Between You and Me

His stomach rumbled, the noise loud and profane in the unnatural hissing quiet of the hospital room. He felt slightly embarrassed by the urges of his body. When something this terrible happened, it just didn’t seem right that Caleb would feel hungry, that his whiskers would grow, that he’d have to take a piss. And yet, that was the case.

He went to the men’s room down the hall, relieved himself, and washed up with thin, watery soap from an old wall dispenser, drying off with flimsy brown paper towels. He was startled by his own reflection in the mirror above the row of sinks. There were no mirrors in an Amish household, of course. Mirrors implied pride and vanity, which had no place in an Amishman’s character. He rinsed the taste of sleep from his mouth, snapped his suspenders into place.

But there were no suspenders. He was still wearing the green shirt and loose trousers Reese Powell had given him.

He hurried back to Jonah’s room. Another hospital worker stood by the bed, marking things on a glass tablet device. A dark-skinned fellow. He smiled politely when Caleb came into the room. “Your son’s been stable all night,” he said. “That’s a good sign.”

“When will he wake up?” Caleb asked.

“That’s up to him, mainly,” said the man. “The doctors can tell you more during rounds. But you can go ahead and talk to him. He’ll be groggy at first, but if everything goes well, he’ll be awake and chattering away in no time.”

When the health aide left, Caleb returned to his vigil beside the bed. “Jonah.” He spoke the boy’s name a few times, just Jonah, and nothing more. Then, since the nurse seemed absorbed in her monitoring, he spoke some more. “Jonah, it’s me, your uncle Caleb. I’m here waiting for you to wake up, because we’ve got lots to talk about. Can you hear me, Jonah? Can you?”

The boy lay as still as a rock. He resembled a graven image carved into a gray headstone like one of those stone angels the English favored in their cemeteries.

“Jonah, can you hear me?” Caleb tried again. “It’s me, Uncle Caleb. Can you feel my hand on your leg? It’s right here on your knee. I’m sure worried about you, Jonah. I sure do wish you’d wake up so we could have a talk.”

He kept standing there, gazing down, his big thumb absently circling Jonah’s knee. Then he saw it. The tiniest flash of movement. The flicker of a shadow on the boy’s cheek.

“Jonah?” Caleb leaned a little closer. “Come on, little man. You can do it.”

The boy blinked again, then opened his eyes. He stared up, then squeezed his eyes shut as if to hide from the glare of the ceiling lights. Caleb kept saying his name, gently touching his knee and right shoulder, taking care not to focus on the thickly bandaged truncated arm. Jonah opened his eyes again—a squint of confusion. This time, he didn’t look at the lights, but at Caleb. He moved his lips, his bluish cracked lips, but no sound came out.

“You can give him a little water,” the nurse said. “He can have sips of water and ice chips if he wants, until the doctor says it’s okay to eat and drink again.”

Caleb grabbed a paper cup from the tray by the bed. “Here you go,” he said, angling the straw to Jonah’s lips. He shifted to their German dialect. “Easy there. Take it easy.”

Jonah drew weakly on the straw. Most of the water trickled out the sides of his mouth and down into the hospital pillow under his head.

“You can raise the bed with this.” The nurse handed him a remote control on a cord.

Caleb fiddled with the automatic controls until he figured out the button that caused the head of the bed to slowly raise up. Jonah looked almost comically startled by the motion, but when he saw what was happening, he relaxed. Caleb raised the bed only a few inches, just enough so the boy could swallow rather than spill. Jonah took one more sip then and finally whispered, “Uncle … Caleb.”

“That’s me,” Caleb said too loudly and too cheerfully. “I’ve been sitting around wondering when you’d wake up.”

“How long have I been asleep?”

“All night long, and then some.” Caleb looked right down into Jonah’s bewildered eyes. “Do you know where you are?”

The boy’s gaze darted to and fro. His poor face looked as though it had been slashed by vicious claws. “No.”

“We’re at the hospital,” Caleb said. “You got hurt bad, Jonah. Real bad. You had to have an operation. Do you remember getting hurt?”

“Um, not so much. I’m having trouble remembering,” Jonah said.

A nurse had warned Caleb about this. Victims of trauma often lost all recollection of the accident. Sometimes they never regained their memory of the specific event. It was a protective reaction. The mind didn’t want to remember a pain so deep and harsh.

“Do you remember going over to the Haubers’ to work?”

“Sure I do.”

Caleb was ashamed to realize that he’d been wishing Jonah would forget the entire morning. “Then you probably remember how I yelled at you,” he said. “I shouldn’t have yelled at you, Jonah. I should know better than yelling.”

“Your yelling doesn’t bother me, Uncle Caleb.”

“It bothers me that I yelled.” Caleb took a deep breath. “Do you remember the shredder?”

“The shredder?” Jonah frowned slightly. “I know how to work it. I know how to work all the equipment. You taught me yourself.”

The trusting expression on his face pierced Caleb’s heart. “Something got fouled up in the blades.”

“It happens,” Jonah said. “And I know how to fix it, too. I grab a longer stalk and push it real hard—” He stopped abruptly. His frown deepened and then softened. He shut his eyes. His lower lip trembled. “Uncle 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.