by North, Will
“It’s the usual, Doc. Owner backs out of driveway right over sleeping dog. Owner disconsolate. Dog supremely pissed off at owner.”
“Have you sedated her yet?”
“She’s a ‘he,’ unless you’re referring to the owner.”
Colin looked at the dog and then at Patsy.
“Oh God; don’t tell me…”
Patsy flashed a wicked smile. “Uh-huh.”
“It’s Otis.”
“And his murderous mistress, ‘Queen Jean,’ your best, most devoted client.”
“Shit. Just what I needed this morning. All right, let’s have a look. What’ve you found so far?”
“Only a probable fractured right tibia.”
Colin checked the terrier’s eyes for signs of shock and then, with characteristic gentleness, murmuring to the dog as his did so, palpated its torso and limbs. The right hind leg was already swollen.
“I expect you’re right, Pats; let’s get x-rays.”
“While you console Queen Jean?”
“Sure you wouldn’t like to handle that for me?”
“I’m just a vet tech, doctor.”
“And a sadist.”
Patsy shrugged. “Not my problem there’s some on this island think you’re a hunk. Mystery to me, though.”
“It’s nothing to do with that; the lady’s been trying to off that dog for years.”
“Don’t we know it! Let’s hope he keeps outsmarting her; she’s probably essential to our cash flow.”
He took a deep breath, left the treatment room, walked down the hall and turned the corner to the reception area.
Jean Forrester launched herself into Colin’s arms, her musky perfume engulfing him like the earlier morning fog.
“Oh my God, Doctor Ryan, what have I done?!”
Colin detached himself from the woman’s embrace.
“Let’s just calm down now, okay? Why don’t you make yourself comfortable in that chair and we’ll have a chat.”
“I didn’t see him, Doctor Ryan; I thought he was in the house!”
“Sit.”
She obeyed immediately.
“Do you have a doggy door, Mrs. Forrester?”
“Please call me Jean.”
“Do you?”
“Well, certainly; I can’t be expected to be at his every beck and call, now, can I?”
“No. No of course not. I had no idea you were so…busy.”
“My life is so full, Dr. Ryan.”
“I’m sure it is.” Colin knew Jean Forrester was the widow of a massively successful software engineer who’d worked himself into a stroke in his mid-forties, been severely paralyzed and cognitively impaired, been placed in the island’s nursing home, and had finally succumbed a few years back. He had left her a great deal of money and, unfortunately, a great deal of spare time. He had also left her Otis.
“I was backing up when I heard the beast yelp…”
The woman in the chair pulled a tissue from her purse and dabbed at nonexistent tears, her makeup unblemished. Jean Forrester was a California native who’d never sunk, as she would put it, to Northwest fashion. No flats or fleece for her. He guessed she was pushing fifty, but it was hard to tell. Henna-haired and just a bit on the wrong side of voluptuous, she went everywhere in heels, never was seen without makeup, and took great care to reveal just a bit more plush, sun-tanned décolleté than was strictly necessary outside of, say, a burlesque hall.
To judge from the number of appointments she logged at the clinic, her robustly healthy Jack Russell was perennially at death’s door. Ever since the dog had snapped at her, three years back, for some no doubt perfectly understandable reason, Jean had been concocting dire conditions that would require the blameless animal to be “put to sleep.” First it was cancer, according, she said, to a vet on the mainland. Terminal. Best to focus on quality of life and euthanize him…though she’d misplaced the vet’s paperwork. Then it was that the little dog repeatedly attacked small children in town, though there were no confirmed reports.
Olivia Mukai, Colin’s unflappable Japanese-American receptionist, answered Jean’s frequent calls with perfect grace and handled her in-office histrionics with the unearthly calm of a Buddhist monk. For this alone, Colin promised Olivia she would have a place in his practice forever.
“Otis will survive, Mrs. Forrester. You’re very lucky…or rather Otis is. May I suggest you look behind the car first the next time you go for a drive? You could easily have killed him.”
She twisted the tissue in her hands. “Are you sure we shouldn’t put him out of his misery? You know, like in Oregon—that physician-assisted suicide thing…?”
“You’re forgetting one thing Mrs. Forrester.”
Her eyes widened. One darkly-penciled eyebrow lifted.
“The terminally ill patient makes that decision, not the patient’s owner.”
“But he can’t speak for himself!”
“Precisely my point.”
He shot her a look but she was rummaging in her purse for another tissue.
“Perhaps you’ll excuse me while I attend to him?”
Radiant smile accompanied by heavy breathing. “But of course, Doctor Ryan.”
***
“PATSY, LET’S SEE that x-ray!” he barked as he reentered the treatment room.
His assistant emerged and handed him the image. He slapped it up into the clips on the light board.
“In a hurry?” Patsy asked.
“What? Oh. Yeah. Kinda.”
She looked at him while he peered at the image.
“Simple fracture. No displacement. No need for surgery. Let’s wrap it.”
“Colin?” Patsy seldom called him by his first name. Not in the clinic, anyway.
He looked away from the light board.
“You okay?”
And suddenly, Colin felt so heavy it was as if he couldn’t support his own weight. He bent over and leaned on a stainless surgery table.
“That’s sterilized, that is…”
He straightened and removed his hands.
“Sorry.”
She smiled. “What’s up?”
“What?”
“No, that was my question. Don’t turn this into a Monty Python routine…”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing, except that you don’t have the time of day for this dog.”
“That’s not true.”
“Sure?”
He leaned back against a counter and closed his eyes.
“Pete tried to kill herself this morning.”
“What? Where? How? Bloody hell, Colin!”
“I found her lying in the middle of Vashon Highway south of Burton, just before dawn. Unconscious. She picked that sharp curve so no driver coming north would see her until it was too late.”
Patsy stared at him for a moment, then shifted her gaze to the middle distance while she followed her racing thoughts. Finally, she refocused and said, “Or picked it because she knew you’d find her first.”
Colin’s head jerked up.
“Huh?”
“Half the people on this island know your morning routine. I’ll bet Betty’s got your cycling schedule posted by the door at the Mercantile, next to the bus and the ferry schedules.”
“Patsy, she was unconscious!”
“Were her fingertips blue?”
“I don’t remember. Maybe.”
“What was her rate of breathing?”
“Very slow, but regular. What’s this about?!”
“Those are the signs of acute alcohol poisoning.”
“I’m a vet, not a doctor, Pats; how the hell would I know that? How do you know, for that matter?”
“My ex; it was an all too common condition.”
“And your point is…?”
“If those were her symptoms, she was in big trouble; if they weren’t, she was waiting for you to rescue her.”
“That’s nuts, dammit!”
“Colin?”
/> “What?!”
“Who are you really angry with?”
Colin looked out the window to the clinic’s parking lot. Eileen was staring blank-faced out the side window of the van, as if watching television. He felt the antagonism seep from him as if into a drain in the floor. He turned back to his tech. “Not you, Patsy. Lord knows, not you.”
Patsy smiled at him, a smile that, had he any sense at all, he would have recognized as enduring affection.
“Colin, you were born to rescue wounded creatures. I suspect that’s why you went to your father’s bar every day after school, as if by being vigilant you could keep him sober and turn him around. But then the Mob took the matter out of your hands. You fought your way to vet school, partly to be able to support your mother, but then she up and died before you could rescue her, either.
“You’ve been rescuing ever since, but with animals; it’s why you’re such a bloody brilliant vet. Hell, animals can’t even tell you where it hurts, but that only makes it more challenging for you. You’re neurotic as all get out, but you’ve figured out a way to make it pay the bills.”
Colin looked up and shrugged. “Thank you. I think.”
Patsy regarded her boss for a moment. The guy’s an original, hopeless and wonderful all at once. She shook her head. Then something occurred to her.
“Who was on call at the medical center?”
“I didn’t take her there.”
“What? Where is she? Don’t tell me you left her at your place in that condition!”
“No. She’s with Miss Edwinna.”
“Rutherford?”
“The one and only.”
“That woman’s batty!”
“You’re wrong about that. Look, use your lovely head for something besides a hat rack: the Petersens and Strongs would go ballistic if word got out that she’d tried to commit suicide.”
“I can’t believe this.”
“What?”
“That you’re more concerned about the bloody reputations of the bloody summer people than you are about Pete’s life!”
Colin stared at her.
“That’s bullshit, and to borrow a phrase, who are you really angry with?’”
Patsy clamped her hands on each side of her head, as if containing an explosion. “You! You’re risking your reputation as a doctor for their reputation as…what? Pillars of Vashon society? They don’t even live here but two months of the year!”
“Like I said, I’m a vet, not a doctor, and besides, there was something else.”
“Now what?”
“There are bruises around both her wrists: signs of forcible restraint, or a fight. I don’t know which and it hardly matters. I thought she needed someplace safe.”
Patsy stood as if flash frozen. Just as quickly, she thawed, reached across the surgery table and took his hand in both of hers. His was cold, from anxiety. Hers were warm.
“Colin. You did the right thing. I didn’t know it was so ugly. I’m sorry I railed at you. What can I do to help?”
“Wrap that pup’s leg and let me slip out the back door? Just tell Lizzie Borden out there I had a farm call.”
“You got it, buster.”
Colin stepped forward and surprised her with a hug.
“I don’t know what I’d do without you, Pats,” he said quietly. And he held on.
She shrugged him off to conceal her surprise. “Go on, get outta here; some of us have work to do.”
When the door closed, she mumbled, “Damned shame nobody was around to rescue him when he needed it…”
nine
PATSY ASHTON CRUISED WEST on Cove Road in her aging Subaru, heading home. It was still early and the sun had yet to hit the tips of the summer-dried grasses on the slopes and meadows on the west side of the island. That would come later, in the afternoon, when the day would wane and the slanting late summer light would illuminate every mote of pollen and dust in the air and make this part of the island look gilded.
Home for Patsy Ashton was the Colvos Store, a lovingly restored one-story structure with a two-story façade like something from the main street in a dusty Wild West town. It had been built in the early nineteen twenties as a general store to serve the daily needs of the largely Scandinavian families who’d settled this part of the island. They’d emigrated and found on Vashon a water-girt, conifer-clad world not unlike their homeland, but without the brutal winters. They cut timber, cleared land, and farmed this side of the island, eventually specializing in egg production and orchard fruits. The old store still had a wooden boardwalk that ran the width of the building, designed originally to protect customers from the mud and horse manure in the forecourt where, to this day, a solitary and ancient gas pump stood, the kind with the glass face showing the level of the fuel, now long gone dry; a sentinel reminder of simpler times.
When the shiny new Thriftway supermarket opened in the center of town, the little store struggled on for a few years, battling against the currents of change like a salmon thrashing itself upstream. When it finally came up at auction, there were few bidders; Patsy was the highest. Where others saw a relic, she saw a home as quirky and individual as she was.
Over the years, she’d pulled down the old horsehair and plaster walls and ceilings and replaced them with insulation and sheetrock, rewired and re-plumbed, traded the drafty single-pane windows for double-glazed ones custom-made to preserve the building’s character, sanded and finished the old end-grain fir floors so that they glowed warm and mellow as the flesh of butternut squash, repainted, hung curtains, restored the wood-fired cooking stove, and added a modern Propane stove as well. It had taken years and with every stage of the project, as she mastered the skills required, Patsy grew stronger and more self-reliant.
Not that self-reliance ever had been her objective. She would much rather have had a partner or husband to handle such chores, but she didn’t. And it wasn’t for lack of suitors. Patsy was a radiant, leggy blonde with an easy laugh, and even now, with her daughter grown, she still turned heads at the supermarket. In fact, it was hard for her to get through the store in under an hour if she stopped in after work, because half the customers, people she generally knew only by their pet’s name, would chat her up. That included any number of available men, none of whom interested her.
She knew there was talk on the island about her and Colin, but talk was all there was. Though their friendship was long and strong, built on trust and shared experience, theirs had never been more than a working partnership.
Not that there hadn’t been opportunities. On the clinic’s first anniversary, they’d closed the door at five and opened an obscenely expensive bottle of Dom Perignon that a grateful customer had given them. Colin had gotten uncharacteristically mushy after the last fluted glass was emptied and invited her to his house above Tramp Harbor for dinner. Patsy had declined. She was already paying overtime for Emma at the nursery school, about which Colin knew nothing, and she was afraid. She was afraid of how much she loved him. She was afraid that, if she revealed herself, he’d pull away. The thought of the two of them alienated, their exchanges stilted afterward at the clinic, ruining everything they’d built in the preceding months, terrified her. She’d given him a hug and told him to drive carefully on the way home.
She’d rued that decision ever since. No, that wasn’t entirely true; it was the right decision, then. He wasn’t hers to be had; he was still Pete’s, not that she’d ever have him. Oh, yes, Pete loved him, in her way, but her way did not include straying from the path that had seemed set for her almost from birth, the path that connected the Petersens and the Strongs, that tied pliant Pete to handsome Tyler, the path that bound their histories as certainly as their real estate. She didn’t know either of them well, had only been to a few of their beach parties, but it seemed to her that Pete wasn’t the kind of person who made things happen; she was the kind who had things happen to her. Tyler had happened to her. Patsy didn’t believe Pete had either the imagination or the coura
ge to choose for herself.
Patsy pulled into the gravel forecourt of the Colvos Store just as her cell phone began playing its salsa ring tone.
“Damn, not another emergency.” But when she flipped open her phone she knew the caller.
“Emma!”
“Mom! Guess what?!”
Patsy smiled. “Okay, let me guess: you’ve found the love of your life, you’ve hit the Megamillions lottery, you’ve got a new piercing, or tattoo or something, you’ve…”
“Mom…”
“I’m listening.”
“I’m in! They found the scholarship money. I’m going to med school at the University of Washington!”
“It’s Labor Day; you got mail?”
“Email. One of the scholarship students pulled out; I was next. I start in a week!”
“Oh, Emma, I am so thrilled! Truly! But to twist in the wind waiting for word on financial aid so long…I’m so sorry I couldn’t afford to send you…”
“Mom, stop. You got me to this point, okay? All on your own. You’re my hero and I don’t want to hear any apologies. Just cheers.”
“Okay, I’m cheering. And I’m very proud.”
“I love you, Mom.”
“I love you too, kiddo. But I didn’t do it all on my own.”
“I know. Will you call Colin?”
Colin had been bewitched by Patsy’s daughter from that first meeting at the door of the new clinic the day he opened. And over the years he’d been a devoted “uncle”—helping with her homework at the clinic after school when he could, going to her science fairs, being in the audience at her school plays, and finally mediating battles she’d had with her mother when she’d hit her teens. But before he was ready for it, she was grown; a fiery redheaded version of her own strong, smart mother.
“No, Emma, I won’t. I think he’d want to hear the news directly from you.”
“Yeah, you’re right. I’ll call him.”
“But maybe not just now.”
“Is he on a farm call?”
“No.”
“Then…?”
“He’s dealing with an emergency. With Pete.”
“Oh, Christ, what the hell is it now?”
