- Blood

Cautiously dad approached the rear of the plane.  The seats in front of the back compartment did not fold down so he had to pull himself into the narrow space between the tops of the seats and the buckled top of the compartment, to where he could get a good look.  He illuminated the penlight and slowly swept the tiny beam across the limp and twisted bodies of his two youngest sons. 

I lay contorted in my seat slumped over in a tangle of limbs on my left side, legs splayed out in unnatural and opposite directions.  My right was leg jutted out the open hatch and disappeared into the dark beyond his sight, while my left leg was pointing straight out in the other direction and bent folded back the knee, causing me to look like I was doing the some kind of grotesque gymnastic split.  The seat belt, which had somehow kept me from getting pulled out of the plane altogether, was pulled up across my chest and my lower body had been compacted into the space in front of the seat by the force of the impact. 

My head and face were awash with blood and lay still in a dark crimson stain on Rick’s leg.  The blood ran across my brother’s lap and soaked into his pants.  A large flap of skin from my forehead had been flayed back, and was draped crudely over my scalp, exposing the glistening tissue underneath.  My eyes were closed.  Dad could not reach me and from where he was had no way to tell if I was even still alive.  But knew it didn’t look good.   

Beside me Rick was slumped against the blood smeared bulkhead of the plane.  He was softly groaning and gurgling and a steady ooze of blood ran from his forehead and over his face.  It had stained the entire front and shoulders of his white t-shirt dark red.  His eyes darted unseeingly around, and he limply lifted his right arm and flopped it down again over my face, splattering our commingled blood across the seat back and bulkhead behind and beside him. 

 Dad reached over the seat for him.

“Ricky..!” Dad said to him loudly, trying to get him to snap out of it. 

Rick only lolled his head and blinked unseeingly into the penlight.  His pupils stayed as wide as saucers even as the beam danced across them.  Dad could immediately see he had suffered a severe head injury…and he was in deep trouble.  The look in Rick’s eyes was one he had seen in the emergency room hundreds of times.  It was not a good look, and made dad very concerned.  Even as he sat there Rick’s brain was swelling in his skull and creating massive pressure which might start killing it at any moment.  Once it was bad enough, the rest of him would follow. 

Dad was seriously worried bout how long he had to live if they didn’t get help very soon. 

He reached out to grab Rick and try to extract him from the cramped space, but it was difficult between his side injury and his frozen shoulder to get any leverage.  Rick had inherited Pappy’s physique and was a stocky kid for his age, so it wasn’t easy to budge him.  Finally, dad adjusted himself to lean on a part of his side that wasn’t broken, and using his bad arm to reach down and grab Rick’s shirt, he reached over the seat back with his good arm toward Rick’s lap, fumbled with the lap belt and popped it loose.  Rick slumped forward.

Dad grabbed him with both hands and with a heave, pulled Rick up to rest his head on dad’s shoulder.  He held it securely there, in an attempt to protect Rick’s neck as much as he could.  Dad then reached under his arms and with a grunt, pulled him the rest of the way over the seat, struggling against his dead weight.  Rick’s limp legs flopped over the seat back and onto the middle seats, and dad gently set him back to rest across the cushions.  For a moment they lay there together motionless, dad panting from the pure physical exertion that the task took.

After a second, he took a deep breath and looked around to get his bearings again, then readjusted himself and cradled Rick in his arms.  He moved him as carefully as he could in the cramped fuselage, working his way out of the plane again, off the wing, and over the tangle of barbed wire.  Once clear of the hazards, he made it over to where Chris sat with Kim, and laid Rick down next to her, pausing to insure Kim was still alive.  She still was.

            He directed Chris to cover Rick with clothes and turned back to the plane.  He paused and took a deep breath.  One more to go, he thought. 
          Again he gingerly stepped through the debris and found his way to the outside of the cargo hatch where I still lay silently.  With my leg firmly pinned under there, he would have to get me out of the plane from the outside.  He pulled out the penlight and examined my leg.  It was stretched out of the hatch and folded under the fuselage at the knee.  The lower leg was completely buried under plane. 

            He wedged his arm and shoulder into the compartment and felt for my head.  His hand brushed against my hair and he traced the side of my face to my neck.  He felt carefully for a pulse.  Through the tips of his fingers he was amazed and gratified when could feel it.  The placement of his hand was awkward, so he couldn’t get a read on how good it was, but at least I was alive.  He worked his arm out of the plane and adjusted himself to consider my leg again.

There wasn’t much blood pooling around the knee, which was odd, but he quickly figured that the pressure from the weight of the plane was pinching whatever was left under there tight like vise, acting as a crude tourniquet.  When he relieved the pressure, however, it would probably open up like a gusher and if was as bad as he expected it to be I would have very little time before I simply bled out. 

How to do this, he thought?

-Evacuation

Once dad laid Kim down on the frozen dirt of the field, and as fast as he could in the shape he was in, he made his way back to the broken corpse plane.  Chris was slowly emerging through the yawning gouge in the side of it as he arrived.  Dad helped him down off the front of the wing, and directed him towards Kim, but then he had an idea and told him to wait a second. 

He turned to face to the nose of the plane.  Even in the pitch darkness, he could see that it was completely destroyed; a tangled mass of aluminum and wires and other debris.  The baggage compartment door on top of the nose was ripped wide open and a couple of suitcases had spilled from it and were now laying in a pile on the ground off to the side of the nose. 

He needed something warm and clothes would at least help.  He snatched one of the cases and ripped it open, dumping it over and spilling the contents onto the ground.  He stooped down to gather up all of the clothes he could lay his hands on, then turned to Chris who was standing behind him.

        “Can you hold these?” he asked.  Chris held out his good arm and dad carefully hung the clothes across it. 

“Kim is right over there,” dad said, pointing in the direction of his little girl laying in the dark on the frozen ground. “She’s alive, but she’ll be very cold soon.  If you can, you need to wrap her in these.  Keep her as warm as you can, okay?” 

Then he grabbed the shoulder above the boy’s good arm and gave it a reassuring squeeze.  “I’ll need your help, son.  Put some of those clothes on, too,” he said.  “We have to stay warm and strong to get out of this.  Go ahead.  I’m going to get your brothers.”

Chris nodded and carefully made his way through the debris and wire over to where Kim lie, disappearing from dad’s sight into the dark and fingers of fog that still clung to the ground.  The clouds overhead were very low and made the scene impossibly black.   

Dad was frustrated.  He needed light, but knew there were no flashlights on board.  He had thought about buying one, just in case, but never did.  One of those things... 

But then he had another thought.  He went back to the pile of items from the bag he had just opened.  They were now laying at the front of the plane in a jumble.  It turned out it was his bag, he realized.  It was only by chance that he had grabbed it first.  He poked around and retrieved his small leather shaving bag from the pile.  He quickly unzipped it, and after some rummaging found what he was looking for. 

He produced a small pen light; the kind the doctor uses to check your eyes.  He had packed it only as an afterthought years ago and had pretty much forgotten about it until that moment.  Now it was the only source of light he had.

He depressed the small pocket clip and the tip illuminated the scratched white and orange paint of what was left of the nose with a small halo of dull white light.   

For a moment, it was the brightest light he had ever seen.   

He swung it across the plane in the vicinity near him and the scope of the damage it revealed was beyond his ability to appreciate right at that moment.  Barely noticing it anyway in lieu of his other concerns, he stooped and waved it around interior of the suitcase until he spotted his old flannel shirt wadded up inside.  He pulled it out and painfully put it on.  It hardly stopped the chilled air at all, put was better than nothing.  Then he turned toward the plane again.

            He waved the tiny light around the jagged opening that had been torn into the copilot compartment.  Something had ripped away the door, taking a large section of the roof and the passenger fuselage with it, as well as the passenger side of the windshield and the connecting fuselage in front of it.  The whole side of the plane had been wrenched wide open, like a jagged clawed monster had grabbed it and torn it away, leaving it a ragged and treacherous orifice – the only way in or out. 

He moved his upper body cautiously in, pulling mom’s seat back upright, and briefly glanced around the cockpit.  It was hardly recognizable as such; it lay completely destroyed and was splattered with gobs of mud and clods of dirt and other debris that had flown around it at impact.  The plexiglass windshield on the pilot side was cracked and jagged as well and many of the instruments were askew and jarred about.  The entire console was dark.  He fiddled with the radio for a few seconds, but it was dead. 

However there were no sparks or smoke from any of the numerous wires and component in the console, so hopefully nothing would catch fire while he was in there.  Considering that, he reached painfully across the seats to flip off the master switch on the console and kill the power altogether, just in case.  There was no indication that the batteries were even functional, but the last thing he wanted was for something to short out and spark as he was stuck in the plane.  The effect of that would be catastrophic should the fuel vapors still hanging thickly in the air be ignited.  The resulting fireball would consume the plane completely. 

As he began to extract himself from the cockpit, he spotted the emergency locator beacon box next to his seat, the ELT.  It had it’s own battery.  A small orange light flashed at him telling him it had been activated by the impact.  That was good.  Even at that moment it was pulsing an signature signal into the air over the emergency frequency.  On the other end, anyone who picked it up would hear the unmistakeable whoop-whoop of an aircraft in distress.  Without radios or any other signaling device, it was the only thing that would tell anyone that we were even there - if they were tuned to the right frequency.

            He squirmed backwards across the seats and pulled mom’s seat forward again, then worked his way back into the middle section of the plane to focus his attention on Rick and me in the very back two seats of the passenger compartment.  We were still concealed in darkness and hidden from view by the high backs of the middle seats.

            He steeled himself.  He did not want to imagine what he was about to find back there.

-The Field

Dad sat bolt upright as the sound caressed his ears causing his whole body to tense.

“Dad..?”  The boy said meekly from the depths of the wreckage, his voice tentative and shaken. 

Dad lurched himself up and onto his feet, pulling himself toward the gapping wound that had been torn into the side of the fuselage.  The kids! Charlene and the kids were still in the plane!  His ragged thought process had not gotten to that realization quite yet and now it came as a shock, and snapped his brain into action mode once again.

Even if there was no fire yet, there easily could be..  He still had to get us all out before a fire really did happen, which it could at any time.  The smell of highly flammable 100LL aviation fuel still lingered in the air.  He peered into the darkness toward the gash in the plane, but could barely make out anything in the interior through the trauma of his swollen face.

            “I’m here, son,” he called hoarsely as he made his way back onto the shattered wing, trying get a look inside and see Chris.  “It’s okay, I’m here.” 

Suddenly he focused at a point just inside the darkened gap.  An icy hand gripped his heart causing his body to stiffen, the buzz in his head increasing in intensity at his discovery. 

Mom’s seat was askew and was empty; he had not encountered her as he quickly exited the plane, he now realized.  He waved his hand into the empty darkness of the devastated compartment, pawing the air for one hint of her, but quickly realized that she was gone.  He reached down and grabbed the seatbelt hanging limply off to the side of the seat.  Somehow it had been taken off.  He didn’t remember at that moment that mom had handed Kim back to Chris.  When she had sat back in her seat, he hadn’t noticed that she had not put it back on. 

He thought instead that perhaps she had taken it off after the crash and had evacuated the plane.  He stood erect on the wing and looked hard into the night, rotating his body to scan the darkness that ran infinitely away from him in all directions.  He may as well been standing in the middle of outer space.  If she had gotten out already and was hurt, she may be somewhere nearby.  But he couldn’t see her anywhere.  He couldn’t see anything.

He glanced down at the ground just behind the crumpled flap of the wing and was hit by yet another shock.  Behind the wing he could make out the small cargo door.  It had been ripped open by the impact, and now hung tweaked on its hinges.  He knew Rick and I were back there.  Concerned, he moved toward it and could just make out something protruding from it.  Something that was not part of the plane, he could tell.  He made his way off of the wing and stooped down to examine it. 

My right leg had peen pulled from the plane on impact, and now was mostly under the plane.  He placed his hand on the knee and positioned himself to look through the hatch.  The leg was ice cold.  He could see my limp body slumped unnaturally just inside.  He couldn’t see my wounds, but my leg lay jutting out of the opening, curved at the knee, then disappeared into the churned up mud under the plane.  All practical experience as a doctor told him that it was mangled under there, and he tugged at it, finding it stuck and unmoving.  I wasn’t moving either.  The leg was so cold that for the moment he could not tell if I was alive or dead.  But he knew there was nothing he could do about that yet.

“I’ll have to get to you last,” he thought.  If the plane did catch fire, he knew I was going to die.  He felt a tinge of guilt at the thought, but he had to save the ones he could first. He stood.  He needed his wife to help him.

            “Char!” he called out again.  “Chaleeeene!!” He was met only with total silence, save for the moan of the breeze through some nearby trees.  If she was not in the wreckage… he realized that it was useless to worry.  He had no way to tell where she went and he had to get these kids out right now. 

Blocking the horror of the empty space where she had just been sitting a few moments before, he turned his attention to his newly defined mission.  Resolved for the moment to do so, he pulled forward the seat where mom was not, and worked his upper body into the fuselage as far as he could to try and survey Chris. 

He could barely make out his shape sitting there in the deep dark of the interior.  He appeared shrunken, small and helpless.  The boy’s wide and terrified white eyes blinked out of the darkness up at him.  He clutched the limp body of his little sister tightly to his chest.

“Kim is hurt,” Chris said, fearfully.  “She’s not waking up.”

Dad reached out for his son.  “Hand her to me,” he said gently.

Chris tried to rotate his body towards his father, but quickly found he was unable to budge.  His sister seemed to push him back into the seat with her limp weight.  He jerked his body again trying to get free.  The fear of being trapped began to rush up from his stomach, manifesting in sudden panic. 

Dad could hear the grunts from his struggle.

            “Son, the belt…” he said as gently as he could. “Undo the belt first and hand her to me.” 

The seatbelt!  Chris reached around the front of Kim and found the buckle that held them both into the seat.  He hadn’t unbuckled it yet.  He fumbled with it for a moment and suddenly it clicked loose, popping away from them.  He drew a deep breath, unaware until that instant how much he had needed to breathe.

            He regained his composure then turned toward dad again shifting Kim’s dead weight across him as he went.  Her body flopped to the right and he caught her fall with the crook of his arm.  He gripped her tightly and began to lift her toward dad when he became aware of a grating crack coming from under her.  Suddenly, with a sharp snap, his hand and wrist popped and shifted down, just as Dad grasped Kim and pulled her into him. 

Chris grabbed his arm with the fingers of his other hand, and felt his wrist.  It felt as if an additional joint had been placed just about half way up his forearm.  He moved the finger on his injured hand and was aware of the way the jagged bones grated at the muscles in his forearm.  It was distressing, yet he felt no pain.  But he was scared by that.  His eyes shot across the darkness toward his father.

            Dad stared briefly at his son’s twisted arm.  He had clearly heard it break, and felt Kim’s body shudder under it as he gripped her.  Chris meekly folded the arm across his chest and wrapped his other arm around it, holding it in place.  The lack of Chris yelling in pain was a good indicator that he was numb from shock, but Dad knew he couldn’t do anything for him until he put Kim down.   

“It’s okay, son,” Dad said, trying to reassure him.  “Just hold on..!” 

He lifted Kim into him, lowering his ear onto his daughter’s tiny chest.  Somewhere from deep within he heard the faint beat of her heart.  A brief jolt of hope lurched into him.  He looked back at his son.  “I’ll be right back.  Try to get out, okay?  It’s really a wreck out here, though, so be very careful.” 

Dad looked around to pick his way carefully backward through the hole in the plane and then stepped gingerly off the back of the wing onto the frozen ground.  The contrast of stepping out into the cold breeze was momentarily painful to experience and made him shudder. 

He negotiated a path through the jagged debris and the barbed wire halo that was wrapped around the plane, then stumbled across the rough dirt to a spot roughly 30 feet away where he thought Kim would be safe from any fire or explosion.  Once there, he knelt down and gently laid her there on the cold stiff dirt. 

He stood, then paused for a moment to consider his options.  The ground around him was clear of debris or junk and only a few patches of icy snow covered it.  Still, the air was very cold, and was getting colder quickly.  In a few hours it would be dangerously so.  She couldn’t stay this way for long, exposed completely, or she would certainly freeze to death.  They all would.  

But at this point, that was better than burning to death instantly in the plane if it caught fire.  He didn’t have a lot of options.  He knew that their survival in this mess would be calculated in terms of moment by moment for at least awhile.  And at this moment he, Kim and Chris were alive, and that was all that mattered.  He’d take the problems one at a time.   

It was all he could do.

-Darkness

The roar of the silence that entangled dad rang from the depths of him and was accompanied by dull throbbing sensations from all over his body, canceling out all other sound as if he was in a vacuum. Every piston-like pulsation initiated blunt undulations through his head, each pulse radiating down his neck through his torso and out into every limb.  Each was emphasized by various stabs, various tweaks, various pinches and various thuds. Every neuron was inundated as the impulses jolted him through ragged nerves, flowing from so many spots that they were indistinguishable in their midst.  Their sum total was a swirling, beating numbness that held his body fast in a haze.  He couldn’t tell where to hurt first, so he didn’t hurt at all.

He knew he was breathing, so he wasn’t dead. 

That was a start. 

The right side of his face was resting against the planes control wheel and his cheek and head on that side felt numb and wet.   Very slowly, he reached the dead weight of his arm up and ran his hand across his face, smearing sticky oozing goo that pulsed from a gash in his head.  His side throbbed numbly causing the dark behind his clenched eyes to flash with each pulsation of his heart. 

He tasted acrid blood in his mouth and gritted his teeth, aware of the welling of potential pain that surged just on the other side of the thin veil of black numbness.  By force of will, he pulled himself through it to emerge into the cold, dark reality beyond. 

With all of his might, he opened his eyes.

The darkness beyond was infinite.  Bright pulsing flashes of light swirled on the surface of his eyeballs dancing upon the flat black of space.  The world had lost all dimensions.  He was effectively blind.  He waited for a long time until the flashing subsided, gradually breaking up into glowing dots that drifted in the blackness before him every time he blinked or moved.  He became aware of a loud, high pitched hum in his ears, and wondered what part of the plane would make that noise before realizing its source was from deep inside his own brain.  It resonated in his skull with an intensity that shut out all other sound.  His head swam.  He closed his eyes again.

            He slowly took a deep and ragged breath, as deep as he could be it for the stabbing that shot through his side, cutting it short.  Very slowly he pulled his leaden arms up to rest his hands against the control wheel.  The action took way more effort than it should have.  He gripped the wheel for a moment, wrapping his trembling fingers around it. 

With what seemed like all his strength, he gritted his teeth again and slowly lifted his face off of the wheel, then pushed his body back into the seat.  The jolt of settling back wracked him and caused him to freeze in a grimace while the sharpness flared up, then slowly dulled to numbness again.  Once it subsided enough he opened his eyes again, again to a shroud of total darkness.

He wasn’t really sure what the nature of the reality he now found himself in was.  All he knew for sure at that moment was that he was in the plane, and the plane was on the ground. 

How? 

He racked his frazzled brain, but could not make sense of the jumbled memory of the chaos that had just occurred and whose violent and flashing images were still splashing randomly across his mind.  He couldn’t remember how this had happened.  It now seemed almost like a dream.  He lolled his head to the side and tried to wake up to some different version of reality, but he stayed right there. 

His other senses began to resolve around him and he became aware of the smell of the plane, and other things, too.  The fabric, the cold air drifting in from somewhere, the faint waft of fuel…

            His eyes shot open.  Fuel!  

FIRE!!  

Panic gripped him with the realization that he was about to be burned to death.  His heart began to pound and he clawed for his seat belt.  In his mind, he could clearly smell the acrid and choking smoke as it began to waft up from behind him, becoming thicker and thicker.  His heart raced and his head screamed as he finally got the lever to operate, releasing the canvas strap across his waist.  He jerked himself forward. 

He could almost feel the fire began to lap at him and the smoke burn his eyes as he clawed at random objects to pull himself instinctively to the right toward where the cabin door used to be.  He lurched through the opening, stumbling and wracking his ravaged body with every movement, casting himself from the wreckage and into the darkness - to safety. 

            Suddenly he stumbled over the right engine and dropped forward, falling towards the ground.  But his fall was cut short as he was whipped across his face by a sharp thread suspended in the darkness.  The pain and surprise of the impact flashed explosively through his head as the thread wrapped around his face and dug into his torn flesh. He rebounded from it and was then flung backwards, drawing the breath from him with a ragged snort.  He dropped on his back against the buckled engine, and sprawled out across the jagged stump where the wing used to be, clutching his face.  He sat stunned and shocked, completely caught off guard.  The sensation erased all other thought.  He waited as the pain slowly faded and the darkness resolved around him before he could even move.

Holding one hand on his face he used the other to claw the darkness until he swatted the impediment.  A thin strand of barbed wire hung suspended invisibly in the black air in front of him, and bounced off of his fingers.  He grabbed it with both hands and stared at the dark space it occupied unseen for a second as the stun left him before suddenly becoming succinctly aware of the lack of the plane exploding behind him. 

Realizing that it hadn’t, he turned to peer at the plane disbelieving and gazed into its darkened interior.  There really was no fire.  Nothing had changed.  It had been in his head. 

He was losing it. 

He slumped over and closed his eyes. 

“Jesus Styner, get a hold of yourself..!” he muttered, but his brain was very fuzzy.  The pieces were still slowly dropping into place.

He pulled himself upright a little more and rubbed his left shoulder.  He had injured it skiing a few weeks earlier and it had since frozen up.  He was going to get it looked at when they got back to Lincoln after the trip, but now it was not too useful.  He had over extended it as he got out and now it was throbbing and immobile.  He could hardly lift his arm at all. 

With his other hand, he reached up and grabbed the wire again.  He couldn’t see anything beyond a few feet and his vision was getting progressively worse due to the blood that oozed into his eyes from what seemed to be everywhere.    He wiped it away as best he could.  Hues of grey began to emerge from the darkness in his left eye.  He was completely blind in the other.  He probed at it and in feeling the puffy skin that squeezed around it figured it was destroyed and useless.

He tugged at the wire again and could feel that it ran around and away from where he was and there was a lot of it.  It seemed like it was tangled all around the plane, giving it it’s own metal crown of thorns.  Apparently the plane had picked it up at some point as it slid.

He was still reeling from the shock of the enormous magnitude of the whole crazy thing and wasn’t quite sure what to do next.  In his wildest imagination he had never pictured himself there, like that.  The reality now quite overloaded his senses.  He just couldn’t quite get his head around it yet.  His brain seemed to have seized up. 

He moved his hand from the barbed wire to his forehead and gingerly felt around the flap of skin that hung loosely down, slowly spewing thick and sticky blood.  It oozed over his head and face randomly, and made his head feel as if a bucket of oil had been splashed across it.  It was most uncomfortable. 

He picked at the wound absently for a moment as he tried to get his brain to work, then suddenly he was shaken like a whip by the realization of a small voice coming from the still and inky darkness of the plane.  He recognized it immediately.

It was the voice of his son.

Chapter 4

The wheels of a Frontier Airlines twin turboprop commuter plane struck the runway with a bouncing chirp, and I was amazed to find myself in Omaha again. 

We taxied around the airport until we arrived at our place on the tarmac, and I unbuckled my seat belt and moved to the door, gingerly working my way down the steps extending from the plane.  I walked briskly through sunshine and the smell of airline exhaust across the tarmac and into the terminal. 

All airports have a unique smell, and Omaha was no different.  I remembered it’s signature aroma from days past.  I walked over the polished and smooth floor, strolling my small carry-on bag behind me toward the rental car desk to claim my ride for the next week. 

Eventually I slid into the drivers seat of a white Pontiac Grand Am.  After several adjustments to the mirrors and seat from those made by the incredibly tall person who had sat there before me, I started it up and guided it out of the parking structure into the brightness of the Midwestern day. 

I hadn’t been here in so long I could scarcely recognize the landscape that rolled gently away from me as I wheeled down the road, a local rock station coming softly through the speakers.  Omaha is not a small city, but it retains its Nebraska roots everywhere you look in the forms of stockyards, grain silos, and railway yards full of the miles of freight cars which send the American prairie’s bounty to the rest of the world. 

I rolled my window down causing the wind to blow across my hair.  The smell of the cool, clean air brought me back to surprisingly good memories, and soothed the anxiousness I felt from what I though I would discover while I was here - back in Nebraska, hunting for the truth. 

            I had never actually expected to be back here like this, but the information I found during my research back home had emboldened me to search further, which much to my astonishment released a virtual landslide of new revelations.  At every step, it seemed, I had lent no faith to any of it bearing any kind of fruit, and at every step I was proven wrong.

My success with the NTSB gave me more ideas about where to look, and as I did, I found more and more people who were there.  And every one of them spoke to me as if they knew me, and they all wanted very much to meet me and tell their stories.  I had been given a reason to come.  Hell, I was compelled to come.  I had to meet these people, and learn their stories if I had any chance of telling mine.  Shelley was right.  Without coming here, I could have never known how much I had to learn. 

I had asked Kim to come along, or rather she had volunteered to meet me out here.  I had told her about my plans for the trip a couple of weeks prior, and much to my surprise she said she wanted to come with me.  She arranged to go out a few days ahead of me to hang out with our family friend Jill, and I would meet her at Jill’s house once I got into town. 

            It would be good to see Jill.  She had been dad’s girlfriend for 10 or so years and came to my family’s rescue in the dark days following the horrors of my step mother.  She always seemed so cool and hip.  She was totally connected with the world and life, and her confidence and grace gave me hope for myself. 

She gave us all hope. She took Kim under her wing and helped her through her adolescence, into becoming a smart and beautiful woman.  I am not sure how things would have been for Kim, or any of us for that matter, were it not for Jill.  She got dad through too.  I have never told her, but she has always been my hero.  We all owe her more than we can ever repay. 

Dad and Jill almost got married, but she was much younger than him, and there were many pressures that kept them from taking that step.  Eventually they broke up, but she fell in love and married her husband Jim, and they raised their family in the quiet and comfortable neighborhood in Omaha where I now found myself, shifting the car into park and getting out before their beautiful stone covered house.

I was struck by her continuing beauty as I walked toward her and I was suddenly transported back in time.  She had not aged in all of these years, and I suddenly felt like I still knew her so well.  I realized at that moment that in all of the time I lived in Nebraska after the crash, she was the closest thing to my mother that I had known.

I hugged her tightly, and for a moment as I held my face to her shoulder I had to try to hold in the sobs that suddenly and unexpectedly sloshed around me.  I was overcome by the maternal way she held me, the way her hair felt in my face, by the complete sincerity of her embrace, by the way she was so glad to see me after so long.  For a moment I wanted to just hold her and cry to her like the child I suddenly felt like, but I was embarrassed and afraid of causing a scene, so I choked it back.  After a few seconds, I collected myself and pulled away with a sheepish smile.

“It’s good to see you,” was all I could manage.

She had two wonderful little boys, Adam and Alec, and each of them treated me like I was some kind of rock star or something from the moment I arrived.  Jill had told them I was coming and they had been waiting excitedly for me all morning.  They swarmed around me as soon as I pulled up, which made me feel really, really good.  After awhile we loaded into Jill’s car and went to a circus themed burger restaurant in a new subdivision nearby.  The boys argued with each other as to who would sit next to me in the car on the way.  I guess it pays to be a celebrity! 

Jill bought me and Kim dinner.  I patted Adam’s head who colored intently next to me, while Alec was lost in his own thing at the other end of the table.  He reminded me of my son, and it made me miss my family terribly, even though I had just left them that morning.

            “What made you decide to start writing about it?”  Jill asked, after awhile of chatting.

            “Weeeell…” I trailed off and really thought about it.  I wasn’t at that moment really sure why I had decided to drop everything, take a week of my vacation time, leave my family, and come out here to learn about something that was not much more, or so it seemed, than a distant memory.

            “I guess the time just seemed right.”  I said after some thought.  I found I was having a difficult time at that moment formulating a sensible response to such an easy question.

The time was right, that was for sure.  Everything had just fallen into place with an ease that I could never have imagined.  I had never been much on the phenomenon of planetary alignment and such, but I was quickly becoming a believer.  People I had never even known about really existed, and they wanted to talk to me. 

I began to realize that the truth, all of it, could really be out there.  I just had to go and gather it all up.  I began to believe that things really happen exactly when they are supposed to, and not a minute sooner or later.  This was one of the few times in my life I just rode with it, and it was taking me exactly where I had to go, for better or for worse.

We spent the night at our childhood friend Cindy’s house in Omaha.  Kim and I drove toward Lincoln the next morning, bright and early.  We had things to do today.  We were going to see Clarke later that morning. 

Clarke Munhenke had been our pastor at the little church we attended as kids, and was a true family friend, although it had been a while since I had seen him.  He knew a lot about that night and had played a big role for us.  Bigger than I ever knew at that time.  My brother had mentioned his name as a good source of information, so, using expert investigative technique, I called Lincoln 411 information and got his number. 

Clarke’s wife Sharon answered the phone.  The last time I saw her was just after I got back from Desert Storm, when I had gone by their acreage in the country east of the city, near the big house where I grew up.  I had just gotten out of the Marines and was heading out to Illinois to set things up for Terri and I to start college.  I had stopped over in Lincoln to see some old friends and found myself near Clarke and Sharon’s house.  Sharon had taught me to play the piano as a kid after the crash, and that turned out to be one of my few outlets for the pain I was in.  It was like my therapy.   

Seemed like a long time ago.  I guess it was.

            When Clarke came to the phone, he was excited to hear from me and when I told him what I was trying to do, he immediately offered his home for us to stay while we were in town.  I happily accepted.  Now I thought of how good it would be to see him, and it made me smile.

            The 60 miles from Omaha to Lincoln down I-80 brought back many memories.  I used to make the trip from Lincoln to Omaha and back on occasion for trips to the Henry Dorley Zoo, or the Spaghetti Plant, or for a weekend with my family at the Granada Royale Hotel, with its neat swimming pool and waterfall.  My dad would go to the Aksarben race track to see horse races sometimes, and later as a teenager, I would sneak up here with my friends for a concert at the Civic Auditorium, or college parties.  They were good times I had all but forgotten. 

Just like from the memories of my childhood, the air was cool and clean and filled with the soft drone of cicada, although not as thick as it would be come July and August when they would drown out practically all other noise, especially as dusk fell.  On the pulsating gyration of their wings they would carry the thick humid air of the prairie summer.

            We drove over the familiar long bridge that spans the Platte River between Omaha and Lincoln.  I had a strange lack of any real consternation.  I believed that nothing bad would happen to me here.  I just knew it was true.  We got to Lincoln a half-hour later as the towering monolith of the Nebraska State Capitol Building came into view a long distance off on the horizon.  At around 400 hundred feet, it was by far the tallest structure in the region.  I have always thought it was the most impressive of all the capitol buildings that I had seen, rivaled only by the Nations Capitol in D.C.

We drove across town to Bryan Memorial Hospital, where Clarke worked as the Hospital Chaplain.  The place had grown from the small brick building I remembered from when dad worked there to a huge medical complex.  I was impressed.  The little city of my youth had really come of age.

We walked into the Hospital and met Clarke at his office.  We chatted with him and he bought us lunch in the Cafeteria.  We ate and told us of our plans and I talked about the circumstances which brought me there.  After giving us the directions to his house and telling us in true Nebraska style to “just come on in,” we let him get back to work, and sauntered out into the sunshine again.

We were going to go to the Civil Air Patrol that night.  I had also always known about the Civil Air Patrol, and that they led the search for us that night.  I had decided during my research prior to this trip that I should check with them too, just in case there was any information that they may have.  Records or something.  I found the website of the Lincoln Composite Squadron and sent an email, just to see what I could find, or if they had any records. 

Within a day I got a response back from their Information Officer, Kathy Hubble.  She said she would find information out for me and did.  I continued to correspond with her leading up to my trip and when she heard I was really coming out, she asked if we would come and talk to the squadron.  Of course I said we would.

That night we went to the CAP headquarters at the Air National Guard base near the Lincoln airport.  It was interesting to be in the building where the search for us had started so long ago.  Other than new technologies, I doubted that much had changed.  I met Kathy and she greeted us warmly and escorted us to the meeting room.  A number of cadets, some just young kids, some in their late teens, and a few adults sat at the tables as the squadron commander talked to them about housekeeping and other items.  Then Kathy introduced Kim and me.

I had thrown together a little presentation about the crash to show to the cadets as a way to thank them for their service and what they could someday do themselves.  It seemed like the least I could do.  It was a photo collage of several pictures of the wreckage that I had.  They watched in total silence, disbelieving of what they saw. 

I spoke briefly and told those cadets that they might go after that kind of crash too, someday.  They asked a lot of questions, but for many of them I did not yet have answers.   

Afterwards we went into a huge hanger connected to the building and watched the cadets drill, marching back and forth under the shadow of the big Air National Guard refueler jet that was parked there.  It was neat to see them marching so sharply, when they were still just kids. 

Then we said goodbye and headed back to Clarke’s house.  We crept up to our respective bedrooms, whispering a hushed goodnight so as not to awaken our hosts.  I entered the small room and sat on the bed, removing my shoes and staring out the darkened window on the opposite wall.  I was tired, but determined. 

I glanced over to a pile of boxes stacked neatly in a small cubby beside the bed and spotted a guitar case tucked on top of them.

Curious, I stood and gently lifted it and set it on the bed, popping open the brass clasps that held together the shaped vinyl halves.  I recognized the instrument immediately.  I had seen Clarke play it many times back at our church during the ‘70’s.  The distinctive “e” shaped Epiphone symbol was still emblazoned near the black pick guard, just like I remembered.  I liked that Clarke would play it at the services.  It made hearing the word of God not so ominous, like it seems to be to purely organ music.  My mom had heard the music from this same guitar with her own ears.

I picked it up and carefully cradled it across my leg, roughly tuning it up then quietly strummed a few chords.  The thinly grained wood had aged nicely and the tone was deep and warm as it resonated through my fingers.  I closed my eyes and listened to the vibration as it gently faded into the air of the room.  After sitting in silence for a few seconds, I replaced the instrument back in the case, setting it all gently back where I found it.

I clicked off the light and lay back on the little bed and stared at the darkened ceiling for a long time before fading off into sleep.

Soon, we would go to Hebron. 

-Impact

Chris’ eyes shot toward mom’s seat as she screamed, and he locked his arms instinctively around his sister sitting in his lap. Within the same moment, the world exploded as the airplane smashed into the wall of trees at 168 miles per hour.

His whole body and the world around him surrealistically lurched as it was rocked by a tremendous wallop, like it had been placed in the path of an approaching freight train.  His senses were assaulted by a simultaneous and insanely loud chorus of shrieking, ripping, and snapping.

The plane jarringly dipped hard to the right flinging him around in his seat.  The panel lights all went out plunging him into total darkness.  In the same instant a blasting crescendo of noise accompanied by a violence he had no way of comprehending ripped through the plane.  The fuselage next to mom explosively disintegrated in a hail of metal, wood, and leaves, disappearing into the darkness.

He was instantly assailed by a massive blast of cold air smashing into him as the airplane was violently jerked sideways to the left.  His stomach floated into his throat as it dropped, crashing from the sky.  With an enormous smashing thud, the plane impacted into the earth. 

He was flung forward hard into Kim, and they both pummeled into the oxygen tank strapped to the back of dad’s seat.  He could feel her little body go limp like a rag doll, but gripped her as tight as he could.  The plane spun to the left, the force of which flung him and Kim in the opposite direction, toward the gaping hole in the fuselage, straining the belt that held them to the seat and inside the plane.  Clumps of debris hurled around the cabin showering over him as the plane slid across the ground with a sickening, screeching groan. 

Chris never screamed.  He was never afraid.  He didn’t have time to be scared.  The whole thing lasted 2 seconds. 

With a sudden and rocking jolt, the plane stopped and was still.  Chris’ heart pounded like a drum in his head and his body resonated like a freshly struck tuning fork. Erie and total silence settled slowly over him like a wet, cold blanket. 

He trembled as he tightly closed his eyes and squeezed the limp body of his little sister to his chest.  He bit on his lower lip and waited.  He thought Kim must be dead and he would be soon too.  Death wasn’t so bad, he figured, now that it was so close, but he never thought it would be like this.  He was probably dead already and just didn’t know it.  From behind the blackness of his eyelids he listened to the sound of the breeze and waited calmly for death’s dark embrace.

From the depths of the still and twisted fuselage of our destroyed little airplane, wrapped in darkness and wisps fog, not a sound or motion came.

-Lost

Chris smiled back at mom and wrapped his arms tightly around his baby sister.  Mom blew him a kiss and turned back around, then settled back into her seat.  She focused on the task at hand, rummaged in the map case, and pulled out the appropriate chart, spreading it over the console in front of her.  She turned on and positioned the light above so she could see and began to look the maps over. 

“Where do you suppose we are?” she asked.

“Not too far…southwest of Lincoln,” Dad replied.  “Maybe…80 or so miles?” 

She looked back out the window.  With the light on, she couldn’t see much of anything but her reflection.

The altimeter swept down to 1,600.  Dad increased the engine power a touch to slow the decent slightly.  The small light he had been focused on still appeared to be fixed on the horizon, but was quickly lost in clouds. 

Mom was nervous.  She didn’t like the feeling she was getting, either. 

“Jim?” she said.

From the kitchen of his neat farmhouse, 1,558 feet above sea level, Charles Braun lifted his head and stared intently into the quiet space of the house, listening.  He could suddenly and distinctly hear a low pitched drone approaching from a distance off, somewhere outside the house to the west. 

“Cara!” he called to his wife in the kitchen.  “Do you hear anything?”

“Sounds like a swarm of locust!” she replied.  He pushed himself up and walked from the kitchen back into his living room and paused, concentrating on the sound.  He walked over to the T.V. and switched it off, focusing his hearing farther. 

It was there again.  The drone was still distant, but definitely coming closer.  It sounded like an airplane, but no one would be flying that close to his house.  The airport was on the other side of Hebron.  They must be lost and looking for it.  He went to the front door and opened it. 

The low clouds extended thickly into the distance all around the farm, becoming fog at some points as they caressed the ground.  That was a strange phenomenon for that time of year.  The noise came from the clouds toward the southwest, and continued growing and growing. 

He stepped fully outside looking into the misty air toward the source of the sound.  It quickly had grown louder and louder still.  Then his eyes locked onto blinking lights, dim at first, but brighter with each passing moment as they pierced through the fog, racing toward him.  He raised his glasses to his eyes.  The lights looked like they were practically on the ground, and moving quickly toward him. 

Suddenly with a crescendo roar, a small airplane resolved from the darkness and raced past, just in front of the house and practically right above him.  It streaked by, maybe 30 feet high!  Alarmed by the spectacle he crouched down slightly, keeping his startled eyes locked to the plane.    

It shot right toward the windmill near his barn but somehow missed it by what had to have been inches and roared on.

“What the hell are they doing?!”  He exclaimed aloud and watched the plane speed into the night growing exponentially quieter as it flew away.  He was flabbergasted.  He listened to the drone for a few moments as the blinking lights were reclaimed by the fog.  He stood stunned, shaking his head in disbelief.

Cara appeared behind him at the door, and asked what was going on.

“I have no idea!” he said, somewhat shaken, still staring into the darkness.  They must have gone higher.  He listened for a few moments more, and shrugged. 

They must have been trying to find the airport, he thought, but people should be more careful in those things!  They went back in, closed the door, and turned the T.V. back on.

Dad had now and quite suddenly become disoriented and was growing very concerned.  He had been concentrating on the clouds and when he looked where he thought the light that he had been watching should have been, but could no longer see it, or any other lights out there for that matter.  The world outside had gone completely black.  The cloud ceiling was still just overhead.  He looked at the altimeter, which hadn’t moved.  He was okay, though, he still had at least 500 feet.  But it was time to start thinking of biting the bullet and going into the clouds.

He tried to relax and loosened his grip on the controls a little, preparing to slowly add power and entering the clouds.  Mom watched dad intently.  She felt tense but not afraid.  Dad knew what he was doing, even if they were low.  Once they got through this bank of clouds, she and dad would be able to get oriented and would be okay.  We were very close to the ground, but also very close to Lincoln.  We would get there, she was sure.

She fixed her stare out the window, then reached up and switched off the light, eliminating the glare, and tried to lock on to some kind of point to focus on, looking for some indication of a house or farm or something on the ground. 

The clouds parted and before her and for a split second she caught a glimpse of something.  It appeared to be rushing toward them.  She immediately knew it wasn’t right.  She knew it was no cloud.

Her eyes opened wide as the first tree scraped the bottom of the fuselage and a wall of larger trees bore down on the plane.  Her heart felt like it was thrust into her throat in horror at what she saw.  She screamed:

“JIM!!!”

Her final word, her husband’s name, was frozen in the space between her and dad.  The world was held perfectly still for a moment as the realization of the unfolding event came upon him, even as he could not right then accept them as fact. 

 

The fact that time was up. 

Chapter 3

Dad peered through the window of the Beechcraft Baron and on into the gathering gloom.  We were somewhere over Kansas.  It would be night soon. 

Small rumbles of turbulence rocked the plane.  Several miles ahead and far, far below dad studied a low lying wind storm that swept over the flat dusty ground, roiling a cloud of soot and ice particles a few hundred feet into the swirling air.  From this altitude it looked like a brown layer of fluffy cotton spread over the surface of the earth.  The weather report he’d gotten in Farmington had predicted the possibility of the storm, and it would probably get a little rough as we flew over it, but it wasn’t suppose to be too bad all the way up here. 

Darkness crept up on the little plane from the eastern sky.  As the plane began to be lightly buffeted from the updrafts created by the storm below, dad squinted from behind his Ray-Bans toward his new concern.  A thin grey line of clouds had crept into view from over the horizon.  It expanded across the horizon from north to south directly in line with the path of our airplane flying through the rapidly darkening sky.  This front, too, had been mentioned in the forecast, so it wasn’t unexpected, but it appeared much lower than he’d thought it would have been. 

“Better check that weather,” he said to mom.  She saw the clouds too and nodded.  She flipped through the pages till she found the correct radio frequency for the nearest flight service station in Minneapolis and turned the knobs on the radio until they were displayed in the display.    

The storm below had closed most of the airports in the region to visual, or VFR flight, which was dad’s highest FAA certification.  If he knowingly entered a situation where he had low or no visibility, like a cloud bank or snow storm, he would be in big trouble with the FAA.  You have to be instrument, or IFR certified to fly in those conditions.  Dad had flown IFR with Bruce many times, so he knew how.  He had the hours, but never took the test, so he had no IFR certification.  Without that certification, he could only legally fly so long as he had visibility.

There was a low pressure front stationary over the area in front of him, explaining the cloud bank extending from left to right like a grey wall before them.  It had been reported as a high system, starting at 5-6,000 feet, which he could easily get under and still fly VFR.  But, as the pressure in the area unexpectedly dropped, so did the clouds.  

Dad considered his options.  The top of the clouds weren’t that high, but he was very hesitant to increase his altitude and go over them.  If he did that, and lost view of the ground, he would also lose critical landmarks.  Of course he could do the calculations and time the flight, and that should put us close, but the odds were that he’d still have to go through the clouds to get down once over Lincoln, if he couldn’t find a hole, which was likely with overcast like this. 

Another option was to just put down and wait.  He didn’t really want to fly through this system; however the wind storm in Kansas wasn’t any good and would have created dangerous wind conditions no the ground for miles around, so diverting that way wasn’t really a good option either.  He considered cutting southeast toward Missouri to avoid the system, and landing in Kansas City or somewhere close, but even if it was clear there, that would cut his fuel short, and he didn’t want to push his luck there.  Most aviation accidents were a result of fuel exhaustion, he knew, and he didn’t want to be one of them. 

So there was left the option to go under the system, and try to stay above the deck.  Beside, these clouds didn’t contain any bad weather, just overcast conditions. 

            He asked mom to get out the sectional chart for the area.  She flipped on a small directional light above her and pulled it out, folding it into a manageable size and put it on her lap.  He glanced at it, noting the altitude of Lincoln at about 1,000 feet above sea level.  He wasn’t sure of his exact position on the map, but the change of altitude wouldn’t be that great from Lincoln. 

He was presently cruising at 6,500 feet above sea level, so a gentle decent to an altitude that would get him under the clouds, but above, say, 1,500 feet would suffice.  If things got too bad, like if the cloud layer got too low to safely fly under, he could always find a farm or small town runway to land at.  With his wife and kids, it was the last thing he wanted to do, but if he had to, it was an option.

He would be able to see the lights on the ground.  And if he could see lights, he could tell if he was getting low. 

As the airplane approached the leading edge of the system, he gently reduced the power and the plane began to sink through the rushing air into an easy decent, aimed for the bottom of the dark bank of clouds.  The sky behind had grown from orange and blue to steel grey as the sun submerged itself somewhere back over the horizon.  Under the clouds the air was black.  The altimeter slowly ticked off the cushion of air under us, gravity pulling us gently down.  Thin wafts of clouds hanging from the bank reached down to grab at the plane as it was pulled towards earth.  They momentarily enveloped the plane for a few seconds at a time.

            The night sky below the clouds enveloped us completely, but below it the air was clear and the dotted lights of the civilization of rural America appeared on the ground, sporadically dotting the wash of black over the ground, trailing off to the horizon in all directions.  Dad continued his decent to stay about 500 feet below the ceiling and restored the power to the engines and leveled the flight.

            Nothing to it.  He turned and smiled at mom.  She saw and smiled back at him, then flipped the light off.  The cabin went dark, save for the lights of the instruments.  It wouldn’t be long now.  The sing-song droning of the engines eased dad back into the seat and he thought of what he’d have to do once they landed.  This and that.  Call Bruce…all the little things. 

            Occasionally, he glanced down at the panel.  The flight remained nice and smooth.  It was clear sailing from here, so to speak.  He was significantly lower than usual when he flew this route, but never gave it another thought.  As long as he was higher than Lincoln, there was nothing to worry about.  He had a little wiggle room if he needed it.

            A poignant thought, as the clouds began to settle around the plane again and the ceiling dropped a little more.  Dad cursed this.  The pressure was still dropping and the clouds had lowered themselves.  The red-flashing anti-collision beacon and wing tip lights reflected off of them forming a multicolored halo around the plane alternating between green and red hues, and white flashes from the wingtip strobes, punctuated by intervals of blackness. 

Dad reduced power again and eased the plane down through the clouds until he could see the lights on the ground again.  He looked at the altimeter.  He had room.  Lincoln was still way down there.

Some time later, the same thing.  The clouds kept coming down, as if to push us lower, and he kept getting lower and lower to get under them.  In the pilot world this was called ‘scud-running.’  Everyone knew it was a good way to get into trouble.  But unfortunately in situations like this, without IFR training it was all you could do without getting in trouble with the FAA.  He had done it before.  The trick was to just not get too low.  The clouds were not suppose to get that low tonight, according to the weather.

He knew that didn’t guarantee anything, though.  Clouds can do anything, so he wasn’t afraid to go IFR if the clouds forced him to an unsafe altitude.  It just wasn’t necessary yet.  And there are reasons why there is an IFR certification in the first place.  It is easy to get off course or otherwise askew when you can’t see in an airplane, especially in clouds where everything looks the same.  A pilot can easily get completely inverted and not even know it, and if not well trained, have a very hard time re-orienting themselves when they realize their error, often at a cost of their lives and that of their passengers.

He hadn’t trained to that extent, but still felt comfortable to simply go through the cloud layer to the clear air above without getting turned over, and then report to the nearest flight service station, acknowledge his error, and request a vector to Lincoln.  They’d want a word with him when he got there, but it was better than the alternative.  There wasn’t turbulence or wind, so it would be a simple steady course, until the clouds were below him.           

But until then, he just had to watch the altimeter.  Keep high enough, above Lincoln’s elevation, and he’d be okay.  He hadn’t wandered off course.  The compass had not changed overly dramatically during the trip down, and they hadn’t been buffeted too badly.  There was a slight crosswind from due north, but nothing that he couldn’t compensate for. 

Beside, he could still see light far beneath him.  As long as he could see the lights on the ground, he’d know roughly how high up he was. 

He was keeping his eye on one particular bright light in the far distance to use as a reference.  From where he sat it was a long way down still, letting him know that there was still plenty of altitude between the plane and the ground. 

But still, he had a tingle telling him to watch his butt.  He was getting lower than he liked, that was for sure.  He preferred to be high.  He’d be happy when Lincoln appeared. 

The altimeter needle slowly approached 1,650 feet.  1,500 feet, 500 feet above Lincoln was as low as he was willing to go.  If the clouds moved in any more, he’d have to just fly IFR and deal with it.  He turned to mom. 

She held Kim in her lap and stared out the windshield into the darkness beyond, looking uneasy.  Her face was silhouetted against the intermittent flash of the wing tip strobe beyond her window.  She glanced at him, and smiled nervously.  They were thinking the same thing.  Dad spoke into his microphone.

            “Were going in pretty low,” he said.  “Why don’t you give Kim to Chris, and help me keep an eye out.  We should try to get our bearings in case the clouds move in again.  I might have to go through them.” 

Mom smiled again.  She unbuckled her seatbelt and turned to get Chris’ attention.  He was sitting awake in his seat and smiled at her immediately as she caught his eye.  He leaned forward to hear her.  She covered her microphone and loudly spoke over the drone of the engines.

“I need you to hold Kim for a little while, okay?” she said. 

He smiled and held out his hands.  Mom gently lifted the sleeping little girl toward Chris over the front seat.  Chris unbuckled his belt and softly took her to him and positioned her on his lap so she faced forward.  Her head lulled back onto his shoulder as he pulled some slack out of the seat belt to make room for her, and then clicked it securely around them both.  Kim settled back into the security of her brother’s embrace and fell quickly back asleep.  Mom looked at her oldest boy and was proud of him.

“I love you,” she mouthed to him, and smiled.