My mind slowly stumbled over what my eyes were taking in. Why is there a cop in my kitchen? Why is Mom screaming? Why do I feel sick? A man in black stood with his hands folded and his head down. I didn’t move.
Mom fell to the floor then, her small frame making a loud thud as her legs gave out from under her. I could hear her sucking in shallow, useless breaths as she began to make her way to me. Her face was bright red and her short hair was disheveled. Mom never left the house, even to go to the gas station, without spending an hour on her hair and makeup. The woman in front of me was a mess, the sight of which caused my heart to pound in fear. I didn’t want her to come anywhere near me. I held on to my sleeping bag, frozen in place, as Mom crawled towards me, her bare legs making sticking noises against the linoleum. She tried to pull herself up by grabbing onto my arm but she collapsed again, unable to stand.
I still have nightmares about Mom’s contorted body slithering towards me, howling, unable to catch her breath. Pain isn’t a feeling or a description; pain is tangible, the long-term effects burning years after the wounds have closed.
I stared at Mom, barely able to make out her eyes under all the tears. When she finally spoke her voice sounded thick, her words stuck under the same weight that was keeping her on her knees. “Honey, there’s been an accident.”
You know how the spokes of a bike make clicking noises when you ride? And when you go faster the clicking speeds up? That is what my thoughts sounded like as they accelerated in my head. Accident. Ok. A car. Your car. We have to go to the hospital. We have to go now because they’re working on you in surgery. You lost your legs. Paralyzed. We’ll build a ramp. You’re in a coma. I need to -
“At the airport,” she continued, cutting off my brain. Choking sounds followed each word that she spoke.
I blinked once, maybe for the first time since she came to me. The wave hit then, the rush of air washing up from my toes and into my lungs, swirling through my ears, boiling my blood. Something like deranged butterflies hit my stomach and I felt the back of my neck tingle. “Is he dead?” I asked.
Of course you were.
Mom bobbed her head up once and another howl escaped her mouth. Her fingers dug into my arm but I didn’t feel the pain from her nails. I dropped the sleeping bag and screamed, reaching for my hair, pulling it in my fists. I toppled to the floor, almost knocking Mom over.
She kept a grip on me. “It was instant. He didn’t feel a thing, there was nothing that could have been done,” she moaned, sounding like she was still trying to convince herself.
What I didn’t know, what I couldn’t have known, was that while I was dropping Emily off at her house, Mom was on the front porch watering her flowers. The police and the black car came. As the officers got out and began to approach her she started to yell at them. “Was it my daughter or my husband? Was it the car or the airport?” For a few agonizing moments, she didn’t know who was dead, her pilot husband or her teenage daughter with a new drivers license. For what I am certain felt like punishment for everything she had ever done wrong in her life she had to brace herself for the death of either her husband or child.
I feel such guilt that she was alone. I should have driven home quicker. I should have gotten up earlier.
You had called Mom about thirty minutes before the crash to tell her you were going to do one or two rounds of take-offs and then you’d call her back so she could join you at the airport. The plane was due for a wash and you needed her help. Your call never came.
I shouldn’t allow my mind to go down this road, but it is impossible not to – you should have stopped flying one take-off earlier. You should have taxied one minute longer. You should have stopped to talk to another pilot before getting back in the plane after you called Mom. If you had, you wouldn’t have died. The wind would have passed without pulling you down.
The police didn’t want to tell Mom what happened to you on the porch. They didn’t want to make a scene and disrupt an otherwise lovely Saturday for our neighbors. When Mom refused to move they picked her up and carried her into the house. Once inside, all they had to say was ‘airport’. Mom had only a couple of minutes to try and grasp what had happened when she saw my car pull into the driveway. She had tried to communicate to the police that she wanted to tell me without them standing in the kitchen, but I came home before they felt they could leave her by herself.
The technicalities of your death are relatively simple. You were taking-off and had reached the approximate height of a telephone pole when the draft you were coasting on dissipated. There was no time to compensate, and so you went down. The left wing struck the ground first, sending your plane into a cartwheel. A few other pilots saw it happen. When it was over, they ran to your body, slumped into what was left of the cockpit.
You died from head trauma. It annoys me to see planes crash from higher altitudes, burn with fire, and yet the pilots walk away unharmed. Each time I see them on the news (which happens often enough to wreck several days for me each year) I don’t feel angry that those pilots survived. That would be wrong. But I do feel angry at you that you couldn’t find a way to survive.
No matter how many times Mom told me you had no time to think and no time to feel any pain, I know it isn’t true. You had to have had a second, even if it was the space of a heartbeat, where you knew something was wrong. Were you thinking about Mom for that heartbeat when you knew you would never see your wife again? Did you have time to think about us both? Were you scared?
I’ve decided that there is no such thing as an instant death. There are moments that stretch on and on, no matter how fast our hearts race against them. Sometimes I am afraid we will always be trapped in that instant, that breath just before you were dead and neither Mom or I knew how much we were about to lose. Every time I catch myself thinking about that moment I collapse inside all over again, the weight of the possibility that you could have lived is too much to bear.
People came to the house. My friends filled up my bedroom, talking quietly among themselves while I sat on the bed, staring at the wall. Emily’s parents sat in the kitchen with Mom while she called our relatives in Missouri.
The day passed and the crowd slipped away, home to appreciate their families, thankful they weren’t us.
Mom’s brother, Terry, and his girlfriend stayed over in the guest room. Emily and I put our sleeping bags on the living room floor, watching movie after movie. Mom went up to your room where I can only imagine the loneliness she felt in the bed you shared for nearly two decades. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night beside my husband and I am torn between wanting to curl up against him and a fierce desire to sleep as far away from him as possible. It is as if I want to prepare myself for the day when he is ripped away from me, as if the blow would be lessened by living my life at a distance.
Late in the night, unable to sleep, I wandered up to my room. I turned the lights on and looked around at my belongings. I started to open and shut drawers. I took items from my shelf. I dug through the mess in my closet. I was overcome with a need to find something was ours, something that held a memory so strong I would be comforted into sleep.
I sat on my bed, surrounded by pictures and keepsakes, sifting through them. Mom must have heard me from your room. She appeared in the doorway. “What are you doing, Sarah?” Her eyes were swollen, her voice hoarse.
I stared at Mom and felt utterly lost. “I don’t know.” I inventoried the mess I had made, the piles on the floor. “Mom,” I said, a plea.
Mom came over to me and sat down on the bed. “Let’s go back to sleep,” she murmured, wrapping an arm around my shoulders. I began to cry. I would never be able to find what I was looking for. I let Mom lead me back to my sleeping bag as if I was once again a little girl who had snuck out of bed after having a bad dream.
CHAPTER FOUR
Lake Sherwood, Missouri was miles away from a city. There was a brown sign with white lettering indicating the turn to Lake Sherwood from the main r
oad, which was easy to miss to anyone who didn’t know what they were looking for. A few miles down that dirt road led to a baseball field, a small parking lot, and a little office next to a gate. Though it would have been simple to drive a car around that gate residents of Lake Sherwood felt privileged to live in an elite, private community. Past the gate the road curved up and down hills, paved in some sections and unpaved in others. There were around thirty homes, spread far apart from each other, nestled deep in the woods. In the center of the community was a lake, complete with a marina, a beach, and a swimming pool that overlooked the lake. A community center of sorts was stationed in between the pool and the beach. On the lower level was a snack bar that served the best hot fudge sundaes I have ever tasted. Life in Lake Sherwood was simple, and the childhood I spent there remains alive and well in my heart.
There was a small gas station fifteen minutes outside of Lake Sherwood, which meant if we wanted anything more than cigarettes, gas, beer or bait we had to drive an hour into Wentzville. Between our distance from town and my parents’ tight budget, we lived a life without certain luxuries. I doubt I grasped what a vacation was until we moved in Minnesota, where nearly everyone headed to Florida or Mexico at some point during the harsh winter months.
My family rarely ate out. Even if we had had the extra money, where would we have gone? There was a McDonald’s on the main stretch of road in Wentzville, the town my grandparents lived in, and sometimes they would take my cousins and I there for lunch. We would play on the plastic playground in between bites of hamburger or chicken nuggets soaked in various sauces. Getting McDonald’s was a very special treat.
When Pizza Hut came to town, McDonald’s couldn’t compete. We were hooked.
I’m not sure where my parents came up with the money for weekly take out food, but each Sunday Dad and I would drive out of Lake Sherwood, past Wentzville, through more farm country until we eventually arrived at a small strip mall with a Pizza Hut. Mom and I would share an Italian Sausage pizza while Dad usually ordered a pizza with everything on it for himself. Mom and I were very plain eaters, and though Mom had dinner on the table every night when Dad got home from work her meals were a rotation of the same five entrees. I’m sure Dad looked forward to Pizza Hut Sundays as it gave him an opportunity to eat something other than hamburgers and pork chops.
Dad would leave me in the car while he went into Pizza Hut, often with the engine running and the radio playing softly. When he came back out he would put our pizzas on my lap for me to hold for the nearly hour long drive home. We usually had breadsticks with our pizza, and the garlic and marinara smells were intoxicating, the anticipation of the greasy, spicy pizza made my stomach rumble and my mouth water.
The drive was so long that when Dad and I returned home our pizzas needed to be re-heated in the oven for a few minutes. (I wouldn’t experience a pizza being delivered to my front door until 1994. We went overboard, ordering Dominoes Pizza two or three times a week, amazed at the convenience and thrill of food being delivered to our house. I had the same fascination with the first ice cream truck that I saw drive through my neighborhood.) We would bring plates and napkins into the living room and while we ate we watched America’s Funniest Home Videos. This was another treat for me because the only other time we ate meals in the living room was when one of us was stationed on the couch nursing a cold or the flu.
To pass the time in the car to and from Pizza Hut I asked my Dad questions. I had an endless supply of ‘whys’ and ‘how comes’ in my arsenal. To his credit, Dad answered everything I threw at him.
“Dad, have you ever stolen anything?” I asked once.
He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel for a minute, hesitating for the first time at my inquiry. “I built a lot of model airplanes when I was a kid. There was one that I worked on for a long time, and when I finally finished it I didn’t have enough money to buy paint. Your grandparents didn’t have the extra money to buy the paint for me, so I stole it.”
I was stunned. “You did? You really stole?” I shifted in my seat so I was looking right at him.
He nodded. “I snuck back home and painted my plane. But I couldn’t fly it. If Grandma and Grandpa had seen it painted they would have wondered where the paint had come from. So I kept it hidden in the basement. Felt guilty every time I looked at it.”
The idea of my father stealing anything was a lot to take in. I wasn’t old enough yet to understand that parents had likely broken every rule themselves that they enforced on their children. But not all parents are honest about this. They tell their kids not to drink when they were getting drunk at high school dances as teenagers, they order their kids not to have sex before they get married when they were the ones giving it up in the backseat of a car after prom. I appreciated my Dad’s honesty. He didn’t shield me from the world.
When I consider what my Dad stole, I can’t help but applaud his efforts. He didn’t arbitrarily steal a candy bar, just to see what it felt like, an impulse most people have at some point in their lives. Even as a kid, planes motivated him. He didn’t let anything stand between him and his passion, including money (or the law). His childhood hobby would become one of the biggest joys of his adult life. I certainly don’t condone stealing but I’ve got to admit, I admire his dedication.
Our house in Lake Sherwood was on top of a steep hill completely surrounded by the woods. We had a backyard that was abruptly fenced off by a privacy wall of thick trees. A turkey feeder filled with corn kernels attached to one of the trees brought wild turkeys into our backyard by the dozens. Two narrow paths were cut on either side of our property that led into the woods. During hunting season men in bright orange jumpsuits would appear out of nowhere, heedless of a little girl playing on her tiny swing set as they carried their giant guns in search of deer.
Our nearest neighbor was at least a mile away down the path on the left of the house. The path to the right went on and on; I don’t know if I ever saw the end of that trail. Dad would take me out on the trails with no real destination in mind and no clock to tell us when to come home. When we went on a walk anything was possible. We wiled away many afternoons searching gloppy mud puddles for tadpoles. I liked to collect tadpoles in old metal Folger’s coffee cans and try to raise them into frogs. On other trips we would set out salt blocks for the deer to eat. A few days later we would return to find nibbles and licks taken out of the salt. “Try it,” Dad would say, and obediently I would kneel down in the dirt and lick the places the deer had already tasted.
Dad and I discovered the Great Valley on accident. We were on a walk when we happened to notice a slight detour off the right side of the path. As we meandered our way over roots that made perfect steps down the steep hill we heard the sound of rushing water. We walked faster, both of us excited, and when we reached the bottom of the hill we were in a valley with creeks flowing rapidly through boulders and fallen trees. Tree trunks that had come to rest over the streams created bridges begging to be crawled over; stacked stones made intricately patterned waterfalls. “Daddy! We’ve found the Great Valley!” I exclaimed.
I was obsessed with the 80’s movie ‘The Land Before Time’. Not only did I love dinosaurs, but the saucy three horn was named Cera. I spent hours running around on all fours bashing my head into couch cushions, convinced I was demolishing boulders and taking out T-Rexes with my invisible horns. Discovering the Great Valley in my own backyard was almost more excitement than I could handle.
From that day forward whenever we went for a walk we always went down our secret staircase to the Great Valley. It became our spot, our world, and I never imagined leaving it behind. I believed, as children will, that the things and places I loved would always stay the same. I suppose I believed I would stay the same, the concept of growing up a distant and obscure place in the future.
Dad worked for a company that was bought out by Minnesota based Supervalu in 1993. I heard that expression discussed over many a dinner but had no idea what it meant.
Dad would become one of the few employees offered a job with Supervalu. My parents had a difficult choice to make. They could stay in Missouri and search for a new job and risk financial instability, or move to Minnesota with secure employment.
They decided to take the job in Minnesota. My Dad was the first and only of his siblings to move more than forty-five minutes away from his childhood home in Wentzville. Even my cousins who decided to go away for college stuck close to Wentzville, and the few that moved away for jobs or relationships inevitably returned to Missouri. We were the only ones to leave for good.
Before we left Lake Sherwood behind Dad and I made one last trip to the Great Valley. Dad tried to be upbeat, but eventually he gave up and just held my hand as we walked through our woods. When we had chased each other around every tree and sufficiently soaked our jeans splashing in the creeks, when we couldn’t stay any longer, with just the slightest nod of his head Dad led us back to the path that would take us home.
Before we started to climb our steps, Dad stopped and pulled out a knife from his back pocket. He scraped away the bark on a tree until he had a clean canvas. I watched with young, damp eyes as he etched our names into the trunk with the tip of his knife. He picked me up when he finished. “Now we will always be here, you and me kiddo.” He carried me the rest of the way home.
Mom gave me my bath every evening, thoroughly checking for ticks and scrubbing layers of dirt off of my knees and elbows. Is there a better feeling then the way a mother wraps you up in a towel after a bath? That simple gesture, the gentle way she dried my hair and helped me step into my kitten footie pajamas instantly took me from wildly energetic to drowsy and content.
Immediately following my bath I got to choose two books from my bookshelf for Dad to read to me. I would lay beside him on the big couch in the living room, my damp hair soaking into his shirt while he read. It’s odd and incredibly touching that it was my Dad who read to me each night. While Mom and I were a duo of bookworms, Dad never read for his own pleasure (the monthly Kitplane magazine notwithstanding). But he dutifully read to me each night, the same stories, over and over, always doing the voices. There were nights I was able to talk him into a third book, and on the occasions when I was exceptionally sweet I could get a fourth.
Taking Flight Page 2