A Family for Christmas
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Tara Taylor Quinn
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Chapter One
Prospector, Nevada
“DAMN.” TAKING HIS stinging toe with him, Dr. Simon Walsh carefully and deliberately lifted his right foot and took another step forward. Landed it successfully. Then picked up the left. Success. And the right. Stepping slowly. Adding roots camouflaged by dirt and other ground cover to his list of possible dangers.
After four days of traipsing around several times a day in the forest that served as the borders for his self-imposed captivity, he’d amassed a list that could have been overwhelming if he cared to believe that it would be a permanent part of his life.
He wasn’t giving it that much credence.
His left eye stared belligerently at the black patch he’d placed upon it, while his right strained to make out a shape in the cloud cover that had become its vision.
Cloud was better than nothing, which was what he’d had when he’d made it to the emergency room four weeks prior. He had six months to a year before he’d know what good his injured right optic nerve would be, if any. More than four hours of pressure due to swelling would usually be the kiss of death. His had sustained at least five hours. But death meant no sight at all. He had clouds.
And...whack! Taking an involuntary step back, Simon lifted a hand to his forehead to inspect for any damage. He was either sweating or bleeding. Didn’t feel much of a gash. Not enough to require stitches, at any rate.
His outstretched hands—one holding a stick like a blind man’s cane—had missed a branch hanging above shoulder level. And his damned eye...nothing but clouds.
His pits were wet. Long sleeves and jeans in seventy-degree weather tended to do that to a guy exerting himself. It had been forty when he’d gotten up that morning. And in the woods he wasn’t ready to trust bare limbs to his right eye.
“Whoever thought this was a good idea?” He asked the question aloud. Talking to himself. When you were a hermit, living alone in a godforsaken wasteland, you tended to do that, he’d learned.
And didn’t bother to answer himself. Something else he’d learned...your conversational skills changed when there was only one of you.
It had been his idea to cover his one good eye four times a day to force the weaker one to work. Everyone knew that muscles had to be exercised to stay strong.
Not that an optic nerve was a muscle, of course. But he couldn’t let his brain go soft. He had to keep things working so that if the nerve managed to kick into gear, the rest of him would be ready and able to support it.
His forehead stung.
Lifting the patch off his good eye long enough to get a peek at his fingers, he saw blood. But he’d seen more than that on patients four days postsurgery. He snapped the piece of black cloth back into place.
He wasn’t stopping now.
Feeling like a damned freak, he continued staring at white fog, stepping gingerly and making his way. It wasn’t like he had anything else to do with his day.
Or his life.
A one-eyed surgeon wasn’t going to...cut it.
So much for an attempt at humor. He kicked at the ground. Just to show that he could. That he wasn’t afraid to express himself. He threw away his stick. Took two steps. And lifted the patch long enough to find and retrieve the walking aid.
“If they could see me now.”
Once one of LA’s top children’s thoracic surgeons, now unshaven, wearing jeans he’d stained with jelly that morning when he’d made his right eye get him through breakfast, wandering around in a wooded valley in the northern Nevada mountains.
Until a month ago, his idea of camping out had been a room at a moderately priced chain hotel—as opposed to his more likely choice of a suite in an upscale resort. That had been before he’d needed to prove self-sufficiency.
As his spirits continued to sink, he pushed forward. Reminded himself that he was a lucky bastard. That he sure as hell had no right to feel sorry for himself.
He had a good eye. He could see. Watch TV. Read. Hell, he could even drive.
He was alive.
He just couldn’t be a surgeon.
And he couldn’t ever laugh with little Opus again. Thoughts of his adopted daughter brought him shame at his own selfishness. If ever there’d been a child who’d taken it on the chin and come up with a grin, it had been that feisty little six-year-old.
What did it mean when a guy started thinking in rhymed clichés?
In his case, it meant he wasn’t ready to think about Opus, not even after a year.
Jabbing his stick hard into the ground, Simon stood in place. Staring. Willing his eye to see something. Anything. To make out enough of a shape in the shadows to discern what it was. Just as he’d been doing pretty much every waking moment of the month he’d been holed up in his newly purchased cabin.
He’d found the place on the internet. It came furnished, with its own well and electricity provided by solar panels, wind and a generator for backup. Completely off the grid. There was only one way in—a mile-long private road. His nearest neighbor was five miles or more away. The seller was a lawyer handling an estate bequeathed to charity. No one to care. He’d paid cash on the spot. Left his cell phone at home.
He had too many well-meaning friends and peers who thought they knew better for him than he knew for himself. He had a burner phone, though. He wasn’t foolish. Careless. Or irresponsible.
He wanted to be left completely alone.
At least until he knew his options. Maybe longer. Maybe he wasn’t ever going back...
Simon’s stick hit something on the ground in front of him. Something solid...and yet not hard like a rock. Playing a game with himself, he stared in the general direction of the object, tapping around it to fill in the blanks. It was long. More than five feet. When he pushed it, it had some give, but didn’t really move. A fallen tree perhaps? What kind of tree?
He continued to follow the mass. Didn’t find obvious branches. Apparently a grown man, a surgeon, no less, could be entertained by a fallen tree.
“Now, isn’t that one for the books?”
What books he wasn’t sure. He was tempted to take off his patch—to take the easy way out and see what was blocking his path. Or just step over it. But he wasn’t letting his right eye off that easy. If he’d given up on his young patients as easily as he seemed to want to give up these days, there would be far fewer homes filled with laughter in the Los Angeles valley.
Give him a chest cavity and he could delineate every nerve, vein and muscle. But trees? In Nevada? He knew next to nothing about them. So he thought about fruit. Oranges grew in Nevada. But they’d still be at the little green ball stage this early in the fall. And there were no orange trees in his new yard. Not like a tree with oranges actually growing on it would be fallen over on the ground. More likely it was some kind of cactus.
How far was he from the cabin?
He’d been out about an hour. Didn’t think he’d turned enough to be headed back. But at his pace, even walking straight, he wouldn’t have gone that far.
He came to one end of whatever was blocking the path.
“Ha!” he exclaimed, as though solving some great conundrum. In his current world, this was one. A fact that might bother him later, when darkness set in and he looked back over his day. At the moment, he was occupied.
Challenging his brain.
He took a small step forward. His walking tool gave suddenly. Stumbling, Simon let go of the stick. The log had to be rotted, which meant any number of things could be living in it. Stepping back, he straightened, instinctively yanking off the eye patch. The first thing he saw was his cabin fifty yards away.
“Damn.” He was right back where he’d started.
And then he looked down.
“Holy shit.” He hadn’t been identifying a log.
He’d prodded a body. A body! Feminine. A hooded, long-sleeved sweater covered the top half of her.
He noticed the jeans, the sweater. The feminine curve of hips. But only briefly. Cursorily. His trained good eye had already seen the moving rib cage, indicating life, as he dropped down to the woman lying on her stomach. Her dark hair was long, tangled. Dirty.
And she hadn’t said a word.
Of their own accord, his fingers reached for her pulse, registering a steady, strong beat. Yet she made no sound. No reaction to being touched.
She was sweating, though. In a thick sweater, exposed to the sun, so sweat by itself wasn’t alarming.
“What the hell...”
He needed to see her face, some age identifier, to look at her eyes, her pupils, her lips, but he didn’t dare move her. Not until he knew that her neck was okay...
Already feeling for breaks, he gave an inward shudder as he pictured his idiot self, prodding this poor person with his walking stick.
What had he been thinking?
Finding no obvious breaks, he leaned down, putting an arm around her shoulders. “I’m going to roll you over now,” he said. “I’m a doctor and I’m here to help you.”
She appeared comatose, but many could hear while in that state.
Lying beside her, he used himself to support her entire body, and turned with her. Then, sliding aside, he sat up. She had major maxillofacial trauma. Severe facial edema. Her face was badly bruised, so swollen he couldn’t make out her normal features, with open lacerations on the right cheek and chin. Medical terms came to him, but as a doctor of children who had to remember he was speaking to children even in tense or emergency situations, he’d begun translating in his thoughts as well as his words. Her lips were oddly healthy looking, considering the rest of her face, with no cuts or signs of bleeding. He lifted her lids enough to note pupil activity. Gums had good color. No immediate sign of oxygen deprivation.
Breathing was shallow. Skin warm, but not hot.
Lifting up her sweater, he made a cursory check of her torso, finding nothing unusual.
He couldn’t be sure about internal injuries. What he was sure about was getting her inside. Assessing more thoroughly. Doing what he could in the moment.
And then, as loath as he was to expose himself to anyone, anywhere—he was going to have to call for an ambulance to come get her.
Either that or pray that she regained consciousness and could tell him who to call on her behalf.
