Читать книгу Listen to the Child - Carolyn McSparren - Страница 11

WHEN KIT OPENED the door to the Creature Comfort conference room early the following Monday morning, Nancy looked up from the comics section of the morning paper. “I wasn’t sure you’d show up.”

“Neither was I,” Kit replied, taking her outstretched hand. “I nearly lost my nerve. I’m not sure I can do this job without a good set of ears.”

The early-morning mist still hadn’t lifted from the Creature Comfort parking lot, although the weather was supposed to clear later in the day. About time. Everybody was sick of the unending late-February rain. Even the jonquils beside the roads looked dispirited.

Kit had dropped Emma at school, then had driven straight to Creature Comfort. Until the accident, she’d loved being surrounded by people. Now she realized that for eight months she’d seen almost no one except her doctors, the audio-clinic staff and her immediate family—if she could still consider Jimmy Lockhart family. She felt shy and out of place. These people knew one another well, worked together all the time. Could she possibly fit in? Would she see conversations around her that she couldn’t interpret? The speech pathology people had warned her against becoming paranoid. It was easy to imagine others were gossiping about her.

Nancy bent to ruffle Kevlar’s ears, then tilted her face up so that Kit could read her lips. “Around here you may find it a plus not being able to hear. All the barking and yapping gets to you after a while. Come on, I’ll show you around and introduce you to the staff that’s here. Later I can fill you in on them over lunch. Did you bring your lunch?”

“You’re going to have to speak more slowly,” Kit said. “I only got about half of that.”

“Oops. Sorry. Did–you–bring–your–lunch?”

Kit laughed. “Not that slowly! The way it works is that I catch some of the words and fill in the blanks from what seems logical. B’s and P’s and M’s look almost alike, but if somebody says, ‘How about you blank me after work?’ the chances are she’s saying ‘meet’ me after work, not ‘beat’ me after work. Not unless you’re talking to somebody deeply weird.”

“As the Mad Hatter told Alice in Wonderland, we’re all mad here,” Nancy said as she shoved through the doors to the kennel. “And overworked, as you’re about to see.”

With Kev trotting at her heels, Kit followed Nancy to the large-animal area.

Nancy knocked on the first door on her left, waited a moment, then opened it and stood back for Kit to follow.

A pretty woman in a lab coat sat behind a desk piled high with reports. A happy baby toddled around the edges of a large playpen beside her desk.

Nancy pointedly looked back so that she was facing Kit. “Dr. Sarah Scott, this is Kit Lockhart. She’s going to be working part-time with us in the small-animal area. Kit, this is Dr. Sarah Scott, head of our large-animal section.”

The baby bounced up and down. “And this,” Nancy said, “is Nell, known to all and sundry as Muggs.”

At the mention of her nickname, the baby opened her mouth and began to make what must be crows of delight. Kit stiffened. She’d never be able to hear her own grandchild’s voice—assuming she ever had a grandchild!

Sarah came around her desk with her hand outstretched. “Hi. Welcome to the nuthouse.”

“Thanks. Can’t be any nuttier than what I’m used to.”

“Keep that thought.”

Nancy took Kit’s arm and led her down the hall. At the far end a wizened elf of a man was giving the Percheron mare a shot in her neck.

“Jack Renfro. He does for Sarah and Eleanor Chadwick, our other large-animal vet, what I do for Mac.” She paused. “But not half as well.”

He pointed a crooked finger at her. “None of that now, missy.” He took Sarah’s hand. His felt like old leather and twisted twigs. “Happy to meet you, lass. Nancy told me already we’re to have you with us part of the day.”

“We also have Kenny Nichols part-time,” Nancy told Kit. “He comes in after school three days a week. He’s off to Mississippi State to do pre-vet as soon as he graduates. You’ll meet him and Dr. Chadwick later.”

Kit learned that Bill Chumney—the veterinarian who handled exotic animals—was on assignment in the Black Hills and wouldn’t be back for several weeks. And Dr. Weinstock was off in Kentucky doing something with horses for the next month.

As she followed Nancy back through the door that separated the small-animal area from the large, she hoped she’d run into Dr. Thorn. Nancy had made a few comments about his bearish reputation, but so far Kit had seen nothing from him but kindness. He might be a little gruff, but he had been charming to Emma and had taken the trouble to make a house call on Kevlar on Wednesday evening. She wanted to thank him for giving her the chance to work again. Besides, he was the first man she’d met since her divorce who attracted her. Big, competent men always had. She’d actually thought Jimmy was competent.

She felt certain Dr. Thorn was the genuine article.

“I THOUGHT YOU WANTED to train another surgical assistant,” Rick Hazard said as he poured himself a third cup of coffee and took it back to the conference table.

“Kit’s bright,” Mac said. “She could learn.”

“That’s about the only job she can’t do around here. She can’t hear you and she won’t be able to read your lips through your face mask.”

Mac flushed. “So Nancy will train her to take over the other duties—dispensing meds, draining wounds, aftercare, checking on ICU patients. Big still gets confused sometimes and doesn’t want the responsibility. Except for the occasional parrot, our clients don’t generally communicate in words. I think Nancy can bring her along fast.”

“I just wish you’d let me at least interview the woman before you brought her on board.”

“Mark approved the expenditure. You agreed to try her at the staff meeting. Don’t go back on your word now.”

Rick raised his hands. “Don’t get huffy. I’m sure she’ll be fine. When can I meet this paragon?”

“This afternoon. According to Nancy, she had an appointment scheduled with her doctor. She’ll be back for a bit after that. Nancy already had her fill out employment forms, so she can start learning her responsibilities this afternoon and really get started tomorrow.”

“Fine. I’ve got a lunch meeting scheduled with Mark and my esteemed father-in-law at Buchanan Industries’ corporate dining room.” Rick crumpled up his cup and lobbed it expertly into the trash. “I can meet her this afternoon.”

“Money problems?” Mac asked. He knew that Coy Buchanan was a tough old coot whose only soft spot seemed to be his daughter, Margot.

“For once, apparently not. Creature Comfort’s more than meeting objectives.”

“Good. Then maybe we can afford another trained vet tech on staff and a couple of clerks.”

“Whoa!” Rick said. “We may be meeting our objectives, but we’re still not rolling in money.”

As he followed Rick out of the staff lounge, Mac said, “Kit Lockhart will be bringing her dog to work with her.”

“Another one?” Rick stopped with his hand on the doorknob. “We’ve already got Mark’s Nasdaq running around, and Big sneaks Daisy in every chance he gets. The last thing we need is another—” He stopped in midsentence. “Oh, damn, I forgot. He’s a helper dog, isn’t he?” He shrugged. “I guess she needs him.”

“He’s well-behaved. I promise he won’t eat the patients.”

“SOMETIMES I WISH the Internet had never been invented.”

Dr. Reuben Zales rubbed his hand across his completely bald head and took a deep breath. “I’ve read the same articles you found on that site, Kit, and a great many more in medical journals. The operation they’re talking about is experimental, and I mean very experimental. At the moment it’s far, far too risky.”

Kit leaned forward and put her hands on the edge of his desk, palms up as though in supplication. “But it sounds perfect for me, Reuben.”

“Sure it does. And maybe in five years, or even two or three if they have good results, we’ll look into it.”

“But it said—”

“I said I am familiar with the Internet site, Kit.”

She couldn’t hear his tone, but she suspected there was an edge of exasperation creeping in. He didn’t like to have his judgment questioned. He admitted he was conservative. Maybe it was a good thing all she got was the words.

He ran his tongue over his lips. It was a constant gesture, almost a tic, and it drove Kit crazy because he spoke while he did it. What she read came out like some archaic Far Eastern language. “Stop that,” she snapped.

He looked at her blankly.

“The tongue thing. I can’t hear you when you do that.”

“What tongue thing?” He dismissed her comment at once. He obviously wasn’t even aware he did it. “Okay. Let’s make it simple. Yes, regular cochlear implants can be miracles. For some people, not for you. You know that. We’ve consulted and discussed a dozen times. The operation you found on the Internet is far more than a simple cochlear implant. I can do those all day with excellent success rates and almost no complications. What you’re talking about is a cochlear implant with a computer chip and wires into the brain—almost like an antenna hard-wired into your head. Yes, it might work. Yes, it would be wonderful, and no, not yet. You could wind up with seizures or God forbid a brain hemorrhage or throw a clot from the operation itself.”

“But the success rate is eighty percent…”

“According to the Internet. It might be eighty percent out of a total of ten patients. Even eight hundred out of a thousand means two hundred failures. Listen, ten years ago bone marrow transplants were very dangerous. They still are, but the success rate and the new techniques make them much less so. We transplant hearts and kidneys and implant pacemakers and defibrillators like garage mechanics. Now. But we didn’t when we started. Let those geniuses practice on some other people before they work on you.”

“But—”

“You are young, smart, tough, healthy, quick and you’ve made incredible strides in lipreading. You have closed captioning on your television. Your computer lets you talk on the telephone—”

“Only at my own computer in my own house.”

“Still. And now you’ve got Kevlar…”

The little dog that lay beside Kit’s chair raised his head and wagged his stumpy tail when he heard his name.

“You’re functioning better than nine-tenths of my patients.”

“That’s because I’m working so hard at pretending this deafness thing is only a small inconvenience. Reuben, you deal with deaf patients every day, but you don’t have a clue what it’s really like to be locked into this silent world. If I thought it would last forever I don’t know what I’d do—I can wait if you make me, but I miss hearing Emma’s voice. And music. Emma hates having me like this. She doesn’t say much, but she’s stopped having her friends for sleepovers, and she practically dives into the car when I pick her up at school for fear some of her classmates will come over to chat with me. God, Reuben, what if I can’t hear her say ‘I do’? What if I never hear my grandchildren laugh?”

He threw up his hands. “I wasn’t aware that she was engaged. Obviously we’d better fly you to Boston this evening.”

“All right. So she’s only ten years old. But all I can see is this blasted silence stretching away until the day I die. Sometimes I don’t think I can take it any longer.”

“By the time Emma is married and pregnant—in that order, I hope—you’ll have had the operation. You’ll hear your grandchildren laugh.”

“Promise?”

“You know I can’t do that.”

“But you think?”

“Yeah. They’ll probably have something even better by then. So far I’m told that with the successful procedures, the patient only gets hearing like a scratchy old Caruso record.”

“Reuben, at the moment I’d kill for a scratchy Caruso.” She looked at her watch. “Oh, Lord, if I don’t get out of here I’m going to be late getting back to my new job.”

“Job?”

She picked up Kevlar’s leash. “I’m working as a grunt at Creature Comfort, the vet clinic.”

“Lisa takes Biff and Shorty there. Great place.”

“They saved Kevlar’s life. He had to have a kidney removed.”

“He’s okay now?”

“Fine. Thanks to Dr. Thorn. Do you know him?”

“Lisa’s mentioned him. Great with his hands, very, very bad with his bedside manner. If you’re going to work there, it’s probably a good thing you can’t hear him.”

“So I’ve been told. Okay, Reuben. If you’re absolutely dead set against it, I won’t risk that operation right this minute. But you have to promise me you’ll research it and talk to the guys in Boston. Try to figure out the absolute first minute it’ll be safe for me to have it.”

“That I’ll do, but don’t expect me to fly you off to Boston tomorrow.”

In the parking garage she strapped Kevlar into his car seat so that he could see out the windows, strapped herself in and started to back out of the parking space. Kevlar put a paw on her arm. She braked and checked her rearview mirror again. A red Corvette, nearly too low to the ground to be seen, flashed by and raced down the ramp.

“Whew! Too close, Kev. Thanks. I didn’t see him.”

The dog wagged his tail and grinned. She drove out more sedately. She’d never realized how much she relied on sound. Before, she’d have heard that idiot’s tires squeal around the corner even before she saw him. Thank God for Kevlar.

“You know, boy,” she said as she drove toward Creature Comfort. “I may be a risk-taker, but I’ve never been foolhardy. I always called for backup when I needed it, and followed my commander’s orders. The screwup with the flash-bang didn’t happen because I went off half-cocked.”

She turned onto the interstate that led to Germantown.

“Mom taught me that the important thing for a cop is to go home alive at the end of the shift. Take as few risks as possible, but be aware that the risks are always present. Now I’m stuck in a situation where I can’t even assess the danger.

“The last thing I want is to stick Emma and my parents with somebody who has seizures or is half-blind. Emma’s had too much put on her as it is. No wonder she’s scared. A ten-year-old shouldn’t have to play momma’s little helper. Momma’s supposed to help her.”

Kevlar leaned over as far as his car seat allowed and licked her ear.

“Okay, so you’re momma’s little helper.” She laughed and wiped her ear. “You better keep your mind on your work once we get to the clinic. Stay away from the big dogs that could scarf you up as a morning snack.”

WEDNESDAY MORNING of her first week she’d come in earlier than usual because Emma had some sort of early breakfast thing at school. Kit stuck her head into the first treatment room because the light was on.

Liz Carlyle hovered over a tiny red dog that lay on its side on the table. She looked up when Kit opened the door and said, “Thank goodness. Come on in here, will you? Nobody else is in yet.”

Kit came in and sent Kevlar to the corner of the room to lie down.

Liz looked up at Kit and said slowly, “She’s a Brussels griffon. Her owner dropped her off just before midnight. She couldn’t stay. She’s got kids at home. These little folks almost never have more than one pup per litter, but I think she’s got two squeezed in there. If she doesn’t deliver at least one in the next five minutes I’ll have to cut her.”

Kit nodded. “I’ve never been around anything like this.”

“Just don’t faint or scream,” Liz said. “Hey! I think we’ve finally got some action!”

The pup looked more like a wet, red gerbil than a dog. At Liz’s instructions, Kit wrapped it warmly in a towel and jiggled it until it began to breathe. Meanwhile Liz ignored her as she gently pried the second pup out of its mother with the tips of her fingers. As Kit bundled that one against her chest, Liz began to work furiously over the little dog. Five minutes later Kit held a third pup.

“Enough!” Liz said and turned to Kit. “Can you handle all three of those guys while I carry the mother to the whelping box?”

Kit nodded again. “Sure.”

“You’re going to have to sit beside them and watch until everybody’s suckling.”

Once the pups and mother were installed in the warm box, Liz put her hand on Kit’s arm. “I heard Rick come in. I’ll tell him what’s going on. He can take over. I’ve got to get some sleep.” She pressed the heels of her hands into her eye sockets. “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.”

Liz looked down at the little dog that was already nuzzling her tiny pups into place against her nipples. “Three pups! That’s practically a record.”

An hour later Nancy came in and sank onto her haunches to look at the pups. “Ooh, they’re teensy.” She grinned at Kit. “That’ll teach you to come in early.”

In the next week and a half, Kit taught abandoned kittens how to nurse from a baby bottle, sat with a Labrador puppy that had been hit by a car, until it came out of anesthetic, and helped deliver a baker’s dozen of puppies from a Great Dane. Whenever a small animal needed a baby-sitter, everyone seemed to turn to Kit. Even Dr. Sarah requested her services to stay beside a foal whose crooked front legs had been straightened and splinted.

“Pups from tiny to giant,” Kit told her father over dinner Friday night.

“Can I see the puppies?” Emma asked. “I’d a lot rather see the puppies than spend the night with Daddy.”

“They’ve gone home, baby,” Kit said. “But the way things are happening, I suspect there’ll be plenty more. Seems like this is the season for babies. Dr. Carlyle says those three Brussels griffon puppies she delivered last week are worth at least a thousand dollars each and the Great Danes yesterday will sell for about eight hundred. The owners want good vets to deliver as many healthy babies as possible, not to mention saving the mother if she gets into trouble.”

After Emma reluctantly left to spend the night with her father, Kit sank into the wing chair in her living room opposite her father.

“So, you like this job?” Tom Barclay asked.

“Love it so far. Nice people, good hours, and nobody seems to mind that I can’t hear.”

“How about that Dr. Thorn who saved Kevlar? You work with him at all?”

“Good grief no, Dad. As a matter of fact, I seldom see him. He’s always in surgery with Nancy.” She moved uncomfortably in her chair.

“I’ve heard he has quite a reputation with the ladies.”

“Really?” Kit tried to sound casual.

“He dated the daughter of one of Catherine’s clients. She decorated his apartment.”

Kit shrugged. “He’s management, Dad, I’m definitely labor.”

“He’s not married. You ought to start thinking about dating again.”

Kit put up her hands. “Please, Dad. No men in my life ever, ever again. Jimmy gave me enough problems for a lifetime. Besides, I’m a deaf woman with a kid. Hardly marketable goods.”

“A good man wouldn’t care.”

“Find me a good man. So far I’ve come up empty.”

Her father stood and Kevlar jumped off Kit’s lap to stand beside him. “Your mother ought to be home from her meeting by now. See you at church on Sunday?”

“Maybe.” She kissed her father’s cheek and let him out the front door. As she watched him climb into his car, she said to Kevlar, “My father, the incurable romantic. The eye of an eagle. But he can’t possibly know Mac Thorn turns me on. Come on, Kev, let’s hit the treadmill.”

KIT FELT HIM before she turned and saw him. She didn’t react to other people that way. It wasn’t that she smelled him. She’d learned to identify the odor of her mother’s familiar perfume and her dad’s scent of wood chips and sawdust. She smelled Emma’s little-girl scent sometimes, but Mac Thorn didn’t have a discernible scent. No aftershave, not even that antiseptic odor that lingered around some of the doctors who’d treated her in the hospital.