Replacement Child (4 page)

“What happened to her? What did you do to her?”

My mother took a moment to pull herself together and think about what to say.

“But, I really couldn’t help myself,” she said when she told the story. “I turned to her and said, ‘She was in an accident. An airplane crashed into my house and killed my other daughter— and my baby here is lucky to be alive. Do you have any more questions I can answer for you right now?’ That woman didn’t have a thing to say for the rest of that ride!”

My father told about taking Linda to her first Thanksgiving Day parade. I was just six months old, at home while my mother cooked dinner. He told Linda she would see the Shriners in their little hats, in their tiny cars whizzing around. He prepared her for the loud sirens and music so that she wouldn’t be afraid.

At the parade, shiny new fire trucks showed off their bells and sirens, clanging in time with the tubas in the high school band. Local royalty rode in convertibles waving and throwing wrapped candy to the children that lined the streets. The
Boy and Girl Scouts were flanked by the Little League and the Daughters of the American Revolution.

They found a spot in front of Levy Brothers department store, out of the wind and cold, to watch the parade. My father bought a red balloon from a street vendor, and Linda was happily clutching it when a little boy approached her, pointed into her smiling face, and squealed, “Eeew—what happened to you?”

Linda burst into tears. The boy’s mother dragged him away with a shake of her head. My father sco oped Linda up quickly to hug her, trying to control her sobs.

“Honey, don’t ever forget that some people are pretty on the outside, and ugly on the inside. You are just wearing your badge of courage on the outside, and you should always wear it with pride.”

These were the kinds of stories that filled in the gaps for me as a child. That gave me the definition of what our family was about. I was not a lead actor in this play.

W
HEN
I
WANTED
to go on a trip to Florida with my friends in high school, I learned more about the actual crash. Our family did not fly. My parents had only recently taken their first airplane ride on a business trip, and Linda had never flown. To boot, my flight was scheduled on American Airlines—the very carrier that crashed a plane into their home. I was sixteen years old and totally oblivious to the ramifications of their putting me on that particular plane by myself. They gritted their teeth and let me go.

JANUARY 22, 1952
(DAY OF THE CRASH)

7:00
AM

M
Y MOTHER WOKE
up early, as usual, to get my father off to work, her seven-year-old off to school, and breakfast for her mother and two-year-old Linda.

They lived on the second floor of a three-story brick building that resembled a stack of faded yellow Lego blocks. It also housed another family and one boarder on the third floor. A candy store on the ground level was a gathering place for local teenagers.

Sounds filtered up from the store and down from the family upstairs having their breakfast as they got ready for the day. My mother was held hostage in the middle.

She had planned their day around Linda’s doctor appointment later that morning. A spunky young mother, she had energy to spare. Her hair was always expertly coiffed by her own hand, clothes neatly pressed. My mother was the kind to strike up a conversation in the checkout line at the grocery store and to show up with a Bundt cake at a new neighbor’s door. Her family was her core.

My father was a generally happy man with thinning black hair and an unwavering smile. He reveled in his young family. My mother took it in stride that he was reserved in showing affection. She had decided she could make up for it by showing him how.

Two years older than my mother, my father had held a plethora of jobs during the Depression years. Sometimes two or three at a time; at first to help feed his five sisters, later for his own family. He had painted houses with his father, delivered laundry, been a milkman, worked in a pharmacy—and now he worked in a jewelry store.

This morning my father wanted only his usual toast and coffee.

“Some eggs or some oatmeal maybe, Al? You can’t work for hours on a piece of toast.” My mother worried that he didn’t eat right when he was away from her. He was thin as a rail, and she suspected he made time only for coffee and cigarette breaks during the day.

After fifteen years of marriage, she still thought she could change his habits.

“Nope, that’s all I need. And hugs from my girls, of course,” he said.

He reached over to give little Linda a tender squeeze. Donna, the seven-year-old, came over to his chair for a full-on good-bye hug, wrapping her arms around his neck and holding her cheek next to his for a moment. A warm knot took hold of his chest as he hugged her back.

“Bye, Daddy, have a good day,” she told him.

He let her hang on for a minute, then extracted himself.

My mother pecked him on the cheek, handed him his coat and his black Dick Tracy hat, and he was out the door. Whistling, he sprang into his 1950 Buick Special with the black leather seats. He loved getting into that car—the first car he ever owned—and driving the couple of miles to his job at Goldblatt Jewelers. He lit a cigarette with the car lighter, inhaled his first puff deeply, opened the front side-vent window, and slowly began to drive away.

Donna waved from the window.

1953

A
FTER THE SURGERY
to lift Linda’s chin off of her chest where flames had welded the two together, she needed X-ray treatments to prevent keloid (thickened) scars from forming. She was three and a half.

My mother said that when Linda saw the gigantic X-ray machine, she became hysterical and could not be calmed. As the technicians tried to restrain her, my mother intervened, quickly grabbing Linda up from the table and ordering them to stop. They just shook their heads, realizing their schedule had been blown for the morning.

“There’s no reason to put her through this now. I’ll bring her back in a week,” my mother told them. “She’ll be ready then. Give me a week.” And she ushered Linda from the exam room.

At home, my parents built a mini model of the X-ray machine—just the size for Linda’s doll, Sandy, to use. My father was diligent in constructing the X-ray machine model, finding pictures in the library of the actual machine used in the hospital and replicating it with tin foil and cardboard.

For a week, Linda gave Sandy her X-ray treatments every day, positioning her carefully and lowering the model X-ray machine close to her, but never touching her. My mother explained exactly what would happen to Sandy each time:

“She just has to lie still while the machine does its job, and she won’t feel anything, see honey?”

It was a brilliant ploy, putting Linda in charge and showing her that Sandy was unharmed.

Sandy had black hair and green eyes just like Linda. When Linda went into surgery, Sandy did too. Operating room nurses always made sure that Sandy had the exact same bandages as Linda. And they used the doll to explain what would happen to her before each surgery.

2005

M
Y COFFEE IS
getting cold on my desk. There is work for me to get to, but I can’t seem to concentrate on the brochure draft I’m meant to deliver tomorrow to a client. This new insurance product is not holding my interest. I’m searching for new words to say “best” that their legal team will let me use. Improved . . . competitive . . . enhanced . . .

Instead of working, I wind up heating up my coffee in the microwave and bringing it downstairs to the basement where I’ve stored my parents’ things: the photo albums and memorabilia that I brought back with me from their apartment.

Years ago, when I first told them I wanted to write, they began giving me clippings from the newspaper accounts of the crash. They started writing down notes for me. Then Linda joined in to add her stories. At the time, I took a look at it all and shoved it into a file folder without much thought. Now their notes are a gift that helps me pull the story together and see my place in it.

A ragged manila folder holds my mother’s longhand on several yellow legal pads with her many attempts to put the story down on paper. On paper, she had relived it again and again,
using different verbs and adjectives, but always ending up with one daughter gone, one daughter brought back from the dead.

In the same folder is an envelope with yellowed newspaper clippings that chronicle the event and offer journalistic snapshots: the day of the accident; hospital treatment; the funeral; the investigation.

Reading the news stories, I recognize the familiar feeling of being separate from my family, like I have always been pressing my nose up against the glass trying to get inside.

The clippings only graze the surface of the story I want to know. Even the notes left by my family tell me only snippets. How did my parents survive losing their firstborn child and watching their other baby go through the agony of being burned over 80 percent of her body and the resulting medical care? How were they able to maintain their marriage through it all? And what was my part? How did they have the courage to even have me?

Whenever I have a new project, whether it’s writing a marketing piece, a news article, or a feature story, I first immerse myself in the facts surrounding the topic. It’s a technique I’ve used since my early days as a reporter, in hopes that the story will bubble up from the minutest detail.

This trail is old, fifty years plus, but Elizabeth fireman Gary Haszko remembers it when I call the fire department. He wasn’t there, but he digs in the archives and sends me news clippings and an eight-by-ten-inch photo of the apartment building just after the crash.

I have never seen this photo before. It didn’t show up in any of the newspapers so far. The detail in it mesmerizes me. It shows
smoke still spewing from the building, firemen standing in the front door pointing a hose up the splintered stairwell. It looks like the picture was taken just after they quelled the flames, and I imagine what was going on inside at this moment. I conjure an image of Donna in the scene, lying in a pile of smoldering ash, trapped under a blackened beam, fighting for her life. I try to see her face, but my mind’s eye only registers a small lifeless body, nearly indistinguishable from the black ash surrounding her.