City Surgeon, Small Town Miracle

Looked out into the pitch-black hallway.

Tried to remember seeing any of her neighbours. Tried to figure which door she could knock on.

Thought again she was being stupid.

This was her first baby. She was hours away from delivery. Maybe a day.

No, she decided as the next contraction hit. Not a day. But hopefully hours. It was stupid to stumble about in the dark waking neighbours she didn’t know.

She groped her way back into her darkened living room and collapsed back onto the settee.

Dammit, she wasn’t going to lie here in the dark and be terrified. She wasn’t!

Max…

‘Don’t think of Max,’ she told herself between gasps. Between contractions. ‘Max has less chance of getting here than an ambulance does, so there’s no use even thinking of him. Think of your daughter instead. Do you want her to meet you sweating with fear in the dark?’

‘No!’

‘So do something about it.

She took a deep breath, which was supposed to be steadying but wasn’t. ‘This isn’t a scary time,’ she told herself, trying hard to believe it. ‘It’s looking more and more like it’s your daughter’s birthday, so put your party hat on. When the ambulance arrives I want to look brave.’

As if…

At least light some candles.

‘Okay. I think I can do that,’ she gasped, clutching at her back and trying not to cry out. ‘Maybe. If I don’t have

something else happen first.’

Three miles wasn’t very long as far as marathons went, but this wasn’t a marathon, this was a sprint. Max was fit but he kept fit by working out between cases in the hospital gym. He had strength training. He didn’t run. He especially didn’t run in the dark without benefit of streetlights.

It’d be a sight easier if his heart hadn’t been hammering in his chest before he’d started. The more he ran the more it kept right on hammering.

He was being dumb, he told himself, over and over again. He was imagining problems when there weren’t any. There was no reason at all for a sane doctor to run across a darkened city, growing more fearful by the minute. But the mantra had started in his head and once started it wouldn’t go away.

Maggie, Maggie, Maggie.

He’d let her go home. Of all the stupid, criminal, irresponsible…

It wasn’t stupid, the sane part of him said. He’d assumed the electricity would come back on as it had come back on last night and the night before.

He’d never imagined this totally irrational certainty that he’d lose her.

She wasn’t his to lose, the sane portion of his brain reminded him, but the sane portion of his brain was getting smaller by the minute, replaced by raw emotion. Maggie was his woman. His heart was telling him that, with every sound of his feet hitting the pavement. And his woman was having his baby.

His? Irrational? Maybe but it didn’t matter. He knew truth when he heard it and he was running.

And in an apartment in Coogee…‘I will not have my baby in the dark. I will not have my baby in fear. I will not have my baby lying on a rented hotel apartment settee with no beauty. Not!’

Her apartment block loomed solid and black in the night. There was a faint light coming from one of the terraces above his head, but none of the windows were lit.

Maggie hadn’t lit her candles, then?

Of course not. Maggie would be asleep. She wouldn’t thank him for barging in and waking her. Terrifying her for nothing.

He made himself slow. Made himself catch his breath. Went into the foyer. Wondered why the door into the foyer was unlocked. Then thought maybe it was attached to some electrical security system that wasn’t working. If the concierge had faced the choice of locking tenants out or letting the foyer stay unguarded overnight, that’s what he would have done.

So he could climb up the stairs to Maggie’s apartment.

Just walk up and knock?

That’s what he was intending to do. Walk up and knock. It’s three in the morning. Wake up, Maggie, I’m here.

Breathe.

Breathe.

Breathe.

Surely the books hadn’t said it hurt this much.

Breathe…

You can do this.

‘I can’t…’

He knocked on the door and the impact of the knock had the door swinging inward. What the…? She hadn’t locked it? She hadn’t even closed it properly?

The corridor he felt his way down was in complete darkness. So was the apartment through the door. Maybe stopping to fetch a torch would have been sensible.

He wasn’t feeling sensible.

He swung the door wide and called. ‘Maggie?’

Nothing.

Did he stumble round in the dark and see if he could find her? Hell, he’d scare the living daylights out of her.

He raised his voice. ‘Maggie?’

Still nothing.

It wasn’t completely dark. There was a faint glimmer from the hall mirror, reflecting light from outside. His eyes were finally adjusting to a darkness that was more intense here than in the moonlight outside, but it was still a less intense dark than the corridor. He could see shapes. A bench in the kitchenette. A hall lamp. The living-room settee.

‘Maggie?’

He was feeling his way in, wondering if he had the right apartment. There were four doors in this corridor and he’d got here by feel.

It’d be just his luck to have the wrong apartment.

‘I’m a doctor,’ he called, just in case some stranger was sitting bolt upright in bed, preparing to have a heart attack because of a prowler in their apartment. ‘I’m looking for Maggie. I’m looking for a pregnant woman in trouble.’

He sounded stupid, he thought, edging into the sitting room as he called.

The drapes were wide open and he could see the moonlit sea beyond. Then, as he drew further into the room, he saw there was another light source outside. Low light, hidden until now by the bulk of the settee.

He moved cautiously forward, hit his knee on a coffee table and swore.

‘Maggie?’ He tugged open the big glass door to see where the light from outside was coming from. ‘Maggie?’

‘Did you bring gas?’ a voice demanded from floor level, and the words were a series of breathless, pain-filled, gasps. ‘If you didn’t, kill me now. Oh, Max…’

She’d set up a birth centre. She was on the tiled balcony floor but on bed of sorts, a mound of soft bedding right at the edge of the terrace, where the open protective rails gave her a sweeping vista of the sea beyond.

There were candles everywhere. She was surrounded by a sea of light, a complete circle apart from the line of sight between her and the sea. The moon was hanging low, casting a silvery trail of moonbeams over the ocean. They looked almost a ribbon, reaching out to touch the woman on the cushions at his feet.

Apart from the hush-hush of the waves on the sand below there was complete silence. All this Max absorbed in a fraction of a second. And then…