Caitlin was another matter.
Ten miles out of Baton Rouge, Carl could no longer detect a heartbeat in her chest. While Danny pushed the chopper’s engine beyond its operational limit, I telephoned Drew Elliott and begged him to do anything he could from Natchez. Thirty seconds later we were over Baton Rouge and boring in on Baton Rouge General. Danny started to land in their automotive parking lot, but space was tight and the risk to bystanders real. While Carl and I stared wild-eyed at each other over Caitlin’s bloody chest, Drew called back and told me to divert to Our Lady of the Lake. A med school buddy of his was a trauma surgeon there, and he was ready to get Caitlin into an OR the moment she arrived. Danny instantly aborted the parking lot landing and got us over Our Lady in less than a minute.
As we dropped toward the rooftop helipad, John Kaiser called and told me we’d been cleared to land at Baton Rouge General. I thanked him and shut off my ringer as Danny flared and settled the JetRanger dead center on the white-painted ring. Crouching against our rotor blast, a trauma team rushed to the chopper and moved Caitlin onto a gurney within ten seconds of the skids touching concrete. Carl and I followed them into the elevator, watching in stricken horror as they started large-bore IVs and searched in vain for a heartbeat. A technician diagnosed pericardial tamponade even before the doors opened on the next floor.
Drew’s buddy was scrubbed and waiting in the OR when they shoved Caitlin through the big double doors and ordered the security guard to keep me outside. Four minutes later, using a long pair of tweezers and a portable fluoroscope, the surgeon pulled a deformed .22 slug out of Caitlin’s heart with as little trouble as a boy pulling a doodlebug from a hole with a stick.
Then he declared her dead.
She’d apparently been dead when they bundled her off the chopper. The surgeon had only opened her chest because the nature of her injury sometimes offered hope of an “exceptional save.” There was also the unspoken reality that the doctor had been doing Drew a favor.
When I close my eyes, I still see Drew’s friend coming through the double doors, pulling off his mask, and reciting his stock speech with solicitous eyes: Mr. Cage, your wife was shot, as you probably know. The bullet struck her heart. We tried every means at our disposal to resuscitate her, but in spite of our best efforts, she died a few minutes ago. I’m sorry.
“She’s not my wife,” I said, which was legally true but made no sense or difference to the well-meaning surgeon.
He apologized again, and I mumbled that he should forget it while it struck me that no matter what the law says, I am twice widowed, which must be a fairly rare mark of distinction among forty-five-year-old American men these days.
Carl Sims put his hands on my shoulders and in a cracked voice said he was sorry. Then he told me that Danny McDavitt would have been there, but the hospital had asked him to move the chopper to a secondary landing site near the car lot. Then, to my surprise, the trauma surgeon spoke some more, telling us things that brought tears to our eyes. He told us that Caitlin was brave, even heroic, and that she and my father had used an ingenious method to try to relieve her cardiac distress. The remarkable thing, the surgeon said, was that Caitlin must have done all the cutting and probing herself. For since my father’s hands had been cuffed, he could not have done it. Had Dad not gone into a diabetic coma, he might have kept Caitlin alive long enough for the trauma team to save her.
I was in no mood to hear praise for my father, and I did not react well. The surgeon shook my hand and bade me farewell, and then a nurse came out with a hospital bag containing Caitlin’s personal effects.
All that happened twenty minutes ago.
Now I stand alone with Caitlin in the OR—“viewing the remains,” as I heard a nurse say, in what she thought was a whisper. Someone had draped a sheet over Caitlin’s body, covering her to the neck, but I removed it as soon as the nurse left me alone with her.
Standing in the awful silence, I relearn lessons that I learned when my wife died, then forgot out of self-preservation. Lesson one: the stillest thing in the world is the corpse of someone you loved. A hunk of cold granite seems more alive than a dead human being. You don’t expect a stone to move. A person robbed of all motion and cold to the touch is the most alien object in the world. Natural instinct drives us away from the decaying body, and quickly. Yet love compels us forward, to kiss the empty vessel of the soul departed.
Lesson two: there are many fates worse than death. The most common is surviving the death of a loved one. For the dead, all questions have been answered or made irrelevant. For the survivor, some questions have been rendered unanswerable. When my wife died, I had months to prepare, yet even then the final reality stunned me. But Caitlin has been snatched away like the son of my deer-hunting friend: alive and vital one moment, permanently AWOL the next. The cruelty in this feels personal. Many in my circumstance would lay it at the door of God. Yet I know where the true blame lies.