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. Thrashing 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 vanishing 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 shift 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.

"Yes, ma'am," said one of the young men. "We got a call that someone had fallen."

"Yes! Please, hurry. She's over here." Before I clicked off the cell, I said to the operator, "Yes, it's them. They're here. The responders are here."

"Okay, good. It's gonna be okay, all right? Stay calm and"-she cleared her throat gruffly-"G.o.d bless you, ma'am."

I took that small prayer with me as I tramped back through the trees, followed by the two young men, who looked comfortingly capable-young, strong, and geared up-the kind of corn-fed Texans who could either climb this tree or tear it down if needed. They beamed flashlights on the ground, looking more and more confused as Kevin hustled down the ladder to meet them.

"We got a call," the EMT said again, but this time it sounded like a question. "Something about a little girl in a tree?"

It took them a few minutes to wrap their heads around the situation-as it had for Kevin and me. I had tried to make the dispatcher understand, and she did communicate to them that it was more than a medical call, but this was the ultimate "think zebras" moment; the reality of it was a little lost in translation. Generally a call that someone has fallen takes EMTs to a scene where an elderly person has fractured a hip or broken a wrist. Even being told "a little girl fell from a tree" brings something completely different to mind. The last thing they would a.s.sume is that the tree opened up and swallowed the little girl like a catfish swallows a minnow.

As the EMTs were absorbing this, the Briaroaks fire engine roared across the pasture. The crew, led by Lieutenant Mike Hill, launched into the same sort of controlled chaos that had surrounded the surgical team: a highly trained, no-nonsense ballet. There was barely a shred of light on the horizon now, so their first priority was lighting the area. They pulled as close as they could to the trees and left all the vehicle headlights blazing, but it was still shadowy and dim in the grove. Hefting large portable lights off the engine, they ran thick electrical cables from the truck. The immense cottonwood towered in the floodlights, ghostly pale wood showing through the chunky bark.

Rooted to the spot where I would spend most of the next two hours, I watched them roust their ladder up next to Kevin's. They called up and down to each other, taking measurements, a.s.sessing Anna's condition-to the extent they could-weighing all the risks and probabilities. Questions had been crowding my brain as I waited. Most of them were asked and answered in the first ten minutes the responders were on the scene. We were all worried about the same dark possibilities.

Did she have enough oxygen? The fact that she'd responded to Kevin told us she had enough to stay alive, at least for the moment.

How badly was she hurt? Anna's silence frightened us more than the sound of her screaming would have. Kevin hadn't observed any significant blood loss or obviously misaligned bones, but from that distance with virtually no light on her, it was hard to tell. The inside of the tree wasn't straight and even; it was slanted and irregular with knots and protrusions that cast deep shadows, even if you managed to lean way in, maneuvering and twisting the flashlight just so.

What about head and spinal cord injury? Again, there was no way to tell and no way to observe proper spinal injury protocol while they extracted her. The harsh reality was that she'd fallen face-first, thirty feet to solid ground; the possibility of her walking away without serious injury was very slim. In light of that, Mike Hill, the engineer on the rescue, made the call: CareFlite would be standing by with an ambulance on the ground and a helicopter in the field ready to fly Anna to the hospital in Fort Worth.

Of course, there was the big question: How do we get her out?

The Briaroaks crew had two ladders, both of which were tall enough to reach the third floor of a building. When they were fully extended, the top rung on one ladder rested against the side of the bridge branch, and the top rung on the other rested against the crumbling lower lip of the open grotto. Standing below them, I could see the bits of bark and moss dropping down as Mike scaled the ladder and leaned into the hole.

"Anna? Annabel," he called. "I'm a fireman. My name is Mike. I came to get you. Can you hear me? Anna, can you answer me?"

Working the flashlight between the twisted shadows, Mike eventually caught a fleeting glimpse of pink. He worked himself a bit lower into the tree and focused the beam of his flashlight on Anna, sitting with her back to the inner wall of the tree, arms around her legs, her forehead resting on her knees.

"I see her! I got her," he called over his shoulder. "She's sitting up. Appears to be conscious. Anna? Annabel! Can you look up here? Hey, Anna, look up here and wave to me."

Calling Anna's name over and over again, he got no response.

"Annabel, my name's Mike. Do you hear me? I'm here, and your mom and dad are here, and we're all working on getting you out of there, okay? I'm not gonna leave you, Anna. We're gonna get you out, and it'll be okay. Just sit tight and don't be scared, okay? Anna? Annabel, look up here and-okay, she looked up! She looked up at me for a second."

Later Mike told us she had turned her face, a blank stare, up toward him for a moment or two before she lowered her face to her arms again, and she stayed that way without moving for most of the next two hours. He stayed, too, even though his legs were burning with fatigue and his back ached. From thirty feet away with the twisted shadows inside the tree, the flashlight couldn't have given her much relief from the pitch darkness, but he was unwilling to leave her without it.

There was a brief notion that someone might be lowered in to get her, but the narrowest person on the crew was a guy named Tristan Nugent, a muscled-up 170-pound dude. There was no way he was fitting in there, even without his gear. The idea was quickly discarded, along with any thought of cutting into the tree with drills or chain saws. Given our limited vision of what the tree was actually like inside, the risk of it partially or completely collapsing on her was too great.

They discussed various ways to lower something down for her to tie onto herself. Someone suggested a rope with some kind of slipknot or noose at the end, but Kevin didn't like the sound of that.

"She can't tighten it around her waist with the pain and distention in her belly," he said. "If she's too weak to hold on or if she pa.s.ses out, it could get up around her neck."

"Do you think she'd be able to get herself into a harness of some kind?" Bryan asked, and Kevin nodded.

"I think so. If it's physically possible, she'll make it happen."

"Helicopter!" Adelynn pointed up at the sound of thrumming blades overhead.

A spotlight swept the pasture for a flat place to land. The twin-engine CareFlite helicopter circled and swooped like a seagull, hovered briefly over a bald patch, and set down halfway between the gravel drive and the cottonwood grove. Dry leaves and dust rippled out from the whirring blades. It powered down to an idle, but they kept it running so they'd be ready to take off. That relentless noise was like a single driving heartbeat as the crew moved about the grove, securing the ladders, pa.s.sing rope and radios, talking on cell phones.

In addition to the two first responders on the rescue truck; Bryan, the Briaroaks chief; plus the crew of three on the Briaroaks engine, there were two paramedics in the CareFlite ground ambulance and a crew of three-the pilot, a flight nurse, and another paramedic-on board the CareFlite helicopter. At some point someone put the other dogs in the house, but Cypress would not be moved. He paced well out of the way but never out of earshot, half sitting on his trembling haunches, pacing again, his eyes riveted on the tree.

Kevin and the fire crew set about fashioning the harness from a thick blue rope and rigging a pulley system they could use to lift Anna out. There was concern that too much movement up and down the ladders might put undue stress on the branch and contribute to the breakage on the lower lip of the opening, so Tristan and Mike, two crew members from the Briaroaks engine, climbed up and didn't come down.

"Anna, can you hear me? Anna, can you look up here for me?" Mike kept calling, and every once in a while he'd report, "Okay, she's responding. I did see a response there."

It was after 7:00 p.m. now. She'd been inside the tree for about two hours.

Seeing the royal blue of Kevin's surgical scrubs under the rigged lights, I realized that at some point, he'd put his coat around my shoulders. A hard, deep shiver went through me, and I closed my eyes for a moment. Don't you do it, Lord. Don't you answer her prayer. Don't take her like this.

"Mrs. Beam?"

I felt a touch on my elbow. It was one of the paramedics from the CareFlite ground unit.

"I'm sorry, ma'am, I need you to come over to the ambulance with me," he said. "Your daughter needs you."

"My daughter..."

"Your older girl, ma'am. She seems to be having a panic attack."

My feet still felt rooted to the spot where I'd been standing since the rescuers arrived. It was all I could do to tear my eyes away from that hole in the tree, but I forced myself to follow him. The back of the ambulance was wide open, and I could see Abbie inside, lying on a gurney. Under the fluorescent lights, she looked ashen and small. As I approached, I could hear her sobbing hysterically through the oxygen mask that covered her face.

"We gave her some oxygen," said the paramedic, "but we can't seem to get her calmed down. We need you to either release her from our care or let us take her to the hospital."

"Oh, Abbie, sweetie..." I clambered up into the back of the unit, asking over my shoulder, "Could I please talk to her in private for a minute?"

He nodded and stepped aside to swing the door shut. I scrunched down on the floor by the gurney so I could get my arms around her. Abbie was cold, shaking with sobs that wrenched the air in and out of her chest.

"Please, Abbie... Abigail, shhhhh... please, you have to relax. Just chill out, breathe in, breathe out. Abigail, breathe with me. Inhale... exhale... good girl. Keep breathing with me. In through the nose... out through the mouth..."

I stroked her back and rubbed her arms, crooning and hushing. It was probably all of three minutes, but I was aching to get back to Annabel, and I realized with shame and sorrow that this scant three minutes of comfort was more indulgence than Abbie had required of me in the past four years combined. She was eleven years old, but she thought and acted with the maturity and seriousness of a little adult.

"Abbie has an old soul," we always say when we're talking about her solid instincts, her natural generosity, her innate intelligence.

There was also this role in which she was cast: the big sister. Abbie rose to every occasion, every time an additional responsibility was prematurely foisted on her because we had to rush off to an emergency room or a doctor's appointment in Boston. We never wanted her and Adelynn to feel like the "other" sisters, and we went out of our way to devote time and attention to them whenever we could, trying our best to balance the way our lives had come to revolve around Anna's health issues. But since when was "whenever we could" enough for any kid?

IN THE DAYS FOLLOWING that initial surgery on Anna's intestines, I was weary but hopeful. Kevin doesn't wear his heart on his sleeve, but he has a very healthy way of processing everything as needed; he contemplates all the possibilities, privately prays, weeps, curses-whatever he needs to do. I tended to stuff everything into an emotional storage locker, promising myself that I would deal with it later. This surgery would fix everything, I told myself. We just had to get through these next few weeks of recovery, and for that, I called on my inner Robo Mom.

The surgeon told us that at some point, Anna's appendix had "gotten sick," and I thought of several times I'd taken her to the doctor's office or emergency room with pain, fever, and vomiting. On one or more of those occasions, the appendix must have been horrifically infected, leaking into her abdomen. As it healed itself, it had formed a thick cord of scar tissue that adhered to the small intestine and constricted as her body grew. After a time, there was only a small pa.s.sageway left, which explained why Anna did well with liquids but couldn't tolerate solid food, which made her stomach distend like a balloon.

The tipping point was the thick milk shake of bowel prep stuff she'd been forced to consume for the endoscopy. You remember-the one where "everything was fine" except for me and my fussy insistence that something was really, really wrong. The weight of that was more than her system could take and caused the complete obstruction.