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Unthinkable Dixie Fremont-Smith Coskie, Wyatt-MacKenzie Publishing (page 4 of 4) Page 4 of 4

As my heart kept pace with the beating engine, I pictured the instant Paul had entered, greeted the world. I heard my son’s innocent cry and felt his tiny rosebud lips sucking on my nipples. And when he was able, I remembered him crawling like a spider among the dandelions, taking wobbly steps, falling and beginning to walk again. I remembered the completeness in my spirit when months later he had tried to say Mama and Dada. I thought of all the humid days he jumped around with his siblings, looking for frogs in our yard, and how he impersonated creatures while playing and interacting with toys in his bedroom. I could almost feel the anxiety of bringing him to preschool and preparing him for kindergarten. There were so many cozy nights I read to him. How he loved the pictures! He was always playing with numbers, trying to figure things out. Wanting to know how a bomb was made. How electricity worked. What was underneath the hood of a car. And, oh, how he and his younger brother Kevin would avoid their schoolwork engrossed in PlayStation for hours. I thought back to the days when Paul taught Anna-Theresa, Kevin, and Monica to tie their shoes and to ride a two-wheeler. I thought back to swim lessons. T-ball, baseball, and basketball practices. Scooters, skateboards, and grind-ing the rails and half pipes. I reminisced of the evenings Amanda and Brianna and their friends spent in our yard, cooking marshmallows in the fire pit. Paul surrounded by the pretty girls, trying to fit in, wearing the biggest, baggiest jeans I had ever seen. I thought back to all the nights Caroline and Paul stayed up talking, and the advice he gave her to stay away from boys. I could almost hear the laughter in his voice as he joked with his father, challenging him to a debate about anything. Paul was always determined to win, especially when it came to parent-child issues, pushing us to the limit, then candidly bringing us back. I remembered how he loved to camp, to sail, to get ready for any adventure. Eerily, I thought: he had never flown in a helicopter.

I glanced down at the miniature earth and the blur of so many Monopoly-sized houses clustered together. I thought about the lives under the numerous rooftops. What was their purpose, destiny? How many sensuous sheets had been ruffled before the sun had risen? How many showers had been taken that morning? Meals microwaved? TV stations watched? How many children had kissed their parents in the early morning? And how many tender lives would perish, expire, and cease to exist by the end of the daylight hours?

The chopper must have hit an air pocket; the intense pressure behind my eyes and in my skull felt like it was about to explode. I was unable to move. As stunned and scared as a deer, or a little boy caught in the bright lights of an oncoming SUV. Forcing the stale vomit in my throat to stay down, I glanced at the tiny ant-like people below, who were unaware as to what had just happened to my son, to me, my family. The helicopter landed precisely on the bull’s eye. Anxiously, I waited to see if there was a corpse on the stretcher. The paramedics quickly lifted Paul’s body out of the helicopter’s Bat Cave. Paul was still alive. I sprinted beside the paramedics, never ducking from the sharp blades.

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From Unthinkable by Dixie Fremont-Smith Coskie. Copyright © 2009 by Dixie Fremont-Smith Coskie. Reprinted with permission of Wyatt-MacKenzie Publishing. www.wymacpublishing.com. For more information about the author, go to dixiecoskie.com.

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