Taking Flight (4 page)

It was easy to forget that you weren’t spending your Sunday morning at the airport. Or that you weren’t downstairs reading the paper. You weren’t anything. Or anywhere. But your clothes didn’t know that. Neither did the sun shining through the bedroom windows, or the faint noise of neighbor kids laughing in their backyard. So many ordinary things continued on, without you.

I left Mom and went back downstairs. I found Uncle Terry standing in the kitchen, leaning against the counter, staring at the coffee pot. “Did you make this?” he asked me, rubbing sleep from his eyes.

“Nope. I don’t know how.” A memory came to me; you lifting me up to the counter. You pulling down the coffee can. I got to scoop the dark powdery coffee from the can into the filter. You would press some buttons and then we’d share a glass of milk and Oreos before going to bed. It had been a long time since I helped you to make coffee, but we still ate Oreos together almost every night after dinner.

The coffee pot was bubbling, filling up right on schedule. Mom came downstairs then. “Who made the coffee?” she asked, an edge in her voice.

The three of us stared at one another. Despite myself I laughed. “I didn’t do it, I swear!”

“David set the timer every night before he went to bed. It was his job,” Mom explained. Fresh tears welled in her eyes. 

We stood in the kitchen, dumbfounded and hopeful. No one ever confessed to making the coffee that morning, and the coffee never made itself again.

Truthfully, I hope too much that it was you to believe anything else is possible.

In May 2008 I stopped at a gas station to fill up my car. I had just opened my door and set my left foot on the ground when I heard a piercing screech, followed by a boom so loud all other noises disappeared. A (crazy) woman mistook her gas pedal for her brake and accelerated herself out of control. She crashed her Toyota Camry into the diesel tank directly behind me. She kept her foot on the gas even after her car was atop the diesel tank, eventually propelling her car off the tank and into the back of my car.

She hit me with enough force that I was thrown awkwardly into the door frame of my car. In her panic to get away from the gas tank she had just obliterated she kept accelerating, causing her car to fishtail and bash into the rear of my car a second time. I toppled from my
the car which
was pushed forward several feet. I landed in a quickly growing puddle of
diesel gas
.
I thought I was going to explode.
If she’d hit a regular gas pump rather than the diesel, I would have
.

Two years of chiropractic work and physical therapy repaired most of my injuries, but the pain that ached from my right hip down to my knee only worsened with time. In October 2011, after many unpleasant tests, my doctor finally discovered that I had torn the labrum inside my hip. An invasive hip surgery was required to correct the tear. After the surgery I had strict orders forbidding me to bear any weight on my right leg for three long months. I nearly went insane trying to maneuver on crutches without using my body properly. The only thing that saved me was the weather. The layers of snow and black ice dissuaded me from doing much more than sitting on the couch watching a lot of movies.

As frustrating as the whole experience was, I was old enough to know that sometimes going through a lot of pain and exercising patience are the only way to heal.

Dad was a young boy when doctors found a curve in his spine. The cure to straightening him out came from confining him from his waist to his neck in a plaster cast. He had to wear this torture device for an entire summer. Instead of the freedom to enjoy three months out of school, Dad would be trapped in a cast, his suffering exaggerated from the heat and humidity that overtakes Missouri in the summer.

Dad spent a few days pouting in his new cast, like any child with two sisters and a brother who had complete use of their bodies might do. Dad was one to wallow when he became overwhelmed and frustrated. He would get into dark moods, one problem spiraling in to another, his whole life ruined.

The thing about those moods (which I inherited, thank you very much) is that no matter how down he became he would always find a way back to the part of himself that knew how to continue on.

Dad had been inside of his cast for a week or two when brilliance struck. He snuck into the bathroom with my Grandmother’s expensive towels tucked under his arm. After some creative work with scissors and some good fortune that no one needed to pee while he was creating his masterpiece, when he emerged from the bathroom he was no longer a depressed and defeated little boy in a cast.

He was Monkey Man.

Grandma’s towels were tied around his neck into a superhero’s cape. He used tape to fashion an M in the center. He burst from his house, his arms outstretched as far in front of him as he could manage in his cast, and declared “I AM MONKEY MAN!”

Up and down the streets he flew, attracting the attention of all the kids on his block. His summer was far from ruined. 

Long before he started to build his airplane my father discovered he could fly. He outwitted the first real obstacle he faced in life by turning his kryptonite into a magic feather.

Flying has always set him free.

Children are prone to believing that their father’s are heroes, whether the father deserves this accolade or not. Sometimes children cling to this hope long after they know better. Eventually we all grow up to see that everyone is flawed. It’s easy to stop believing our parents are heroic. 

The first time I heard the story of Monkey Man was at a family bar-b-q at my Aunt Diana’s house. It was a spring day, presumably close to my father’s birthday in May. My parents and I were abruptly corralled together on the patio while my family shared knowing smiles on their faces. Someone told the story of Monkey Man, and all three of us were presented with our own capes made out of soft beige towels. The capes were embroidered for Monkey Man, Monkey Mom and Monkey Kid.

Someone took a family photo of us proudly wearing our capes. In the picture Mom is looking at Dad and I am standing in front of them, leaning into both their legs.

The smile on my face reminds me how proud I was to be their daughter. Not only did I believe my parents were superheroes, my whole family believed it too.

The first decision I remember Mom and I making about your funeral was where to bury you. Though we had lived in Minnesota for almost seven years, Missouri still felt like our real home. “It’s a big decision, but we have to think about what David would want. We also have to be okay with not having him here,” Mom explained while we stared at a plate of untouched sympathy cookies at the kitchen table.

Burying you in Missouri was a no brainer. I was too young to know how quickly a family who has been a part of your entire life can break apart after a tragedy such as we had suffered; I was too young to understand how much I might want to be able to visit your grave when the urge struck. At the time I had no clue how much everything had changed, the line between “before” and “after” had already begun to divide the people I loved. 

We decided to place you in the plot beside Grandpa. Grandpa’s body had been obliterated by cancer just two years earlier. Before his diagnosis we had made a trip down to Northern Missouri and met Grandma and Grandpa at Grandpa’s hunting cabin. He must have been incredibly sick at that point, but with his oldest son in town he found the energy to climb up on the roof with you to repair some shingles. There was a tree in the front yard with a bench built around it and we took several photos of the five of us to mark the occasion. You weren’t a hunter and didn’t take fishing very seriously, but you knew how much the visit meant to Grandpa.

That was the last time Grandpa would ever take his small fishing boat out on the river. A few weeks after we had returned home Grandpa had finally gone in to a doctor about his back pain. Within a couple of months of the diagnosis –
t
here was cancer in every bone and tissue in his body – he was dead.

You spent the remainder of that summer and early fall feeling frustrated and guilty. You wanted to be in Missouri with your parents, helping Grandma look after her dying husband. But you had a job, I had school, and the world doesn’t stop because of cancer.

We saw Grandpa for the last time a few weeks before he died. He was a frightening sight to behold, a skeleton with skin hanging from his withered body. I’ve yet to see anyone as sick as him. He was in bed when we packed up to go home, and I think we all knew that we would never see him alive again. We all leaned down to hug him, and the last thing you said to your father was that you loved him. 

As Mom and I talked about burying you, I thought about you burying your father. Why didn’t I think to ask you how it felt? Why didn’t I take notes on what I would one day be expected to understand when you or Mom died?

Why didn’t I ask you how you kept breathing when you remembered he was gone? Did you wish you cried more? Did you grieve in secret when Mom and I weren’t looking, or did you stuff the sorrow of it all deep inside, never letting it touch your heart.

Was the idea of putting your parent in a box in the ground as absurd for you at forty-six as it was for me at sixteen?

The doorbell and the phone had been ringing non-stop since you died. Our usually quiet house was suddenly a hub of activity. Beautiful
f
lowers that made me angry and food I couldn’t eat were being delivered in constant succession. There seemed to be an unspoken mission to never leave Mom and I alone or without food.

On the morning of July 3 a reporter with the Chaska Herald showed up on our doorstep.
I
n a small town, a plane crash was front page material. He tried to explain himself to me but once I realized what he wanted I slammed the door in his face.

The day before we had already read several blurbs in the Star Tribune and the Pioneer Press about your accident. I hadn’t expected to see them, and as far as I was concerned those blurbs were enough.

Mom must have heard the door slam because she appeared from the kitchen. She walked past me and opened the door. The reporter began to talk immediately. “Mrs. Norton, I’m with the Herald. I’m writing an article on the accident. Can I have a moment of your time?”

“Absolutely not! How could you even show your face here at a time like this?” Mom hissed, her slight frame trembling with rage.

The reporter sighed. His job couldn’t have been easy. “Mrs. Norton, this story will be in the paper, with or without your help. Without you, I only have a few facts to go off of. David Norton built a plane...which broke, causing the crash that killed him.”

“That’s not what happened. It was the wind. His plane was perfectly safe. The FAA inspected it with a fine tooth comb.”

“Those are the facts I need to make this story accurately portray your husband’s life and death.”

“Fuck,” Mom spat. We had both become so aggressive, so hateful in the past seventy-two hours. She turned to look at me. “What do you want to do, sweetie?”

“I won’t talk to him.” Another minute of this and I was afraid I was going to punch him.

“You don’t have to,” the reporter said. “You can just sit down, both of you, while I go over what I’ve got. You can jump in whenever you feel comfortable and tell me what I need to change.”

Mom opened the door wider. “We don’t have a choice,” she conceded.

The reporter sat at our kitchen table for a couple of hours. There were many pauses for tears and lots of curse words that I doubted would make the final draft. I listened and did my best not to look at him while I absorbed the details I already knew: David loved to fly and was a very experienced pilot, he always wanted to build his own plane, he took over the family basement and filled it with tools and wood that would eventually become a plane, if wind weren’t a factor he would be flying still today.

He loved his daughter more than anything in the world.

I think Mom threw that in because I needed to hear it, but of course it made it to print. Human interest stories are the most powerful, after all, regardless of who they hurt in the process.

When it was over, the reporter bravely turned to me, an angry, grieving teenager and asked if there was anything I wanted to add. I started at Mom, dabbing her eyes for the millionth time. I took a deep breath. “If this had to happen, it’s better that he died doing something he loved.” This cliché sentiment had become the Norton family mantra; it seemed to be the go-to for those who otherwise wouldn’t have known what to say. I thought that if I said it maybe then I would start to believe it. But there was no better. There was alive and there was dead, and nothing anyone said could make this okay.

The reporter ended his article, your story, with my words. The story made the front page of the paper. Above the text was a picture of you in your plane, nearly ready to take off in the very field you had died in. Most of the teachers at my school and more than a few of the students learned about your death from the newspaper. Teachers I didn’t even have classes with when school started that fall stopped me in the hallways to ask me if I was the kid of that guy they read about in the papers, the one who crashed his plane.