A Family To Come Home To

‘I should be back in about fifteen minutes,’ she said as she pressed the key fob to unlock the car. ‘If you don’t mind waiting, I’ll get you a set of keys and show you where everything is when I get back—unless you’d rather have Rose get them for you and settle yourself?’

‘I’ll wait,’ he said decisively. ‘There’ll probably be questions that only you can answer.’

‘Fine,’ Kat said briefly, managing to limit herself to a single word this time and sliding into the car. If Sam didn’t arrive soon, she’d be making a complete idiot of herself, babbling non-stop. She switched the engine on then glanced into the rear-view mirror to check that Josh had put his seat belt on, before turning her head and starting to reverse out of her parking space in front of the practice.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw the briefest flash of something moving before Josh shouted out and something thumped against the car. Something hard.

‘Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God!’ she wailed as she slammed on the brakes and flung her door open. ‘Sam!’ she shrieked as she leapt out of the car and sped towards the back.

‘Mum…I’m sorry! I forgot!’ wailed her youngest as he threw himself into her arms.

‘Sam!’ Relief that he was apparently totally unharmed took all the starch out of her knees and they nearly buckled.

‘I forgot about going round the front of the car where you can see me,’ he said urgently. ‘It’s all my fault.’

‘Well, you’ll remember next time,’ she consoled him, wiping an uncharacteristic tear from a cheek that still retained a trace of childish chubbiness. All too soon he would be grown up and…She shuddered at the realisation that his whole future could have been wiped out in that split second.

‘At least you weren’t hurt, so—’

‘But he was!’ wailed Sam. ‘And it’s my fault!’

‘He?’ Kat glanced up sharply. ‘Who?’

‘I think he means me,’ said a voice somewhere at the back of her car, and her knees completely gave out.

‘Ben?’ She was reduced to crawling on her hands and knees but she didn’t have to go far to find him, his long legs out of her sight under the chassis while his upper body lay spread-eagled on the ground in front of her. ‘Oh, God, Ben! Are you hurt? Oh, that’s a stupid question! You wouldn’t be lying there if you weren’t. How badly are you hurt?’

Without even realising how she’d got there, she was at his head, her fingers gently winnowing through the thick dark strands as she searched for bleeding, lumps or, God forbid, depressed fractures. It certainly wasn’t the time to notice the sprinkle of silver strands at his temples.

‘Where did I hit you?’ she asked as she worked her way down his neck, conscious of the strong musculature even as she was examining each vertebra for damage or misalignment. ‘How did you fall?’

‘My leg,’ he said through gritted teeth. ‘I realised you were going to hit it and tried to get out of the way but…’ He shook his head in spite of her attempts to hold it still. ‘I managed to stop my head from hitting the ground.’

‘Is your leg broken?’ Her hands were shaking now as she continued her assessment with his arms, not daring to examine the rest of his spine while his lower half was restricted by the vehicle. She didn’t have enough people around to log-roll him.

‘If not, it’s the worst dislocation I’ve ever—Agh!’ His attempt at moving it must have been agony but he’d closed his mouth on the curse when Sam had crouched down beside them. Kat was immeasurably touched.

‘It was my fault, Mum,’ he hiccuped. ‘I was right behind the car and he…Is he going to die?’ The words were almost hysterical and she suddenly realised just how traumatic this was for a child who had lost his father only a year ago.

‘I’m too grumpy to die,’ Ben volunteered suddenly, and when Sam gazed at him in surprise, he aimed an exaggerated scowl at her son. ‘And I’ll get grumpier and grumpier the longer I’m lying on the ground.’

‘Kat! Oh, my stars!’ exclaimed Rose. ‘Josh came in to get me. Do you want me to phone for an ambulance?’

‘No!’ It was Ben who answered first. ‘No ambulance.’

‘But, Ben…’ she protested. It was obvious he needed expert help.

He hardly gave her time to speak before he was pushing himself up onto his elbows and beginning to inch himself backwards, out from under her car.

‘It’s not serious enough to warrant tying up an ambulance,’he declared decisively. ‘Drive your car forward again, then you’ll have room to strap my legs together for support…if Rose will fetch some bandages?’ He threw a quick smile in the receptionist’s direction but if he’d looked gaunt before, now he looked ghastly. His skin was pasty and had a waxen sheen and the muscles in his jaw were bulging as he gritted his teeth to brace himself for the next few inches of progress across the tiny car park.

‘You will give me a lift to the hospital, won’t you?’ he asked, almost as an afterthought.

Of course she would give him a lift to the hospital if he was so stubborn as to refuse the offer of an ambulance. After all, it was her fault that he’d been injured. If she hadn’t been distracted with her thoughts about the way he’d almost shanghaied her into giving him the job, she would have been more vigilant.

‘Yes. Of course I’ll give you a lift,’ she said crossly. ‘Just stay still until I’ve moved the car. You could be doing yourself more damage like that.’ She turned to get into the car and saw her two sons staring down at the injured man with very different expressions on their faces.

Sam’s was easy to read—a mixture of terror that he was going to watch another man dying, the way his father had, and guilt that it could have been his thoughtlessness that had caused the injury. Josh’s was more complicated, most of it hidden behind the mask of impassive resignation he’d worn since his father had died, but she was almost certain she could see a measure of respect for the man’s stoicism.

‘Sam, you had better get in the car,’ she ordered briskly. ‘Get in the front and put the belt on. Josh, can you wait beside Ben? I’m going to need your help to get him in the car and then you can look after him on the way to hospital. Can you do that for me?’

For the first time in nearly a year there was a crack in his impassivity, the sudden glimpse of fear swiftly replaced by pride that she’d asked him to do this and determination that he wouldn’t fail her. ‘No problemo,’ he said with a shrug full of the nonchalance of youth. ‘And if you need some pieces of wood for splinting, Sam could get some of the off-cuts left over from when the fence was mended last week.’

‘Good idea,’ she said with a smile for both of them, while a secret doubt struck her.

Had she been going about things the wrong way this last year? she wondered as she quickly pulled the car close to the building again. Had she been wrapping her sons in cotton wool and giving them too much time to brood on all the ways their lives had changed for ever, rather than keeping their minds occupied?

Children’s emotions were such a minefield. There certainly wasn’t any way to practise helping them to cope with the loss of a parent. All she could do was take it day by day.

Kat climbed back out of the car and got her first look at the extent of the damage she’d caused.

She felt sick.

There wasn’t any blood that she could see—Ben’s neatly pressed suit trousers were virtually unscathed. But the shape of the injured leg was a different matter, the damage to the bones just below his knee obvious even from a distance. A classic example of a motorcyclist’s fracture.

‘Here you are, Kat,’ Rose said, as she bustled out with a small stack of towels and several wide bandages tucked under one arm, the other fully occupied with the oxygen cylinder she’d grabbed from the corner of Kat’s surgery. ‘I’ve attached the mask so all you have to do is turn the knob to regulate the flow.’

‘Entonox?’ Ben’s expression lightened slightly at the thought, even though his eyes were clouded with pain as they met hers.

‘Unfortunately not,’ she said with a grimace. ‘You’d need the ambulance for that…But it should be less painful once I’ve got your leg immobilised. Do you want me to get you some analgesic?’

‘No, thanks,’ he said with a definite shudder. ‘I hate the feeling of being out of control.’

‘Well, I’m sorry about that, but from now on I’m in charge so you’ll just have to lie still,’ she said firmly. ‘Now, Josh, can you put my jacket under his head to make him more comfortable, then keep him still, OK? And, Josh, you have my permission to sit on him if you have to.’

Just before she looked down to focus on the task of completing her examination and stabilising the fractured leg against Ben’s sound one, she registered a flash of mischievous glee in her son’s face that had been missing for far too long. What a shame that it had taken something this dreadful to bring it back.

‘Here,’ Ben said, offering her a wickedly sharp blade already extended from the penknife attached to his keyring. ‘You’ll need that to slit my trousers.’

Kat threw him a regretful look. ‘I hate the thought of ruining such beautiful tailoring,’ she said, even as she began ripping them upwards from the hem.

‘It’ll be a lot less painful than trying to take them off,’ he said with a groan as he dropped his head back on the jumper Josh had folded for him and left her to her task.

Once the trouser leg was stripped back to his knee, the injury was obvious—a textbook presentation. It was the work of seconds to check his capillary refill and that his reflexes were still working.

‘Can you point your toes for me?’ she asked, although there had been none of the ‘six P’s’ signs of compartment syndrome evident, but if his attempt produced pain localised in his calf muscle then, whether he liked it or not, she was going to phone for an ambulance.

‘No pain in the calf,’ he confirmed with a significant glance in her direction that told her he had been concerned about the same complication. ‘Initially, the leg was bent at a horrible angle. I think that by dragging myself out from under the car, I may have straightened it out and prevented circulatory complications.’