Replacement Child

by Judy L. Mandel

  “It’s fantastic!” Gary told me. “We take up around fifteen skydivers and they all jump out together for a free fall. Then we dive the plane fast to get out of their way, or we might wing a few. You’ll love it!”

  I wasn’t sure if I should take the trip with this man I barely knew, but when he described it, I felt a chill down the back of my neck, and I knew I would say yes.

  Before I knew it, I was in some kind of military cargo plane. It had a giant hatchback that opened from the top with a ramp for driving in trucks, tanks, and large equipment.

  The jumpers piled into the back of the plane, laughing and talking loudly. Their bright orange, red, and yellow jumpsuits rustled against the gray walls.

  Gary strapped me in and helped me put on a helmet.

  We climbed quickly to ten thousand feet, high enough for the free fall, in the cloudless summer sky. I had a mile-wide view in the copilot seat: a thrush of green, black strips of road, brown and white brushstroke buildings. Straight ahead, a deep-blue pallet. For a while, I recognized some landmarks—the highway, the airport, the center of the town. Then it all blurred to small dots and lines.

  “Ready, guys?” Gary said through the loudspeaker to the back of the plane. “I’ll give you a count of ten. Try to jump one right after the other so you don’t get separated. You have plenty of space up here.”

  He counted them down, and I felt the weight of the plane shift as they jumped one by one. We lurched into a straight-down dive.

  “Hold on, Jude.”

  I felt like my ears were going to explode, and I pulled on Gary’s sleeve for help.

  “Hold your nose and blow—it will relieve the pressure. Like this.”

  I did—and it worked.

  We circled the jumpers from a safe quarter-mile distance. I could see them holding hands in their circular formation. A marionette sky sculpture, floating in slow motion, suspended from nothing. Then, all at once, they let go their hands, separated, and pulled their chutes, looking like slices of rainbow cutting the bright blue.

  chapter sixty

  2006

  I’M SITTING IN my kitchen, stunned, my hand still on the phone. I have just had a conversation with my sister that confirms, after all these years, what I have always suspected: She was much closer to my mother than I ever was. I know this now because my mother confided in Linda the secret of her life.

  I had sent her the draft of the manuscript last week for her comments, and she called me this morning.

  “I have to tell you something, but I don’t know if I should,” Linda began the conversation.

  I was confused, and I wondered if I had gotten some details wrong in the story.

  “No, that’s not it. There’s just something that will make more sense to you if I tell you, but I promised Mom I would never tell you. She was afraid of what you would think of her.”

  “Well, now you have to tell me. Nothing is going to make me think less of her.”

  “She really did have an affair with Uncle Jack,” Linda blurted out.

  Uncle Jack, you’ll remember, was Sheila’s father—Donna’s friend who my mother saved in the fire.

  “Are you sure? Maybe it was just a friendship—not a real affair,” I offered.

  “No, they went away together at least once. And he was always in New York when I was in the hospital and Mom was there alone. He divorced his wife hoping that Mom would leave Dad, but she never did.”

  Strangely, although I’m taken aback, I am not surprised. I had no idea at the time about the affair, but I had been a witness to my parents’ arguments and to my father’s coldness over the years. I suspected there were many years without so much as a kiss between them.

  My mother had needed, and found, a kindred spirit that gave her some of the understanding and affection she couldn’t get from my father. And, I have to say, I’m glad she didn’t live her life without it. I also now have an idea why I could never settle for a passionless marriage. Kids know everything you never tell them.

  Following the crash, both Linda and Sheila were in the hospital for months recovering. Although my father was devoted to Linda, he hated hospitals, and did not often go. My mother, alone, helped Linda through the painful debridement of dead tissue, waited for her to wake up after she underwent skin grafts, and held her hand when she came out of anesthesia sick and vomiting. She was strong when Linda needed her, but afterward, she fell apart, exhausted and spent.

  Uncle Jack was visiting his daughter, Sheila, in the hospital at the same time that Linda was being treated that first year. So that is when their relationship started, Linda tells me. He was the one who was there for my mother, to pick up the pieces.

  Linda says that it went on for years. Jack would come to the hospital to be with my mother even long after Sheila was released as well as during the intermittent years that Linda was back in for surgeries. It makes sense that he would move to our neighborhood, that he would join our swim club to be close to my mother when she would be there for whole days in the summer with us.

  As we talk, Linda reminds me about the day, when I was seven or eight, that Jack’s wife, also named Florence, appeared at our door. I wasn’t alarmed to see her, and I let her in as usual. But, when she saw my mother at the top of the stairs, she started railing at her.

  “Leave my husband alone! I know what you are up to! Admit it!”

  My father came out of the kitchen and grabbed the offending Florence and showed her out the door. He turned to me, watching it all from the landing, and said, “Crazy! She’s just a crazy lady!” I didn’t understand much of what was said then, but finally my mother folded up into herself and fainted at the top of the stairs. Then, my father was standing over her, yelling, “Get up, Florence! Don’t do this—just get up!” When she continued to lay still, he picked her up and helped her to their room.

  Uncle Jack continued to be in our lives. My father always bristled whenever he was around, but I don’t know if he ever really knew the truth for sure. Uncle Jack doted on Linda and me and gave us gifts over the years that were outside the realm of what my father could afford. One year it was bicycles, the next it was one of the new remote control TVs for our room. Each time, my father threatened to give back the gifts, but my mother always talked him into letting us keep them.

  After my father died, I ventured to ask my mother why she stayed with my father. We were sitting in her room at the assisted-living apartment, and she was sitting up in bed. I was holding her hand.

  “He was my best friend in the world,” she told me. “We had been through so much together.”

  After she died, I found another letter that was both a confirmation of my parents’ troubled and complex marriage and a clue to my own restlessness. My mother wrote it when they were both well into their seventies, and I don’t know if she ever gave it to my father.

  Al,

  I never feel any attention from you . . . we appear to be roommates to the outside world. I’m sorry you’ve fallen out of love with me. My love and devotion have not changed, but I simply can’t take your indifference. You may feel you are doing your duty, but without some demonstration of love, it doesn’t matter. We have a few years left and truthfully I don’t want to continue living them out in this fashion. Maybe it’s time to separate.

  chapter sixty-one

  JANUARY 22, 1952 (THE CRASH)

  4:00 PM

  PARTS OF LINDA’S body were red and blistered. Other parts were black, white, brown, and leathery, with precious few spots of healthy pink skin. Second- and third-degree burns covered 80 percent of her small body.

  Paramedics took great care with her, believing she was near death, moving her gently to a stretcher and into the ambulance. They tried to start an IV, but they couldn’t find a vein. Her best chance was to get her to the emergency room.

  In the ER, nurses and doctors were swift and practiced in assessing Linda’s injuries. She was intubated to be sure she could breathe. Her eyes were examined for burns, and none
were found. A catheter was inserted to measure urine output. Nurses started an IV after locating a usable vein in her leg to immediately begin replacing fluids.

  A nurse urgently reported burns around Linda’s torso and chest, a major concern. Burned tissue constricts as it settles and dries and could stop Linda’s chest from rising and falling to take a breath, suffocating her. The tissue needed to be cut. A surgical cut, an escharectomy, was made to decrease the pressure.

  Dead, burnt tissue was removed or cut away as much as possible. No ointments or dressings were applied at first, and Linda was covered with clean sheets and a blanket for warmth.

  An oxygen tent was erected around her bed to promote healing of her skin, to protect against infection, and to retain as much fluid as possible.

  Later that night, nurses dressed Linda’s wounds with silver sulphadiazine and gauze to prevent infection. Being bathed for debridement (taking off dead skin) and changing her dressings was so painful that they gave her anesthesia for the ordeal. Later, my father gave the U.S. Atomic Commission permission to experiment with a new medication, called Tryptar, which was sprayed over her open burns to dry dead tissue.

  chapter sixty-two

  JANUARY 23, 1952

  MY FATHER GOT to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital just as several ambulances arrived. He got the attention of the receptionist at the desk and explained that his wife and daughter were in the plane crash.

  “They are both being treated right now, Mr. Mandel,” a nurse came to tell him. “It’s best that you wait here, and I’ll let you know when they are admitted and where they will be.”

  It was two hours before anyone came out to talk to him again, telling my father what room my mother was in and that Linda was in the intensive care unit on the fourth floor. He’d have to wait awhile to see either of them. The nurse pointed him to another waiting room.

  At 2:00 AM, my father was sitting alone in the dimly lit hospital lounge when a nun quietly approached. With an arm on his shoulder, she told him that they had found Donna’s body among the last of the victims excavated from the ashes.

  His last vestige of hope gone, my father walked to a water fountain and took a long drink.

  “Do you want some coffee or something, Al?,” the nun asked.

  “Not now, Sister. I want to see my family.”

  A PHOTOGRAPHER FOLLOWING the story intercepted my father at this juncture. The muscles around his eyes seemed to have let go, his mouth slack, his cheeks hostage to gravity with a weight too heavy to carry.

  FINALLY, MY FATHER was told he could go in and see Linda, but that my mother was sleeping and he should not disturb her. He felt relieved to postpone that next conversation with my mother, grateful to give her a few more oblivious hours.

  He went up to see Linda in intensive care. At the door to the unit, he looked from bed to bed trying to find her. Finally, a nurse came over and led him to her.

  He wouldn’t have known it was his little girl, wrapped in bandages that circled her small face and mummified her torso and arms. She appeared as a small lump of cloth beneath the semitransparent walls of the oxygen tent. Only her eyes were visible. She was surrounded by monitors and IVs and had several tubes coming in and out of her body.

  So tiny, my father thought. How can her little body withstand all this? He pled with God: Take me instead. Give this ordeal to me, and let her be. Believing for a moment that his prayer might be answered, my father closed his eyes to wait for his transformation but was snapped back to reality by the bustle of nurses checking Linda’s vital signs.

  When a doctor walked in, my father approached him.

  “Is she going to be all right?” he asked.

  “I wish I could tell you more,” the doctor said. “We’re doing everything we can. Her burns are extensive, and she is struggling to breathe. I would say she has a fifty-fifty chance right now of surviving. I’m very sorry.”

  My father moved his chair as close as possible to Linda’s bed and watched her chest rise and fall, sometimes forgetting to breathe himself. He didn’t believe she would live, and he felt guilty for that thought. He knew my mother would need him to be hopeful, to believe in Linda’s recovery, especially after she knew about Donna. He would try.

  Nuns filed in to sit next to the bed in shifts, clicking rosary beads as they prayed.

  “She is very close to God now,” one nun said to him.

  A rabbi came in and sat with my father for a while, offering a prayer, and finally just an arm around his shoulder. A St. Jude medal, Sacred Heart medal, and a Star of David rested on Linda’s pillow just outside the oxygen tent. Looking at the pile, my father thought, I’ll take any help I can get from any God that will listen.

  A nurse who came in during the night told my father to go home and get some rest.

  “That would be a nice idea—if I had a home to go to,” he tried to joke.

  Finally, as morning settled in on the hospital routine, my father was told he could see his wife.

  “What does she know?”

  “Not very much.”

  He glanced over at Linda and saw she was still unconscious.

  Walking slowly to the elevator, he paused before pushing the button and leaned hard against the wall, trying to come up with some reason not to tell my mother that Donna was dead. It was impossible to find the words.

  Seeing my mother awake and whole in her hospital bed, my father was overwhelmed with emotion. She leaned up on her pillow and gave him a weak smile.

  He needn’t have worried about the words. One look into his eyes, and my mother’s worst fears were confirmed. He leaned over the bed to gently hug her and began to weep.

  chapter sixty-three

  1980

  ON NEW YEAR’S Day, Linda and her live-in boyfriend, Tom, had argued, and he took off with her house and car keys. He had recently moved in with her and her girls: five-year-old Debbie and six-year-old Cheryl. On the phone from Florida, she told me he was drinking again, and she was nearly hysterical as she recounted the scene—frantic about what to do. Stranded in the house with her daughters, she said she had no one else to call for help.

  My parents lived only ten miles from her, but she called me, 1,350 miles away in Connecticut.

  I didn’t really know what I would do when I got there, but I quickly found a nonstop flight. When I arrived, my sister was still in her bathrobe, her makeup smeared from wearing it through the night. The red-brown scars on her neck stood out in relief against her too-white makeup. Her eyes dripped black around red edges. Tears had cut paths down both cheeks. I felt a familiar ache at seeing her. It was the same ache that kept me away for long periods of time over the years.

  Debbie and Cheryl seemed dazed-mute in front of the TV until they recognized me at the door.

  “Aunt Judy, Aunt Judy!” they greeted me in unison. “Mommy, Aunt Judy is here!”

  Linda needed only a few seconds to update me on the situation before I knew what I had to do. I loaded my two nieces quickly into my red compact rental car.

  “Mommy’s not feeling too well,” I told them. “You guys can visit with Grandma and Grandpa while I go get her some medicine.” I turned on the radio, and we sang along for the drive to my parents’ condo. Then, I went looking for Tom at his favorite haunt by the beach.

  Benny’s on the Beach was a weathered white wood protrusion on the pier, jutting out over the ocean. The small restaurant had an outside bar, sporting blue-and-white painted picnic tables. It opened for drinks at noon. Along one side of the building was a patio of white plastic tables, chairs, and scum-green umbrellas hawking Heineken and Coors Light. Smells of coffee, smoke, and bacon mixed with the salty air.

  Tom was hunkered inside with a cigarette and a cup of coffee. I watched him sweep back his oily black hair with his fingers, rub his black-and-white beard stubble. He wore a wrinkled once-white T-shirt under his denim jacket. The blue of his jeans was dulled by brown shadow. He actually waved when he saw me.

  He reminded me o
f another boyfriend Linda had in high school. When she brought home Vinny one night, my father had a visceral reaction to him. He recoiled when they shook hands. I heard a lot about it through my parents’ bedroom wall.

  “How old is he, anyway?” my father started. “He looks thirty!”

  We didn’t know where Linda had met him, but my parents suspected it had something to do with the late nights out with her new girlfriend, and that they may have been using fake IDs to go to bars.

  My father also had an inkling that Vinny was an alcoholic, and he set a trap for him. He told Linda to invite him over for dinner one evening. Then, he carefully left out his best Chivas Regal scotch. Vinny didn’t stop drinking until he passed out on our couch. We never saw him again.

  Even looking this disheveled, Tom acted like he owned the place and called all the waitresses “sweetheart” and “honey.” I watched as they winced and rolled their eyes.

  “How much to leave my daughter alone?” my father would have offered.

  I had only one thing to say to him: “Give me my sister’s keys and then go away.”

  Tom flashed crooked, stained teeth and exhaled smoke in my face.

  “You think you know her, but she’s different now. She’s not the sweet innocent big sister she makes herself out to be.”

  I already knew that just by looking at him. He embodied everything that made me fearful for my sister.

  Linda once told me, “I can see the good in anyone.”

  It sounded like a positive thing at the time. Now, I wasn’t so sure.

  Even sitting here, at this awful juncture, I tried to find the good in this man. There must be moments, I told myself, that he gave her some measure of comfort, happiness, pleasure. Moments she deserved. This softened me toward him, at least enough to stop me from strangling him right there in Benny’s.