Soul Survivor: The Reincarnation of a World War II Fighter Pilot

by Andrea Leininger

  This, then, was the makeup of the vaunted “panel” that Andrea would consult about her continually growing worry over James’s nightmares:

  •Jenny (Aunt G. J.), who would bring the torches and pitchforks if it came to that;

  •Becky, who would offer sensible, tactful suggestions and, often enough, bright insight;

  •Andrea, who would call for unity and a plan and try to mend hurt feelings when members clashed;

  •Bobbi, who was capriciously opinionated, maddeningly cautious, and, ultimately, completely unpredictable.

  With this formidable posse ready to roll, Andrea believed that she had no real choice but to send out the bat signal. So far, no one else had had any really good ideas about James. Doctors, educators, friends—they all called the nightmares a normal stage of childhood. And the fact was that both Andrea and Bruce had accepted the diagnosis, even after James’s first harrowing airport forecast. But there came an event after which it could no longer be lightly dismissed. One night in late June, James was kicking and thrashing, and Andrea finally came to hear and understand precisely what her little son was saying.

  “Airplane crash! Plane on fire! Little man can’t get out!”

  The thing she noticed—the truly unnerving thing—was that he was kicking and thrashing exactly like someone who was really trapped inside a burning airplane!

  It was then that she pulled Bruce out of his sleep. “You have to listen to this. You have to hear what he’s saying!”

  That was the night Bruce stood in the doorway, stunned by what he saw and heard.

  It was not, as the casual readers of the child care books suggested, something “developmental.” It had nothing to do with the geographic shift from Dallas to Lafayette. It was no passing whim of a repressed tyke.

  They couldn’t figure out what it was.

  Bruce shook his head, baffled, but Andrea—always the advocate for action—convened the panel.

  The panel functioned in various modes. There was the daily mode in which the everyday gossip was replaced by a definite issue that needed intense discussion: one or more pregnancies, potty training tactics, choosing between public and private schools, how and why the husbands were driving them crazy. Then they had their alert mode in which an anxiety was alleviated—we’re having a Thanksgiving dinner; please bring enough stuffing to avoid a repetition of “Stuffingate,” the year when Becky’s husband, Derald, exploded when they ran out of stuffing.

  The emergency mode, or case red, was only used for true danger, such as when someone lost a job, or a husband was thought to be straying, or there was a major disease to be dealt with.

  So far, Andrea was still operating in the alert mode.

  The routine for summoning the panel was set pretty firmly. Every day Andrea made James his hot breakfast—scrambled eggs, cinnamon toast, pancakes, or French toast—then put him on the potty (which he resisted with the determination of a rock) while she washed the dishes and made the daily calls. The phone would be cradled between her shoulder and her ear, and she fried more than one cordless phone when it fell into the dishwater.

  She called Bobbi and told her the story and got her opinion. Then she called Becky and repeated the story, along with Bobbi’s take on it. Finally, she called Jen and repeated the story and Bobbi’s and Becky’s reactions. She had not yet mastered the conference call. By the third call, she was getting a little dizzy repeating the story and juggling everyone’s answer. But she was determined to get all the girls in on the case.

  At first, they were all pretty dismissive. They had heard this song before. They felt that there were other, bigger items on the agenda: Jen’s attempt to adopt a child, Becky’s house hunting, Bobbi’s complaints about her boss (she was a paralegal in a law office).

  But Andrea pulled them back. “We have to talk about this, she insisted. It’s four or five nights a week and it’s really, really loud.”

  The next thing she did was to send everyone the passage about night terrors in a child care book. “First read this,” she said. “It’s homework. Then we’ll talk.”

  The consensus was that this was not a true crisis. It was something developmental, normal; it would expire in its own natural time. You just had to be patient and deal with it—go to his crib and soothe him. It would be difficult, but no more difficult than getting up three times a night with an infant. As a group, the panel was not very concerned.

  The group had an immediate answer: James was too wrapped up in airplanes. Get him distracted with other toys. Bobbi sent boxes of Thomas the Tank Engine cars, complete with depots and tracks.

  Becky thought that James had probably heard something on the news about a plane crash. He was just showing some normal anxiety. After all, his father was in the air a lot.

  Jenny was the only one who took it to a higher level. “Oh, my gosh!” she said. “What did you think? What did you do? Are you freaked out?” But then, Jenny was the sister who had a National Enquirer attraction to high drama.

  So Andrea took their collective advice to heart. She hid the Blue Angel video—told James that it broke—and tried to divert his attention from airplanes. She made certain that he had his naps, screened out all violent newscasts, and tried to repress showing her panic.

  And so the summer herked and jerked along, with James crying out in the night and Andrea going sleepless, with occasional sweet intermissions coming, thankfully, to break the harrowing routine. After graduating from junior high in June, Bruce’s youngest, Gregory, fifteen, came for a visit. He had been the most distant of Bruce’s four children, siding with his biological mother, incapable of showing any affection for his stepmother, not wanting to seem disloyal.

  But Andrea’s charm and warmth broke through the frost, and they found that they liked each other.

  At the same time, Andrea decided to get tough with James about the potty training. She put the potty in the middle of the living room and removed his pants. He would have the humiliating job of running around all day without pants in front of his big stepbrother unless he learned to use the potty.

  It worked. There were a few spills, but then he learned to use the potty. Everyone felt a thrill of triumph.

  There came nights when James had his nightmares, but Gregory had been warned. The outbursts were loud, and he was rudely awakened, but his bedroom was far enough away that he could pull the blanket over his head and go back to sleep.

  It was a tactic not unlike his father’s stubborn denial of the seriousness of the issue. But since he came down to Louisiana, Greg had bonded strongly with his half brother.

  In late June, the family went to New Orleans and toured the city. They went for a ride on the Natchez down the Mississippi and visited plantations. Bruce was grateful that Gregory carried James in a back carrier, giving him a welcome rest.

  It was, in the end, a delightful, refreshing visit—a nice break from the nightmares.

  Not long after Greg left, Jenny announced that she needed a vacation and was coming down to Lafayette from her new home in Trumbull, Connecticut. She was weary from the arduous and expensive adoption process, and she wanted a break.

  “You won’t get much rest,” warned Andrea. “This is the heart of the nightmare season.”

  “How bad can they be?” replied Jenny, who was James’s godmother. “I mean, the kid is still in diapers and on the bottle.”

  So far, Jenny had only heard rumors of the nightmares. She had not actually witnessed one.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THERE ARE MEMORIES that stick forever—things as small as a sigh or as big as Pearl Harbor. And for the Leiningers, there were the events of the night of August 11—every moment, every sound, every sight, every jolt—as if frozen in amber.

  Andrea awoke to her morning coffee, which Bruce always brought to her before he left for work. He’d lean over their bed, hand her the cup and kiss her good-bye. She grunted her appreciation. Andrea was not a morning person, and it took the push of caffeine to get her engine
going.

  James waited, as he always did, for her to finish her coffee before he got going. Then, like clockwork, he woke up. He heard her moving around, and he started jibber-jabbering in bed, calling her. As always, he woke up happy—no vestige of the nightmare clouded his morning.

  Then she came in and changed his diaper, took him into the kitchen, and made his breakfast. She chirped and he jabbered, and between them it meant feeling good.

  James watched Sesame Street while she scrambled his eggs. She sat with him and drank another cup of coffee while he ate. She didn’t eat breakfast—it always stoked her appetite and made her too hungry to wait for lunch. But she liked to keep James company, and they talked about the day. Today was Friday, grocery shopping day.

  Then, while she washed the dishes, he played with his trucks and planes and blocks in the family room. And she was on the phone, calling Bobbi, calling Jen, calling Becky, calling Bruce (who was always too busy and had to get off the phone).

  When the dishes were done and calls were completed, they drove to the Super Kmart, and they were chattering at each other in the car: “Did you see the big truck? How many wheels on the big truck?” And the other drivers looked over and did double takes at the amount of prattle going on in the car with the grown-up woman at the wheel and a little kid in the backseat.

  There was a devoted efficiency to Andrea’s view of motherhood. It was the result of a kind of lifelong utilitarian vigilance. Ever since she was a young woman and on her own—a ballet dancer working three jobs to stay alive in large, expensive cities—there had never been enough money or enough time, and so Andrea learned to be tightfisted with her resources, to squeeze the most out of every dime and every minute. With James, it meant that she tied lessons and meaning together into every activity. Nothing was wasted.

  “Okay, when we go grocery shopping, what do we buy first? We buy the frozen things last because you don’t want them to melt. Okay, here’s the cereal; you don’t want to buy this cereal, because it’s too sugary. We need six cans of tuna. Let’s count the cans.”

  Up and down the aisles they went, James riding in the rumble seat of the shopping cart, Andrea holding a graduate seminar in grocery shopping—“What vegetable is this? How many tomatoes did we get in a pound?”—leaving behind a trail of admiring shoppers: “I can’t believe you talk to your child like that.”

  Even outside, where he got a treat for his good behavior, he got a tutorial to go with it. Andrea gave him a quarter for the little merry-go-round. She let him hold the quarter. “Who is the president on the quarter?”

  By the time they got home and sorted out the meals for the week and made certain that everything on the list was there, it was time to make dinner.

  Jen was due to arrive on Saturday, and Andrea wanted the evening to go smoothly. It would be a hectic weekend. Jen was always a firecracker, and there would be plenty to do.

  No one thought about the nightmares. The nightmares had become part of the family routine. It had become just another night. James’s room had been redecorated, and his crib had been converted into a daybed, and it was not with dread but a kind of philosophical acceptance that Andrea took him down the hall that Friday night to put him to sleep.

  “Three books, that’s all,” James said, as he said every night, holding up three chubby little fingers.

  Three books at nap time and three books at bedtime—that was the deal. She read Dr. Seuss, the Berenstain Bears, The Three Billy Goats Gruff, and, of course, classics like Rumpelstilskin and Jack and the Beanstalk.

  She would lie with him in his daybed and read him three improving books, one for each pudgy finger, and then he would go to sleep.

  On this night, however, the daybed felt a little cramped, and there was the issue of Andrea’s back, and so they moved to the master bedroom—the Dada bed—so that she could stretch her legs and read comfortably.

  Andrea read a Dr. Seuss, Ten Apples Up On Top!, and James sat there, listening.

  One apple

  Up on top!

  Two apples

  Up on top!

  Naturally, it was a counting book. Something to teach James his numbers. The animals pile up apples on their heads in a progression, until they all finally balance ten.

  Look!

  Ten apples

  On us all!

  What fun

  We will not

  Let them fall.

  There were bears and tigers and dogs in the book, but nothing alarming, or suggesting violence—just a harmless metered-rhyming children’s book. And in the middle of it, James lay down on his back beside Andrea and said, “Mama, the little man’s going like this,” and then he kicked his feet up at the ceiling, as if he were upside down in a box, trying to kick his way out. “Little man’s going like this.” And he kicked again. It was the same kind of kick as in his nightmares, but now he was wide awake.

  And he said as he kicked, “Ohhh! Ohhh! Ohhh! Can’t get out!”

  He reenacted the dream almost without emotion.

  Andrea was trembling. Her hair felt as if it were standing up. She decided to be very careful. She put down the book. And something made her press on: “I know you’ve talked about that before, baby, when you had those nightmares. Who is the little man?”

  And as he lay there with his feet up in the air, he said in a strangely quiet little voice, “Me.”

  Without making too much fuss, Andrea handed James the book and said, “You know what? Let me go get Daddy so you can tell him, too.”

  Bruce was in the family room, down an L-shaped hallway, watching TV. Andrea walked slowly down the hallway to the curve in the L; then, when she was out of James’s line of sight, she bolted down the last leg to the family room. She was in Bruce’s face, trying to whisper, but too excited to do anything but spray a fine, incomprehensible mist.

  Bruce wiped his face, unable to distinguish between her attempt at quiet tact and her being in the throes of a psychotic meltdown.

  “Bruce, you’ve got to hear this!”

  “What?”

  “James is talking about the little man.”

  “What!”

  Bruce leaped out of his seat, and now they were both racing down the L-shaped corridor.

  James was leafing through the Dr. Seuss book.

  Both parents approached their son as if on eggshells.

  They sat on the bed and spoke in a hoarse whisper. “Baby, tell Daddy what you were telling me before.”

  Obediently, James lay on his back, exactly as he had done before, and said, “Little man’s going like this,” and kicked up at the sky, exactly as he had done before, and said while he was doing it, “Ohhh! Ohhh! Ohhh! Can’t get out!”

  Andrea spoke softly: “James, you talk about the little man when you have your dreams. Who is the little man?”

  Matter-of-factly, he repeated, “Me.”

  Bruce’s face turned pale. Later, he would say that his brain felt as if it had turned into the size of a pea.

  For months Andrea had been trying to get Bruce’s attention. He always listened but then saw no significance in the dreams. “Children have bad dreams,” he said. “It will pass. Let’s not panic.” But now, in his own marital bed, his child was wide awake and calmly reenacting something so odd, so far beyond his imagination’s ability to compute, that he was momentarily struck dumb.

  He looked at Andrea, as if she might have some kind of explanation, and then he bent over to his son, who sat up.

  “Son, what happened to your plane?”

  James replied, “It crashed on fire.”

  “Why did your airplane crash?”

  “It got shot.”

  “Who shot your plane?”

  James made a disgusted face. The answer was so obvious. He had treated all the other questions with a certain tolerant innocence, but this one seemed to strike him as so inane that he rolled his eyes.

  “The Japanese!” he said with the disdain of an impatient teenager.

  It
felt as if the air were sucked out of the room. Neither parent remembered breathing since they had come in here. Both felt in a state of mild shock. Later, they would say that the answers that came out of their two-year-old’s mouth were like Novocain. They were numb.

  Maybe it was only a moment—it seemed an hour—then Andrea’s training kicked in. “Okay, baby, let’s brush your teeth and go to bed.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  JAMES FELT CHEATED out of Ten Apples Up On Top! He got to hear only half. He made Andrea promise to finish reading Dr. Seuss the next day. Okay, she said, but for now, bed.

  Andrea was rushing—she needed to discuss what had just happened with Bruce. She delivered James his expected “hundred kisses” (the long bedroom good-night routine known as the “tucky-in-ies,” included turning on the night light, reading the “just three books,” a song—invariably Patsy Cline’s “Walkin’ After Midnight”—and a rapid-fire series of kisses over his face and neck).

  Then there was the scripted part of the ceremony:

  She said, “Good night, sleep tight.”

  He said, “Don’t let the bedbugs bite.”

  She said, “See you in the morning light.”

  He said, “Dream about Blue Angels.”

  Then Andrea closed his door and hurried down the hall to the den. She and Bruce had long since agreed never to discuss the nightmares in front of James; and they both were bursting. They spoke in urgent stage whispers:

  Bruce:Did I hear what I just heard?

  Andrea:I can’t believe it.

  Bruce:Well, let’s not get too excited.

  Andrea:Are you nuts? I’m freaking out. Where did that stuff come from?

  Bruce:I’ll tell you this: wherever that shit came from, I’m sure it’s from your side of the family.

  Andrea:What if he’s…

  Bruce:What if he’s what?

  Andrea:How did he know about the Japanese?

  Bruce:I don’t know. How the hell did he know about a drop tank?

  Andrea:I’m scared.