Chapter Excerpt
The Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery was open to an article on updated needle chest decompression protocols that Gideon Baker already read twice. He read it a third time anyway.
Setting the journal on the nightstand, he stared at the ceiling of the apartment that the Army was still generously providing while it figured out what to do with him. Almost ten months since the blast.
Sleep still eluded him, but he’d stopped being surprised by it after month three. The ceiling of temporary quarters in San Antonio looked the same at two in the morning as it did at noon, featureless and indifferent, which was fine. He had no particular argument with the ceiling.
His phone lit up on the nightstand. Kade. Mom says she needs help finishing that puzzle. When are you coming back?.
Clutching the phone in his hand, Gideon swung his legs over the side of the bed.
His lungs registered the change in position the way they registered most things these days—not pain exactly, just a reminder.
Something happened here. Don’t forget. He wasn’t going to forget.
In no particular hurry—his norm nowadays—he padded in bare feet to the kitchen, filled a glass at the tap, and stood drinking it in the dark.
Through the doorway he could see the other room—the one he’d taken to thinking of as the workshop, though that was a generous description for a folding table and two plastic storage bins of supplies.
The USS Enterprise sat on the shelf above the table.
He’d finished it six weeks into medical hold, working in two and three hour stretches when the pulmonary rehab appointments left him tired but not yet ready to sleep.
It had taken him eleven days. The model was impeccable.
Every detail exact, every panel fitted flush, the nacelles perfectly aligned. He’d always had good hands.
In the Star Trek universe a man with blast lung would have been healed in approximately forty-five seconds by Dr. McCoy with something that looked like an electric razor.
Gideon had spent considerable time thinking about this.
He did not find it funny exactly. It was more in the category of things you either laughed about or didn’t get out of bed about, and he’d made his choice.
Below the Enterprise, mounted on the wall in its frame, the completed 2000 piece puzzle of the Grand Tetons caught the ambient light from the window.
He’d finished it last month. Two thousand pieces, working an hour at a time, sorting by color and pattern with the same methodical precision he’d applied to triage.
He’d started another one immediately—the night sky over the Sahara, which was either aspirational or masochistic, he hadn’t decided.
On the table, the ship in a bottle waited.
He’d been working on it for three weeks and it was humbling in a way that nothing since the blast had managed to be.
The Enterprise had been a model kit—instructions, numbered parts, engineered to go together.
The ship in a bottle was a different kind of problem entirely.
Thread and tweezers and patience and the particular physics of fitting something large through something small, which should have been impossible and wasn’t—if you were methodical enough.
He was methodical enough. Just not fast.
His gaze shifted to the Enterprise. The puzzle.
The bottle with its half-rigged mast. Had he ever felt so useless in his life?
The question wasn’t rhetorical and it wasn’t self-pity.
It was just the honest arithmetic of where he was versus where he’d been versus where he was going, and no matter how many times he ran the numbers, the arithmetic kept coming out the same way.
He refilled his glass, went back to the doorway, and looked at the table a moment longer. The phone still clenched in his hand buzzed.
Kade again. She says to tell you she bought another one with no sky.
He stood in the doorway between the kitchen and the room where he kept his hands busy so his brain didn’t eat him alive, and looked at the phone, then he looked out the nearest window to the building across the way—concrete and glass and the particular gray of a San Antonio predawn like any other the last several months.
His mind drifted back to the Sweet family ranch.
About Hanson’s face at the anniversary celebration—settled in a way it hadn’t been in the years Gideon had known him.
About the wide open nothing of that pasture that somehow a man from California had decided was exactly enough.
About the well used kitchen and the way a room full of people could feel like oxygen when you’d been breathing recirculated air for ten months.
Even the puzzle work was more interesting when you weren’t doing it alone.
He opened his fingers and typed: Tell her don’t start without me.
Casting one last look at the Enterprise on the shelf, the puzzle on the wall, and the bottle on the table, he went back to bed. For the first time in longer than he could honestly account for, he fell asleep before the ceiling had a chance to become familiar again.
The border collie on table two had eaten approximately way too much of his owner’s garden hose and showed absolutely no remorse about it.
“Hey buddy.” Leaning over the table, Dr. Victoria Ramsey ran her hands along the dog’s abdomen.
Her hands had done this enough times that they knew what they were looking for before her brain had to get involved.
The dog looked up at her with the bright untroubled eyes of an animal that had no idea what all the fuss was about. “You’re lucky it came back up.”
“Is he going to be okay?” The owner—a twelve year old boy with the look of someone who feared losing his best friend—stood at the edge of the exam room with his hands shoved in his pockets.
“He’s going to be fine.” She straightened and pulled off her gloves. “But he’s spending the night so we can monitor him, and when he goes home that garden hose is going somewhere he can’t reach it.”
The boy nodded, his expression as stern as stone.
She walked him through what to expect, when to call, how to keep a border collie from eating the hose in the future, which was a longer conversation than most people expected, and sent him to the front desk where Dani would handle the paperwork.
Dani was twenty-two and had strong opinions about everything from vaccine schedules to the proper way to fold surgical towels.
Two of many things that made her an excellent vet tech and occasionally exhausting company.
Currently she was in the large animal bay with Cassie, Kade Sweet’s wife and Vicki liked to think, a good friend.
She stripped her gloves, washed her hands, checked on the recovering tabby in kennel three who was coming out of her spay nicely, made a note on the border collie’s chart, and pushed through the door to the large animal section of her veterinary practice.
The bay smelled like hay, antiseptic, and the particular honest smell of large animals that Vicki had stopped noticing approximately fifteen years ago.
A mare stood in the center stall looking deeply unimpressed.
A hoof abscess had to be the most inconvenient thing to develop the week before the county cutting competition.
At the mare’s head, Cassie had one hand on the halter, talking to the horse in the low steady murmur she used with every animal she encountered on the Sweet family ranch. A tone every animal, no matter who it belonged to, seemed to appreciate.
Dani squatted near the affected hoof with the focused attention of someone unwilling to make even the smallest of mistakes. “Abscess is draining clean.”
“Good.” Vicki moved to the hoof, crouched, confirmed what Dani had found. Clean drainage, no secondary infection, the mare would be fine inside a week with proper care and some time off the competition circuit.
“You’re a miracle worker.” Cassie stroked the mare now settled with a fresh bandage and a bucket of water.
“I’m a vet. There’s a difference.” Vicki pulled off her second pair of gloves and dropped them in the bin. “The miracle was that she didn’t kick Dani in the face.”
“I was perfectly positioned,” Dani straightened her shoulders and grinned.
Raising a single brow at her new tech, Vicki put on a stern face. “You were three inches from her strike zone.”
“Comfortably three inches.”
“There’s no such thing as comfortable around animals that weigh in by the ton not the pound.” Vicki turned back to her office.
Cassie followed beside her. “Have any plans for this weekend?”
“I’ve got a stack of journals I need to weed through. I plan to snuggle into bed with a warm blanket, hot beverage, and my reading glasses.”
“You need to get a life,” Cassie huffed.
“I have a life.” Vicki eased behind her desk. “I have a very full life. I have forty-seven patients this week, a border collie who ate a garden hose, a mare with an abscess, a cat recovering from surgery, and approximately four hours of charting waiting for me after closing.”
“That’s not a life. That’s a schedule.” Cassie sank into the seat in front of Vicki’s desk. “Kade knows people. Good people. I’m just saying.”
Vicki looked at her sideways. “By people you mean men.”
“I’m simply observing that there are good men in the world and some of them are single and some of them happen to be stationed not too far from here and—”
“And what makes a long distance relationship any better than no relationship?”
Cassie opened her mouth to speak, but Vicki kept talking. “Are my clients supposed to haul their animals halfway around the world every time the man gets transferred to a new post?”
“Well…” Cassie started.
“Of course not. You know that. You’re married to a military man. I can’t be following a man around the world. Not now, not ever.”
Cassie was quiet for a long thoughtful moment.
“I’m not looking,” Vicki heaved a soft sigh.
“I’m not unhappy. I’m busy and I’m exactly where I want to be.
The clinic is exactly what I always wanted.
” She looked around. Over the last few years she’d taken Veterinarian Ralph Harmon’s legacy and updated and expanded and turned it into her dream facility. “That’s enough for right now.”
Nibbling on her upper lip, it was pretty obvious her friend was fighting the urge to say more. Instead she merely muttered a withered, “Okay.”
Vicki nodded just as Dani appeared in the doorway. “Mrs. Patterson’s cat is awake and yelling about it.”
“God Bless vocal cats.” She’d take a loud recovering cat over a quiet lethargic cat any day of the week. “We’ll keep the mare overnight, just in case, but tell Clint that y’all can come get her any time tomorrow.”
“Will do.” Cassie bobbed here head. “But if you change your mind about meeting a two legged male. You know where to fine me.”
Vicki merely rolled her eyes, and smiled at her friend. Even though she hadn’t known Cassie that long, the woman was one of those people who just felt like someone you’d known all your life.
Pushing through the door to the recovery room Vicki let her mind fall back to where it belonged—completely and efficiently caring for her patients.
It was enough. It was more than enough. She repeated the mantra to herself three or four more times before she finally gave up.
So what if she found animals more reliable than people.
She did not need a man in her life. And maybe if she said that three or four hundred more times even she’d believe it.