were times when the thought sent me whirling into a jumble of panic and amazement. I hadn’t wanted any of this—I’d resisted it with all the fury of my fears, if truth be told—but Shayla had woven herself into the fabric of my life with wide, forget-me-not eyes, timid smiles, and satin-soft hands that had tugged at my resolve as surely as they now tugged at my sleeve.
“Hey, hey, hey!” She brought me out of my reverie with her trademark threefold plea.
“What, what, what?” I answered, taking her small hand from my sleeve to kiss her fingers.
“Look!” Shayla snatched her hand back, swiveled in her seat, and came up on her knees to lean as far into the window as she could. Through a gap in the clouds, she could see the random, irregular shapes of German fields, the crisscross of roads where tiny headlights strained to pierce the morning gloom, and the clustered homes and barns of farming villages scattered here and there across the hills. “Look!” she said again in her cute-as-can-be little-girl accent, pointing this time. “Look at Djoh-many!”
She reached behind her without taking her eyes from the window, grabbed a fistful of my shirt, and pulled me closer. “You see?”
Two thoughts simultaneously struck me. The first was that her seat belt couldn’t be fastened tightly enough if she was able to kneel in it. The second was that there was no turning back now. That bank of light approaching like a luminescent storm front was not merely a pretty sight to get excited about as we descended toward Frankfurt. It was a reality so stark and final that it tore a gaping hole in the armor of my bravado. Germany was no longer a distant destination or a temporary lapse in sanity. As streetlights blinked off far below and the outline of a modern city emerged out of the early-morning gray, Germany became as real as the seat belt cutting me in half as I leaned toward the window and gazed at the beginning of my future.
There was a small town called Kandern nestled somewhere in those hills. And in that town was the American school for missionaries’ kids where I was going to teach. The apartment where Shayla and I would live. The new life I would build—we would build together. I swallowed around the boulder and took a calming breath. There was nothing predictable about what waited for us in Kandern, and though I’d done as much Internet research as I could in recent days, I knew I was still sorely unprepared.
“Her seat belt should be tighter.” The attendant’s hand on my shoulder was a welcome distraction.
“Yes. Of course.” I smiled, trying to tighten Shayla’s seat belt while she strained away from me. “Shay? You’ve got to sit down, honey. We need to get your belt tighter.”
“Look!” she said again, this time mesmerized by the outline of mountains in the distance.
“Can you sit down, Shayla?”
“No,” she declared, ignoring my futile attempts to peacefully get her to sit. I hadn’t had much experience with four-year-olds, but my time with Shayla had taught me that their attention span was not only limited—it was also selective. “Look! Look!”
I didn’t take the time to follow her pointing finger. Grasping her arm and turning her toward me, I marveled at her ability to swivel her body without removing her nose from the streaked surface of the airplane’s window. “Shayla, sit down!” I tugged a little harder and her nose came unglued from the double-paned glass.
“But I want to look!” She pushed the seat belt lower on her hips so she could rise toward the window again.
“Not right now.”
“I want to see!”
“We’re going to be landing soon and then you can look and look and look, but you’ve got to keep your seat belt tight until we’re on the ground.”
“But why?”
“Because,” I answered firmly. Six months of parenthood had rid me of my original distaste for the pat answer. As much as I’d despised it when my parents had used it on me, I realized now that the only reasonable response to some questions was simply “Because.” Why did she have to go to bed? Because. Why couldn’t she have another piece of cake? Because. Why did the other kids get to stay at home while she had to go to Djoh-many? Because. Why did I want to be a missionary and not a normal person anymore? Because. “Because” was my new best friend. It was not, however, Shayla’s. I