Listen to the Child. Carolyn McSparren
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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.
Emma grabbed her mother’s arm and turned her around so that she stared directly into Emma’s eyes. “Mom, will you be all right by yourself?”
“I think I can just about handle it, thank you.”
“You going to Granddad’s for dinner?”
“I can probably manage to microwave something all by my very own self.” But she smiled to show she was kidding.
“Oh, Mother,” Emma said. “Come on, Daddy. Can we go to the park?”
“Yeah, well, about that…” He pointedly turned away so that Kit couldn’t read his lips. She could, however, see Emma’s face and the look of resignation that came over it.
“Jimmy, playing video games while you sleep on the sofa is not much fun for a child. Couldn’t you do something Emma wants to do for a change?”
He turned back to face her. This time he didn’t smile. “Hey, she’s my kid too, okay? You don’t run my life any longer, okay?”
Kit bit down a reply. Not in front of Emma. “When will you be back? Emma has school tomorrow.”
“Yeah, I do remember about school. Eight, maybe nine.”
“Try seven, maybe eight. She has to be in bed by nine.”
He didn’t say anything else as he herded Emma out the door and into the front seat of his yellow Mustang.
Kit leaned on the door. The psychologists said that divorced parents weren’t supposed to let the child hear them snap at one another or say nasty things about each other. They were especially not to fight over the child. Kit tried hard.
Emma was too smart. When Kit and Jimmy had finally put an end to a marriage that both had known—almost from the start—was a mistake, Emma had been devastated. She’d been Daddy’s girl. Jimmy could do no wrong. The breakup was all Kit’s fault.
Kit knew that the divorce rate for cops was higher than for the rest of the population, but when she and Jimmy met at the police academy and married soon after they graduated, she’d never expected to become a part of that statistic. Now she wasn’t even a cop any longer—just a pensioned-off ex-cop. Jimmy would probably ride a squad car until he retired. That had been part of the problem—she’d had too much ambition to suit Jimmy, while he hadn’t had nearly enough to suit her.
Now Emma had endured two years of Jimmy’s canceled visits and his endless succession of empty-headed girlfriends. They either treated Emma like an interloper or fawned all over her to get close to her father. Just when she’d get used to one girlfriend, the girl would disappear to be replaced by a clone. There were so many that Kit had stopped asking their names, merely calling all of them “New Girl.”
Kit was having a harder and harder time convincing Em to spend Sunday afternoons and alternate Friday nights and Saturdays with her father. Jimmy kept promising that they’d go to see the latest movies, then reneging when New Girl preferred to see something R-rated that was unsuitable for Emma.
Occasionally, he simply got in a baby-sitter and left. At first Emma had refused to admit she’d been left with the sitter. Finally, however, she’d confessed in a welter of tears.
It was far worse, though, when Jimmy dumped Emma at his mother’s Germantown condo for the day. Kit carefully avoided saying anything negative about Mrs. Lockhart to Emma, even if there were times she had to bite her tongue. Jimmy’s mother didn’t keep to the same rules.
Mrs. Lockhart had never liked Kit. Not that she would have liked any woman who married her son. She’d been civil to Kit until the divorce. After Kit threw Jimmy out, Mrs. Lockhart switched from kid gloves to brass knuckles. And used Emma as her punching bag.
Kit