Tennessee Vet

He realized that he didn’t even know what this vet looked like. At first, she’d been behind her flashlight, then he’d been paying so much attention to the eagle he hadn’t even glanced at her, and now she was wearing a surgical mask.

She finished her stitching, and between them they moved the eagle—already stirring—into a cage. “I have to clean up the mess,” she said. She pulled off her mask and tossed it into the trash receptacle, then turned to look at him.

He felt a jolt go through his solar plexus. She was probably five foot five and not model-thin. He guessed in her thirties. Chestnut-brown hair was pulled back in a scrunchie, but escaping in tendrils around her face.

Those eyes. Extraordinary. The color of Barbados rum with flecks of what looked like 24-carat gold in them. They were wide eyes, as though she could take in the whole world without turning her head the way that eagle could. Wise, aware eyes, as though she’d seen it all and knew she could handle it. He had a feeling that she didn’t simply look, she saw. Not a beautiful face, exactly, but he didn’t think he’d forget those high cheekbones or that broad forehead. His first impression was that she was a person of value. Worth knowing. He also noted that she had great legs.

“I don’t know about you, but I’m spitting cotton and hungry as a coyote,” she said. “You do with some sweet tea and a pimento cheese sandwich? It’s homemade.”

“I could probably eat the coyote. I was headed to the overnight gas station to get some snacks when I hit our friend in there. I didn’t have sense enough to go to the grocery before I drove back up here from Memphis this afternoon. I’m not used to having to think about those things ahead of time. In town I’m five minutes away from a supermarket. Here, the closest place is eight miles away.”

“You get used to planning ahead.” As she chatted, she straightened, cleaned, put instruments into the sterilizer, scrubbed down the table and tossed her trash. “I can go over all this again and scrub the floors tomorrow morning. Come on.”

“Shouldn’t we stay with him tonight?” Stephen asked.

Barbara shook her head. “We’ve done all we can do before morning. He needs to rest.” She turned out the lights, locked the clinic and flashed her light on Stephen’s mauled grill. “Sorry about your car. I think you can drive it, though. He doesn’t seem to have punctured the radiator or slashed any hoses. After I feed us, I’ll follow you home to be sure you get there.”

“You don’t...”

“All part of the service. Sorry, my apartment’s off the back of the barn.”

He followed her out of the clinic, across the parking lot, through the barn and to a door at the end. With all but a couple of lights off, he couldn’t see much of the animals in the stalls, but he heard a couple of horses snoring. “I’ll be glad to stay with him and let you get some sleep. I can call you if—”

“If what? You don’t know what you’re looking at. I promise you there is nothing more I can do tonight. It’s up to him. He’s alive, which is amazing. ’Course, he may never be able to be released back into the wild...”

“After you fix his wing and he convalesces, of course you can release him.”

“Not necessarily. Come in.” She turned on lights in her apartment. He followed her in.

“Bathroom’s down that hall past the bedroom,” she said and pointed. “Look, I have no idea at this point whether I can fix his wing or not. It may not knit properly or at all. It may have to be amputated.”

He was halfway down the hall, but he spun to look at her. “No! You can’t do that. He has to fly again. Be whole again.”

“Don’t freak, Mr. MacDonald. Even if he can’t fly, he’ll live a comfortable life in one of the zoo’s animal training programs. He’ll be well fed and possibly even find another mate.”

“Another mate?”

“Bird his age will almost certainly have a mate. I assume he belongs up at Reelfoot Lake. No idea how he got down here. He and his family are probably nesting in the same nest they’ve used for fifty years or longer.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“Not at all. Eagles keep their nests. There’s a nest on a river in the Grand Tetons that they think has been there a couple of hundred years.”

“He’s hurt, broken, possibly disabled, not knowing where his mate is or whether his eaglets are surviving, unable to care for them and he may spend his life in a cage. Being stared at and pitied, unable to fly free. What kind of life is that for him? I should have let him die.” A wave of depression washed over him. He’d learned to fight it most of the time by refusing to feel anything at all, but this depression was for another creature, one whose situation was too close to his own. How did he guard against that?

“You do know what anthropomorphism means, don’t you?” she asked.

“Of course I do. It’s giving human characteristics to animals. The more research is done, however, the more we find there is precious little difference between us and them. He has to fly again. Find his way back.”

“So he can land and say, ‘Honey, I’m home?’ All I can do is my best, Mr. MacDonald. Now, about that sandwich.”

* * *

OF ALL THE crazy ways to spend an evening, Barbara thought as she spread mayonnaise on slices of the French baguette she’d picked up at the bakery in Williamston. She was always as ravenous after a difficult surgery as if she’d bicycled twenty miles or run a marathon. Her body had long since used up whatever energy she’d gained from that second-rate diet meat loaf.

She glanced up from the kitchen island where she was working. MacDonald was pacing around her living room staring at the books on the shelves. Lots of shelves, lots of books. Not in matching leather bindings. Not alphabetized. Her books and John’s were as intermingled as they had been the day he died.

Barbara had a simple filing system. Total recall.

When she and John had built the barn and created their apartment, they’d planned to give themselves plenty of room for books. Originally, they’d planned a big deck off the back, but after John had died she’d never gotten around to it. Or to anything else domestic for that matter. Who had the time? Or the interest when there was no one to share it with.

She saw the room as Stephen saw it. It was squeaky clean, but all it needed was a thick layer of dust and a bunch of hanging cobwebs to turn it into Miss Havisham’s wedding feast in Dickens’s Great Expectations. And she acknowledged the truth—that she hadn’t yet built the deck because finishing a project alone that she and John had planned together seemed like a betrayal. She’d never admit to a soul that she felt that way. Her friends, her clients and even her children talked about how well she had coped with John’s loss, how she had kept growing and changing. She knew better. Emotionally, she was as empty as she had been the day John died. She told herself she was happy being alone with no one to answer to except her children and her clients.

But sometimes in the night, when she reached for the place beside her where once she had felt John’s chest rise and fall, she hated knowing that she’d never love again.

Her fallback position was physical and mental exhaustion. She considered herself meticulous when it came to keeping the clinic immaculate. But when half the time she fell into bed after working flat out for twelve or more hours, it really didn’t matter when the coffee table had last been dusted. She managed to keep the kitchen and bathroom clean and the papers and magazines at least in separate piles, but that was as far as it went.

She wasn’t exactly embarrassed to have Stephen MacDonald scrub up in her bathroom, but this MacDonald guy in his vintage Triumph and polo shirt with the proper logo on it did not belong either in Emma’s rental cottage or Barbara’s apartment.

When he came back from the bathroom, she saw he had run water over his face and hair as well as scrubbed his hands and forearms.

She took her first good look at him. Oh, boy. Talk about the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood! Grandmother, what big eyes you have. And how bright blue. She didn’t think his eyes were the result of those fake colored contacts, but you never knew.

Further perpetuating the wolfish image was his short gray hair and what Shakespeare would have called a “lean and hungry” look. Actually, she seemed to recall Shakespeare was talking about an assassin. He stood a bit over six feet tall and had kept his stomach flat. Golf, maybe. Barbara sucked in her own stomach on a big breath, but she couldn’t hold it in for long.

“Sorry, I made kind of a mess,” he said. “I tried to get the blood out of my khakis. Unsuccessfully.”

“When you get back to The Hovel, put everything into the washer on cold. If there is anything I know about, it’s how to get blood out of cloth.”

“Does it ever bother you?” He propped himself up on the wall beside the refrigerator and stuck his hands into his damp pockets.

“Blood?” She picked up a wicked kitchen knife and sliced the sandwiches crossways, then slid two halves apiece onto plates and added pickles and potato chips. “I grew up on a farm. I was pulling piglets out of sows when I was five or six years old. Gangrene bothers me... Sorry, not the proper social chitchat over snacks. Death bothers me. Creatures in pain bother me. Damage I can’t fix bothers me. If it can live a happy life, then whatever I have to do to get the animal to that point is merely repair work. The same thing your mechanic will have to do with your radiator grille—I just do it with flesh and bone instead of metal.”

“Did you always want to be a vet?”

She laid out silverware and napkins and handed him a plate. “I wanted to be an Olympic three-day event rider. Jumping incredibly large and athletic horses over humongous fences at death-defying speeds.” She looked down at herself and let out a rueful sigh. “That was twenty pounds ago when I was seventeen. I was a good enough rider for local over-fences horse shows, but even if my pop had been able to afford a million-dollar jumper or the training and travel to go along with it, I wouldn’t have been good enough.”

“Why not?”

“Most three-day eventers at the Olympic level are certifiably insane. I have too much imagination. I could always visualize what would happen to the horse if I crashed.”

“The horse? Not you?”

This time she laughed. “Human doctors say ‘First, do no harm.’ We say ‘The animal always comes first.’”

“So my eagle took precedence over my antique automobile grille?”

“Of course it did, as you knew at the time. A lot of people would have sliced up the bird to avoid nicking their chrome. You didn’t.”