by Heather Abel
“To David?”
“Of course David.”
“I didn’t even ask to. Why didn’t I ask?” Rebecca began to cry, and Caleb led her to the truck and slammed her door, his muscles overactive with relief. David hadn’t drowned. Nobody was dredging the river. He’d taken a walk, gotten a little scraped up. Caleb found he was still holding the phone, and he set it in his lap as he drove.
After Escadom, the road to Delta dipped into a canyon, crumbling reds and ochre on either side, leprous earth, and then they were stopped for eleven minutes while the coal train rushed by, a passing storm. Once the barrier rose, Caleb drove twice the speed limit. He knew this road.
He’d driven this way so many times, for so many reasons, and all of them were what he wished he were doing; all of the days that came before this one were perfect, he knew now. This was the way to the courthouse for his DUI. This was the way to the bulk-food run. This was the way to the airport twice a summer. This was the way to the Kmart, the way to the hog farm, the way to discount windows, the way to the public swimming pool in Montrose.
This was the way to Delta County Memorial Hospital, a facility only slightly larger than the Kmart. He parked, followed signs to the emergency room, the doors opening for him.
“I need to see David Cohen. Where is he?” he asked at reception. A woman typed slowly, stared at her computer screen. “No, nobody’s been admitted by the name of David Cone.”
“Cohen,” Rebecca said. Caleb turned to her, surprised. He’d been only barely aware of her presence beside him.
“Cone?”
“Cohen,” Caleb said louder. “C-O-H-E-N.”
“Oh, Co-hen.”
But no, she couldn’t find any patient by the name of Co-hen either and sent them to wait on the molded plastic seats, underneath the muted TV. A toddler was smashing his hand against the buttons on the vending machine. A radio on the reception desk played the country hits of the summer. The boy’s mother picked up a newspaper from the floor and began fanning herself with it. She caught Caleb’s eyes, rolled hers. “They can’t even turn on the swamp cooler for us?”
Caleb sat for a few minutes and then returned to the desk, where the receptionist had begun a word search. “Look, I’m legally responsible for David Cohen. I’ll need you to find him now.”
“I assure you we’re doing all we can.”
Finally, a young man in scrubs came out of the triage room with a clipboard in one hand. He walked over to Caleb. “You’re the one looking for David Co-hen?”
Caleb nodded.
“We helied him to Denver Trauma about half an hour ago.”
Caleb stood up, stepping close to the man. “Didn’t you want to tell me? Didn’t I need to authorize? Weren’t you planning on telling me this?”
The man looked at his clipboard. “Looks like his dad was contacted. Dad’s on his way to Denver. Mom was called as well.” He had the lilt of a native Spanish speaker. “Mr. Co-hen will be getting the best care possible. You can try to calm down now. You can rest assured.”
fifteen
Rocky Mountain High
Factoring in the hour they’d spent in Grand Junction to rent a car, because Caleb said his truck might “explode into flaming shrapnel” at the speeds required on the highway, the drive from Delta to Denver took seven hours, during which time they followed the unspoken code of emergency: you don’t talk, you don’t speculate, you grimly move forward. Caleb switched lanes often, passing eighteen-wheelers, tailgating tourists. Although Rebecca had never spent a day quite like this, had never, for example, driven the breadth of the Rocky Mountains, much of childhood had felt similarly under the sway of crises beyond her control, and she felt like a child again in the passenger seat, hoping Caleb would stop for a bathroom, for food, not wanting to ask. Far worse than her bodily needs was the pain of culpability. She’d wanted to hurt David last night, and this morning he’d fallen and hurt himself. She’d asked for this. But her pain at least could be relieved. She’d apologize for how snide and unhelpful she’d been, and David would forgive. What does it matter? he’d ask. She’d come all this way to see him.
Childlike, she’d brought nothing—no wallet, not even a sweatshirt — and when they reached the hospital, it was Caleb, with his ID and authority, who stood in line for the receptionist, sending Rebecca to the waiting area. There were men moaning in their wheelchairs. A protestation of lap babies. An elderly woman lay across three chairs with newspaper over her body. People sat staring at nothing, ignoring the magazines, arms crossed in front of their chests. There was a line for the pay phone, two lines for the receptionists behind plexiglass, but no sense of movement, just the purgatory of waiting in the bracing wind of air-conditioning.
When Caleb returned, it was with good news. He shook her shoulder giddily. “It’s going to be fine. He fell, broke something. They wouldn’t say what—let’s assume arm, maybe leg. Ouch. He’s in surgery now. His folks are with him.”
“Joe and Judy are here?”
“Waiting in a hallway by post-op. Non – family members aren’t allowed, but a nurse suggested we go to the cafeteria, away from this madness. She’ll tell them to find us as soon as we can see him. It’s going to be fine.”
Released from the strictures of emergency, Rebecca couldn’t stop babbling as they made their way through brightly lit hallways, up an elevator, down another hallway, explaining that Joe and Judy were like family, second parents. She described Judy’s thwarted career with the New York City Ballet, Joe’s physical resemblance to Gandhi, which had led to, or perhaps derived from—the causality, now that she thought about it, unclear—an obsession with the great man. For Christmas, Georgia and Ira always gave Joe a Gandhi biography or photo or figurine. Caleb would love David’s parents. And they, him.
Outside the cafeteria, Caleb stopped at a row of pay phones and placed a collect call to the counselors. After a failed attempt, he hung up, laughing. “Of course they won’t answer. I have the fucking phone. It’s in my truck. I drove off with it.” It felt like a tremendous joke: how naïve and scared they’d been just a few hours ago.
It wasn’t just their good humor that made people turn to stare at them as they pulled open the doors of the cafeteria and entered into the humid smell of disinfectant and spaghetti. It was, she realized, watching Caleb set a plastic tray on a metal counter, that they came from a land of dirt. Their boots shed mud with every step they took; their shirts held several generations of stains; their hair was greasy, the texture of straw from swimming in the river, with curls matted together. The denim of her shorts, like that of his jeans, had turned brown with dust. As Caleb walked ahead of her around the circuitous lines of food, the smell of him rose above the institutional stench. And she surely smelled the same or worse, she realized proudly.
When she’d met Caleb at the start of summer, she’d been surprised by his appearance. A tree of a guy with lines like bark on his face, he wore odd, ill-fitting jeans, a snap shirt, a cowboy hat. She’d wondered whether it was all a calculated performance. Now, she knew that he simply lived outside the world of commerce, outside of culture and aesthetics, preference and reference. And after eight weeks at Llamalo, she was becoming like him. Everything here seemed antiseptic, unnecessary, funny. What was this greasy meat? These glossy red apples? This case of colored drinks? What were these walls? This TV? This roof? Why be inside at all?
Even electric light, flickering from rectangles in the dropped ceiling, seemed an unnecessary and profligate hindrance to sight.
As they ate, she told him about Ira’s letter in OSN, reciting much of it from memory. Caleb leaned forward to nab a package of salt from her tray. “This must be devastating for you.”
It was, she admitted. Encouraged by his response, she told him at length how she’d begun to question her very identity and purpose. Would she still study media and its role in the uprisings in the third world or run her student activist organizations? And if not, who would she be? If progress toward justic
e was hopeless, as Ira insisted, then what?
Caleb listened attentively, although he admitted he had no answers. He’d lived too long without even reading a newspaper, except the Grand Junction Tribune for the funnies and classifieds. “Although for me,” he said, “the way I do live is its own political act.”
“That’s not systemic,” she said quickly, feeling slightly bad about putting him in his place, but it seemed necessary to his understanding of all she’d lost. “Not fighting to change the distribution of power.”
“Power, huh?” He shrugged, apparently uninjured. “Maybe not. I guess I’ve always been interested in something really basic. How it changes you just to live out there, on the plateau. I don’t think these individual changes happen in a vacuum. I think they do ripple out into the world. Anyway, I heard you talk about Ira a bunch this summer. I can understand how this would shake you.”
It was a momentary disappointment when his focus turned from her to the door behind her. “That’s gotta be . . .” he said, rising out of his chair. She turned.
Standing by the stacks of trays, peering around for her, were Joe and Judy—she, with short curls and impeccable posture, he, bald and tan with frameless glasses.
Rebecca and Caleb headed toward the couple. As they passed the cashiers, Caleb stopped her with a hand on her arm. “Just so you know, David might be a little pissed at me at first. We had a bit of a thing last night.”
Then his face turned affable, his arm stretched out. “I’ve wanted to meet both of you for so long,” she heard him say, while she hugged Judy, and more briefly, Joe.
“How is he? How is he?” Rebecca asked.
“Let’s find a table,” Joe said, releasing her.
“We already ate, but the two of you should definitely,” Caleb said. “Why don’t we go keep him company?”
“Let’s find a table,” Joe repeated, and there was nothing to do but follow him through the grid of chairs to the far, unpopulated reaches of the room. He came to a stop by a window that looked out on a cement courtyard of smokers and wheelchairs and gestured to Caleb. “Sit.”
Rebecca moved to sit as well, but Judy reached for her hand, intertwining her fingers with Rebecca’s, keeping her standing beside her.
“So, how’s he holding up? We can’t wait to see him,” Caleb said as Joe pulled out the chair opposite him.
Joe cleared his throat, crossed one leg over the other, sat back in his chair, folding his arms in front of his chest. Finally, he said, “I don’t know how much you know about tort law.”
“Not much, I admit. Why? Is there something we should be thinking about?”
Rebecca saw a discomfiting differential in their facial expressions. Caleb was open and curious, Joe, tight and controlled, as if working hard to maintain neutrality.
“At seventeen, David’s my dependent. I’m responsible for his medical expenses, which means I can, and I will, sue you for the following. The cost of surgery. The emergency room visit. The helicopter.” Joe’s eyes were focused on a spot in front of him. “There will be rehab, I’m told. Perhaps weeks, but more likely months, of physical therapy.”
Caleb jumped in. “Sure, that makes sense. And thanks for the heads-up. You shouldn’t have to pay for any of this.” He gestured around the cafeteria as if Joe were asking him to underwrite the bowls of Jell-O, the Lipton tea. “I mean, you know that David wasn’t on my property when he slipped. Left on his own accord. Just took off. But sure, this shouldn’t be on you.”
“As I was saying, I can claim medical expenses against you. David has no lost earnings, so you won’t be liable for that.”
Rebecca was remembering that Joe, unlike Ira, became placid in inverse to his anger. When happy or bored, he might appear jokingly mad, but when truly outraged, he became as calm as salt. It was clear from the way Caleb chuckled amiably that he didn’t understand this. “Yeah, right. They still don’t pay you to go to high school, do they?”
“Still, I can sue for David’s pain and suffering of all sorts,” Joe continued, as if Caleb hadn’t spoken. “Not just physical, but emotional. Any fears about the future, any psychological trauma caused by the night.”
“Night?” Caleb smiled and shook his head. “He left this morning.”
Joe turned to his ex-wife. “Did you hear that, Judy?”
Judy nodded. Her rings were digging into the bones in Rebecca’s fingers.
Joe resumed his cool regard of Caleb. “We’ve been wondering the extent of your negligence. In his few moments of lucidity this evening, although of course he was on a high dose of medicine to ameliorate the extreme pain, David described the ordeal of last night. The terror and pain magnified by darkness and isolation. Thankfully, he must have lost consciousness for some of it. When the EMTs found him, he’d begun to enter shock from blood loss. Judy and I have been trying to imagine a night like that. A broken pelvis. Unable to move. Nobody answering his screams. Nobody, apparently, even aware he was missing. As a father, it’s not easy to imagine my son like this. You could argue, and many have, that you can’t or shouldn’t place a financial figure on pain and suffering, and yet that’s exactly what our legal system does.”
A train had begun to hurtle through the cafeteria, a train with broken brakes, unable to stop, and Rebecca was both passenger and onlooker. Judy’s grip, while painful, was keeping her upright.
“It was his pelvis?” Caleb was agitated now. “Look, nobody’s given us any information. We’ve been asking.”
“What I’d like you to understand today is that none of this will shut down your camp.”
Caleb threw up his hands. “Great. Thanks, I guess. Thank you for not shutting me down. Now can I see him?” He pushed his chair backward, but stopped short of standing when he noticed that Joe hadn’t moved.
“No, the lawsuits won’t shut you down. Depending on the length of the docket in Colorado, it could be years before you pay a penny. And insurance, which I’m assuming you have, will cover some, although not all, of it. Eventually, you’ll see a drastic, perhaps untenable, increase in your premiums. It’s likely that, at some later point, you won’t be able to find a company willing to insure your land. But, ultimately, you will not be enjoined to cease operations as a result of my tort suit, which means—”
“Enjoin? You lost me there.”
“As I was saying, I can’t get a judge to issue an injunction against you. And so, you should understand, I will need to shut you down through other means, and this will be immediate and irrevocable.”
“I’m sorry, but are you threatening . . . ? David ran away. This wasn’t something I could control.”
With one hand, Joe began sweeping the table’s crumbs into a pile. “My son spent a night holding on to the side of a cliff, bleeding and unable to move. And you? You didn’t even know he was gone.” He paused to gently nudge the collected crumbs over the table’s edge and into his upturned palm. “So think of this as a promise. I will personally call every parent—every mother, every father—who has ever sent a child to your camp. I will convince them—it shouldn’t be hard—not to send their children to you. And if you find new children, I will track down their parents. I will visit each family individually if need be. I will inform newspapers not to sell you ad space. I will come to any meet and greet you hold. I will make sure that, starting right now, you will never care for children again.”
Rebecca watched Caleb’s lips open in surprise, but her thoughts were with her own immediate future: what she would say when she saw David, how she might apologize for her terrible stinginess. Can’t you just help me? he’d asked her last night.
“Look,” Caleb said, leaning forward. “I understand you’re upset. I’m upset. But shutting me down isn’t what David wants. Not in the slightest.”
“Don’t you dare tell me what it is that my son wants.” Joe stood, wiping his hands together, releasing the crumbs to the linoleum. “Come on, Judy. I want to get back to him.”
Only Caleb was sitting now, elb
ows on the table, forehead dropped into his hands. “Can you wait here for me?” Rebecca said to him. “I’ll be back.”
“Oh, hon.” Judy released Rebecca’s hand, glanced over at Joe. “The thing is, David doesn’t really . . . He won’t see you right now.”
“So, I should wait here?”
“No, hon, look. He was adamant about this. David says he won’t see you at all.” Judy’s tone was soothing but laced with a deep maternal reproof, the likes of which Rebecca had never heard before; she’d always been so good.
“But you said he’s groggy. He’s medicated. So I’ll wait. I can wait. I’ll wait.” It seemed important not to stop this pathetic pronouncement of her ability to wait, and so she repeated it until Joe said, “Rebecca, just go home. Ira and Georgia would love to have you. Get on a plane and go home. We’re not here to disturb David.”
As they walked away, Rebecca, guilt clinging to her like an unwashed smell, was struck with the cool scientific knowledge, as if this were happening to someone else, that she would never feel happy again. Can’t you just help me? he’d asked.
No. She couldn’t. She’d wanted him hurt.
“Of course he’s upset. He’s a father,” Caleb said after nearly an hour of silence. It was 9:22 according to the clock on the dashboard of the rental. They were back on I-70, crossing the Rockies westward, but in the darkness the mountains had disappeared, and they could see only the white lights of cars in the oncoming lanes, the red taillights ahead of them. “But calling the parents? No. He’ll realize that’s overboard. He’ll cool off before that.”
Did he really believe this? “Joe? Cool off?” Rebecca said. “He only goes in one direction.”
“The thing he needs to understand is, David loves Llamalo. He doesn’t want this. A broken pelvis is terrible, sure, but . . . it heals. At least David’ll be able to explain everything.”
“You don’t get it. This has nothing to do with what David wants. There’s not going to be some consensus meeting. Joe’s decided to ruin you, so he will. It’ll become his extracurricular, his hobby.”