Soul Survivor (10 page)

She said, “See you in the morning light.”

He said, “Dream about Blue Angels.”

Then Andrea closed his door and hurried down the hall to the den. She and Bruce had long since agreed never to discuss the
nightmares in front of James; and they both were bursting. They spoke in urgent stage whispers:

Bruce:
Did I hear what I just heard?

Andrea:
I can’t believe it.

Bruce:
Well, let’s not get too excited.

Andrea:
Are you
nuts
? I’m freaking out. Where did that stuff come from?

Bruce:
I’ll tell you this: wherever that shit came from, I’m sure it’s from your side of the family.

Andrea:
What if he’s…

Bruce:
What if he’s what?

Andrea:
How did he know about the Japanese?

Bruce:
I don’t know. How the hell did he know about a drop tank?

Andrea:
I’m scared.

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.

B
ULLSHIT!”

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 not 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.