Chapter Seven

I sought the Lord and he answered me,

And delivered me from all my fears.

Psalm 34:4

THE MOMENT MIKE’S FEET were on the ground, Anna was whisked from his arms and onto a waiting gurney, and the paramedics began evaluating her. She was smiling and happy when Kevin and I ran to her, but we were afraid to hug her, and we couldn’t get close enough to do more than touch her face for a moment, her leg for another moment, telling her over and over again, “We’re here, Anna. We’re right here. We love you.”

“Daddy,” she said, “I lost your headlamp. I’m sorry.”

Kevin half laughed. “That’s okay, baby girl, that’s okay. I don’t mind.”

After all that waiting, all that slow, painstaking movement, it felt like a sudden tornado of activity with Anna at the eye of the storm. There were so many hands on her, stabilizing her neck and head, strapping her onto the body board, checking her vitals. Hurried feet crunched through the dry leaves and sticks, hustling the stretcher toward the waiting helicopter.

Running after them, I tried to make sense of the voices I was hearing, a blur of dialogue between radios and rushing figures in the dark field.

“Trauma center… prepping OR… anticipation of spinal injury…”

“… severe abdominal distention… could be looking at a ruptured spleen…”

“… on our way now… gears up in about ninety seconds…”

“Abdomen is severely distended and hard to the touch. Anna, does this hurt when I press here?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Where else does it hurt? Can you show me?”

“It’s kind of… everywhere.”

As we approached the perimeter of whipping wind from the helicopter blades, someone stepped in front of us and said, “Mom and Dad. We need one of you to come with us. Just one.”

We looked at each other, immediately knowing everything that was unspoken. I saw in Kevin’s face that he didn’t want to let Anna out of his sight—never wanted anything to take her away from him ever again—but he knew that she would want her mommy at the hospital. He saw in my face that I needed to be by her side, but it tore me apart to leave Abbie and Adelynn, who’d just been through a horribly traumatic experience of their own.

The decision was made without a word and only a moment’s hesitation.

“I’ll go,” I said.

“Yes. Okay.” Kevin nodded. “I’ll meet you there.”

While the flight nurse secured Anna for takeoff, the paramedic took my elbow and maneuvered me into the cockpit next to the pilot, firing instructions as he buckled me in.

“Ma’am, don’t touch anything, okay? Very important. Don’t touch any of the knobs or buttons or anything. When we touch down, you wait for me to come get you. Just stay put right here until we help you out, okay? Ma’am, are you understanding me?”

“Yes, sir,” I said woodenly. “I understand.”

“Here’s your headset.” He parked heavy earphones on my head, positioning the mic next to my cheek. “You’ll be able to hear everything. You’ll be able to hear Anna, and she’ll be able to hear you if you talk to her. The nurse is right there with her.” Before he closed the door, he smiled and said, “Don’t worry, we’ll be back on the ground before you know it.”

I nodded, enveloped by noise—the jackhammering of the chopper blades, the crackle of radio traffic in the headset, the rushing of my own blood inside my head. The pilot communicated our status and ETA to the trauma center at the hospital and to the flight nurse and paramedic behind us, and they were communicating back to him. I couldn’t tell who was talking when.

“… female, nine years old…”

“We are good to go, Fort Worth.”

“Approximately eighty-five pounds. Four feet, five inches. No obvious head trauma. Abdomen is distended, rigid and tender on palpation.”

“CareFlite, we’re standing by in trauma one with spinal and brain injury team.”

Spinal and brain injury…

“They have to assume the worst,” Kevin had told me when the chopper set down in the field. “They have to be prepared for the worst. That doesn’t mean the worst is inevitable.”

I repeated that to myself now.

“Ready on the right.”

“Ready on the left.”

“Patient secured.”

“Nose right, tail left… Fort Worth, we are gears up.”

There was a small jostle and sway as we lifted off the ground. As we rose up and the earth fell away, I looked down at Kevin standing there, one arm around Adelynn, the other around Abbie. Their faces were small and white in the wash of headlights from the emergency vehicles. Kevin’s expression was etched with a grim determination I’d gotten used to. He wanted to be with Anna, but now she was in capable hands, and even if there had been room for both of us to go, one of us had to be on the ground for Adelynn and Abbie.

With my whole heart reaching out, I looked down on the retreating chaos and kept my eyes fastened on my family. Tinier and tinier. Disappearing. They were seeing Anna and me disappear the same way, receding into the stars above our house. Kevin and I had developed our MO: divide and conquer. But sometimes I felt that divide like a scalpel blade, and this was one of those times. I felt a part of myself being left behind in the dark pasture.

We’d gotten used to it, to the extent that a person can get used to losing a limb over and over again, but I wondered if Abigail and Adelynn felt it as a choice I was making, to be with Anna instead of them. Would they look back and remember only that I left them yet again? Would they be able to forgive me?

“Where’s my mommy?” I heard Anna’s voice in the headset. “I don’t see my mommy.”

“She’s on board with us, Anna. Your mommy’s right up here.”

“Ma’am?” The pilot touched my arm and gestured to the headset. “She can hear you if you want to talk to her. Just go ahead and say something.”

I understood that. And I wanted to talk to her. I wanted to say, I’m here, baby. Mommy’s here, and my brain was screaming, Why can’t I say something? Why am I not comforting my child?

The words just weren’t there. I couldn’t even force out the simple syllables of her name. I felt as frozen and distant as the crescent moon hanging on the horizon below me.

“Your mom’s here, Anna. She’s right up front by the pilot,” the flight nurse was saying. “Annabel, don’t try to turn your head, sweetie. Keep your head still.”

“Why?”

“We want to make sure you don’t have any broken bones in your neck, so let’s just keep very still until we get to the hospital where they’ll give you some X-rays and make sure everything’s okay, and then we’ll take the straps off.”

“Okay,” Anna sighed. “The lights are so pretty.”

“You’ll feel a little pinch here, all right, Annabel?”

“Are you giving me an IV?”

“Yup. I’m sorry.”

“Oh, that’s okay,” Anna said amiably. “I was just curious. I’ve had like a million shots and IVs since I was six. Mommy showed me how to blow the pain away till it’s done. Like this…”

“That’s a good technique,” the nurse said. “Sometimes people hyperventilate.”

“Yeah, I picked up a few tricks. Like how to mess up the blood pressure cuff. It feels cool when you bend your arm.”

“Oh, that is a good trick! But let’s not do anything like that right now. I need you to stay still for me, Annabel.”

The radio chatter resumed, a running dialogue between the flight nurse and the trauma center monitoring Anna’s blood pressure and heart rate. Flight status and landing instructions passed between the pilot and the ground. I forced myself to focus and breathe.

This is really happening.

The Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex was a carpet of lights below us. A pattern of skyscrapers and streets emerged as we swooped in, circled low, and landed on the rooftop at Cook Children’s—the one part of the medical center we’d never seen. I felt the helicopter settle. In less than a moment, a door flew open on the far side of the roof, and the trauma team poured out onto the tarmac, running with a gurney and equipment on wheeled racks. They swarmed around Anna, swiftly shifting her stretcher to the gurney.

The pilot took my headset as he delivered brusque instructions on how to get out. A bracing rush of cold wind hit me when the paramedic opened my door, and then I was down on the tarmac, running after the doctors and nurses already hauling back toward the rooftop door.

“I’m right here, Anna! Mommy’s here!”

I’d found my feet. Found my voice. The whole bizarre situation had thrown me for a momentary loop, but now I was on familiar ground. I knew how to do hospitals. I caught up to the trauma team and stayed close by Anna’s side, dropping back for only a moment as they banged through the doors into the bright lights.

“Wait! Wait!” she cried out. “What are you doing?”

A nurse wielding a pair of scissors opened the front of Anna’s shirt in one swift motion. “Sweetie, we have to cut it so we can see where you’re hurt.”

“That’s one of my favorite shirts,” she groaned.

“Well, she’s alert.”

“Overall, she doesn’t look too much worse for wear,” the ER doctor said. “Jesus was with this kid today. I’ve never seen anyone fall headfirst from that height without serious spinal and head injuries.”

“Annabel, I’m going to press on your tummy here. Does this hurt?”

“No, but is Dani here? Dani Dillard. Can you tell her I’m here?”

“Dani’s not here tonight,” said the nurse, “but I’m a friend of hers. Is there anything I can help you with?”

“Never mind,” said Anna. There could never be a substitute for Dani.

Monitor wires and IV tubing snaked out around Anna’s body. One nurse picked through the bark and debris in her hair, looking for evidence of a head injury while another assessed her neurological responses.

“Can you feel me tapping here on your knee, Annabel? Okay, good. And how about right here? And here on your ankle? Let me see you wiggle your toes, Annabel. Wiggle those toes for me.”

Anna wriggled her bare feet. That was my last glimpse of her as they swept her down the hall to begin a barrage of MRIs and CT scans.

Her precious, muddy toes wriggling.

ON ANY GIVEN DAY, Adelynn or Abigail might or might not have shoes on. Not Anna. She was like her daddy. I almost didn’t go out with him when I met him in college, because he was almost always barefoot, and I thought that was just so odd. The barefoot quarterback. Kevin was a straight arrow who loved to play football and made it sound noble when he talked about it. He had a scientist’s brain and a caregiver’s soul and was all about commitment to God and family. He was also great to look at. Still is. I don’t hate that a bit.

Falling in love, getting married, having Abigail—it was all so easy. We were just doing what came naturally. Be fruitful and multiply, right? That’s such a beautiful, bountiful way to express it. Sadly, it’s not always as easy as it sounds. After Abbie was born, I got pregnant almost right away, but I lost the baby just short of the second trimester. I got pregnant again and lost the baby at eight weeks. Testing revealed an abnormality in my uterus. We were told we’d have no trouble getting pregnant, but our chances of carrying the baby to full term were about 50/50.

Trusting in God’s good will for our little family, we tried again and had Annabel. Her entrance into the world was dynamic and unique. She was delivered by her daddy, who had delivered countless babies of just about every other species and was thrilled by the idea of bringing Annabel into the world. Things got intense when the baby presented with the cord around her neck, but it was nothing Kevin couldn’t handle. I felt safe and completely loved, and our blue-eyed baby girl was born. We named her after Anna, the elderly prophetess who saw baby Jesus in the temple and recognized him as the Messiah, plus bel for beautiful.

Two years later, when Adelynn was born, Kevin opted to let the OB deliver her. With the complications of Annabel’s birth, he’d had to shift into doctor mode; this time around, he wanted to enjoy it as an undiluted daddy moment.

We had our three precious girls—the family we’d hoped and prayed for—but in five years, I was pregnant five times. Each miscarriage was like an emotional and hormonal body slam. Each baby brought pure joy, but along with them came all the work and wonder of motherhood—sleep deprivation, diapers, laundry, chow-slinging, and pediatrician appointments. Powering through the care and wrangling of three rambunctious tots year after year, Robo Mom came out to take care of business, and a small, struggling part of me got pushed into a dark corner.

I genuinely thought I’d processed it all at the time, and I am by nature a happy person, but while Adelynn was a toddler and preschooler, I began to experience spells of depression and anxiety. Both Kevin and I were stunned and alarmed when a major bout of depression came out of nowhere, or so it seemed, and dragged me out to sea like a riptide. We were on our way to visit Nonny in Corpus Christi, but as we traveled, I became physically sick and emotionally immobilized, which was baffling to me and scary for the girls. I’d always been the dynamo supermommy; suddenly I couldn’t stop shaking, couldn’t think through the ingredients of the day.

Thank God for Nonny, who flipped into mega-Nonny mode and took care of me and wrangled the girls during that trip. Loved me. Never judged me. Just helped me get through it. She did far more than a woman in her eighties should be expected to do; I felt wretchedly guilty and grateful. It was one of the many moments in life when I was grateful for the powerful women who surround my girls, including the matriarchs of Kevin’s family: Gran Jan, Nonny, and Mimi.

Things got worse before they got better; at one point I descended into this very deep hole in my soul. I didn’t want to die, but the pain and anxiety were just too much to live with—which is how I so keenly understood Annabel’s desire to leave it all behind and be with Jesus. When I look back on it, trying to find some meaning in the whole experience, trying to trace its thread in the greater tapestry, all I can come up with is the idea that perhaps God was preparing me, too—hollowing me out like the tree, lending me the open insides and homing instinct of Jonah’s big fish—so that I would have the capacity to hold Anna and take her where she needed to go.

This is a very long-story-short version of it, but you probably know the rest: counseling, pharmaceuticals, and the fact that life goes on force a person to march through that shadowed valley. And there are a lot of people on that march. I wasn’t alone. And if you’re in that place, I just want you to know: You’re not alone either.

Ultimately, while I prayed that God would give me Nonny’s unstoppable energy and Mimi’s unfailing love and Gran Jan’s unshakable faith, I had to find my own way of mothering, my own path in life. I muddled through and went forward, hoping that my girls would see that a woman can still be energized and loving and faithful, even if she stumbles and falls once in a while. It seems that a fully lived life is going to be a bit of a roller coaster, not a flat go-cart track that just takes you around and around in a safe little circle. I want my girls to know that.

There’s a wooden sign posted in the powder room at our house, right above one that says “LOVE YOU MORE”: “Life should NOT be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in an attractive and well-preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, chocolate in one hand, martini in the other, body thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and screaming, ‘WOO HOO, what a ride!’ ”

Mimi’s passing was the end of an era, but no tragedy. When we told the girls she was gone, we knew they’d be heartbroken. We would all miss her terribly, but Mimi was such a gift to the people she loved and who loved her, she left us overwhelmed with gratitude.

“It’s cause for rejoicing,” I told the girls. “She lived a long, wonderful life, full of fun and love and laughter. Now she’s with her Savior in Heaven, singing with the angels forever and ever, and we’ll meet up with her there someday.”

I rather liked the idea that she was there waiting for us, preparing a great big Sunday dinner for the whole family and keeping an eye on us in the meantime.

AS THE LIGHTS OF the CareFlite helicopter disappeared into the night, Kevin stood in the field with Abbie and Adelynn. All around them, the rescuers were breaking down their equipment, high-fiving and talking about going to get some food. Mike sat on the tail end of the truck with a water bottle, utterly exhausted, but he stood up and shook Kevin’s hand as Kevin and the girls headed back to the house. My friend Debbie was there moments later, washing dishes with nervous energy, making sure the girls were fed and cleaned up for bed.

“I need to go check on Anna and Mommy,” Kevin told them. “Y’all stay here with Debbie, and Mommy will be home when you wake up.”

“I’m waiting up,” Abbie said. “Tell Anna I’m waiting up.”

“Me too,” said Adelynn, even though she was already yawning.

Kevin didn’t see a need to argue with them, even if he’d had the energy. Before he headed over to the hospital, he made sure they were calmed down and tucked in for the long wait, camped out on the couch with Debbie, and he arrived just in time to be with Anna while she went in for a CT scan. For the first time since this whole thing began, she was crying, not wanting to go into the small, enclosed space inside the CT scanner.

“Can we stay with her?” I asked. “Maybe if we could be in the room.”

With Kevin talking his low, comforting talk and me stroking her leg, she lay still as they rolled her into the tube. When she came out, they transferred her to a gurney bed and unstrapped her head, but one of the ER nurses stayed there, gently holding Anna’s head perfectly still until all the radiology reports came back confirming that there was no spinal injury.

It was well after midnight when the ER doc called us back into the little room with the white-on-white wallpaper. The bad-news room. We had our armadillo skins on. We’d just sprung her from the hospital in Boston and were afraid to have her go back to that dark emotional state that gripped her while we were there.

The ER doc told us the one thing we weren’t prepared to hear.

“Basically, she’s okay,” he said. “We did a complete assessment. Everything’s come back normal so far. No fractures, no need for stitches. Sonogram and X-rays showed the spleen and other organs intact and unharmed. Other than a possible concussion and some superficial bumps and bruises, she doesn’t appear to have been injured at all.”

“But… how is that even possible?” I asked.

“I wish I knew. I’ve never seen a kid fall from a third-floor height and not sustain at least a couple of broken bones. It wouldn’t be surprising to see paralysis, catastrophic brain injury, even death.” He opened his hands in a broad gesture. “I guess somebody up there was looking out for her.”

Kevin and I exchanged a look of pure astonishment. We might have even laughed a little, I don’t exactly recall.

“I hated to put her back in the CT scanner,” the doctor told us. “That can feel claustrophobic even if you haven’t been trapped inside a tree for three and a half hours. But she did exceptionally well with everything. Seemed very calm and friendly. I would say she even seemed happy. Bright. Alert. And I notice the distention in her abdomen has almost disappeared.”

This I already knew. Anna’s belly had been severely distended and rigid to the touch when she was brought in. She was still suffering from the acute issues that had landed her in the hospital in Boston a matter of days before, and we were now well past time for her medication, but while the nurses and I gave her a gentle bed bath, washing the mud from her neck and combing the dirt and debris from her hair, her little tummy seemed to be deflating right before our eyes.

They wanted to keep her for observation overnight, particularly because of the concussion. “But I feel cautiously optimistic,” the doctor said. “She should be ready to go home in a few days.”

He left us to our familiar hospital routine. With Anna conked out sleeping, Kevin and I talked quietly for a little while.

“I feel like we dodged a bullet,” he said. “Christy, this could have been a lot worse, and I mean a lot worse. The EMTs were saying how you could see the dirt packed to the top of her head. She hit the ground skull-first. And a hollow tree like that—it’s a whole ecosystem. What are the odds that that tree is just sitting there empty? You would expect there to be a raccoon or skunks or something in the bottom, a beehive halfway up, bats in the crevices, and down at the bottom you’d expect roaches, fire ants, scorpions, at the very least. And I know I’ve seen snakes out there, poisonous spiders, scorpions—”

“Yes. I get the picture.”

“Imagine what would have happened if she’d fallen in there when she was out climbing around by herself. If Abbie and Adelynn hadn’t been there. You know, if a kid disappears, people make all the calls and the Amber Alert goes out. The search goes on for a while, and then…” He made a gesture with his hands like something disappearing into thin air. “The very last place anyone would think to look for a kid would be inside a tree. You’d never see that kid again. No one would ever know what happened to her.”

“Please.” I covered my face with my hands. “Kevin, just—please. Okay? I can’t even think about that right now. Everybody keeps saying Jesus was with her, and that’s the image I’d rather have in my head right now.”

I couldn’t bear to think about all the ways this could have been torturous—or fatal—for Anna. I wasn’t ready to go there at that moment. Thinking about it later, I comforted myself with the idea that Cypress and the Welcoming Committee would have been with her in the woods. They would have known. They would have communicated it to us like Lassie in Lassie Come Home. But I’ve never really been able to follow all those “could have been worse if…” thoughts any more than I could allow myself to follow all the “might have been better if…” thoughts when I looked back on all the pivotal moments and decisions of Anna’s treatment. I had to let go of all those roads untaken—the good and the bad possibilities—and trust that God’s hand was on her through all of it.

As I prepared to leave, Kevin settled in for the next shift, sitting on a plastic chair while they waited through the wee hours for a room to be assigned.

I got home at about three in the morning and crept in to check on Abbie and Adelynn before allowing Debbie to hug the stuffing out of me for a few minutes.

“They tried so hard to wait up for you,” she told me, blinking sleep from her eyes. “So did I. You must be exhausted, girl.”

After she left, I stood in a hot shower, weak with fatigue and from feeling overwhelmed, a litany of thank you thank you thank you bouncing back and forth inside my brain with a giant, inflatable ball of what on Earth just happened?

It felt so strange to see the neat stacks of laundry still on my bed, because it seemed like a hundred years ago that I was standing there sorting everything into the appropriate piles. I shuffled it all aside and lay down, but I didn’t sleep. My mind was already chugging through the list of things I would need to do when I got up in two hours. Get clean clothes for Kevin. Assemble a bag for Anna with books, music, her favorite hospital activities and IV-accommodating comfort-wear. Start making calls to find host homes for Abbie and Adelynn.

It was New Year’s Eve, I realized. People would have plans. That might be a problem on top of how disappointed the girls would be that our own plans were off now and we wouldn’t be joining the rest of the family at Nonny’s. Even so, I was just as glad to be trading in the calendar and saying good-bye to 2011. Hopefully we’d be trading up.