Bruce:Relax, honey. Look, there’s a reasonable explanation.
Andrea:What? I really want to hear a reasonable explanation.
Bruce:I don’t know. This is crazy. Let’s talk to Bobbi.
Andrea:It’s too late to call now.
Bruce:Talk to Jen tomorrow. What time’s her plane?
Andrea:In the afternoon.
As they whispered worriedly, they half listened for the first outburst of a fresh nightmare. It was after midnight—the nightmare hour—and they danced around the subject of their tiny son’s newly explicit claims, managing to avoid their scary implications. The improbability or threat in their thoughts got censored out as too dangerous to be considered. Could it be something he saw, something he overheard, someone getting to him and planting an idea? Too ridiculous.
And then they were too tired and too nervous to stay on watch, to go over the same ground again.
Andrea lay awake all night, turning over the conversations. Bruce was also awake, but James slept like… well, a baby.
The next day passed slowly, waiting for Aunt G. J. Her plane was due at three, and Andrea and James got to the airport early.
Aunt G. J. came out of gate 1A, and the two sisters ran into each other’s arms, jumped around and screamed—their usual mild greeting—and in eight minutes they were back on West St. Mary Boulevard. In ten minutes they each had a rum-soaked “hurricane,” the traditional New Orleans beverage, which had won a place in the Leininger home.
James was in the family room, involved with a video, and Andrea and Jen settled into the sunroom, where Andrea told her sister about last night’s new chapter in the bad-dream story. There was never anything neutral or withheld in the reaction of Aunt G. J. “Holy shit!” she cried. At least her mind was off her adoption woes.
She slugged down her hurricane and went for seconds.
“What did you do? What did you say? What did you think? What did Bruce say? Are you freaked out? Oh, my God! That’s crazy! Where would he get that?”
Which is the way Aunt G. J. oriented herself to tricky situations: alcohol and torrents of back-to-back questions.
Jen got up and took her second drink into the family room and sat with James. They had always been great friends.
“James, your mommy was telling me about what you said last night. That is so interesting. I just wanted to ask you something: how did you know it was the Japanese that shot your plane down?”
James turned away from the video and looked at her and said simply: “The big red sun.”
Jenny pivoted on her heels, grabbed her sister’s arm, and marched back into the sunroom, where they each poured another hurricane. They didn’t need to discuss anything. They both knew that James was describing the Japanese symbol of the red sun painted on their warplanes—the symbol that was rudely translated to “meatballs.” That’s what American fliers had called Japanese planes in World War II: meatballs.
And so they did what they always did during a family crisis: they called Bobbi. It was the Scoggin girls’ version of dialing 911. But Bobbi was uncertain what to make of it. She said she would think about it.
Jenny was tired and went to bed early, hoping for a long night’s rest. It had been a lot to take in. She slept in the guest bedroom, and even though she had been warned about the nightmares, she didn’t think they would bother her. After all, she was a good sleeper, and she’d had more than a few stiff rum concoctions to knock her out. If James did have a nightmare, she wouldn’t even wake up.
But just after midnight, she was jolted out of bed. The bloodcurdling screams coming out of James’s room all but flung her to the floor. She stood there for a moment, in her oversized T-shirt and shorts, then stumbled out into the hallway and stared wide-eyed into James’s room. He was thrashing and screaming, and even though she had been warned, nothing could prepare her for the sight of her godson fighting for his life. Without realizing it, she uttered “What the fuck!?”
Andrea just turned and looked at her sister. Jenny hadn’t even noticed that Andrea had beaten her to the room and was bending over the bed. Tenderly, Andrea picked up her son and cooed reassurances into his ear, trying not to wake him. James was shrieking and struggling, fighting to get out of his mother’s arms, struggling to escape from what it was that had him in its grip. Jenny was just blown away.
Even after James had calmed down and stopped screaming and thrashing, Jenny was still shaken, but game. She did what she always did: tried to lighten the moment. She looked at Andrea flatly and said, “I see dead people.” It broke the spell, and they both burst out laughing.
They grabbed each other and went down the hall, trying not to wake up the rest of the house. Andrea opened a bottle of wine, and they sat at the kitchen table and talked long into the night.
Finally, everyone got back to sleep—or some sort of wakeful rest.
In the morning, Andrea called her mother to tell her about the new developments and that Jenny had witnessed a nightmare. Suddenly, there was Jenny, grabbing away the phone. “Let me talk to her. Mom? Mom? Listen, you will not believe what happened last night. James was screaming and shrieking! Shrieking!”
And then Andrea reclaimed the phone and coolly told Bobbi that Jenny had truly witnessed a nightmare and was not exaggerating, that this was not the “stage version.” And then Jenny grabbed the phone again and said that James was thrashing around and kicking and that the stories Andrea had told were all true and that, if anything, she had downplayed them. And then Andrea had the phone again. “See? I told you. See?” And then Jenny grabbed it back. “Let me talk to her…”
It was a more or less typical Scoggin girls’ hysterical phone conversation.
Andrea had James in her arms, and even while all this telephone tag was going on, she was changing his diaper and trying to feed him breakfast.
Bruce had long since left for work—fled, really—glad to be gone from all the drama. He could deal with work, even on a weekend, but this was too much. This was over his head.
Once the phone juggling had eased and the details all shared, turned over and evaluated, debated, and given a philosophical spin, Andrea, Jenny, and Bobbi all calmed down. It was then that Bobbi brought a new idea to the table. She had been thinking about this a lot. The surreal, after all, was her home ballpark. She had done a lot of reading and research about the supernatural, paranormal, and ultrastrange phenomena. Maybe it was time for all the girls to think outside the box.
Bobbi was raised Catholic and maintained a very active role in the church. Her religious roots were as deep and heartfelt as Bruce’s. But she had always had a taste for other cultures, other religions. She was not closed off to New Age concepts. Also, she had a natural, insatiable curiosity. When she heard about something new, she would plunge into research about it. Her grandchild’s dreams had sent her straight to the bookstore, and she had spent weeks reading about dream interpretation, night terrors, and nightmares. It was a direction she hadn’t anticipated, but there was the possibility of a past life—she’d been reading about it.
There were the tantalizing clues: the big red sun, the Japanese involvement, the fact that James thought that he himself was the guy trapped in the burning plane.
All of it was outside the realm of what they had come to expect—way outside the box.
CHAPTER TEN
BULLSHIT!”
There was nothing devious or cunning about Bruce Leininger. In fact, he was invariably blunt in his opinions. His public views were delivered raw, unshelled by caution or prudence. So when he heard “the panel” discuss the possibility of a “past life,” his reaction was swift and direct:
“Bullshit!”
This was the reflexive result of his heartfelt Christian beliefs. A true Christian, according to Bruce, could not believe in reincarnation. The promise of that faith was eternal life, not a periodic reappearance of the immortal soul in some random future incarnation. The soul did not make “cameos.”
He was no
t certain what was happening to his son James, but he had struggled hard—a tussle that took him to C. S. Lewis’s book Mere Christianity, in which he followed the author’s painful path of questioning and doubt to arrive at a solid, unshakable foundation of faith. The Bible was also full of mysteries, but it would be unthinkable now to squander all that hard-won conviction on some flaky leap of New Age speculation.
If Bruce was rock solid in his own Christian beliefs, Andrea’s faith was a more flexible brand. She was a lifetime Christian believer and took great comfort in her regular church attendance. But growing up in the wild Scoggin household (along with living the open-minded life of a professional dancer, which had included sharing an apartment with three gay male dancers) imbued her with a supple respect for freethinking possibilities. A practical solution—even one at odds with her accepted version of liturgical verity—was preferable to hitting a blind wall of uncertainty about her son.
Thus, the “panel” whispered and conferred and turned over possibilities and far-out hunches while Bruce remained behind the locked door of his implacable hostility toward anything that smacked of heresy.
“Never, never, never,” he said. “Not in my house. There will be no such thing as a past life. Never!”
And still the nights on West St. Mary Boulevard were broken by the frantic screams and desperate thrashing that could be heard down the hall. During her week-long visit, Jen could hear the nightly commotion, although she stopped leaping out of bed and running to lend whatever assistance she could—which was none. She would simply stand back, a spectator, and swallow whatever glib remark came to mind.
She reported this to her fellow panel members in her fashion—“Yikes!”—but she could never learn to deal with the nightmares without freaking out. No, she kept herself at some remove, but the truth was that the size of the nightmares rendered her all but paralyzed. She simply did not understand whatever it was that came out of her little godson. It was serious business, all right, and whenever she was faced with serious business, Jen was not comfortable if she couldn’t make light of it.
It was a miserable season. The whole region was on strict water rationing during that hot, dry, record-breaking summer. The temperatures were stuck for days over a hundred degrees. But the Leiningers were resourceful when it came to saving their plants. They bailed out the bath when James was done and used the water on the potted plants—a slow but innocent way to get around the restrictions. They kept a bucket in the shower to catch the splash and spillover and used that for the lawns and for flushing. These were tricks that they had learned when they lived in San Francisco, where there were often restrictions on water usage.
It was also that breathless moment, just before Labor Day, when the historic presidential campaign of 2000 was about to launch in earnest. Not that there was doubt about the political sentiments of Lafayette Parish—or Louisiana itself, for that matter. All you had to do was check the bumper stickers. If you could find backing for Al Gore, it was either on an out-of-state license plate or a prank. The lawns might be parched from the drought, but they bloomed with posters for George W. Bush. Here was the beating heart of a red state.
And so, during that first dog-day August of the new millennium, while Bruce was suffering his own slow burn, a measured consensus was building among the members of the panel. James was experiencing something beyond his years, and maybe beyond his own lifetime. Just what it was—that was still up in the air.
By the end of her week-long stay, Jen was ready to fly back to Connecticut, her husband, Greg, and her frustrating adoption quest. She’d had enough of the mysterious screams. Jen never did find the relief and rest for which she had come to Louisiana. She and Andrea had sat up nights in the family room drinking wine and getting sloshed and coming to no conclusion about the nightmares. They were both setting, Andrea would say sarcastically, “a fine example of parenting.”
But on the subject of James, they agreed: they were stumped. And so, on Saturday morning, August 19, Jen was to fly home. They all packed in the car and drove to the regional airport. As they approached the airport, as the planes on the tarmac came into view, James said in that plain, unexcited voice, “Aunt G. J.’s airplane crash. Big fire.”
Jen froze in the backseat. “I hope that’s not a premonition.”
Andrea and Bruce tried to reassure her. James had said that before. He said it when Bruce was getting on a plane, and look, Bruce was still here.
Then Bruce half turned in his seat and spoke to his son again. “Airplanes DON’T crash on fire! They get to their destination just fine. It scares people when you say such things. You need to be careful and not say something that will make someone afraid.”
From the backseat, Jen said in a timid voice, “Maybe I should fly out tomorrow instead.”
No, no, no. It’s nothing. It’s not a premonition. It’s just something he says. Playing with those damn airplanes! Bruce looked angry, as if James had done something rude in front of company. Damn, he thought, this thing has got to stop!
Jen was still upset, and Bruce and Andrea tried to play it down, made little of what James said, waved off her concern.
Jen’s plane took off and landed without incident, but there remained that frightening, frozen instant when no one could swear for sure where that tiny little concerned voice was coming from.
A little more than a week after Jen flew back to New England, it promised to be just another normal Sunday—a last, lazy blast of a summer weekend. Bobbi and Becky in Texas had been left to spin their own pet theories about James and his bad dreams. No one could guess that the world of the Leiningers was about to spin completely off its axis. Their everyday life was just so ordinary.
On that Sunday, August 27, the Leiningers skipped church. They had too much to do. There was the yard work before it got too hot. They all woke up around eight, and Bruce lingered over coffee and the Sunday newspaper before tackling the lawn, while Andrea fussed over dishes and bedding and household chores and the daily upkeep of James—his meals, his naps, his games.
Their house had an odd-numbered address, and so that day they were allowed to water the lawn. And around six in the evening they turned on the sprinkler in the front yard, and James ran around in the spray wearing his blue swim diaper. He played on the wet grass while Bruce and Andrea watched from their rockers on the front porch, drinking minted iced sun tea and admiring the rainbows made by the mist and the fading Louisiana sun. Every once in a while, one of them would reach over and refill their glasses from the jug. Andrea had made the uniquely Southern tea by filling the jug with water and tea bags and leaving it out in the sun to steep for four hours, then removing the tea bags and refrigerating it.
Dinner was a cold pasta salad—something else that wouldn’t require an oven. The meal was over by seven, and the family watched TV for a while, and then Andrea started to get James ready for bed. A routine day.
Andrea skipped James’s bath since he had played in the sprinkler. By nine he was in the Dada bed for story time. Andrea had barely gotten started on Dr. Seuss’s Oh, the Places You’ll Go! when James began talking about certain details of the nightmare.
“Mama, little man’s airplane crash on fire…”
Just conversational. But Andrea had been waiting for just this opening. She and Bruce had a whole bag of questions for James, but every time they tried to raise the subject, James stonewalled them. He would talk only on his terms, which was when he was good and ready—when he brought it up.
And so they had prepared for this.
“Let me go get Daddy, okay?”
She hurried down the L-shaped hallway. “James is talking about the little man.”
Bruce was out of his chair, and in seconds they were both sitting on the bed, trying to keep the strain out of their voices.
“James, tell Daddy about the little man.”
“Little man’s airplane crash on fire.”
Andrea asked, “Who is the little man?”
“M
e.”
There was no hesitation, no pause, no dramatic flourish. He was talking about something that called for no emotion.
Andrea asked, “Do you remember the little man’s name?”
And he said, “James.”
He didn’t understand, she thought. He was repeating his own name, as a two-year-old might if asked his name. Andrea was getting frustrated because she didn’t know how to push him without doing damage. She was desperate for some answers, but not if it was going to upset him.
Bruce took over the questioning.
“Do you remember what kind of an airplane the little man flew?”
“A Corsair,” he answered without hesitation.
Bruce flinched as if he’d been punched. He knew the plane. It was a World War II fighter plane. How could James even know the name of a World War II aircraft, much less say with certainty that it was the aircraft in the dream?
“Do you remember where your airplane took off from?”
And James said, “A boat.”
Another answer that left Bruce dumbfounded. He knew vaguely about Corsairs and how they were launched from aircraft carriers in World War II, but how in hell did James know this? How could he have assembled such a complicated and credible nightmare? Nothing that Bruce had ever seen or read or heard could have influenced James to have this memory with all its intricate facts that he repeated over and over again.
Bruce was now convinced that he somehow had to trap his child and find the cracks and flaws in his story.
“Do you remember the name of your boat?”
“Natoma.”
Bruce told Andrea to get a pen and some paper. He wanted something hard, on paper—proof that this was some kind of fantasy.
At this point, Bruce felt a little vindicated. No past life. No seamless story moving through different centuries. Just a confused child who, somehow, got a strange story in his head.
“Natoma, huh?”
Soul Survivor: The Reincarnation of a World War II Fighter Pilot Page 7
