Descent (34 page)

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.
Th
ey’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 longer 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.

“Not bad, not bad,” he said, reading the old suture scars with his thumb. “Are you a carpenter, Mr. Courtland?” The thick and laconic drawl was somehow at odds with the purple scrubs and the keen eyes and the strong antiseptic smell of him. In his other hand he held something, which at a glance appeared to be a human foot, absently carried away from the operating room.

“A poor one,” said Grant.

“Not as poor as some. I’ve seen men who didn’t know better than to stop at two fingers but came in with all four in a sandwich bag. Table saw?”

“Yes.”

The doctor nodded. He released Grant’s hand. “Was there no chance of replanting?”

“Replanting?”

“Reattachment.”

“I forgot them. I’d been drinking.”

“Ah,” said the doctor. “Please, sit,” he said, and they lowered into the deep laps of the chairs with the coffee table between them. The doctor paying no mind to the thing in his hands.

“I saw a young man once who’d cut off his hand with a circular saw. One of those powerful ones—what are they called?”

“Worm drive.”

“Yes. A worm drive. The saw kicked back as such saws are inclined to do, I’m told, and severed his free hand cleanly at the wrist. In his panic, or whatever it was that ruled his thinking, he did not apply a tourniquet but instead plunged his wrist into the fireplace, much as Caitlin has done.” The doctor shook his head. “Remarkable, the human will,” he said. “This young man then drove himself and the severed hand to the hospital, where I told him I could replant the hand but that because of the burning I would have to shorten the forearm a bit, and do you know what the young man said? He said, I ain’t gonna be no short-armed freak, doc. Throw that hand out and let’s get on with it.”

The doctor sat smiling pleasantly.

“How is my daughter, Dr. Wieland?”

The doctor’s face grew serious, though his eyes shone brightly. “She is wonderful, Mr. Courtland, she is wonderful. The entire staff is in love with her.”

“What about her foot?” said Grant.

“I understand we do not have the foot.”

“Her leg, I mean,” said Grant.

“It’s a pity we don’t have the foot. I’d have liked to see the incision, even if there was no hope of replanting.” He now regarded the foot in his hand. They both did. It was a plastic anatomical model, the bones and sinews all exposed in their grisly articulations.

“Because of the burning?” said Grant.

“That’s right.”

He searched the doctor’s face. “And if she’d used a tourniquet instead?”

The doctor stared at him, smiling faintly. “As I understand it, Mr. Courtland, Caitlin expected to be going down the mountain on her own two feet—as it were. Is that not correct?”

“That’s correct.”

“That’s why she cut off her foot in the first place, is it not? Because as far as she knew that was her only hope?”

“Yes.”

“Well. I have operated on the toughest young men and women you will ever know, and if any one of them had told me they’d performed such a feat as walking down a mountain with one foot severed and managing a tourniquet all the while, I’d have said it was nothing but the morphine talking.”

Grant had no response.

“No, Mr. Courtland. Your daughter did what she believed she had to do to get down the mountain. A tourniquet? No, sir. She never would have made it.”

He peered at Grant and began shaking his head again. “Remarkable,” he said.

“Will you have to shorten her leg?” Grant said.

The doctor was staring at the plastic foot. “No, I don’t believe so. But I have to ask, Mr. Courtland—has your daughter any interest in medicine? As a practice and science, I mean?”

“Not that I know of.”

“No special interest in podiatry? In surgical technique?”

“Not that I know of. Why?”

“Remarkable,” said the doctor, then was silent.

Grant watched him. “What’s remarkable, doctor?”

“All of it,” he said. “But most especially the disarticulation itself.”

“The disarticulation?”

“The cut, the cut. With an ax, no less. If I didn’t know better, Mr.
Courtland, I’d say Caitlin consulted with Dr. Syme himself before she picked up that ax.” Then, using the plastic foot for reference, he explained the particulars of the Syme’s procedure. He spoke of the disarticulation of the ankle joint and the resection of the malleoli and of the removal of the calcaneus by subperiosteal dissection, and as he spoke, his slow-moving drawl was gradually overtaken by a narrative of escalating passion, as though the very language of surgery caused in him a kind of unmanageable excitement. As though he’d taken Grant with his missing fingers as a fellow enthusiast of the amputation arts.

“Caitlin’s disarticulation is beautiful,” the doctor said. He smiled, his eyes catching the light. Then, sobering, he admitted that there was, however, a good deal of soft-tissue trauma that would require some complicated grafting, which would slow down her healing.

“But she is strong, by God,” he said, “and I’ll tell you something else, Mr. Courtland: in about six months, when she gets one of these Flex-Symes carbon running feet under her, she’ll wish she’d lost both feet.”

Grant stared at him. “Did she tell you that?”

“Tell me what?”

“That she’s a runner.”

The doctor looked at him, puzzled.

“I’m told your daughter brought only two things down with her from the mountain, other than the clothes on her back,” the doctor said. “Is that not correct?”

Grant didn’t understand.

“May I?” said the doctor, and he leaned over the coffee table and picked up the white plastic bag that sat near Grant’s feet and had been sitting there all that time. Grant looked at it and wondered who had given it to him and when. The doctor loosened the plastic drawstring and reached in and peeled the bag away from a pair of running shoes. They had once been pink and white, and one of them, the left, was shaped and cleaned by its recent usage in the snow while the other was dingy and stiff, and the moment he saw them Grant took them from the doctor and held them in his hands and wept.

71

Sean was inside
the
terminal on time, but his mother’s plane was delayed and he passed the time wandering with his limp and his cast in the massive weave of travelers, until finally he took refuge in a small shop. He pretended to browse the magazines, then bought a toothbrush and a small tube of toothpaste and went to the men’s room where he stood brushing his teeth and washing his face and running his dripping fingers through his hair. The face he saw in the mirror looked old and foreign to him. Men came and went. After a few minutes he threw away the toothbrush and the small tube and went back to the terminal corridors to wait for her.

He didn’t see her at first among the passengers emerging from the security exit. He saw a woman he mistook for her, looked past her, and looked back and it was her. She saw him at once and walked over to him with her red eyes brimming. She was older and somehow smaller and her blonde hair was styled in an unfamiliar way and within it were new streaks of white. She stood looking him over and shaking her head and saying nothing. She raised her hand to his face and swept her thumb over his dry cheekbone as though to wipe away a tear.

“Is your father with you?”

“No, he’s with Caitlin,” he said, and at this sentence her face fell and she reached for him and held him while passengers dodged all around them. He could not remember the last time they’d embraced, but it seemed he’d been a boy then, reaching up to her from far below.

When she released him her face was wet but composed. He took the small bag from her shoulder and hung it on his. She asked was it a long drive to the clinic and he said no, not long, and they turned and began to walk. Soon they were on the highway in the Chevy, driving back into the city, back
into the west, as they’d done long ago, toward those same formations looming so incredibly in the sky.

At the clinic, at the first sight of her aged and joy-wrecked mother, Caitlin knew her better than she’d ever known her before, seeing in her eyes nothing of what she herself had gone through but only the full and terrible love of a mother for the child who came from her and was part of her and was all of her and the loss of whom could not be borne.