Caleb?”
Caleb would have given his own life to avoid speaking the next words. “A terrible thing happened, Jonah. You got hurt bad, liebling. Real bad.”
The boy’s eyes opened very slowly, as if he knew somehow what he was about to face. With an even slower motion, he lifted his right hand from beneath the blue blanket. Blood had dried in the seams of the short, stubby fingernails. He opened and closed his hand.
Caleb took hold of it, cradled it between both of his big hands, and carried it to his lips. “I’m so sorry, Jonah. I’m so, so awfully sorry.” He felt resistance as the boy tried to free his hand from Caleb’s grip. And with shattering clarity, Caleb knew why.
He felt an urgent need to intervene before Jonah discovered the unthinkable all on his own. “Jonah, son, look at me.”
The serious blue eyes settled on Caleb’s face. There was bewilderment in those eyes, and a sense of betrayal. Jonah was a child; he’d given a child’s trust to those charged with looking after him, and he’d been betrayed.
“Your other arm’s gone, son,” Caleb said quietly. “It got cut off.”
They both fell silent. Caleb imagined the realization sinking like poison into the boy’s mind. Jonah didn’t move. He didn’t blink. He didn’t speak a word for several agonized moments while he looked at his bandaged stump, wrapped in layer after layer of cream-colored gauze. There was a cap or spigot of some sort protruding from the bandage.
“Gone?” he asked, his voice cracking.
“It got all mangled in the shredder. There was so much damage that it couldn’t be fixed. They had to cut it off in order to save your life.”
“Gone?” Jonah said again. “It’s my arm. How can it be gone?”
“It’s a lot to take in, I know,” Caleb said. “I’m still … I can hardly believe it myself, except that I was there. The emergency workers saved your life. They came out right away, did what they could to stop the bleeding, and then they called a rescue helicopter. Life flight.” It had all happened just twenty-four hours ago, yet it seemed as though a lifetime had passed. “They brought us here to the hospital in the helicopter,” Caleb added. “You and me both.”
“We flew.”
“Yeah, we flew. Right up into the sky, like a bird or a dragonfly.”
“Isn’t that against Ordnung?”
Caleb pushed up one side of his mouth, an attempt at a smile. “Just like your daddy, you are,” he said. “To tell you the truth, I was more worried about you bleeding to death than I was about church rules.”
Jonah flinched and pulled his gaze away from the terrible, bandaged limb. His face was a picture of dull, uncomprehending shock. He had that look you might see on the face of a mother who’d just lost a child. Miriam Hauber had worn that look long after she’d lost a baby just hours after its birth. That same dazed, hollow nothingness, as if the world had suddenly become a place he didn’t recognize.
“Then what happened?” asked Jonah.
“Everything went real fast,” Caleb said. “I’m not even sure I remember everything right myself. They took you off the chopper while the blades were still going around, and they rushed you down to the emergency ward. Then it was like flies at a picnic, and you were the main dish. I had no idea such a crowd of folks could swarm all over a little old tadpole like you. They hung blood, and put in lines, and yelled stuff at each other, stuff I couldn’t begin to understand. Everyone worked real hard to save your life, Jonah. What happened was, the folks in the trauma center, the doctors and nurses and interns and so forth, they got you stabilized. What that means is they made sure your heart was okay and your blood pressure, and your breathing, so they could take you up to surgery.” It felt strange, speaking of such unfamiliar things, but Caleb saw no point in hiding anything from Jonah.
Jonah looked at the ceiling. “Where is surgery?”
“It’s … it’s a place where they took you to do an operation to save your life.”
“Is it where they cut off my arm?”
Caleb pinched the bridge of his nose, surprised to feel the throb of a headache. He didn’t often get headaches. “Yes, son. Yes.”
Jonah turned his attention back to the bandaged arm. “Were you there?” he asked. “I mean, when they were cutting off my arm, were you with me?”
“What? No.”
“I wonder if they used a saw, like Eli Kemp when he’s doing the butchering.”
Good Lord almighty. “I was in a waiting room, thinking about you the whole time. When the operation was done, they put you here in this place called the surgical intensive care unit. Hospital folks have been checking on you all night long. I reckon the doctors will be real pleased to see that you’re awake and talking.”
Caleb left a gap of silence for Jonah. Sometimes silence was needed, not more talking. Caleb had learned this when, in a single terrible moment, he became responsible for Jonah and Hannah.
Yesterday, though, when they’d rushed the boy off to surgery, he had been grateful for talk. He remembered pacing the waiting area of the emergency room, wondering what was going to happen next and not knowing whom to ask. That was when Reese Powell had approached him. Caleb could not remember what had been going through his head when she’d arrived. But he remembered turning to her, and feeling a small but noticeable measure of relief when she offered a change of clothes and then helped him navigate his way through the labyrinthine hallways of the hospital.
He wasn’t sure why she had taken an interest in him. Everyone else in the emergency room seemed to race from crisis to crisis, darting and feinting through an obstacle course of equipment, coworkers, frightened patients, and families.
Reese had looked very young to Caleb, though she projected an air of confidence. She was different from anyone he’d ever met, man or woman, in a way that tempted him to stare, like he’d stared at Niagara Falls or a shooting star. Her short hair was as black and shiny as the wing of a raven, framing a face he could look at all the livelong day. Of course, he had no call to be noticing the beauty of a woman, especially at a time like this, but noticing her like that wouldn’t change what had happened, no matter who was bleeding on the operating table.
When she’d started talking to him he had realized the source of that beauty was something simple yet powerful—compassion, combined with a fierce and earnest intelligence. She had this way of looking at him as if she knew how scared he was for Jonah and how much he needed to understand what was happening to his nephew. As she’d explained the terrible injury, Caleb had sensed the smallest glimmer of hope. He knew a medical student was only at the beginning of the practice of doctoring, like an apprentice carpenter learning from a master craftsman. Yet there were things that she knew, things he couldn’t even imagine. Things about the human body and the way it worked or failed to work. Through yesterday’s endless hours, Reese Powell had seemed absolutely determined to stick with him, answering not only the questions he asked but also those he didn’t even know how to.
All this seemed to be a lot to notice about a woman he’d only just met. But Caleb was like that sometimes. He’d meet someone and see exactly what that person was like based on a few minutes’ conversation.
It
