LITMIR.BIZ

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hugged her mother next. Anyone watching may have thought it strange that she greeted her sister before her mother but Ruby and Lucy didn’t have an easy relationship. Ruby had always felt far more comfortable sharing her thoughts and feelings with her sister, but she recognised that the sometimes stilted relationship she had with her mother was her own fault. She’d always pushed her mother away. Ruby had always wanted to assert her independence and it had backfired on her in spectacular fashion during her teenage years but she’d been too proud then to admit her mistakes. She wasn’t sure if she’d changed all that much in the ensuing years.

      ‘It’s good to have you home.’ Lucy welcomed her with open arms.

      Her mother would say she was home but Adelaide hadn’t been home to Ruby for almost eleven years. She wasn’t sure where she would say home was. But she wasn’t going to argue over semantics now. It wasn’t important. She was going to be mature and agreeable. Whether she called Adelaide home or not was irrelevant—she was here now. A week earlier than planned. She’d had flights booked for the end of the week, scheduled for Scarlett and Jake’s wedding, she hadn’t planned on making a middle of the night dash to the bedside of her critically ill little sister.

      Ruby could hear the soft click and hiss of the ventilator behind her. So far she’d avoided looking at Rose and still she hesitated. She wasn’t sure if she could handle seeing her younger sister lying in a hospital bed connected to machines.

      She let go of her mother and asked, ‘Have the doctors been back? Have they said anything more?’ She asked the question even though she was unsure about whether she was ready to hear the answer.

      She knew the question was just another delaying tactic. When Jake had met her at the airport he’d told her what they knew about Rose’s condition so far. Which wasn’t much and not nearly enough to thaw the icy fingers that had gripped her heart since Scarlett had phoned her in the middle of the night. She knew the doctors suspected meningitis and had put Rose into a medically induced coma and started her on a course of antibiotics, but Jake hadn’t been able to tell her anything further.

      She had directed her question at Scarlett and was struck again how she automatically turned to her sister and not their mother in a crisis. Scarlett, as the eldest of the Anderson sisters, had always been the level-headed one. The one who everyone in their scrambled family turned to in times of crisis, but Ruby had a premonition that this crisis might be too big for Scarlett to handle alone and she suspected she would have to be prepared to stand up and be counted too. The only issue was she didn’t know if she was capable of that.

      Up until now Ruby had done a very good job of avoiding major responsibility but it seemed times might be changing. She was going to have to be prepared to take some of the burden from Scarlett.

      She’d had plenty of experience of her life changing around her without warning or consultation. It had been something that had shaped her into the woman she was today, one who wanted total control over her own life. One who didn’t want to give anyone else an opportunity to upset her apple cart. Taking control hadn’t always worked out so well for her but at least her mistakes, downfalls and dramas had been of her own making.

      But even though recently she’d been doing a relatively good job of controlling her own little world she wasn’t able to control the world that existed around her, and the wider world had a habit of intruding when she didn’t want it to and throwing curve balls her way.

      Scarlett shook her head in reply to Ruby’s question. Jake and Scarlett were both doctors yet they had no more insight into Rose’s situation and the lack of information frustrated Ruby.

      Ruby herself wasn’t a stranger to hospitals. All the sights and sounds and smells, which to many others would seem unfamiliar, were nothing unusual for her. She was a nurse, she’d had plenty of experience looking after patients and their families but she’d never been on the other side. She’d never had to sit by and watch while someone she loved was on life support and being cared for by a team of doctors and nurses. It was a very different situation and, for reasons she didn’t fully understand yet, it made her uneasy. She knew it was, in part, due to exhaustion. She was tired and emotional but she had to face her fears. She’d been on the go since four this morning and lack of sleep wasn’t making things any rosier.

      Rose.

      She needed to face her fears. She needed to see Rose.

      She could feel anxiety gripping her chest, adding to the pressure of those icy fingers around her heart as she forced herself to look at her younger sister. She knew she was nervous, worried about the sight that was going to confront her. She turned to the bed.

      Half a dozen various tubes and leads connected Rose to monitors and to life. Ruby tried to ignore the mechanical sounds of the ventilator as she focused on Rose. The pale skin of her arms was covered in a purple rash that was indicative of septicaemia but the rash didn’t appear to have spread to her face. Ruby didn’t know how she would have reacted to that. Rose had always been unbelievably pretty and Ruby didn’t want to face such a stark and obvious sign of Rose’s affliction. She looked as though she was sleeping and Ruby was grateful for small mercies.

      But she still didn’t understand why nothing was happening. Everyone was sitting around, waiting. If the doctors wanted to run more tests, where were they? Why wasn’t someone doing something? What were they waiting for?

      ‘Where are the doctors?’ She turned away from Rose and, out of habit as much as anything else, once again directed her question to Scarlett. She forced herself to look at Lucy next. Forced herself to include her mother, but Lucy looked as though she was in shock and Ruby doubted she’d even heard her question.

      Her mother looked tired. Lucy had always been beautiful. Scarlett had inherited her looks but although Lucy often looked tired, Ruby had never thought she looked older than her years. Until today.

      Lucy had been only eighteen when Scarlett was born and they were often mistaken for sisters. But Ruby knew people wouldn’t be making that mistake today. Sitting side by side, their similarities were still obvious but so was their age difference. Growing up, Ruby had longed for their colouring, longed for their dark hair, dark eyes and flawless fair skin. She had the fair skin but she’d hated her red hair, even though her mother had insisted it was strawberry blond, and the smattering of freckles that were strewn across the bridge of her nose.

      Ruby could see some strands of grey in Lucy’s dark hair, which she didn’t remember seeing before. She knew she had caused some of the lines on her mother’s face but there were more of those too than there used to be. Definitely more than there had been a few months ago when Ruby had last come back to Adelaide, and she suspected the events of the past twelve hours had put them there.

      But this wasn’t about her or her mother now. It was about Rose, and she needed to stay calm and positive. Biting back a scream of frustration, she looked back at Scarlett, wanting someone to answer her.

      ‘They’re waiting for the results of the blood tests,’ Scarlett told her.

      ‘I thought they’d diagnosed meningitis?’

      Scarlett nodded. ‘They’re treating her for septicaemia and bacterial meningitis but they haven’t identified the strain yet.’

      Ruby knew that bacterial meningitis was more serious than the viral form and she also knew that the prognosis varied widely between the different strains of bacteria and between different people. What she didn’t understand was how Rose could have caught the disease.

      ‘How did this happen? How did Rose get sick?’ As she asked yet another question she wondered if they should be talking in front of Rose. She believed that coma patients could hear conversations going on around them but she figured Rose had probably heard everything else that had been discussed so far this morning.

      ‘No one can really say,’ Jake answered, ‘but the most likely scenario is that Rose picked it up at work in the after-school care facility. The bacteria can’t live outside the body for long so people need to be in close contact.’

      Rose was studying to be a primary

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