by Bill Rancic
It has to work. It has to.
He closed his eyes. She knew he was hanging on by a very thin thread. She said, “In a few hours we’ll be sitting in a warm building drinking hot coffee and soup. We’ll have real blankets and the good painkillers. We’ll have TV and Internet.”
Phil smiled weakly. “Sounds good,” he said. “You won’t leave without me?”
“No way,” she said, and took his hand. “You didn’t leave me. I won’t leave without you.”
The sound of the airplane’s rotors was growing louder, and outside the survivors were all cheering. Daniel, she thought. Daniel, they’ve found us at last.
25
“So they saw the smoke?”
Kerry goes silent while I turn around in my seat to get a better look at my son, to see his face. We’re coming to the end of the story now. Jackson’s been quiet for much of the ride, listening to his mom and me tell him what we remember, then what we only heard about afterward, when all the facts were known. Some of it, quite frankly, we’ve had to imagine for him, filling in the parts we didn’t see or don’t remember with the parts we heard about in the hospital, while we were recovering, and parts from the journal, that we couldn’t have known or imagined. It isn’t that hard. In the years since the accident, how many times have I thought about the one who isn’t here to tell his part of the story? Hundreds of times. Thousands, maybe. I’ve walked those paths with him through the snow and darkness, through the wind. I have thought about the way he felt, the things he feared, the decisions he made. I’ve thought of him nearly every day, wondering why I’m here and he’s not.
“Well, what do you think?” I ask him.
He scrunches up one side of his face and says, “They must have seen it. You wouldn’t be sitting here talking to me otherwise, right?”
“You’ve always been a smart kid,” I say.
Outside, the flat plains of Alberta have given way to the green hills and winding highways of the northern edge of British Columbia; soon we’ll be crossing over into Yukon Territory again. It will not be the same as the place we remember. We’ll be staying in the city, in a hotel with heat and food, with beds and blankets. The place will be brown and gold, the end of autumn, not the cold, dark, wintry landscape we lived in those five days, somewhere between hope and despair. In some ways I feel as if we’ve never quite left the place behind. It’s always there, lurking at the back of my thoughts, just out of reach.
“They did see us,” I say. “Your mom and the others made sure to put lots of green branches on the fire that morning, to make plenty of smoke. They made sure it was something the rescue planes wouldn’t miss, once the skies were clear enough. They saw us, all right. They circled the campsite a few times and dipped their wings. That’s what they do to let you know.”
“So Mom was a hero?” asks my son.
“All I did was help build the smoke signal,” says Kerry. “Other people were heroes then, honey, not me.”
“What about you, Dad? Where were you?”
I look over at my wife, remembering the day we were rescued. The moment the plane dipped its wings, as it circled the camp to the sounds of cheers, she came inside to sit next to me, let me know we were found. She picked up my hand and held it. The inside of the plane was dim; my thoughts were fuzzy, but I remember feeling, for a moment, that I might be able to fly myself, sitting so close to her, feeling her concern for me. I knew I wasn’t imagining it. I’d waited so long for her feelings for me to change, and they had. It was only friendship then, but it was enough.
I’d said, “If I die, I want you to know something.”
“You’re not going to die now, so don’t talk like that,” Kerry said.
“It’s still a long way back,” I said. “I need to tell you . . .”
“Shh.” She pulled the blanket up to keep me warm. “You don’t need to say it. I know.”
I coughed, painfully. “And here I thought I’d been so clever.”
Now there’s a sound from the backseat, and Jackson asks, “So how were you rescued?”
“We went outside, and over the hill we could see the helicopters coming toward us,” Kerry says. “I don’t think I ever heard such a wonderful sound in my life.”
“You got to ride in a helicopter?”
“I did. I was one of the first passengers on. Your dad insisted. He was the sickest one there, so he got to go first. He said he wouldn’t leave without me.”
“You wanted to make sure she was okay, too, didn’t you, Dad?”
I smile over at my wife. Kerry looks as beautiful as ever, but there’s a sadness around her mouth, a tightening that I know all too well. “Your mom was hurt, too. I couldn’t leave her behind.”
“And what about Daniel? What happened to him?”
Kerry’s face pales again. There are several things I would like to forget from those days in the Yukon—unlike Kerry, my memory of those days doesn’t have any holes—but foremost is that look, the expression on Kerry’s face when she first heard that Daniel was dead.
We were on the helicopter by then, me on a gurney, Kerry at my side. The rotors were so loud we couldn’t speak until one of the men gave us each a headset. He introduced himself as Bill Abernathy, the director of crisis operations for Denali Airlines. “We’re going to get you folks seen by a doctor in less than two hours,” Bill had said into his headset. “I give you my word.”
The relief I felt was short-lived. The next moment Kerry was asking for news of the two men who’d gone out into the wilderness to look for help. We still had hope then—surely Daniel’s plan had worked, because here were the rescue helicopters. They’d found us. Had they found Daniel? Was he the one who’d led the rescue planes to us?
“In a way,” Bill said, then told us how twenty kilometers west of the crash site they’d found two men in the snow, an older man who was already dead of a heart attack and a younger man, wrapped in blankets, suffering from severe exposure, his hands and feet and face covered with frostbite. By the time they’d gotten to him, Daniel was delirious, barely conscious, but Bill said when they loaded him onto the chopper he’d roused himself enough to tell them his name and that he was a survivor of Denali Flight 806. It was Daniel’s signal fire that had drawn the rescue teams back in this direction, Bill said. After searching above the storm for four days with no sign of our ELT signal, the airline had started widening the search grid, wondering if the pilots had put us down farther away from Whitehorse than the airline had originally estimated. But then just that morning a small twin-engine had spotted Daniel’s signal fire and sent word back to Whitehorse. They’d dispatched the rescue plane right away, which found the crash site three hundred kilometers southeast of the city of Whitehorse, about fifty kilometers east of the town of Teslin. The search had come back in our direction at last.
Daniel saved us, Bill said, but he had not been able to save himself. He’d died on the flight back to Whitehorse, his body half-frozen, his organs shutting down one by one. They’d found him a few hours too late.
Bill had brought Daniel’s journal. It had been wrapped in his pack, wet around the edges but mostly legible still. Kerry took it with trembling hands, and I held her hand as Bill told us what Daniel had done, how brave he’d been, how much he’d given up for us. I remember Kerry clutching that journal and sobbing all the way back to Whitehorse, sobbing Daniel’s name, for her own sake and the sake of the child she carried.
I’d never felt so helpless. I wanted to comfort her, be there for her, but it was she who was there for me. When the emergency crews were helping me into a waiting ambulance at the airport, Kerry stood above me pale and damp, her face washed with something that seemed like desperation. Probably she’d had too much death, too much loss—Daniel, and Judy, and Bob, and all the others. Or maybe she was just being brave. She grabbed my hand and said, “Don’t you die on me, too.”
I gav
e her a weak smile and said, “I may not have much say in the matter.”
“I mean it, Phil. Don’t you dare. If you die, I will kill you.”
“I won’t,” I said, and meant it. I would find a way to live, if I could. So Kerry and I went into the hospital together, warm for the first time in days, to have our wounds treated.
It turned out she had a fairly serious concussion; I had internal bleeding from a puncture in my small intestine, a slow loss of blood that would likely have been fatal within the next twelve to twenty-four hours. The doctor told me this later, when the danger had passed. If it hadn’t been for Beverly’s care, or if the planes hadn’t found us in time, I would likely have died, too.
Afterward, in the hospital, Kerry and I learned to lean on each other, Kerry sitting by my bedside or I hers, even while she mourned Daniel, even when she said she was sure the sadness would eat her until she disappeared. I knew that grief, I told her—I’d lived through it, too.
And then the strangest thing happened. I had lived through my grief, I realized. I had grieved Emily for years when I thought I couldn’t go on, but I had, and came out the other side still whole, still human, even when I thought every decent and good part of me was gone.
“I want it to stop. The pain, it’s too much,” she said to me once, only a couple of days before Christmas. The ward at the hospital was decorated red and green; my room was strung with colored lights. I loved those lights, the electric colors, gold and blue and red. I begged the nurses never to turn them off. In the reflection of the lights, Kerry’s face changed colors over and over. “When does it stop? When do you ever start to feel normal again?”
“You don’t,” I said. “The button never resets, not really. But you can still find reasons to go on.”
“Have you?” she asked, her face streaked with tears. “I mean, really?”
I took her hand. “For what it’s worth, I have.”
“I don’t know if I can ever be happy again.”
“You don’t have to think about that now. Right now it’s okay to be sad. Just don’t let it eat you alive,” I told her. “You have lots of reasons to go on. The baby most of all.”
I held her when she cried then, the same way that I held her up later at Daniel’s funeral, then at Judy’s. Eventually I helped her sell her condo, sorting through Daniel’s things, deciding what to keep and what to let go. I stood next to her the day she gave her notice at Petrol because by then it was clear that her injuries had made it impossible for her to work with computer screens and telephones any longer. I went with her to doctors’ appointments and made her dinner and helped her move. In turn she found me a new apartment near hers, took me to the movies, even went with me to pick out new furniture. She kissed me for the first time that day, more than a year after the crash. We’d found a soft leather sofa that Kerry said I had to get, and before I could turn to the salesman and say I’d take it, she caught me on the mouth, a look of surprise registering on her face as much as it must have on mine.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know why I did that.”
“Don’t apologize,” I said, nearly breathless. “Believe me, that was nothing to apologize for.”
Kerry and I were friends, and then we were more than that. Together we started to reassemble the pieces of our lives, little by little.
Now we’re passing a sign that reads “Whitehorse 10 km.” I’m still thinking of that kiss, that moment when we crossed that invisible line, when Jackson says, “So that means Dad is not my real father? Right? If Daniel was the one Mom was dating before the crash, then he’s my father.”
I feel my breath catch. It’s one thing to know it; it’s another to hear him say it out loud. You’re not my real father. I’ve always thought, or at least hoped, that there’s more than one way to be a father.
“Your dad is your real father,” Kerry says. “He’s been there for every important moment in your life. But he’s not your biological father.”
“So what you’re telling me is that Daniel Albrecht was my biological father.”
“Is,” I say. I won’t deny the man his place in my son’s life. Not now. Not ever.
Kerry is clutching the journal to her chest and talking fast now, the way she does when she gets emotional, or maybe it’s just that, like me, she’s worried about what Jackson will say next. “Your dad has loved you, been with you, since the day you were born. You couldn’t ask for a better one.”
“It’s okay, Kerry, let him have a minute,” I tell her. “It’s a lot to take in.”
We’re quiet again. The only sound is the buzz of the road under the tires.
Then Jackson says, “But it all could have ended differently, couldn’t it? If the plane hadn’t gone down, you would have married Daniel instead, right?”
Kerry glances at me, then says, “That’s true. I would have married Daniel and not your dad. But it did happen. Everything changed.”
I look over at her in the passenger’s seat, this woman I loved for so long without being able to say so. She takes my hand and says, “We had to accept what happened and move on. That’s all we have control over.”
When we came back to Chicago, I did my best to step into Daniel’s shoes. I was there for all of it—the ultrasound appointments, the Lamaze classes, the false labor. And when Jackson was born and placed in Kerry’s arms, the next person who’d held him was me. I’ve been his father that day and every day since.
“So it was all an accident,” Jackson says. “Everything.”
“Not everything,” I say.
I remember our wedding day, Kerry in her white dress, barefoot on the Lake Michigan sand, Jackson chubby in her arms, cradled between us, whining to get down and play in the sand. He was about a year old, just learning to walk. When I made my vows, I made them to him as much as to her. To love, honor and cherish. In sickness and in health.
I love them both, would do anything for them both. And yet there is always the ghost of Daniel in the lines of Jackson’s face, in his laugh, the sound of his voice. In Kerry’s memory, her sorrow. She says we are, both of us, carrying our ghosts around all the time—and if she can live with mine, then I can certainly live with hers.
Jackson has been quiet a long while. Then he says, “I’ve heard you two talking about Daniel before.”
I feel my breath catch again. “You did?”
“Yeah. I mean, it’s not like you never talk about him.”
Kerry looks over at me again. We didn’t think we were so obvious.
“I didn’t realize he was my father. My biological father, that is. But I’m glad.”
“You are?” Kerry asks.
Jackson is thoughtful for a moment. “Well, he sounds like a good person. Someone who would help other people like that. I’m glad I know more about him now. But Dad is my dad. It’s weird to think he might not have been, if things were different. But I’m not sorry.”
“No,” Kerry says. “Neither am I.”
And it’s true. I feel a strange lightening, as if a weight I hadn’t been aware I was carrying has suddenly fallen away. Whenever I’ve thought of Daniel these past ten years, it’s always been tinged with guilt. I took his place, this good man who did so much to help others—to help me—and I’ve wondered for a long time if I did the right thing, if I was worthy. Would Daniel have been a better father, a better husband? Would he have been more patient with Jackson, more fun? Would he have made Kerry happier, made her feel more loved? Has it really worried me so much that Jackson would reject me? Or would he understand that once Daniel was gone, we needed each other, Kerry and I?
No, I think—he does understand. Or he’s beginning to. This is the family he’s always known. He accepts it, the way he accepts his red hair and his freckles. It’s a part of him, like I am. Like Daniel is.
From the back Jackson says, “Will you tell me more about hi
m? What he was like?”
“Of course, honey. We’ll tell you everything we know.” Kerry takes the journal in both hands, turns in her seat and offers it to him. “Here,” she says. “Start with this.”
Jackson opens the book and says, “Was this Daniel’s?”
“It was. Now it’s yours,” Kerry says. “It will tell you how brave he was.”
“Oh.” I see him in the rearview, smiling a private smile to himself. “Thanks.” Then he says, “You must have been pretty brave too, Dad.”
My eyes are blurry, but I don’t want either of them to see me wipe my face. “Why’s that, buddy?” I say.
“Helping Mom. Keeping everyone calm. If everyone had started fighting over the fire that time, you might all have died.” He’s quiet for a minute, thoughtful. “And then everything you did for Mom, afterward. You took care of us.”
“I love your mom, and I love you. I’d have done anything for you two.”
We’re coming around the bend now. In a few more minutes we’ll be back in the city of Whitehorse, back where everything changed. Where we lost one future and gained a new one.
“So what are you thinking, honey?” asks Kerry. “Are you glad we told you?”
He’s quiet for a minute, then he says, “I guess so. I feel—lucky, I guess. Not everyone gets to say they’re the son of a hero.” He grins. “Much less three.”
I take a breath as the city comes into view around the bend. It’s a bright blue October day, the sun washing the green hills gold. I take my wife’s hand and say, “We made it. Look.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Bill Rancic is an entrepreneur, television personality, and motivational speaker, and author of the New York Times bestseller You’re Hired: How to Succeed in Business and Life, as well as Beyond the Lemonade Stand and I Do, Now What?, the latter written with his wife, Giuliana Rancic. The winner of the first season of NBC’s breakthrough program The Apprentice, Rancic appears before companies and organizations around the world on a variety of business-related topics and is a frequent guest on numerous daytime television programs, including Today, The View, and Rachael Ray, and various CNBC programs. He lives in Chicago with his two best friends, his wife and his son, Duke.