Try - The Complete Romance Series (3 page)

“I’m so sorry,” I heard him say quickly to
the office manager. “We’ve got an appointment for 4:30. I tried to make it on
time, but traffic was just terrible.”

“Name please?” I slunk back away from view
to let Alice handle the man.

“Willis—it should be Landon Willis,” I
heard the man say. Amie grinned at me.

“No luck for you, huh?” she wandered off
to the break area further back in the office, leaving me to get myself together
for the appointment. It irritated me that the guy was late for his son’s first
session—a lot of parents thought that the evaluation was really just a
formality, and when they started out with that attitude, they were almost
always chronically late, which mean that I ended up having to supervise two
patients at the same time at least four or five times a day.

I gathered up the charts I would need for
my evaluation of little Landon, and waited for Alice to call me up to let me
know that it was time to bring the boy back and start the process. The phone on
my desk rang and I picked it up quickly. “Yes?”

“Landon Willis is here,” Alice told me.
“He’s checked in, his insurance is verified.”

“I’ll come get him then,” I said, managing
as much enthusiasm as I could. I put the phone back in the cradle and strode
towards the door between the clinic and the waiting room, where Landon and his
father sat waiting. When I stepped through, holding the door open, I saw that
Landon had reclaimed his crutches and was bouncing them on the floor by the
rubberized bottoms. “Landon?” I looked at the little boy and he stopped what he
was doing, looking up and giving me the most evaluating look I’d ever seen from
a kid.

“We’re up, bud,” the man said, standing
quickly. He looked at me uncertainly. “Should I carry him back or…
”
I shook my head.

“Let’s let Landon use his crutches for
this,” I suggested, holding the door open for them to come back. “We want to
get him back to normal as quickly as possible.”

The two came through the door and I led
them towards the clinic area, trying to decide how I felt. Landon looked to me
like the kind of boy who would run off the second he got the chance—the kind of
kid who needed extra supervision during his sessions to make sure he didn’t
overdo it.
Probably gets that trait from
good old Dad,
I thought as I stopped at the first station I needed to use
for the evaluation. Landon’s dad—the file said his name was Patrick—was
actually pretty good-looking, once I got over my irritation with him for being
late; as Landon monkeyed around on his crutches impatiently, Patrick watched
his son carefully.

“Okay,” I said, setting the chart down and
taking up a blood pressure cuff. “This is probably going to mostly be pretty
boring for you Landon, but I need to make sure I know where you are in terms of
your health right now, and how well you can do things like balance and stand
straight and all those other things.”

“He’s a very healthy kid,” Patrick told
me. I steeled myself for him to start complaining as I got Landon to sit down
in a chair so I could get a good pressure reading.

“Sometimes injuries can throw things all
around,” I said, fastening the cuff around Landon’s arm. “Having to change
habits, and not being as active, things like that…we just want to have a good
baseline for your son’s health before we get started on working with him.” I
glanced at Patrick and saw him nodding his approval.
Well, that’s a surprise,
I thought. I started the general health
evaluation, taking down Landon’s blood pressure, pulse, and taking him through
the different tests for respiratory capacity and everything else we needed to
know. I was glad to see that he wasn’t incredibly fidgety—I had been dreading,
at the end of my day, having to keep a five-year-old on task while we went
through what was admittedly a boring process.

“You’re doing great, buddy,” Patrick told
his son, taking the chair I pointed out to him while we started on the
functionality tests.

“This one is going to see how your balance
is,” I told Landon; as always I almost completely ignored his father except
when I had to explain to him the rationale behind what I was doing, or ask him
for help in positioning his son. I took Landon through the different tests:
checking his balance, checking his coordination, and his flexibility. He
chattered all the time, asking me about anything that popped into his mind; I
let him—after all, as long as he was making the movements and focusing enough
to not risk hurting himself, I was happy.

“How long did you have to go to school to
learn to be a therapist?”

“I had to go for years,” I told Landon.

“It’s very difficult to study for,”
Landon’s father informed his son. “They have to go to school and get a special
degree, and then they have to work with patients, and take tests.”

“So you must be really smart, Ms.
Mackenzie.”

I laughed.

“I like to think so! Do me a favor, Landon
and step up onto this platform—just the one leg. I want to see how you move. If
you need help or if something hurts, let me know, okay?” Landon nodded.

“Do you have a husband? Or kids?”

I blushed at the question—it was common
enough that I thought I would eventually stop blushing at it, but it was too
close to my parents’ concern for my love life for comfort.

“Nope,” I said, smiling at Landon and not
looking at his father at all. “I love to work with kids, but I haven’t found
anyone I want to get married to yet, so no kids for me.”

“Do you want to get married some day?”

 
I
nodded. “I think it’d be nice if I found someone,” I told Landon.

“Do you live with your mom and dad?”

“Nope—I live right here in the city, on my
own.” I grinned at Landon, patting his back as he stepped down from the platform.
“The other leg now, if you would?” Landon nodded and concentrated in the task
at hand, lifting his foot to step up onto the platform.

“Do you get to eat ice cream whenever you
want? Dad says I can’t, because I’ll rot my teeth out.”

“Well Dad is right—if you ate ice cream
all the time you’d lose all your teeth,” I said, glancing at Patrick in amusement.

“Dad also says I can only watch one scary
movie a week,” Landon informed me. “Even though I never get scared!”

“What about that nightmare you had back in
June?” Patrick looked at me and grinned slightly—it lightened his face up, made
him seem more handsome. I pushed that thought aside.

“That was just because of something that
Pete said,” Landon protested.

“Whenever I had nightmares, I used to get
into bed with my mom and dad,” I told Landon. “And you know—they were always
caused by something I ate. I loved watching scary movies as a kid, too.”

“I get into bed with Dad sometimes,”
Landon told me. I knelt down and put the strap of a weight-bearing machine on
his ankle. “I don’t have a mom.”

The matter-of-fact way that he said it
made my heart lurch in my chest and I looked over to see how Patrick was taking
it.

“A lot of people don’t have moms,” I told
Landon. “Real quick, Landon, see if you can pull that up with just your leg.”

By the time I’d finished evaluating the
little boy, I was exhausted from all the chatter, but pleased. “He has very
good general health,” I told Patrick and saw the relief that flooded across his
face. “The prognosis is excellent. I think Landon here lucked out with where he
broke his leg. It’s going to take some aggressive therapy, but we can get him
back up to speed.”

“Just what I need,” Patrick joked,
tousling his son’s hair. “But you’re sure he’ll be able to do everything like
normal?”

“Possibly even better than before, if we
go about this right,” I said, smiling to reassure the man. “If you can get him
to do some exercises that I’m going to show you in between sessions—but don’t overdo
it—he’ll bounce right back from that break in no time.”

“Whatever we need to do,” Patrick told me.
I gave him a few instructions, and then sent the two on their way with the hint
that Landon should take a nice, long bath with some Epsom salts in the water
before he went to bed. As I watched them leave, I had to admit that even if
he’d been late, Patrick was obviously dedicated to his son.

Chapter Four - Patrick

“Come on back, Landon and Patrick,” I
smiled at Landon’s therapist, following him through the door and into the
therapy area. The first appointment I’d met with her, for Landon’s evaluation,
it was almost difficult for me to take her seriously until halfway through the
session; she was so gorgeous that I couldn’t quite believe that she was
actually a real therapist. I could tell too that she didn’t have a really high
impression of me—there was a little look on her face when she let us into the
back of the clinic that told me that she was just waiting for me to confirm her
bad impression.

Mackenzie reached down and gave Landon’s
hair a quick tousle as she led him over to one of the machines. “We’re going to
start out with some stretches, okay big guy?” I stood back so that I wouldn’t
distract my son, watching him interact with the therapist. She was short—though
I hadn’t noticed that at first; her hair was some brown-red color, her skin was
as pale as the porcelain plates my wife had gotten for our wedding. She looked
too fragile and precious to be able to do the things I’d seen her do with
Landon in the first few days of our sessions. Her scrubs made it almost
impossible to make out what her shape was like, but I thought privately to
myself that it was probably very good indeed, based purely on how strong she
was.

I watched my son get into his exercises
with the kind of single-minded focus that he had whenever there was anything
physical going on. It was all I could do when I got him home at the end of the
night to keep him from trying to jump around and climb the furniture. “I think
we might be able to discontinue the crutches after this week,” Mackenzie said,
glancing at me from where she was supervising Landon on some kind of pedaling
machine. “He should hold onto them in case he feels like he needs them, but the
strength is returning really well.”

“It’s pretty hard to keep him using the
crutches anyway,” I told her, sitting down on one of the benches. Around the
room, there were kids of all ages working away with other physical therapists,
and I silently said a prayer of gratitude for the fact that Landon’s reasons
for being in PT were not as serious as some of the cases I’d seen in our first
few sessions.

“They slow me down!” Landon finished his
exercise and started to snatch his feet free of the pedals—only to stop, with a
look on his face that told me that he remembered almost too late that Mackenzie
had scolded him for doing just that two days before.

“Well, you’d be
really
slow if you hurt yourself again, don’t you think?” Mackenzie
made a face at Landon, the expression dissolving into a grin. “There are these things
called tendons, here in the backs of your knees,” she explained to him,
reaching down and brushing her fingers on the area. “They help your knees bend
and move. If you try and start running around like normal with your muscles
weak, then it puts strain on the tendons and ligaments that hold everything
together—and if you hurt those, it hurts a
lot
.
So better to listen to your body, don’t you think?”

“But my body wants me to run!” Landon
squirmed, giggling into Mackenzie’s face. She laughed, shaking her head.

“I don’t think it does,” she said, keeping
her tone firm even as she grinned. I tried to keep from laughing myself. “Your
brain wants you to run because I bet you get bored easily, huh?”

“Yeah,” Landon agreed.

“Do you do psychotherapy too?” Mackenzie
glanced at me and shrugged, the smile still curving her lips.

“But we really want to make sure that your
leg is up for it before we let you just run like crazy. If you tear something
in your knee because your muscles can’t hold you up properly, you might not be
able to even walk for a long time.” Mackenzie gave my son a quick, serious
look. “I think you’d hate that.”

“And that kind of injury hurts a lot,” I
added, giving Landon a look of my own. I remembered Landon’s injury and a
shudder worked through me; I’d broken my share of bones as a kid, playing
hockey and lacrosse, and I knew how much it hurt. I’d also torn my Achilles
tendon—and it was hard for me to say which injury had actually hurt the most.

“But the good news is that I think you can
start walking short distances on your own,” Mackenzie told Landon, guiding him
from one machine to another. “I’ll still want you to use your crutches when
you’re in school, and you should be really careful when you’re playing, but if
you’re just going to the bathroom at night, or from the living room to bed, you
can do that without the crutches.”

“Okay!”

I smiled to myself and continued watching
as Mackenzie worked with my son, keeping him on task and entertained,
distracting him from the inevitable pain that came along with getting his
muscles back into shape. Even after only a few sessions, I was able to see a
difference in the way that Landon moved around. He was starting to feel more
comfortable—and he was definitely sleeping sounder.