Craig Davidson - Sarah Court

“It’s just tightness, Abs. Loosen up.”

On the eighth rep of her following set Abby abruptly hit total muscular failure. At the same time and at the very height of extension Abby’s right shoulder and left wrist broke. Her wrist re-broke: she’d first broken it years ago leaping from a house on fire. She zonked out. The sound of my daughter breaking apart — greenstick snap of her wrist, fibrous ripping of her shoulder socket — shocked me on such a purely auditory level that the bar slipped through my hands.

Four forty-five pound plates. A weight bar weighing forty-five pounds. Two safety clips weighing an eighth of a pound each—225¼ pounds fell the distance of a child’s footstep onto my daughter. Her windpipe would have been completely crushed had the bar not been checked by her chin, the bone of which broke into several pieces. Her eyes closed, then opened. They say she likely never regained consciousness. Only body-shock trauma. Blood hemorrhaged into both eyeballs.

I heaved the bar off her throat. Dislocated both shoulders doing so. She rolled off the bench. Her skull hit the rubberized weight mat. Her eyes tiny stoplights. Jaw hanging open. A dent on her throat where the bar crushed the cartilage-wrapped tube of her airway. Fingernails ripping at her neck hoping to gouge deep enough to let air in. My brokenwristed, broken-shouldered, broke-chinned, redeyed daughter crawling on the shockproof mat of the downtown YMCA. I grabbed for her. Abby’s hand swung wildly. My nose burst. Blood all over. Every part of her flexed so hard.

When the ambulance arrived an attendant slit her throat below the crimping. Threaded in a tube.

Our cerebral hemispheres begin to corrode one minute after oxygen is cut. Hypoxic encephalopathy. Cerebral hypoxia. More simply: black holes eating into the fabric of our brains. Wesley Hill, old neighbour and friend: his job was pulling people out of Niagara Falls. If they had been under too long it was no different than pulling turnips out of a garden. A Niagara Lobotomy. Abby’s neurologist— not Saberhagen — said Abigail had surrendered sixty percent neural capacity. Blood surging into her ocular cavities bulged and burst the corneal dams. She’s blind.

A week afterward purple bruises blotched my shoulders where they’d been pulled out of joint. The local rag painted me a monster. Dredged up Over and Out. My ex-wife secured a temporary restraining order that, following token legal wranglings, would become permanent. I cried easily at things of no importance.

That evening I found Saberhagen on his back porch shooting at squirrels with a pellet gun. Working on a Flatliner. A booze-puffed texture to his face. He’d been relieved of duties as neurosurgeon at the General. His scalpel had slipped a fraction. When the blade is inside a patient’s head, a slip is catastrophic. A patient may forfeit his childhood or sense of direction. Saberhagen, participant in the famous Labradum Procedure at Johns Hopkins, was disbarred from the operating theatre.

I said: “Why shoot the poor things?”

“Eating seeds I laid out for the birds. I’m not running a squirrel soup kitchen. How are you faring?”

“Guess I want to die, Frank.”

“If that happened to my kid I guess I’d want to, too.”

He went inside to fix us drinks. When he sat again, he said: “The very definition of freak accident. I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“A hell of a thing to happen, is all. Abby’s such a good gal.”

The evening shadows grew teeth. Frank said:

“Remember that kid who burnt down the fireworker’s house?”

“Philip Nanavatti. The kid’s name was…”

“Teddy. Wasn’t a bad kid. Just fucked up. In animals, there’s what’s called a biological imperative. What they’re hardwired to do. We’re the same except that little bit smarter. We’re not too smart as a species. Just enough to screw ourselves up. That kid, Teddy… burning things was his biological imperative. I was there when firefighters drug out what was left. A carbonized skeleton but Fletch, I swear: that boy died happy. Abby jumps out the window. Breaks her wrist… we do it, too. Break things. Ruin ourselves then ruin everything around us. Those closest we ruin worst. Ninety-nine percent is good intentions, I think. We want good things for others. To do good ourselves.”

Charter members of the Bad Fathers Club, the two of us. Men with matching polarities — we habitual if accidental brutalizers — amplify what’s worst in ourselves. Seeing it reflected in each other somehow justified it. All these years me thinking I wasn’t so bad and my only evidence being my neighbour, the surgeon, was cut from the same cloth.

“Could she be fixed, Frank?”

“Her brain can’t.”

“Eyes?”

“If you had a donor.”

“Ever done eye surgery?”

“Eyes are the newspaper route of the surgical world.”

“Could you do Abby’s?”

“The Eye Bank’s wait list is long as hell.”

“What if you had a donor?”

“… as a matter of skill, yes. I could. Changing sparkplugs. Thing is, I can’t. Red tape runs round that sort of procedure.”

“It’s the two of us speaking.”

“Even on a purely conjectural level I’d need to know you were serious. Not only serious about the procedure. About everything. Your frame of mind.”

“I’ve stopped buying green bananas.”

Frank searched my face. Finally, he said:

“There’s a loose consortium of businesspeople. Most surgeons know of them. For a price, you can get an organ. Only rule: don’t ask where it came from. And it doesn’t come cheap. Eyes won’t be all they’d take, Fletch.”

“These people are professionals?”

“Far as I know, you’re asking whether the mob is professional.”

Nick showed up. He now worked for a credit card company. Recently divorced. His kid, Dylan, was with him. A chubby boy smelling of peanut butter. I put my dukes up for playful shadowboxing. Halfhoping Nick would slug me. He pushed my hands down. Hugged me. His kid being there, I guess. Frank said something mean-spirited but ultimately truthful. I left.

The farmhousestands off the main road. Several dozen head of cattle sleep in the abutting pasture. James kicks the door open before the car checks up. Staggering around with Matilda in her cowl of bloody towels.

“My dog — my dog’s dying!”

Light blooms in a second-story window. A man in sleeping flannels leans out.

“She’s been chopped,” James tells him. “Bleeding real bad.”

“Chopped?”

“Scratched,” I tell the guy. “Clawed. Badger or something.”

“He said chopped.”

“He’s out of it. We thought you could help. Or tell us where the nearest vet is.”

A second sleep-puffed face, female, materializes.

“How bad is it?”

“She’s a tough dog,” I tell her. “But deep.”

The woman rubs the flat of her palm over her face. “I’m no vet, but I could stitch that dog up. Give me a minute to get decent.”

She meets us downstairs. A hard-shouldered woman stepping into a pair of galoshes. Husband taller and thinner with big-knuckled hands. A hunting rifle is crossed over his chest.

“He thinks you guys could be running a home invasion scam,” his wife says. “Show up at night with a sick dog, appealing to our tenderest feelings—”

“How do we know that dog’s hurt?” the guy says. “Towels soaked in red food colouring.”

“Fair enough,” I say. “I’m Fletcher. This is James and Matilda.”

“Michelle. Matt’s the hubby. We do all that work out in the barn.”

Frost-clad grass crunches underfoot as we make our way through cattle whose bodies steam like stewpots in the moon-plated field. I touch one: skin texture of a truck tire. Michelle unlatches the barn door. Lights screwed into high beams fritz and pop. She leads us to a metal gooseneck from which a darkly knotted noose suspends.