two already today, sutures were not something I had much to do with.
Heidi’s mom said, “I’m Angie. Thank you so much for what you did for Heidi. I met your nice boyfriend last night, made him a real dinner.”
Oh, fuck.
Henry almost fell off Heidi’s bed in his astonishment, so I hauled him back onto his feet. “Must rush, I’m needed on the ward. Glad Heidi’s better.” Henry towed me out into the corridor.
“Boyfriend!” he said. “You’ve got a boyfriend? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Ahh, good question,” I said. “Sorry, kiddo, I was planning on telling you. We only just got together.”
Henry looked disapproving. “You’re supposed to tell me these things, you know. Go on, I want details.”
“Not here,” I said, mindful of the nurses hovering around, including F’s bedwarmer, Lena.
She smiled knowingly at me as I strode out of the ward, Henry almost running to keep up with me.
I made Henry wait until we got into the car. “Well?” he demanded as I started the car. “What’s he like? Why didn’t you tell me? Is he another doctor?”
“He’s a medical student, one of my latest batch. His name’s Matthew. There, satisfied?”
“No way,” Henry said. I leaned out of the window and swiped my staff card through the exit gate at the car park. “I wanna know all about him. When am I going to meet him?”
“Not this weekend,” I said firmly. “Give me a chance here.”
Henry subsided into quiet glee in the front passenger seat.
I had no idea he’d be so pleased I was seeing someone. He’d hated my last boyfriend, so I’d kind of assumed that his malevolence would carry on to Matthew, but it hadn’t. Maybe he’d worked out I was lonely? I never knew what was going on in Henry’s head.
He bounced on to my bed that night, unbearably cute in his striped pajamas, suddenly young again. I looked up from the document I was scanning, highlighter pen in my mouth.
“He Hinny,” I said, then I took the pen out of my mouth and said, “Hey, Henry.”
“Dad?” Henry said. “Do you love Matthew? Because if you do, and you want him to stay here on the weekends, you could just close the bedroom door, and I wouldn’t walk in or anything.”
I smiled at him. “That’s very generous of you,” I said, touched more than I expected.
Henry bounced again, sitting cross-legged, and said,
“Well?”
I shook my head. “Give up, kiddo. I’m not going to talk to you about how I do or don’t feel about Matthew, not without talking to him first. For all I know, he’s going to run screaming from this obnoxious pre-pubescent child of mine.”
Henry chortled happily, obviously drawing conclusions of his own, and he flopped down beside me on the quilt. “I spotted his toothbrush and razor,” Henry said. “I must have been an idiot not to see them last night.” He wriggled a bit, digging into me with both a knee and an elbow at once. “You know, if he’s a med student, he’s probably not much older than me, is he?”
We both burst out laughing. “Go to bed, you little horror,”
I said.
“Good night, Dad,” he said, and he scrambled into my lap for a quick hug, crumpling all my papers.
“Good night, Henry,” I said, kissing his forehead.
He clambered off the bed and scooted out of the room. I picked up my papers, leaned back against the bed head, and closed my eyes.
I wasn’t sure how I felt. The rational bit of me was saying that I couldn’t possibly, after only a week, actually know Matthew well enough to be in love with him. But, if I turned that bit of my head off, I couldn’t think of him without a smile creeping across my face. Then there was that piece of foolscap paper, carefully stored in my wallet. It didn’t say much, just, ‘Dear Andrew, You spoke wonderfully, I was nearly in tears’. The writing trailed off part way through the next word, but it was enough that Matthew had actually tried to find me.
Then there was the way he’d kissed me.
If I wasn’t in love, it was a damn good facsimile of it.
Chapter Twenty Three
It was my usual weekend routine. I’d wake early, study for a good solid eight hours, when the house was at its quietest, then go down the pub mid-afternoon. I’d sink a few lagers, hopefully at someone else’s expense, and head back to the house to hit the books again.
It sounded pretty awful if I described it to anyone, but it worked. I could keep my marks up this way, and get enough sleep, too.
What I hadn’t expected was to find someone else sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of tea and a paper when I went downstairs at six on Sunday morning, tea bag in my hand.
“Hi, Angie,” I said sleepily, putting the kettle on and leaning against the pantry. I could see through the laundry to the little store room that was where Heidi and Tim slept. It occurred to me that I hadn’t seen Tim for a few days. “Did you sleep in Heidi’s room?” I asked Angie.
She nodded. “I can’t afford a room anywhere, so it seemed the obvious thing to do. Guess Heidi had neglected to mention she lived with her boyfriend, so it wasn’t until I found all his stuff that I realised I’d kicked him out of the bed.”
The kettle boiled, and I took a clean mug … There were clean mugs! And plates when I opened the cupboards. In fact, the sink was empty. “Oh, wow, you washed up,” I said as I poured water onto the tea bag.
“Doesn’t anyone usually do it?” Angie asked.
“No, we all wash up what we need for ourselves each time,” I said. “I’ve got used to it. I can remember early in the year, we had some sort of roster, but it rapidly became anarchy. I keep all my food in my room. You found Heidi’s food?”
Angie nodded. “Took me a little while to work out why she had cans of baked beans in her room, and a jar of coffee.”
She smiled knowingly. “Andrew came around yesterday while I was at the hospital. He’s really rather gorgeous,” she said.
“He had his son with him, too.”
I sat down at the kitchen table with my tea. “You met Henry?” I said. “What’s he like?”
She pursed her lips for a moment. “Spoilt would be my guess. His dad obviously adores him. You’ve not met him?”
I shook my head. “I’ve only seen photos of him.”
“Gruesome little child,” Angie said. “Just like my eldest. He was obsessed with plane crashes.”
“I had a thing about bones,” I admitted. “I had shoeboxes of them, scrounged off Tile Hill, in the woods. I always hoped I’d find human remains one day. I found a dead cat once and cleaned it up and reassembled the skeleton with glue.”
Angie stared at me, and I smiled in a way that I hoped was disarming, but probably just made me look like a serial killer in training.
“Think I’ll get started on my revision,” I said, standing up again.
