Taking Flight Read Free Page A

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