Part 6
He understood what she meant before he understood what it would cost him. She would not ask him to stay, because she had asked once and he had sat in the driveway.
“Caleb?” Gary said. “You there?”
“I’m not coming.”
Silence on the line, then the sound of Gary’s nicotine gum going double time. “You’re the foreman.”
“Put Ray up.”
“Ray’s fifty-eight.”
“Ray’s better on ice than I’ll ever be. He sharpened his gaffs tonight. He’s waiting for you to call.”
“This goes in your file, Caleb. I can’t have a foreman who sits out the worst storm of the year.”
“Then put it in the file.”
The gum stopped. “Caleb. I’m sorry about what you two are going through. I mean that. I still need you out here.”
“I know you do,” Caleb said, and hung up.
His hand was shaking, which made no sense; he’d stood on a crossarm in forty-mile winds with a hot line eighteen inches from his shoulder and never shaken. He set the phone face down on the windowsill.
Jenna was watching him. “Why?”
He pulled the stool over and sat down across from her, the isolette between them, the little monitor counting green numbers beside his elbow. For a minute he couldn’t start. Then he did.
“You know what Ray taught me first? Before knots, before anything. You never take anybody’s word that a line is dead. Dispatch says it’s open, you test it. The guy who pulled the fuse swears, you test it. Some farmer wires a generator into his dryer outlet and backfeeds the whole road, and the line that’s dead at the substation is live in your hands. So you put your own tester on it. Every time.”
Jenna didn’t move.
“After Clara, I’d rather be forty feet up in the sleet than in that house. Up there you test it, you ground it, and it can’t hurt you.” He looked at the isolette. “Monday a doctor told me he was dead and I took her word. I took everybody’s word. Even mine. I sat in the driveway because the house was the last place where I’d have to find out it was really true, and as long as I didn’t go in, I didn’t have to.”
Jenna pressed the heel of her hand against her mouth. When she spoke, it came through her fingers.
“Banjo didn’t.”
They sat with that while the ice ticked on the glass.
The night nurse came around the curtain at eleven-thirty, a heavyset woman named Pauline with reading glasses on a beaded chain. She looked from one face to the other with the expression of someone who had walked into a lot of conversations at the wrong time and had made peace with it.
“He’s stable enough to come out for a while if somebody wants to hold him skin to skin,” she said. “Mom, you’re first in line.”
Jenna looked at the isolette for a long moment. Caleb watched her want it.
“Dad hasn’t had a turn,” she said.
Caleb went cold all over. “I’ll pull something out.”
“I’ll handle the lines,” Pauline said. “You handle sitting still. Shirt off.”
He unbuttoned his flannel and then the thermal under it, and sat in the recliner Jenna gave up, and Pauline lifted Wes out of the isolette with the wires and IV gathered in one hand like reins. She laid him on Caleb’s bare chest, face turned to one side, the yellow hat crooked. Then she tucked a warm blanket over both of them.
He was lighter than Caleb’s climbing belt, and Caleb didn’t dare breathe all the way out.
Jenna pulled the stool close and sat with her knees touching the recliner.
At 1:15 the lights dipped. It lasted half a second, the overheads browning and recovering, and every monitor in the unit chirped once and fell back to its counting. A nurse across the room said, “Generator,” to nobody in particular. Caleb knew exactly what it was. Somewhere out on the hillside, a line had come down under the ice, and the hospital had felt it, and the transfer switch had done its work. He knew which feeder. He knew which poles. He knew Ray was out there in the dark with a headlamp and a bucket truck, or worse, on gaffs, because some of those poles stood where no truck could reach.
He didn’t move.
Jenna dozed with her head against the arm of the recliner. Caleb watched the ice come down, and the green numbers hold, and his son’s back rise and fall under his palm, and he didn’t move for four hours.
Somewhere around three, Wes’s left hand opened against Caleb’s chest. It opened slowly, the fingers spreading, and then it closed again on a pinch of chest hair and held on.
Caleb stopped breathing for a second. Then he made himself start again, carefully, so as not to dislodge anything.
At 5:40 his phone buzzed on the windowsill. Jenna woke and reached it for him. A photo: an ice-sheathed crossarm against a black sky, a single headlamp beam glaring off it. Under it, Ray had typed: 14’s hot. Your pole was a pig. Still got ten fingers.
Caleb typed with one thumb. Thank you. A second message came in under it, from Marlys: a blurry photo of Banjo asleep against the Kettunens’ back door with Caleb’s glove under his chin.
Jenna was looking at him over the phone. Her face was creased from the chair arm, and her hair was flat on one side.
“You stayed,” she said.
“I’m here.”
She got up stiffly, holding her incision, and pulled the stool closer still. Then she laid her hand on his forearm, over the blanket, over Wes, and left it there.
At seven Pauline told them transport would come for the MRI at seven-thirty. – Caleb didn’t hand him over until seven-twenty-nine. At a quarter past nine, Dr. Haugen came back from radiology without any pictures in her hands and asked them both to sit down…
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