by Tim Johnston
She smiled at him and at the boy. “She’s going to be just fine, Mr. Courtland. She’s a strong young woman. But she’s been through a great deal.” Her face grew somber and Grant told her that they’d talked to the sheriff and they knew about her foot, and the doctor nodded and told them more about it: the cleanness of the wound and the undamaged tibia and fibula and how Caitlin had likely saved her own life by cauterizing the blood vessels as she had. A surgeon could hardly have done a better job of it, said the doctor, and she looked at them as if this, above all else, was the brightest fact.
“Can it be reattached?” Grant asked, voicing an idea that, until that moment, had not occurred to him.
“The foot?” She turned to the sheriff, who stood apart, and the sheriff shook his head.
“Even if we had it,” she said, “too much time has passed and the soft tissue is too damaged and, well . . . Dr. Wieland will tell you more precisely when you see him.”
“Dr. Wieland,” said Grant.
Dr. Wieland down in Denver, she explained, was one of the finest podiatric surgeons in the country. He worked on soldiers and he would finish what Caitlin had begun and he would see to a perfect stump.
Grant looked at her. A perfect stump.
She glanced at the clock on the wall and said they would take Caitlin down by ambulance in about an hour.
“Ambulance,” said Grant. “What about a helicopter?”
“She’s in no grave danger, Mr. Courtland. And Dr. Wieland won’t be able to see her until the morning anyway.”
Grant nodded. He and the boy stood waiting.
The doctor looked at them. She looked at the sheriff and she glanced around the waiting room.
“Is Caitlin’s mother here, Mr. Courtland?”
“No, she’s in Wisconsin. I wanted to see her first. Caitlin. I wanted to be sure before I called.”
“I see,” said the doctor. “All right. Well. I need to talk to you a moment before you see your daughter.” She looked gently at the boy and said to Grant, “Perhaps just the two of us would be best?”
“You can tell us both.”
“All right.”
She didn’t have to glance at the sheriff; he’d already left the room. She mated her hands before her and looking into Grant’s eyes she told him that an examination in these cases was automatic and mandatory, and that their examination of Caitlin had shown that she’d been pregnant.
Grant stared at her.
The boy hung his head.
“Where is it?” Grant said.
“It?”
“The child.”
“The pregnancy never came to term, Mr. Courtland. She miscarried.”
“Miscarried.”
“Yes.”
“How long ago?”
“She’s not sure. She thinks last spring.”
The boy looked up.
“She told you that?” Grant said.
“Yes.”
“When?”
“Before we put her under to work on her leg.” She held Grant’s eyes. “She didn’t want you to know, Mr. Courtland. Not out of shame, which is a normal reaction, but because she couldn’t bear the idea of you having to think about it—of having it in your head.” She smiled faintly. “Finally, just before we put her under, she agreed to let me tell your wife.”
The doctor regarded them both. “As I would have told Mrs. Courtland, I believe it’s best for Caitlin that you all know all the facts, here. But she doesn’t need to know that you know, not right now. Do you agree?”
Grant nodded. The boy nodded.
“Is that everything?” Grant said.
The doctor told him that the HIV rapid test had come back negative and that they’d have the confirmation results in two days and that Caitlin would need to be tested again in a few months.
“She’s weak, she’s malnourished,” said the doctor, “but her heart is strong. And so is her head. She wasn’t happy that we wouldn’t keep her awake until you got here.” The doctor smiled, she looked at the clock—then turning back to them with a crease in her brow, she said, “Oh, I meant to ask: who is Dudley?”
In the end there was nothing but a wide birch door and a nickel latch handle, and the doctor closed her brown hand on the handle and it gave a soft click and the door swung in without a sound and she held it open for them to pass, and Grant stepped in first and the boy came behind and they stood in the first bright wave of the room and everything they saw and heard and smelled amid the lights and the machines and the tubes and the propped meager figure in the bed was utterly alien to the girl they expected to see. Yet when they stepped closer and saw the dark hair on the pillow and saw her sleeping face, so gaunt now, aged as theirs were aged and more so for having aged all at once, yet when they saw this face, the years and the machines and the room fell away and they would’ve known her had it been twenty years, had it been a hundred, and the love held back so long became undammed inside them and because they could not fall into her arms with this love they turned and fell without a word into each other’s.
THE EMBRACE, BRIEF AS it was, cost them the moment when the girl, fighting her way into the most painful light, opened her eyes and saw the two men standing there. She did not believe it. She felt the blood so thick and heavy in her veins, the dull drifting of her brain and the tremendous weight of sleep like stones lashed to every part of her and she knew she was drugged and she did not believe what she saw, but the tears came just the same, hot and fast, and she said the word she had waited so long to say.
Daddy, she said.
68
He could not speak but only stood there, hunched over her, careful of the tubes and wires and the incredible thinness of her under the bedding. His jaw was pressed to her wet neck, and she trembled with the quaking of his body. There was no sound in the room but the chirping of the machines and the soft patting of her hand on his back and her reedy voice saying It’s okay now, Daddy, it’s okay, it’s okay, Daddy.
She opened her eyes again, the pupils so large and black even in that light, and Sean, standing back from the bed, tried to hold her gaze, but he could not and he looked instead to the floor.
“Dudley,” she said, just audibly, and he looked up and she was smiling at him over their father’s shoulder. She said something more he didn’t hear and he stepped forward and she swallowed and said in her drugged whisper, “I knew you were alive.”
SHE SLEPT AGAIN AND they stood looking down on her. Grant reached to draw a strand of hair from her face, passed his knuckles softly over her cheek, her chin. Then he turned to his son: “I’ll call your mother now. Are you all right?”
When he was gone, Sean stepped closer to the bed. He took up her limp hand. He looked at her feet: the tented shape of the left foot under the bedding and the footless right in its enormous white wrappings, like a swaddled child. When he looked at her face again her eyes were open. Wet and glazed and looking at him.
“So tall,” she said.
She looked beyond him to the closed door, and before she could ask he told her that she wasn’t here, that she was still back home, in Wisconsin. “We wanted to see you before we called her,” he said.
“Is she all right?”
“Yes.”
She studied him. “Do I look as old as you?”
“You look just the same.”
“Bullshit.”
She saw the cast and puzzled at it. “What happened to your hand?”
“It got in a fight.”
“With who?”
“The wrong man.”
She stared at him. Then she looked beyond him again toward the door, and he turned to look but there was no one there.
“Are they still . . . ?” she said.
He nodded.
The machines beeped and hummed. He looked around at their mysterious faces. When he came back to her, some fresh wave of pain was in her eyes and she said, “Sean, I’m so sorry.”
He shook his head.
“I never sho
uld have left you,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t,” he said.
“I was supposed to take care of you—”
“No,” he said.
“And I left you there.”
Her lids faltered and the grip drained from her hand. “But you stayed,” she said. “You stayed, all this time.”
Next she knew, the world was in motion—walls and ceiling panels and lights all sliding by in a lurid hallucinatory blur. Then she saw her father beside the bed and the sight of him walking and the feel of his hand around hers told her it was not the world in motion but herself.
The small woman doctor walked ahead of him. Her brother walked on the other side of the bed and a man she didn’t recognize was pushing the bed. A bag of clear fluid swung from a chromium hook.
She squeezed her father’s hand and he looked down and his haggard face reset itself.
“Hey there, sleepyhead.”
“Where we going, Daddy?”
“Down to Denver, sweetheart, to see another doctor.”
“Will Mom be there?”
“Not right away but soon.”
He smiled and she said in sudden desperation, “I wanted to call you but they took my phone away and wouldn’t give it back!”
“It’s all right, sweetheart. We’re here now.”
“But I wanted to call you and they took my phone away. Why’d they take my phone away, Daddy?”
The woman doctor with the pretty face smiled and said, “It was the sheriff’s phone, honey, remember?”
They passed through the parting glass doors and into the harsh outdoor lights of the stone canopy. Beyond the canopy the mountains and the ski runs and the sky were all blue-gray in the coming dawn and she felt the cold air and saw the sky and began at once to weep.
“Billy,” she said.
“Shh,” said Grant.
“Daddy,” she said.
“Yes, Caitydid.”
She closed her eyes and Grant touched her face.
“I’m so sorry,” she said.
“Hush,” he said.
“He found me, Daddy.”
“I know, baby.”
“He stabbed the Monkey.”
Grant and Sean looked at each other.
“He stabbed the Monkey,” she wept, “and I chopped off his foot.”
The EMTs took command of the gurney, buckling the legs and rolling it into the ambulance all in one motion. Grant shook the doctor’s hand a final time and thanked her and she told him again that Caitlin was going to be just fine, that she had never met a stronger young woman nor a braver one.
She stepped away and the sheriff came forward.
“I just got off the radio with my deputy,” he said. “They found him.”
“Alive?”
“No, sir, he’s as dead as they come. The dogs found him sitting under a tree with a bowie knife stuck in his neck. His own, from the looks of it.”
“Billy,” Grant said.
“That’s how it looks.” Kinney adjusted his belt. “Dogs also found a hole up there.”
“A hole.”
“A kind of pit. In the rocks. Deep. Looks like he was trying to put Billy down there when he got that knife stuck in his neck. Then he crawled away and died and Billy went back to the cabin. How it looks.”
“So he’s dead,” Grant said.
“Dead and gone to hell.”
The EMT had his hand on the ambulance door. The sheriff didn’t move.
“What else?” Grant said.
“Bodies. Down in that pit. At least two. We won’t know how many till morning.”
Grant nodded.
“I can take you up there, if you want,” said Kinney. “After you get Caitlin settled down in Denver. If you want to see that shack. That man. I figure it’s your right.”
Grant looked into the ambulance. He shook his head. “I’ve already seen it, Joe.”
He climbed in and sat beside his daughter and found her hand, and the EMT shut the door and the ambulance pulled away with the colored lights flashing but no siren, and when they passed through the parking lot Sean put the blue Chevy in gear and fell in behind them and he stayed behind them all the way down to the city.
69
She dreamed that night of a house in the woods. They were not the woods of the mountains that went on and on like the sea, but a small woods, and through the trees she could see the sun on the lake, a rich, wobbling yolk of deep yellow, and the windows of the house, which was no house she recognized, were struck with the same rich light, as if the house had been designed, oriented, to blaze in just this way at just this hour of every day, like the cathedrals of Europe. A woman sat on the porch steps waiting, a woman no older than herself, and at her approach the woman stood and smiled and drew the hair from her forehead in a certain way, and love flooded into
Angela’s heart as her young mother took her into her arms and held her and kissed her and said, Angela, my love.
Mom, what are you doing here, where’s Daddy?
Daddy isn’t here, sweetheart, but Faith is.
Faith’s here? Where?
Inside, inside. They’re all inside, and Angela’s heart grew faint. All?
And the door swung open and within was a vast room like a ballroom, and everywhere she looked there were girls, young women, all in marvelous clothes, the loveliest dresses—slender modern girls dressed for someone’s wedding, or graduation, their smiles, their eyes catching the light, their faces open and luminous—so many faces! She looked and looked and at last she saw her own face among them, her own smile, and Faith came running into her arms, and they kissed the tears from one another’s cheeks . . . and happy as she was in this dream of reunion Angela was uneasy, her stomach like a fist—there were too many girls, and taking Faith’s hand she moved more deeply into the room, and there were many girls she knew by name and many she did not and her heart was pounding and her legs were unsteady. They were nearing the back of the vast room, nearing windows full of the dying light of sundown, when at last she whispered, Is she—? Faith, is she—?
And Faith smiled and said, Don’t stop, Angie, keep looking.
Hair of every shade, thick, shining hair of youth and she saw a ponytail like walnut silk, and she could not breathe—but it wasn’t her. And here was another girl, and another, all of them so young, so full of love, and none of them Caitlin, and she awoke then in sobs, swimming in the scents of hair, of warm smooth faces and of kisses, saturated in them, and her palms were full of the most incredible—“Smell, smell!” she demanded, but the arms that held her were not a sister’s, not a daughter’s. “It’s all right,” he was saying. “It’s all right, Angie, it was just a dream.” But he didn’t understand, he didn’t understand how she had loved them, all of them, his arms so thick and muscled and hard in the spinning, fragrant dark.
THIRTY, PERHAPS FORTY MINUTES later, as she was falling asleep again, her phone began to rattle on the tabletop, and Angela freed herself from him and groped and found it and lifted the blue light to her face thinking, Grace, oh God, you forgot to call Grace . . . but it wasn’t Grace.
70
When they reached the clinic Dr. Wieland was in surgery and Caitlin was set upon by a swarm of purple-clad nurses and orderlies who moved and spoke and touched like a single entity whose only purpose was to reassure and calm the hearts of all who came before them. Grant and Sean were diverted to a small waiting room where three oversized leather chairs sat around a well-made walnut coffee table. A sweating pitcher of water, a hot pot of coffee on the table. Living plants in festive Mexican flowerpots. They were alone in the room and they knew without being told that no one else would come into the room unless it was one of the nurses or orderlies in purple scrubs or the doctor himself.
They had been in the room fifteen minutes, according to the wall clock, when there was a knock at the door and a young man stepped in to tell them that the doctor would be in surgery with another patient for a little while long
er and to ask if there was anything they needed. They both wanted to say an ashtray but didn’t. Fifteen minutes later the same young man returned to say that the doctor had finished with his surgery and was now with Caitlin and he would come talk to them soon.
Grant looked at the wall clock and he looked at his watch and he went to the window and looked out on the city in the early light. He remembered standing at another window on another morning, his naked wife behind him. Naked for the last time. His for the last time.
“She’ll be landing in half an hour,” he said. “And it’ll take about that long to get to the airport.”
Sean poured more coffee. “What did she say?”
“What did she say?”
“When you called.”
Grant thought but couldn’t remember. He’d made the call in a dream, unable to believe what he was doing, what he was saying. What did you say to a mother who believed her child was dead? How did you break that news? She’s alive? We found her? We have her? Or were those the sheriff’s words
to him?
He met his son’s eyes and shook his head. “I don’t remember.”
They were quiet. The wall clock ticked. At last, with a sharp stab of pain in his knee, Sean pushed up from the chair and opened the door.
“Sean.”
He turned back.
“I’ll tell her . . . the rest,” Grant said. “I’ll do that.”
Ten minutes later, with a brisk rap for warning, the door opened and a tall man in purple scrubs and a white doctor’s coat walked in and introduced himself as Dr. Wieland. Grant looked for blood on the white coat and saw not one spot. The doctor was silver-haired and slightly stooped in the way of tall old men although he was not so old and his hand as the two men shook was alive and strong and did not let go of Grant’s but instead kept hold of it, turning it over to see what his fingers had felt.
