3. The Accident
My life after that fell into the same strange pattern. Even though I was worked off my feet all week, I always looked forward to Friday nights, wondering how much more of the enigma that was Oliver Monroe I could figure out that evening. He still never talked to me more than a few words, and unless it was necessary to be around me, he always was invisible while I was around. I would always fall asleep on my couch after night shift, and would always wake up in my bed the next morning. On Saturdays I would go over to Ruth's, with my satellite phone strapped to me if I was on call that weekend, and we would discuss the phone call she always had with Oliver that morning about me. Not that he ever revealed that much to her - he thought I was very talented and wanted to make sure I woke up sometime during the next week. Did he really think I was so weak that working through one night would mean I'd feel the need to sleep forever? It wasn't like I was Snow White with the poison apple!
It was six weeks since I first arrived in Keyes, and I was glad for my little routine. I never felt any closer to understanding Oliver, but this only served to increase my interest in the man. I am rather embarrassed to admit I Googled him at one point, but nothing that was related to him ever popped up. His name seemed to be constantly popular throughout time, with people with his name existing as far back as the 1600s.
It was Friday afternoon again, and I was buzzing with the anticipation of our next meeting. What would he tell me tonight, or more importantly, what would he tell Ruth in the morning? I was a little impatient, sitting at home, waiting for 6pm to role around so I could head over to the hospital. I decided to go for a walk to distract myself for the hour that remained before I would have to go to work. I didn't walk anywhere in particular, my legs just carried me along as my thoughts were completely preoccupied with Oliver, yet again. I don't know what it was about him, but there was a sense of something entirely other about him. I found it difficult to resolve the image I held of him in my head as merely human, something I knew that if I discussed with anyone else they would probably think I was mad.
In the intervening six weeks, there had been more than enough emergencies to keep us occupied during the Friday night shift. Like the time a pregnant Warrengibie woman came in complaining of stomach cramps, and Oliver instantly knew she had a placental abruption, even though she wasn't bleeding, and delivered her baby via an emergency caesarean section, saving both mother and child. Or the man who had been stabbed by a mate at the pub, who conveniently passed out while Oliver sewed up his wound seeming I couldn't administer anaesthetic at that time because I was preoccupied with the man who had stabbed him. That seemed to happen a lot around Oliver, patients conveniently passing out. I wished I was so lucky. Would save me from some of the verbal diarrhoea I had to put up with when yet another drunk was dragged up to hospital by either their mates or by Doug the cop.
Oliver also had a knack of knowing exactly what was going on without patients ever needing to say a word. It was like he could hear their thoughts or something, which was ridiculous, of course. He must just be fairly intuitive.
I just couldn't make what I observed in those brief moments I was around Oliver add up in my head. They always seemed to me like Oliver was something more. And this just served to make me even more interested in him. It was pathetic, I was starting to feel like a stalker.
I looked at my watch and it was time I head back to the hospital so I wouldn't be late for night shift. Knowing the brevity of our contact during these evenings just made it all the more important for me to be around in case he would be forced to be around me too.
I was nearly at the hospital when I looked down the road to see Oliver coming in the opposite direction. As always, he was wearing that trench coat of his and hat that he always wore during the day (he took slip-slop-slap even more seriously than I did - not surprising considering his skin), and as always, the sight of him distracted me from everything else, until there was a screeching sound coming around the corner. His eyes flew up in my direction, locked on my face in horror, and for once they didn't hold me as I turned to face the sound.
A car was barrelling around the corner, coming straight at me. I knew in that instant that I was going to die - I couldn't get out of it's way fast enough. It wasn't even a second later that I felt the impact, and I was surprised when I was thrown away into the wall of the hospital, hearing my arm snap.
I looked back to where I was and saw the car wrapping around Oliver, somehow in the space I had been a second ago. I screamed, whether due to my arm or the terror of seeing the death of someone I knew, I couldn't say.
The car flipped over Oliver, as if somehow he had acted as a fulcrum, once again flying in my direction. I didn't feel fear this time as it came towards me, a sense of inevitability washed over me. This was it, I was dead.
But it didn't hit me. I waited, braced, with my eyes shut, but that impact never came. I opened my eyes and saw the ute on it's side, barely three meters from where I lay. How had it ended up there? I didn't want to look at it too closely, knowing that it would be smeared with Oliver's remains. I closed my eyes again and tried to keep breathing.
"Kaia? Kaia? Are you alright?"
I opened my disbelieving eyes, and there he was. In one piece, not a scratch on him, standing before me in a pale blue shirt, his golden eyes filled with worry.
"Kaia, can you hear me?"
"Where's your trench coat?" I couldn't believe that was the first garbled sentence out of my mouth - it should have been, why are you alive? I guessed I wasn't sure that he was alive. Maybe I was hallucinating.
"I didn't bring my trench coat today. Kaia, are you hurt?"
No, he had brought his trench coat. I saw him in it just before… why was this so important?
He reached towards me and touched my forehead, evidently deciding I was beyond rational conversation at the moment. I shivered as his cold hand brushed against my skin. Was he always this cold? Was he even here? Was I even here? No - the pain in my arm told me that I was alive at the very least. Whether he was or not, I was not entirely certain.
He reach across and touched my arm as I hissed in pain. His perfect brow furrowed in response.
"Kaia's arm's broken. Can you warm up the x-ray machine?"
Who was he talking to? Oh, Cassie had come out from the hospital, evidently the noise had alerted her.
"Can you call Greg? I'm not sure of the condition of those idiots in the car."
"Did she get hit?" Cassie sounded worried.
"Just clipped, I think. Thankfully they ran into the fire hydrant."
What? Fire hydrant? I had been nowhere near it, I was at least 5 meters away from that.
I looked up at him once again, trying to make my scrambled thoughts into coherent sentences.
"How you get here so fast?"
"I was only a few metres away, Kaia. I pulled you out of the way."
So I hadn't been hit by the car - Oliver had pulled me away. Thrown me away, if my flight into the wall was anything to go by. How strong was this man? Strong enough to survive being hit by a ute, anyway.
"You…were hit. You should be dead. Why aren't you dead?"
"I wasn't hit, Kaia, the car was nowhere near me."
"Yes, I saw you, I saw you die…"
"You're in shock, Kaia, you're just imagining things."
"I'm not!"
"It all happened so quickly, how can you be sure of what you saw?"
"If it didn't happen, then where's your trench coat?" As the words spilled out, it suddenly clicked. He may be pristine, but he was missing his trench coat. Evidently getting rid of the evidence…wait, had I gone mad?
"Please, Kaia," he begged me, as Doug the cop arrived finally.
I don't know why, but I swallowed and nodded at him. These questions could always wait for later, when we were alone.
Oliver stood up and left me then, going to greet Doug and tell him what happened, and then go and see to, as Oliver called them, those idiots in the car. Dr Young reached me then, babbling about if I was ok and did my arm hurt and all sorts of things that I wasn't really listening to. My mind was somewhere else.
After my x-rays, it was decided that I would need to be flown to Broome and get my arm reconstructed by an orthopaedic surgeon. I had fractured my humerus in two places, most of it shattered into pieces. Dr Young couldn't work out how it had shattered in that way - the area was about the size of a human hand… I would need a shoulder reconstruction, as my arm had dislocated in the process (something else Dr Young couldn't explain) and I had fractured the joint capsule. I had an idea of how that had happened though…
I hadn't seen Oliver again since the accident, but my mind hadn't left the scene. I just kept playing it over and over in my head.
I was walking down the street, Oliver was walking towards me about a hundred metres away, the ute came rushing around the corner and was going to hit me, suddenly I was thrown away from it's path and into the wall, breaking my arm, then Oliver was hit by the car, the car flipped over him and should of landed on me, but instead landed three metres away from me. Somehow in all of that, Oliver had lost his trench coat.
I must be going mad.
The two men in the ute - drunk, of course - could hardly remember the incident. Neither of them could remember Oliver being anywhere near them. Then again, they couldn't remember me being anywhere near them, so they were hardly reliable witnesses. Unbelievably, they both came out of it fairly unscathed. The same thing could not be said for their ute.
Ruth had been fluttering around me like a mother chook since the accident. I couldn't get any sense out of her, so I didn't try. Evidently she needed to babble to calm herself down. I had calmed down considerably since the accident, even though my mind continued to whirr as piece by piece fell into place in my head. Once I was done working out what had happened, Oliver and I were going to have a talk. Even if I could make sense of the how, only he could make sense of the why.
The RFDS plane arrived and I was being shuffled out towards it, Oliver still not having reappeared. This frustrated me - I would not get the chance to talk to him before I left, and I had no idea when I would be able to come back. Was this his plan? Did he think if I was away long enough I would forget about my impossible rescue? He was not going to be that lucky.
When we got to the airstrip, I saw a man come bounding over to us. Was he a local? He was indigenous, though I couldn't say if he was Warrengibie or not, but he was lighter than most of our locals. One of his parents was white, obviously. He had a mop of curls and a cheeky smile, and he was well dressed in a simple white dress shirt, sleeves rolled up to his elbows, and a pair of old jeans. A stethescope hung around his neck.
"Hi, I'm Dale. You must be my patient for today."
I couldn't help but smile back at him. His personality permeated the air around him.
"I'm Kaia."
"Lovely to meet you, Kaia. So, business class or economy?"
"Don't think I can afford business class."
"It's alright, I know a guy," and he winked at me and turned to Dr Young.
"Multiple fractures to left middle and distal humerus. There is splintering of the bone distally. There is also a fracture of the glenoid capsule from a posterolateral dislocation, which has been reduced."
"Ok, so no-one else to pick up while I'm here?"
Dr Young shook his head, as Dale turned back to me.
"Ok, let's get this show on the road."