When the Wind Blows Read Online Free PDF

he’s
paying attention.
See that? Look at his eyes. Newborns don’t fix and follow—never. He’s actually tracking us from one to the other. Do you
     understand what that means?
    “Infants never remember objects after they disappear. He does. He’s definitely watching us. Look at his little eyes. He already
     has memory. He’s just a
super
baby!”

Chapter 10
    I WOKE UP trying to catch my breath, crying softly over a horrible, crushing dream about my husband, David. It was the way
     I awoke almost every single morning these days.
    I missed David so much and that hadn’t changed since the night a year and a half ago, when a crackhead shot him in a lonely
     parking lot in Boulder.
    David and I had been inseparable before his death. We skied all over Colorado and the rest of the West. Spent Sundays at a
     health clinic for migrants in Pueblo. Read so many books that both our small houses could have doubled as lending libraries.
     We had more friends than we knew what to do with sometimes. We loved and lived a full life just about every minute of the
     day.
    I had a thriving big- and small-animal practice. Early each morning, I went off to farms and ranches where I took care of
     horses and other large animals. People from all over the county brought their smaller pets to me at the Inn-Patient. For what
     it was worth, I was named “Veterinarian for the ’90s” by the
Denver Post.
    Now, everything was changed, the arc of my life was dipping in the wrong direction, and it didn’t seem reversible. I thought
     about David’s murder all the time. I bothered the police in Boulder until they asked me to stay away. I rarely went on house
     calls anymore, although cases still came to me.
    I flung myself out of bed. I threw on my old faithful blue plaid robe and stuck my feet into slippers I’d been given for Christmas
     by a couple of cute kids whose coyote-mauled puppy I’d stitched up.
    The slippers were made to look like cocker spaniel heads. Dopey eyes staring up, pink tongues lolling, floppy ears, the works.
    I turned on the tape deck—Fiona Apple’s unmistakable, throaty moan; eighteen years old and full of piss and vinegar and creative
     craziness. I liked that in a diva.
    I opened the door from the “master suite” and entered the lab. I was greeted by my favorite poster for this month
:Fox hunting is the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable—Oscar Wilde.
    First things first, I filled the coffeepot with hazelnut vanilla. Once the java started to perk, I began to look in on my
     patients.
    Frannie O’Neill, this is your life.
    Ward One was a twelve-by-twelve room with a sink, a single window, two tiers of neat, clean cages. The bottom tier held three
     boarders: two dogs and the roommate of one of them, a common leghorn chicken.
    One of the dogs, a standard poodle, had ripped his catheter out again, despite the e-collar I had on him. I chewed him out
     in all of the sixteen words I know in French so he’d understand me. Then I reinserted the tube in place. I ruffled his topknot
     and forgave him.
“Je t’aime,”
I said.
    Ward Two is a slightly smaller replica of Ward One, but without any windows on the world. Some of my “exotics” were caged
     in this room: a bunny with pneumonia, not going to make it; a hamster that I received by way of UPS with no accompanying note.
    And there was a swan named Frank that my sister, Carole, rescued from a pond out by the racetrack. Carole thinks she’s St.
     Theresa of the wilds. At the moment, my sister was off camping in one of the state parks with her daughters. I almost went
     with her.
    My coffee was ready. I poured myself a steaming cup, added whole milk and sugar.
Mmm, mmm good.
    Pip was at my heels. Pip’s a Jack Russell terrier, a funny little boy who’d been turned in as a stray but had probably been
     abandoned. He did a little up-on-hind-legs dance that he knows I like. I kissed him, poured out a bowl of kibble, added in
     the last of some Rice