A Proposal Worth Waiting For

Just inside the plane, they caught up with the final members of the Crocodile Creek group. Benita mimed fanning herself with relief and said, ‘I’d almost given up on you.’

‘So had I. But I couldn’t let them miss the flight.’ Miranda lowered her voice. ‘Not these two. Not little Josh.’

‘Be careful of that,’ Benita warned. She meant the favouritism.

‘I know.’

Miranda saw the Allandales blocking the aisle further down as they sorted through their cabin luggage. Stella Vavunis stood just ahead, handing over her crutches to an attendant, to be stowed in one of their special hidey-holes for the duration of the flight because they were too long for the overhead carrier bins.

The teenager’s head hung with embarrassment, and her body was stiff and hunched, as if she just wanted to disappear. She felt humiliated and angry at the whole world about being singled out this way, and having to hop and hobble to her seat. Miranda thought she heard some very rude words muttered under Stella’s breath.

‘She isn’t handling that prosthesis very well yet, is she?’ Miranda murmured to Benita. ‘It says in her notes it was fitted a week ago.’

‘She won’t even try, according to her physio,’ the nurse answered. ‘She hates it, still insists on using the crutches because then she can get away with looking as if she has a broken leg.’

‘There’s a physiotherapist visiting the camp every day. I’ve had a couple of phone conversations with her. Susie Jackson. She sounds nice.’

‘We’re all nice, Miranda!’ Benita said.

‘True. You’re saying nice isn’t enough, in a case like this.’

Nice. The word dovetailed with some of Miranda’s questions about Nick, too, and about why she hadn’t yet been able to give her heart to a man who truly wanted it. Was being nice the problem? Too nice. Nothing but nice. Nice wasn’t enough, and sometimes it was boring…

‘Stella has to be motivated,’ Benita was saying. ‘She has to believe what we tell her, she has to find someone she’ll really listen to and trust. The prosthesis is too much reality for her right now. The crutches are what she knows, and she’s sticking to them.’

‘Tough for a thirteen-year-old, when body-image issues are so huge at that age already.’

‘I know, but she’s so darned prickly and negative and ungrateful I want to shake her, sometimes.’ Benita gave a rueful shrug. ‘We rub each other up the wrong way, I’m afraid, she and I. I’m not as patient as I should be.’

‘That’s a pity.’

‘I shouldn’t admit to it, should I, but you know how it is,’ Benita said. ‘Some you love, some you don’t, often without even knowing why.’

‘True,’ Miranda replied, watching Nick and Josh.

Benita was right. Again. When it came to love, you often didn’t know why.

‘I have to fight to hide it, to be honest,’ she was saying. ‘Her dad’s supposed to be coming later in the week.’

‘Yes, that’s in our notes. He’s a major donor to the rebuilt camp and medical centre.’

‘And very driven. As well as very rich! I won’t be surprised if something gets in the way of him making it. I don’t think Stella will be surprised either, and I really, really wish I could step in and fill the breach, but we just don’t get on, she and I. I get more glares from her than words. Hope she finds a friend or two this week. Someone she can talk to.’

‘Someone better than just the usual nice, you mean?’

Benita smiled ruefully. ‘That’s right.’

The passengers blocking the aisles took their seats one by one, and Miranda found her own group of patients towards the back of the plane. There were three empty seats left, all in a row. Just ahead of her, Josh was walking on his own, as his dad had promised, with Nick directly behind him.

‘There’s your seat, mate,’ he said to his son, the ‘mate’ part sounding a little forced and unnatural. ‘Right by the window.’ Josh climbed eagerly towards it, sneakers treading squarely in the middle of the two seats adjacent. ‘Oh, hell, Josh, don’t tread on the seat with those shoes!’

Too late. The deed was done.

Josh looked scared when he understood the reason for his dad’s disapproval, even though Nick was telegraphing only a second or two of mild anger. The little boy’s sneaker soles looked clean…sort of…but they had that deeply grooved tread that harboured every piece of grit and every grass clipping until just the wrong moment.

‘Hope your neighbour isn’t wearing a white silk dress,’ Miranda said to him, smiling. She wanted to diffuse the difficult moment between father and son. Nick could see the expression on his son’s face and didn’t like it, she could tell.

But Nick didn’t smile at her teasing comment. Once again, was she being too nice? ‘Actually, it looks to me as if my neighbour is going to be you.’

‘Lucky for you, then,’ she persisted. ‘I don’t even own a white silk dress.’

Why had she bothered? Once again, he didn’t smile back. She sat down beside him and felt his tightly coiled body like a piece of humming machinery just inches away.

Miranda was in demand for most of the flight.

The aisle seat was either a deliberate choice on her part or a lucky bonus, because she had to hop up and down every five minutes to answer the summons of a hand waved over someone’s head and the call of her name.

Somebody needed their in-flight snack to be delivered early. Someone else had forgotten to pack painkillers and had a headache. Did Miranda happen to have some on her?

She dealt with it all cheerfully, and Nick was torn between regret that they didn’t get the smallest opportunity for a proper conversation and relief because he didn’t know what on earth they would find to say, with so much past and so much distance in between.

They’d studied medicine in the same programme and graduated as doctors at the same time. He’d been incredibly focused on his studies back then, knowing that nothing less than a cream-of-the-crop performance would satisfy his father.

And his father was right about so many things.

You did have to work hard to get where you wanted to go in life. You did have to keep a clear head and a strong focus and not step back to let others through first. With a whole lot of life’s biggest challenges, you only got one chance. Mess things up, and that chance was gone forever. Blow off your work with drugs or alcohol, fast cars, garage rock bands or loose women, and you could so easily fail.

Some of his father’s tenets of faith Nick was no longer so sure about, but those ones he still basically believed.

So he’d worked and he’d focused, hadn’t married or fallen seriously in love or gone out with endless strings of girls during his university years the way some people had. He’d kept his distance from Miranda the way he’d kept his distance from almost everyone. His fellow medical students hadn’t been friends but future professional rivals. But he’d noticed her, during the classes they’d taken together—noticed her more than either of them had realised at the time—and she’d told him that the same was true for her.

He’d admired the way she managed to win the approval of various crusty or supercilious professors without playing teacher’s pet. He’d heard the clever, perceptive, diligently researched answers she gave to knotty medical problems posed in class or during their earnest stints of hospital observation. He’d seen the way she worked and focused, just the way he did. He’d liked the way she smiled and the way she danced, the few times they’d gone out in the same group.

She’d liked his laugh, and the way he would say something funny sometimes when nobody was expecting it. She’d liked the way his questions always pinpointed exactly the areas that other students were unsure about. She’d liked the fact that he never featured in lurid, gossipy stories of drunkenness or womanising.

And then, one critical night ten years ago, after they’d already known each other for six years, casually, as fellow students, he’d let his guard down and they’d spent fourteen uninterrupted hours together at someone’s party and beyond —couldn’t remember the guy’s name any more—and had fallen for each other the way the moon had fallen into orbit around the earth.

Thinking about it, he discovered that it still scared him.

The suddenness of it. The strength. The things he’d told her. The vulnerability he’d shown. The power he’d given her over his emotions, just in one short night. It was as if a lifetime of well-schooled stoicism had broken down all at once. When a dam broke, it didn’t simply spring a leak, it flooded. Everything pent up inside him had broken that night, because of her, and had come flooding out.

With her. To her. For her.

‘I love you, Miranda.’

Unstoppable. Crystal clear. Terrifying.

They’d been drinking, of course, but not that much. He hadn’t been hungover the next day. At the point when he’d really begun talking to her, he had downed maybe three beers in three hours. The words had exhilarated him as he spoke them, like jumping out of a plane with a parachute on his back—terror and freedom mixed like a potent cocktail, making him dizzy and wild. How many times had he said them that night? He couldn’t remember. Three? Five? More?

They’d started in the kitchen. What had she said to him? Something that made him think instantly, She knows who I really am, she knows what I really feel, she’s fabulous. Why didn’t I see any of this before? Within ten minutes they lost all awareness of what was happening around them—the music, the laughter, the people coming and going in search of ice or chips or more beer.

The emotional nakedness and physical hunger between them was wonderful and crippling at the same time. He ached for her, wanted to kiss her and take her to bed so badly, and yet he wanted to listen to her, too. He wasn’t simply possessed by a young man’s hormonal imperatives, his whole heart was melting and singing. He had no idea it was possible to feel this way. Had no idea how thoroughly they’d already come to know each other after six years as fellow students. Had no idea how he’d failed to see it coming.

It was a warm night, summer just started, air fresh and a little salty because they were near the ocean. ‘Want to find somewhere outside?’ he asked her, and she nodded. They sat on some brick steps, knees hunched up, bodies touching. He remembered the sweet smell of flowers. Jasmine, or something. All tangled and lush around the posts and lintel of some wooden white-painted garden arch. It gave them privacy. He kissed her for minutes on end and when he finally pulled away, she smiled into his face and stroked his jaw with her hands, looking at him with a helpless frown on her face as well as the smile, as if, like him, she couldn’t understand how something could simultaneously be so strange and so right.

‘Dad?’ Josh said tentatively, bringing Nick’s focus crashing back to the present.

‘Yes, lit—? Yes, mate?’ Again, he’d almost said little guy.

He didn’t like mate. It didn’t feel right. What else was there? Love. Sweetheart. Darling. Not those either. He hated it that his son was five years old and he didn’t know how to find the right affectionate nickname.

‘Can I please have a snack?’

‘Sure.’ There should be a snack cart coming along soon, but Nick wasn’t going to rely on Josh liking airline food. He was absurdly grateful at the mere fact that his son had spoken to him. ‘You want the muesli bar or the cheese dipper?’

‘Muesli bar.’

‘And something to drink?’

‘Just water.’ He sounded good now, no wheeze left at all.

Miranda appeared. ‘If you need the bathroom, now would be a good time, Joshie. Before the aisle gets blocked by the food service.’

Joshie, Nick thought. That worked. That he could say, without feeling that he was somehow faking his way through it.

Thank you, Miranda Carlisle. Again…

They must have talked and kissed and sat on those steps until two or three in the morning, learning about each other, by which time the party had been sagging and ebbing into the usual late night dark kind of feeling, people leaving in twos and threes, warm bodies slumped together on the couch, a touch-and-go moment when an irritable neighbour might have called the police, only someone shut down the pounding music just in time.

‘Where could we go?’ he asked. ‘I want to be with you. I don’t think I ever want to let you go.’ He meant it, at the time, more than he’d ever meant anything in his life. Lord, in hindsight the nakedness of it still brought hints of blind panic.

‘My place,’ she offered at once. It was a shared house. Fellow med students, but they’d gone north to the Gold Coast, she said, for their version of this end-of-exams party night.

Miranda made it clear that the two of them would be alone—a typical gesture of giving, he thought. No one to overhear, no one to hide from, no one to ever know, no matter how late they slept in.

You’re safe, Nick.

He knew he never would have made himself that vulnerable, offering ‘my place’ as if it was the easiest thing in the world. He protected his own space like it was some kind of dark secret, even though it was nothing out of the ordinary, just a ground-level studio flat next to the garage, beneath his landlord’s suburban home.

The way he’d protected his heart until that night, with her.

When a dam broke, it flooded…

They made love.

He still remembered odd details. They stood out in his mind like bits of coloured glass catching the sun. Miranda’s dark hair sweeping across his chest—it had been longer back then. Her laugh, all creamy and secret and just for him. The confessions he’d made afterwards, while they’d lain in each other’s arms until morning, not sleeping at all.

Those confessions had felt liberating at the time, a huge weight off his mind, gateway to a new freedom he hadn’t imagined before. ‘I’m not sure if I care enough about people to be a good doctor. I have the medicine down, but how do you care the right amount?’ ‘I don’t think I really love my parents the way I should. My father is so…so rigid, and my mother gives in to everyone.’ ‘Stupidity makes me angry. And weakness. And sneakiness. All those things. I pull back. I just don’t deal with it. Is that showing strength, to pull back? Or am I being weak, too?’

He wondered now, as Miranda jumped up once more from the narrow aircraft seat beside him, if she was still as calmly trusting, if she still wore her heart on her sleeve, if she ever said I love you the very first night.

He didn’t.

He never had since.

Where was the sense in making yourself that vulnerable? he’d decided. And yet holding back, the way he had in his marriage to Anna, hadn’t brought him happiness. With any luck, she wouldn’t be seated beside him on the next flight— the final hop out to Wallaby Island, on a propeller-driven plane.

As the larger jet flight began its descent into Cairns, the ‘Fasten Seat Belt’ sign confined Miranda in place and she felt so aware of Nick—the forbidding silence broken only by occasional rather wooden comments to Josh, the strong shoulder that encroached a little into her own space. Hadn’t these airline seats grown even smaller and more cramped since the last time she’d flown?

It was so stupid. She really wanted to say to him, So why did you never phone me, when you promised that you would? After ten years, you just didn’t ask that. After ten years, you already knew.

There were basically only two possibilities.

Either he had only wanted to get her into bed, and hadn’t minded lying to her for the sake of that goal. ‘I love you, Miranda.’

Or in the cold light of day, he hadn’t found her nearly as captivating as the party in the moonlight had led him to think.

At the time, she’d believed his sincerity absolutely, hadn’t even thought to take his phone number as insurance. He had said he would phone, he had said he loved her, which meant he would and did, so she hadn’t needed his number. When a day went by, then two, then a week, the pain and questions started to slow-burn inside her and lasted for months.

Had she completely misread that sense of rightness and promise? Why had she trusted him so easily?

Because, despite her stellar performance in her studies, she had been as dumb as a rock in some areas, and one of those areas was men. There was a causal link to the apparent contradiction. She had been clueless when it had come to men because she’d done so well in her studies.

Success in medicine took hard work. Hard work left little time for other activities. Other activities included hanging out with female friends, meeting men and talking about the men in great detail with the female friends.

She’d been the beloved only child of older parents. She’d grown up too sheltered and too eager to give her heart. She honestly hadn’t known that some men were love rats, and that you couldn’t always tell who the love rats were at first—or even second or third—glance. Shutting herself away to study, she hadn’t had enough opportunity to experience the bruising reality of the real world. She’d stayed far too innocent for far too long. Was probably too innocent still. Too innocent and too nice. How did you get tougher? Did she want to? She hadn’t realised that matters of the heart required as much prior study as an anatomy exam.

Oh, and there was another reason why she’d believed the I love you thing.

Because she’d said the same words back to him, all night, and had meant them from the bottom of her heart.

‘Joshie, we need to put the cars away now, so we can put your tray table up,’ Nick said to his son.

No reply.

‘Josh, are you listening?’

‘Is this the kids’ camp?’ He twisted around for a moment, and might have been talking to Miranda, not to his dad. She felt Nick stiffen beside her, and stayed silent, leaving the conversation to unfold between father and son, the way it should. ‘I can see buildings. They’re tiny!’

‘No, this isn’t the camp,’ Nick answered, ‘because we have to go on the other plane first, remember? That’s Cairns you can see.’

‘And I can see ocean and sand, and shapes in the water.’

‘Let me look…’ Nick leaned past Josh. ‘Wow!’

The aircraft banked to line up its approach and Miranda caught a glimpse of tropical yellow and blue, sun glinting on water, and lush rainforest greenery. The promise of the water, the warmth and the reef washed over her like a delectable scent in the air and for a moment she had absolute faith that they were all going to have a great time.

She was too adept at faith, though, too nice for her own good.

Hold back, Miranda. Keep your heart safe. Haven’t you learned that yet?

Well, if she hadn’t, she had Nick Devlin on hand to remind her.

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