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Almost as troublingas the pain was the depression that came with the long recovery and confinement. At night, slipping in and out of a restless sleep, he would dream—or sometimes, he thought, simply remember—Virgil looking down at him as he lay on the ground, not knowing if he was dying.
Virgil’s head wound, and blood-covered face, was the result of a slug that had hit a tree branch a half-inch above his head, blowing splinters into his scalp. The wound had bled like crazy but turned out to be not serious, although, Virgil told him, it had itched ferociously for two months. Lucas didn’t know at the time that the wound wasn’t serious, and he didn’t know it in his flashbacks or dreams, either, and reexperienced the fear that Virgil had been shot in the head.
—
At the Targetstore, he browsed grooming supplies, lotions, and disposable razors. When he returned home, he popped a Vicodin and hobbled back to the TV room, where he dropped onto the couch, put his legs up on an ottoman—Weather refused to allow a La-Z-Boy in the house—and called up the streaming series calledJustified. The main character was a deputy U.S. Marshal named Raylan Givens, who was apparently in the process of shooting everybody.
More interesting, for Lucas, was that he was close to an actual deputy U.S. Marshal named Rae Givens, though she’d never be mistaken for Raylan, as she was taller, black, and female. Lucas shared his interest in the streaming series with his adoptive daughter, Letty, who worked with the Department of Homeland Security as an investigator. They were texting daily, both appreciations and criticisms. He was still on the couch, watching a third consecutive episode, when Weather called.
“I’ve got a problem,” she said.
—
Like this:
As Lucas was sinking into the couch, a six-year-old first-grader at St. Paul’s Friedrich Nietzsche Elementary School had fibbed about his urgent need to visit the boys’ room. Although his newly minted teacher had suspected that he was plotting to get out of the phonics lesson, she’d been so harried that she let him go with a stern warning to return as soon as he’d completed his mission.
He’d taken his time getting down the hall, taken his time using the low-hung urinal, carefully zipped up afterward—he’d already experienced the male affliction of an overly hasty zip-up—and on the way back to his classroom, poked his head into the open door of the teachers’ prep room. There was a lot of interesting stuff in the prep room, including, unfortunately, a fascinating guillotine-style paper cutter.
That morning, Weather had done a rhinoplasty, which she would not allow Lucas to call a “nose job.” From her office window at the University of Minnesota Hospitals, she’d seen the hints of the incoming storm, not dangerous billowing orange clouds, like asummer thunderstorm, that might be hiding a tornado, but dark and murky, the arrival of autumn, several weeks late.
After lunch she’d harvested skin from a man’s thigh and moved it to his forearm, to cover up the excision of cancer tissue that had been taken out earlier.
The skin graft was the last op on her schedule. That done, she’d changed out of her scrubs, into street dress, and returned to her office. Her assistant, Alice, was in her cubicle, on the phone to a prospective patient, while Weather met with a friend, an associate professor of history, about the pros and cons of breast-reduction surgery.
They’d gotten to the question of whether the professor’s husband’s desires were relevant, when a plastic surgery resident knocked twice, hard, on the office door then burst in without waiting to be invited.
“We got a good one,” he crowed, excited, his voice like a truck horn, urgent, hoarse, too loud. “Elementary school kid chopped off three fingers of his dominant hand with a paper cutter. A teacher’s aide picked up the fingers and iced them. Happened a half hour ago. They’re on the way. Bulthorpe told me to get you. He’s putting together a team, whoever he can find. I’m on it.”
Weather said, “Oh, shit,” and to the associate professor, “We’ll continue this later, Marie, but my bottom line is, you wouldn’t regret it.”
The prof said, “Go! Go!”
Weather went. Not to her first rodeo. On the way to the OR, she called Lucas, to tell him that she wouldn’t be home for dinner, and probably not until after midnight.
As she talked, she could hear the television in the background:MoreJustified. She told him what she knew about the incoming emergency, as briefly as she could. She added: “How bad are you?”
“Not bad,” Lucas said.
“On a one-to-ten scale?”
“Nagging. Maybe a two. I’m going to push it a little,” he said.
“Not too much. Don’t hurt yourself,” Weather warned.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Go take care of the kid.”
“You know where the Vicodin is.” And she was gone, dropping down a stairwell to the women’s locker room.
The kid arrived on a gurney, conscious and hurting, his father racing into the hospital a few minutes behind him, his mother five minutes behind her husband. Nurses and orderlies moved the kid into the OR as the suits took care of the paperwork, and Weather, another plastic surgeon named Senat Morat, and two residents scrubbed up. Morat was very good, but Weather was the queen of the OR.
Over the next nine hours, the two surgeons, with assistance from the residents, an anesthesiologist and an anesthetist, two surgical techs, and three nurses, put the fingers back on. They first removed smashed tissue that couldn’t be saved, trimmed the bones as little as possible, located and spliced tiny arteries and veins to get blood in and out, and rejoined nerves to make the fingers work.
The kid had been given a general anesthetic, knew nothing after he’d been wheeled into the OR, in pain, in shock, scared with pleading eyes. The gas passers were in and out during the entire procedure, watching the kid’s heart and lung function.
Not exactly routine, but it wouldn’t make the evening news, either.
—
