The Yellow Packard (33 page)

Stepping into the car, he pushed the gas pedal four times, pulled out the choke, and punched the starter. As the six-volt battery delivered a burst of power to the starter, the engine slowly turned over, but it didn’t catch. Taking a deep breath, Nate pumped the gas pedal two more times and once more hit the starter. The results were the same.

“Come on, baby, don’t let me down now!”

He’d just finished sweet-talking the car when the passenger door flew open and Beverly eased in with Angel in her arms. Her worried eyes looked to her husband as she slid across the seat toward him. “What’s wrong? Why haven’t you gotten it started?”

“It’s a cold night,” he explained, “the oil is thick.”

“But, Nate?” She moaned, trying to keep the shaking child in the safety of her arms. “We’ve got to go now. I think she’s dying.”

“I’ll get it started,” he assured her as he pressed the gas pedal two more times and hit the starter. The old motor wheezed. It coughed twice more as Nate continued to press the starter; then it finally caught and began to purr.

“Let’s go,” Beverly urged.

“It’s has to warm a bit, or it’ll kill when I let the clutch out.” He looked at the instrument panel, silently pleading with the engine to heat up. After a minute of idling and the temperature needle still registering
cold
, he pushed in the clutch and backed the car out of the garage and across the snow-covered lane. In spite of the fact that the snow was up to the running board, the Packard’s wheels steadily propelled the family to the street.

She pulled Angel even closer to her body. “Can we make it?”

As the car gained traction and eased forward, Nate grimly smiled. “The car’s heavy,” he explained. “And the motor is powerful. If I keep it in first and second and we don’t have to stop much, I think it will get us there. Just say a few prayers.”

The words had no more cleared his lips than Angel began to shake even more violently in Beverly’s arms. After staring at his daughter in the dim illumination of the dash lights, he glanced down at the car’s clock. It was two thirty-five. Even on a good day, the drive to the hospital would take ten minutes. How long would it take tonight?

As he eased down the street, the wipers couldn’t keep up with the falling snow. They did their best to push the slush off the glass, but still Nate could only see for a few seconds at a time and then the world was white again until the blades moved back the other direction. Thankfully there was no traffic, so Nate could aim the car right down the middle of the empty streets and ignore all the stop signs. Still, because the snow was so deep and visibility so poor, the best he could do was a top speed of fifteen miles an hour. Even at that speed he felt as if he were trying to control a sled flying down a mountain trail.

Block by block they fought their way through the raging blizzard. Twice the car slid toward a curb only to have Nate reverse the steering wheel, slow down, and regain traction. All the while, Angel continued to shake uncontrollably. A mile became two and then three and finally four and five. What seemed like days was less than half an hour, and somehow Angel managed to hang on.

It was just past three when Nate finally saw the four-story brick hospital through his almost completely snow-covered windshield. He slid like a boat into port into the emergency room’s driveway. But pulling up the slight incline caused his wheels to spin for at least thirty seconds. He thought he was going to have to stop the car, grab his little girl, and race the last one hundred yards on foot. Just as he was about to shift into neutral and set the emergency brake, the Firestone tires caught and the Packard jerked forward. They were going to make it! He had just eased in front of the hospital’s doors when Beverly’s words caused his heart to stop.

“She’s not breathing,” she cried out. “Nate, she’s not breathing!”

Nate said nothing. With no explanation, he reached over and grabbed Angel from his wife’s arms, pushed open his car door, and raced through the snow up the ramp and into the hospital. Charging up to the desk, he screamed, “My baby’s not breathing. You’ve got to do something!”

A middle-aged nurse, dressed in a starched white uniform, got up from her chair, glanced down at the child, ran her hands over Angel’s face, and then gently took her. She barked some instructions to another nurse who was sitting across the room at another desk. That woman grabbed a phone and called for a doctor to come down immediately.

“She’s got a mass on her brain,” Beverly explained as she came up behind Nate. “Dr. Hutton has been treating her.”

The nurse nodded, her kind brown eyes catching the couple’s for a moment as she quickly moved across the room. “We’ll do what we can,” she assured them. “You stay here, and I’ll get her into the emergency room.” Just before she disappeared into a side room she glanced over her shoulder and called out, “When did she stop breathing?”

“Just as we drove up,” Beverly said.

“Good.”

A second later, the nurse and Angel were gone, leaving the two frantic parents alone in the waiting room. Nate pointed toward the chairs, wrapped his right arm around his wife’s back, and gently guided her toward a seat.

Chapter 62

F
or five long hours, Nate comforted his wife while they watched doctors and nurses coming and going. Outside, the snow stopped falling and the city awakened to an unexpected winter wonderland. It was the kind of scene Angel would have loved and one that would have likely found her up to her waist in snowdrifts making everything from snowballs to forts. But that wouldn’t happen today. In fact, it might never happen again.

It was just past eight when Dr. Hutton emerged and walked across the room to the where the couple was sitting. While he appeared exhausted, there was also a peace in his eyes.

“Is she …?” Beverly couldn’t force herself to say the words that had been etched in her mind for hours.

“She is fine,” the doctor softly replied. “She is sleeping and we are about to put her in a room. But if you hadn’t gotten her here at the very moment you did, we would have lost her. How you made it through that storm I don’t know. I mean the only the reason I was here was because I couldn’t get home.”

“Thank God she’s okay,” Nate said with a smile. He looked toward the doctor and then his wife. He knew what the doctor meant was she was all right
for the moment.
Today, tomorrow, or next week, or next month, Angel would be hit again, and when it happened the ending would likely be much different.

“When can we take her home?” Beverly asked.

The doctor smiled. “If nothing else happens and she feels good, I would say tomorrow. Now, Beverly, why don’t you go see her right now. It will take a few minutes before the room is ready, but I know you need to hold her.”

The woman didn’t need to be asked twice. She bounced off the chair, across the room, and into the open door that had been her focus for so much of the night. After she had disappeared, the doctor took a seat beside Nate. After putting his hand on the father’s shoulder, he softly said what didn’t need to be said, “What you experienced tonight will happen again. There is nothing we can do about that. The mass is growing and things will get worse. So, as a friend, not as Angel’s doctor, I recommend that you cherish the good days you have left. Crowd as much into them as you can. Make what life she has left as sweet for Angel and yourself as it can possibly be. Every moment in each day is a gift.”

Chapter 63

N
ate watched Angel sleep that night at the hospital. Even though he sent Beverly home to rest and get ready for their child’s homecoming, he never left the chair beside her bed. The next day, after their yellow car had retraced the route from the hospital to their home, he followed the little girl everywhere she went. He felt as if he were trying to crowd a lifetime of memories into just a few short moments.

As the horrible day of the bad seizure turned into a good day and then a great day, Nate found it hard to leave for his next flight run. Yet he had to work because bills still came in. So to make sure he was always informed on what was going on at their small, brick home in Wilmette they began a new routine. He’d call Beverly from Midway Airport before he got on the plane. He’d then call her from the airport, wherever that was, as soon as he landed. He’d call her again from the hotel and the next morning before he took off. The calls were always the same—Beverly would answer; he’d say, “Hello;” and she’d say, “She’s fine.” They’d talk for a few minutes, and then he’d hang up.

When he’d get back to Chicago, as soon as he deplaned, he’d race to the employee’s entrance and look for the Packard. As long as it was there, as long as his wife was in the driver’s seat and his little girl’s mitten-covered hand was waving from the back window, it meant he would get to embrace her at least a few more hours or maybe a day or maybe even a week. And that was how life was measured—in moments. One moment at a time.

The days turned into weeks and the weeks to a month and then two, and just as the focus of his life changed, so did his prayers. When they’d discovered the mass in Angel’s head, he’d asked for a miracle. That prayer continued until the big seizure hit. The prayer then changed to “Please let me be there when she dies.”

He knew it would tear him to pieces to see his daughter take her last breath, and he dreaded that experience more than anyone could begin to understand. But he had to be there, not just for Angel, but for Beverly. He couldn’t bear for her to go through that experience alone. With the infertility and all they had been through even before Angel came into their lives, that would simply be asking too much.

A hundred … no a thousand times … he had thought back over all Beverly had endured during their marriage. It had almost broken her heart when she found out she was the reason they couldn’t have children. She felt she had cheated him and even begged Nate to divorce her and find someone who could give him children. It had taken him more than a year to convince her that adoption was something he was excited about. But for reasons he didn’t understand and she couldn’t quite explain, she didn’t want to adopt. If God wouldn’t let her have kids, she saw it as a sign that she wasn’t supposed to. He’d figured they’d never have children. Until fate stepped in.

An older woman at church, Blanche Ragsdale, was taking care of a little girl from Missouri whose parents had died. She brought the little blond bundle of energy into the Sunday school class that Beverly was teaching. The child and woman instantly bonded. A few weeks later when Blanche died unexpectedly of a heart attack, Beverly immediately stepped in to take care of the little girl. They were told that Blanche had left Angel to them in her will. So, simply because of that one act, Beverly found a way to see God’s hand in everything—from her not being able to have children of her own to sending Angel her way.

And then came the fall at the playground.

Now, each time he looked into Angel’s eyes, he knew this would be their only child. Beverly simply couldn’t make a leap of faith to adopt again. Thus he had to squeeze every moment out of these last few weeks or days. He had to embrace being a parent now because there would never be another time.

Chapter 64

N
ate Coffman sat in the pilot’s seat of the DC-3 as he went over his checklist. After completing it, he looked to his copilot. “Collins, did you have a good Valentine’s Day?” He didn’t really care if the other man had done anything special for the holiday; he just felt the need to make conversation.

“Not bad,” the copilot replied. “I got Kathy some perfume. That special French kind she likes. I dropped a lot of money on it, too. Do you know what she got me?”

Nate smiled. “What?”

“She got me a rake. What am I supposed to do with a rake in Chicago in the middle of the winter? You tell me that.” Collins looked out the window and studied the scene on the Nashville, Tennessee, tarmac. “Got some weather moving in. Are we all loaded up?”

“I’ll walk back and check with Ann,” Nate replied.

Moving from the cabin to the passenger compartment of the American Airlines plane, he tipped his head to a couple of elderly ladies and caught Ann Grayson’s attention. After showing a ten-year-old boy how to fasten his seat belt, the stewardess walked over.

“You need something, Nate?” she asked.

His eyes scanned the seats. “Is everyone who bought a ticket on board?”

“We’re missing one,” she replied, “but we are already five minutes behind schedule, so I guess that’s his tough luck.”

“Okay,” he answered. “I’ll get things rolling.”

Moving back to the nose of the plane, he tossed himself into the pilot’s seat. Just as he picked up the radio’s microphone to inform the tower that Flight 22 was ready to go, he heard a voice on the speaker.

“American Flight 22. One of your passengers just checked in. The agent told him he was too late. You want to open the plane up for him or just take off?”

The pilot glanced back toward the gate. This trip had taken him out for two days. Two days was nothing to most people, but to him it was a lifetime. The crew had already rolled the steps away, and the door had been latched. So if they left the guy stranded, it wouldn’t be their fault. He wouldn’t get in trouble with the airline for it either.

Nate glanced over to his copilot. Collins shrugged. “Won’t be another plane leaving for Chicago until tonight. The guy will have a long wait. But it is up to you.”

Sighing, the pilot barked into the microphone, “Tell him to pick it up, and have the ground crew get the stairs back in place.”

Ten minutes later they were airborne, the pilots flying the metal bird through a light snow northwest toward Chicago. As they climbed, the precipitation grew heavier. At six thousand feet they were in the midst of a full-blown blizzard. Yet the snow was not the main issue of concern for the veteran team; it was the wind. Gusts were hitting them like punches from a heavyweight champ. As Nate battled to keep the crate on course Collins quipped, “God’s not in a good mood.”