MEMORIES by TB's LMC RATED FRPT

A chance look at a newspaper article takes Gordon back to the days and months he spent recovering from his hydrofoil accident.

I don't know what got me to thinking about all that old stuff again. My recuperation, I mean. Well, yes, actually, I do, if I'd shut up and stop kidding myself. It was what happened to Elaine. I mean, I haven't seen or spoken to her in more years than I can count. But back when we were school kids in Kansas, she was one of the kids I hung out with. It was always me, Jacob, Elaine, Konner, Morgan and Alexis. It was like some weird rendition of ‘Our Gang' or something. We were inseparable for a few years there in, let's see, I think maybe seventh through tenth grades.

Then things just sort of happened. Elaine only had her dad; her mom had died when she was young, just like mine had. When her dad got a job transfer and she left, it was tough for the whole crew. After she moved, none of us felt like anything was the same anymore and all went our separate ways even though we were all still in the same grades together at the same school.

She had written me a few letters and sent a couple postcards, but I was always hell at writing back. She tried e-mail, too, and for a while that worked. I guess we kept the e-mail up until I went into WASP and then I just sort of cut ties with everyone. Curse of becoming part of an organization like WASP, I guess. I hadn't really thought about her too much until that article I happened to find on the Kansas City Star's website.

I wouldn't even have been at that site had it not been for the fact that Dad had asked me to find out how the different parts markets in Kansas were doing. He's thinking of moving part of our businesses out there and wanted some numbers, and I drew the short straw, so to speak. I pulled up the latest issue of what has become by now a purely on-line newspaper and an article right there on the first page caught my attention.

KC HIT AND RUN DRIVER SOUGHT

But I guess even that wouldn't have caught my eye if her name hadn't jumped right out at me from the first paragraph of the story.

Kansas City police are asking for the public's help in locating the driver of a car who, yesterday, hit a pedestrian crossing at Lange and Marsh streets. Thirty-three year old Elaine Pitcher had the right-of-way to cross at the crosswalk when a dark brown late model four-door sedan slammed into her.

As of the time this article is being written, the hospital will not comment on Pitcher's condition except to say that it's critical.

Police are asking that if you saw the events that occurred at approximately 5:25 p.m. on Wednesday, December 21st at the intersection of Lange and Marsh to call immediately and help bring the perpetrator of this hit-and-run to justice.

The article said nothing else. It wasn't enough. Something deep inside told me I had to know more. I looked up all the major hospitals in Kansas City and was lucky enough to hit the right one the first time.

"Hello," I said. "Could I please be connected to Elaine Pitcher's room?"

The phone rang three times before a female voice answered. "Hello?"

"Elaine?" I said, heart beating a hundred miles a minute.

"No, this is the night duty nurse, may I help you?"

"I'm trying to find out Elaine's condition."

"Relative?"

Shit. I'd forgotten about this part. Wouldn't tell me anything if I just said I was a friend. Okay, Gordon, it's a female nurse. Lay it on thick. I had a pad of paper and pen at the ready. "Well, of course, I'm a relative, Nurse..."

"Alicia. Just exactly how are you related to her?"

"We're engaged," I said softly. Now came the syrup. "I'm out of town on business and I saw the article in the Kansas City Star about the hit-and-run." I pretended to sniffle, just to really lay it on thick. "I'm so worried about her, I'm going to catch the first jet back home but please, I need to know first how she is."

I still had it, because Alicia fell for it hook, line and sinker. "Oh, I'm so sorry. What's your name?"

"Gordon. Gordon Tracy." And I sniffled again, just for good measure.

"Mr. Tracy, I'm so sorry, but Miss Pitcher is in critical condition." I scribbled "unmarried" on my note pad. "She was in surgery for four hours while they repaired her lumbar. They've got her on antibiotics and painkillers. She's regained consciousness a few times but we're pretty much keeping her knocked out." I kept scribbling as she talked.

"Lumbar?" I asked, my voice thick with emotion. And this time, the emotion was real. I even noticed my hand was shaking slightly. "What exactly are her injuries?"

"Four herniated discs, one cracked vertebrae...her doctors aren't optimistic that she'll even make it..." Alicia hesitated. "Mr. Tracy, I really shouldn't give out all this information, I could get into a lot of trouble. I only have your word that you're her fiancée." I had scribbled "herniated discs," "lumbar" and "cracked vertebrae" on my notepad.

"No, I understand," I replied, my voice sounding far away even to me. "Thank you, Alicia. I will be there as soon as I can."

As I cut the vidphone call, I just sat there staring at the words I had written down, I don't know how long. They brought back memories of my own accident so long ago. The hydrofoil crash that had almost taken my life and those words, those awful bone-crushing words my doctors had uttered started echoing around in my head like ghostly voices that I couldn't get rid of.

Never walk again...never walk again...never walk again...

Truth was, I'd been so full of painkillers, antibiotics and muscle relaxers that I remembered nothing of that time. My first memory had been waking three days later and feeling as though someone were taking a sword and grinding it through my back. I can't even describe it, there's no way to explain how that feels. I woke up screaming in pain. I registered my father's face. Nurses came, drugs were administered, and the blissful ignorance borne by the IV cocktail once again took me away to the clouds.

I got Dad his Kansas numbers. I saw the strange look on his face when I handed him the sheaf of papers. He knew something was on my mind, but a Tracy instinctively knows when to ask and when not to. Thank God for that, because now would not have been the time, Dad.

My mind raced forward as I slowly made my way down the front stairs and down to the beach. I kicked a shell, willing my thoughts elsewhere, willing the memories to re-bury themselves.

I looked at that thing called a walker and hated it. Hated how it looked and what it represented. Hated that anyone dared to think they could make me use it. It was ugly and it was for the weak and old. I was from WASP. From WASP! I wouldn't touch it. I wouldn't even look at it. No matter how hard Dad or the doctors or nurses tried, I wouldn't put a finger near it. They left it near the bed, I used my hands to throw it across the room. I hated what it meant. It meant I was no longer the man I had once been. I was weak. And that...that was unacceptable.

It was my father who had insisted upon the damn thing. The doctors kept saying I wouldn't be able to walk, not with all the sciatic nerve damage from crushed and ruptured discs. But Jeff Tracy got what Jeff Tracy wanted and a brand-new walker had been delivered in short order. I tended to agree with the doctors and thought my father was crazy. With the pain I was in, I couldn't even fathom sitting upright let alone walking. Especially with that walker. Weak, that's what it would make me.

Tracys aren't weak. Never have been. With a father who went to the Moon and then started what is now Tracy Corporation; with a brother who was a decorated Air Force man and an astronaut, another astronaut brother, an astronomer and an engineer, not to mention me being a hotshot WASP man, there was no such thing as a weak Tracy. I just sat there in my bed staring out the window, my arms folded across my chest, my useless legs sticking out from my body like two toothpicks some jokester of a God had seen fit to lay in front of me, to make me think I had legs that worked, to trick my father into thinking I could walk.

I knew better. For a long, long time, I knew better than he did, listening to my naysaying doctors who were thoroughly exasperated with my father by that time. The nurses had become sad and Dad...well, I guess he was the strangest of them all. The look on his face never changed once, not the whole time he was there. And he was there the whole time. That man left my room only to get food and coffee for himself. He went to the bathroom and showered in my hospital room's bathroom. He sat in a chair next to my bed probably 20 hours a day. But no matter what I said or he said, his face never changed.

I didn't realize it until years later, but the look in is eyes, that look on his face that never went away was a combination of two things: hope and determination. He would tell me, "Don't listen to those doctors. You will walk again, Gordon, but you have to be willing to try."

Try indeed. With that ugly gray metal thing that would make me look like a fool? I couldn't even get comfortable in bed on my own, it was too painful. Had to have my dad and the nurses and orderlies use the pads under my body to roll me left or right. If I wanted to be moved to my left side, I had to reach over and grab hold of the bed railings with my right hand; right side, had to reach with my left while they heaved. Couldn't move myself. Couldn't even pull myself up higher, had to have them do that, too, by pulling the sheets. I was helpless.

My arms and hands moved. I could flip through the 8 channels the hospital got. I could feed myself. But I couldn't get up to go to the bathroom. I had to have a catheter installed. That's the lowest of the low, to see your urine just sliding down a tube into a pouch hanging off your bed. I couldn't even stand at a urinal and take a piss like a man. If I wanted anything, anything at all, I had to ask my father, like I was a child again. Or if he was gone or asleep, I'd have to hit the call button and someone would come and ask what I needed.

"My left side is numb, I need to move to my right."

"I'm hungry."

"I need some water."

"I dropped the TV remote."

"The pain's worse."

I could do almost nothing for myself and yes, I went through a pity-fest that even now makes me ashamed to think about. I'm sure my face is bright red right now as the sun sinks lower in the sky.

"You will walk again, Gordon, but you have to be willing to try." Dad. He never left my side. I don't know how he ran the companies during that time. He was never on the phone that I knew of except to give updates to the family.

I'll never forget the morning I woke up and used the button to push the back of my hospital bed up so I could see what looked to me like miserably shrunken legs. I threw the covers off them and onto the floor and just stared at them.

Once they had allowed me to run through the yard from the swing set into the house for a cool glass of Grandma's lemonade. Once they had allowed me to play tag football during recess at school. Once they had kicked faster than anyone else, allowing me to win a gold medal at the Olympics. Once they had fit into flippers that allowed me to dive to the depths of the ocean. And once they had let me walk.

I sat there and looked at those legs. It was 3am and Dad was asleep in the room's other bed. I sat there and looked at them and remembered how I had used them. My back was aching, but it wasn't so I couldn't stand it, and so I just sat there and looked at them. I took stock of the rest of my body. I'd been fed by IV bags for so long I looked a lot thinner than I had been. The muscles I'd built up in WASP were smaller, but thanks to the tireless efforts of dozens of physical therapists none of my muscles had atrophied.

And so Dad told me that I could walk. The muscles in my legs were capable, I just had to block out what the doctors were saying. Psychobabble that left me more angry than I had been to begin with. If all those specialists said I couldn't walk, who the hell was my dad to contradict them? He didn't have a goddamn medical degree.

At that time I'd had no idea how close I'd come to dying. No idea that I'd barely lived at all yet here I was bitching about therapy and my father and my legs and that...I remember looking to the side of the bed. That fucking walker. It stood there silent and threatening, like it would pounce on me at any moment. And I looked it up and down in the dim light of my room like a hunter on safari sizing up my prey.

I was tired of lying around, I realized. I had no idea what was outside my hospital room. Was I at the end of the hall or in the middle? Was I on the third floor or the seventh? Even looking out the window it was hard to gauge the true distance to the ground from a hospital bed. Were there other people in other rooms who'd been in accidents like mine? Who were told they would never walk again? Who were forced to use the dreaded walker if they wanted to stay out of a wheelchair?

God, a wheelchair. The thought hit me line a bullet train. I couldn't imagine spending the rest of my life being pushed around the house by my brothers. With no ability to dress myself or clean myself. I'd gotten used to the sponge baths here, it was true, and I'd even gotten used to the catheter and its pouch. But to be that way for the rest of my life? But dammit, the doctors said I had no choice. I would be useless from the waist, down, for the rest of my days.

Father said differently.

Could I really stay out of a wheelchair? Was it...was it really possible?

I kicked a shell in the sand just as the sun hit the Pacific. I stopped and looked off into the distance, remembering hiking myself up into a sitting position. Remembered swinging my legs out over the side of the bed. I looked at my enemy...that walker...and cursed it as I placed my hands on its grips. But I decided then and there that I wouldn't let it beat me. I'd use the beast Father had introduced to me and then when I could walk without it, I'd toss it aside like the useless, worthless ugly thing it was.

Because no way was Gordon Tracy spending the rest of his life in a wheelchair. No way in hell.

I felt strong. My arms felt strong. And so I let my body slide off the bed and for a few seconds the flats of my feet hit that cold linoleum. For a few seconds I felt triumphant, felt that I had beaten my withered legs and the walker and the stupid doctors with their clucking tongues. I even felt like I could throw the walker across the room, like I didn't need it at all to walk, that I could do it on my own.

But of course, it wasn't that easy. Yes, for a few seconds, my feet did touch the floor. But then my legs crumpled beneath me and I suddenly found myself slumped on the floor without any idea how I'd gotten there. The walker rattled and fell before me, its wheels spinning as though laughing at my feeble attempt to do what it and my doctors knew I couldn't.

Dad was there in an instant, and the nurses appeared. They took the walker away, they got me back into bed with those stupid plastic bootie things on my feet that pump up and pump down to keep you from getting blood clots, they say. I remember being horrified at my failure. Why hadn't I just been able to walk? I'd given in to the dreaded walker, why hadn't it worked? My father had lied to me. The doctors had been right all along. Why had I even tried? Why?

"Son," my father said after the nurses went away, that same look on his face, "you have to start out small and with help. Rome wasn't built in a day."

I was so angry and embarrassed I couldn't even respond. He left me all alone that day, and I contemplated my life as it had been and as it was now. I was still loaded up with painkillers, still getting antibiotics, still tied to IV poles and stuck in that bed. But I had felt the floor beneath my feet for the first time in I had no idea how long. And it made me want more.

That had been the beginning of my willingness to try. To do what the physical therapists and doctors said I couldn't. To allow my father to hold my hand or arm as I struggled to come back from death. Because later on he told me that's what I'd done: come back from death. I also found out years later from Scott that he'd never seen our father so frightened in all his life as when he'd gotten the call about me being in the accident. The doctor had said, "We don't expect him to live through the next twelve hours," and Scott said Dad's reply had been, "The hell he won't!"

I remember when I could finally stand on my own inside the rectangular space of the walker. The doctors were shocked. The physical therapists were shocked. The nurses brought me flowers and cheered me on. And my father insisted that I be treated as though I would walk just fine again one day in spite of my spinal fracture, rather than as a hopeless lost cause.

I remembered how my back hurt so badly, how I tried to hide it, how my father would come into my room to find me with tears streaming down my face because I could barely handle the pain. He'd call for more drugs and it would calm me, but the one thing most people don't know about the drugs that relax you and take away your pain is that they also cause depression.

It was something I had never understood until then. Feeling so low, so alone. Dad could be right there holding my hand, yet I felt like I was completely and utterly alone in the world. I'd wake up in the middle of the night crying for no reason at all, or see something on TV and my eyes would fill with tears. Once again, less than a man. Tears at the drop of a hat, something no Tracy had ever let happen to them. But I couldn't help it. Dad explained it was the drugs, but it didn't really help to know that. Logically I understood, but logic completely fails you when you're under the influence of an IV cocktail.

It took me so long to even want to try and walk. And then when I failed it took me so long to try again. And because it hurt so bad I would cry at night when I thought my dad was asleep. I later found out he knew, that he'd been awake and heard me, but left me alone, left me to my grief and pain without stealing my dignity. Because that was the one thing I was slowly getting back, the thing I'd lost that I was bound and determined to have again.

Every day, twice a day the physical therapist would come. Every day I would grip the sides of the walker and place my booted feet on the floor. Every day I would hold my body up with my arms, hunched over the walker like a little old man, shuffling one or two inches at a time. And every time the therapist would leave, Dad would say, "You walked." That was it. At first I thought, yeah, right, I walked what, ten inches? Big deal. But then as time went by, as I did get better at it, as I kept going, as I started to believe and started to listen to my father's encouraging words, I realized that my doctors had been wrong and my father had been right.

I was going to walk again. In fact, I was walking. But don't think it was a bed of roses after that. God, just thinking about the first time I came home with that walker...it makes me cringe. I watch the purples and reds fill the sky as the sun sets and figure I should probably head back to the house. Even a tropical island gets a bit nippy in December.

The walker had ceased to be my enemy and had become an extension of me. I couldn't walk without it, that was all there was to it. I would try, but my back muscles were so weak and still so painful that even with the walker I was hunching over because I couldn't hold my own chest up. Walking without it wasn't even an option at that point. Everyone tried to act like nothing was out of the ordinary, but I noticed that things had been moved around so every space on the floor was wide enough for me and my walker to squeeze by. No one ever mentioned it. I guess they thought of the ugly gray thing as just another appendage, too.

And things had been going well for about a week. I had even taken a few hesitant steps without the walker. My doctors hailed me as a miracle, my father and grandmother fairly beamed day in and day out and I really and truly believed that one day I would be able to sprint again with the best runners in the world.

That was, until the night I choked on some water I was drinking and got into a coughing fit. I knew right away something bad had happened in my back. The searing pain, the feeling of someone sticking a knife into it – it was all I could do not to scream like a child. I had been alone in my room when it happened, and it was midnight. I thought, maybe I just strained my back muscles too much with the coughing and that I would be fine in the morning. Dad had had a panic button installed, kind of like the nurse's call button back at the hospital, but I wouldn't use it. The sudden pain was nothing. It would go away.

But it didn't go away. I didn't sleep a wink that night, just rolled around on my bed alternately moaning and squeezing tears out of my eyes, I think. I don't know if I can describe what it feels like. The muscles are spasming, so the back keeps jerking, which feels like someone's punching you. And the other pain, the knife-like feeling, it just doesn't stop. I wanted to die. I prayed to whatever God there was to please just stop the pain. I would do anything He asked, anything at all, just please stop it, let me sleep, make it go away. I was doing so well, I had been walking with my walker, I had been doing what I was supposed to, why this, now? Why did it hurt so much again like it had in the early days of trying to learn to walk again?

Finally at 4:30 that morning I could no longer stand it. In my hazed state I grabbed for the panic button but it fell between my bed and the wall and I began to cry in earnest at the injustice of it all. Even in my decision to seek out help I had to fight. It seemed I had to fight for every goddamn thing, and now was denied the ease of calling for someone to come.

But I knew I needed help, panic button be damned. I hauled myself out of bed, gripping my walker until my knuckles were white, basically using my arms to support my entire weight. I grunted and cried out with every step I took. The seven feet from my bed to my door seemed to take a hundred years and when I finally turned the knob and opened the door I couldn't help the sob that escaped my lips.

I guess Dad was the only one awake, or maybe just the only one with his door open at the time, but he seemed to appear in front of me out of nowhere. "What is it, Gordon? What happened?"

"I coughed, Dad," I said, tears flowing unchecked down my face. I couldn't stop them any more than I could stop the excruciating pain in my lower back. It felt like my entire lumbar had exploded. I could barely get the words out of my mouth. "I coughed," I repeated.

"You're in pain again?"

I could only nod. I felt his hand in the middle of my back and shook my head. Then he lowered his hand and I cried out.

"Oh, no," he whispered, running for his room. Within seconds he was back with shoes and a jacket on. He ran into my room, grabbed my jacket and somehow got it on me as my legs turned to jelly. My breath came faster and faster as I tried to cope with the knife feeling and to my surprise my father lifted me into his arms. I nearly screamed into the crook of his neck, grabbing handfuls of his coat in my fists. Here I was a grown man being carried like a toddler by my father, crying into his coat like a child.

But at the time, all I could think of was that I had never been more grateful for my father's presence than I was at that moment. After that thought, I knew nothing but blinding pain. I don't remember the ride to the hospital. I don't remember the Emergency Room. I don't remember the spinal specialists or nurses. I don't remember going in for yet another surgery, probably the eighth or ninth I'd had by that point. I don't remember anything until waking up two days later.

It was déjà vu. I was lying in a hospital bed with my father by my side. My throat was so dry I couldn't speak. He lowered the cup's straw to my lips and I drank greedily, but he wouldn't let me have too much. "What...happened?" I finally managed to say.

"When you coughed, you pushed out part of the repairs made on your fracture and the force of your coughing ruptured the discs between L4 and L5, and L3 and L4. They had to go back in and replace both of them with synthetics, and re-seal the fracture."

His face was sympathetic but also somehow seemed relieved. I could see it in his eyes; he was reliving the nightmare of the first time I'd been in the hospital. But there was something else. Something it seemed he wasn't telling me. "Why am I so hot?" I asked.

"Son, they also found a gram-negative bacteria in your bloodstream."

I shook my head. In the haze of morphine and whatever else I was on, I couldn't grasp what he was telling me.

"A bacteria that usually only lives in your intestines somehow got out into your bloodstream," he explained softly. "You were in the early stages of septicemia. If you hadn't coughed and torn your back all to hell, they wouldn't have known until..."

He didn't have to finish the sentence. Even in my muddied mind I knew the end of it. If I hadn't gone through all that extra pain, the knife-twisting, the sucker-punch feeling...if I hadn't cried like a baby in my father's arms that night, I could very well have been lying in a coffin that day instead of the familiar hospital bed I found myself in once more.

I couldn't even think of what to say. All I could do was squeeze his hand. He squeezed mine back and I knew that once again, Dad was there to stay with me until I went home.

And when I did go home a week later, I went home terrified. Terrified of coughing again. Terrified of sneezing. Terrified of doing anything that would force a sudden jolt to my lumbar or the fracture. I was bed-ridden, full of IV lines with about three different antibiotics to continue fighting the bacteria they insisted was no longer in my bloodstream but further insisted they still needed to combat. Morning and night a nurse came to give me new antibiotics. Every other day they took blood samples. And the whole time I was delirious.

At least, that's what Grandma tells me. She said I hallucinated, babbled, and told wild stories about things that were ‘really happening to me right then and there' which, of course, really weren't. She said I reminded her of Don Quixote fighting windmills, but the new drugs I was on were necessary to keep me still enough for my back to mend yet a second time. Aside from the disc replacements and shoring up that fracture, they'd also thoroughly irrigated all four of my incisions. And irrigated doesn't mean just pouring water on. It's akin to power washing the dirt off the outside of a house. Just thinking about it sends a shiver up my now-healed spine.

I look up as I climb the curving staircase to the house. I walk into the lounge. My father is still sitting at his desk, undoubtedly hell-bent on IR paperwork or something similar. He doesn't look up as I walk in and for some reason I sit down on the couch in the middle of the huge room. I just want to look at him and the memories continue coming at me, flowing like Niagara Falls. I can't stop them. And I realize I don't really want to.

The first two weeks are holes in my memory that can only be filled by others who tell me what happened. Vague images steal through the shadows of my mind; impressions of things that may have happened but more than likely did not. I was noisy, that much I know. I moaned constantly for the first week, then fell mostly silent as I was taken off the last of the antibiotics. My medications were then reduced to muscle relaxers and painkillers that my grandmother proclaimed would bring a horse to its knees.

Like clockwork she doled them out to me. She didn't have to, Dad kept insisting I should have a round-the-clock nurse, but Grandma's more stubborn than all the Tracy men put together and still insisted she was perfectly capable of giving me pills if I needed pills. Makes me smile to think of how spitfire she was about it. I wish I'd been coherent enough to hear her arguing with Dad. Scott told me it was funny as hell.

Water was all I drank, soft foods were all I could eat. I think we kept Yoplait in business for an entire month with my diet. My temperature was checked every twelve hours, and pillows were stuffed all around me by the attending nurses Dad finally got to come in for a few hours a day, or Grandma, who said she knew best for her grandson, or whoever else happened to be there at the time, to try and take the pressure off my spine and keep me comfortable enough to sleep.

For a long time after I started getting better, I felt like I had missed so much of my life. From the day of the accident to my first coherent day after the ninth surgery, it had been well over three weeks. The world had changed a bit. My family had changed a bit. And I, in my illness, had missed nearly every moment of it. Moments I could never have back. Two family birthdays. Gone. Alan's race win. Gone. The early talks about International Rescue I didn't even know about. I missed Grandma's pies and the beginnings of carving out the hangars on Tracy Island. I missed Scott and Virgil's stories about their hot dates and high times in the Air Force and at Denver Tech.

That first coherent night I remember lying in my bed, my father's soft snores telling me he'd once again fallen asleep in a nearby chair there in my room. I remember thinking about the things I had missed as I had fought first for my life, then for my mobility, then for my life again against a deadly bacteria and once again against the enemy that was my own back. Because it does become your enemy. It's a part of your body that has always worked but now refuses to obey your commands, refuses to do what it was made to do. It is something to be disowned, something to be yelled at, something to abhor. And yet there it is – still a part of your body no matter what you do. And still not working right.

The surgeons were amazing, and technology to heal ills such as mine was advancing every day. But every day I was there in bed and the world was still turning without Gordon Tracy. Oh, it wasn't a pity fest by any means. It was a revelation of sorts, I guess you'd call it. Because I realized that the fun bantering with Alan over the sink in the morning while trying to shave was something I hadn't experienced in weeks. I realized that the pranks I'd played on all my siblings hadn't been played on them in weeks. I realized I had no idea how my dad's companies were doing now, nor how much money they were making.

I didn't know what had happened to my former WASP buddies, or what the outcome of the hydrofoil accident had been at WASP HQ. Dad had avoided every question I tried to ask about that. I hadn't felt snowflakes on my face – after all, it was December. I was finally starting on more solid food, finally really getting my appetite back, but once again the walker which had once become my friend now stood unused in the corner of my room. My father hadn't even mentioned it. Everyone talked in hushed tones. I realized that the one thing I hadn't heard recently was laughter.

Those small, silly, insignificant moments are the ones you suddenly hold onto. Alan pouting for no good reason. Scott barking at you like you were one of his cadets. Watching Virgil paint beautiful landscapes like a true master. Sitting by silently as John found just one certain star with his telescope and quietly explained its significance. Getting drunk on someone's birthday and listening to Dad's old Air Force stories over and over again, then passing out and waking up with the world's worst hangover the next morning.

I smiled as these memories returned, but it was during the wee hours of that morning about three-and-a-half weeks later that I resolved to try one more time. I silently shook my fist at whatever power lived up in the heavens, Father's words coming back to me, and said, "You aren't taking me down again. You aren't because my father says you aren't."

The thought startled me into the present. I looked up at my dad; he was scribbling something on a notepad. He must have felt my eyes on him, because in short order he looked up, met my eyes and smiled. It startled me because for the first time I realized that the only reason I had lived after the accident, the only reason I had learned to walk the first time, the only reason I had made it through all those surgeries and the septicemia...the only reason I was sitting here now as a fully functioning member of International Rescue was because my father had told me I would live, and then that I would walk.

On the strength of my faith in the man who sat before me, I got well. My belief in him made me well. I frowned as a lump formed in my throat. How had I never seen this? How had I never seen that it had been Dad who'd picked up a spirit as broken and twisted as my body had been; picked it up, held it and made it whole again?

"What is it, son?" His voice makes me jump slightly as I realize I've been staring at him.

But I can't speak. That night when I laid there contemplating the small moments in life, the moments so perfect that time almost stands still, like standing on the Olympic podium or watching the nose of Alan's car cross the finish line or seeing footage of Dad first stepping out of his spaceship onto the surface of the Moon...that night I knew I wanted to miss no more of those moments.

And so I woke up and forced myself to sit up, grimacing because of the pain. But I did it. "Dad," I said, loudly enough to wake him.

"What is it, son? Need meds?"

"No, Dad," I shook my head as he turned my small bedside lamp on. I reached out with my arm and pointed over to the corner of the room. His eyes followed my outstretched finger and he smiled, gray eyes twinkling. He nodded and retrieved my walker, setting it towards me so I could swing my legs around and grab hold of it.

And I did. My feet hit the hardwood floor. My hands gripped the sides of the walker. I looked up at my father and saw something that at the time I didn't recognize. It was faith. He believed one hundred percent that I could do it. He always had, even when the doctors had said no. And now, he was believing in me again. Believing enough for both of us. I looked down at my feet once, ignored the backache and used my arms to pull myself out of bed. For a full minute I stood there, supported mostly by my hands and arms, yes, but I was still standing, facing my father man-to-man at last.

Dad smiled. And though the days, weeks and months that followed were full of hard work, sweat, tears, pain and a lot of falls and bruises, slowly but surely I gained my strength back. My legs became stronger and one time I remember realizing that as long as I had my back brace on I could actually shuffle around without the walker. I began to be able to take a shower by myself with no help from Dad. I began to be able to go to the bathroom by myself with no help.

I did exercises to strengthen my back muscles, and like a miracle, those muscles strengthened enough that my back started being able to hold my chest upright. I woke up one day and got out of bed to find I was no longer hunching. I was walking like a man instead of an ape. Then I realized that for twenty minutes at a time I could actually sit upright rather than spending all my time lying down. It was unbelievable to actually be able to sit on the couch with Alan and watch a car race from start to finish! Such small victories, but victories I had earned. That I had paid for. And victories that would not, I now realized, have been possible without my father.

"Gordon?" His voice snapped me back to the present and I blinked.

"Yeah, Dad," I said hoarsely, my voice full of emotion I didn't know how to express. Dad got up from his desk, crossed the room and sat down next to me. Not too close, but close enough for me to know he was there for me.

"Are you okay?" I nodded. The lump in my throat prevented words. "What are you thinking about?"

How could I tell him? How could I tell him that it had taken me thirteen years to finally understand that I owed everything to him? Sure, I had to do a lot of hard work, but he was the one who made me believe the hard work would be worth it. I sat there on the couch next to him completely pain-free because of his strength. Because of his Tracy stubbornness and his faith. Because of his love.

But the only thing I could get out of my mouth were two simple words. "Thank you."

He cocked his head, trying to figure out what on earth I was thanking him for. But looking into my eyes he must've seen it because he nodded his head once and that look...that look from way back when I'd first awakened after the accident...it was back. Then he smiled, the biggest smile I think I've ever seen on his face.

"You're welcome, son," he replied, his hand reaching out and squeezing my arm. "You're welcome."

With that, he got up and walked out of the lounge. That one person could have the power and fortitude to bring another back from the brink of death was something I had never really contemplated. In a way, I suppose my brothers and I did that all the time, but we did it physically, for the most part. Pull someone from a burning parking garage, save someone from a collapsing mine, rescue men trapped in a sub on the ocean floor. Our rescues weren't quite the same as the rescue my dad had performed on me.

And my mind wandered back to Elaine. I had no idea if her father was still alive or not. If he was, did he have the same strength Jeff Tracy had? I was certain that Nurse Alicia had been about to tell me they didn't even know if Elaine would live – could her father, through sheer force of will, make her live as mine had? Or if he were dead, did she have anyone at all to pull her through? Alicia had believed I was her fiancée, which made me believe Elaine was single. How about friends to help give her strength? To give her a reason to live? Did she have children, maybe? If so, were they old enough to be able to be there for her?

What would I have done if I had been alone in that hospital room after they resuscitated me? After they'd had me on the operating table for umpteen hours? Would I have lived if my father hadn't been there? I suddenly doubted that I would have. And I knew from what the nurse had said that some of Elaine's injuries were very similar to those I'd had. If she had no one...somehow it occurred to me that she would die. As I would have without Father.

That's when I made my decision. Aquanaut of International Rescue or no, I had someplace I had to be. And it wasn't on Tracy Island. The memories began to trickle back into the corners of my mind as a new resolve filled me. I would find out whether or not Elaine had a Jeff Tracy. And if she didn't, she was going to find one...in his son.