Rescue Me

lips drew together. “He’s too old to be messing with those stallions.”

Sadie’s shoes fell to the floor with a thump-thump. There had to be a mistake. Her father was always very careful around high-strung stallions because they were so unpredictable. He was as tough as an old saddle, but he was almost eighty. She shook off her coat and moved to the nook. “He’s been around those horses all his life.” Breeding American paint horses had always been more than just a hobby to Clive. He loved it more than raising cattle, but cattle ranching paid better. She hung the coat on the back of a chair and sat next to Carolynn. “He’s always so careful.” He’d been kicked and stepped on and thrown many times but never seriously hurt. Never anything that required more than a few hours in the hospital getting stitched back up. “How could something like this happen?”

“I don’t know. Tyrus called a couple of hours ago with a few of the details. He said something happened with the lead rope. Your daddy was fixing it and somehow got in between Maribell and Diamond Dan.”

Tyrus Pratt was a foreman in charge of the JH remuda. Which not only included the paints, but a fair number of cattle horses, too. “Why didn’t anyone call me?”

“Don’t have your number.” Clara Anne blew her nose, then added, “We’ve just been sittin’ here, waitin’ for you to come home.”

And while they’d been waiting, she’d been getting felt up by a guy she hardly knew. “What’s Tyrus’s number?”

Clara Anne pushed a piece of paper toward Sadie and pointed to the top. “Here’s the number of the hospital in Laredo, too. Tyrus’s number is below. He’s staying the night at a hotel.”

Sadie stood and picked up the landline hooked to the wall. She dialed the hospital, identified herself, and was connected with the emergency room doctor who initially treated her father. The doctor used a lot of big words like “traumatic pneumothorax” and “thoracic cavity,” which translated meant Clive had a collapsed lung due to blunt force trauma and had a chest tube. He had four fractured ribs, two displaced, two nondisplaced, and he also had damage to his spleen. The doctors were guardedly hopeful that he wouldn’t require surgery for either injury. He was currently in ICU on a ventilator, and they were keeping him deeply sedated until he could breathe on his own. The doctor’s biggest concern was Clive’s age and the risk of pneumonia.

Sadie was given the name and number of the pulmonologist treating her father, as well as the geriatric physician overseeing his care.

Geriatric physician. Sadie waited on hold while being transferred to the nursing station in ICU. A doctor specializing in the care of the elderly. She’d always thought of her dad as old. He’d always been older than the daddies of other girls her age. He’d always been old-fashioned. Always old and set in his ways. Always old and grouchy, but she’d never considered him elderly. For some reason the word “elderly” had never seemed to apply to Clive Hollowell. She didn’t like to think of her father as elderly.

Her father’s nurse answered questions and asked if Clive was on any medication other than the blood pressure medicine they’d found in his overnight bag.

Sadie hadn’t even known he had high blood pressure. “Is Daddy on any medication other than for his blood pressure?” she asked the twins.

They shrugged and shook their heads. Sadie wasn’t surprised that the women who’d known Clive Holloway for over thirty years didn’t know of possible health issues. That just wasn’t something her father would have talked about.

The nurse assured Sadie that he was stable and resting comfortably. She’d call if there was any change. Sadie left messages with his doctor’s answering service, and made airline reservations on the first flight to Laredo, via Houston. Then she sent the Parton sisters home with the promise that she would call before her nine A.M. flight.

With adrenaline pumping in her veins and exhaustion pulling at her limbs, she moved up the back stairs to her bedroom at the end of the hall. She moved past generations of stern Hollowell portraits. As a child, she’d taken the somber faces for scowling disapproval. She felt like they all knew when she ran in the house, didn’t eat her dinner, or shoved her clothes under her bed instead of putting them away. As a teen, she’d felt their disapproval when she and some of her friends played the music too loud, or when she’d crawled home after a party, or when she’d made out with some boy.

Now as an adult, even though she knew that the somber faces were more a reflection of the times, missing teeth, and bad oral hygiene, she felt the same disapproval for crawling home from her cousin’s wedding. For leaving Texas and staying gone. For not knowing that her elderly father had high blood pressure and what medications he took. She had a lot of guilt about leaving and staying gone, but she felt the most guilt for not loving the ten- thousand-acre ranch that she would someday own. At least not like she should. Not like all the Hollowells staring down at her from the gallery hall.

She moved into her room and flipped on the light. The room was just as she’d left it the day she’d moved away fifteen years ago. The same antique iron bed that had belonged to her grandmother. The same yellow and white bedding and the same antique oak furniture.

She unzipped her dress and tossed it on a wingback chair. Wearing just her bra and panties, she moved down the hall to the bathroom. She flipped on the light and turned on the faucet to the claw-foot bathtub.

She caught a glimpse of her face as she opened the medicine cabinet and looked inside. The only items there were an old bottle of aspirin and a box of Band-Aids. No prescription bottles.

Her panties and bra hit the white tile floor and she stepped into the tub. She shut the curtain around her and turned on the shower.

The warm water hit her face, and she closed her eyes. This whole night had gone from bad to worse to horrendous. Her daddy was in a hospital in Laredo, her hair was as stiff as a helmet, and she’d let a man stick his hand up her dress and down her panties. Out of the three, her hair was the only thing she could deal with tonight. She didn’t want to think about Vince, which wasn’t a problem because she was consumed with worry for her father.

He had to be okay, she told herself as she shampooed her hair. She told herself he would be okay when she wrapped a towel around her body and went through the medicine cabinet in his bathroom. All she found was a half tube of toothpaste and a pack of Rolaids. She told herself he’d be fine when she went to bed. She woke a few hours later and grabbed the small bag she’d packed before leaving Arizona. She told herself he was strong for his age. She called Renee on the drive to the airport and filled her in. She estimated that she’d be gone a week and instructed her assistant on what to do while she was away.

As she boarded the flight from Amarillo to Houston, she thought about all the times her father had been thrown from horses, or knocked around by twelve-hundred-pound steers. He might have walked a bit stiff afterward, but he’d always survived.

She told herself that her daddy was a survivor as she waited three hours in the Houston airport for the hour flight to Laredo. She kept telling herself that as she rented a car, plugged the coordinates into the GPS and drove to Doctor’s Hospital. As she took the elevator to the ICU, she’d half convinced herself that the doctors had overestimated her father’s condition. She’d half convinced herself that she’d be taking her father home that day, but when she walked into the room and saw her daddy, gray and drawn, with tubes coming out of his mouth, she couldn’t lie to herself anymore.

“Daddy?” She moved toward him, to the side of his bed. He had a bruise on his cheek and dried blood at the corner of his mouth. Machines dripped and beeped, and the ventilator made unnatural sucking sounds. Her heart squeezed and she pulled a ragged breath into her lungs. Tears pinched the backs of her eyes, but her eyes remained dry. If there was one thing her father had taught her, it was that big girls didn’t cry.

“Suck it up,” he’d say as she lay on the ground, her bottom sore from getting bucked off one of his paint horses. And she had. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d cried.

She stuffed everything way down and moved to the side of his bed. She took her father’s cool, dry hand in hers. He had a pulse oximeter clipped to his index finger, turning the tip a glowing red. Had his hand looked so old just yesterday? The bones so prominent, the knuckles big? His cheeks and eyes looked more sunken, his nostrils pinched. She leaned closer. “Daddy?”

The machines beeped, the ventilator moved his chest up and down. He didn’t open his eyes.