I raced down the hall from my office to the front of the building, where I’d been summoned the moment a woman entered the reception area, cradling her bleeding dog in her arms.
“Where are they?” I asked Chandi, who sat at her desk by the door, typing something into her computer. Like me, she was in her midfifties, and at this point, we’d worked together for more than thirty years. She was my business manager, my accountant, and, besides Evan, my closest friend. When Randy had retired and sold me his practice, one of the first things I did was make sure Chandi knew I couldn’t run the clinic without her.
“Room three,” she said, nodding in that direction. “Paula is with them.” Paula was one of the inmates I’d worked with for the past six years, a woman convicted of check-writing fraud. As I had, she earned her vet tech degree while still incarcerated, and when she was released, I gave her a full-time job. She was a short, heavyset woman with a big smile and sparkling green eyes; since joining my team, she’d met and married her husband, and given birth to a little boy named Joseph. Not all of the women from the prison took to the service-dog training program—some quit, some ended up committing other crimes and returning to jail—but Paula was one of my success stories.
“Dr. Richmond,” Paula said as I entered the exam room. She wore light blue scrubs, and her auburn hair was pulled into a ponytail on top of her head. The dog lay on the paper-lined table, its white fur bloody along its side, its breathing pattern staggered and irregular. I looked at the owner, a woman I recognized as someone new to the clinic—I’d seen her and her dog only a handful of times, so I had a hard time recalling her name. “This is Gretchen,” Paula continued. “And her pup, Wiley.”
I stepped over to the table and rested a gentle hand on the dog’s head. “It’s okay, boy,” I said in a soothing voice. He had a deep, six-inch laceration along his rib cage that I immediately knew would require stitches. But first, we’d need to get him into X-ray to make sure he didn’t have any broken bones, and then perform an ultrasound to find any possible internal bleeding. I raised my eyes to Gretchen, a thin blond woman who was trying not to cry. She appeared to be in her mid-to late thirties. The same age as my girls. I blinked a few times, attempting to push down this thought. Even now, more than three decades after I’d last seen them, they were always lurking in the dark corners of my mind, ready to take me back to the moment in which I lost them. I still wrote each of my daughters a letter on her birthday, filing them away in the same box where I kept the notebooks I’d written in while in prison. I told them about my marriage to Evan, my growing vet practice, and the volunteer work I did with other incarcerated women. I told them that after I’d reached out to my mother several times over the years, her husband finally called me and said that she’d had a sudden heart attack when she was fifty-seven and died. I told them how deeply I grieved the fact that she and I never were able to resolve our differences, and that I hoped their relationships with their new families were healthy and strong. I told them that I thought about them every single day.
“What happened?” I asked Gretchen, forcing myself to focus on the situation right in front of me.
“I was at the grocery store,” she said. “I opened the hatch to put the bags inside and he just took off across the parking lot, into the street. A car’s brakes screeched and tried to stop, but it still hit him.” She shook her head and squeezed her eyes shut, remembering. “The sound he made was so horrible . . . like he was screaming. It sounded human.”
I nodded, carefully moving my hand down Wiley’s neck to check his pulse. It was fast, but still strong. A good sign. “Dogs can do that when they’re in pain or scared,” I said. I glanced toward Paula and looked down at Wiley’s head. She stepped over and held it steady, as she understood I needed her to do in case Wiley decided to try to bite one of us. His dark eyes were glassy, and he seemed to be in shock; from his earlier appointments with me, I remembered him being a sweet, gentle boy, but an injured dog was an unpredictable creature..
“Is he going to be okay?” Gretchen asked in a shaky voice.