CHAPTER 12
Laney
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The call came at nine minutes past ten, and Laney was already reaching for her boots before Charlie finished the sentence.
“She's pawing, she keeps looking at her side, and she won't touch her hay.” Charlie's voice came thin and fast through the phone. “Hutch said colic. He said come now.”
“Pulse and gut sounds?” Laney had the phone wedged at her shoulder, lacing one boot in the dark of her own kitchen, Banjo already up off his bed and circling, reading the change in her the way he'd read it a thousand nights. “Is she down? Is she rolling?”
“Not rolling. Walking the stall. Charlie, I don't know, I'm not the vet, that's why I called the vet.”
“Walk her. Don't let her lie down and don't let her roll. I'm twenty minutes out.”
She made it in seventeen.
The first thunderhead was already stacking over Eagle Bench when she swung the truck through the cattle guard, a bruise-colored shelf with its underside flickering, lit from inside like something with a pulse.
Heat lightning, no rain yet, the air thick and waiting.
She catalogued it the way she catalogued everything — storm coming, barometric drop, mares get colicky on a falling glass — and filed it under cause, not omen.
She did not believe in omens. She believed in gut sounds and capillary refill and the steady hands her father had spent her whole childhood teaching her to keep.
Her hands were steady. She noted that too, with the small grim satisfaction of a fact holding firm. Good. Stay that way.
The foaling barn glowed at the far end, the single hanging lamp throwing its tired gold out through the gaps in the board-and-batten, and a shape moved across that light, leading something dark and restless in a slow circle.
She'd expected Hutch at that lead, and the shape was too tall, too still through the shoulders.
It was Beck.
Her pulse jumped — once, hard, a single misfire — and she labeled it adrenaline and got out of the truck.
She had not been alone with him since the bench.
Since the line shack and the rain coming down like the sky meant to bury them both, and the long gray ride out at dawn with everything said and nothing said and her own heart beating in a rhythm she didn't have a chart for.
Three nights ago. For three nights she had drilled herself to fold it back into the box where it lived. She'd nearly managed it.
“Heart rate's up, she's restless, she keeps kicking at her belly,” Beck said, not turning, keeping the broodmare walking.
He had Juniper's lead in one fist and his other hand flat on the mare's neck, low and quiet, like he was holding a frequency only the two of them could hear.
“She tried to go down twice. I kept her up.”
“Good.” Laney came through the door dragging her kit, and the smell hit her — clean straw and warm hide and iodine and underneath it the sour-sweet wrongness of a sick animal, the thing she could smell before she could name it. “Keep her moving. Tell me everything from when Charlie called you.”
“Wasn't Charlie. Hutch hollered down from the house, I was closest.” He glanced at her then, just once, storm-grey under the lamp, and she felt the glance land somewhere under her sternum and chose not to chart it. “She was sweating up. Flank's tight. I figured colic before anybody said the word.”
“You figured right.” She knelt, opened the kit, and let the work take her the way it always took her — clean and total, the rest of the world narrowing to one body in trouble and the sequence required to read it.
Tom's brass-handled hoof knife caught the lamplight in its slot.
She didn't need it tonight, but her thumb found the worn brass on the way past, the way it always did, the way you touched a saint's foot going by.
Steady hands, Laney-girl. Assess before you act.
The animal doesn't care how scared you are.
She was assessing, she told herself, and assessing was a long way from scared. There was a difference and she was the only one who needed to know which.
“Hold her head. Right there. Don't let her swing into me.”
Beck planted himself at Juniper's halter and made the mare stand, and the mare stood for him, blowing, the big barrel of her heaving.
Laney pressed her stethoscope to the flank and listened, moving it in a slow grid, quadrant by quadrant.
Gut sounds — there, faint, a sluggish gurgle on the upper left; nothing on the lower right, which was the part that made the back of her neck go cold even as her face stayed smooth.
She pressed two fingers to the gum above the mare's teeth.
Tacky. Refill slow. Pulse forty-eight and climbing.
She ran it like a list, out loud, because saying it kept her hands from running ahead of her head.
“Elevated heart rate. Tacky mucous membranes.
Reduced gut sounds on the right. She's painful but she's not thrashing.
That's a spasmodic-or-impaction picture until I prove otherwise.
I'm going to tube her and give her something for the pain, and then we walk her, and we watch, and we do not let her roll. You with me?”
“I'm with you.”
“She's eleven days from her due date and she is the single most valuable animal on this place, so I need your hands exactly where I put them and nowhere else.”
“Yes ma'am.”
It would have made her smile, on a different night, the yes ma'am out of a man who'd never said it to anyone in his life.
She didn't smile. She drew up the banamine and found the vein and the storm cracked open overhead — no rain yet, just a white sheet of light that came through every gap in the old barn boards at once, a lightning-blue strobe that turned the whole interior to a flat photograph for half a heartbeat: the mare's rolled eye, the straw, Beck's knuckles white on the halter, his face all hard planes and the scar through his eyebrow.
Then dark gold again, and the thunder rolling in behind it long and low like something dragging itself across the mesa.
Juniper flinched at the light and tried to bolt. Beck held her.
“Easy,” he said, low, to the horse, in the exact register Laney used herself. “Easy now. I got you. Nobody's leaving.”
The words went through her like the cold of the alcohol swab going through the mare's hide. She did not look up. She put the needle where it belonged.
They worked.
For the better part of an hour they worked, and somewhere in it the thing between them that she'd worked three nights to shut away went quiet, because there was no room for it.
There was only the mare. Laney passed the tube and Beck steadied the head; she listened and Beck walked; she watched the clock on her phone and the gut sounds came back, quadrant by quadrant, the lower right finally giving up a thin hopeful gurgle that made her exhale through her nose.
The pain eased out of Juniper in increments she could read like a falling fever — the kicking stopped first, then the flank softened, then the great head came down and the mare blew out long and wet and stood, finally, just stood, with one hind foot cocked.
“There,” Laney said. Her voice came out rougher than she meant it. “There she is.”
Outside, the rain finally let go. It came down all at once, a roar on the old roof, and the lightning came with it now in earnest, blue and close.
Another strobe ripped through the barn boards, lighting the aisle in hard white bars, and in it she saw Beck's shoulders drop, saw the breath go out of him too, and understood that he'd been just as scared as she'd refused to be.
He'd been holding it the whole time, behind the easy hands and the easy now, and only now, with the mare safe, did he let it show.
“False alarm,” she said. “Or close to it. Gas and spasm, with the weather and her being so heavy. No impaction, no twist of the gut.” She owed him the rest of it, because it was true and he'd earned it.
“You caught it early. You kept her up. If she'd gone down and rolled, eleven days out, this could have ended very differently. You did that right.”
“I had a good teacher.” He wasn't looking at the mare. “Watched her work a colic on a cutting horse one summer when I was eighteen. Never forgot it.”
She remembered that summer. She remembered being eighteen and watching him watch her, and thinking she would never in her life be looked at like that again, and being, as it turned out, correct.
“Don't,” she said.
“I didn't say anything.”
“You were going to.”
He huffed something that wasn't quite a laugh. “I was going to say thank you. That's all. For coming. For — ” He gestured at the mare, at the kit, at the long hour. “For all of it.”
The adrenaline went out of her then, all at once, the way it always did when a case turned — a clean drop, the floor of her stomach falling away, leaving her hollow and shaking very slightly in the hands that had been so steady.
She knew the physiology. Sympathetic surge, then the crash, the body dumping what it had hoarded for the fight.
She'd felt it a thousand times in a thousand barns. She knew exactly what it was.
She did not know why, this time, it left her wanting to lean into the nearest warm thing and stay there.
She crouched to repack the kit instead. Tubes, syringe, the brass knife winking in its slot. She heard Beck come down off the rail, heard the straw shift, and then his hand and hers reached for the same lead rope where it had fallen coiled in the aisle, and their fingers met on the rough hemp.
Neither hand pulled away.
It was nothing. It was a lead rope. She'd touched ten thousand of them.
His hand was warm over the back of hers and the calluses on his palm were the same calluses she remembered and that was the trouble, that was the whole entire trouble, that her body had a memory her mind had overruled for ten long years and the body did not care about the ruling at all.
She looked up.