NEWPORT BEACH – He was certain his papa was still looking down on him now, as certain as he was before that airplane took off and, despite never getting high enough off the ground, still landed in heaven.

Daddy was watching from above back then, too. He knew it. Why else would Mama have told her little boy to smile his biggest smile into the camera and wave?

Sitting on the other side of the world, Ruslan Salei would wave back at his laptop screen, his eyes and his heart having returned home again even as his body and his tomorrows remained in Russia.

Mama never really had cared if her little boy played hockey. That was her husband’s life, Bethann Salei always figured, and a 4-year-old shouldn’t have to worry about doing anything more than being a 4-year-old.

But everything changed in September when that plane fell from the Yaroslavl sky, taking 44 of the 45 souls onboard. Now, it mattered. The game mattered. Hockey mattered. A father’s memory depended on it.

So, to get little Aleksandro back on the ice after the accident, after he had decided he didn’t want to play the game anymore if his papa couldn’t play the game anymore, Bethann had to bribe him.

With a balloon.

Every day before practice, for three weeks, they would stop at Pavilions, buy two balloons — one for Aleksandro and one for his sister, Alexis — go outside, allow the strings to slip through their hands, tickling their tiny fingers, and watch as the balloons floated away.

Higher and higher and higher still, until finally disappearing.

“It’s gone, mama,” Aleksandro would say then. “Papa caught it.”

• • • • • • • • •

In one of his last acts on this Earth, Ruslan Salei made out his will. He and Bethann began planning his estate, setting up a trust for the kids. They talked about where he’d be buried.

The couple had been together for 14 years and married six, had produced three beautiful children, had a gorgeous home here and a second one built to Ruslan’s specifications in his homeland of Belarus. So busy with what was happening, they hadn’t thought about what could happen.

He had accumulated plenty in collecting professional paychecks for 14 seasons, the first nine of which came with the Ducks. Yet, until that day in July, sitting in some attorney’s office, not entirely sure why they were even there to begin with, the Saleis never had time for what if, never pondered just in case.

Now, for some reason, they even were deciding to get their new baby, Ava, barely 5 months old at the time, a passport.

Then, just before he left for Russia and training camp with his new team, Lokomotiv Yaroslavl, Ruslan had the cameras installed. Throughout the house, inside and out, he could watch his family, be with his family, something as small as a mouse click having the power to shrink 6,000 miles into nothingness.

He could be gone and home, at the same time, home with the loved ones for whom he left in first place. He was doing this for them. Being a good husband and father, chasing a more secure future for his kids because the money was guaranteed.

The kids. A reporter in Belarus once asked Ruslan to identify the greatest accomplishment of his career. Dismissing three Olympic Games and numerous world championships, pushing aside the Stanley Cup Final with the 2002-03 Mighty Ducks, he chose his children.

Ruslan could have taken a chance and not signed with the Kontinental Hockey League, could have waited to see if an NHL team wanted a defenseman with 37-year-old knees and 917 games of wear but also wisdom, could have chased an entirely different form of riches — that Stanley Cup he never had won — but none of that was guaranteed.

Still, he did appear in 75 games last season for the Red Wings, averaging nearly 18 minutes a night for one of the league’s elite franchises.

Ruslan, who always prided himself on being steady and dependable on the ice, decided to grab the sure thing.

Over Labor Day weekend, Bethann and the kids were having lunch at Fashion Island, one adult trying to corral three squirming, bubbling spirits. She could sense the sympathy coming at her from all around, the looks of strangers turning the back of her neck unpleasantly warm.

“They have no idea,” she told Ruslan via Skype that night. “They look at me like I’m a widow or something. But they don’t know I have you.”

Three days later, at 6:30 a.m., the phone rang. Bethann checked the caller ID. New Jersey. Ruslan’s agent, Mark Gandler. There’d been a horrific accident.

“I was right back in that same attorney’s office going over what we had just done two months before, the will, all that stuff,” Bethann says now. “It didn’t even seem real. It still doesn’t seem real. It seems too perfect, you know, how everything unfolded? It’s like we planned on him dying.”

When she heard, she screamed. Alexis, 6, sitting on the couch with a plateful of waffles, disappeared under her blanket. Aleksandro just kept looking around, his eyes wide and moistening. Ava, sitting in a swing nearby, did nothing.

Bethann kept screaming at no one in particular. She gathered herself long enough to try to talk to the kids, but they were too frightened to listen.

It wasn’t enough for her just to live the experience once. So she watched it on television. Two months later, Bethann retrieved the video from the camera Ruslan had installed in their living room. She studied the images from the day before and from that morning, to see the contrast, searching for something, though she didn’t know what.

There are no logical answers to questions this preposterous. When they found Ruslan’s body, he wasn’t wearing a watch. But he always wore a watch, Bethann thought, even to bed. The small brown bag he took with him everywhere? The bag that held all his important documents — credit cards, identification papers, phone numbers — along with a photo of his mother, Toma, and a picture of Jesus Christ? He had left it back in his apartment.

“This isn’t real,” Bethann kept telling herself. “It doesn’t make sense. How can this be? I just talked to him.”

For a week, she didn’t sleep more than 20 minutes at a time. She’d awaken with her chest burning. She couldn’t eat and stopped producing enough milk to nurse her baby girl.

Bethann didn’t read anything for days. She avoided Facebook and the Internet. She’d walk out of the house, with her cell phone sitting on the kitchen counter and the home phone stuck in her purse.

They had always had a deal, these two: She’d take care of the children; he’d take care of her.

Now, nothing was normal at a time when all any of them wanted was normal. Simple, uncomplicated normal. The way it used to be. Yesterday. Last week. Last month.

The neighbors, well meaning and all, kept bringing over prepared meals. The kids pushed the food aside. They only wanted something their mama had cooked. Eggs, pancakes, burgers. Anything. Just like a normal day.

The flower arrangements kept arriving, too, crowding the living room. The larger they were, the hotter grew the anger Bethann felt building inside her, each one a reminder of what she no longer had. Finally, after Aleksandro threatened to line them all up and take his hockey stick to every last petal and stem, Bethann convinced someone to just throw them all away.

She hasn’t touched Ruslan’s clothes. Or his shoes. His toothbrush hangs undisturbed in the bathroom.

Some days, she calls his cell phone, just to hear his voice. Sometimes, she’ll leave a message. She has no idea when she’ll call to have the phone disconnected.

For months, she kept the last voicemail he left her. She listened to it again and again and probably still would be listening to it had she not accidentally erased it.

“I have better days than others,” Bethann says. “Some days, I feel like I’m back to Square One. This week, I’ve been missing him a lot. But we’re doing OK, you know? The kids are doing OK. I just focus on them. They’re all I have, and they’re all I need right now.”

She’s mad, of course, haunted by what ifs. Mad at herself for not just picking up the phone and asking Detroit coach Mike Babcock to make Ruslan an offer. He wanted so much to play with the Wings again.

She’s mad at the NHL for not giving more chances to older players, mad at the KHL for allowing this disaster to happen, mad at Lokomotiv Yarslavl for, to this day, still never calling or paying a penny of her husband’s salary.

And the results of the investigation? The explanation that the crash was caused by pilot error, by a supposedly trained aviator somehow slamming on the brakes during takeoff? She’s mad at that, perhaps most of all.

“That sounds like the stupidest thing,” Bethann says. “It’s either a stupid lie or that pilot never should have been in that position. It just sounds stupid to me.”

She’s even mad at God. See, Ruslan was going to travel that day by car. The team was playing in Belarus and he had made plans to visit his family there, had arranged for a driver and everything.

But then, no. Since it was the regular-season opener, since he was one of the sports’ veterans and one of the team’s newcomers, he decided it was more important to be a good teammate. He would travel with the boys.

“I want to blame somebody,” Bethann says. “I want to blame God some days. ‘Why didn’t you push on Ruslan’s heart more to drive that day? Why?’ There was a chance he could have saved one guy. But I try not to dwell on that because that’s wasted energy, you know?”

A couple months ago, a No. 24 with “Salei” across his shoulders stood on the ice again at Honda Center. Aleksandro was part of a ceremony before a Ducks game. Bethann waited in the tunnel, just off the ice, in the shadows, videotaping her little boy.

When he skated back to her, he did so with purpose, his legs churning, his arms pumping, his eyes alive, partly showing off, Bethann remembers, partly because he was ready to play. Aleksandro didn’t want to leave the ice and couldn’t understand how the game could start without him.

“My husband isn’t gone,” Bethann says. “My son is going to be him someday.”

And what a story that would be, the little boy bribed back to hockey by a balloon climbing higher and higher and higher still, all the way to the NHL.

Ruslan wouldn’t believe that without seeing it for himself. Luckily, Aleksandro knows his papa is watching.

Contact the writer: jmiller@ocregister.com