Replacement Child

by Judy L. Mandel

  “I think I do understand,” he said quietly, seeing her pain.

  “I’m not going to mince words,” Dr. Horowitz continued. “Many couples have a very rough time after losing a child, and many get divorced. I don’t want that to happen here. They blame themselves, or worse, they may blame each other.

  “Have you two thought of having another child? Many couples that have lost children find that having another helps them heal.”

  “I don’t know,” my father said. “It seems like we’d be tempting fate, after what’s happened to our girls. Maybe this is how it’s meant to be.”

  “What about you, Florence?” the doctor asked.

  “Maybe it would help. I always wanted two children at least. All I see now is struggle ahead. And it might be good for Linda to have a sister or brother. Maybe take the focus off of her and her problems somewhat. Another baby could give us all back a sense of a normal life—a normal family again.”

  The prescription, then, for their own survival was a child conceived to heal the family. Untouched, they thought, by their tragedy. And with another mission—to live life large for them all, to ride the biggest waves and carry them on her wake.

  chapter sixty-eight

  1953

  IN HIS HEART, my father wasn’t at all sure they should have another child. He missed his little girl terribly—was bitter about her death. He blamed himself for not being there to protect his family. He replayed his revised scene in his mind a thousand times: my mother rushing out of the apartment with Linda rolled in the quilt while he ran back to push the beam off of Donna, lifting her up over the flames and smoke, carrying her down the steep stairway just before it collapsed.

  There could be no replacement for Donna. He didn’t want one. And he thought Linda would need their undivided attention for many years.

  But he wanted his wife back. He needed her smiling again. If a new baby would do it, he would comply.

  My father chose the Blumenkrantz Hotel in Lakewood because he knew how much his wife loved the ocean, and because it was an affordable way to get away to the beach for a few days. They needed a change of scenery. Different surroundings to shift their perspectives, lift their spirits—their souls—from the oppressive daily grind.

  “A perfect beach day, Flurry!” my father declared as they pulled in to the hotel parking lot. Entering the lobby, my mother took in the wood paneling, the leather upholstery, the Victorian grandeur of the place. She noted the indoor pool, adjacent to the formal dining room. Her hope for the weekend was renewed. Until now, she had been doubtful, but she didn’t show it for my father’s sake.

  She knew he was more fragile than he let on. She remembered the night his claustrophobia kicked in as they rode through the Lincoln Tunnel to New York City. They were stuck in traffic in the tunnel for forty-five minutes. An endless dark netherworld. Suddenly, my father couldn’t catch his breath and was hyperventilating—he said he couldn’t breathe at all. My mother took his hand and calmed him. She talked to him about their plans for the next day and told him when to take a breath. They would breathe each breath together until they got through the tunnel.

  They checked in to the hotel, unpacked their suitcases, changed into bathing suits, and headed for the beach. My mother wore her black one-piece suit, cut in an octagonal shape at the top with a small tasteful skirt at the bottom. My father was in his only green-and-blue plaid bathing trunks. His boney white chest screamed for a sunburn.

  They drove to Bradley Beach and picked a spot midway between the water and the boardwalk to lay out their hotel towels next to each other.

  “We should’ve brought an umbrella,” my father said, squinting. “The sun is so strong today, no clouds to block it at all.”

  At that, my mother dug into her beach bag and produced two hats, a Yankees baseball cap for him and a floppy brimmed canvas one for herself.

  My father smiled, leaned over, and kissed his wife on the cheek. “That’s why I married you—you’re always taking care of us.”

  My mother reached her arm over his shoulder and gave him a squeeze. “I try.”

  “What other hazari do you have in that bag? A hot dog maybe? Some mustard and a Coke? How about one of those big salty pretzels?”

  “Now you’re making me hungry,” my mother said, and slapped him on the chest.

  They left their towels and walked to the boardwalk, bringing back hot dogs and Cokes and two big pretzels.

  “This isn’t helping me keep my girlish figure,” my mother said, taking a bite of pretzel.

  “Me neither,” my father said seriously. He stood and posed, hands on his hips, tilting his chin to the sky. Looking at his skinny physique, my mother burst out laughing, nearly spitting out her mouthful of Coke. Suddenly, she was uncontrollable—shaking, laughing, tears streaming. She put down her soda and folded her arms in on herself to hold herself together. My father was momentarily stunned, but knelt next to her to put his arms around her to calm her down. He instinctively pulled her toward him.

  Their hats had fallen off and lay in the sand, and their hot dogs were getting cold. My parents found themselves in an unexpected embrace, holding each other tightly, neither one willing to be the first to let go.

  chapter sixty-nine

  MAY 21, 1954

  WHEN MY MOTHER first went to the doctor suspecting she was pregnant, he told her she was wrong.

  “Florence, I know how much you want a baby, but you’re just not pregnant. The urinalysis shows up negative. Your symptoms may be a hysterical pregnancy. Sometimes when a woman wants so much to have a baby, her body mimics pregnancy.”

  By then, though, my mother knew that doctors were people—not gods. They made mistakes and had different opinions. She knew she was pregnant and went to a new doctor.

  At thirty-eight, she was an older mother—especially by 1950s standards. Against her doctor’s recommendation, she insisted on being awake and unmedicated for the delivery.

  “I’m not going to miss a minute of it. I don’t care about the pain,” she told my father. “I want to be fully aware during the whole thing. After all we’ve been through, I don’t think I would believe it if I was put to sleep and woke up with a new baby.”

  After the delivery, the last thing my mother heard before she passed out was, “Oh boy!” So, when she woke up, she told my father, “We had a little boy, Al—you’ve got the son you wanted!”

  “I don’t think so!” my father said.

  My father had just seen me in the nursery in my little pink cap with the pink ribbon on my name card that read MANDEL, BABY GIRL. The doctor told him everything went well, that his baby girl was healthy and his wife fine.

  “I’m absolutely thrilled to have another little girl,” my father assured my mother, and presented her with a clear blue two-karat diamond, commemorating the birth. Later, he designed a new wedding ring for her around the nearly perfect stone.

  BIRTHDAYS IN OUR house were happy celebrations—always indulged to the nth degree. My father had a unique way of celebrating his birthday. He insisted on bringing us all gifts for his birthday each year.

  “Al, you’re going to confuse the kids!” My mother would complain.

  “I don’t care, it makes me happy—I get to do what I want for my birthday—so that’s what I want to do!”

  We were not confused—just excited for his birthday every year.

  My tenth birthday was the best. I was kind of a tomboy, playing baseball and basketball, mostly with my father, trying to be the son he wanted and to please him. I woke up that morning with all my gifts spread out at the foot of my bed, including a brand-new basketball and baseball glove.

  Every year my mother would tell me the story of how I was her “hysterical baby” from a nonexistent pregnancy. My father would make jokes about being told I was a boy at first, and he’d tease me about being a tomboy, call me “my son Judy,” and we’d all laugh and eat more cake.

  I never knew Donna’s birthday until recently when
I scheduled my own minor surgery on July 25.

  “Oh, you chose Donna’s birthday to go in for it?” my sister asked.

  Every July 25, my parents must have thought of how old Donna would have been. What she would have looked like. If she would have been in college, starting a career, getting married, having children. And every July 25, I had no idea what they were all going through.

  My cousin Joyce is exactly Donna’s age. She sat across from me at lunch after the memorial service for my parents. I could hear my mother’s voice in my head, so clearly: “She would have been sixty-one when I died. She would have still been beautiful.”

  chapter seventy

  MAY 22, 1954

  MY MOTHER’S BREASTS were full. She longed to hold her new baby to her, to help her learn to suck, to feel the relief of the release of her milk.

  A nurse brought the baby and helped position the newborn in the crook of my mother’s left arm. The baby seemed disinterested until she coaxed her to take the nipple, then she reached a tiny hand out of her blanket. My mother relaxed at the familiar feeling, the tingle that reached into her womb. As the baby became more intent, gurgling and smacking, my mother’s tears mingled with her milk.

  The nurse came closer and laid a hand lightly on her shoulder.

  “She’s so much like my first,” my mother told her. “The way she reaches up, the sound she makes, the crinkle in her forehead when she eats.”

  It was the only time my mother would breast-feed me. Trying once more, she found herself tense at the baby’s touch, her milk refusing to come. The visceral connection to her first, lost child was too much for her body to accommodate. By the time she left the hospital, she had taken medication to dry her milk.

  chapter seventy-one

  2006

  I AM SHOCKED TO notice that it’s dark outside and I’ve been working into the night. David is working late, and I’m alone in the house. I feel that I’m coming to the end of this project, and I have a better understanding of my role in my family and how the accident affected my life.

  The realization that I was a replacement for Donna has given my life a new dimension, and I finally feel grateful that I could help my family heal from that devastating tragedy. Working through the layers of my childhood, I have some long-sought answers about how my father’s attitude toward me shaped my choices and relationships with men. And I know that my father loved me the best he could.

  Coming to an end is a bittersweet feeling. When I’m really done, I will finally be leaving my family’s tragedy behind me. I’ve turned over each stone, looked into every closet, and shined a flashlight under all the beds.

  I won’t leave my parents behind, though. They still live in my head. Their voices, their faces are still clear to me. Even more so now that I understand them as the complex people they were. My walls are still covered with their pictures. I’ve decided to keep them up in my office. But I’ll take down the crash scenes, the headlines, the photos in the hospital.

  The ones I’ll keep on the bulletin board are the happier times: at our home in Cranford when my mother would serve the biggest turkey we’d ever seen, or at the beach together, or my parents dancing—always the cha-cha.

  chapter seventy-two

  1981

  I LINGERED AT HOME in the morning, nearly missing my flight to Florida. When my alarm went off, John pulled me back to the warm bed, not wanting me to leave him. His need for me left me weak and trapped me.

  “Don’t go. You don’t have to. I mean, you aren’t doing the surgery yourself, are you?”

  “It’s my father, of course I have to go.”

  My father was having heart bypass surgery, and I was flying to Florida to be with him and my mother and Linda. John seemed to have no understanding of my need to be there. I knew then that this second try at marriage was failing—I was failing, again. I was free-falling in this belly flop of a marriage that was wearing me out.

  We met when I had just gone back to college to get my degree. I was singing and playing guitar on nights and weekends to pay for tuition. Steven and I were still married, but our sexual hiatus was taking a toll, and our relationship was wearing as thin as the knees in my old jeans. He had completely stopped coming to my singing jobs.

  So it had begun with John’s eyes—bottomless brown—finding mine from a table in the back of the bar where I played guitar. Like pulling a loose thread on a sweater.

  He was the opposite of Steven in so many ways. Dark, warm with a hearty laugh, and always surrounded by a gang of friends. His longish near-black hair hung into his eyes. His drooping mustache collected a wisp of white foam from his beer.

  He followed me from happy hour to a later club gig and brought his entourage to fill the place. He silently unraveled cords, set up my amp, plugged in my guitar, and sent up drinks while I played. He even lugged all my equipment out to my car at 2:00 AM. In the dark, deserted parking lot, he took me by the shoulders and leaned into me.

  “I’m married,” I pulled away.

  “But are you happy?”

  It was a trapdoor question that I couldn’t answer.

  “Your eyes look very sad,” he said. “At least meet me for lunch tomorrow. Just to talk.”

  Our trysts started innocently enough. He told me about his advertising firm and showed me some of his newest work—an ad for sealant, a brochure for a tool company. We talked about my writing class, and I brought him some of my work to discuss. We were just friends, I told myself for a while. But soon I didn’t pull away when he reached for me, and our lunches ended in his bed.

  I found I couldn’t lie to my husband, who had first been my best friend. I was no good at sneaking around, taking secret phone calls, making excuses. So pretty quickly, I left the husband for the lover, thinking, Isn’t this the right thing? John helped me find a part of myself that, at twenty-seven, I thought was lost. And he was so unlike my father—so affectionate, so attentive, so demonstrative—that I was sure I would not repeat my fatal error of being attracted to the familiar chill. I was convinced that this new passion was my remedy, unaware that I was just playing the same song backward. I would discover John had familiar insecurities, but that they manifested in his being overly controlling and jealous.

  “Be careful what you wish for,” my mother used to say.

  In a matter of months after we were together, I realized I had merely exchanged the texture of my loneliness. This man could be my lover, but never my friend. He truly cared about my well-being only if it affected him. He didn’t support anything that could potentially take me away from him, for even a few hours. His jealousy infiltrated every part of our relationship.

  He didn’t show up for my graduation from college, something I had worked long and hard to achieve. When I got my first real job as a reporter, John called the bureau office every night I had a story deadline.

  “Are you really working? Who’s there with you? When will you be home?”

  He complained about the hours. He wanted me home. He wanted me to have dinner ready for him. He wanted sex every night. He ripped the phone from the wall when he thought I was getting calls from my ex and threw raw potatoes at me to get me off the phone. Friends were afraid for me. Then, I became afraid for myself. The stress finally manifested as actual illness with a flare-up of Crohn’s disease, and I finally couldn’t ignore that I was emotionally, spiritually, and physically miserable.

  When I left him, John kept the expensive silk negligee he bought me, with the soft intricate black lace trim. He swore later that he burned it.

  THEY WAITED FOR me, the expert on bypassing my father’s heart. They wouldn’t let them open him up until I arrived to wish him luck and maybe say good-bye. I didn’t think they would do that for me.

  “See, Flurry, she made it!”

  They wheeled my father down the hall, and I walked in step with the squeak-squeak of the gurney wheels, holding his hand.

  “I love you, Dad.”

  He looked straight up at the dimpl
ed ceiling tiles that folded quickly behind him and squeezed my hand.

  “You too.”

  His words, his wet cheek, were a gift.

  chapter seventy-three

  APRIL 8, 1988

  JUSTIN’S BIRTH GROUNDED me. Changed my chemical composition. A catalyst in the creation of new matter.

  “You are perfect,” I whispered to him, only hours old. “You will have what you need to grow strong, the life you deserve. You can count on me.”

  His face lit up when I sang to him. “Hush little baby, don’t say a word, Momma’s gonna buy you a mockingbird.”

  His eyes followed me; his smile collapsed when I left his room. But, even in the midst of mother-euphoria, I was aware of the precipitous cliff, the seeds of my parents’ warnings fully blossoming.

  Anything can happen.

  Planes fall from the sky.

  Returning from shopping, I imagined Justin’s skull cracked like a watermelon on the pavement. I hallucinated fire engines and ambulances, incinerated baby on the perfect lawn.

  My mother’s voice was often in my head: “Only you will protect your own child. No one else will watch out for him like you.”

  But I also felt a swelling calm. Molecules of my mother’s courage, her fortitude, crystallizing into a solid force. I was ready to run into a blazing building, ready to fight to save even one finger.

  A YEAR LATER, my baby son was pressing his face into my neck, holding his ears. His body shook each time the planes roared overhead. We were watching an air show of jets, entranced by the swoops and dives.

  The planes were sleek blue and yellow machines. Each Boeing F/A-18 Hornet was numbered brightly on the tail. We could see U.S. NAVY emblazoned across the top of the wings when they turned topsy-turvy. The pilots’ silhouettes could be seen inside the glass cockpits. They first flew in formation, the tips of their wings nearly touching. Dipping in fluid unison, the planes formed stark geometric patterns framed in blue. They trailed white smoke as they soared and looped.