Taking Flight (10 page)

Mom has come so far. She has learned how to balance her own checkbook. She moved out of our house that would always be haunted by you to an apartment that has become her own space. She told me once, bravely, “I wish I could be with my husband. But I can’t. I’ve been in a relationship my entire adult life. So now I need to learn what Jan likes to do, who Jan wants to be.”

Jan, as it turns out, likes hair bands, black leather clothes, and Harley’s. These are things I never would have expected, but they are genuinely who she is now. She took a motorcycle riding class in the parking lot of a technical college one summer and is proud to be a woman who can ride. She starts getting excited in March, when the days start to get longer and the weather starts to warm itself out of winter. When Mom is riding, or talking about riding, she is confident, relaxed and happy.

“I understand why David loved flying now,” she tells me, and I am overjoyed, because I know how happy flying made you. This must mean Mom is in a good place now.

Even though I am a married woman and much too old for such things, Mom brings me 7-Up and chocolate when I get sick. She buys me an Easter basket with a stuffed bunny every year. When she plays with my two dogs I feel a pull inside my heart to see her playing with a grandchild. She is not the mother I had, but I no longer feel as though I lost both my parents.

Mom didn’t survive. She learned to live.

You wouldn’t recognize her, Dad, but you’d sure as hell be proud.

I suspect that every father dreads the day their daughter, especially their only daughter, falls in love. My Dad probably knew he wouldn’t need a shotgun to scare away potential suitors. His tall frame coupled with a glare from his serious face would have any teenage boy either running away or peeing in their pants. Still, I’m sure the idea of me dating made him nervous, uncomfortable, sad and scared.

Dad lucked out in a lot of ways. Not only was I a good kid, I wasn’t boy crazy. I had crushes from time to time but I was more interested in painting or writing poetry than in chasing boys. I had as many friendships with boys as I did girls, so it’s possible that Dad assumed he had plenty of time to worry before something more developed.

I was fourteen when I met Christopher at Many Point Scout Camp. My friend’s younger brother was spending a week at the scout camp while we would be with her parents in a cabin across the lake enjoying the less rugged family camp. I certainly didn’t go with the expectations of meeting a boy, but love is tricky that way. The less you’re looking to meet someone is when that someone enters into your world.

Many Point was four hours away from Chaska in Northern Minnesota, a half an hour from Lake Itasca. Our van pulled into the parking lot in the late afternoon. I was waiting outside the van for our cabin assignment, admiring the calm lake that stretched out from the main lodge when Christopher walked by. I watched him disappear into the staff door of the lodge, but didn’t think anything special of him. I turned my attention back to finding our cabin and unloading the van.

There was an opening campfire ceremony that evening, and Christopher was stationed among the other counselors. He seemed both comfortable and bashful as he stood in front of the large crowd. I watched him entertain some little kids, not minding when they climbed on him like he was a jungle gym. He had a gentleness about him, a sweet smile that set him apart from the other teenage counselors. The sun was sinking beneath the trees and loons were bobbing along the shoreline, calling out to one another across the lake. In that simple summer moment something changed inside me; I wasn’t a kid at camp, I was a girl who was noticing the way a boy whom she had never met could make the eyes linger and the heart race.

On the second night at camp I saw Christopher out of his scout uniform. While some people might have seen a trouble maker under the baggy jeans and chunky ball chain necklace, I saw a multidimensional person. I saw someone who was like me, who followed the rules, who was the kid adults respected, but who was also someone who had a personality inside that defied responsibility. With one smile in my direction, I was a goner.

The last night of camp Christopher and I exchanged numbers. He was coming home from camp in two weeks and asked if he could call me. I didn’t know then that sometimes boys don’t keep such promises, so I left absolutely elated, counting down the days in my mind when we would talk again.

My parents took me out to dinner the night I got home from Many Point. Before we went to the restaurant I made them stop at Target so I could drop off the several rolls of film I had taken at camp. At dinner I tried to make them understand the magic of that place, the kindness and humor of the counselors, the sounds of the loons on the lake and the stars that shone in the inky night sky. I didn’t tell them about Christopher, though I’m sure they could tell something was up. I had never been so excited or chatty before about anything. To their credit, they didn’t pressure me for any details.

It was pouring rain when we stopped back at Target after dinner. I ran out of the store with my pictures stuffed under my shirt to keep them dry. In the backseat I flipped past sunny days and silly poses of my friend and I in our cabin, until I found the few snapshots I had gotten of Christopher. Christopher climbing into a canoe and holding the side so I could step in safely, Christopher at the campfire, Christopher and I standing beside a wall of pine trees, our shoulders barely touching. I looked at the photos constantly while I waited for my phone to ring.

He called, just as he had promised, and before long Christopher was part of my every day life. It was incredible to have a crush out in the open, to have it reciprocated.  Maybe it’s like this for every teenager the first time they fall in love, and maybe there are a few couples who are different. Couples who, when they say they love each other, actually mean what they’re saying. I believe Christopher and I meant it. We lived forty minutes apart and we were too young to drive, so the only connection we had grew from our conversations. 

My parents met Christopher on Halloween. They had agreed to let me go on a date to one of those places with haunted houses and trail rides. There were hundreds of cars outside the entrance dropping off hundreds of teenagers. My parents were nervous about leaving me in the crowd to meet someone they didn’t know, so Christopher had been instructed to find our car so he could meet my parents and reassure them he wasn’t a psycho.

We waited for a long time in a line of honking cars before he finally appeared. He had cut his shaggy hair off and what was left was styled into short spikes. A section in front, the one that had been white since he was a little kid, was dyed dark blue. He was cuter than I remembered and I couldn’t get out of the car fast enough. 

Just before I shut the car door behind me I heard Dad groan. “You have got to be kidding me. That kid?”

The airplane was a sacred part of our family and special clearance was required from Dad to come within a ten-foot radius of his baby. There were times when he was really concentrating on an intricate piece that even I wasn’t allowed to get too close.

As the plane grew in size Dad needed help lifting and moving pieces around. Mom was first in command for the job, and the whole process usually ended in them snipping at each other until everything was set exactly how Dad wanted it. When a job required all three of us Dad would repeat the same instructions over and over, coupled with constant reminders to be careful.

Christopher and I were watching a movie one night when we heard Mom call for us to come to the garage. “Dad needs help moving the wings.”

Christopher and I had been together for over a year. Dad had allowed Christopher to eat dinner with us at my family birthday party, he had taken pictures of us in front of the fireplace before school dances, and every weekend he had driven back and forth from Chaska to Maple Grove so we could see each other. Through it all, Dad had been polite enough, but he had never been inviting.

When Christopher and I stepped into the garage, Dad was standing by the wing, his hands on his hips. He was wearing his Cardinals hat, turned backwards, a resolute expression on his face. He stared at Christopher for a moment, and then pointed to the wing. “I need you to lift that while I make some adjustments where it connects over here, by where I’m standing.” They stared at each other “Can you do that?”

Christopher nodded and took his place at the wing. For the better part of an hour, I leaned against the wall of the garage with Mom while Dad and Christopher worked on the plane. Christopher carried the plane cautiously, carefully, just like he carried my heart.

Dad never warned Christopher to be careful. I think he finally understood, as they handed the fragile wing back and forth, that no amount of warning could protect the wing from being mishandled. No amount of warning could protect me from a broken heart. As difficult as it might have been, Dad
let go, trusting me to t
he first boy who would ever carry my heart.

There is a stigma attached to families without a father. In my experience, it is assumed that an absent father is a deadbeat father. I have been faced with many uncomfortable interactions because of this. “Where do your parents live?” or “What do your parents do?” seem like harmless enough questions.

But what is the harmless answer?

If I only answer for Mom, then I leave the interpretation that you aren’t a part of my life.

If I answer for Mom and explain that you passed away, then I have to answer follow up questions. “How?” “A plane crash, really?” they say, amazed that it does actually happen. Then I get to hear about how scary flying is or how unsafe those little balsa wood planes are, as if you got what you deserved for taking such a stupid risk.

Regardless of how I answer, I inevitably find myself thinking that there are so many people in my life that you will never get to meet.

These people will only know the Sarah from after.

Few people can bring out the girl I was before you died. As my friends dropped out of my life I began to place a high value on anyone who was able to make me feel like I had before life had forced me to age ten years in the span of ten minutes.

There was a life I was meant to live that was destroyed after you broke my heart. There was a life waiting for me with a boy who I think I was meant to be with, once. The mistakes I made which cost me his love and friendship would not have been capable by the Sarah I used to be.

The loss of his presence in my life is the biggest regret I have in your death.

Much as I am sure children of divorced parents love differently than those raised by happy parents, a daughter who watches her mother crumble completely after the death of her husband barely loves at all. When you died I stopped trusting love. I was terrified of loving someone so much that I wouldn’t survive without them. Mom loved you so much that she lost herself in you. There wasn’t enough of her without you to function. The idea that I could fall prey to the same fate has been enough to keep my heart at a distance from men.

This brokenness in me, this fear, ruined something wonderful.

We were friends, and then we were more than friends. He wanted the whole package, until death do us part. But he wanted it with a girl I no longer was. He couldn’t seem to straddle the dividing line between who I was and whom I was turning out to be. I couldn’t be the child he had befriended, the woman he needed to be domestically bright and kind. He couldn’t have handled his Sarah swollen with tears or laying in bed unable to move after going on a bender of sadness and depression.

The relationship I would have had stretches out before me, distant but strong, like a dream that lingers in the mind long after waking. Both of us reserved, cautious, selective, we would have dated exclusively in high school and college. You and Mom would have gotten along fabulously with his corporate father and stay at home mother. The four of you would tell stories at our engagement party about all the times you had to yank the phone out of our hands when we lived under your roofs. You would have acknowledged that all along we had something special, that you all saw it years before we stopped arguing when people tried to call us boyfriend and girlfriend.

At our wedding I would have wanted to be as beautiful as possible for him. His vows would have been said only for my ears, and he would have loved me delicately and passionately, all in one embrace. I would have loved him more and more as the years passed. I would have been excited to have his children. I would have wanted to give him a big family. I would have been a good wife and an even better mother. He would have been an attentive husband and a compassionate father.

We should have had this life. Two best friends who could stop the other in their tracks with a smile, who could weaken the knees with a single kiss, who couldn’t bear to say goodbye at four in the morning with a full day of work only a few hours away. We were meant to be, once.

When I least expect it his face flashes in front of my eyes. I still grab my phone to call him and it isn’t until I realize I don’t know what number to dial that I remember we don’t belong to each other any more. It is the friendship we had that I miss every day. Sometimes I ache so much for my friend I have to stop what I’m doing and catch my breath. I’ve written countless letters to an old address, hoping someday he will respond because he still sees in me who I was. Because he forgives me for not loving him in the way he needed.