He felt the same—at least the sense of it, until she put it into words, and then he was down there too, deep in the ocean. But in his tortured imagination, the sharks had already attacked. All Jagger could do was scream, a bubbling explosion of muffled anguish.
He tried to comfort Beth, all the while buffeted by an internal storm of anger, frustration, and worry. His thoughts flipped from images of Tyler in happier times—jumping into his arms, falling asleep on his lap—to should-have-been fantasies of sweeping the boy out of harm’s way and somehow getting the upper hand on the woman: hopping up, dodging her bullets, making her eat the gun. He continually checked with the nurses and learned more than he wanted about bullet probes and forceps, resorbable microsurgical nerve and blood vessel sutures, and how infections have caused more deaths than blood loss in gunshot victims.
The physicians’ frequent calls for blood—it sounded like “Adem!” in Arabic—were like fresh jabs at his heart with an ice pick. A nurse rushed out of the OR, her green smock bloody, her surgical mask spattered.
A thought pierced Jagger’s brain: That’s my son on her, my son!
She rambled in Arabic to the nurse at the station, rushed back to the OR door, and turned again. She waved her hand in a spinning circle and yelled an Arabic word Jagger understood: “Haza! Haza!” Now! Now!
The station nurse picked up a phone, replaced it, consulted a computer screen, picked the phone up again, and started dialing.
Jagger learned over the counter. “What is it? What’s happening?”
The nurse ignored him, pushed the disconnect button, released it, dialed.
Jagger reached out and grabbed her arm. “What!”
“The pediatric surgeon hasn’t shown up yet,” she said in nearly perfect English. “I paged him twenty minutes ago. Please!”
He released her, and she continued dialing. She spoke into the phone, urgency imbuing every foreign syllable. When she hung up, Jagger said, “Where is he? Is he coming?”
She nodded. “Yes, yes. The ER surgeons are doing everything, but he too will be here soon. Don’t worry, please.”
Don’t worry. Don’t worry! If ever anything was easier said than done . . .
He sat on the edge of a chair and stared at the blue cotton slippers a nurse had asked him to put on over his bare feet. He thought about his boots on the steps near the burning bush, next to Tyler’s sneakers. His boy had wanted to remove his shoes to approach the bush. What kind of kid thinks like that? What kind of god strikes him down?
Eventually a man came down the hallway, fast-walking with nurses scurrying around him, slipping off his watch and pushing scrubs over his arms and chest. He rushed into Tyler’s OR. Jagger tried to follow, but two hefty orderlies stopped him.
Some time later—twenty minutes, an hour, a day; Jagger had lost all sense of time—sharp calls emitted from the room, followed by the unmistakable THUMP! of a defibrillator. Both Jagger and Beth pushed through the OR door before the orderlies could stop them. Tyler’s little body lay on the operating table, his skin too white under the blinding brightness of a Cycloptic lamp, blood everywhere, an army of doctors and nurses standing around, one holding defib paddles over Tyler’s chest, then pressing them down and Tyler convulsing, all eyes on the EKG, blipping irregularly.
“No! Tyler! Tyler!” Beth yelled.
Someone barked out words, and the orderlies intensified their efforts to pull them away. Jagger knew that, unlike movie depictions, deliberators didn’t restart flat-lined hearts. Mostly, they corrected ventricular tachycardia, which was the heart’s equivalent of a last cry for help, telling anyone listening, “I’m going . . . I’m going . . .” which it often did within seconds—unless shocked back into a normal rhythm.
Behind Jagger someone said, “Talitha Koum.”
THUMP!
The bouncing green line on Tyler’s EKG spiked, plummeted, began making a mountain range on the screen. The physician holding the paddles nodded and handed them to a nurse. Jagger let himself be pulled away.
He twisted out of the bouncer’s arms and wrapped his arm around Beth to guide her. They nearly walked into Owen, who moved to Beth’s other side and gripped her arm. Jagger realized it was he who had said those words, Talitha Koum. The man had disappeared sometime during the chaos of Tyler’s arrival. Jagger was glad to see him; it felt like having someone else on their team, a friend. He didn’t want to think of where they’d be, what would have become of Tyler, had Owen not been there.
[ 55 ]
Shuffling back to the chairs, Jagger could feel Beth shaking as violently as she would have standing naked on the Arctic tundra. He and Owen lowered her into a chair, and Jagger sat beside her. Owen crossed the room and sat on the floor, his back against the wall.
“What?” Beth said. “What was that?”
“I’ve heard that happens all the time during surgery.” He hadn’t. “The heart’s response to low blood pressure, trauma.”
“His heart . . . oh, Jagger . . .” She pushed into him harder and wept into his shirt.
Could anything be more emotionally wrenching or physically draining as watching your child fight for his life? All the love and protectiveness that fills every cell of your body like a third strand of DNA from the moment you learn of his existence, feelings that can’t possibly grow stronger, but do with each of his smiles and tears and sounds and thoughts—that irresistible force that nurtures, guides, teaches, and tells dangers real and perceived, Don’t even think of coming near my kid . . . All of it crashing head-on into an immoveable object made of helplessness and the fact that the human body is fragile in a world of hard, sharp things moving too fast, of diseases, stupidity, and malice. That point of impact, where neither side gives or flexes or compromises, creates an energy that can tear you apart.
Jagger felt that tension pulling at his sanity, and he held on to his wife as he would a tree in a hurricane. Like a tree, she was rooted in soil that was more solid than the tilled-up dirt of his life. Maybe that was cheating, depending on her strength, which flowed from a source he had blocked off and rejected; but she was his wife, and it was on her he trusted to help him survive this storm. In turn, he hoped to be someone she could hold on to. But he wondered how much help he could be when all he wanted to do was rage . . . at God, at the world, at the people who did this to his son.
He sat beside Beth, comforting her as best he could, then got up and walked to where Owen sat. The man’s head was lowered, his hands clenched together in his lap.
“Talitha Koum?” Jagger said, crouching in front of him.
Owen raised his head and smiled. “Jesus said it when he raised Jairus’s daughter from the dead. It means, ‘Little girl, I say to you, get up!’ It applies to little boys as well.”
“A prayer?”
“A plea.”
“You took off,” Jagger said.
“There’s a chapel on the third floor.” He pushed himself up. “I hear it calling to me now. Do you hear it?”
Jagger rose, shook his head.
Owen gripped his arm. “Of course. You do your work here. I’ll do mine there.”
Jagger watched him disappear down a hall, then he started pacing. He thought about calling someone, even got the mobile phone out of Beth’s bag. He stared at it, noticing for the first time in months the bars that indicated service. He opened the directory and found the number for Beth’s parents, a little picture of them smashing their faces together to fit in the frame, laughing about it. But why put them through the agony of uncertainty? There would be time to call when they knew more. He dropped it back into the purse.
He found himself in the bathroom, staring at his own bloodshot eyes in the mirror, and Tyler’s blood caked on his cheek. He splashed water over his face and scrubbed it off, a token to his belief, his having to believe, that Tyler would be fine. He watched the pink water swirling around the drain, going down, and regretted letting even that much of his son get away from him.
As he return
ed to the chairs, a surgeon pushed through the OR doors. Jagger tried to read his eyes, but didn’t get anything until the man pulled his mask down, showing a tight smile. Beth ran up and grabbed Jagger’s arm, afraid, Jagger thought, of collapsing regardless of the news. What the doctor said was a blur of contradictions: Tyler was in critical condition, but stable. They’d removed the bullet and repaired damage to his lung, several blood vessels, and muscles.
“He is not—what do you say?—away from the forest yet, but he is a very lucky little boy. The bullet missed his major arteries and his heart. Do you know what sort of gun was used?”
Jagger shook his head. “A pistol.”
“It is interesting,” the doctor said. “It appears to be a .25 caliber and extremely low velocity, not what we normally see.”
Jagger understood: low-velocity bullets were special-order ammo, meant to be subsonic, so there would be no crack of a bullet breaking the speed of sound; combined with a small caliber, it was ideal for a sound-suppressed firearm—an assassin’s weapon. The woman’s gun hadn’t been equipped with a suppressor, but he suspected that an inspection of its muzzle would reveal threads to accommodate one.
“Bullets cause tissue damage in three ways,” the doctor was saying. Jagger almost interrupted, wanting only a bottom-line prognosis, but Beth nodded, her brows furrowed in concentration. Jagger appreciated her desire for knowledge, even when it was stomach-turning and hit close to home. The journalist in her. He pulled her closer as the doctor continued.
“Laceration and crushing from the bullet itself. Fragmentation, either from the bullet or from splintered bone. That’s like getting shot again. Then there are shock waves and cavitation, caused by the energy radiating out from the path of the projectile. This can be more devastating than the bullet, which is why firearm injuries tend to be worse than those produced by blades. Eighty percent of nerve damage results not from the bullet but from shock waves. They’ve been known to even fracture bones several centimeters from a passing bullet.”
Beth pulled in a breath and covered her mouth. The doctor patted the air reassuringly. He said, “That is not an issue with your son. In all cases, the greater the velocity of the bullet, the worse the damage. Because the child was shot with a small caliber at low velocity, he sustained minimal shock wave damage, no bone breakage, and the bullet did not fragment, as far as we can tell at this point. As I said, a very lucky boy.”
“Lucky?” Beth said. “He almost . . . almost died. He’s still in danger, isn’t he?”
“He is,” the doctor said, “but considering his size, if he’d been shot with an ordinary round, the type we usually see . . .” He shook his head. “We need to monitor him for any internal bleeding we may have missed, and of course infection. He lost a lot of blood and his body went into shock. He seems to be bouncing back, but we will know more in twelve or so hours.”
“Seems?” Jagger said. “He seems to be bouncing back?”
The doctor smiled. “The human body is a complex organism. It constantly surprises us, both for bad and for good. We’ll move him to a private room in the ICU. He will sleep for some time, but please, be there with him. I believe he will”—he searched for a word—“ feel your presence and will respond favorably.”
“You couldn’t drag me away,” Beth said. She hugged Jagger, pressing her face into his chest and digging her fingers into his back.
Her tears soaked through his shirt, and he wished they were anyplace but here, doing anything but this. He wanted it so badly, the weight of it weakened his knees and pulled at him as though gravity had suddenly doubled its power. He braced himself, fighting the urge to collapse. If he ever had to be strong, it was now.
[ 56 ]
Five and half hours after Jagger and Owen had carried Tyler into the ER, the boy was lying in a hospital bed, canted to one side by foam wedges to keep pressure off his back. Jagger eyed the machines arrayed around his son. They beeped and hissed and occasionally squiggled out a few inches of paper, a permanent record of his vital signs at that particular moment. One IV dripped antibiotics into a tube that snaked to a needle in his arm. Another of saline kept him hydrated. A vinyl bag hanging on the bed by Jagger’s knee caught urine from Tyler’s bladder, and somehow to Jagger that captured the enormity of what had been done: his son couldn’t even pee.
He held Tyler’s hand and tried to see past the oxygen mask to his face. Pale, except for his eyelids, which were the color of storm clouds. He could tell they had cleaned him up, but had either been sloppy about it or too careful: the rim of his ear was caked with maroon blood.
Beth sat in a chair on the opposite side of the bed, stretching to hold Tyler’s other hand. Her head was bowed in prayer, but as he watched she raised it and frowned at him. “God didn’t do this,” she said.
He closed his eyes and bit his tongue. She didn’t want to hear his opinion on that.
“Jagger?”
He hated the pain in her eyes, the redness that he couldn’t imagine ever going away.
She said, “Let this draw you closer, not push you away.”
He wanted to yell at her to shut up about that, to open her eyes to the way God really was, merciless and spiteful. Instead, he ran his hand over his face and pushed his fingers through his hair. “I need some air,” he said, turning toward the door. “And coffee. You want some coffee?”
She shook her head, and he stepped into the corridor. It was bright with fluorescents, reflecting off floors so polished they could have been liquid. Still, the place appeared as vacant as an office building on Sunday morning. To his right, at the far end of the corridor, a nurse crossed from her station and disappeared into a room. He turned the other direction and started walking. A wall of glass at the end, overlooking rectangles of undeveloped parcels and the low, white buildings of Sharm el-Sheikh to Naama Bay and the Red Sea. He spotted a door with a plaque showing a stick figure on stairs, pushed through, and descended.
At the first landing, he stopped. His lungs were keeping time with his racing heart, pumping air like a bellows in the hands of a spastic kid. Dizziness made his vision swim. He staggered and grabbed the railing, then stumbled into a corner and leaned his forehead against a pipe running from floor to ceiling. It was cold, and that’s all he thought about: the pipe and the way it cooled his skin . . . not about Tyler or the woman who shot him or God or anything but the pipe and its temperature.
Tyler.
The woman.
God.
Jagger groaned, and it turned into a scream. RoboHand gripped the pipe, and he leaned back. His real hand was squeezed into a tight fist, hurting from being that way for a while. He threw it into the wall, making an indent. He punched again and again until he broke through, and continued striking the edges, widening the hole, leaving bloody streaks and spots around it.
A hand seized his shoulder and spun him around. He pulled his fist back to strike the intruder. It was Owen, right in his face, glaring. He grabbed Jagger’s head, fingers curved around behind, palm over his ear, firm.
“I know,” he said, the words what you’re going through unnecessary, communicated through his gaze, and his expression said that he really did.
Jagger felt a measure of the chaotic jumble inside him flow out, as though taken by Owen, a burden shared. His fist opened, and his hand fell to Owen’s shoulder. He wanted to say something, to explain himself, but the sense that Owen already knew everything was so great that all he could do was nod.
Jagger had never believed that sympathy or even empathy helped anyone; intense emotion, agony, was unique to each person: a million starving people in the world didn’t help ease the stomach cramps of the man who hadn’t eaten in three days. But this was different. It was shared anger, grief, and pain, coupled with a solution; it was the one-legged man throwing his arm over the shoulder of another one-legged man because together they could both walk.
Owen pushed a box into his arms. “I guessed size eleven.”
Jagger lifted
the lid to see new cross trainers and a package of socks. He nodded. “Thanks.”
“There’s a kahwa up the street.” Owen smiled at Jagger’s puzzlement. “A café. We have to talk.”
Jagger returned to Tyler’s room first, and Beth assured him there was nothing for him to do there at the moment, and she’d be fine if he grabbed coffee with Owen.
“Go get out of your head for a while,” she said. “It’ll do you good.”
[ 57 ]
The two men walked four blocks into a neighborhood with dirt streets and none of the sparkle or forced Egyptian décor that made Sharm el-Sheikh attractive to tourists. They approached the kahwa—a converted house—at just past six in the morning, a smoldering orange glow singeing the eastern frays of a violet sky. When Owen pulled the door open for Jagger, the aroma of coffee, tobacco, and fried food wafted over them. Smoke hazed the cavelike interior, whose dim light came from dozens of candles lined up like soldiers on a narrow shelf running the length of each wall, a yellow bulb hanging over the service area behind a counter, and murky front windows.
The 13th Tribe Page 21