Listen to the Child

“Yes, you probably do.” Catherine sounded defeated. “You and I never could communicate. I don’t suppose you and Emma can actually talk all this through, can you?”

“That would just make things worse. She’s adjusting at her own pace. I’m not going to rub her nose in my infirmity. God, Mom, remember when I shot that guy and had to go to the shrink? Now every time I hear anybody say, ‘And how did that make you feel?’ I want to hit something. I’m not going to do that to Emma.”

“She’s your child.” Catherine walked to the kitchen door. “Time for me to go home.” She turned to face Kit. “I almost forgot to tell you. Vince Calandruccio called. Said to call him at the Dog Squad tomorrow morning to tell him about Kevlar.”

“Vince is a good guy. A lot of the guys I worked with on the job have stopped calling to check up on me, but Vince keeps coming over and bringing Adam, of course. He never goes anywhere without his dog.”

Catherine nodded. “You look wiped out. Go to bed. And if you don’t make it to Sunday school, don’t sweat it. I’m sure God will understand.”

“Thanks for watching Emma, Mother.”

“You’re welcome.” Catherine picked up her purse and walked through the door.

Suddenly Kit felt so exhausted she wasn’t certain she could drag herself up the stairs to her bedroom. The doctors had warned her about that. After any kind of stress and particularly after a long session of reading lips, her energy could suddenly bottom out. And sometimes she lost her balance. The doctors said that was the physical trauma of the blast and the psychological trauma of nearly winding up both deaf and blind.

She didn’t like to remember what a close call that had been. The scar that bisected her right eyebrow and touched the corner of her eye was barely noticeable thanks to a great plastic surgeon. And her vision in that eye was almost normal, thanks to an ophthalmologist in the trauma center who’d removed splinters from her eye without damaging it.

The doctors told her she’d never remember the blast itself, but she’d heard the story of her accident so many times she almost felt as though she could.

She’d come through plenty of hostage situations and drug takedowns without a scratch. It was embarrassing to lose her hearing and her job with the police department in what amounted to a comedy of errors.

Keystone Kops, Vince Calandruccio called it.

Start with one rookie who kicked in the back door of a crack house a second too early so that Kit had to cover him to keep him from getting his ass blown off. Add another cop at the front door with a flash-bang grenade who didn’t know Kit was already in the vestibule. Toss in a commander who waited a couple of seconds too long to rescind his order to lob in the flash-bang.

What do you have? Kit Lockhart standing practically on top of the damn grenade when it went off.

She still had to watch herself on the stairs. Her depth perception wasn’t perfect, but it was improving.

Unfortunately, Emma had eyes like a hawk, ready to spot the least sign of weakness in Kit.

Life was better with Kevlar. Emma seemed willing to hand over some of the responsibility she felt to him. Thank God he was going to be all right.

Kit leaned against the wall at the top of the stairs for a moment, panting.

“Oh, this is not a good thing,” she said as she bent to catch her breath. “It is high time we went back to working out, Kit, my girl. You’ve been lazy too long. You’re getting soft.” She walked into her bedroom, shucked off her sweater, then pulled off her boots and dropped them beside her.

Lord, she hoped the noise they made wouldn’t wake Emma! She slipped down the hall and peered into her daughter’s bedroom. Emma lay curled up asleep. From the crook of the little girl’s knees, Jo-Jo raised his flat head and looked at Kit for a moment before subsiding into sleep again. Kit crossed to the bed and bent to kiss Emma’s forehead, damp with nighttime perspiration.

On her way back to her own bathroom, she jabbed hard at the heavy punching bag in the corner of her bedroom. “Ow! Wimp. Next time wear gloves.” She kicked at it. “Wonder how Dr. John MacIntyre Thorn keeps up those muscles. He certainly wouldn’t risk injuring his hands on a punching bag.”

In the bathroom, she began to cream her makeup off. Then stopped and leaned both hands on the sink. Thank God for those hands of his. Please, let him really have saved Kevlar.

ACROSS THE HALL, Emma opened her eyes. It was much easier to feign sleep now when her mother couldn’t hear her breathing.

She heard the sound of her mother’s fist as she thwacked the heavy bag, then her exclamation. She couldn’t understand the rest of the words.

Her mother never used to talk to herself—not out loud. Emma wasn’t certain she even knew she was doing it since she couldn’t hear her own voice.

Weird.

Even weirder to think that she could play her stereo all night. Her mother wouldn’t know about it unless Emma woke the neighbors, and they called to complain.

At first she’d thought being able to get away with stuff behind her mother’s back was cool—her friend Jessica definitely thought so. But it wasn’t. She’d always relied on her mother to set boundaries. Before, when she played her music too loud, her mother told her to turn it down.

Before, her mother knew when she was playing a video game in her room when she was supposed to be doing homework just by the pinging sound the game made. All the way from the kitchen, too.

Emma hated feeling guilty when she took advantage of her mother’s deafness. She hated having to find her mother and look at her to tell her something instead of just yelling from upstairs or the back yard. It made every word they said to each other too important. Why couldn’t they just go back the way they were before the stupid accident?

CHAPTER TWO

MAC SLEPT LATE on Sunday morning. He deserved a little extra time after having worked on that corgi until nearly ten o’clock on Saturday night.

His first thoughts on waking were of Kit Lockhart. Mrs.? He hadn’t asked her last night, but he definitely wanted to know whether she had a husband.

Not that he was likely to see her again once Kevlar was fully recovered. His life was entirely too busy to complicate with women, and definitely not with women who unnerved him.

Even though it was a Sunday on which he was not officially on call, he dressed, grabbed a doughnut and an espresso from the drive-through and drove to the clinic to check on his patients.

He went straight to the small-animal ICU. Bigelow Little, the kennel man and general clinic help, was on his knees in front of the corgi’s cage.

“Hey, Dr. Mac,” Big said. “He come in last night?” Big stood up.

At six foot four Mac was used to being the tallest person in the room, but when Big was around, Mac knew how Chihuahuas must feel around Irish wolf-hounds. Big was immense—nearly seven feet tall, and half as broad. Not an ounce of fat on him. He looked capable of breaking Mac in two, but was in fact the gentlest soul on earth.

“Removed a kidney. We had any bodily functions this morning?”

Big grinned and ran his huge hand over his cropped white-blond hair. “Yes, sir. Downright apologetic about it, though. Acted like he’d done dirtied in the churn.”

“You had him out?”

“Cleaned up after him is all. Didn’t know what you wanted me to do.”

“If you have time, you might try walking him around in here. He’s pretty sore, but he needs to use those legs. Don’t want him throwing a blood clot.”

“I’ll do it.”

And he would. Big Little had been the greatest find the clinic had made since it opened. An inmate at the local penal farm, Big had been one of the members of the first team to work the new beef-cattle herd at the farm. Dr. Eleanor Grayson, now Eleanor Chadwick, had been the veterinarian in charge of that program, and had picked Big out immediately as having a special rapport with animals.

When Big was pardoned, Creature Comfort had hired him at once. Now he had a small apartment on the grounds behind Dr. Weinstock’s laboratory, and acted as night watchman as well as a jack-of-all-trades in the clinic. If anyone could coax Kevlar to walk, Big could.

Mac checked his other patients, then went to look over his schedule for Monday. He wondered when Kit Lockhart would come to visit Kevlar today, and realized he hadn’t told Big she was deaf. He started to go back, but Rick Hazard stuck his head out of his office door and called him.

“You keeping banker’s hours?” Rick said.

“It’s Sunday, dammit.” Mac bristled. “And I was here late last night removing a kidney.”

Rick raised his hands. “Whoa! I’m just kidding. How come you didn’t let Liz Carlyle handle it? She was on call for small animals last night.”

Liz Carlyle was an excellent vet. At the moment she was working on an advanced degree in veterinary ophthalmology and her surgical skills were top-notch.

“I trust her, but I trust me more.” Besides, Kevlar’s kidney problem was an interesting and delicate case and a welcome change from neutering dogs and spaying cats. “I didn’t have anything better to do.”

Rick nodded. “Like you don’t have anything better to do this morning. Hey, podner, you ought to get a life.”

Mac forced a smile. “I have a life. And I have patients in ICU. Where else would I be? You’re the one who’s usually on the golf course by now.”

“That’s where I would be if I weren’t on call here. Eighteen holes, then a late brunch with Margot at Brennan’s, a long post-brunch snooze in front of the television set and a late supper.”

“And you think I should get a life?”

“Actually, I think you should get a wife.”

“You sound like my mother. Don’t.” Mac pivoted on his heel and walked back to his office, then stopped and turned. “Look, since I’m here already, I’ll handle the calls, if any, until Liz gets in. Will that give you time for your golf game?”

“Heck, nine holes, at least. Forget what I said about getting a life. You just go right on being a lonely workaholic as long as you want.”

After Rick dashed for the parking lot and his golf clubs, Mac propped his feet on his desk and picked up the copy of the Sunday paper he’d brought with him. He might take in a matinee this afternoon, maybe try a new restaurant tonight. Or he could work out at the gym. He had plenty of friends at the gym.

Except they seldom showed up on Sunday.

More annoyed by Rick’s gibes than he was willing to admit, he pulled open his desk drawer and took out a dog-eared black leather address book. He’d take someone to dinner tonight, maybe wind up spending the night.

He wasn’t quite certain when he’d given up sex. It hadn’t been intentional. Recently he hadn’t been seriously involved with any woman. He never had been able to master the bed-hopping techniques of some of his bachelor colleagues. Sex should entail real emotional attachment.

Talk about getting old!

He ran his eye down the names in his address book. Cindy was married—pregnant, he thought. Marilyn had moved away to Seattle or someplace. Jennifer would probably be free, but her endless prattle about social functions would give him a migraine. Claire would hang up on him.

Sarah Scott and Eleanor Chadwick, the two large-animal vets, were both happily married, and Sarah had a baby. Mac couldn’t barge in on either of them on a Sunday. Bill Chumney, the exotics vet, was out in the Dakotas somewhere building a census of black-footed ferrets, and Sol Weinstock was at the international equine clinic in Lexington, Kentucky, working on his experiments with EIA vaccine.

Mac wandered back to the kennels. The cages were cleaned and all the animals had fresh water and food.

“You about done, Big?” Mac asked.

“Uh-huh. Got the little guy out and walked him around some. He’s a real happy fellow, isn’t he?”

Mac nodded. “You doing anything this afternoon?”

Big turned his seraphic smile on Mac. “Me’n Alva Jean are taking her kids to the zoo.” He looked hard at Mac. “Hey, why don’t you come along? They got that new baby gorilla out. Ain’t nothin’ cuter than a baby gorilla.”

Mac shook his head. “Thanks for the offer, but no. I’m here until two. Then I’ll probably take in a movie.”

“You ought to come with us. Alva Jean wouldn’t mind.”

Alva Jean had recently been through a nasty divorce. The last person Mac might have expected her to take up with was Big Little. Well, maybe not the last. She’d walked out on her husband because he had smacked her and the two children around. It took a great deal to rile Big Little, and he would as soon raise a hand to a woman or child or animal as he would take up brain surgery. At least with Big she’d be physically safe from her husband.

Unfortunately, if the husband tried to hurt either his ex-wife or his children again, he wouldn’t be safe from Big.

Mac had no intention of spending all afternoon with this unlikely pair, and definitely not with Alva Jean’s two small children in tow.

It wasn’t that he disliked children, exactly, but they always acted like—well—children.

He avoided them even in his practice. Nancy usually spoke to distraught parents about Bobby’s rottweiler or Betty’s kitten.

You could count on animals to act like animals, so he preferred to devote himself to them and not to the owners who caused so many of their problems.

He said goodbye to Big and walked back up the hall to his office. His footsteps echoed on the tile floor. All the treatment rooms were soundproofed, so once he had closed the door on the kennel, he could no longer hear the whines and barks of the patients. The clinic felt almost eerily quiet.

As he reached the door of his office, the front-door buzzer sounded.

Good. An emergency. Maybe something to get his teeth into, to keep him from feeling as though he was the last human being on earth.

He walked into the reception room and peered through the glass doors.

His heart bounced into his throat. It was that Lockhart woman. He’d know that hair anywhere.

He opened the door for her.

“I’m here to see Kev.”

“Yeah. Come in.” He stood back and held the door.

She turned away from him and called, “Hey, Em, it’s okay.”

The passenger-side door of an elderly but well cared for red Jeep opened and a slight figure jumped out and ran up the stairs.

A child! A tall, skinny girl in oversize jeans and sweatshirt. Obviously Kit Lockhart’s child. There couldn’t be half a dozen people in the city with hair that extraordinary dark red. As she bounced up the steps, he saw that she had missed out on her mother’s green eyes. Hers were hazel.

She might be a beauty someday. At the moment she was as uncoordinated as a day-old foal.

He took a step back.

“Is he okay? Can we see him?” the child asked. “We brought him some of his toys.” She held out a brown paper sack.

“Whoa, girl. This is my daughter, Emma. Emma, this is Dr. John MacIntyre Thorn. He’s the man who saved Kevlar’s life.”

“Uh-huh. Can we see him now?” She slipped past him.

“Um, yes. Please follow me. And be quiet.”

Fat chance, he thought. He’d learned about the habits of prepubescent girls from growing up in the same house with his younger sister, Joanna. They invariably squealed every chance they got. No doubt this one would do the same.

As they came to the door of the ICU, he pointed to the Quiet sign. He pushed open the door and stood aside. The child shoved past him, then stood stock-still a foot inside the door. He nearly tripped over her.

“Oh,” she whispered into the immediate stirring of whimpers and meows.

“Kevlar’s over there on the bottom tier.”

She went to the corgi and dropped to her knees in front of his cage. “He’s Mom’s dog, really,” she said, pressing her open palm against the wire. “He works for her. Can I get him out and pet him?”

“Carefully. Don’t let him run around. Just hold him and pet him. You can give him his toys before you leave.”

“Thanks,” said Kit as she joined her daughter on the floor. “Hey, Kev,” she crooned. He came into her lap, licked her chin and settled quietly while mother and daughter bent those extraordinary red heads over him.

Mac felt the need to talk, to tell them about the incision, the prognosis, how beautifully the dog was doing—anything to interrupt this tableau that pointedly excluded him. But he couldn’t speak to Kit—she couldn’t see his lips. He had no idea how to speak to the child.

Emma solved the problem for him. She stood up awkwardly, but with the fluidity of young joints, and began to wander around the room while her mother continued to pet Kev. He watched her long fingers caress the dog’s pelt, and felt a shiver down the back of his neck.

“What’s wrong with this little dog?” Emma asked.

“What? Oh—let’s see.” He prided himself on knowing his patients. “That’s Chou-Chou. A bichon frise. Cataract surgery on the left eye. We’ll do the right one in about six months.”

“He was going blind?”

“You know about cataracts?”

“My granddad had them. What about this one?”

“Her name’s Rebel. She’s a boxer. Had a flipped intestine. Not all that rare in large dogs. But it kills quickly if it’s not surgically corrected.”

She poked a finger into the next cage where a large black-and-white cat slept and shivered from time to time. “This one?”

“Her name’s Folly. She got hold of some antifreeze. There’s been so much liver damage we may not be able to save her.”

“Oh, poor kitty! We have a cat named Jo-Jo, but he never goes outside.”

“How does he get along with Kevlar?”

“When Mom brought Kev home, Jo-Jo spent four days under the towels in the linen closet. Then he decided that if Kev was going to stay, he’d better get used to him. Now they’re good buddies.”

Mac had fallen into step beside Emma as she checked every cage. He found himself explaining all his cases almost as though he were talking to an adult.

Exactly as though he were talking to an adult, actually. Emma seemed to understand what he said, and when she didn’t, she asked for explanations.

He discovered he was enjoying himself.

“Hey, Em, let Dr. Mac off the hook,” Kit said as she unfolded from the floor with the same ease her daughter showed but with much more grace. She held Kevlar against her chest. “He’s got stuff to do.”

“Doesn’t look like he’s got any other stuff at all,” Emma said.

“Emma Lockhart!”

He laughed. “She’s quite right. I was reading the Sunday paper and getting ready to check the large-animal patients in the back when you arrived.”

“Large animals?” Emma asked suspiciously. “What kind?”

He shrugged. “Cows, sheep, horses—”

“Horses? You got horses?”

Kit groaned. “You just hit the hottest button you could. This child has never even been on a horse, but she is horse crazy.”

He glanced at Emma’s shining face. “I don’t work on the large animals so I don’t know if we have a horse in the clinic at the moment,” he said. “I haven’t checked the charts.”

“Could we see? Could we, please?”

If she’d whined, he probably would have said no, but she sounded enthusiastic and excited.

“I don’t see why not.”

“Listen,” Kit said, “you don’t have to…”

He didn’t attempt to answer her, but took Kevlar gently from her arms, put him back in his kennel and gave him his toys. “Here, boy, play with these.”

“Bye, Kev,” Emma said. It was obvious she was eager to get going.

“See you tomorrow, sweetie,” Kit said. She touched Mac’s arm so that he faced her. “When can he come home?”

“Tomorrow, if he doesn’t develop an infection. But he won’t be up to par for a couple of weeks.”

“Can he work for me?”

“So long as it doesn’t entail running up and down stairs too often, I doubt that you could keep him from working.”

“Come on!” Emma’s exasperation was aimed at her mother.

Mother and daughter followed Mac down the hall toward the heavy door that separated the large-animal area from the small. The room beyond was cavernous, with a broad central hall. On the left were offices, operating rooms and storage areas. On the right was a large open pen for cows, and past that were raised padded cells for animals coming out of anesthesia. Past the padded stalls were a number of smaller stalls that could be used for recuperating animals.

Mac picked up a clipboard from a hook beside the first office door and ran his eye down the list of patients. “You’re in luck.”

“You have a horse?” Emma practically danced a jig.

“Not just a horse. Follow me.”

They followed him past the enclosed stalls. As the space opened out, both Emma and Kit said “ooh,” as he knew they would. If he’d expected Emma to run to the stall, he was mistaken. She froze as though afraid to approach.

The big gray Percheron mare didn’t raise her head from the bale of hay she munched. The black foal, however, scrambled awkwardly to its spindly legs and leaned against its mother’s broad side.

“What’s wrong with her?” Emma whispered.

Mac started to tell her, then looked at Kit and raised his eyebrows. He wasn’t quite certain how much this child would or should know about the processes of delivering babies. Kit, however, nodded at him and kept her eyes on his mouth.

“The filly’s fine. It’s the mother we worked on. See those sharp little hooves the baby has?”

Emma nodded.

“Well, when the baby was coming out, one of those hooves tore the inside of the mare. She was bleeding so badly we had to bring them both into the clinic to stitch her up.”

“Wow.” It was a long-drawn-out whisper. “Could I touch the baby?”

“I doubt you’ll get that close to her. Stand here quietly, stretch out your hand and don’t move.”

Emma did as she was told. After an interminable two minutes in which Emma’s hand didn’t wobble, the foal reached out a velvet nose and touched her fingers. Then it bounced away and nearly fell down.

Emma broke into delighted laughter. “She has whiskers! They tickled my fingers.”

“Now it really is time to go, Emma,” said Kit. “I mean it. Don’t forget your dad’s picking you up at two.”

He saw Emma’s shoulders drop. “Yeah, okay. All he wants to do is watch football on TV, then he goes to sleep on the couch and snores. I get sick of video games.”

Kit glanced at Mac, who looked away quickly. “Maybe he’ll take you to the park. Thank Dr. Mac and let’s go.”

As he locked the front door behind the pair, he felt a pleasant glow. He hadn’t done too badly with the child. Obviously unusually intelligent and mature. And her mother was either separated or divorced. He’d bet on divorced.

The child would be off at her daddy’s tonight.

He wondered if he could think up a reason to call Kit up and maybe take her to dinner.

Call her up? Just how in the hell did he expect to do that? Even if she had a light on the phone and picked it up, she wouldn’t be able to hear a word he said.

“EM,” Kit called up the stairs. “Your dad’s here.” Then she turned to the tall, handsome man who stood just inside the door. “You’re late, Jimmy. It’s almost three.”

He grinned sheepishly and shoved an unruly shock of sandy hair back from his forehead. Once that gesture and that grin had won him forgiveness for every lie he told, but they no longer had the power to charm her.

“Sorry, babe. Saturday night, you know how it is.”

You bet she did. Cop bars, pitchers of beer, too much laughter invariably leading to some sort of confrontation. She’d dragged Jimmy away too many times not to remember.

Jimmy’s shifting eyes and even broader grin told her that Emma had come down the stairs behind her. That was one of the things she most hated about her deafness—Godzilla could walk up behind her and she’d never know until he bit her head off.