Page 32 of A Home Among the Snow Gums
All she’d needed to do to prove to herself she could make it further afield on a day trip to Canberra or Wagga Wagga was survive a few hours in Dalgety, and guess what?
She’d failed. She pushed her fingers into her tear ducts until they stopped leaking. She might never get to a fertility clinic.
Her next patient wasn’t due in until two, which left her ninety minutes of empty time that needed to be filled. If she wasn’t busy when Josh returned he’d be on her case, again, asking her if she was either medically unsound or a bloody idiot or both and she’d better start talking or else he’d be calling their parents.
Like that threat would work. Josh was about as likely to interrupt their parents’ well-earned drive around Australia to share Hannah drama with them as she was to wear a skirt to work. He knew the brother–sister code and he wouldn’t break it.
Besides, it wasn’t as though she had answers to his questions. She’d barely slept in the hours since she’d been driven home trapped in the shocked silence of Kev and Lionel, trying to work it out:Wasshe medically unsound?Wasshe a bloody idiot?
She’d given up trying to sleep last night somewhere about two o’clock in the morning and dug out her old journals from the last time she’d crossed the line. Reading the contents had not been fun.
She needed a coffee. And if ever there’d been a day to add a heaped teaspoon of refined sugar to a caffeinated beverage, it was today. She popped her head out the door and looked down the corridor; all was quiet, so she decided to whip upstairs and make herself something to eat while she was at it. Perhaps somewhere in the pages she hadn’t yet read would be a clue to how to get back on the right side of the line she’d crossed. She’d done it once before, hadn’t she?
Her flat on the top floor of the old stone building she and her brother owned was quiet. She flicked the switch on the kettle and opened the journal at the page she’d dog-eared the night before.
The entries were short and clipped. Defensive, she could see now, with the benefit of more than a decade of hindsight. Kind of like the way she’d been living ever since.
Day thirteen, she read.Dr Mack is coming to see me in a few minutes. I’ve got nothing to say about anything.
Day fourteen and fifteen didn’t mention anything besides the dinner choices—meatloaf and mash on one day (yummy), cold pasta salad the next (repulsive)—but then came day sixteen:The nice nurse unlocked the outside door and I sat in the sunshine with Mum when she came to visit and when she cried it was like my brain was frozen and what my eyes were seeing and my ears were hearing were muffled by snowfall.
Day twenty.Dr Mack said the word today: depression. I’m depressed. Me, Hannah Celine Cody. That’s why I did what I did.
She turned the page and a leaflet fell out, one of the many the staff of the clinic had given her and encouraged her to read. It didn’t look familiar. Perhaps she’d been given it at the beginning, when she was too raw and wrecked to read anything.Long-term Effects of Cyber Bullying.
Did she really want to read this now?
Her gaze fell on the fridge door, where she had stuck crayon drawings from young pet owners. She had a framed university degree, too, but that was downstairs in her treatment room, and she had a bank loan that was ahead in repayments, and she had patients whose owners sent her Christmas cards. She was valued here. She’d worked hard and success had come her way after she earned her vet degree at the Wagga Wagga campus of Charles Sturt University.
So why, she wondered, was she still overreactive?
She wasn’t a teenager anymore. She had no excuse for smacking the camera out of the hands of that photographer on Saturday. She knew she had issues and she’d thought she was finally ready to emerge from the cocoon she’d built for herself among the snow gums of Hanrahan and strive for the fulfilment she yearned for, but now she’d blown it.
A knock at the door had her ramming the journal shut and shoving it under a vet article she’d read at three o’clock that morning in the hope it would send her to sleep: ISDRENCHRESISTANCE THEEMERGINGPROBLEM IN THEMANAGEMENT OFWORMINFESTATIONS INSHEEP?
‘Hannah,’ said Sandy, opening the door a smidge and popping her head in. ‘Sorry to disturb you—emergency downstairs. Owner thinks their dog ate one of the kids’ toys when she wasn’t looking. Its breathing is a little funny and it pooped out a chunk of Lego this morning.’
‘How big is the dog?’ When it came to dogs pooping toy chunks, size did matter.
‘Pug sized.’
‘Huh.’ Self-reflection and her instant coffee sugar hit would have to wait. ‘Send them in to Josh’s treatment room. I’ll be down in a tick.’
‘The crate with the angry cat is in there.’
‘Shoot. Okay, I’ll run down and disinfect my room so give me a minute before you bring them in.’
‘You got it.’ But Sandy made no move to head back down to the clinic.
‘Why are you lurking like that? If you’re worried I’ve found your secret stash of biscuits and brought them up here to gobble them all up, I haven’t.’
‘And you never will. No, it’s just—well.’
‘Spit it out.’
‘The police are here. One police officer, to be specific. Looks to be in full work mode and she’s asking for you.’
‘Full work mode? What does that mean?’
