Soul Survivor (11 page)

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?”

“Me.”

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?”

“
Natoma.
”

“That sounds pretty Japanese.”

James got annoyed. “No, it’s American.” He gave his father another of those prickly, torn-patience looks.

Andrea tried to soften the mood. “Tell me again what the little man’s name was.”

“James.”

Now James seemed restless, bored, tired of the whole interrogation. But more than that, he seemed angry—angry at Bruce for
doubting his word!

This two-year-old was standing up to his father over the name
Natoma
! Andrea was a little shocked. So she ended the questioning and put James to bed. She read him his three books and gave him
his hundred kisses and sang him his song and gave him her blessings for a peaceful night’s sleep.

Bruce was not in the family room. He was in his office, Googling on his computer. He had keyed in
Natoma
and found something.

“You’re not going to believe this,” he said quietly.

Andrea looked over his shoulder at the screen. There was an old black-and-white picture of a small escort carrier.

Bruce stood up. In a voice filled with surprise, he said, “
Natoma Bay
was actually a United States aircraft carrier that fought in the Pacific in World War Two.”

They both stood there, stiff, and so did the hair on the back of their necks.

I
N A FUNNY WAY, when James gave us the name
Natoma,
it made me mad. Not at anyone, just at the situation. He wasn’t even potty trained and he was telling me something that shook
my world. I needed to be right about this. You see, I like to be able to solve things. Put the sink back together. Assemble
the bike. Get management to see the advantages of improving worker benefits. I like to wrap things up, find logical solutions
to difficult problems, and move on to the next challenge.

The thing to understand about Bruce Leininger was that when he ventured into truly unknown territory, when he was faced with
something not written down in any textbook or programmed into a hard drive, he began to panic. You would never see the panic—just
the grim tower of suffering silence that he presented to the world.

It was the same coping mechanism of a lot of modern men. His background was conventionally schooled and systematically oriented.
His spiritual side was covered by his Christian faith; and that was the end of that story. But when it came to the secular
world, the pegs always had to fit into the right slots. Tell him that a rigger got knocked off an oil platform by a high-pressure
hose, and he could cope with it. It had a rational cause and a rational effect. Tell him that a two-year-old child—his own
two-year-old child—was dreaming about a World War II battle, and his brain seized up.