Falcon Song: A love story (17 page)

Saying farewell to her mother was too hard to face for a few more minutes and Kate carefully sat back down beside her in the living room with a sigh. Her mom smiled sadly as she said, “I remember those days of feeling like a great blue whale coming in for a landing. You look really good, Kate. How are you feeling?”

“Like more of a cross between a great blue whale and an aircraft carrier. Sometimes it takes a while just to change directions. You look good too, Mother.”

“Thanks, Katie, honey. I’m lonely without you, but I’ve lost a little weight. That’s a good thing.”

“You look like you’re twenty five again!” Kate smiled at her and then tears filled her eyes as she went on sadly, “Daddy doesn’t. I had no idea he was so…”

Her mom squeezed her hand. “He’s okay, Kate. He’s lost a lot of the enthusiasm he always exuded, but he’ll make it through. We really aren’t twenty five anymore, you know.”

“I know, but he’s not seventy either.” She sighed and changed the subject. “How are Jason’s parents?”

Her mother smiled sadly again. “Well. Lonely. They lost Kennen and then you and now they’ve even lost Jason in a way. He’s changed a lot since you left, Kate. Those dazzling smiles are few and far between now. And he doesn’t come by as much as he used to. I’m sure part of it is how busy he is now. He tours all over the country and even beyond, but I would guess most of it is that he can’t face coming, without you being here.”

“Oh, Mother, surely he’s over me by now. It’s been six months.”

“It’s been longer than that, Kate. And he is far from over you. I can’t believe you don’t realize that. Didn’t the lyrics of this last several songs make that clear?”

Kate shook her head. “I don’t listen to his music anymore, Mom. I can’t.”

Her mother paused and looked at her in surprise and then nodded. “I’m sorry to bring him up, honey. So tell me more about this John you married? What’s he like?”

For another twenty minutes they talked and finally, Kate heaved herself off the couch and tearfully told her mother goodbye. It was insanely hard to do.

Settled into the luxury of the Mercedes, she once more headed to Texas and she’d certainly talk to God as she drove again. She was almost back to highway forty when the car turned almost of its own volition. She had to at least drive past Jason’s apartment. Even if he was outside and saw the car he wouldn’t ever know it was her, but she had to at least drive by.

His car was there, but there was no sign of him and all of his lights were off except the porch one. Kate pulled to the curb and killed the engine. What would she give to be able to walk up and knock on that door? She thought back to her decision to just leave and not tell him and for the first time, she wondered if it had been a mistake. She’d prayed about it and felt it was right, but tonight had been a clear demonstration of what it had cost her. Cost a lot of people involved. She thought of Jason up in that room and hoped he never did find out the baby was his. He would be so disillusioned with her for keeping such a big deal from him.

She finally reached into her pocket and pulled out the small box. She assumed it was something from Jason, the way Kiersten had been acting. She was right. In the light of the street lamp she pulled a slender diamond and gold bracelet out that had a tiny gold Falcon in flight dangling from it. Kate had never seen anything quite like it and she let it hang and twist as the minimal light caught the sparkling stones. It was beautiful and she’d treasure it forever, even though she knew she’d never be able to wear it. It would be too painful of a reminder of him every time she saw it.

She put it back into the box, wishing she didn’t have to cry so much every time she thought of him. She looked back in the box for a note, wondering why he had sent it even after this many months. It simply said, “I’ll wait forever. I love you, Jason.” She clutched the box to her chest with a sob. She wished he hadn’t changed and begun to follow Cody’s lifestyle. She would love to let him know there truly was a little Falcon.

After several minutes, she pulled back out and hit the road for the Texas state line as she whispered through her tears, “Goodbye again, Jason. I’ll always love you.”

Chapter 16

She did fly back to be with John on Christmas Eve. Sadly, it didn’t really matter to her where she was if she couldn’t be at home, but she didn’t want John to be alone.

Finally, in the airport, she found a small painting of Jesus she loved and hoped John would like. It was of Christ reaching a hand down to a child to help him up over a boulder in a stream. Maybe it would help convince John the atonement included him and the mistakes he so regretted and he would allow the Savior to reach down and lift him up at this last time in his life.

He took her to a concert on Christmas Eve at a local church and then Christmas morning she went with him to help feed the homeless a hot breakfast and pass out gifts of socks and underclothing and toiletries the mission had been gathering.

Afterward, as John helped her out of his own Mercedes in the garage and into his opulent house, Kate realized this trip had been good for her. Until this morning, she’d almost come to take the luxury of her present lifestyle for granted.

She and John made another holiday dinner and as they ate, for the first time, he talked to her about death and how he really felt about it and what he hoped to accomplish this last few weeks here on earth. It was both heartbreaking and enlightening, but by the time she flew back out the next day, she felt much closer to him than she had.

Although she was only in Amarillo for not quite two weeks, while she was there, Kiersten forwarded her another package from Jason. It was a post card of Columbus, Ohio and it said, “We played to thirty thousand. It’s lonely without you. Come home soon. I love you, Jason.” In the same package she found a section of small birch tree branches that had twisted around each other and finally grown so tightly together their bark had actually become one piece. She knew exactly what he was trying to tell her. She still felt the same way about him.

She flew straight from Amarillo to San Francisco and had her car shipped home. It was the first time she’d ever been that far west and honestly, she was a bit intimidated. Northern California was a long, long way from Wye, Oklahoma.

She’d been working in the restaurant for about a week when she got an emergency call from Kiersten telling her her dad had a blood clot in his lungs and they hadn’t been able to get it to dissolve so far and would she please come home as fast as possible. Kiersten didn’t use the word die, but Kate knew that was exactly what they were worried about as she hurried out of the restaurant and climbed awkwardly into her rental car, praying for all she was worth.

An hour and a half later, her dad was even worse but she’d been able to find a flight, grab her bag, turn in her rental car and she was hurrying for the right concourse in the airport when she had to slow down and try to catch her breath. Being eight months pregnant and upset definitely cut down on your wind. She glanced at her watch and began to try to run again. She was going to miss this plane.

Approximately fourteen miles of endless concourse later, she finally made it to her gate just in time to see the plane she’d been trying to catch pull away from the building and begin to taxi slowly toward the runway. Kate leaned against the window and started to cry as she silently said, “God, you could have held that plane. You know what’s going on here.”

Rushing like this wasn’t good. Her heart felt like it was going to burst and the muscles in her lower abdomen were pulling tightly. She tried to catch her breath and at the same time try to regroup mentally to begin looking for another plane.

One of the women staffing the gate approached her to ask if she was okay and she nodded. “I’m okay; I just needed to make that plane.”

Kate must have looked as uncomfortable as she felt because the middle aged woman encouraged her to sit down while she called to find another flight. Kate did and had just picked up her phone to begin making calls when it rang. It was Kiersten again and fear clutched at Kate’s heart. She prayed as she pushed send that it wasn’t what she dreaded it was.

Kiersten was crying so hard her husband must have finally taken the phone because he came on the line instead to tell her sadly her father had just passed away. Kate stood up again in shock and couldn’t help the tears that flooded down her face. It couldn’t be true. Her father was barely fifty years old! Fifty year olds didn’t die!

Kate wasn’t even aware if she ended the call or not. She wasn’t aware of anything until the same clerk came back and put an arm around her as she cried. She tried to explain through her tears, but couldn’t even make the words come out of her mouth. The clerk was telling her she’d called for someone from airport hospitality to come and help her out with whatever she needed. Kate didn’t know how someone from the airport could help. What she needed was her father to be well and whole and alive. That was what she needed.

She struggled to get control of herself and then a moment later when she felt something pull low in her body and then a trickle of warm water flowing down her slacks, she began to sob again uncontrollably. Just when she’d thought she couldn’t handle this heartache at this time and place, now she realized she was going to be delivering a baby more than four weeks early and nearly two thousand miles away from anyone on earth she knew. It was almost more than she could stand.

The courtesy shuttle did indeed come for her but instead of helping her find a plane; they delivered her to a waiting taxi where she sat on a plastic garbage bag for a fifteen minute ride to St. Augustine Hospital. Enroute, she phoned Kiersten’s husband and tearfully told him of her situation and then she called John to let him know as well. His gentle words of encouragement, and promise to fly out to be with her as soon as he could were the only bright spots in an otherwise terrible day.

Once at the hospital, she helped herself out of the taxi, paid the driver and then, dragging her bag, began the incredibly long trek to the labor and delivery wing while her body commenced going into labor.

The next several hours were a blur of organized chaos, heartache and pain. The only thing worse than the way her body was feeling was the way her heart was feeling. The thought of losing her father and then not even being able to go home and be with her mother was unbelievably painful. That was even without including the fact she was alone, far from home and delivering Jason’s baby prematurely without him. She had never in her wildest nightmares pictured this the way having a child with Jason would be.

At first she was so disappointed in God for letting all of this happen, but between contractions, she realized God had indeed been mindful of her when He let her miss that plane. Had her water broken on board, her baby would have been in an even more precarious position than he was here in this state of the art hospital.

She couldn’t help the tears that continued to fall almost non-stop as she labored. Even an epidural didn’t end them and the best she could do was to cry quietly while the hospital staff hovered with looks of pity. She’d told them of her father’s death, but she couldn’t bring herself to talk about how sad it made her to be delivering this baby without her life long friend who was the father. Somehow that fact even eclipsed the loss of her dad. As the hours dragged on, the pain and heartbreak of doing this without Jason broke her spirit down completely.

The attending physician had put a fetal monitor on the baby’s head and as her labor progressed, they were watching him very closely. There was a chance he’d be fine this early, but there was also a chance he wouldn’t be able to breathe on his own and that birth this early would stress him to the point of harming him or worse.

For more than seven hours she was in labor as they looked on and finally, her tears seemed to run dry and though she was still so sad, she was able to just go through the motions. Then at ten o’clock that night, when she thought they were getting close to finally actually delivering him, when the baby’s heart rate plummeted, they wheeled her into an operating room and prepared to take him C-section. The nurse who had been helping Kate since she’d come in went off duty just then and a new one came on, and for some reason Kate felt like she was now doing this by herself again.

When they decided to take the baby surgically, they gave her something to stop her labor, but they didn’t remember to mention to her it would make her shiver uncontrollably and the way her body was reacting frightened her terribly.

Once in the OR, the anesthesiologist injected a huge syringe of something into the epidural catheter he’d put into her back earlier and there was a sudden whoosh of heat and then she was numb from the chest down and couldn’t even help herself move.

Although she was exhausted and half paralyzed, she was awake and watching and listening to the activity that buzzed around her and she had never been so afraid and stressed in her life. As the doctors and nurses spoke back and forth and the machines buzzed and whirred around her, she stared at the screen that monitored the baby’s heart rate and tried to get a handle on the tears that had started up uncontrollably again.

The physicians and staff around her didn’t seem to be paying any attention to her and more than ever before, she was completely heartsick to be doing this without Jason. Her thoughts went to him and she wished desperately that he’d been here. He would have helped her through this and kept her calm. He’d have kept everything under control and moving smoothly and he’d have been there to make sure the baby was all right when she couldn’t.