“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.