Melting the Argentine Doctor's Heart / Small Town Marriage Miracle (11 page)

Not, she accepted, to the home she wanted—the home she still, deep down, hoped to find in Jorge—but a sensation of belonging, as if this country with its smiling people, beautiful parks with their statues and towering
trees could be her home, hers and Ella’s, no matter what happened between Jorge and herself.

‘Tostado
for Ella—a toasted sandwich with ham and cheese—yes?’

Jorge had lifted Ella onto a chair at a table that looked out across the park to the river. He looked enquiringly at Caroline, who realised she must have been lost in her thoughts of an unfamiliar sense of homecoming for too long.

‘She’d like that and maybe she’d like some
dulce de leche
—the sweet milk you used to speak of,’ Caroline replied.

Jorge, who was pulling out a chair for her, hesitated, looking directly into her face, frowning slightly.

‘Did you think I’d forget things like that and
mate?’
she asked him, disturbed by something that had flickered in the air between them, not like the arc of attraction of the previous day, something different.

He didn’t answer but continued to frown, making her wonder just what was going on in his head. It caused an ache deep within her that she didn’t know.

‘You might like to try a
super-lomito
,’ was all he said, dashing any hope she might have had that he’d been thinking anything personal or had felt the flicker. ‘It is a steak sandwich with a slice of ham and a fried egg on top of it.’

Caroline managed a nod, while inside she was smiling sadly. Here she was, thinking attraction—that was what the flicker had been—and he was thinking ham and eggs. Served her right.

I
T WAS
an idyllic afternoon. Looking back, it seemed to Caroline that both she and Jorge had set aside the past and all its pain and problems and lost themselves in the joyousness that filled the air throughout the
plaza.
Ella took it all in, watching the make-up football games, joining children on the slides and swings, throwing sticks into the river and watching them float, throwing stones to see the splash.

By the time they returned home, Ella was sleepy so for a second night she had noodles for tea, a quick bath, then into bed, not even staying awake to the end of the story Jorge was reading her.

Not wanting to see him sitting on the bed with Ella nestled up to him as he read, Caroline had walked across to the clinic to check on their patient. Juan was there, an anxious look in his eyes, although he hesitated when Caroline questioned him.

‘He’s had more antibiotics,’ he said. ‘He shouldn’t be suffering from an infection.’

He was! The man’s pulse was racing, his face flushed, his wounded foot swollen to almost twice its size. Caroline checked the dressings, picking up signs of a
nasty ooze, and knew immediately that an infection had taken hold.

‘I think Jorge might have to operate again. I hate asking you to watch Ella for me, so perhaps there’s someone else. I’m happy to pay someone to—we call it babysit—if you can find someone you trust.’

‘Mima will do it—but not for money. She is happy Jorge has helped us so much here in the settlement and she likes little Ella. I will get her and take her to the hut and tell Jorge what you think.’

By the time Jorge and Juan returned, Caroline had updated their patient’s status, filling in her findings on the file by the side of the bed. She was bathing him with wet flannels, hoping to lower his temperature, not wanting to give him drugs before Jorge decided what he’d do.

‘I’ll have to open up the wound and clean it out,’ he said as he examined the stained dressings. ‘You will assist?’

He looked at Caroline and she read his distress. An infection could kill the man, and Jorge would surely blame himself for not having headed it off.

‘Of course,’ she said, and knowing how he thought added, ‘and it wouldn’t have made any difference if you’d been here all afternoon. Juan said he only developed the fever in the last hour.’

Jorge nodded, accepting her words, although she knew he’d still be wondering.

He and Juan shifted the man into the treatment room, Juan taking up his position at the man’s head, ready to watch over the anaesthetic and the monitor. Jorge opened
the big cupboard and began to pull out what he’d need, while Caroline unwrapped the injured foot, grimacing as she saw the swollen, angry wound.

‘I wanted to keep his heel if possible as it would give him more stability, but the blood supply to the foot is so poor it might not be possible.’

It was an exercise in patience and precision and Caroline could only watch in wonder as Jorge probed and cut. She was kept busy swabbing and flushing, doing all she could to keep the intricacies of the wound clear for his scalpel. Juan reported the monitor findings—the man’s blood pressure was stabilising, his temperature coming down.

‘It’s tricky,’ Jorge said, ‘because of the way the calf muscles hook onto the heel, but the smaller muscles hook further forward so they get better leverage. You have to balance the amount of bone you keep—all surgeons think more is better—against the amount of support the bone will get. I’m taking it further back towards the heel so he’ll have good fleshy support but it means sacrificing some of the tendons.’

It was easy for Caroline to see that he was totally immersed in the surgery and it made her wonder just where his new life would take him.

‘Have you seen many of these injuries or have you been reading up on amputations?’ she asked, her fascination in the operation taking precedence over all the emotional stuff she’d been battling since she arrived.

‘Making mud bricks, building and reading,’ Jorge said lightly. ‘That’s been the pattern of my life lately.’

Then, as if sensing that she wasn’t going to accept so easy a reply, he looked up at her.

‘I’ve been reading widely,’ he admitted, ‘across a multitude of medical disciplines. I know myself well enough to know that whatever I do next, it will have to be a challenge—a real challenge.’

He carefully attached a tendon to the tarsal bone, saying, almost under his breath, ‘I don’t think this will do much good.’

That done, he straightened for a moment while Caroline swabbed and flushed.

Working with her like this, Jorge decided, was exciting somehow. The agonising emotions her sudden arrival had stirred back to life were set aside more easily while they worked as professional colleagues. And probably because of this professional closeness, he found himself telling her things he’d only, at this stage, discussed in his head.

‘Given the state I was in when I returned home, I suppose it was natural I looked at psychology first, working my own way through the change in my life and wondering if it was in me to help others.’

He glanced up and saw the interest in her blue eyes—interest only, not a hint of pity. Was he wrong in thinking that was what she’d feel? Had he been wrong all along?

No! This was definitely not the time to be distracted by ‘what ifs’ so, resolutely, he turned his attention back to the probing and stitching.

‘Burns, naturally, seemed a good idea, but so much good work is already being done in research and
development there, particularly in growing new skin from the patient’s own skin cells. Surgery had always interested me, and with landmines still littering the ground in many countries, I knew I could always be useful there.’

‘Hence your knowledge of foot amputation,’ Caroline put in. Although he couldn’t see her mouth because of the mask she wore, he knew she was smiling as she spoke for the smile shone in her eyes and lilted in her voice, a perilous distraction.

Caroline!

Her name sighed through his head and whispered in his heart, so it took all his attention to focus once more on his patient, although once he was back on track with the operation, he could continue his conversation.

‘I’m thinking genetics. I know it’s the buzz word these days, and it’s an infinite field, but I would like to tie it into racial differences. We’ve known for a long time about some genetic abnormalities in particular races and scientists have been working to change the genes that cause these but I’m more interested in the genetics of our indigenous population—the similarities and differences. We are in a unique situation as there are pockets of indigenous people who have never intermarried with the migrants who settled here.’

It made sense, Caroline decided, but knowing how well Jorge interacted with patients, she knew that shutting himself away in a laboratory would be, in some ways, a loss to medicine.

‘It would also give me time to spend among these people,’ he added, looking up at her, the twinkle in
his dark eyes telling her he’d guessed what she’d been thinking.

Again.

But the discomfort she was feeling had nothing to do with his prescience, more to do with the twinkle that had sliced through her professional façade as easily as a scalpel through flesh. One glimpse of smiling eyes and she was thrust back into the emotional storm she’d been determined to hold at bay.

It fanned the embers of her anger that he could slide beneath her poise so easily. She should be stronger than this, more in control of her feelings, but how could she remain detached when every moment in his presence held reminders of what had been between them, even the very professional conversation they’d been having? His interest in every aspect of the medical world was one of the things that had drawn her to him, fascinated by the breadth of his knowledge and his determination to keep adding to it.

‘There, I think I’ve got all the infected tissue, but I’ll leave a new drain in place, higher up this time, just in case.’

He stepped back and Caroline read pain in the way he moved and tried to straighten.

‘I’ll sew it up,’ she said, telling him, not offering. ‘Needlework was my best subject at school.’

She moved so she was closer to the table, closer to Jorge as well but now was not the time to be considering closeness or the manifestations of it. Right now she needed to do her best to make the truncated foot as neat as possible, to close the wound tightly to prevent new
infection, yet to sew it up in such a way that their patient would have some padding beneath the bones, and be able, in time, to learn to walk on it.

Jorge had stepped back to give her room, and although in some inner corner of her mind she continued to be aware of his presence, she concentrated on her job, pleased when, more than an hour later, Jorge said, ‘Well done, that’s a splendid job. Let’s hope this time it will begin to heal.’

He touched her lightly on the shoulder, guiding her away, telling her that he’d dress it and help Juan take their patient back to the small ‘ward', but Caroline was reluctant to move.

Once out of the small treatment room, all her concerns and worries about the future would return. It was all very well for Jorge to talk of taking them to Buenos Aires, but what then? The way Jorge spoke, his father could be a problem in some way and on top of that there’d been no indication from Jorge by either word or deed that she was important to him except as the mother of his child.

So she couldn’t stay on for ever in his father’s house. She’d have to find a home nearby for herself and Ella. She’d have to find a job because she loved her work and believed she should continue it.

She’d have to—

‘There is something wrong? You’ve left something in the wound? We’ve forgotten something? ‘

Jorge’s questions brought her abruptly out of her thoughts and she turned towards him.

‘Nothing in the wound—I was just thinking …’

Was she frowning that he touched her gently on the arm?

‘Juan and I will take care of him from here. There is food in the hut, maybe not much variety but certainly eggs if you would like to make an omelette. I will wait with our patient until he comes out of the anaesthetic and possibly relieve Juan from duty tonight. You will be all right in the hut? ‘

The twinkle was long gone from his eyes but Caroline thought she read anxiety there in its place. Was he worried that she’d been standing feeling lost while he and Juan prepared to shift their patient?

Or concerned about abandoning his role of host? Although she understood, after this setback, why he’d want to remain with the patient.

‘I’ll be fine,’ she told him, and she hurried away, cursing herself for the muddle in her mind, for the mess she seemed to have landed in by jumping on a plane in such a rage and not thinking far enough ahead to at least have some kind of plan.

Back home it had seemed so easy. In her mind, Jorge, badly injured and fearing her pity, had rejected her with enough cruelty to convince her he hadn’t ever loved her. Seeing the scars in the picture, she’d immediately decided he’d rejected her out of pride, hence her anger and the mad flight to Argentina. She’d had enough functioning brain cells to realise her assumptions could be wrong, but had decided that working with him for a month would be enough time to suss that out.

What she hadn’t expected was to have so little time alone with him. Neither had she expected to be swept
off to his father’s house and into a wider web of complications in a situation already complicated enough, given that every moment in his presence was a kind of torture.

The moon was out and she paused to look up at it, nearly full, shining through the branches of a tree, a stark, spiky, possibly unattractive tree, although in the moonlight it had a peculiar beauty.

She sensed rather than heard Jorge’s approach.

‘I thought I should see you safely settled back at the hut,’ he said quietly, moving up beside her where she was gazing at the tree.

‘I can manage,’ she told him. ‘I know where things are. But what is that tree?’

‘It’s a thorn tree, a native of the Grand Chaco where the Toba people come from. There are two or three in the settlement, the seedlings brought out of sentiment, I suppose, by families when they came south.’

‘I should have guessed,’ Caroline replied. ‘They’re very similar to the thorn trees in Africa. I’ve always liked them, so persistent, growing where it seems nothing much should grow.’

He’s like those trees, she thought to herself as she continued to admire the bare black branches outlined against the deep purple of the sky. Prickly, thorny, keeping people at bay, yet there’s a strange beauty in the trees, especially when seen in silhouette, and Jorge’s inner beauty won’t have changed. He just doesn’t realise it.