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This story is published as part of The Geeky Press/Youshare Project reading series

March 26, 2006. Unlike any other Sunday, today I am reeling over the pregnancy test that read positive the day before. This is the very first Sunday that I am pregnant! Okay, technically I was pregnant a few Sundays before this as well, but this is the first I am aware that there are tiny cells multiplying inside me, that I am growing a human life, that Paul and I are going to have a baby together. This could just be the most perfect Sunday in our lives. Before choir starts rehearsing at 9:45 a.m., there is excited discussion about my husband Paul’s excellent starting position in the first IndyCar race of the season in Homestead-Miami (9th, not so far behind his teammates Buddy Rice, 3rd, and Danica Patrick, 6th); have I met his new team owners David Letterman or Bobby Rahal (no); and where would I watch the race (at home with a few friends). They don’t know about the extra special secret hiding in my belly, but I am certain that my smile must be glowing and radiating from my entire body. I am nervous and thrilled for Paul, who was practically giddy when I talked to him on the phone yesterday. And, as has been the case for the hundreds of races Paul has driven, in the back of my mind I am terrified by the danger inherent in flinging a racecar around a track at 200 mph. But that’s in the back of my mind, and Paul’s good fortune and this new little baby in my belly are in the forefront.

I daydream my way through choir rehearsal, trying to decide among the myriad of ways I could tell Paul the triumphant, victorious news that we are pregnant! Should I be creative and funny, some sort of allusion to an inside joke? Or maybe serious would be better? Every now and then I pay attention to the Lenten music we are rehearsing, and the stark contrast between my over-the-moon happiness and the somber mood of Mozart’s Ave Verum Corpus: “Hail, true body, born of the Virgin Mary, who having truly suffered, was sacrificed on the cross for mankind, whose pierced side flowed with water and blood: May it be for us a foretaste in the trial of death.”

An hour later we make our way from the rehearsal room to the choir loft in the back of the church. I am floating through the air, unaware of climbing the stairs to the loft. The choir loft is a tight squeeze around the organ, men on one side, women on the other. But the loft opens up to overlook the warm sanctuary, filled with dark oak beams crisscrossing the ceiling, chandeliers hanging among the beams, and original artwork from a previous pastor. The upper halves of the 1929 walls are covered with fifty-two shields, each painted with a different symbol representing a week of the church year. Stained glass windows guide the eyes up the sides of the church, leading to a traditional medieval triptych of the crucifixion of Christ above the Indiana limestone altar. As we wait for the church service to begin, my mind keeps wandering from lovely thoughts about Paul to lovely thoughts about our baby. Then the words “Paul” and “crash” break through the daydream haze. Someone in the congregation is wondering if there is any news on the IndyCar crash in Homestead-Miami, that Paul was involved in, hurt, maybe. “Should we pray for him?” Pastor Bill looks directly up at me in the choir loft and asks if I’ve heard any news?

Crash. The word lines my brain and fills my mind. Crash crash crash crash crash. As the word envelops my body, it pushes my heart up to my throat and then lets it drop down to the depths of my stomach. CRASH. I can’t breathe. I am numb to everything other than that word.

But, wait, nobody has called me. It can’t be that bad if no one has even tried to reach me. This isn’t the first time Paul has crashed. Crashes happen all the time in racing. In NASCAR the saying goes “rubbin’s racin’,” meaning that driving up and nudging the car next to you is all part of the game. In IndyCar, the slightest touch can send cars flying into the wall. But crashes can also happen when drivers are minding their own business, nowhere near another driver. A loose car with a lot of oversteer can easily spin around in a turn; too much understeer and you miss your turn and end up in the tires. None of this really matters, of course, if you’re the wife of a racecar driver. I hear the word crash and immediately I become incapable of exhaling.

I reach down for my bag and fumble around for my phone. There are five phone calls from Paul’s brother Greg, who is with Paul in Florida. Oh my God. I suddenly realize I had silenced my phone before choir rehearsal, and in my dreamy euphoria had not even thought to check how Paul had done in the morning warm-up before the race. Shaky and sick, I clutch my phone and run down the steps from the loft and out the side door. I pace along 52nd Street next to the church while I try to reach Greg. If there are cars driving by, I don’t notice them. Greg’s voice sounds tight, anxious, emotional, responsible: Paul was involved in a crash. He was airlifted to the hospital. He’s in stable but critical condition.

I climb back up the steps to the loft to grab my bag. Everyone looks over at me with concern. I whisper to a fellow singer that Paul is in critical but stable condition and that I’m leaving. Obviously. On my way out, Greg calls again. “Tonya, Paul is a really sick boy. The doctors are trying to stabilize his internal injuries. And when they do, they’ll have to amputate at least his feet.” Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God. Thank you, God, for keeping Paul alive. But, oh my God, he will never race again?

I start to think about all the changes and accommodations we will now have to make in our lives. We’ll have to move to a new house. Paul found our house on a bike ride around a neighborhood nestled in a sea of trees. The yard slopes down to thicker woods and a little creek that marks the end of our property and the beginning of our neighbors’ woods. During the summer we cannot see those neighbors through the full layers of leaves. During the winter the snow-lined trees are starkly beautiful, spectacular when a bright red cardinal lands on one of the branches. The house itself is split into three levels: family room on the first level, kitchen and dining room on the second, bedrooms on the third. Short stairways connect each of the levels, and even lead to the bathroom off the master bedroom. We love this house and our woods, but always joked that neither of us could be injured in this house because it would be impossible to move from level to level with all the stairs. After Paul broke his back in a crash the previous year and had to wear a back-brace for a few months, we discovered first-hand the nuisance of the stairs. I knew there was no way Paul could live in that house as an amputee.

It is easier to think about the house than about Paul’s career and passion for driving. What will he do? His career as an IndyCar driver is over, which is going to devastate him completely. I think about Alex Zanardi, who lost both legs in a 2001 crash in Germany and worked his way back to driving racecars using prosthetics in the World Touring Cars Championship. I think about Sam Schmidt, who crashed at the Walt Disney World Speedway in Orlando, resulting in spinal injuries (C3-C4) and paralysis, and now powers a wheelchair around racetracks as a team owner. Perhaps, when he’s ready, Paul will be inspired by their stories, motivating him to achieve a different kind of greatness. But now, just one year after breaking his back in a crash, and after he had earned a spot on a premier race team where he could finally reach his potential as a driver, what would he do without future races to motivate him? I am afraid he will build up only anger. I worry that the anger and frustration will lead to problems in our marriage. But for now, I am just so thankful that he’s alive.

It takes half an hour to drive from church to my house. I make all the required phone calls. I think about what I’ll need to pack. Fear, worry, questions without answers are building. What does “critical but stable” really mean? Why has this happened, especially when Paul was now finally poised to make his mark as a driver?

When I walk in our front door and see all the physical reminders of Paul, a feeling of love somehow overcomes the terror and panic from the drive home. I sit on the couch that Paul and I picked out together. When we were couch-shopping, our number one priority was to be able to lay down comfortably next to each other on our new couch. We would walk up to a couch that had potential—which basically meant that the cushions lining the back were removable, and the price tag was under five hundred dollars—and throw the pillows on the floor and lay down next to each other right there in the store, immune to the funny looks this generated. At home on this couch, there was something so comforting and wonderful about feeling Paul so completely next to me while reading a book or watching a movie or taking what Paul would call an “epic nap.” I desperately need to be next to Paul, to hold his hand, to watch him breathe, to rest my head on his chest and listen to his heartbeat.

I am jolted out of my reverie when the phone rings. I rush to the nearest phone in Paul’s office opposite the living room fireplace. His office has the potential to be a beautiful room, with built-in oak bookshelves and French doors looking out to the deck and the woods. But the furniture is all mismatched, left over from various stages of his life: a cream-colored, sticky-drawered dresser and desk set from his childhood bedroom, one white and one brown table from friends’ Goodwill piles, and a telephone from college, a relic that still has the coil connecting the handset to the receiver.

I pick up this handset.

“Hello?”

“Tonya, it’s Greg.”

Oh no, his voice is strained, tight and high-pitched, like his body is trying to prevent him from saying what has to be said. Maybe things are real only after they’re spoken aloud.

“Hi Greg.”

“Tonya, Paul didn’t make it.”

I’m still standing next to the phone as the terror and horror spill over and tears start pouring down my face. The cord is only two feet long; I can’t escape. But maybe I misheard?

“What?”

“Paul died. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”

Greg is crying too. I know what these words mean but they don’t make any sense. I can’t hold myself up. My head droops into my hand, elbow anchored on the white table that holds Paul’s computer and piles of other stuff. I try to fixate through the tears on the pen marks that won’t come out of that table; maybe they hold the answer to this confusion, or at the very least some small part of Paul’s soul. I collapse with the grief that has poured through my body; I can feel it filling every cell, taking over my entire being. And I’m suddenly reminded.

“Greg, I’m pregnant.”

[Photo credit to Tonya]

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