Still Here

"You learn to leave without an answer. The leaving is part of the work — the admission that the rest belongs to someone else, or to nothing, or to the night."

By quarter past five the light through the small window had gone from amber to the particular bruised pink that happened in the Hills when the sun had dropped behind the western ridgeline but the sky hadn't yet given in to evening. The concentrator's hiss had become part of the room's background — the kind of sound you stopped registering consciously, the way you stopped registering your own pulse. I had been writing numbers on the log sheet for more than two hours.

The numbers were coming down. Not steadily — the rate did not respect my desire for a neat descending line — but on balance, across the intervals. Sixteen-forty, one-seventy. Sixteen-forty-five, one-sixty-eight. Sixteen-fifty, one-seventy-four. Sixteen-fifty-five, one-sixty-one. Seventeen hundred, one-fifty-eight. Seventeen-fifteen, one-fifty-two.

The spike at sixteen-fifty had jolted something in my chest. I had made myself recount at sixteen-fifty-two and confirmed the climb, and then at sixteen-fifty-five I had counted again and watched the number drop three points below where it had been at the previous interval, and in the moment of relief I had realised how tightly my good hand had been gripping the edge of the table.

I had eased my grip. I had not allowed myself to believe that relief was the right response. A rate of one-fifty-two was still far too high. She was still small and curled and not quite in the world the way she had been at eleven this morning. I had seen animals stabilise for three hours and then go, and I had seen animals that looked finished rally without warning in the last hour before the vet arrived, and I had learned not to mistake trajectory for outcome.

My arm ached. The sitter's chair was not built for people who needed to keep one arm elevated, and I had been angling my injured forearm along the tabletop in a position that was meant to reduce strain and had, over the course of more than two hours, introduced a different kind of strain. I shifted carefully, keeping my palm flat on the pouch so Mabel registered no change in pressure, and let the new angle work itself into an acceptable compromise with my shoulder.

Footsteps in the corridor. Dennis's footsteps — I had learned them over two years, the slight scuff of the left boot, the deliberate pace that never sped up for anything. The door opened without a knock, which was the Dennis signature, and he came in carrying a mug and a folded tea towel.

He set the mug down on the table at my good-hand side. Close enough that I could reach it without stretching. The steam rose pale in the room's dim, and the surface of the liquid was dark enough that I knew without asking what it was. Milo. He had remembered. I had never told him. He had simply remembered from some previous exchange I could not specifically place.

"Ta."

"Don't let it go cold."

He did not sit. He stood near the table with the folded tea towel still in his hand, his eyes going to the log sheet and then to the oxygen setup and then to Mabel's pouch. Whatever he saw in the log sheet — and Dennis could read a log sheet at a glance, the same way he could read a sick animal from across a paddock — he did not remark on. He handed me the tea towel instead.

"Your arm's bleeding."

I looked down. The edge of the bandage, where it came closest to the elbow crease, had darkened. Not much. A small oval of pink seeping through, not fresh-red but not old either. I had not felt it happen. The sitting position, the elevation, the occasional shift — something had opened the wound just enough.

"It's fine."

"It's seeping. Put the towel under it. Don't get it on the log sheet."

He said it the way he said most things — in a voice that did not invite discussion — and waited long enough to see me accept the towel and position it under my forearm before he took a half-step back.

"Stephen's been held up."

"How much?"

"Faculty meeting went long. Then the Northern Expressway's stopped somewhere past Mawson Lakes — truck on its side, or so Margaret said. He's reconsidering the route. Looking at the back roads now through Highbury and Tea Tree Gully." He paused, reading my face. "He reckons seven at the earliest. Maybe closer to half past."

The numbers in my head rearranged themselves. Two more hours of vigil. I had been assuming he would be here by six. I had not been thinking hard enough about expressways at this time of day on a Monday.

"Right."

"I asked Margaret if I should take over the chair so you could go stretch."

"What did she say?"

"She said ask you."

I looked at the log sheet. Looked at Mabel's small curled shape under the mask. The rate had come down over the last hour, but I had been the one counting. I had been the one tracking the spike and the drop and the slow overall reduction. A different hand on the pouch at this point, reading the log cold, wouldn't catch the shape of the last two hours the way my hand could. And Mabel had — if it could be called anything as grand as preference — settled into the particular weight of my palm over the last ninety minutes.

"I'll stay."

Dennis nodded once. It was the answer he had expected, and the fact that he had asked anyway was itself an act of care.

"Drink the Milo."

I lifted the mug one-handed and sipped. It was made properly — three good spoonfuls, hot milk, stirred until the powder had fully dissolved rather than floating as those little undissolved clumps that ruined it. Dennis had been a father. Dennis's kids were grown and in Queensland and he did not often talk about them, but the Milo told me things about him that conversation probably wouldn't have.

"Mine's hot chocolate usually," I said.

"Ran out of hot chocolate. Haven needs to order more. I left a note."

"Of course you did."

The corner of his mouth moved. He was already half-turned toward the door.

"Stand up between counts, Jerome. Even once every half hour. Walk to the window and come back. Your back's going to give you a second problem if you don't."

"I know."

"Knowing isn't doing."

He left. The door clicked shut behind him with a softness that was also Dennis-signature — he did not slam, he did not linger. I took another sip of the Milo. Sat with the warmth of the mug against my palm for a moment, feeling the small ordinary fact of it against the larger extraordinary fact of the afternoon.

The clock said seventeen-twenty. Count due.

One-fifty.

I wrote it down.

Stephen arrived at ten past seven. I heard him before I saw him — the back door to the treatment wing opening and closing, the rapid walk down the corridor, the brief stop at Margaret's office where I heard her voice once and his voice answering, and then the walk continuing, the door of the IC room opening without ceremony.

I had been in the chair for nearly four hours. My back was the problem Dennis had predicted; my arm was the other problem. I had stood up between counts three times since Dennis's visit and once done a slow careful loop around the small room, one-handed, to keep my legs from cramping. The light through the window had gone from bruised pink to proper dark nearly an hour ago. The window now showed only my own faint reflection against the outside, and if I angled my head I could see a single star between the roofline and the treetops.

Stephen was still wearing his university clothes. A grey wool jumper over a collared shirt, chinos, leather shoes that had seen a car park rather than a paddock — he had come straight from the campus with only whatever stop-offs the diverted route had forced on him. His bag was already open by the time he reached the table, the vet kit ready, and the first thing he did was look at the log sheet without speaking.

He read it the way he read everything — the full sweep, top to bottom, no skimming. Then he put the sheet back on the table, put his hand on my good shoulder briefly, and picked up his stethoscope.

"Jerome."

"She's been coming down. One-forty-eight at the last count."

"Good." He was already listening. The diaphragm of the stethoscope moved across Mabel's chest in the small methodical pattern I had watched him use dozens of times on dozens of patients. His face did the thing it did when he was listening properly — eyes unfocused, head slightly tilted, mouth closed. I had learned not to try to read his diagnosis from his face during this part. He was not calculating yet. He was only gathering.

He moved the diaphragm. Listened again. Moved it a third time.

"Crackles," he said eventually, not to me but to himself, confirming what he had already suspected. Then, to me: "Aspiration, probably. How was her feed at eleven?"

"Normal. Forty mils, full feed, usual pace. No coughing, no rejection."

"Position?"

"Upright, body angled forward, teat in the side of the mouth, standard."

"Taryn fed her on the weekend?"

"Yes."

"Any notes about struggle, wet breathing, nasal discharge?"

"Nothing flagged."

He nodded. He was already pulling out the kit he needed — a small syringe, two vials, the things he would use. His hands moved without looking, the muscle memory of someone who had done this enough times that the procedure no longer required his eyes. He was briefing me as he worked.

"I think what's happened is she aspirated at some point over the weekend. Maybe not badly — maybe a tiny amount, not enough to flag immediately. Then the material in her lower respiratory tract has seeded, and we're now thirty-six hours in and she's developed an infection that's presenting as acute respiratory distress." He drew up the first vial. "It's not confirmed without imaging, which I'd rather not put her under sedation for tonight. But the presentation fits. The crackles fit. She's young, her lungs are small, and small lungs go off cliffs quickly."

"What's the injection."

"Ceftriaxone. Broad-spectrum, good coverage for the likely pathogens, well tolerated in marsupials at this weight. We'll start her now, I'll run a subcutaneous fluid bolus for the dehydration she's starting to develop from the breathing work, and we'll keep her on oxygen through the night." He looked at me. "I want you to watch what I do. I'm going to tell you why I'm making each decision, and then you're going to tell me what I'd need to see from her in the next hour to adjust the plan. Because I want someone in this room to know as much as I do about this case, and I'm not going to be here at two in the morning."

He said it without weight. Without flattering me. He was simply moving.

I put down the Milo, which had gone cold on the table a long time ago.

What followed took nearly an hour. Stephen worked with the unhurried economy that I had learned to recognise as the signature of competence — no movement wasted, no step performed out of order, and a narration that stayed technical enough to be useful and plain enough to be absorbed. Ceftriaxone intramuscular, the thigh, a small needle because her thigh was small. Subcutaneous fluids — lactated Ringer's, warmed, delivered through a butterfly set into the loose skin at the scruff. The slow rise of the fluid pocket under her skin, which would absorb across the next couple of hours. The continued oxygen, flow rate unchanged. The temperature — still within range but at the low end, which he noted on the sheet in his own hand, underlined, circled.

When the fluids were in and the injection was done, he pulled the chair closer to the table and sat down beside me. He did not take over the counting. He asked me to keep it going. We sat together for nearly thirty minutes, him on the edge of the table and me in the vigil chair, waiting for the first response to the antibiotic and watching the fluid pocket under her scruff slowly flatten as her body absorbed it.

The rate came down. One-forty-two at eight o'clock. One-thirty-eight at eight-fifteen.

He listened to her chest again.

"Still crackles. Less than before, or I'm imagining less than before. Hard to say at this stage."

"When would you expect improvement?"

"If it's aspiration pneumonia and the antibiotic matches, we should see clinical improvement in twelve to twenty-four hours. Breathing rate coming down further, better oxygenation, warmer peripheries. The first night is the one you're most likely to lose her in, though. I won't pretend that isn't true."

He was speaking to me the way he had spoken on Thursday afternoon in this same room. I recognised the register. The decision to be honest, rather than reassuring. The respect of it.

"Who's on overnight?"

"Rachel's on from midnight. I've already phoned her from the car, she's coming in at eleven instead. I'm staying till she arrives, maybe longer. After Rachel, Dennis is doing the five-to-seven window personally. We'll cover her in three-hour shifts through the night." He glanced at me. "You are not on this list. Before you ask."

"I wasn't going to."

"You were going to."

"I was going to offer."

"I know you were. And the answer is no. You've been on this chair for four hours, you've got a seeping wound on your dominant arm, and you drove up here from Craigmore this morning. Go home. Eat something that isn't Milo. If you want to phone at ten for an update, phone. But you're not sitting through the night and that isn't a negotiation."

He was already rinsing his hands at the small sink in the corner. His back was to me. I looked at Mabel in her pouch — her small curled shape, the shallow but slightly slower rise and fall of her flank, the faint pink still visible at the edge of the mask where her snout pressed against the gauze.

"Is she holding?"

Stephen turned off the tap. He dried his hands on the paper towel with the same unhurried economy he had shown throughout. Then he came back to the table and stood beside me, and for a moment we both watched her breathe.

"She's holding," he said. "I won't tell you she's out of it. But when I walked in the door she was at one-forty-eight, and we're now at one-thirty-eight with fluids on board and the first antibiotic dose in, and a hundred-thirty-eight is survivable for a young wombat for quite a long time. It's not where I want her by morning. But it's where I want her now."

"Okay."

"The thing you did," he said, and then stopped. Rephrased. "Catching it at three and getting her onto oxygen at three-fifteen — that bought her something. I don't know how much. But at a hundred-eighty-plus, with nothing on board, and me another four hours out at that point — she wouldn't have been here for me to treat." He didn't look at me. His eyes stayed on Mabel. "You understand what I'm saying?"

"I think so."

"Just wanted to say it."

He put his hand on my good shoulder again — the same brief contact as at arrival — and then moved past me to the door. He paused there.

"Go home, Jerome."

He left.

The room was suddenly much quieter than it had been. The concentrator, the clock, the small faint sound of Mabel breathing. I sat for another moment, not because I needed to count — the next count wasn't due for two and a half more minutes — but because the transition from being the only person responsible in the room to being nobody in the room took a small adjustment that my body had not quite completed.

I did the last count anyway. One-thirty-six.

I wrote it on the sheet. Then I drew a line across the column, the way we did when responsibility changed hands mid-shift, and I wrote S. Groves arrived 19:10, handover complete 20:22 in the margin.

I stood up.

My back gave me the specific grievance Dennis had warned it would, in harsher terms than it had given me during any of the earlier stands. I stretched carefully, one-handed, keeping my injured arm against my body. The tea towel on the table was darker now — the seep had continued through the last two hours, not dramatically, but enough that I would need to change the dressing at home before bed.

I looked at Mabel one more time.

Then I left the room.

Margaret was in the corridor, standing near the door to her office with her glasses pushed up into her hair and a phone in her hand — mid-call, or between calls, hard to tell. She lifted a finger to me in a gesture that meant wait a second, finished whatever sentence she was composing in her head, and lowered the phone.

"He's happy?"

"He's as happy as the situation allows."

"That's a yes."

"That's an as happy as the situation allows."

She smiled once, briefly. Then the smile went. "Good. Thank you, Jerome. Go home. Have your mum look at your arm."

I nodded. I did not trust my voice for thank-yous right then. She seemed to understand that, because she was already lifting the phone back to her ear as I moved past her toward the staff room.

My jacket was where I had left it on the hook. My bag was under the table. I gathered both one-handed, slung the bag over my good shoulder, and checked my phone for the first time in nearly five hours. Two texts from Mum, both already read. One text from Charles, sent at ten past seven. hope the animal is ok. dinner's in the fridge if u want it when u get home. No punctuation. No kisses. Charles at his most sincere.

I put the phone in my pocket.

The corridor from the staff room to the staff exit ran past the education wing, the tea-room, the door into the small mammal ward, the door into the raptor complex. I did not go into either of the last two. The raptor complex door was closed. Behind it, somewhere, Ghost would be on his perch, watching the small fragment of sky that was visible through his flight-aviary mesh, his eyes adjusted now to the full dark. I thought about opening the door and looking in. I did not. Ghost was not mine tonight. Nothing was mine tonight, now. Stephen had her, and Rachel would have her, and Dennis would have her, and my part of it had ended at twenty-twenty-two.

The staff exit opened onto the small gravel yard that led to the volunteer car park. The cold hit me as I pushed through — proper cold now, the deep end-of-day cold that had the smell of eucalyptus smoke in it from somebody burning off down in one of the adjacent paddocks. The sky above the treeline had gone full black, the early evening's bruised pink long since processed away. The mist that had threatened earlier had not arrived. Overhead, several stars were already visible, and the particular hard brightness of one of them suggested it was Venus rather than a star at all.

The car park held four vehicles: my Corolla, Dennis's ute, Stephen's station wagon, Margaret's hatchback down the far end near the main building. A kookaburra laughed somewhere in the trees along Tenafeate Creek Road — that long falling cackle that always sounded to me like the bird was mocking something specific, though I knew it wasn't.

I walked to my car.

The gravel crunched under my boots. My keys were in my good hand. I unlocked the driver's door one-handed and stood for a moment with my hand on the door frame, not opening it yet, looking back at the Haven's main building.

Lights in the IC wing. Lights in Margaret's office. Everything else dark.

I got in. I closed the door. I sat with my hands on the steering wheel for a moment — not because I was about to do anything, not because I was working up to anything, just because that was where my hands were.

The windscreen fogged slightly from my breath. I did not wipe it.