The program allowed overstressed mothers to have three full hours to go shopping or have a long, lingering brunch while their children were in reliable hands. It was not meant to drive mothers to three straight hours of hysterics, which is how Andrea spent her first holiday from parenthood.
She had packed James’s lunch and his diaper bag and deposited him in the “Angels” class with ten other toddlers. James seemed happy and excited as they walked down the hallway, brightening even more when he spotted the little kiddie gym and the small slide in the classroom. He ran over to the play set, and Andrea handed his lunch bag and his diaper kit to Miss Lisa, making certain to mention his complete health status—his latest shots, his allergies, the name of his pediatrician, her cell phone number, and his toilet habits.
Then she bravely called out to James, “Bye, buddy, have a great time. Be a good boy and I’ll be back to get you at lunchtime!”
He didn’t even hear her, he was so busy with his new pals and toys. Fine, she thought—no tears, no excruciating farewells, no tugging at her, no having to pry his little fingers from her calves. It was clean and simple. Now all she had to do was kill three childless hours. Three blissful, carefree hours. She would go shopping and…
But as she pulled out of the parking lot and into Johnston Street, it hit her. She was leaving her baby… to… whom?! She didn’t know these people. Not really. For all she knew, they could be paroled child molesters! Ax murderers! Just exactly what did she know about these so-called teachers who called themselves Miss Lisa and Miss Cheryl? And even if they were as good as Mother Goose, would they know what to do in a crisis? What if James choked? What if the other kids were mean to him? What if he missed her?
Oh, there were high-operatic fears that she could scale like a lyric soprano.
And what would James make of being there? He would think she had abandoned him. Wouldn’t that be the assumption of a two-year-old? Look around and Mom’s not there; ergo, she’s gone—forever.
Naturally, Andrea tried to prepare him. She told him about the school, she said it would be only for a little while, and then she would be back. But did he really understand? He was too little.
She didn’t understand!
In this dark moment of woe, she turned to her mother. She called Bobbi on her cell phone, trying to hide her tears. Andrea knew that Bobbi was no comfort when she heard tears. Any emotional display, and Bobbi would go into her tough-love mode. So Andrea tried to sound brave, but her mother could discern her daughter’s near hysteria through the false courage and fed her that icy reassurance that Andrea should have expected: James will survive. He’ll be fine. It’s only a little day care, for heaven’s sake. Buck up!
Just the kind of sensible talk Andrea should have expected from a rational human being. Right now she didn’t need a rational human being. She needed a soul sister.
Which is who she called: her sisters, Becky and Jenny, who completely understood Andrea’s irrational panic. After all, they had grown up under that same emotionally charged roof, where they, too, learned to downplay their theatrical outbursts under Bobbi’s unsparing judgments. And, like good sisters, Becky and Jenny made those soft cooing noises that said they understood and sympathized with a crazed lady going to pieces over a child torn from his mother’s loving arms by a play date.
As always, talking to her sisters was comforting, but Andrea was a mess as she rolled her cart through Sam’s Club, picking up paper towels and cookies and steaks and floor cleaner—and sobbing and blubbering into the cell phone.
Somehow, the three hours passed, and she got back to the church early to pick up James. A little too early. She tried not to seem like a stalker, peeking through the bushes as she waited.
Finally, it was noon and she marched into the classroom, careful not to fall apart in front of the other moms, who didn’t look as if they had been sobbing and wailing all over Lafayette.
She felt she was the picture of control and respectability as she smiled crisply for Miss Lisa and Miss Cheryl, as if this three-hour break had flown by smoothly.
And—thank God!—James burst into tears when he spotted his mother.
James lived inside a carefully cushioned, loving world. It was hardly surprising, given that he was a late child, born under difficult circumstances to wildly overprotective parents. Bruce was only slightly less obsessive. He would wake up early so that he could give James his first bottle of the day, and he kept his son up late so that he could give him his last bottle at night.
When it came time for James to be weaned off his bottle, it was Bruce who had an emotional problem. Often, Andrea would come out in the morning and find Bruce cradling his son in his arms and feeding him from the forbidden bottle.
The child was fine with the sippy cup, and Andrea was certain he would have had no trouble giving up the bottle. But Bruce was another matter. He cherished his private moment when he could hold his son and whisper a kind of talking love song; it was an intimacy that he held on to as long as he possibly could.
The Christmas before James turned three, Andrea came up with a drastic solution. She rounded up all the bottles in the house and put them in a sealed package. She explained to James that she was going to leave all the bottles for Santa Claus to distribute to children who had no bottles. Bruce had no further argument—not without taking on Santa Claus.
One day in early June, just when school closed for the summer, a great, long train of eighteen-wheel trucks pulled into the parking lot of the Lafayette Convention Center—the Cajun Dome—and out poured a colorful band of muscled roustabouts, slick pitchmen, glib barkers, and a wizened corps of carny gypsies in all their wild, tattooed splendor. The Cajun Heartland State Fair had come to town. It was as if a fleet of pirate ships had landed. They began to pitch their soiled tents and unload the big, clunky rides; they erected their exotic booths to house the eternal crooked games of chance that would plug up the midway with their dusty prizes of cheap toys and useless gadgets. Then came the whirling helicopter, the dizzying Tilt-a-Whirl, the shaky Ferris wheel, the faded carousel, all looking frail and patched, as if they were held together with duct tape and baling wire. On such flimsy devices rode the children of Lafayette.
The Cajun Dome is only about a mile away from West St. Mary Boulevard, so there was no way for Andrea and Bruce to avoid it—not when they had to drive down West Congress Street and James’s eyes would bulge and he would plead to be taken to the fair.
And so, armed with antibacterial hand wipes, with their hearts in their throats, Andrea and Bruce took James to the fair. Well, there was just no way to be careful. Bruce and James went on the Super Slide, which worked by simple gravity—no moving parts. Bruce kept James between his legs while Andrea watched and took pictures from the sidelines. There was a gentle carousel, but it didn’t get James’s blood flowing. He wanted one of those risky rides. They let him on the Spinning Bear and the high Ferris wheel, but his favorite was the little helicopter that dipped and rose. He insisted on riding six or seven times. Nothing felt safe.
They fed James ice cream and let him have his first cone of cotton candy, and he was a happy boy dancing around to the tinny jingle—“Welcome to the Cajun Heartland State Fair. Go! Go! Fun! Fun!”—until everyone agreed that they needed a new jingle.
Soon after, the middle of June, something new happened during the nightmare. It was about a week after the fair. When James started screaming, Andrea did what she usually did: came rushing in and rubbed his back and hovered over the crib. Then she picked him up and carried him to the rocking chair. By now James was awake, and Andrea cooed soothing noises. Then, almost offhandedly, she asked if he remembered what he’d been dreaming about.
And he said, “Airplane crash, on fire! Little man can’t get out.”
She didn’t call Bruce out of his sleep; he’d be grumpy and uninterested and dismiss it as no big deal. She would tell him about it in the morning.
Andrea was unclear about the importance of what James ha
d blurted out—not really blurted out, actually, but declared with calm, emphatic confidence.
She hesitated to bring in the high priests of family wisdom—her mother and sisters, known collectively as “the panel”—because she felt she had already used up her credibility with them.
This credibility gap had a long history. It went all the way back to the business with her pregnancy, with all kinds of specialists and consultants and a long chain of worry that didn’t end with James’s birth. When James was a three-month-old and did not push up his arms when Andrea laid him on his stomach, she was convinced that there was something terribly wrong with him. By the time he was six months old, her sisters and her mother were fed up with her constant alarms—she was always worried.
During those first six months, Andrea was losing weight; she was sky-high nervous, and she couldn’t stop jabbering about this sign or that, watching James under a microscope for some sign of trouble. She had spoken about everything incessantly to the panel, and they finally gave her some useful advice.
“Go to the doctor and get a pill, for the love of God! You’re making us all crazy. James is fine; you’re the one with the problem.” And it was the power of their collective exasperation that convinced her.
Andrea’s doctor put her on Paxil. It was a godsend for her and James.
As a result, Andrea did something that she had never done before—she became a little reticent with her family. She withheld the full horror of James’s nightmares and tried to limit her talk to the routine difficulties of a toddler. But after this night, she did mention to her mother, almost lightly, that James was not sleeping well.
Bobbi took a conservative, reasonable position on the nightmares. She said it was the new house and the new environment. Then Andrea spoke to her sister Becky, who asked if he was overtired at night. If he was not getting his naps in the afternoon, he would be prone to night terrors. Keep him on schedule and make sure that he has his rest during the day, she said. But even that hadn’t worked.
Andrea had been running around during the day, fixing up the house, and James had not gotten his regular naps. He would fall asleep in the car, but that wasn’t the same thing. Andrea then made certain that he was home and in his crib for a proper nap. For a few days, it worked. But then the nightmares returned. Even with the naps.
However, Andrea wasn’t yet ready to bring in the whole team. For one thing, another member of the panel had a greater call on everyone’s sympathy. Jenny and her husband, Greg, couldn’t have a child and were actively trying to adopt. Furthermore, they had to move out of Dallas to Trumbull, Connecticut, after he took a new job. And if that wasn’t enough, Jenny had a health issue, a precancerous condition that had to be attended to.
Bringing up the nightmares again struck Andrea as almost selfish, a little heartless. Andrea already had her baby, albeit with some sleep issues; Jenny was needier.
Meanwhile, there was still the house to sell back in Dallas. It was new, but Andrea spruced it up to make it more attractive for the market. And there was the nervous wait for buyers. The house finally sold in late May, and the Leiningers realized a modest profit, but it had taken a toll on their nerves.
At the same time, Bruce was under pressure to bring all of OSCA’s human resources programs up to date and in line with federal labor guidelines so that the company could go public and rake in some cash and then be sold. It was not unlike what he’d had to do with his home in Dallas: sprucing it up so that it could be sold.
This was a common business practice. A large corporation, Great Lakes Chemical, was carving off a small chunk of itself to raise money.
Not that Bruce knew much about the oil and gas industry—he was a specialist in human resources. That meant that he was flying back and forth between Lafayette, Louisiana, and Great Lakes Chemical’s corporate headquarters in Indiana to report on his progress.
In June, the company was days away from making the public offering, and everyone was on edge. No one was more jittery than Bruce, shaping benefit packages in a completely unfamiliar industry. He was determined to figure out a fair compensation for guys who were out on the deep rigs, working twenty-one days straight then taking seven days off.
A few weeks later, they were on their way to Lafayette Regional Airport. Bruce was heading to a business trip in Indiana. James was in the backseat, playing with one of the toy airplanes he had picked up in Texas, and Bruce was wondering if he had packed enough warm clothing and all the right files. Suddenly, as they turned into the airport road and the big jets came into view, out of the backseat came this little voice:
“Daddy’s airplane crash. Big fire!”
There was a stunned moment inside the car. Both parents exchanged looks of alarm.
What?
“Daddy’s airplane crash. Big fire!”
Bruce exploded: “No! James, do not say that. Airplanes don’t crash! Do not say that ever again! Do you hear me?” He was barking.
The plane that James held in his hand had no propellers. He had repeatedly crashed his toy plane into a coffee table in the den, breaking off the propellers. In fact, he had done that to all the planes that Bruce had bought him in Dallas—crashed them all into the table again and again, breaking off the props.
“Daddy’s airplane crash! Big fire!”
Bruce did not take it lightly. He was the one about to get on an airplane—something he never did without anxiety or without praying—and here his son was, making this ominous forecast. He thought James had deliberately picked that moment and calculated its impact to say something terrible. No such thing. James was barely two. And what came out of his mouth was not malice or perversity; it was the spontaneous report of someone else.
At the time, Bruce didn’t understand. He assumed that James was just being mischievous. The child, aware of his father’s edgy state, was trying to make him even more nervous, he thought. As if a two-year-old could work out such a complex formulation to bug Daddy.
CHAPTER FIVE
AS THEIR LIVES progressed, each Leininger was busy, wrapped up in his or her own travails: James, having his four or five nightmares a week and, during the day, crashing his toy airplanes, breaking off the propellers, and turning the wooden coffee table into distressed furniture; Andrea, fixing up the house while watching James go from nightmare to nightmare, and relating it all to her family, who had become numb to Andrea’s story, given her tendency for drama; Bruce, working into the night to help take OSCA public.
The deadline for the initial public offering was June 14, and the filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission had to be complete and perfect.
I was working hard—very hard—and there was that pleasurably tingly combination of exhaustion and exhilaration when you have done righteous work and you know it. Pride. Getting it right. I tell you, it took long, long hours to get it right. The health care and the retirement plan, the insurance and the complicated compensation packages—it took a long time, and it took a lot out of me. I’d come home just like I said—exhilarated and exhausted, feeling that terrific sense of… accomplishment… and I was just looking for a quiet place, some peaceful moment, to drink it all in, to savor what I’d done. Then falling into that deep, deep virtuous sleep… interrupted by shrieks in the middle of the night.
On the evening of June 14, having completed all his work for the company, Bruce came home to another nightmare, and this one had nothing to do with James.
Bruce expected a happy respite—the reward and relief after the company finally went public. Here was the payoff for all the hard labor. Now the pressure was finally off. He and his colleagues could relax and savor the prize. He left the office at six thirty and picked up a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon before heading home to what he thought would be a blissful candlelit dinner.
But when Bruce came through the front door, the phone was ringing. He assumed it was someone calling to congratulate him on a job well done, to pat him on the back. But Robert Hollier, his boss, was phoning fro
m an airport to summon him back into action. “There’s been an accident out on one of the rigs. Get your ass back to the office.… I’m flying back now.”
Andrea was flummoxed. What was going on? She was throwing hand signals for an explanation while Bruce made “shut up” signs. He hung up, and his face had turned that grim, ashen shade of trouble.
“What is it?” she asked.
The candles and dinner would have to wait, he said. Andrea was bobbing up and down, trying to get some information, and all Bruce could say was that there had been “an accident… I’ll call you when I know more…”
And then he was gone.
One of the men working on a rig out in the Gulf had gone into the water. He was a young guy, in his mid-thirties, knocked off the platform by a loose high-pressure hose during a “fracing” operation—a tricky and dangerous technique to relieve pressure. The rock under a rig has to be “fractured” so that the gas or oil can escape into the well and up out of the ground. If a worker gets too close and the hose gets loose, he can be cut in half. In this case, the rigger, a senior equipment operator, was knocked into the Gulf when the hose burst loose.
The Coast Guard had been called; a helicopter was circling; ships from various companies were on station, performing a night search around the rig. But it looked hopeless. When you went into the water out there, in the dark, with all the currents and chop of the sea, unless you were plucked out quickly, the chances of a rescue were slight.
Soul Survivor: The Reincarnation of a World War II Fighter Pilot Page 4
