Stephen White - Critical Conditions

I woke without my alarm the next morning, feeling an unfamiliar confidence that triumph and tragedy had finally traded places and that life was about to resume its usual precarious balance. I drove to Children’s early, met briefly with Merritt, dictated a discharge summary, and signed Merritt’s discharge order. Although I felt more hopeful about Merritt’s legal situation than I had since I’d seen the bloody clothes, I didn’t tell her about Andrew’s confession. The Boulder police had a lot of confirming to do. I would let Merritt’s Uncle Sam be the bearer of all those good tidings.

Sam arrived at the unit right when he said he would and squirreled Merritt out of the hospital through a side exit, successfully avoiding a crush of media that, to my dismay, had somehow been alerted to her pending discharge and who were intent on chronicling her journey to join her sister in Seattle. While I rushed back to my house to prepare for my flight to see Lauren, Sam drove his niece to the Trent home in Boulder and waited while she packed some things for her trip to rejoin her family.

Reluctantly, I had agreed to drive to the Denver airport with Sam and Merritt. Transporting patients to airports was an ethical quagmire I would rather not have waded into, but the discharge team had convinced me that Merritt needed chaperoning until she was safely in Seattle and I convinced myself that it would give me a good opportunity to observe Merritt and test out the wisdom of releasing her from the hospital.

With his wife gone, Sam was playing single parent to Simon, and Lucy had either volunteered or been cajoled by Sam into spending her day off accompanying Merritt the rest of the way to Washington. While Sam was getting Merritt home from the hospital, Lucy was watching Simon. Since she would need her car to get back from DIA after she completed her round trip that evening, Lucy and Simon were going to meet us at the airport.

Merritt and Lucy’s flight to Washington was scheduled to depart an hour and fifteen minutes before mine. I sat in the backseat of Sam’s car on the drive to the airport. The time I observed between Sam and his niece was playful and lighthearted, as they argued the relative merits of his love, hockey, and hers, basketball. Merritt finally agreed to go to an Avalanche game with her uncle, and I felt a stab of loss that I might not be accompanying Sam to any playoff games. Sam promised not to miss a basketball game next season at Boulder High. Watching the two of them banter, I realized these were the first jovial moments I recalled experiencing from the moment days ago that Lauren had received the phone call that her mother was sick.

We arrived at the airport a good hour before Merritt and Lucy’s flight.

I’d already recovered from all my initial annoyance with Denver International Airport. It is halfway to Kansas, there is no getting around that, but once you get there, the place works. DIA is attractive, spacious, and efficient. Every trip out there costs twenty extra minutes by car; every flight in or out saves at least that much aggravation. Every time I land at another airport I appreciate DIA more and more.

But in all my trips I had never checked a bag at DIA. My carry-on habit wasn’t a protest against DIA’s oft-maligned automated baggage system but was, rather, more philosophical. My feelings are this: if I can’t fit it in a carry-on, I figure I don’t need it. Merritt’s packing philosophy was a little more liberal. She was traveling with a duffel bag the size of a pregnant sow and a suitcase that didn’t have a prayer of fitting in the overhead compartment.

Sam pulled his car up to the curb of the check-in level on the United Airline’s side of the huge tented terminal so we could check Merritt’s bags. Lucy and Simon would meet us later in the train station down below the terminal. She figured Simon would enjoy watching the trains come and go.

A Skycap grabbed Merritt’s bags from Sam’s trunk and I waved Sam off to park the car. The Skycap perused Merritt’s tickets to discover her destination, and quickly attached computer-generated tags to her luggage. He placed the bags, one after the other, on a nearby conveyor belt and the luggage immediately disappeared into a rubber-toothed tunnel.

The baggage system at DIA is the stuff of local and national legend. Being a carry-on devotee, I’d never examined it up close before and was fascinated watching its humble curbside beginnings. This was, I decided, like viewing one of the headwaters of the mighty Mississippi.

“Where do they go?” I asked the closest Skycap, pointing at some disappearing suitcases.

“The bags? Down a floor. Underneath the terminal, there’s six big stations that collect bags from the curb, six more that collect bags inside at the ticket counters. Automated scanners read the tags to discover where the bags are supposed to be goin’, then they get loaded on these tele-cars, like little railroad cars you might see in a, you know, coal mine, and then it shoots ’em, the tele-cars, right down to your gate on tracks. More tracks down there than at Gran’ Central Station. The tracks go every which way for a while, then they all join in the middle of the terminal and scoot straight down a tunnel to the concourses. Those bags be in your plane before you’re off the train.”

“It really works?”

“You bet.”

“What’s that?” I pointed at a separate setup a few steps away. A large flat gray bin, maybe eight feet by four feet and a foot high, sat empty on a big stainless steel tray.

He smiled a toothy grin. “You recover your manners and get around to showing me some ’preciation for my help with the young lady’s bags, I’ll show you how it all works.”

I gave him five bucks and he placed another customer’s ski bag in the flat gray bin. “This one’s already tagged. These skis are going home to Omaha.” He punched a code on an adjacent keypad, a stainless steel door slid open, and a stainless steel cradle carried the gray tray in the same general direction Merritt’s bags had just traveled. A moment later, another empty gray tray automatically slid into the place of the one that was schussing the skis to Omaha.

He said, “Oversized bags, skis, golf clubs, and stuff like that go in those gray trays. I punch in a code. Elevator takes ’em down and puts ’em in the system. They get loaded on double cars and go right to the concourse.”

“Same system?”

“Same one. But the cars be different. They use big double tele-cars for these oversize bins. This stuff’s too big for the beige bins on the single tele-cars. But the same system.”

“And it really works?”

“God be my witness. It does.”

I realized I’d lost track of Merritt. I looked around and spotted her thirty or forty yards down the curb talking to someone whose back was to me. I thought it was a man. I started down the sidewalk to join her so we could go inside to find Sam and get in line to retrieve our boarding passes.

With his left hand, the man was pointing at a car, a recent-model, dark blue Lincoln Continental, that was idling beside them at the curb. His right hand was on Merritt’s back.

She took a step away-toward the terminal, not the car-and, with a quick move, he grabbed her arm. To me, it didn’t look like a friendly gesture, but she didn’t scream at first. A second later, though, she was mounting a vigorous effort to try to shake free. Failing, she looked my way. I knew what terror looked like when it was reflected in Merritt’s eyes, and I decided she was terrified right then, and I started to run toward her. My first thought was that the man was a particularly aggressive reporter who had somehow tracked Merritt to DIA.

I closed about half the distance and watched Merritt try to free herself from the man’s grasp with a violent shove to his chest. It didn’t work. Then she lifted her left foot and pounded hard on the man’s instep. He released his grip for a split second and she leapt backwards, sidestepping a large woman cradling a large child. The man recovered quickly and was no more than a yard behind her. Merritt saw him, and without hesitation dove headfirst into one of the big gray four-by-eight trays that carry oversize luggage into the automated baggage system. This one was just beginning its journey to the concourses. In addition to Merritt, that particular tray’s cargo was an aluminum tube almost a foot in diameter and five feet long.