The dismissive way they call me "Mom" always makes me wish their real mom would walk in and smack them upside the head. No, I was not happy, but, yes, this was a step in the right direction. Even if the test showed something bad, knowing is better than not knowing. Knowing means you can do something about it.

I held Anna in my arms before and after X-rays and then a sonogram to confirm the results, and then we waited until they called Kevin and me into the little room where they take you when they have to tell you what you don't want to hear.

"I'm sorry," the ER doctor told us. "The intestine is one hundred percent obstructed. The surgeon is on his way. You should prepare to be here for a long while."

Kevin and I were left standing there with the very real possibility that Anna would die that night.

STANDING IN THE COTTONWOOD grove four years later, I felt the same ringing in my ears as my head wrapped around the reality-the gravity-of what was happening.

The tree towered in front of me. Anna was somewhere inside it, close enough for me to reach out and touch her and still be utterly unreachable.

Abbie broke away from me, and before I could call her back, she was clambering back up the tree, agile as a squirrel. I sucked in a deep breath. Suddenly that branch seemed so much higher than I remembered. And the gaping grotto so much darker.

Chapter Four.

Blessed are those who wash their robes, that they may have the right to the tree of life and may go through the gates into the city.

Revelation 22:14 DEEP IN THE HEART of the tree, Anna drifted, vaguely aware of the suffocating stillness and then... something else. Someone else. Somewhere else.

"I always thought Heaven would be like sitting on clouds," she told me later, "but it's like... it's like being suspended above the universe."

She was very circ.u.mspect and said very little about the experience. This wasn't like one of her long, spun-out recaps of a funny dream or a movie she'd seen. She confided only a few details on only a few occasions, and when she told me about it, I felt her weighing her words in a way that was very Annabel. This was the girl who used to look at the "Your Pain on a Scale of 1 to 10" chart and select the stoically moderate 6, even when all clinical indicators told us she was actually experiencing something more like a 9. She'd been through enough real drama in her short life; she had no interest in melodrama.

"Mommy, the gates of Heaven really are made of gold, and they really are big and bright."

When she confided in me and Kevin and Gran Jan in the days that followed-and in the years since then-she chose carefully what she wanted to share and what she wanted to keep to herself. And I respect that. I have never pumped her for details. I am curious-of course, I want to know as much as you do-but as the song says, "I can only imagine."

I imagine the pitch darkness dissolving to light around her, the dank air suffusing with pure oxygen, that prison cell of Earth and rotted wood giving way to clear blue sky, pure freedom. I close my eyes, and I can see her getting up from the muck, stepping into the City of G.o.d.

"I have always thought G.o.d has a big heart because He has so much love, and He does," she told me. "Mommy, He has a big heart that glows. G.o.d's heart was so filled with joy that it shined with... with gold glory. And His eyes were like the biggest and most beautiful star in the sky."

THE FIRST OF THE evening stars were visible in the eastern sky as I ran across the open field, stumbled, caught myself, kept running, over the grated cattle gate to the gravel drive. I felt calm but fiercely focused on what needed to happen.

Find my cell phone.

Call Kevin.

Call 911.

Get Anna. Get my eyes on her. Get my arms around her.

I burst through the kitchen door, ran to my room, and thrashed through the neat piles of laundry looking for my cell. My hands were trembling as I clicked to Favorites and speed-dialed Kevin's number. In the forever-long seconds it took him to answer, I was already out the door again, running down the driveway.

I called the veterinary clinic at 5:25 p.m., trying not to sound panicked when the receptionist answered.

"It's Christy. I need Kevin right away, please."

"He's right here. Hang on."

Knowing what I know now, this is another moment that sends a shiver down my spine. Kevin was supposed to be in surgery, performing a delicate operation on a large dog, but as the procedure got under way, he was concerned about the way the dog was responding to the anesthesia, and he closed. This was a complex orthopedic surgery, and there was no one there who could have stepped in, so there's no way he would have scrubbed out once the procedure began. But the way things went, he happened to be standing right there at the front desk in his scrubs, talking to the dog's owner when I called.

"Hey, babe." Kevin's voice was like cool water.

"Kevin, Anna's in trouble."

I blurted out everything I knew about the situation-that she'd fallen into a hole in a tall tree, that I couldn't get to her-and even in the moment I think we were both surprised at how calm I sounded. Kevin immediately knew the tree I was talking about.

"I knew Abbie had been climbing up there, but I'm surprised Anna-"

"Please, just get here as quickly as you can. I'm calling 911."

"Hang on, hang on. I'll be there in ten," he said. "In less time than it would take them to get over here, I'll have a ladder up there and get her out."

I bit my lip, wanting to believe it would be that easy. "Please, hurry."

Kevin told me later that he envisioned climbing up a few branches, calming Abbie, reaching four or five feet into a depression, and helping Anna down from the tree, no blood, no foul, just another Beam sisters misadventure that went over the line.

He could be right, I thought. We were a.s.suming different answers to the same questions: Was she hurt? How deep did the chasm go? Abbie insisted that Anna had fallen all the way to the ground, but that didn't seem possible. How could a tree that large still be standing if the trunk was nothing but a hollow pipe? And if it was hollow but still solid enough to stand, could there be air inside? Regardless of how deep it was, the rotted core of a tree must be crawling with all kinds of creepy G.o.d-knows-what...

"Kevin, please, please hurry."

I knew he was only a few minutes away, but those few minutes were agony. Adelynn was alternately clinging to my leg and gashing at the ground with anything she could find. Abbie was sobbing, refusing to come down from her high perch. She kept crying out into the black hole-"Anna! Anna!"-begging Annabel to answer her.

Why didn't she answer?

"Having some trouble?" Our neighbor came through the trees, peering at Abbie in the twilit branches and me pacing below.

"Yes!" I ran to him, grateful to see another grown-up, even though we'd only met a few times in pa.s.sing. Living in the country, there's a lot of s.p.a.ce between people, but when someone needs help, the gap closes.

"Need a ladder?" he asked.

"Oh, yes, Jack, thank you. Please, hurry."

He was back in less than a minute, but when we propped the ladder against the tree, it was a good ten or twelve feet short of the branch where Abbie had posted herself like a sentry.

"Mommy," Abbie called to me. "I think she's-I don't think she can breathe."

I called Kevin again. "Kevin, I'm really getting scared. Abbie is at the top of the tree freaking out. She says Anna is having a hard time breathing. I can't stand here. I have to call 911. I have to do something."

"I'm here. I'm at the turnoff. Just sit tight and let me see what's going on."

The headlights on the borrowed diesel jalopy bounced across the pasture, closing the distance between us with a comforting roar. Kevin pulled to a stop and leaped out, leaving the bright lights directed toward the tree. On his way out of the animal hospital, he'd had the presence of mind to grab a great big rope they use to restrain horses for surgical procedures, but when he took in the situation-the true height of the tree, the inadequacy of even the tall ladder propped against it-he felt a jolt of nervous adrenaline. This might not be as simple as he thought.

Sprinting the quarter mile through the trees and over the field to his workshop, he was praying, willing himself to stay calm for his girls. Moments later, he came back to us on a dead run, panting hard, lugging a twenty-four-foot extension ladder on his shoulders.

"Abbie," he called, "c'mon down here now. You're not safe up there."

"I don't care!"

"Abigail. Get down here. Now."

"Daddy," she said wretchedly, "I'm scared. And I hurt my ankle. And I can't leave Anna, Daddy. I promised I wouldn't leave her."

"Okay." He rubbed one hand over his face, sweating despite the cool of the evening. "Hang on. I'm coming up there."

We positioned the ladder, extending it as high as it would reach, and Jack and I held it steady while Kevin scrambled up. I heard him talking to Abbie in his low, calm Daddy voice, and after a moment, she let him help her down. It was dark now, and Abbie's bare legs were visibly shaking. When her feet were finally on the ground, I allowed myself to exhale.

"Kevin, did you see Anna? Is she breathing? Could you hear her?"

He shook his head grimly, striding toward the veterinary truck. I had to run to keep up with him.

"Kevin, I should call 911. Should I call?"

"I'll get her," he said. "Let's just stay calm."

He hitched a high-powered flashlight to his pocket, looped the rope over his shoulder, and headed back to the tree. With the twenty-four-foot ladder fully extended, Kevin was able to climb up and peek over the edge of the opening if he balanced on his toes on the very top rung-a sight in itself that stopped my heart.

Oh, G.o.d, please. Keep your hand on him. Keep him steady...

Running his hand along the jagged edges of rotting wood, Kevin still expected to find Anna relatively close to the hole. He was thinking that once he was at eye level, he'd be able to see her, and she'd be able to take the rope.

"Anna? Anna, Daddy's here. Everything's okay."

He looked up into the hollow of the tree above the hole, which gave him a sense of what the inside of the tree was like, but to look down, he'd have to climb higher. Kevin reached out with one arm and tested the branch where Abbie had been standing. When he shifted his weight to it, the branch moaned softly, and I covered my face with my hands.

"Oh, G.o.d! Please, be careful, Kevin!"

"Sit tight," he called to me, leaning into the cavity. "Everything's under... control..."

I heard his confidence leave him.

As Kevin beamed the flashlight down into the chasm, he saw what Abbie had seen. He'd grown up outdoors, climbed his share of trees, but he'd never seen anything like this. It was like staring down a dry well. Kevin's stomach dropped as his brain processed the truly dire straits Anna was in. He leaned in, but the corridor angled away from the light. There seemed to be no end to it.

"Anna? Can you hear me?"

He paused, straining to hear something. Anything. The only sound was the light wind in the leaves overhead.

"Okay, Anna." Kevin kept talking in that strong, soothing voice. "Okay, we got this. Daddy's here. Everything's going to be okay, baby."

I don't know if he was trying to convince her or himself or Abbie and Adelynn and me as we huddled shivering on the ground below.

Abandoning the ladder altogether, Kevin hoisted himself onto the wide branch and leaned most of his upper body into the hole. Trying not to dislodge chunks of the brittle rim, he stretched tentatively into the hole, like he was leaning into the mouth of a monster. He angled and tilted the light until he caught a glimpse of pink.

"Jesus..." Kevin took in a strangled breath. "Jesus, help me."

Anna was curled motionless in the dirt, in a fetal position, entombed in the bottom of the narrow wooden corridor. She looked lifeless and impossibly far away and very, very small.

Kevin dropped that great big rope that he'd thought was surely adequate for anything that could possibly be going on over here. I watched it spiral down to the scrub gra.s.s, as useless as a garden hose in a forest fire.

"Kevin? What's happening?"

"Christy. Call 911."

His voice was calm, but I know this man. I couldn't see his face, but I could feel his gut-deep fear.

"Nine-one-one, what is your emergency?"

The answer rushed out of me. Calmly. Firmly. Emergency room mommy. No panic, but no wasted words.

"Stay on the line with me, okay, ma'am? I'm dispatching the volunteer fire department now. I want you to stay on the line with me until the first responders arrive."

"All right." I nodded at no one. "Yes. Okay."

I stood there, rooted to the spot, my cell phone frozen to the side of my face. In the background, I heard the dispatch radios and phones spreading the alarm. The operator came back, relaying questions from the paramedics, and I recited Anna's age, height, weight, blood type.

"Does your daughter have any existing medical problems?"

I made a soft, choked sound that was neither a laugh nor a cry. Or maybe it was a bit of both. "Yes. Yes, she does..."

ONE GETS THE HANG of explaining things after a while, but that first year, it was like trying to lay out the meandering plot of a soap opera. First came months of misery without any meaningful diagnosis or treatment. Then came a year with the GI specialist who saw Anna more times than I can count. He doggedly stuck with the "this mom tends to overreact" theory until the abdominal obstruction occurred. Even then, the pediatric surgeon we met in the emergency room had to practically twist his arm.

"But you just saw her yesterday and scoped her and sent her home. Now I've got her, and she is one hundred percent obstructed. I'm seeing it on the X-ray, confirmed on the sonogram. It's confirmed. She's in serious trouble."

Kevin and I sat in ashen silence, listening to the ER doc on the phone in the hallway.

"Look, what the little girl always does or the mom always says-that's irrelevant. This is now, and she needs this surgery right now or she's not going to make it. Please. Help us help her."

His voice fell to an agitated murmur. It seemed like some tense words were being exchanged.

"What does all this mean?" I whispered to Kevin.

"She has a blockage of some sort in her intestines," he said. "They have to go in and release it surgically."

I didn't really understand what that meant yet-how seriously life-threatening this was-but I knew this was major, major surgery. Kevin's face had turned to a stern mask. I could tell he needed to think for a minute. Anna needed him to think. It was generally accepted that I was Chief of Little Girl Maintenance in our family, but Kevin spoke the language of diagnostics and biology. I depended on him to translate for me sometimes. But speaking the language of scalpels and surgeries could be a blessing and a curse. Ignorance can be bliss, truth can be brutal, and helplessness is simply foreign to Kevin's nature. He sat there contemplating, elbows on his knees, fingers tented in front of his face, until the pediatric surgeon came back into the room.

We were presented with choosing between waiting for the highly regarded specialist who knew Anna's history or placing our trust in this ER doctor we'd known for all of forty-five minutes.

Without hesitating, Kevin said, "Do the surgery."

It terrified me, but to the left of that terror, there was a weird sense of relief. We knew now what we were up against. We'd named the dragon, and we knew how to slay it. We could do the homework, make the decisions, and see her through this. Once she got through this surgery, she'd be fine. Kevin even says, "I'm a surgeon at heart. A chance to cut is a chance to cure." That definitive, black-and-white solution was so appealing to both of us at that moment. In the years that followed, we'd have given anything for such cut-and-dried options.