Taking Flight (13 page)

Sometimes I forget they were ever a part of my life, my heart.

And other times, when I least expect it, I feel like I can’t breathe, when I remember the family I used to have.

Here’s why it ended, the ugly truth: I should have died instead of you.

I will never forget the dark eyes that glared at me, the clenched fists, the words burning hate into my memory. The one person who had the nerve to tell me what everyone was really thinking.

Maybe she was angry. Maybe she was just mean. Maybe I shouldn’t listen to something someone said without thinking. I can’t help it. When your niece, my cousin, said those awful words, something inside me knew it was true.

Since I couldn’t replace you, I spent years trying to fix what I hadn’t broken. I wanted so desperately to win back the figures that faintly resembled the aunts, uncles and cousins I had before you died. They were all gone, and the credo in the Norton family was hung on every wall: I should have died instead of you.

You wouldn’t believe how often I wished to take your place, just to make them happy again.

B promised me that he would be there for me in all the ways that you couldn’t be. He would be at my high school graduation, he would walk me down the aisle. B was inconsolable after you died. I think, at the time, that he believed he would really do those things with me, for you.

I didn’t participate in my high school graduation. Mom was the one who walked my down the aisle. It doesn’t make me mad that he wasn’t the stand in for these milestone events; I didn’t want to be a pawn someone else uses to relieve their guilt. 

It was during a visit to Wentzville on my twenty-sixth birthday that I snapped. And I mean I really snapped. I had had enough of the cold shoulder, the self-righteous punishments, the rolling eyes and the pressure to make another attempt to fix the Norton family.

Mom and I decided to let them go. We each wrote a letter and sent them certified mail so there was no doubt that they had gotten the message. Mom let loose in what I can only describe as a testament to her love for you and her sense of protection towards me. She let our family know what we had been thinking for all the years since you’d died. It was the first time that I felt like Mom was back, like there was someone in my corner again, like someone had finally heard me clanging in the cellar and had come to set me free.

After the break, or whatever you want to call it, I felt twenty pounds lighter. I’ve moved on more in my grief for you since letting them go than I managed to do in all the years I tried to keep us together. I guess, right or wrong, we are bad for each other without you. Grief eradicates what was, and memories of an unbearable weight become the only proof that life was once different. 

I often worry that you hate me for the bridges I have burned. But I don’t think you would feel nearly as angry at me as you do at them. The ones who wished your daughter dead in your place, the ones who broke all their promises, the ones who cast your wife to the cold world of single, widowed parenting. I am only now, as an adult who may someday soon be a mother, comprehending how terrifying it must have been to be Mom. She shouldn’t have had to go through being my parent alone. There should have been a support system in the family that had loved us for over sixteen years.

I asked Mom once who she hoped was alive in that horrible moment when she knew she would only get to keep one of us. I knew how she would answer, but I didn’t know if I would believe her.

“You. Your Dad would have said the same thing. You never, ever, want anything to happen to your child,” she said.

I believed her. As much as she loved you and you loved her, I believe that either of you would have sacrificed yourselves for me. And this is how I know that you want me to be happy, even if it means living a life without your family.

I think of Grandma, who buried a son and a husband, and lost a daughter-in-law and a granddaughter. I miss her the most. I miss calling her on my drive home from work just to talk. I miss the way she made me feel like I was special among her lot of grandchildren. She isn’t innocent in the fallout, but she was definitely caught in unfair crosshairs. I resent the choices she made. I want to know why she couldn’t fight for me like I fought for her.

I try to remember that family and blood don’t always go hand in hand. I think you would really enjoy the people who are in my life now. I don’t have many friends, but the ones I have are the type that you can call at three in the morning when everything is falling apart and they will show up to take you to the hospital or pour you a drink, whatever you need. We’ve seen each other through marriages, divorces, deaths and births. Every joy and sorrow gives us another opportunity to support and love each other. This is something that your family couldn’t do for us.

I wish so badly that you could meet my in-laws, my father-in-law especially. Every time I see his band play I know you two could have talked about music for hours. He treated me like a daughter years before his son married me. Nothing could ever replace you, but he has made things a little easier. 

You raised me to cherish family, and I think by family you meant people who love unconditionally. And I think that’s really what you wanted me to learn, to look for in this life. As time has passed, as the emotions have calmed down and the expectations have disappeared, I’ve learned that the family I have lost were not people I would choose to have in my life. I am not the person who they would want in their life, either, but this doesn’t stop me from loving the woman I have grown to be, without them.

I don’t think it would stop you from loving me, either, and that’s
all the acceptance I need
.

I took drivers education over the summer of 1999. Mom drove me to a little building in Chanhassen where I sat watching videos of bloody car accidents and then took practice quizzes out of a thick instruction manual. Mom was the one who took me to take the permit test, and when I passed, I assumed that Mom would be the one to teach me how to drive.

Mom took me to a parking lot and after a few basic pointers put me behind the wheel. I made it less than ten feet before her invisible break pumping had me slamming on the actual breaks. She had her hands dug into the dashboard, her perfect long nails threatening to break. She screamed at me for hitting the breaks too hard, I screamed at her for making me nervous, and just like that, the lesson was over.

When Dad took me to the same parking lot he seemed completely at ease when he switched seats with me. As I started to inch forward, my eyes were staring directly at the hood of the car, trying to see the road in front of me. In a calm voice Dad said, “Now Sarah, looking at the car is going to get you in an accident. Keep your head up and eyes forward. There you go!” he encouraged as I tried to position myself in the way he described. It was difficult to look straight ahead instead of looking down. We must have circled that parking lot for an hour before I was looking the right way, but he never yelled at me.

As February and my sixteenth birthday approached Dad made sure I got plenty of practice driving in the snow. There were drifts at the ends of the streets that made it impossible to see around without stopping well over the cross walk. Black ice caused the car to swerve at random, leaving me to figure out how to correct my path. Parallel parking was demonstrated between cars awkwardly parked on the street and in between snow drifts. I was envious of my friends who were taking their tests in the summer, when they didn’t have the additional worry of snow to shake their confidence.

The day of my test came, and I was convinced that I would fail. I barely ate breakfast and I couldn’t concentrate at school. It was February 29, a rare leap day, and I tried to be hopeful that magical things could happen on this extra day, including me passing my test on the first try.

I was to be picked up when school let out to go right to the DMV. I assumed that Mom would be taking me, but to my surprise, it was my Dad’s grey Cutless Supreme that was waiting for me at the curb.

“What are you doing here?” I asked after throwing my backpack in the back seat.

“I taught you how to drive. Now I want to see you pass your test.”

I knew that Dad had left work early to be there – and he never left work early. I felt special, and little more confident. At the same time, I knew if I failed it would be much worse letting Dad down than it would have been with Mom.

“I’m really worried I’m not going to pass.”

“I’m not,” Dad said.

We got to the DMV and went inside the busy lobby. I stood in a line and checked in with a receptionist. Dad was sitting in a chair, looking excited. I sat down beside him, but before I could even think about my nerves, an instructor called my name. I let out a huge breath and made the sign of the cross. Dad’s laughter was the last thing I heard before I took the test.

I had no reason to be worried. Dad taught me how to drive with the same thoroughness he used to meticulously craft his airplane. There was no detail, no angle that he hadn’t considered. The instructor even complimented me on my parallel parking skills. “You aren’t even nervous! Everyone gets nervous to parallel,” he said, sounding truly surprised.

I shrugged, playing cool. “My Dad is a good teacher.”

When we got back to the DMV, I parked the car out front and looked to my instructor. “Congratulations,” he said. I smiled like I had just won the lottery.

I opened the car door, intending to run right in shouting that I had passed. But before I even shut the door Dad, looking so professional in his suit, was standing outside in the frigid air, grinning from ear to ear, watching for me to return. He didn’t say a word, just opened his arms nice and wide, and like a child I ran into them. I laughed into his chest and he ruffled my hair with his knuckles.

It was the best hug we ever shared.

When we got home from the test I wanted to drive somewhere, anywhere, by myself. Dad said I could drive to Emily’s house, probably because she lived so close. “I’ll tell your Mom. Have fun, and be careful,” he said.

Even though it was far from warm out, I rolled my window down. As I backed out of the driveway, Dad leaned against Mom’s car, his arms folded over his chest. I was elated at my success, my new freedom, the strangeness of being alone in a car. I waved goodbye to Dad, his reflection stationed in my rearview mirror as he watched me leave him behind.

The last gift you gave me was a car. It must have been May or June, because I remember the sun shining on the green grass in our front yard when you pulled up in my first car.

You did not tell Mom you were buying me a car. Better to ask for forgiveness than permission, I suppose. 

The 1989 Plymouth Horizon was, without question, a beater. It was probably blue, once, and the seats had various food and coffee stains all over them. But the radio worked and there was room for at least three of my friends and some beach bags. It cost you all of $500, but to me, that car could have been a shiny Rolls Royce. I loved it.

Since there wasn’t a CD player I took my smaller battery operated boom box and buckled it in to the front seat. I would roll all the windows down, crank up a CD and gladly run any and all errands that gave me an excuse to drive my new car.

Shortly after you died, Mom took my car away.

She thought it was a safety hazard when you were alive, and after you died in a freak accident she was paranoid that I would meet the same end in that tiny, old car. I don’t know what she did with it, but one day, it was gone.

Just like you.

I started driving your car, which I loved just as much as the Horizon. I kept your radio stations programmed in and I took comfort watching the compass you had stuck to the dashboard bobble back and forth, telling me what direction I was headed. When certain songs came on the oldies station I was convinced you were driving with me, sending me a song from wherever it was you had gone.

I’ve heard that if you have two dogs and one dies, sometimes the companion is soon to follow. They can’t live without each other. Your car must have known that you weren’t coming back, because before my junior year of high school began, your car was dead too.

Mom arranged a tow truck to take your car away while she was at work. While I waited for the tow to arrive I turned your car on one last time, blasting the oldies station as loud as the volume would go, not caring who I ticked off in our neighborhood. I brought the basketball outside and took shot after shot, even though my eyes had filled with tears and I couldn’t see the net.

Everything was so damn unfair. My arms weakly threw the ball as sobs shook my body. There was nothing left that would keep you with me. You would never come back for your car, or for me. You were gone.

When the tow truck came I shut off the radio and pressed my face against the steering wheel, my tears dripping all over the rubber grips. The men in the tow truck ignored me, an emotional teenage girl. They hooked up your car and drove away while I sat alone in the driveway, feeling like I
had buried you all over again.

Every Memorial Day weekend my parents would pack up the car and we would drive the eight hours down to Missouri for a family reunion. Our family rented the same pavilion every year in Athens, a small town whose claim to fame was the Cannon Ball House. During the Civil War a cannon ball shot through the front of house and exited out the back. We toured the white house every year to stare at the splintery holes covered by protective plastic.