“Fine. I’ve got a lunch meeting scheduled with Mark and my esteemed father-in-law at Buchanan Industries’ corporate dining room.” Rick crumpled up his cup and lobbed it expertly into the trash. “I can meet her this afternoon.”
“Money problems?” Mac asked. He knew that Coy Buchanan was a tough old coot whose only soft spot seemed to be his daughter, Margot.
“For once, apparently not. Creature Comfort’s more than meeting objectives.”
“Good. Then maybe we can afford another trained vet tech on staff and a couple of clerks.”
“Whoa!” Rick said. “We may be meeting our objectives, but we’re still not rolling in money.”
As he followed Rick out of the staff lounge, Mac said, “Kit Lockhart will be bringing her dog to work with her.”
“Another one?” Rick stopped with his hand on the doorknob. “We’ve already got Mark’s Nasdaq running around, and Big sneaks Daisy in every chance he gets. The last thing we need is another—” He stopped in midsentence. “Oh, damn, I forgot. He’s a helper dog, isn’t he?” He shrugged. “I guess she needs him.”
“He’s well-behaved. I promise he won’t eat the patients.”
“SOMETIMES I WISH the Internet had never been invented.”
Dr. Reuben Zales rubbed his hand across his completely bald head and took a deep breath. “I’ve read the same articles you found on that site, Kit, and a great many more in medical journals. The operation they’re talking about is experimental, and I mean very experimental. At the moment it’s far, far too risky.”
Kit leaned forward and put her hands on the edge of his desk, palms up as though in supplication. “But it sounds perfect for me, Reuben.”
“Sure it does. And maybe in five years, or even two or three if they have good results, we’ll look into it.”
“But it said—”
“I said I am familiar with the Internet site, Kit.”
She couldn’t hear his tone, but she suspected there was an edge of exasperation creeping in. He didn’t like to have his judgment questioned. He admitted he was conservative. Maybe it was a good thing all she got was the words.
He ran his tongue over his lips. It was a constant gesture, almost a tic, and it drove Kit crazy because he spoke while he did it. What she read came out like some archaic Far Eastern language. “Stop that,” she snapped.
He looked at her blankly.
“The tongue thing. I can’t hear you when you do that.”
“What tongue thing?” He dismissed her comment at once. He obviously wasn’t even aware he did it. “Okay. Let’s make it simple. Yes, regular cochlear implants can be miracles. For some people, not for you. You know that. We’ve consulted and discussed a dozen times. The operation you found on the Internet is far more than a simple cochlear implant. I can do those all day with excellent success rates and almost no complications. What you’re talking about is a cochlear implant with a computer chip and wires into the brain—almost like an antenna hard-wired into your head. Yes, it might work. Yes, it would be wonderful, and no, not yet. You could wind up with seizures or God forbid a brain hemorrhage or throw a clot from the operation itself.”
“But the success rate is eighty percent…”
“According to the Internet. It might be eighty percent out of a total of ten patients. Even eight hundred out of a thousand means two hundred failures. Listen, ten years ago bone marrow transplants were very dangerous. They still are, but the success rate and the new techniques make them much less so. We transplant hearts and kidneys and implant pacemakers and defibrillators like garage mechanics. Now. But we didn’t when we started. Let those geniuses practice on some other people before they work on you.”
“But—”
“You are young, smart, tough, healthy, quick and you’ve made incredible strides in lipreading. You have closed captioning on your television. Your computer lets you talk on the telephone—”
“Only at my own computer in my own house.”
“Still. And now you’ve got Kevlar…”
The little dog that lay beside Kit’s chair raised his head and wagged his stumpy tail when he heard his name.
“You’re functioning better than nine-tenths of my patients.”
“That’s because I’m working so hard at pretending this deafness thing is only a small inconvenience. Reuben, you deal with deaf patients every day, but you don’t have a clue what it’s really like to be locked into this silent world. If I thought it would last forever I don’t know what I’d do—I can wait if you make me, but I miss hearing Emma’s voice. And music. Emma hates having me like this. She doesn’t say much, but she’s stopped having her friends for sleepovers, and she practically dives into the car when I pick her up at school for fear some of her classmates will come over to chat with me. God, Reuben, what if I can’t hear her say ‘I do’? What if I never hear my grandchildren laugh?”
He threw up his hands. “I wasn’t aware that she was engaged. Obviously we’d better fly you to Boston this evening.”
“All right. So she’s only ten years old. But all I can see is this blasted silence stretching away until the day I die. Sometimes I don’t think I can take it any longer.”
“By the time Emma is married and pregnant—in that order, I hope—you’ll have had the operation. You’ll hear your grandchildren laugh.”
“Promise?”
“You know I can’t do that.”
“But you think?”
“Yeah. They’ll probably have something even better by then. So far I’m told that with the successful procedures, the patient only gets hearing like a scratchy old Caruso record.”
“Reuben, at the moment I’d kill for a scratchy Caruso.” She looked at her watch. “Oh, Lord, if I don’t get out of here I’m going to be late getting back to my new job.”
“Job?”
She picked up Kevlar’s leash. “I’m working as a grunt at Creature Comfort, the vet clinic.”
“Lisa takes Biff and Shorty there. Great place.”
“They saved Kevlar’s life. He had to have a kidney removed.”
“He’s okay now?”
“Fine. Thanks to Dr. Thorn. Do you know him?”
“Lisa’s mentioned him. Great with his hands, very, very bad with his bedside manner. If you’re going to work there, it’s probably a good thing you can’t hear him.”
“So I’ve been told. Okay, Reuben. If you’re absolutely dead set against it, I won’t risk that operation right this minute. But you have to promise me you’ll research it and talk to the guys in Boston. Try to figure out the absolute first minute it’ll be safe for me to have it.”
“That I’ll do, but don’t expect me to fly you off to Boston tomorrow.”
In the parking garage she strapped Kevlar into his car seat so that he could see out the windows, strapped herself in and started to back out of the parking space. Kevlar put a paw on her arm. She braked and checked her rearview mirror again. A red Corvette, nearly too low to the ground to be seen, flashed by and raced down the ramp.
“Whew! Too close, Kev. Thanks. I didn’t see him.”
The dog wagged his tail and grinned. She drove out more sedately. She’d never realized how much she relied on sound. Before, she’d have heard that idiot’s tires squeal around