Part 4 (1/2)

I stroked Anna's forehead as controlled chaos-the tightly ch.o.r.eographed ballet of a surgical team-was set in motion all around us.

”We need to intubate her and suction the stomach before anesthesia.” Someone in scrubs wedged between me and Anna's bed. ”Dad, can you help us hold her?”

Kevin nodded and positioned himself with a firmly grounded grip on Anna, who was suddenly hyperaware and terrified. Thras.h.i.+ng and whimpering like a wounded animal, she fought with her last inch of free will as this big strange man she'd never seen before methodically forced a thick plastic tube up into her nose and down her throat.

”Swallow, Anna, swallow. We need you to swallow now,” he kept barking like a drill sergeant. Meanwhile, Anna gagged and wretched and vomited, struggling against Kevin, who held her in an unyielding grip, his face etched with sorrow.

I paced between the bed and the door, just trying to keep it together, digging my nails into my arms, biting my lip b.l.o.o.d.y to keep from yelling, Stop it! Stop it! Get off her! You're hurting her! They were helping her, I told myself numbly. Wasn't this what we'd been praying for? An answer? A resolution? But why? I begged G.o.d for understanding. Why does it have to come at this terrible cost?

”Anna, everything's going to be okay. I got you, Anna. Daddy's here.”

Kevin's voice filled the room, low, sweet, and sonorous, filled with love and a specific brand of agony. Slow tears rolled down his face and dropped one by one into the tears that streamed from the corners of Anna's eyes.

Annabel's kind and gentle personality definitely comes from her daddy. ”He's a middle child, like me,” she likes to point out. He is a modern-day James Herriot who cares for all G.o.d's creatures, great and small. It was a bitter irony in his life, having a career as a healer and still being utterly unable to fix this tiny creature who was and is most dear to him.

G.o.d made mankind in his own image, we're told in Genesis. There have been many moments in my life when I saw that fleeting reflection. At this particular moment, I saw a father, heartbroken at what has to happen to his precious child, hearing her pleas-not ignoring them, never, never turning away-but knowing that this moment of anguish was part of a bigger plan.

Of all the names we have for G.o.d, maybe the most appropriate for those moments is the Aramaic word Abba, which most closely translates to ”Daddy.” Abba is the G.o.d we cry out to when we are at our smallest, our most vulnerable. Abba is the G.o.d whose heart we break, the G.o.d who weeps for us and says, ”Daddy's here.”

”IT'S OKAY, BABY. ANNA, Daddy is here for you. Everything's going to be okay.”

It was dark now in the cottonwood grove. The headlights from the truck cast a watery haze of yellow illuminating the ground around us. Kevin held the flashlight inside the broken grotto at the top, making the tree into a tall, dim candle in the dark woods. It was just enough light to show me his face as he leaned in, talking and talking to Anna in that sweet and sonorous Abba way.

Over the past four years, they'd developed a unique bond, daddy to daughter, during some intensely difficult times. They spent many dark nights, not always speaking but always communicating, knowing what needed to be done-the quick repair of an IV, an adjustment to the nasogastric tube-knowing that sometimes it hurts. Anyone who's had to care for a chronically ill child knows what I'm talking about. Anna understood. Kevin came to be grateful for her courageous, unshakable spirit, but it left a scar on his soul.

”Anna, look at me. Can you look at Daddy? C'mon. Show me that you can hear me, Anna. Can you move your arm? Show me you can move your arm, baby.”

Waiting the agonizing half hour for the response teams to find their way to us in the maze of dark country roads, Kevin was forcing himself to be a doctor. a.s.sess her condition. Determine if she was...

No. Neither of us was willing to allow that possibility.

Far below, in the sliver of light, he could see Anna lying there. She looked peaceful. There was no obvious misalignment of her arms and legs, no significant blood loss that he could see. Everything in his gut was telling him that she was alive, but his medical mind was doing the math, factoring how far she'd fallen, calculating the vanis.h.i.+ng odds of anyone coming away from that without head trauma, internal bleeding, some kind of devastating spinal cord injury. He wasn't ready to process the less immediate psychological impact of being effectively buried alive.

”Annabel!” He called her name, and there was a hint of drill sergeant in it now, a tone of authority our girls know better than to ignore. ”Anna, do as I tell you. Move your arm, Anna. Move your arm. Show me you can hear me. Right now, Anna, you show me.”

She didn't look up, didn't flinch or s.h.i.+ft her position, but her arm moved. She raised one limp hand up from the dirt and set it down. Kevin whooped out loud, praising G.o.d for that small miracle.

”Christy! She's alive. She moved her arm.”

”Oh, G.o.d,” I breathed. ”Thank you, G.o.d.”

Kevin stayed there, watching from his perch high in the jagged grotto, scanning the rolling darkness for the distant lights of the ambulance and fire crew. She didn't call out to him, but he knew she was alive. That was all he needed. He felt Anna's serenity, the way he did during all that wordless togetherness they had shared through so many dark hours. He allowed her quiet spirit to calm his pounding heart.

Sirens wailed, coming closer, and soon heavy tires sprayed gravel on the turnoff to the driveway.

”Anna, I have to get down now,” Kevin told her quietly, ”but I'll be right here. Mommy and I are right here, baby, just a few feet away, and we're praying for you, and we're waiting for you. It'll be okay soon.”

Annabel lay still, never moving, not responding.

Chapter Five.

See how great a love the Father has bestowed on us, That we would be called the Children of G.o.d; and such we are.

1 John 3:1 I LOVE THE STORY about the day when Jesus, who could have been doing other things that other people deemed bigger and more important, chose to spend his time with a group of little children. Some guys started raising a stink about it, and Jesus said, Let the little children come to me, for such is the kingdom of G.o.d. Truly I tell you, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of G.o.d like a little child will never enter it (Luke 18:1617).

The Bible says very little about people entering or even seeing Heaven and living to tell about it: Ezekiel and Isaiah had prophetic visions and were overwhelmed by the glory of G.o.d. John says he saw the Holy City in Revelation. Paul tells about a friend who was ”caught up into Paradise and heard inexpressible words.” Stephen said he saw Heaven, and he was promptly dragged out and stoned to death. Clearly, it's a sensitive topic-maybe because people in our cynical world have such a hard time receiving it like little children.

”The way I saw Heaven was...” Anna thought hard, searching for words when she told me months later. ”It's hard to describe. But Jesus really does have a brown beard and an old-time white cloth robe that... I think it is a little ripped at the bottom, but I can't remember exactly because that was all the way back during Christmas break.”

You remember how that is. A thousand years are as a day when school is out.

Another thing Annabel once told me: ”I want to play French horn. It has the same word as French fry!” She sees the world as only a child can, and she saw Heaven the same way. She received it exactly the way Jesus hoped we all would: on faith. I don't press her to talk about it, but I find myself pondering the expression of the inexpressible, the look of love on Jesus's face as He put His arms around her and brought her onto His lap.

From the time they were babies, my girls have been shown countless images of Jesus: iconic paintings, like the one that ill.u.s.trates that story from Luke, and more modern takes that are probably a more accurate depiction of his skin tone. At Sunday school and church, they've been told the stories. They've seen the cla.s.sic movies and watched doc.u.mentaries on family-friendly cable channels.

But I'd like to think that when Annabel saw Jesus standing there, she knew Him with her heart. Because He already knew her heart so well.

Anna being Anna, she quickly cut to the chase and asked Jesus: ”Can I see the creatures?”

”Creatures? What creatures?”

”You know,” said Anna, ”the ones with the body of a lion and the head of an eagle.”

”No.” (Did He smile at that, I wonder?) ”No, you cannot see the creatures.”

”Mommy, He told me no!” She stressed that point when she was telling me about this part, unpleasantly surprised, because in her mind, Heaven is where everything is yes, and now her very first request-a relatively simple one, to her way of thinking-had been turned down without much due process.

”You have to go back, Anna. It's not your time.”

”But I don't want to,” Anna said. ”I don't want to go back.”

”I know you don't want to go. But I have plans for you to complete on Earth that you can't complete if you're in Heaven...”

He knew why she wanted to stay. He had to have known. Kevin and I never doubted that He heard us all those nights we spent crying out to Him when Anna was in agony. We started out with formal requests for healing; eventually we were broken down to begging for even an hour of relief. We just couldn't understand why, why, why He kept telling us no.

For Him to tell Anna no in this moment, face-to-face, after all she'd seen and heard in this place-to expect her to leave this place of gold glory for a place of pain and anguish-it must have been incomprehensible to her. It was certainly incomprehensible to us as we watched her suffer. No seems to be the one thing we have no trouble receiving like little children.

”I HEAR SIRENS,” I told the emergency operator. ”I think they're here.”

”Okay, good. Just stay on the line with me, ma'am. Don't hang up until the first responders get there.”

The first unit from the Briaroaks Volunteer Fire Department arrived a little after 6:30 p.m. Seeing Kevin's truck on the far side of the field, they made their way over to the cottonwood grove, steering around the stumps and gullies as well as they could without slowing down. Bryan Jamison, the burly Briaroaks chief, was right behind them.

I ran over to the unit and asked, ”Are you the first responders?”

Okay, I know. Duh. But appreciate the moment I was in.