Carolyn McSparren - Listen to the Child

This wasn’t the way Kit and her mother ever spoke to one another. Her mother’s sudden emotion made Kit uncomfortable. She tried to laugh. “I wasn’t at death’s door, Mom.”

Her mother raised her eyes. “You certainly looked as though you were. I’m sure you looked half-dead to Emma. Suddenly the impossible—being abandoned by her mother—became possible. You don’t get over that quickly.”

“So on top of everything else I’m supposed to feel guilty that I got blown up, because I scared my parents and my child? I know this is hard for her, Mom. At first she fell all over herself being helpful—mommy’s little nurse. Treated me as though I was some sort of invalid. Brought me tea in bed. Refused to let me out of her sight. But that gets old fast when you’re ten. Now I embarrass her.”

“Yes, you probably do.” Catherine sounded defeated. “You and I never could communicate. I don’t suppose you and Emma can actually talk all this through, can you?”

“That would just make things worse. She’s adjusting at her own pace. I’m not going to rub her nose in my infirmity. God, Mom, remember when I shot that guy and had to go to the shrink? Now every time I hear anybody say, ‘And how did that make you feel?’ I want to hit something. I’m not going to do that to Emma.”

“She’s your child.” Catherine walked to the kitchen door. “Time for me to go home.” She turned to face Kit. “I almost forgot to tell you. Vince Calandruccio called. Said to call him at the Dog Squad tomorrow morning to tell him about Kevlar.”

“Vince is a good guy. A lot of the guys I worked with on the job have stopped calling to check up on me, but Vince keeps coming over and bringing Adam, of course. He never goes anywhere without his dog.”

Catherine nodded. “You look wiped out. Go to bed. And if you don’t make it to Sunday school, don’t sweat it. I’m sure God will understand.”

“Thanks for watching Emma, Mother.”

“You’re welcome.” Catherine picked up her purse and walked through the door.

Suddenly Kit felt so exhausted she wasn’t certain she could drag herself up the stairs to her bedroom. The doctors had warned her about that. After any kind of stress and particularly after a long session of reading lips, her energy could suddenly bottom out. And sometimes she lost her balance. The doctors said that was the physical trauma of the blast and the psychological trauma of nearly winding up both deaf and blind.

She didn’t like to remember what a close call that had been. The scar that bisected her right eyebrow and touched the corner of her eye was barely noticeable thanks to a great plastic surgeon. And her vision in that eye was almost normal, thanks to an ophthalmologist in the trauma center who’d removed splinters from her eye without damaging it.

The doctors told her she’d never remember the blast itself, but she’d heard the story of her accident so many times she almost felt as though she could.

She’d come through plenty of hostage situations and drug takedowns without a scratch. It was embarrassing to lose her hearing and her job with the police department in what amounted to a comedy of errors.

Keystone Kops, Vince Calandruccio called it.

Start with one rookie who kicked in the back door of a crack house a second too early so that Kit had to cover him to keep him from getting his ass blown off. Add another cop at the front door with a flash-bang grenade who didn’t know Kit was already in the vestibule. Toss in a commander who waited a couple of seconds too long to rescind his order to lob in the flash-bang.

What do you have? Kit Lockhart standing practically on top of the damn grenade when it went off.

She still had to watch herself on the stairs. Her depth perception wasn’t perfect, but it was improving.

Unfortunately, Emma had eyes like a hawk, ready to spot the least sign of weakness in Kit.

Life was better with Kevlar. Emma seemed willing to hand over some of the responsibility she felt to him. Thank God he was going to be all right.

Kit leaned against the wall at the top of the stairs for a moment, panting.

“Oh, this is not a good thing,” she said as she bent to catch her breath. “It is high time we went back to working out, Kit, my girl. You’ve been lazy too long. You’re getting soft.” She walked into her bedroom, shucked off her sweater, then pulled off her boots and dropped them beside her.

Lord, she hoped the noise they made wouldn’t wake Emma! She slipped down the hall and peered into her daughter’s bedroom. Emma lay curled up asleep. From the crook of the little girl’s knees, Jo-Jo raised his flat head and looked at Kit for a moment before subsiding into sleep again. Kit crossed to the bed and bent to kiss Emma’s forehead, damp with nighttime perspiration.

On her way back to her own bathroom, she jabbed hard at the heavy punching bag in the corner of her bedroom. “Ow! Wimp. Next time wear gloves.” She kicked at it. “Wonder how Dr. John MacIntyre Thorn keeps up those muscles. He certainly wouldn’t risk injuring his hands on a punching bag.”

In the bathroom, she began to cream her makeup off. Then stopped and leaned both hands on the sink. Thank God for those hands of his. Please, let him really have saved Kevlar.

ACROSS THE HALL, Emma opened her eyes. It was much easier to feign sleep now when her mother couldn’t hear her breathing.

She heard the sound of her mother’s fist as she thwacked the heavy bag, then her exclamation. She couldn’t understand the rest of the words.

Her mother never used to talk to herself—not out loud. Emma wasn’t certain she even knew she was doing it since she couldn’t hear her own voice.

Weird.

Even weirder to think that she could play her stereo all night. Her mother wouldn’t know about it unless Emma woke the neighbors, and they called to complain.

At first she’d thought being able to get away with stuff behind her mother’s back was cool—her friend Jessica definitely thought so. But it wasn’t. She’d always relied on her mother to set boundaries. Before, when she played her music too loud, her mother told her to turn it down.

Before, her mother knew when she was playing a video game in her room when she was supposed to be doing homework just by the pinging sound the game made. All the way from the kitchen, too.

Emma hated feeling guilty when she took advantage of her mother’s deafness. She hated having to find her mother and look at her to tell her something instead of just yelling from upstairs or the back yard. It made every word they said to each other too important. Why couldn’t they just go back the way they were before the stupid accident?

MAC SLEPT LATE on Sunday morning. He deserved a little extra time after having worked on that corgi until nearly ten o’clock on Saturday night.

His first thoughts on waking were of Kit Lockhart. Mrs.? He hadn’t asked her last night, but he definitely wanted to know whether she had a husband.

Not that he was likely to see her again once Kevlar was fully recovered. His life was entirely too busy to complicate with women, and definitely not with women who unnerved him.

Even though it was a Sunday on which he was not officially on call, he dressed, grabbed a doughnut and an espresso from the drive-through and drove to the clinic to check on his patients.

He went straight to the small-animal ICU. Bigelow Little, the kennel man and general clinic help, was on his knees in front of the corgi’s cage.

“Hey, Dr. Mac,” Big said. “He come in last night?” Big stood up.

At six foot four Mac was used to being the tallest person in the room, but when Big was around, Mac knew how Chihuahuas must feel around Irish wolf-hounds. Big was immense—nearly seven feet tall, and half as broad. Not an ounce of fat on him. He looked capable of breaking Mac in two, but was in fact the gentlest soul on earth.