High Country Hero

by Ford, Holly

  ‘Alice is still here? Jim didn’t take her home last night?’

  ‘She’s out in the old horsebox,’ Krystal said calmly. ‘Jim asked if we wouldn’t mind keeping her here for a couple of days. You know, till his back comes right.’

  ‘Krystal,’ Lennie said carefully, ‘does Jim do this often? Call in sick?’

  ‘No.’ Krystal shook her head. ‘Never. It must be really bad.’ Yes. Lennie felt a blaze of guilt. Yes, it must. Of course it must. Her poor grandfather was probably on the floor paralysed with pain right now, and all she could think about was how badly he was letting her down. What kind of person was she?

  Beside her, the monitor beeped. Her eyes flew to the display, her adrenaline spiking. Pesh’s breathing steadied again.

  ‘Morning all.’ Paul, striding through the double doors with a coffee cup in his hand, came over to lean against the counter. ‘How’s she doing?’

  ‘Chest negative all night,’ Lennie said. ‘She’s holding steady.’

  Paul nodded, watching Pesh. As Lennie got out her stethoscope to listen to Pesh’s chest, she appreciated his silence. The most critical period, maybe, had passed, but they both knew there was a long, long way to go before Pesh was out of danger.

  ‘I just finished talking to Jim,’ Paul said briskly, when Lennie had removed the stethoscope from her ears. ‘He’s going to be out for at least four weeks.’

  Lennie stared up at him. Four weeks?

  ‘And effectively,’ Paul went on, with a resigned look at Pesh, ‘you’re out for a few days too. We need to make a plan.’

  ‘We need a locum,’ Lennie agreed.

  ‘Sure. But I don’t know one who isn’t working right now.’ Paul paused. ‘I’ve told Barb not to book any non-urgent companion animal appointments for the next couple of days. Until we find somebody to help out, I’ve suggested to Jim that we refer all our large-animal work to VETSouth.’

  Lennie swallowed. ‘What did he say?’

  ‘He told me—’ Paul let out a small sigh ‘—to check with you.’

  What was going on with her grandfather? Whatever it was, Lennie didn’t have sufficient capacity to deal with it now.

  ‘I don’t see that we’ve got a lot of choice,’ she admitted. They had a duty of care, and right now they couldn’t provide it. ‘It’s a good idea.’

  Paul looked relieved. ‘I’ll talk to Benji.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Lennie smiled at him, meaning it. In the last fourteen hours she’d started to like Paul a lot. She looked at her watch. Time to check Pesh’s pressure again.

  ‘Paul?’ She glanced up as he started to walk away. ‘You don’t know of anyone with a proper recovery monitor, do you? One that does everything? I looked for one to hire last night but none of the suppliers seemed to have one.’

  ‘And by everything,’ Paul said, ‘you mean…?’

  ‘ECG, temp, respiration. Ideally pulse ox and capnography too.’ The Royal had four of them.

  ‘I don’t think you’re going to find anything like that around here.’ Paul’s voice was dry but not unkind. ‘Listen, why don’t you let me keep an eye on Pesh for a while?’

  ‘I can’t ask you to do that.’

  ‘It’s fine. I’m not going into surgery for a couple of hours.’

  Oh god, what if Pesh crashed while the theatre was full?

  ‘I’ll check her every ten minutes,’ Paul promised. ‘If anything changes, we’ll call.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Lennie said. ‘Really. But—’

  ‘Lennie,’ Krystal told her firmly, ‘you need to go home.’

  ‘I can’t.’ In fact, even if she wanted to, ‘I don’t have a car.’

  ‘Barb won’t mind running you home,’ Paul said, equally firmly. ‘Just for an hour or two. Grab some sleep, get yourself cleaned up. Check on Jim.’ Paul frowned. ‘He sounded in a bad way.’

  •

  Pulling up outside her grandparents’ house in the passenger seat of Barb’s car, Lennie felt a moment of pure, cold misery. It was so empty. So quiet. No Pesh racing out. No Alice in the paddock. No smoke coming from the chimney—Jim really must be in a bad way if he hadn’t even lit the fire.

  ‘You won’t mind if I don’t come in, will you?’ Barb kept the engine running. ‘I’d better get straight back. Busy day.’

  ‘Of course.’ Lennie climbed out into the thin drizzle that was just beginning to fall, a plastic bag full of yesterday’s filthy, blood-stained clothes hugged to her chest. ‘Thanks for the lift.’

  ‘Say hi to Jim,’ Barb called, winding the window down as she hit reverse. ‘Hope he feels better soon.’

  Lennie waved without looking, heading for the door. To her surprise, it was locked. Just as well she hadn’t lost her keys yesterday. With her free hand, she fumbled them out from her pocket.

  ‘Grandpa?’

  It was quiet inside the house, too. No radio, no TV. He must be asleep. Zonked out on pain meds, probably. Tiptoeing up the stairs, she poked her head around her grandfather’s door. His bedroom was empty.

  Lennie raised her voice. ‘Grandpa?’ With a grimace, she opened the bathroom door. It was empty as well. She headed back into the hall. ‘Grandpa!’

  Oh god, had he passed out somewhere? Could she lift him? She hurried downstairs, searching rooms with increasing urgency. There was nobody in the bloody house. In the kitchen, she reached for the garage door opener. Jim’s truck was gone.

  He was well enough to drive?

  At long last, Lennie noticed the note tucked under the coffee jar on the bench.

  Heading down to the huts, might be gone a couple of weeks.

  Few things to sort out.

  Don’t worry about me, just get Pesh well.

  G.

  She knew him well enough to know which huts he meant. The river mouth enclave he and his mates took over whenever they could. Lennie read the note again in disbelief. He’d gone fishing?

  Don’t worry about him? She wasn’t worried, she was fucking furious. How could he do this? He knew better than anyone how much Pesh meant to her. How much work it was going to take to ‘get Pesh well’. Did he just not care?

  Suddenly, she understood how her grandmother felt. She could kill Jim right now. How the hell was she supposed to handle everything by herself? Instead of helping her in her hour of need, he’d run off and dumped her with all his problems as well. The practice, Alice, the house, the cat…Unbelievable, selfish, selfish man.

  Lennie dashed at the tears tickling her cheeks. Lois was right. Her grandfather had ruined her life. He’d brought her here, he’d left the gates open. None of this would have happened if it wasn’t for him. And now he was making up excuses not to even go into the clinic that was so important to him she’d had to leave her dream job, and because she was in his stupid clinic she didn’t have the right equipment to look after her dog, and god knew how she was going to get through another night, at the very least, before Pesh could come home, and…and…she needed help. Lennie choked up on the thought.

  She’d always, always, believed she could count on her grandfather. He and Lois had been there for her for as long as she could remember. Longer. Relief swept through Lennie’s exhausted brain as she realised that one of them still was. Could she? Damn right she could. Jim had ceded his claim when he’d abandoned her here, and anyway, she was past caring who had the right to do what. Blowing her nose on a piece of kitchen towel, Lennie picked up the phone.

  •

  Back in the recovery room an hour later, exhaustion misting the edges of her vision, Lennie kept her head down, trying to stay out of the way of Krystal and Paul and the curious clients coming and going around her. Everyone had the same question. Was the big white dog going to be okay?

  ‘She’s stable,’ was all Lennie could tell them.

  Catching herself rocking towards the recovery room’s non-slip vinyl floor, Lennie lurched upright again. With a brisk shake of her head, she pulled out her phone and focused on the screen, setting the alarm to
go off in thirty minutes.

  ‘Chest still negative?’ Paul checked, looking over the chart. ‘You want a hand to get that tube out?’

  Lennie gave him a grateful nod.

  An unknown number of half-hour intervals later, she became dimly aware that Krystal was mopping the floor around her. The sudden slam of the double doors woke her fully. The clinic’s new client sofa was making its way towards her, Paul holding one arm, Barb piloting the other.

  ‘Looks like Jim was wrong,’ Paul said, putting the couch down beside the bed where Pesh lay propped on her sternum. ‘This thing is going to be useful.’

  Lennie managed a smile.

  ‘Why don’t you let me take over for a few hours,’ he said gruffly, watching her curl into the cushions.

  ‘Thanks,’ she told him, ‘but…’

  ‘No thanks,’ Paul finished for her, with a sigh.

  ‘I just…’ She tried to clear the fog from her brain. ‘I just have to be here.’ She’d never forgive herself otherwise.

  He nodded. ‘If anything happens, call me. I’ll be right over.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Krystal said. ‘Me too.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Lennie said again, ‘so much.’

  ‘Get some sleep,’ Paul ordered. ‘For Pesh’s sake. Nobody wants a tired surgeon.’

  Listening to him and Barb lock up, Lennie lay back on the sofa, resting her head on its arm. Hopefully the farm dogs hadn’t got to it yet.

  Some time later, Lennie heard a key turn in the clinic’s back door. The smell of something good drifted in, followed by Paul with a foil-covered dish in his hand and a sleeping bag under his arm. ‘Gill sent this,’ he said, raising the dish. ‘I’ll put it in the lunchroom.’ They shared a smile as Pesh’s nostrils twitched. Paul set the sleeping bag down on the couch. ‘And I thought this might be handy.’

  When he’d gone again, Lennie ran the next check on Pesh and wandered out to the lunchroom. But in spite of how good it smelled, she discovered she had very little stomach for food. She stared down at the remains of the dish, the thought that she couldn’t even feed it to Pesh tearing at her heart.

  Returning to the sofa, she lay watching her sleeping dog breathe, her own eyelids increasingly heavy. In the space between phone alerts, between waking in sudden panic thinking that she’d missed an alarm, Lennie found herself dreaming of helicopters. Emerging from a particularly vivid episode, it took her a moment to place herself. To realise she was alone. She blinked away her sense of disappointment. Not alone, she reminded herself guiltily. With Pesh.

  As her head cleared, the imaginary pounding of a Robinson engine was replaced by a much closer sound. Jesus Christ. Somebody was trying to open the clinic’s front door. Resisting the temptation to pull the sleeping bag over her head and hope for the best, Lennie clambered to her feet and peered out at reception. She really, really didn’t need drug thieves tonight.

  ‘Lennie? Are you there? It’s Fifi.’

  Oh. Relaxing her grip on her phone, Lennie unlocked the door.

  ‘We thought you might be hungry.’ Fifi held out a pizza box. ‘How’s Pesh?’

  ‘That’s such a kind thought.’ Lennie patted her pockets, looking for her wallet. ‘How much do I owe you?’

  ‘No, no. It’s on us.’ Fifi shot an anxious look at the recovery room doors. ‘Is she getting better?’

  ‘You know—’ Lennie touched the wood of the reception desk ‘—I think maybe she is.’

  ‘We’re all thinking of her.’ Fifi sniffed. ‘If there’s anything we can do…I would have brought you a bottle of wine as well, but I figured you couldn’t tonight.’

  ‘No.’ Lennie smiled. ‘Not tonight.’

  ‘Well, there’ll be one on the bar for you when you’re ready.’

  Having waved Fifi off, Lennie felt compelled to open the box, but she could do no more justice to The Hard Yard’s pizza than she had to Paul’s wife’s chicken cacciatore. Adding it to the clinic’s fridge, she dashed back to obey the call of her phone alert. Pesh’s stats were stable.

  Curling onto the couch again, Lennie listened hard. The skies over Kimpton were silent. She turned the phone in her hands. Giving in to a growing ache for she didn’t know what, she brought up Mitch’s number. He picked up on the second ring.

  ‘Hey.’

  As his voice met her ear, Lennie closed her eyes.

  ‘What’s happening?’ Mitch said gently.

  ‘She’s doing okay,’ Lennie tried to keep her voice steady. ‘I just wanted…’ To hear that voice. ‘You were here last night,’ she said. ‘Weren’t you? You were outside.’

  Mitch said nothing.

  Lennie bit her lip. ‘Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you come in?’

  ‘You had your hands full,’ he said. ‘You needed to be with your dog.’

  It was true. There’d been no space in her life for anyone but Pesh last night. But if Mitch had known that, why had he come? Oh, she was way too tired to work this out…‘So,’ Lennie said slowly, ‘you just sat there in the car park?’

  In the continued silence, she sensed an internal debate. ‘If last night had gone a different way…’ Mitch paused again. ‘It’s not good to walk out of something like that alone.’

  Oh. Lennie stared down at her dog, a lead weight in her stomach. If she’d lost Pesh last night…She tried not to picture herself closing the clinic door, the empty night waiting for her outside.

  ‘Mitch, I don’t know what to say.’ Thank you didn’t seem to cover it.

  ‘You don’t have to say anything.’

  That was good. That was good, because she wasn’t sure she was capable of forming words. ‘I’m so tired,’ she found herself saying, a catch in her voice.

  ‘I know,’ Mitch said quietly. ‘I know, but you’re doing it. You’re getting through. I’ll help you any way I can. Can I help?’

  ‘Could you just…’ Lennie felt herself slipping. ‘Can you just stay on the line with me for a while?’

  ‘I’m here.’

  She closed her eyes again.

  The next time she was aware of Mitch’s voice, it was coming from somewhere down her shoulder, along with a beeping sound.

  ‘Lennie, your alarm’s going off.’

  Groggily, she regathered her phone. ‘Thanks. I need to take a new set of obs.’

  ‘How are they?’ Mitch asked calmly, when she put the phone back to her ear.

  ‘No change. She’s stable.’

  ‘What are you getting? Talk me through.’

  In spite of the entries on the chart beside her, Lennie had lost track of how many sets of stats had gone by when she noticed the windows of the recovery room starting to grey.

  ‘Mitch?’ she said softly, unsure if he was still on the end of the line.

  ‘I’m here.’ His voice sounded a touch more rugged than usual. ‘It’s okay, you’ve got another seventeen minutes to go.’

  ‘It’s getting light.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I can see that.’

  ‘Oh Jesus.’ Lennie stared blearily at the line of the hills outside. ‘I’ve kept you awake all night.’

  ‘I wouldn’t swear it was all night,’ he admitted. Imagining the kink of that muscular mouth, she thought she heard a faint scrape of palm across stubble.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t be.’

  ‘Mitch…?’ Racked with guilt, for the first time in thirty-six hours Lennie also found herself feeling like she could maybe laugh again one day.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked.

  ‘You can hang up now.’

  ‘Now that you mention it—’ Mitch smothered a yawn ‘—I should probably get to work.’

  In the pause that followed, his unspoken question was easy enough to hear.

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ she told him. ‘Krystal’s going to be here in an hour.’

  ‘How’s Pesh looking?’

  Lennie wrapped her hand around the big white paw. ‘She’s looking good.’
r />   ‘That’s great,’ Mitch said. There was another pause. ‘I’d better go.’

  ‘Mitch,’ she began, barely knowing where she was headed, just wanting to hear his voice again, the haze of exhaustion obscuring whatever it was she was trying to say.

  ‘See you later,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry about it, okay.’

  Eighteen

  ‘Well, hello.’ Pesh’s tail waved as Lois bent to greet her in the driveway that evening. ‘Hello, look at you.’

  Enveloped in her grandmother’s hug, Lennie breathed in the smells of her childhood—lavender water, daphne and baking, cut with just a hint of Arpège.

  ‘Thank you for coming, Grandma,’ Lennie got out, a little thickly.

  ‘Sweetheart.’ Lois clicked her tongue. ‘What else was I was going to do?’

  ‘Have you been alright by yourself?’

  ‘I seem to have coped,’ her grandmother said pertly. She touched Lennie’s unwashed cheek before turning back to Pesh. ‘Can we go for a little walk?’

  ‘I think so,’ Lennie decided, on the other end of Pesh’s very short lead.

  ‘This way,’ her grandmother said, matching her pace to Pesh’s hobble as they headed for the side gate. ‘There’s another old lady just around here who’ll be very pleased to see you.’

  Lois opened the gate. Lennie felt the first hint of a pull as Pesh picked up the pace. Alice tottered to the other side of the paddock fence, her hindquarters swathed in vet wrap.

  ‘Easy does it.’ Lennie laughed as Pesh stuck her head through the fence. ‘You want a proper look? Come on, I’ll let you in.’

  In the paddock, dog and deer sniffed each other’s bandages curiously.

  Lennie turned to her grandmother. ‘Do you think they’re comparing notes?’

  ‘I’m sure Krystal’s wraps are neater than mine.’ Lois smiled. ‘And Pesh looks very pretty in pink. I think she got the better deal.’

  As Pesh and Alice continued their investigations, Lois draped an arm around Lennie’s waist. ‘You did quite a job, getting them both out of there.’

  Lennie shook her head. ‘It wasn’t me who did that.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Lois tugged the back of Lennie’s shirt. ‘I did hear,’ she said with faux innocence, ‘that you’d had some help.’