A Child to Heal Their Hearts. Dianne Drake
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* * *
“Who was that, Daddy?” Allie asked him. Now she was sneaking up, hiding what he guessed was also a filled water balloon behind her back. So, he could take it like a man or, actually, like a daddy, and let his youngest have her turn at dousing Daddy, or he could spin and run like crazy. After all, he was well over six feet tall, considered well muscled by some. Legs that had helped him finish in the pack at a few marathons. So if he couldn’t outrun a little girl... “She was a doctor.”
“Who takes care of little kids, like you do?” Allie asked. The expression on her face was so determined, he knew what he had to do.
“No, not that kind of doctor, sweetheart.” He braced himself for the hit. “Remember when we talked about what having surgery means?” OK, so most parents weren’t quite as forthright as he was in his child-rearing ideas, but he didn’t believe in lying, not even when it was about something Allie probably wouldn’t even understand and definitely didn’t need to know.
“Where they have to make a zipper so they can see your insides?”
He chuckled. “Actually, yes.” Which meant she did listen to him. Music to the ears of a long-suffering parent. “She’s the kind of doctor who makes the zipper.”
He thought back to the conversation with Keera. Strained, at best. Maybe more like totally stressed out. Someone he pictured as nervous. Someone he also pictured as... One momentary distraction was all it took, and Reid Adams fell victim to his daughter, who landed the perfectly placed water balloon center chest. “Got me,” he shouted, dropping to the ground, where five or six other children converged on him and bombarded him with water balloons the way his own daughters had done.
“No fair,” he shouted while laughs and squeals muffled any protest he wanted to make. Not that he really wanted to protest. This was part of his fun. What meant the most to him now was thinking about how his daughters would be exhilarated, and knowing that his two little conspirators had led a group of normally sedentary kids into an adventure was, probably, the most fun of all.
Then he wondered about Dr. Keera Murphy. Would she have seen any of this as fun? Or worthless, as she wasn’t a big one for children? More than that, why did it even matter to him? And why did he make a mental note to do a little Internet surfing on her when he had time?
“No more water balloons,” he shouted, trying to stand up. But to no avail. As he rose to his knees, a whole new group of water ballooners swarmed him, loaded down with filled balloons of every size, color and shape imaginable. He barely had enough time to cover his face before the fun began.
* * *
“I know what I said, Dr. Murphy, and I’ve got a line on someone who might take her later tonight or some time tomorrow, if there’s nobody else available. But Mrs. Blanchard prefers her wards to be toilet trained, and as Megan isn’t, I’m not sure she’ll get all the attention she needs.”
They were sitting in the parents’ waiting room across from the hospital daycare center. A very cheerful place. Lots of bright yellows and oranges, like they were tying the conventional child stimuli colors into their parents. This was only the second time Keera had ever been there. The first had been that morning, when she’d left Megan in the able care of Dolores Anderson, the director. “She could be traumatized.”
“Maybe, and if that’s the case, I’m wondering if a pediatric hospital ward might be the best place for her temporarily.”
“Seriously, you want to stick her in a hospital?”
No, that was not acceptable. While she didn’t have any strong urges toward the child, she wasn’t some cold-hearted dungeon master who wanted to lock all the untrained kiddies away until they potty trained themselves. This was a child who needed attention, not isolation, and so far all of Consuela’s ideas seemed more like isolation.
“Look, just keep trying with Mrs. Blanchard, OK? If she won’t take Megan, maybe she’ll have a suggestion about who can.”
“We’ll work it out, Doctor. I promise, that’s all I’ve been doing today.”
Consuela was deliberately not making eye contact with Keera, trying to keep her gaze focused on anything else, and Keera accepted that. She’d probably do the same thing if she found herself in that same spot. But what Consuela didn’t understand was that so far today childcare had been a breeze because she’d had the help of the whole hospital daycare staff there to get her through it.
Tomorrow was another story. It was her day off—the start of her week off, in fact. And that’s when the reading commenced with a whole stack of medical journals she’d had for a year or more. Nowhere in those plans was there room for a toddler.
“I’m not criticizing you, and I hope you don’t think that I was. But I grew up in the foster-care system. A lot of it in institutions, and it’s horrible. Being passed off from one place to another, never knowing where you might end up next. I never got adopted because I was older when I went into the system, so I was in a grand total of nine different homes and three different institutions, all before the age of eighteen. And, no, I wasn’t a good child because of that.” She closed her eyes, fighting back those memories.
“This child doesn’t need that kind of trauma in her life.” As much as she’d disliked Kevin by the end of their marriage, Keera knew he would have been a very good father. A doting daddy. Megan didn’t deserve to go from that to cold indifference, which was what would happen if she was sent to an institution. Or even the wrong foster-family.
“It’s not always a traumatic situation, Doctor. We have very good caregivers.”
“Yes, I’m sure you do, and I admire people who would take on the responsibility. Right now, though, Megan needs more that what you’re able to find her, and I know that’s not your fault. But it’s not her fault either. Yet she’s the one who’s going to be bounced around or institutionalized.”
And she was waging the battle with the wrong person. She knew that. But the right person—the one who should have made arrangements for Megan in the event something like this happened—was dead. True to Kevin’s form, he hadn’t thought about the practical things. Hadn’t when they’d been married, hadn’t after they were divorced, and now his daughter was paying the price.
“I’m sorry about your childhood, Doctor, and I understand your frustration but, like I said, I’m doing my best. There aren’t any distant relatives suited to take her, or who even want her, for that matter, so I have to come up with another plan. But you’ve got to understand that in the short term Megan might have to go to a hospital pediatric ward, a group home or even the county home. It’s not what I want to do but what I may have to do if you can’t or won’t keep her for a little while longer.”
“In the meantime...” Resignation crept in a little too quickly, but maybe she saw something of herself in Megan. Abandoned child. It was hard to get past that. “If I keep her a day or two, that doesn’t mean I want to be a temporary guardian or any other kind of custodial figure. It simply means I’ll feed and clothe her while you continue looking for a better situation.”
“Which I’ll do,” Consuela promised.
“Good. So now I’ve got to go to the grocery and buy a few things a toddler would eat. Maybe pick up some clothes, toys...” OK, so she was relating to the situation but not to Megan herself. It was the best she could do. Better than most people would do, she thought as she bundled up the child and took her to the car. This was an honest effort, and it kept the child out of all those awful places Keera knew so intimately. Shuddered even thinking about them. Dark places, bad for children...
While having children had never been part of her plan—past, present or future—there’d been a time when she’d needed what Megan needed now, and no one had reached out to her. So how could she refuse?
“Megan, did you have a good day today?” she asked as they wended their way through the hospital corridors on her way to her car. “Play with lots of nice toys? Meet