The 13 th tribe

[56]

Five and half hours after Jagger and Owen had carried Tyler into the ER, the boy was lying in a hospital bed, canted to one side by foam wedges to keep pressure off his back. Jagger eyed the machines arrayed around his son. They beeped and hissed and occasionally squiggled out a few inches of paper, a permanent record of his vital signs at that particular moment. One IV dripped antibiotics into a tube that snaked to a needle in his arm. Another of saline kept him hydrated. A vinyl bag hanging on the bed by Jagger’s knee caught urine from Tyler’s bladder, and somehow to Jagger that captured the enormity of what had been done: his son couldn’t even pee.

He held Tyler’s hand and tried to see past the oxygen mask to his face. Pale, except for his eyelids, which were the color of storm clouds. He could tell they had cleaned him up, but had either been sloppy about it or too careful: the rim of his ear was caked with maroon blood.

Beth sat in a chair on the opposite side of the bed, stretching to hold Tyler’s other hand. Her head was bowed in prayer, but as he watched she raised it and frowned at him. “God didn’t do this,” she said.

He closed his eyes and bit his tongue. She didn’t want to hear his opinion on that.

“Jagger?”

He hated the pain in her eyes, the redness that he couldn’t imagine ever going away.

She said, “Let this draw you closer, not push you away.”

He wanted to yell at her to shut up about that, to open her eyes to the way God really was, merciless and spiteful. Instead, he ran his hand over his face and pushed his fingers through his hair. “I need some air,” he said, turning toward the door. “And coffee. You want some coffee?”

She shook her head, and he stepped into the corridor. It was bright with fluorescents, reflecting off floors so polished they could have been liquid. Still, the place appeared as vacant as an office building on Sunday morning. To his right, at the far end of the corridor, a nurse crossed from her station and disappeared into a room. He turned the other direction and started walking. A wall of glass at the end, overlooking rectangles of undeveloped parcels and the low, white buildings of Sharm el-Sheikh to Naama Bay and the Red Sea. He spotted a door with a plaque showing a stick figure on stairs, pushed through, and descended.

At the first landing, he stopped. His lungs were keeping time with his racing heart, pumping air like a bellows in the hands of a spastic kid. Dizziness made his vision swim. He staggered and grabbed the railing, then stumbled into a corner and leaned his forehead against a pipe running from floor to ceiling. It was cold, and that’s all he thought about: the pipe and the way it cooled his skin… not about Tyler or the woman who shot him or God or anything but the pipe and its temperature.

Tyler.

The woman.

God.

Jagger groaned, and it turned into a scream. RoboHand gripped the pipe, and he leaned back. His real hand was squeezed into a tight fist, hurting from being that way for a while. He threw it into the wall, making an indent. He punched again and again until he broke through, and continued striking the edges, widening the hole, leaving bloody streaks and spots around it.

A hand seized his shoulder and spun him around. He pulled his fist back to strike the intruder. It was Owen, right in his face, glaring. He grabbed Jagger’s head, fingers curved around behind, palm over his ear, firm.

“I know,” he said, the words what you’re going through unnecessary, communicated through his gaze, and his expression said that he really did.

Jagger felt a measure of the chaotic jumble inside him flow out, as though taken by Owen, a burden shared. His fist opened, and his hand fell to Owen’s shoulder. He wanted to say something, to explain himself, but the sense that Owen already knew everything was so great that all he could do was nod.

Jagger had never believed that sympathy or even empathy helped anyone; intense emotion, agony, was unique to each person: a million starving people in the world didn’t help ease the stomach cramps of the man who hadn’t eaten in three days. But this was different. It was shared anger, grief, and pain, coupled with a solution; it was the one-legged man throwing his arm over the shoulder of another one-legged man because together they could both walk.

Owen pushed a box into his arms. “I guessed size eleven.”

Jagger lifted the lid to see new cross trainers and a package of socks. He nodded. “Thanks.”

“There’s a kahwa up the street.” Owen smiled at Jagger’s puzzlement. “A cafe. We have to talk.”

Jagger returned to Tyler’s room first, and Beth assured him there was nothing for him to do there at the moment, and she’d be fine if he grabbed coffee with Owen.

“Go get out of your head for a while,” she said. “It’ll do you good.”