Picking Wings Off Butterflies

Picking Wings Off Butterflies

Excerpt from Chapter 3

“The Car That Hit Me Sent Me Flying”

            Since my father and I rarely saw each other, I’d become accustomed to thinking of him as though he were a familiar stranger. I can still remember his soft-spoken voice, his handshake, and the warmth of a rare hug that we could only exchange between years of separation. We were not close, and may never have been close even if I’d lived with him after my parents divorced when I was nine. Still, there were things he’d do for me that reminded me that I was his son. Why he personally drove us out to Helena, I can’t say. Being retired, maybe he was bored and had free time. Maybe he felt like taking a drive and getting out of town. But I’d like to believe he wanted to spend time with Gena and me. Whatever his reason, I’m glad he was with me, because when we got back to the motel, my world changed forever.

            The motel clerk notified me that I was to call the sheriff’s office in Helena immediately. The sheriff informed me there had been an accident in Germany, and I was to call my army company. The noncommissioned officer on desk duty at Company C, Thirty-Second Signal Battalion, reported that my son had been hit by a car while walking home from school and gave me the number to the hospital. Through my broken German and the hospital staff’s broken English, I was passed on to several German medical personnel and finally reached the physician who had been monitoring David in the hospital’s critical care unit. David had suffered a massive head injury. He’d fractured his left femur. He was in a coma and was not expected to survive the next twenty-four hours.

            Even now, the words I heard sound unbelievable. They are words that fall deafly, as though mouthed in a silent, black-and-white, slow-motion film sequence. These kinds of words are as implausible as they are unimaginable. No parent is prepared to hear such words, even less inclined to spend time worrying that such words would ever be uttered in reference to their child. Perhaps if I’d been in Frankfurt, maybe then could I have dared to believe what was happening. But I was halfway across the world, in a state I’d never traveled through, in a city I’d never visited, leaning against a pay phone with a sweaty black receiver dangling from my ear, hearing an obscene fable that only happens to other children and other parents. Surreal would not even begin to describe the world of confusion I found myself in.

            How the army pulled it off I’ll never know. But then again, in times of crisis, the armed forces are masters at logistics. When working as a team for a noble purpose, its personnel will sacrifice everything to render aid to those in conflict. Not surprisingly, then, at three o’clock in the morning, there was a knock on our motel door. I opened it to a member of the Red Cross. The elderly lady, donned in a white overcoat with a red cross stitched on the front pocket, handed me a one-way ticket to Frankfurt out of Great Falls, Montana, early that morning. She wished Gena and me well, was sorry she could not have done more, then departed mysteriously in the darkness of the early morning chill.

            Just hours later I would be jarred out of my mental stupor and ushered back into reality at one of the airport’s departing gates. Around me stood Gena, my father, and my stepmother, suffocating me within an inconsolable circle of despair. I instinctively moved toward my father and began hugging him like I’d never hugged him before. I don’t recall ever crying so profusely in my life. I’ve never cried that hard since. Somehow the good-byes got all rolled up into one. I knew it would be years before I’d see my father again, but when I hugged him, it was as though I was saying good-bye to my son—forever. And it was one of those body-convulsing, quaking, uncontrollable, and relentless cries of anguish that comes from deep down in the pit of your being, unleashing a grief you never thought humanly possible.