A Full House. Nadia Nichols

      “Dad?” Sally’s voice was a poignant mixture of remorse and hope. “Does he know about this? Did you tell him?”

      “He called before I knew myself.” Annie turned to face her daughter. “He told me that he wants you to spend some time with him this summer. Trudy’s going to have the baby soon, and he thought it would be good for you to be there for the birth, so you could get to know your brother right from the start.”

      Sally’s eyes unexpectedly filled with tears. “He said that?” she said, her face working.

      Annie’s heart turned over. She felt breathless and turned away, wandering to the cherry highboy beside the fireplace. She trailed her fingers across the satiny finish of the old heirloom and finished her coffee. “Do you want to go?” she asked.

      “I miss Dad,” she said simply.

      Annie nodded. The highboy was a beautiful piece, her great-grandmother’s. It had begun its life in Cotswold, had been shipped to Australia for two generation’s worth of family history and then had come to America when Annie had married. One day it would be Sally’s. Annie pictured her mother’s kind and patient face, so very far away from her now, and her eyes stung. “Someday you’ll have children of your own,” she said softly, turning to face her daughter. “And that, young lady, will be my revenge. Now go to bed.”

      Annie should have returned to work but she didn’t. She phoned Matt, who told her not to bother. Everything was quiet at the hospital and only one hour remained of her shift. “Remember, you owe me that camping trip,” he reminded her before hanging up. She sat out on the balcony and sipped another cup of coffee while Ana Lise worked through her guilt in the kitchen by baking. She brought Annie a big piece of apple strudel, fresh from the oven, and hovered over her.

      “I am so sorry about all of this, madam,” she said. Ana Lise had never called her “madam” before and it startled Annie, who raised her eyebrows at her housekeeper in surprise.

      “Oh, Ana Lise. Go back to bed. It’s not your fault. But from now on I think we should put a lockout on the dumbwaiter after 6:00 p.m.”

      “Ja, ja.” Ana Lise nodded vigorously, relieved. “I think so, too.”

      Annie watched the sun rise over the city, heard the burgeoning swell of noise gather faintly and then grow until the peace was gone, obliterated by swarms of cars, buses, trucks and people. Millions of people, all going somewhere, doing something. Alive and living for the moment…

      She sighed. The camping trip with Matt suddenly appealed very strongly. She was a country girl at heart, having grown up on a big sheep station that her father managed. Her father had been a great man and a great leader of men. Quite a shock it had been to a lot of people when he had died in the Outback soon after Annie’s seventeenth birthday. He hadn’t come in one day from riding the fence line, that endless wire fence erected to deter the dingoes, the wild dogs of Australia, from the sheep. They had sent search parties out that night and more the following morning. More than a hundred men had searched for three days, but he was dead when they found him, he and his horse, both.

      They found the horse first, just three miles from the fence line. Broken leg. Shot. Searchers reconstructed the scenario. The horse had spooked and thrown John Gorley, then bolted three miles before the fall that fractured its cannon bone. Gorley had followed the horse, eventually finding and destroying it. He had been hurt himself in the fall, worse than he would probably have admitted, because John Gorley was not a man to admit to any sort of weakness.

      Knowing where he was, he’d cut due south to intersect the fence line near the Boranga station, but had died two miles shy of his destination. The autopsy had proved his grit. Big John Gorley had walked over fifteen miles in two days of relentless heat with no food, one pint of water, a broken arm, six broken ribs and a ruptured spleen.

      The Outback had killed her father, yet it had nurtured him, too. Annie had not forgotten the harsh beauty of it, the smell and the taste and the feel and the sound of it. She was born in Australia and the land of her birth was in her blood. Sally had never seen the land down under, nor had she expressed any desire to, but that might change as she matured and became more curious about her roots. About her grandmother who lived in Melbourne now and her uncles, two of whom worked at Boranga and the third who had stayed on at Dad’s station.

      “Daddy,” Annie said softly, marveling at how unreal his death still seemed, how impossibly remote the idea that she would never see him again or hear his deep, humor-filled voice or feel the intense glow of pride his words of praise could evoke in her.

      Sally said she missed her father, and why wouldn’t she? Though he called her once a week, she rarely saw him. Perhaps she should spend some time with him this summer. It would be good for the both of them to get to know each other better, and it would get Sally away from those awful kids. That alone was enough to make Annie reconsider Ryan’s proposal.

      CHAPTER TWO

      “YOU PROMISED ME, Annie,” Matt reminded her two weeks later to the day. They were standing to one side of the door to X-ray. “I trust you’ve been packing your gear.”

      Annie sighed. “I know I promised, but I can’t go right away, Matt,” she said. “Sally’s hearing is first thing Monday morning and…” She shook her head, still unable to believe she was talking about her child. “I can’t just up and leave her, Matt. I was thinking that maybe we should wait until she goes to visit her father, and even then I may not be able to get a whole week off. I’ll ask, but there’s only an outside chance. You know how Edelstein is. He hates for anyone to have a life apart from the hospital.” She gazed at Matt, then reached for his arm and gave it a sympathetic squeeze. “Come on, Matt. I said I’d go, I just can’t promise you an entire week, that’s all. We’ll have to make the best of what we can get, and in the meantime, I’ll go to court with Sally.” An unexpected laugh erupted before she could quell it.

      “I don’t know how you can find the situation funny.”

      “It’s not funny at all. It just sounds so strange to my ears… It’s awful, it really is…” She sighed wearily and shook her head. “My daughter would never smoke pot or hang out with a seventeen-year-old juvenile delinquent named Tom or get arrested for possession of an illegal substance. Know what I mean?”

      “I hope she’s learned her lesson.”

      “Me, too. She’s been going to these special meetings on Tuesday nights that are guaranteed to put her on the straight and narrow and she seems to be taking it very seriously, which is good because I’m having a hard time with all this stuff. Court hearings, for heaven’s sake. All I can picture is Sally being hauled away in handcuffs by that scruffy cop, Lieutenant Macpherson. He could easily pass for a derelict. I understand it’s part of his job to look like the very people he’s trying to arrest, but still…”

      “I take it he’s not one of your favorites?” Matt said sympathetically.

      “He arrested my daughter, didn’t he?” Annie shot over her shoulder as she pushed through the doors to X-ray.

      ANNIE’S SATURDAY NIGHT in ER began with a blistering flurry of activity that only intensified as the early hours of the morning brought a rising tide of traumatic injuries. By 3:00 a.m. she was up to her elbows in other people’s crises, which in a way was a blessing because she had no time to dwell on the Monday morning hearing. She was actually beginning to look forward to the camping trip with Matt, and also beginning to entertain the notion of getting out of the city once and for all. Perhaps it was time for that long-yearned-for return to the country, to a quiet, backwater place where Sally could make new friends and discover sunshine and fresh air.

      “Dr. Crawford?” Rob Bellows, a surgical resident, entered the treatment room and spoke at her elbow. “I’ll take over for you here. We’ve got another incoming. Gunshot wound to the chest, EMT’s report it’s pretty dicey.”

      “They’re all pretty dicey,” Annie said wearily, stepping back from the table where the victim