Soul Survivor (9 page)

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.

T
HERE 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.”

J
AMES 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.”