A Treasury of Miracles for Women (13 page)
Jackie grinned and pointed heavenward. “Always.” Years earlier she and Michael had begun using the gesture as a way of reminding each other of their belief that prayer would keep them safely in God's hands. Michael returned the sign and smiled.
“See you soon,” Jackie said. She reached down for Cody's hand and the two of them headed toward their brand-new Ford Ranger parked outside.
The two-lane highway that led from the camp to the city below was barely etched into the side of the mountain and was bordered by sheer clifflike drops of several hundred feet. It wound like a roller coaster up and down the moun tain and left little room for error. Each year there were nu merous fatalities along the twenty-five-mile stretch of roadway from the valley floor to the camp. The Connovers had known people who had been killed when their cars flipped over the side of the road and tumbled into the canyon below. Even someone like Jackie, who knew every curve and straightaway of the road as if it belonged to her, could easily spend an hour of complete concentration while driving to the nearest market at the base of the mountain.
As Jackie and her son set out, the day was beautiful: soothing rays of sunshine filtered through the pine trees, and the sky blazed a crystal-clear blue above. Jackie hummed to herself as she buckled Cody into his car seat, checking to be sure it was attached securely to the backseat of the vehicle. She kissed the child's forehead and tousled his hair before climbing into the driver's seat.
Nearly three hours later they had gotten all their sup plies and were heading back up the mountainside when Jackie began to feel the supplies shifting in the back of her vehicle. She slowed down enough to prevent the load from spilling. At about the same time, she reached a busy section of the narrow highway, which served as a shortcut for com muters. Jackie knew that a spill could trigger a dangerous ac cident and she silently prayed that the load would stay in place.
Glancing in her rearview mirror, Jackie saw several im patient drivers behind her. She tried to accelerate, but as she did, the supplies in her truck bed shifted dangerously and she was forced to slow down once more.
Cody was singing to himself, unaware of the predicament his mother was in. He sang in his sweet, childish voice as Jackie looked for a place to pull over.
Help me, God. Protect us, please.
If only Jackie could let the cars behind pass, she could resume at a slow pace and avoid spilling the supplies. She scanned the side of the highway in frustration. There were only inches separating the road from the canyon's edge and there was no turnout for several miles.
Once more she glanced in her mirror and worried that one of the drivers might try to pass—a common cause of se rious accidents along the highway. Her eyes were off the road for just a moment. When she looked again, her truck was heading off the roadway. Terrified they might fall over the canyon edge, Jackie made a split-second decision against slamming on her brakes.
“Hold on, Cody, baby.” She directed the truck onto a narrow shoulder and slowly applied the brakes. The other cars quickly passed and Jackie sighed aloud. She tried not to think what might have happened if she hadn't looked ahead when she did.
Then, before she had time to pull back into traffic, the earth under the truck's right tire gave way and in an instant the Ranger began tumbling down the mountainside into the canyon.
“Hold on!” Jackie screamed. Somewhere in the dis tance she could hear Cody crying.
The Ranger tumbled wildly downward and Jackie was struck by an uncontrollable force that slammed her body against the shoulder harness of her seat belt and then against the truck's shell with each complete roll. As the vehicle bounced and rolled down the mountain, Jackie could feel her head swelling.
I'm going to die,
she thought. But all that mattered was her baby in the backseat.
“Cody!” She screamed his name, but there was only si lence in response.
Finally, more than five hundred feet down the moun tain, Jackie's Ranger came to rest upside down. Jackie was trapped in the front seat, but she was conscious. A warm liq uid was oozing around her eyes, mouth, and ears.
“Cody!” she shouted, desperately trying to maneuver her body so she could see the child. “Cody, where are you?” She listened intently but heard only the sound of the wind whistling through the canyons. Her body nearly paralyzed with pain, she worked herself out of what remained of her Ranger. It was then that she saw the backseat. Amidst the mangled metal, Cody's car seat was still strapped to the backseat, its tiny body harness still snapped in place.
But Cody had disappeared.
Jackie felt a sickening wave of panic. If the child had been thrown from the truck during the fall, he could not possibly be alive. He would have died immediately upon im pact.
“Cody!” she screamed again. Tears streamed down her face as she gazed up the steep hillside above the mangled wreckage for any sign of her tiny son. Suddenly she knew what she had to do. She fell to her knees.
“Lord, thank you for allowing me to live.” She whis pered the words, her body shaking violently. “Now please, please let me find Cody.”
She stood and took a few painful steps up the hill.“Cody!” She yelled his name as loudly as she could, her voice choked by sobs. “If you can hear me, baby, I'm coming to find you. Can you hear me?”
Jackie looked straight up the rocky mountainside and realized she would have to climb it herself. There was no other way to find her son. Suddenly, she saw people standing along the road's edge waving toward her. Then she re membered the cars that had been following her so closely. Someone must have seen the accident.
“Are you okay?” a man yelled, his voice echoing down the rocky canyon. Nearby, another passerby was already using a cellular telephone to call for help.
Fresh tears flooded Jackie's eyes as she screamed back, “Yes! But I can't find my son!”
Moving as quickly as the pain would allow, Jackie began making her way up the hillside. She was coughing up blood, and her head felt ready to explode. Still she continued to call Cody's name every few feet. Finally, when she was forty feet from the road, she heard his voice.
“Mommy! Mommy!” he cried. “I'm here!”
Jackie felt a surge of hope and refused to give in to her body's desire to pass out. She had to reach the boy. “Cody, I'm coming!” she shouted.
At that moment someone standing alongside the road pointed downward. “There he is!” Three bystanders scram bled down the cliff toward a small clearing hidden from the road. They reached the child at about the same time Jackie did.
Cody was sitting cross-legged on top of a soft, fernfronded bush. His eyes were black and blue and he had dark purple bruises around his neck. His tiny body shook with fear and he was sobbing.
“Dear God, help us!” Jackie prayed out loud, fearing that Cody's neck might be broken.
At about that time a medical helicopter landed on the highway. Paramedics ran toward Jackie and Cody, surrounding them and swiftly administering emergency aid. Within minutes, mother and son were strapped to straight boards and airlifted to Huntington Memorial Hospital in Pasadena.
Jackie's head had swollen to nearly twice its normal size from the number of times it had slammed into the back of the truck. Her lungs were also badly damaged from the pres sure of her seat belt, which had definitely saved her life. She was placed in intensive care and given a slim chance of sur vival.
Meanwhile, Cody was taken to the pediatric unit where he was held for observation. Doctors took X rays and deter mined that despite his severely bruised neck there was no damage to his spinal column. He had no internal injuries and had even escaped a concussion.
Several hours passed before Michael got word of the ac cident and was able to rush to the hospital. When he reached Jackie's side, she was unconscious, hooked up to nu merous tubes and wires. Her head was so swollen, her face so badly bruised, that he hardly recognized her. He held her hand, crying and praying intently that she would survive.
Then he went to find Cody.
The little boy began crying when Michael hurried in.He muffled a gasp at the sight of the child's bruised neck and eyes and took hold of the boy's hand.
“It's okay, honey, everything's going to be all right. Why don't you tell me what happened?”
“Oh, Daddy,” Cody cried harder, burying his head in his father's embrace. After several seconds, he finally looked up. Tears streamed down his face as he began to talk.
“We were driving and then we started to fall,” he said. “Then I was on the bush but Mommy kept on rolling and rolling and rolling.” Cody began to cry harder. “I was so wor ried about her, I didn't know if she was ever going to stop rolling. Is she okay, Daddy?”
“She's going to be fine,” Michael said. He narrowed his eyes. Something the child said didn't quite fit. “How did you wind up on the bush, honey?”
Cody wiped at his tears. “The angels took me out of the truck and set me there. Right on the bush.”
Michael could feel the blood drain from his face. “An gels?”
Cody nodded. “Yes. They were nice. They took me out and set me down so I wouldn't be hurt.”
Michael gently ran his fingers over the purple bruises that circled his son's neck. Suddenly a chill ran the length of his spine. Goose bumps popped up on his arms and legs. Angels? Taking Cody from the car? He remembered scrip tures that spoke about angels watching over those who love God.
“Do you know my angels, Daddy?” Cody asked. He was no longer crying; his honest eyes were filled with sincerity.
Michael shook his head. “No, Cody, but I'm sure they did a good job getting you out of the truck. Sometimes God sends angels to take care of us.”
Over the next few days, as Jackie's condition slowly began to improve, sheriff's investigators learned more about the accident. First, they determined that no one had ever survived a fall of five hundred feet along the Colorado mountain highway. Typically, even if a person is wearing a seat belt, the head injuries caused by rolling so many times cause fatal hemorrhaging.
Second, they found the Ranger's back window in one piece without so much as a single crack. It lay only a few yards down the mountain from the highway. Although the officers had never seen this happen before, the window had popped out in one piece upon initial impact with the steep embankment.
Next, they determined that Cody would have had to fall from the tumbling truck on the first roll for him to have landed where he did. Which meant that in a matter of sec onds the back window would have popped out, and Cody would have somehow slipped through the straps of his seat belt and fallen backwards through the opening onto the soft bush.
“A virtual impossibility,” the investigators said. In addition, the area was covered with sharp, pointed yucca plants. Had the boy landed on one of them, the wide shoots that jut out from the plant could easily have punctured his small body and killed him. The soft bush where he was discovered was the only one of its kind in the immediate area.
“From all that we know about this accident,” the inves tigators said later, “we will never know how Cody Connover survived.”
For Cody, the explanation was obvious.
Jackie made an astonishingly quick recovery and months later she was home and pregnant and preparing their cabin for Christmas when Cody approached her. He had a tree ornament in his small hand. The ornament was shaped like an angel.
“Angels don't really look like this, Mommy. Do you know that?”
Jackie felt her heart swell with gratefulness. To think they could have both been killed made this Christmas their most special one yet. She smiled at Cody. “No? What do they look like?”
“They look like nice daddies.” Cody shrugged. “But they're not daddies, they're angels. Because that's what they said they were.”
Throughout the Christmas season, Cody continued to speak matter-of-factly of the angels who pulled him from his mommy's car, set him on the soft bush, and kept him safe until Mommy could reach him.
For Jackie, the story is proof that though they lived in a remote part of the state, God still cared for them, still kept his watchful eye upon them.
Left with no other explanation, she and her husband believe their son is telling the truth about what happened that August afternoon. About his very special encounter with angels.
T
he bad news came just eight days after Christmas.
Until then, Julie and Bryan Foster were by most stan dards one of the happiest couples anywhere. They were in their early twenties, lived in Nashville, Tennessee, and shared a passion for country music and the outdoors. They constantly found new ways to enjoy each other's company, whether by mountain-biking, hiking, or playing tennis to gether. Attractive and athletic, Julie and Bryan seemed to live a charmed life in which everything went their way.
Then Bryan got sick. At first the couple believed he was only suffering from a bad cold. They wondered if he had mononucleosis. But the doctors ran blood tests. Finally, on that cold January day, Bryan's condition was diag nosed as acute lymphatic leukemia.
At age twenty-eight, Bryan was suffering with the deadliest form of cancer.
“You have to live, Bryan,” Julie told him when she heard the news. “I can't live without you.”
Bryan wrapped his arms around her. “Don't worry, honey. God will take care of us.”
During the next three months, Bryan's cancer slipped into remission and he stayed the picture of health. Muscu lar at six feet two inches and two hundred pounds, Bryan looked more like a professional athlete than a man suffering from leukemia. During that time, he continued to work and at Julie's request, neither she nor he talked much about his illness.
At the end of that period, doctors discovered that Bryan's brother was a perfect match for a bone marrow transplant. But before the operation could be scheduled, Bryan's remission ended dramatically and he became very ill.
“I'm afraid he's too weak to undergo a transplant,” Bryan's doctor explained as the couple sat in his office one afternoon. “The cancer has become very aggressive.”