by Lynn Austin
“You’re worse than an old lady, Steve. Call Dr. Bennett yourself if you don’t believe me.” He hoped Steve wouldn’t call his bluff.
“I can get someone else to fly that charter for you tomorrow if you’re not up to it.”
“No way! I’ll be fine tomorrow. Go finish your dinner.” Steve studied him for a moment then reluctantly returned to the table. The house seemed to sway as Mike followed him. He wouldn’t be able to finish his food or force down any apple pie either.
“I’m really sorry, Cheryl,” he said. “Your dinner was great, but I seem to have caught some kind of flu bug. I hope you’ll excuse me.”
“That’s OK, Dad. Why don’t you lie down for a while?”
“Cheryl and I can stay home tonight if you don’t feel up to babysitting,” Steve said.
“I’ll be fine. The kids can take care of me for a change.” Mike eased into Steve’s recliner, slowly tilting it back as far as it would go. He wouldn’t be able to keep up this façade much longer. Steve was already suspicious. The longer Mike delayed, the greater the likelihood that Steve would learn the truth and ground him permanently. Mike closed his eyes, feeling very drowsy all of a sudden. Soft, gray clouds of sleep closed in around him. He would have to take his final flight very soon.
When Mike awoke, he couldn’t tell if he’d slept several hours or a few minutes. Then he heard the clatter of dishes and Lori and Mickey arguing over whose turn it was to clear the table, and he knew it had been a short nap. His stomach had settled, and he no longer felt like he was flying through heavy turbulence. He pushed the recliner to a sitting position and picked up the evening paper, hoping to appear fully recovered for his son’s benefit. A moment later Steve and Cheryl walked into the living room dressed to go out.
“How are you feeling, Dad?” Cheryl asked.
“I’m fine now. This is the weirdest flu I ever had. One minute I feel fine and the next minute I’m heading for the bathroom. But I’m on the upswing now. I just hope none of you catch it.”
Steve studied him for a long moment as if trying to see what was going on inside him. Mike flipped through the newspaper with apparent unconcern. Finally, Steve let out a long sigh. “All right, I guess we’ll get going. Hey, you kids, Mom and I are leaving. You behave yourselves and don’t give Grandpa a hard time.”
Mike turned to the sports pages to check the latest major league standings, ignoring Lori’s periodic announcements of who was helping and who wasn’t. The squabbles continued until eventually the supper dishes got loaded into the dishwasher and the kids wandered into the living room.
“Are you still sick, Grandpa?” Lori slipped her slender arm around Mike’s neck. He tossed the newspaper onto the floor and pulled her on his knee.
“No, I’m much better now, Princess.”
“Will you tell us a story?” Peter asked, crawling onto Mike’s other knee. Mike savored the warmth and vitality of their sweaty bodies and the way they seemed to melt into his arms.
“Oh, what a lapful I’ve got! Aren’t you guys ever going to stop growing? I can hardly hold you both anymore.”
“Tell us a story about flying,” Mickey said from his command post under the coffee table.
“Yeah, tell us about the time you crashed.” Peter added the sound effects of an airplane whining to its doom, followed by an ear-shattering explosion.
“Grandpa crashed more than once, dummy,” Mickey said.
“I’m telling Mom. You’re not supposed to call people dummy.”
“Hey, hey, hey! No stories until you guys quit your squabbling.” The boys shot each other accusing looks but remained silent. “That’s better. Now then, which crash did you mean, Pete?”
“The one by Lake Plathit.”
“That’s Lake Placid” Mike said, laughing, “and if you guys know all of my stories, why do I have to tell them again?”
“Pleeeease,” Lori begged. “We like your stories, Grandpa. Just one more time?”
“OK, OK. Now, let’s see . . . how does that story go again?”
“You had to fly to Lake Placid to pick up a charter.”
“Oh, yeah. That’s right. Well, when I started out that day the weather report at Adirondack airport didn’t sound too good, calling for broken cloud cover at about 1,000 feet. But I decided I would fly the Beech Bonanza up anyway and take a chance on being able to spot the airport through the clouds.”
“You were flying VFR, right?” Mickey asked.
“That’s right. I didn’t fly on instruments back then. Anyway, I headed north and had pretty good flying conditions until I came to the Adirondacks just past Glens Falls. Then things got bad in a hurry. I should have turned back, I suppose, but I climbed above the clouds, instead, to get out of the bad weather. I figured I’d be able to spot Mount Marcy above the cloud cover, then I could watch for Whiteface Mountain just north of Marcy. The airport is about 15 miles or so due west of Whiteface.
“But about the time I figured I should be getting close to Mount Marcy, there was a solid bank of clouds below me and no mountains visible at all. I couldn’t even spot Marcy, and it’s more than 5,000 feet high! Well, I kept heading due north, hoping for a break in the clouds so I could at least find out where I was, but before long I began to realize that I was lost. There was just no way I could descend through that soup to look for Adirondack airport, not with all those 3,000 and 4,000 foot peaks hiding under the gray stuff! Plattsburg and Burlington airports had both reported worse weather conditions than Adirondack airport, so I finally decided the only thing I could do was turn around and head back to Warren County airport near Glens Falls before my fuel got any lower.
“I banked around to head south again when I thought I smelled oil smoke. I checked the instrument panel, which I’d been ignoring up until then, trying to see the ground, and that’s when I knew I was in serious trouble. The oil pressure was nil and the temp gauges were both rising. By now the cockpit was filling with smoke, so I cut the engine and put the plane in a shallow glide. My altitude was only about 7,000 feet, and I knew Mount Marcy was down there somewhere, less than 2,000 feet below me.”
“And you didn’t have a parachute,” Peter added.
“Nope, no parachute. I tried to keep the plane level and glide down as slowly as I could, all the time straining my eyes for a break in the clouds or for the dark shape of a mountain to come out at me.”
“Were you scared, Grandpa?” Lori asked.
“You bet I was! My hands shook so badly I could hardly hold the stick. I tried to restart the engine a couple of times because sometimes you can make it in on just a couple of cylinders, but the engine was a goner. And I thought I was a goner too. The worst part was waiting—just falling and falling out of the sky, waiting for the end to come.
“Down I went, and at about 6,000 feet I entered the soup. It’s an eerie feeling, you know, just gliding silently through the clouds with nothing visible outside the cockpit but gray fuzz. You have no sensation of falling when you’re in the clouds and no sense of direction. The only way you know you’re going down is by watching the altimeter unwind.” He drew circles in the air with his forefinger.
“Five thousand feet. Four thousand feet. I was well below minimum altitude by now, and I knew that any second I could slam into Mount Marcy or Porter or Allen Mountain, depending on where I was. All I could do was grit my teeth and brace for the impact of the crash that was sure to come.
“Three thousand feet. Two thousand feet. I could hardly believe I was still alive! Then all of a sudden—whoosh! I broke through the cloud cover and saw mountains on either side of me and the northern tip of Lake Placid dead ahead of me. I had been skimming along right down the valley between the peaks, just missing Whiteface on one side and Moose Mountain on the other. My heart nearly jumped out of my chest, but now I knew at least I had a fighting chance of coming out of it alive if I could just set the plane down someplace. I was wringing wet with sweat, but I joined the living again.
“Now
, Lake Placid is a fairly big lake, maybe four or five miles long, so I decided to steer the Bonanza down along the eastern edge where there weren’t too many rocks and trees and try to land close to the shoreline. I didn’t have pontoons, but I glided her in just as if I did and, boy, did it ever feel good to touch down again!”
“But the plane flipped over, right?” Mickey asked.
“Yeah, it nosed over on me after I landed, but I unhooked my seat belt and walked away without a scratch—very, very glad to be alive.”
Lori hugged him tightly. “I’m glad you didn’t die, Grandpa.”
“Me too!” Mike said, laughing. “I kept thinking about your grandma as I was going down, and about your dad and Uncle Mike. What would they do if anything happened to me? Your dad was about Mickey’s age, and Uncle Mike was about 12, I think.”
“Why did Grandma and Uncle Mike have to die?” Lori asked. “I never even got to meet them.”
“Well, dying is just a part of life, Princess. Everyone has to die sooner or later. I’ve had a couple of close calls, like the one over Lake Placid, but it wasn’t my time to go yet.” He gently brushed a wisp of hair off her forehead. “I guess your grandma and Uncle Mike ran out of time.”
“But what happens after you die?”
Mike drew a deep breath. He wished he had an answer for her, one that would sustain her through her grief in the months ahead. But he didn’t know the answers himself. He tried to remember what his wife had believed about death, how she had consoled him when they got word that Mike Jr. was dead in Vietnam. Where had her courage and strength come from during the last months of her illness? It was too long ago. He couldn’t remember.
“Well, I really don’t know what happens, Lori,” he said at last. “Once someone dies they can’t come back to tell everyone about it. But your grandma was a real good woman. She always went to church every week, and she believed that you go to heaven when you die and live up in the clouds with God.”
“I don’t like God. He makes people die.”
“That’s no way to talk, honey. I think God must be a pretty good guy. I always figured He was the One who steered my plane between the peaks that day. But sooner or later everyone’s time to die finally comes, and there’s nothing we can do about it.”
“Will we see each other again after we’re all dead?”
“I won’t lie to you, Princess. I honestly don’t know.”
A heavy sadness settled over Mike’s heart and a nameless apprehension and dread. It was the same sense of foreboding he had felt in the Adirondacks as he descended blindly through the clouds, waiting for the impact, wondering where he was heading and what was going to happen to him. But he felt an even deeper sadness for his grandchildren. He had nothing to leave behind with them—no assurances, no comfort, no consolation for their grief.
He knew he would have to end his life soon. The effects of his disease had started to show. But as he studied the little faces he loved so dearly, he longed to leave them hope and reassurance. For their sakes, he wished he could find the answers to their questions before he died.
Chapter 7
Monday, October 5, 1987
Wilhelmina sat at her kitchen table surrounded by tall piles of her brother’s books. A damp, musty smell emanated from some of the older ones that had once been her father’s. She wrinkled her nose with distaste. She had been sitting here, staring into space, for well over an hour, listening to her grandmother’s antique clock as it ticked off the seconds in the quiet house. She hadn’t opened Peter’s books. They held no answers for Mike. Her Bible lay open before her as well, but she could find no starting place, no point of juncture between the teachings of Jesus and the life of Mike Dolan.
What would Jesus say to him? “Mr. Dolan, you’re going to die soon. Do you want to spend eternity in hell?” Or maybe, “You’d better hurry up and get saved, brother, before it’s too late.” She’d heard similar phrases used within her evangelical circle, but they didn’t sound like Jesus” words to Wilhelmina.
She felt so helpless and inexperienced. Would she even get the opportunity to speak with Mike again? It would be much too forward of her to knock on his door uninvited. Should she reschedule the piano tuning? Dream up a new excuse?
The telephone jarred her out of her thoughts. It was Carol. “Hello, Wilhelmina. How are you, dear? Listen, I’m calling to tell you that I can’t go to the ballet with you this weekend. My sister and her husband are driving up from Virginia to stay for a week. I hope you can find somebody to go with you. Maybe Ellen Stockman would like my ticket.”
This was the answer to Wilhelmina’s prayers. It was perfect. Mike had confessed that he’d never been to the ballet the same day she admitted that she’d never flown a kite. Well, now that she’d flown a kite, he had to go to the ballet. They were performing “Romeo and Juliet.” What better introduction to the subject of death and suicide than Prokofiev’s beautiful, tragic ballet? Yes, it was perfect.
After she hung up the phone, Wilhelmina dialed Mike’s number at the airport before she had time to change her mind. She recognized Mike’s cheerful voice.
“Well, hey there, Professor. Long time, no see. Don’t tell me, let me guess . . . You’ve decided to take me up on my offer and go flying with me.”
“Well, no. Not exactly.” She was surprised to find that she was smiling.
“I’m sorry to hear that. What can I do for you, then?”
“You can come to the ballet with me this Sunday afternoon.”
“The ballet!”
“Yes. You said you’ve never been to one, and I just happen to have two tickets, so if you’re not busy Sunday . . .” She ran out of words suddenly, and there was an uncomfortable silence.
“I’m speechless!” Mike finally said.
“I’ve decided not to take ‘no’ for an answer, so you may as well stop dreaming up excuses and come with me.”
Mike laughed his hearty, contagious laugh. “Where have I heard that line before? OK, Professor, I guess you got me there.”
“Good. Then it’s settled. Why don’t you come to my house around one o’clock, and we can drive over to Hartford in my car?” Wilhelmina wanted to make it clear she had no desire to repeat her ride in Mike’s pickup truck.
“Hartford! Say, we could cut the trip down to no time at all if we flew.”
“No,” she said quickly, “I think I would rather drive.”
“OK, this is your party. I’ll be there Sunday at one.”
By Sunday, Wilhelmina’s nerves vibrated like opening night at Carnegie Hall. This was it, her big debut, the opportunity God had provided for her to talk to Mike Dolan about his eternal soul. She could not—she dared not—fail Him this time. She may not have another chance.
She had read through all four of the Gospels this week in preparation and had tried to memorize some of the key passages, writing them out on index cards, which she carried in her purse. She had hardly paid attention to Pastor Stockman’s sermon that morning—something about Jesus saying, “let the little children come to me . . .” Well, she had no time to worry about children. Her mission was Mike. She had reviewed the memory verses on her index cards instead. John 3:16, “For God so loved the world . . .”
By the time the service had drawn to a close, Wilhelmina had begun to tremble. During the stillness of the closing prayer she accidentally stepped on one of the organ pedals, creating a rumbling, thundering noise that jarred the congregation out of their seats. Many of them probably believed the Second Coming had arrived. She had never done such a thing before in all her years as organist, but Wilhelmina had been in too great a hurry to be embarrassed. She drove straight home to change for the ballet.
She was upstairs in her big front bedroom at five minutes to one when she heard Mike’s noisy pickup truck pull into her driveway. Wilhelmina took a deep breath and mumbled a quick prayer. The doorbell rang. She hurried downstairs to let him in. But when she opened the front door Mike wasn’t there. Instead, his l
ittle granddaughter stood on the step in a ruffled pink dress and shiny patent leather shoes.
“Hi, Professor Brewster,” she said shyly.
Wilhelmina’s mouth fell open, but she couldn’t make a sound. She caught a quick glimpse of Mike’s truck backing out of her driveway.
“What? . . . Where? . . .” Wilhelmina was too startled to be coherent. When she realized the awful truth that Mike was gone, leaving his granddaughter behind, Wilhelmina released her disappointment with a groan. “Oh, no!”
The little girl’s smile faded. Her bottom lip began to quiver.
“I’m sorry,” Wilhelmina said quickly. “It’s just that . . . I mean . . . oh, never mind! Come in.” The child didn’t move. Wilhelmina knew she had been rude, but she didn’t know how to make things right. She had never fussed much with children, even her own nieces and nephews. But apparently she was stuck with this child for the afternoon, and it made her furious. She attempted a smile, but her voice was brusque.
“Come in, child! I’ve forgotten your name.”
“Lori,” she said in a whisper.
“That’s right. Come in, Lori.” She took the girl’s arm and pulled her into the house. Lori’s terror-stricken expression made Wilhelmina feel like the wicked witch inviting Hansel and Gretel into her house for gingerbread. She led the way into the living room and watched as Lori gazed at the huge front hall and spacious rooms with awe.
“Sit down.” It sounded more like a command than an invitation. Lori obediently sat, perching on the edge of the sofa cushion as if ready to run. “Would you like a cookie or something?” Lori shook her head. This was going badly. Wilhelmina decided to start over.
“I’m sorry for treating you rudely, Lori. It’s just that you took me by surprise. I was expecting your grandfather, you see.”
“He had to give a flying lesson.”
“A flying lesson! Couldn’t that have waited one more day?” Wilhelmina spoke without thinking, venting her anger. She had been a fool for thinking Mike would go to the ballet with her. When she thought of all the planning and preparation she had done for this day and how it was all going to go to waste, she wanted to weep.
