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 returned 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.