Descent (33 page)

67

They took the blue
Chevy,
Grant at the wheel, and they smoked and said nothing, staring out at the darkness and the traffic and the signs and the tire tracks in the snow and the setting moon, and she was safe, the sheriff said, she was in no danger. Every mile taking them that much farther from the mountains where’d she gone missing and where all the men and all the searching and all the hours in the world never would have found her, she was fine and resting and they shouldn’t hurry. The lights and the land rushing by at that unreal hour and wondering had she seen this, and this, that day so long ago in the strange car, in broad daylight. They wanted to speak just to know it was real, but they did not trust the sound of their own voices not to rip it all apart, road and mountain and moon and truck, throwing them back to their beds and to the dawn and a heartbreak all the greater for how much they’d believed. And what would they say anyway that they didn’t already know without saying? She was safe, she was resting. There was nothing else to know and nothing to do but to get to her, and when they saw her, when they truly believed in this night, then they would make the phone call, and this too was understood without either of them saying it.

The sheriff didn’t want them driving at that time of night in the mountains; he wanted to send his other deputy down to get them, but the deputy would have been an hour just getting to the ranch and it was that hour that ended the discussion.

Grant followed the sheriff’s directions at least and did not take the Loveland Pass but drove ten miles beyond it and came back from the west on the state highway, and at last they saw the lights of the little resort town and they saw the blue hospital sign and they located the emergency entrance and Grant parked in the first space he saw without reading any more signs and they crushed their cigarettes in the tray and stepped out of the truck.

The sheriff awaited them outside, leaning against the wall near the glass doors, and the sight of him swung Grant back in time to a different hospital, different child, but same sheriff waiting. He and the boy crossed the parking lot and as they stepped up to him the sheriff unleaned himself from the wall and removed his hat that his face not be in shadow, and the gesture stopped them both cold.

“She’s fine,” Kinney said, raising his hand. “She’s just fine.”

“Where is she?” said Grant.

“You can’t see her, not just yet.”

“The hell I can’t.” He took a step and the sheriff caught him by the arm.

“She’s in with the surgeon, Grant.”

“The surgeon. You said she was fine.”

“She is fine. She’s not in any danger. It’s just that, well . . .” He tapped his hatbrim against his leg.

“Joe. Just tell us.”

He told them, there in the humming yellow light, speaking evenly and accurately, and when he was finished Grant and the boy stood still. Kinney tried to imagine what it would be like to be this man before him, this father, hearing such things. His own daughter unconscious within the building. He could not.

At last Grant nodded. He looked at his son and his son nodded too.

“We’ll go in now, Joe.”

“All right. But one more thing.”

They waited.

“She didn’t want to be carried, Grant. After all that, she wanted to come down on her own.” He looked from one to the other, father to son. They stood looking at him, as if expecting him to go on. “That’s all,” he said.

“Did she?” said Grant.

“Did she what?”

“Come down on her own.”

The sheriff looked at him. “Hell no,” he said. “I by God carried her down.”

Grant put his hand on the sheriff’s arm. “I’m sorry about Billy, Joe. I don’t even know what to say.”

Kinney raised his hat and set it on his head. “Me neither.”

Then the boy, who had said nothing, said, “What about the man?” and Kinney looked at him. He was not even recognizable as the boy he’d first seen in a hospital bed himself not very long ago, knee like a purple cannonball.

“I can’t say about him,” said Kinney. “There’s a good twenty lawmen up there now, dogs too, and unless that sonofabitch can fly they’ll track him down.”

Grant hardly heard. He’d already turned toward the glass doors.

THEY HAD WAITED ALL
this time and now they waited some more, standing and sitting and standing again, the night-shift nurse tolerant of their pacing and their repeated demands for information, for updates, the sheriff bringing them coffee and stepping out to smoke and talk with other lawmen, the TV in the corner muted and the clock ticking loudly from its place on the wall, ticking off most of an hour before a woman in blue scrubs emerged and came up to them. She was small in her scrubs, her face dark and without makeup and open and kind. She introduced herself as Dr. Robinson and Grant held her hand and said, “How is my daughter?”

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 should 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.