Replacement Child (5 page)

I picture firefighters sifting through the rubble, spotting her remains camouflaged in the scorched splinters, and I no longer wonder why it took nearly twelve hours to find her.

I get out a magnifying glass to search the faces, to stare at the second-story window and look for my sister.

JANUARY 22, 1952
(DAY OF THE CRASH)

7:30
AM

“O
KAY
,
GIRLS
,
LET
’
S
get going,” my mother announced and clapped her hands for attention.

“Donna, are you getting dressed? Linda, come on over here, honey, and let’s finish our breakfast. You can see Donna later when she gets home. Mom! We’re going out soon. Your breakfast is on the table. We’ll be back a little after noon.”

Finished with breakfast, the three readied to head out to walk Donna to school. Donna was pretty and petite with clear green eyes. She had on her black jumper with a white blouse underneath, the lace of the collar tickling the edge of her cheek. The night before, my mother curled her chestnut brown hair into a pageboy. Now, she furrowed her brow.

“I don’t need those leggings, Mom; I’m too old for them!”

My little girl is growing up so fast,
my mother thought. “At least put your gloves on!”

Linda was content to be snuggled up warmly in full winter garb, protected from head to toe with wool leggings, sweater, coat, hat, and mittens. My mother threw her coat over herself
and buttoned it on the way out the door, grabbing both girls’ hands for the short walk to Woodrow Wilson School 19.

There was a light mist falling, and in the dense fog my mother could not see around the next corner.

1952—1957

F
OR MOST OF
1952, my parents lived in a hotel while Linda stayed in the hospital. Late in the year, they were able to move to the Warinanco Village Apartments in Elizabeth that we called “The Village.” When she was well enough, Linda came home to the new apartment, and my mother got busy lining up friends for her among her new neighbors. She managed to find all the mothers with girls around Linda’s age and recruited them to her cause. As a result, Linda had a group of loyal friends she felt safe with and camaraderie she cherished for a very long time.

One day, the boys included the girls in their after-school baseball game—mainly because they didn’t have enough players—in the courtyard behind the apartment complex.

The captains took turns picking girls for their teams, and Linda was left standing alone. At the time, Linda wore a brace on her left leg up to her knee that included a shoe like a man’s work boot.

Linda ran home, as best she could, crying.

“They don’t want to play with me.”

My mother was hesitant to intervene with explanations and her usual plea for understanding. She knew Linda should start taking over this role for herself.

Just as she considered what to do, she heard a commotion outside. Out the window, she and Linda saw an animated argument between the boys and girls. Hands on hips, fingers pointing, girls shouting, boys cowering. Within minutes, her friend Nancy Boroff knocked on the door, marched in, and pulled Linda’s arm to go back outside.

“We told those boys we aren’t playing unless you play. JoAnn, Janie, Sue, and me, we all told ’em,” Nancy told Linda proudly. With a grateful lump in her throat, Linda joined the game.

Nancy was a skinny, high-energy little girl with wide eyes and ash blonde curls. Later on, I loved her because she always brought me a present when she visited. But her best gift was the friendship she lavished on my big sister.

Together, they had contests to see who could jump over the hedges from a moving swing. They would roller-skate through clotheslines of clean clothes, chased by the women who had just hung them out. They had wars with wagons full of berries they picked from the bushes behind the apartments. They made costumes and put on talent shows for their parents.

Linda felt so normal with her friends that she sometimes forgot her limitations.

“Let’s go play by the brook in the woods,” Nancy suggested one day after school. A small gathering of trees behind the apartments passed for woods. The shallow brook could be
crossed by hopping from rock to rock as stepping-stones, requiring a full leap between them.

Linda had been warned that she shouldn’t go near water, that it would ruin her brace and shoe. But when Nancy hopped from one rock to the next, she followed despite her heavy metal brace.

Pretty soon, she lost her footing and fell in. The brace and orthopedic shoe were soaked, ruined.

Linda panicked, “My mother is going to kill me! I can’t get this wet. She’s warned me a zillion times!”

“Don’t worry, I’ll tell her. I’ll take the blame,” Nancy said. “It’s my fault anyways, I shouldn’t have brought you here.”

They slogged back to the apartment, the waterlogged shoe and brace weighing Linda down. They stood on the front stoop for several long minutes, and just as Nancy got the courage to knock on the door, it opened.

My mother saw Linda dripping wet and ushered them both inside.

She yelled, “Oh, my God, how could you?” Her Hungarian temper flaring, knowing how upset my father would be about the expensive shoe and brace. But she couldn’t bring herself to really be mad.

Secretly, she thought,
This is what normal kids do.

I
WAS FIVE
. I was six. I was seven. I was eight.

I sat on the edge of Linda’s bed with her little brown and tan plaid suitcase open next to me, watching her pack slippers, underwear, and nightgowns.

“Don’t worry, Jude,” Linda said. “I’ll be back before you know it. And stay away from my stuff, will ya?”

Instead of an answer, I started picking apart one of the raised balls of fabric on her white chenille bedspread.

“Hey, cut that out—you’ll ruin it!”

I wanted her to yell at me. That just felt more normal. Better than thinking about her going into the hospital again, and about what they would do to her there. There was never much explanation to me about what would happen to her, and so my mind was left to wander about the cutting, the moving of bones and skin, and the reattaching pieces of her like some giant jigsaw puzzle. I tried to imagine it all without any blood, like in the movies when they cut away from the surgery scene and you only see the patient later recovering in bed. All pristine and clean and neat without a drop of blood even at the site of the intravenous needle. But when I closed my eyes, I saw the blood, remembered the raw skin graft
sites I had seen when her bandages were changed, the reddened stitches and bloody gauze pads. I felt lucky and guilty about it at the same time, that I didn’t have to be cut with scalpels and prodded with needles. That I could stay safely behind.

Some of the surgeries were to replace scarred skin with better skin from another part of Linda’s body, so she would have two places she would be healing. One where scar tissue was removed and replaced, and the other at the donor site where healthy tissue was taken from. She had one surgery to try to reconstruct her burned ears, but the donor ears were rejected and had to be taken off.

When Linda went in for surgery, my mother always went away, too. She’d be in the hospital in New York with Linda when she had the operation, and then she’d stay in her room for the first few nights. After that, she might come back at night, and then go right back in the morning until Linda came home. Every year it was a couple of months before it was over.

It was very lonely at home without them. Very quiet. My father read the paper when he got home from work, and we would heat up a dinner that my mother left for us. I’d watch the news with him; he’d ask how school was and if I did my homework.

I was happy to have my father all to myself then, but not without a stab of guilt, feeling that my happiness must mean that I was glad Linda was in the hospital.

On Saturdays, my father brought me to his jewelry store to help out. When I was too little to wait on customers, I helped wrap gifts and polish rings in the back. When gift wrapping was needed, he’d call me out to the front counter and introduce me
to the customer with his arm around me. He’d give me instructions about what kind of gift it was and which paper to use. It felt like we were a team. My pay was sometimes a piece of jewelry: a ruby ring or a new charm for my bracelet.

At night, when my mother would call from the hospital, I would stand next to my father to hear her. Snippets would filter through to me from their conversation:

“Why did Linda have a bad reaction to the anesthesia? Was it different medicine?”

“Well, how long did they say it would be to heal from this?”

“What do you mean they don’t know if it’s going to take?”

Mostly, I didn’t know what any of it meant. But I could tell from my father’s voice, the crease in his forehead, or whether or not he sat down heavily on the kitchen chair next to the phone as he listened to the report from my mother.

After about a week, I could usually go up to see Linda. I liked to bring her candy or a magazine. Even when she was all bandaged up, with tubes coming out of her, or casts on her legs, she always greeted me with “Hey, Jude!” when I came in.

Visiting Linda with both of my parents felt like the whole family was together again. We would hang around all day, even after visiting hours were over. My father always told some joke that got her laughing. Sometimes she’d even have to tell him to stop. My mother would give him “the look,” and he’d settle down. Most often, though, he’d make her laugh again at least once before we left. He always left her with a laugh, but when we left, he was like a deflated balloon. When my mother stayed behind in New York and he and I would go home alone, it was always a silent ride.

When I was in second grade, I had eye surgery to correct my crossed eyes. I remember expecting the same level of drama that surrounded Linda whenever she went to the hospital.

But when I packed my pajamas, slippers, and Tiny Tears doll in Linda’s usual hospital suitcase, no one acted like it was much of a big deal. It was as if I were going to a sleepover party.

Linda looked a little worried when I left with my parents. She hugged me and said, “Don’t worry, Jude, you’ll be home before you know it!” That made me feel better, and I tried to make myself remember to say that to her the next time she left.