After a few minutes, she complied, lowering herself with a grunt of effort.
"Stay down, baby." Sam knelt by her head, holding it and murmuring in her ear. "Stay-"
With a defiant clearing of her throat, Sylvia lurched to her feet.
"That"s bad, right?" Cody asked, his face paler than it had been a minute earlier. "She shouldn"t be standing up, right?"
"It"s better if she lies down," Sam admitted. "But it"s pretty pointless to argue with a fifteen-hundred-pound horse. She-"
He broke off as the mare"s sides began to fan violently in and out. "Here she comes," Edward said, returning from the office with a cordless phone in his hand.
Sam gave Sylvia"s neck a pat. "Vet?"
"Up in Big Arm. He can"t get here for an hour."
"Then we"re on our own," Sam said. "Get down again, baby, there you are..." He coaxed gently, stroked her, ma.s.saged her. "Down, that"s a girl." Eventually she obeyed. Sam hoped she"d stay put as he knelt to see how things were progressing. "Cody, give me a hand here."
The boy hesitated just for a beat. "Yeah, okay."
The foal was trying to present with its legs sticking up toward the croup, a dangerous situation. Sylvia rolled and twisted, driven by instinct to correct the position. When that didn"t work, Sam nodded at Edward. "She needs some help turning it." He held the mare"s head, murmuring mindless phrases, trying to soothe her. Edward and Cody stripped down to T-shirts to wrestle with the slippery emerging legs, Edward uttering low curses and Cody goggle-eyed with fascination and worry.
"I keep losing hold. d.a.m.n, that"s narrow," Edward said, his hand caught inside. "Cody, are your hands smaller than mine?"
"I guess. You want me to try?"
Edward hesitated, then eased back when the contraction ended. He pa.s.sed a tube of lubricant to Cody. "Here"s what you do. We want the forelegs first, but turned this way, see?"
"Yeah." Cody smeared on the lubricant and took a deep breath. A few seconds later, his hand disappeared inside the mare. If the situation hadn"t been so dire, Sam would have laughed at the expression on the kid"s face. Edward coached him, instructing him to bring the legs down and around, working between contractions.
Sylvia grunted and pushed, expelling Cody"s hand and then, pulse by pulse, the foal, hooves first. Cody didn"t move out of the way in time but caught it against his knees, rearing back when the hindquarters slipped out.
"Easy there." Sam bent to examine the foal, suctioning out its mouth and nose. It gave a jerk of its bony body, then a strange cough, and began breathing on its own. Its pale muzzle took on the color of life. Its umbilical cord, still attached, pulsed in time with the mare"s heartbeat. She stood with a lumbering effort, twisting to lick at her baby.
"Wow," said Cody, his eyes bugging out, his entire front covered with birth fluid, his mouth wide in a grin. "Wow."
Sam squirted iodine on the umbilical cord. He should have become a vet. Or a teacher.
Instead, he was a father who didn"t know his son. That, he decided, as he looked at Cody"s sweat-streaked face, was about to change. Whether Mich.e.l.le liked it or not.
The sac still hung from the mare, slapping against her hind legs. Sam saw the reflex coming, but before he could speak, she kicked out. In a flash of movement, the hoof caught Cody, right on the temple.
Chapter 12.
As they approached Crystal City, Gavin kept his gaze fixed dead ahead, his jaw perfectly square, his hands relaxed on the steering wheel. Yet Mich.e.l.le could tell-there was some subtle turbulence in his manner-that the hospital appointment had rattled him. Monday: 6:45 A.M. Perhaps knowing the precise day and time of the transplant was disconcerting.
It sure as h.e.l.l was for Mich.e.l.le.
"Are you all right?" she asked.
"I"m in end-stage renal failure," he said. "How all right can I be?"
"I"m sorry. I wish I knew what to say to you."
"You don"t have to apologize for anything." He flexed his hands on the steering wheel. "I"m a lousy father, have been from the get-go. Being sick only makes me lousier."
"I don"t know." She tried to keep her voice light. "A true believer would say it"s the universe"s way of bringing us together."
"Are you a true believer, Mich.e.l.le?"
She stared out the window. Long gray-white smudges of highway and snow. "I used to be."
He trained his eyes on the road. "When your mother told me she was pregnant, I panicked. I was just getting started in my career. I was in the most cutthroat business in the world, and I didn"t think I"d make it on my own, much less with a family to care for. Kept seeing myself as a failure, pumping gas for a living, trying to make ends meet, chasing down bit parts and making everyone miserable. Didn"t have a pot to p.i.s.s in, Mich.e.l.le. I had a rented room in Studio City and a risky role coming up."
His words sounded like lines recited from a script.
"That must have been Shelter from the Storm." The film had made him a star and a household name.
"As excuses go, it"s pretty weak, but my career was everything at the time. I thought all a father did was send a monthly check, maybe show up for special occasions. The truth is, I never knew how to be a father, and I was too scared to try. Mich.e.l.le, I"d give anything to change that, but I can"t. It"s one of the lessons people never seem to learn-that you can"t change the past." He glanced sideways at her. "I just hope it"s not too late to fix things."
"Why didn"t you even try, Daddy? Didn"t you know I needed you?" The anguished question burst from her.
"Mich.e.l.le-"
The mobile phone chirped, startling them and shattering the tension in the truck. Mich.e.l.le felt a twinge of annoyance. For once she and her father were actually beginning to talk, and now this. He clicked on the speaker phone. "Gavin here."
"It"s Edward Bliss, from over at Lonepine."
"What can I do for you, Edward? You"re on the speaker phone."
"Is Mich.e.l.le with you?"
"I"m here." Like a sudden shadow, a chill swept over her. "Is everything all right?"
"Mich.e.l.le, I"m at Meridian County Hospital. Your boy, he-"
"Jesus Christ." Gavin"s foot pressed to the floor, and the truck shot forward, hurtling down the highway toward town.
"What happened?" Her chest pounded with dread.
"He"s going to be okay," Edward said quickly. "He was kicked in the head by a horse."
"Oh my G.o.d-"
"It happens sometimes, it-" Static crackled, obliterating Edward"s voice. As the peaks of the mountains plunged the road into gloom, the connection died.
"We"ll be there in five minutes," Gavin said. "You got your seat belt on?"
Mich.e.l.le nodded. She couldn"t speak, could only hang on as they sped into town. The hardware store, the cafe, the munic.i.p.al building and library pa.s.sed in a blur. She died a thousand deaths, racing to get to her son. She imagined Cody, her beautiful boy, broken and bleeding in some emergency room, his head bashed in. Please. Please. Please. She could barely find the words to pray.
The truck screeched to a halt in front of the community hospital. Built of narrow reddish brick and small windows, it had an awning that stretched over the emergency entrance. She jumped out, dragging her purse along. The automatic doors hissed open. Lurching to the admittance desk, she was barely able to catch her breath.
"Cody Turner." The lump of dread in her chest started to hurt. "He"s my son. He was kicked in the head-"
"-by Sam McPhee"s mare," the attendant said. "Curtain area in the examination room, ma"am." She held up a clipboard. "Now, if we could just get some information-"
"Later." She raced down the hall. Earthtone linoleum, green-tiled walls, extra-wide doors with frosted gla.s.s windowpanes-were all hospitals alike? A nurse holding a tray of instruments was in the exam room. "You"re the mother?"
The Mother. Spoken that way, it sounded so weighty, so dire. She straightened her shoulders, forced herself to get a grip. "I am."
The nurse, whose name tag read Alice O"Brien, nodded at an aqua-colored half curtain enclosing a wheeled cot. Blue jeans tucked into snowmobile boots showed at the bottom. She could hear a low, masculine voice murmuring something indistinct.
"The doctor"s with him right now," Nurse O"Brien said.
Mich.e.l.le parted the curtain. "Cody?"
"Hey, Mom." His voice was small. A flesh-colored patch covered part of his head. Rusty bloodstains streaked his hair. A bluish cast tinged his complexion. His clothes were wet, smeared with blood and a whitish slime. She wanted to touch him, hold him, scream with relief that he was conscious.
The other person in the cubicle was Sam McPhee. "Sam? Where"s the doctor?"
Then she noticed what he was wearing. A green fiber gown and a pair of high-intensity lighted eyegla.s.ses. Surgical gloves.
Mich.e.l.le blinked fast, confused.
"Mom, Sam is the doctor," Cody muttered.
"He"s what?" She stared at Sam. "You"re what?"
"The doctor." Sam lifted a corner of his mouth. "Why do I feel as if I should apologize for that?"
"My G.o.d." She sank to a metal swivel stool beside the gurney. The information was coming at her too fast. "Okay, just tell me about Cody. He"s a mess. Is he-"
"It"s a head injury, Mich.e.l.le. And he was lucky-it appears to be mild." Sam"s voice was gentle. "The other stuff all over him is from the mare."
The nurse arrived with another tray and set it on a rolling table by Sam. The attending clerk came in, too. "Ma"am, you need to sign this."
"What is it?"
"A consent form."
She took the clipboard and lifted her gaze to Sam. He looked like a stranger in the gown and headgear, tall and slightly mystical, the high priest of some alien nation. "What am I consenting to?"
"Treatment. In this case that means you"re authorizing me to debride and st.i.tch this head wound."
"I don"t want any st.i.tches, man." Cody"s lips were practically blue, stark against the shocked pallor of his face.
"We"ll numb the area. Easier than going to the dentist," Sam said.
Mich.e.l.le scribbled her name across the bottom of the sheet. On the next page, she swiftly answered a series of questions about Cody"s health history, allergies, reactions to medication-all negative. The form under that was covered with small print. "What"s this one?"
"An admit form," the clerk said.
"I want to keep him overnight," Sam explained. "His GCS scale was fifteen-that means all his neurological responses are fine. The CT scan showed a mild subarachnoid hemorrhage, so observation for a short period is probably the only treatment needed. We"ll do a routine follow-up later, but I don"t expect any complications."
Her hand trembled wildly as she signed. She heard her father come in. "Hey, Sam," he said.
"Gavin." Sam didn"t look up from Cody.
Gavin seated himself in a molded-plastic chair inside the door. For a moment an eerie sense of unreality closed in on her. Here she sat, surrounded by her father, her son, and Cody"s father in a situation straight out of a nightmare.
One thing at a time. She needed to force herself to concentrate on one thing at a time. "So tell me what happened."
"Cody was helping with a mare in labor," Sam said. "And doing a d.a.m.ned good job of it. Tweezers," he said to the nurse, and began to pick at the edges of the wound. "He helped Sylvia give birth to a gorgeous little filly. That"s the good news. Hold this clamp, will you, Alice?
"The bad news is," Sam continued, "Sylvia got a little antsy during the afterbirth and started kicking." He teased away the patch, revealing an alarming curved gash. The flesh gaped open, showing blood-drenched tissue. "Breathe through your nose, Mich.e.l.le. This isn"t pretty."
She rolled the stool closer to the bed. Cody"s hand crept out from beneath the blue-paper sheeting and she grasped it, holding on hard. His fingers were icy cold.
"It"s okay, Cody-boy," she whispered, calm now, although she knew that later she would fall to pieces. "Just hold real still."
He swallowed, his cheeks and his neck pale. For once he didn"t sneer with disgust when she called him the old pet name.
Sam and the nurse cleansed the wound. Somehow she maintained a measured stoicism even though the large flap of skin and copious flow of blood terrified her. The wound was an upside-down crescent shape. She sat transfixed by Sam"s hands, noting with a strange, horrified awe how deftly and delicately they worked, how sensitive they were.
His intense absorption in his work both rea.s.sured and frightened her. Like a rock tumbling in a stream, the revelation turned over and over in her mind. Sam had become a doctor. A doctor.
An ugly, sinking sensation spiraled downward through Mich.e.l.le. She didn"t want to feel this, didn"t want to think this, but she realized she had convinced herself that Sam would never amount to anything more than a rodeo b.u.m. That was how she had rationalized the past seventeen years. That was the excuse she gave herself for not moving heaven and earth to find him. She had convinced herself that he"d be a tumbleweed, a ne"er-do-well, hardly a fit father to Cody.
Yet now she saw that Sam had held on to his dream, pursuing it long after she"d abandoned her own.
Don"t let me be this small, this petty, she thought. Don"t let me resent this.
In the end, it was Cody who saved her from her own thoughts. The nurse turned on a pair of buzzing clippers. Cody squeezed her hand in sudden surprise and terror, and a powerful wave of love washed over her. Sam had become his dream, but she had become Cody"s mother, and there could be no comparison.
"Mom," Cody said breathlessly.
She forced a smile. "I"ve been nagging you for months to get a decent haircut. I guess now"s as good a time as any."
She couldn"t be certain, but as Nurse O"Brien clipped away at the hair, Sam"s mouth twitched, just a bit shy of a smile.
She shouldn"t be surprised that he actually became a doctor. It made sense, after the way his mother raised him. He wanted a way to make people better.
The attending clerk brought Gavin a cup of water. Mich.e.l.le had forgotten he was there. The glaring overhead light magnified the lines of fatigue around his eyes.