Melting the Argentine Doctor's Heart. Meredith Webber
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Fortunately, though not so fortunate for the people who lived here, the taxi had turned off the tree-lined boulevard, down a suburban street then into a small lane between makeshift homes.
‘Poor people who come from the north,’ the taxi driver explained. ‘The city builds them housing but more come before they can all have homes.’
The clinic looked exactly as it had on the internet, like an old corner store, painted white, and the small, brown-skinned people lazing around outside it might have been the same ones she’d read about in the article, mostly indigenous Toba people who lived in this overcrowded section of the big city of Rosario. The taxi stopped and though her stomach was knotted tightly and her lungs had seized so she could only gasp in short choppy breaths, she resisted the temptation to ask the driver to take her back to the airport.
Resisted, too, the panic that threatened to overwhelm her, reminding herself of the reason she had come.
Whatever she might feel—whatever might lie between Jorge and herself—her daughter deserved a father. Growing up without one herself, she had longed for someone to call Daddy. But worse than the longing—that hollow gap in her life—she knew how insecure it had made her around boys, and how uncertain she’d been about men.
Perhaps it even explained how easily she’d been seduced by Jorge’s declarations of love …
Refusing to acknowledge such a dread thought, she forced air deep into her lungs, shook her daughter gently awake, paid the cab driver, and muttered, ‘Here goes!’ to herself.
Yes, her voice had quavered and, yes, she had a momentary concern about bringing Ella to this obviously overcrowded area of what had looked a beautiful city, but having come all this way for Ella to meet her father, Caroline was not going to be stopped at the front door.
The sleepy child grumbled slightly when her mother lifted her, but as the little arms locked around Caroline’s neck, and the soft, thick, dark curls brushed her cheek, her tension eased, determination returning in its place. She was doing this for her daughter.
Jorge looked up as his helper and friend, Juan, came rushing into the room.
‘Taxi with lady and baby outside. Lady with baby coming in.’
Juan’s use of the word ‘lady’ was enough to tell Jorge that this was no ordinary visit. The woman obviously wasn’t one of the local people for whom he’d set up the clinic, so a taxi dropping off a woman with a child—an emergency, surely.
He was moving towards the door of his office as these thoughts chased through his head, and a couple of paces past that he was at the front door of the clinic, staring in disbelief at the tall blonde woman striding up the front path, a small, dark-haired child nestled in her arms.
His first fleeting thought was that this would be a really good time for lightning to strike him, but when the cloudless sky failed to deliver instant incineration, and he doubted a tsunami would sweep him away—too far from the sea—he was forced to confront the intruder.
‘Caroline?’
His voice made a question of her name but his gut, cramping uncomfortably, knew exactly who it was. Heat stirred in unfamiliar places, while his heart gave a bump in his chest and panic rattled his brain. Fortunately the doctor in him reacted with concern for the child and, automatically turning the good side of his face to the woman he’d once loved—once?—he let the doctor take over.
‘What are you doing here? Is the child ill?’
His words halted her, but only momentarily, not enough for him to really study her, to see if she was still as beautiful as the vision he saw in his dreams.
Beautiful! She’d mocked him when he’d called her that, pointing out that her mouth was too big, her nose too thin, her eyes too wide apart, hair too fair—a dozen shortcomings listed as she’d shied away from his praise …
Caroline didn’t answer. She continued down the path until she stood directly in front of him—close enough to touch if his arms had moved from his side, if any part of his body would have obeyed an order from his stunned brain.
She studied him, her face betraying nothing as she took in the scarring down his right cheek. Now his brain was beginning to work again and he realised she could only have found him through the internet and the article that had appeared on it had shown his photograph, scar and all.
‘The child,’ she said carefully, her voice so taut he knew she was as tense as he was, ‘is your daughter.’
Dumbstruck! He knew the word yet had never understood its meaning until this moment. It was as if the lightning bolt that hadn’t come earlier had finally arrived, spearing into his brain.
At that moment, the child raised her head from her mother’s shoulder and looked around, smiling tentatively at him before shyly snuggling her face back into Caroline’s neck. The denial he’d been working up to died on his lips. As a small child, his mother had so loved his curls she’d refused to cut his hair, and he’d seen the face that looked at him in photographs of himself as a toddler.
He had a child!
He had a daughter!
The knowledge bounced around in his head in the blank space where his brain had once been.
‘Her name is Ella.’
Ella?
Caroline had called the child Ella?
Had she remembered it was his mother’s name?
Of course she would have! And the naming could be part of an elaborate con. The child—Ella—had kicked against restraint in her mother’s arms and was now on the ground, looking around her, eyes wide as she took in these new surroundings.
And unless Caroline had found a lover who looked just like him, maybe Jorge had to accept the child was his.
His daughter!
Ella!
He squatted down, holding up a hand to stop Caroline who looked as if she might swoop on the little girl.
‘Hello,’ he said, using the deliberately soft voice he used not only for children but for new patients at the clinic.
Dark eyes stared at him, moving across his face, pausing, then a tentative smile danced around small pink lips, and she raised a hand in a small salute.
‘Hi,’ she said, and as he squatted, immobilised by the smile, by her voice, she stepped forward and put the palm of her hand against his scarred cheek. ‘Sore? ‘
He couldn’t speak, the lump in his throat too hard to dislodge. How could this be? How could he comprehend it? The child was his? This child, who’d touched his face with baby-soft fingers? He reached out, shocked to see his fingers shaking, and brushed his hand against the shiny brown curls.
‘Not sore,’ he said gently, unable to tell her of the pain in other parts of his body, in particular his heart.
The child smiled, and patted his cheek this time, then, in the way of very small and easily diverted children, she turned to check out her surroundings.
Glancing up, he saw tears in Caroline’s eyes, but the reality of what she’d done took precedence over weakness, growing in enormity.
They couldn’t stay.
He wouldn’t get involved—couldn’t get involved.
For the last four years he had pushed the world away, hating the pity he saw in people’s eyes, happy only when he was working on a new project, doing something to help people worse off than himself, people who wouldn’t care if he looked like Frankenstein’s monster because he was willing to help them.
He knew it was pride—foolish, stupid pride—that had made him react this way—and if he hadn’t known then his father had told him often enough—but it was the only way he could cope with