Replacement Child (26 page)

“Mr. Mandel, I’m so sorry we didn’t come to you first . . . ”

The jester grinned, his eyes masked in black, his toreador hat perched at an angle.

Then my father and my fiancé stood facing each other, shaking hands.

“Take good care of my little girl,” my father said as he looked him in the eye, a steady laser gaze.

“Of course I will, Mr. Mandel. You can count on that.”

The deal made, my father put his arm around Steven’s shoulder in conspiracy, turned him away from me.

“And, don’t worry, son, she’ll fill out in a few years, you’ll see. Her mother was as skinny as a rail when I married her. Now look at her,” he said, cupping his hands in front of his chest in the universal sign for large breasts.

W
E WERE A
very idealistic young married couple. After the wedding and a short road trip of a honeymoon, we went back to Connecticut to find jobs and an apartment. I had quit college to get married, so job opportunities were not plentiful for me. I got a clerical job in Hartford at a brokerage firm, and Steven started working for an ad agency that sold space on the side of VW Bugs. Neither of us was living out our dreams. Steven had set his sights on broadcasting, and I wanted to break into music to sing.

One day, we both came home from work and sat silently at our tiny kitchen table, unable to find a way to explain our day to each other, when I blurted out, “I got fired.” Steven one-upped me: “I punched my boss in the face.” He had a better excuse than I did. I was just a lousy clerical worker. Steven had hit his boss when he said he had married me just to get a green card to stay in the States. We agreed then that we would support each other if either of us found a way to go after what we wanted.

After that, I found work in a music store and met some musicians who encouraged me to start singing and playing guitar at coffee shops and clubs in the area. Steven would come with me, setting up my equipment and watching out for me. He was very supportive at the start, but it got difficult for him when he got a day job in a department store. Eventually, there were nights he couldn’t make it or would leave early to get some sleep.

In a year or so, I quit the music store job and joined a full-time band. Again, Steven was behind the decision. I had put down the guitar and was concentrating on being a lead singer. The first band I was in played locally, so I was home most nights. Later, though, I joined a cover band that traveled up and down the East
Coast playing the hotel circuit. I was away for weeks at a time. By then, Steven was working at an insurance company full-time. I knew he was frustrated with the job and the mundane path he seemed to be on. He began to pull away from me, both emotionally and physically, and I was starting to think that I could never make him happy. I was losing the feeling that filled the hole in my self-esteem. When my young husband pulled away, it was like my father’s indifference all over again. I think it was then that I started subconsciously looking for someone new to give me the validation I needed.

2006

I
T IS EXTREMELY
cold today in New England. The cold brings a profound quiet to the neighborhood. No children are playing basketball in the driveways or street hockey outside my window after school.

I’m reading through letters from my father. He had such beautiful handwriting, and—surprisingly—was the better of my parents at expressing his emotions on paper. Whenever I find one of his letters to me, buried in a sock drawer or folded in among my jewelry, I wind up blubbering at his words. I never heard these thoughts from his own lips, and I never knew them as a child. Almost all his letters to me were written after I was an adult, and most after he was seventy. Each of them ends with the warning to “be careful” about something I’m about to do or am involved in at the time.

As I look back now, many of his letters still defined me in terms of my sister:

Even when we felt you were being neglected you showed strength and understanding to love Linda as much as we did, and to show that love to her.

Or the letters claimed that I was their hope, their healer, who he finally learned to love:

One of the greatest gifts given to us at an essential time of our lives was when the gods delivered you into our hearts and lives. Your birth helped sustain us with some faith and hope. It’s taken me a lifetime—but you’ve taught me to say it and feel it—I love you and it’s forever.

I was a compromise, a gamble, a winning bet:

I compromised. I told mother we’d try one time—and if it takes—okay. If not, we’ll just continue with God’s plan. So, you see, you really are one of God’s special children.

That was the dichotomy that characterized my relationship with my father. Surely he thought about the fact that I would not be here if Donna had lived. So, any love for me was a kind of betrayal. I was alternately a blessing and a painful reminder of her. Although I looked like her, I was flawed by a lazy eye. I was good, but could never be
as
good,
as
kind,
as
exceptional as Donna. How could I be?

Sometimes I fantasized that I was Donna reincarnated. The true replacement child, in disguise.

Judy in disguise—with glasses.

JANUARY 22, 1952
(THE CRASH)

3:45
PM

L
INDA HAD BEEN
playing in the living room in the back of the apartment when the plane hit, and she was instantly engulfed in flames. Donna was in the kitchen in the front of the apartment. My mother was between the rooms by the stairway after getting her mother and Sheila out the door.

“Get the baby!” Donna screamed. “The baby is on fire!”

My mother tried to see where her voice was coming from, but the smoke was so thick she couldn’t see Donna in the kitchen. She could not see her face. Later, she was grateful for this small blessing, that she would not be haunted by the image of her daughter’s last expression, the fear in her eyes, before she had to abandon her.

“Donna, run!” my mother ordered Donna as she ran to the living room. “Down to the front door, it’s the only way out!”

My mother saw no movement from Donna and was momentarily angry at her daughter’s defiance. Then she saw that Donna’s leg was wedged under a fallen beam that caught her before she could run. One of the crumbled brick walls of the
structure rested on top of the beam. She weighed some fifty-one pounds. The beam and debris trapping her was easily one hundred times her weight.

For a moment that passed like hours, my mother was frozen, torn between her two children. To run to the baby, or to help free Donna. Neither choice could be the right one. But, making none would condemn them both. She knew she had to move.

Finally, she let Donna choose and followed her older daughter’s plea to go to two-year-old Linda.

Reaching the living room, her heart seemed to stop when she saw the ball of flame that was her baby. Linda had stopped screaming. The quilt lying on the sofa was untouched, and she wrapped Linda in it and rolled her on the floor to put out the flames, ignoring the burns that now scorched her own hands. Then, she rolled the baby down the stairs that led to the outside front door. She turned back to get Donna, but before she could take a step, she heard the click of the door lock at the bottom of the stairs. With the door locked, she knew that no one would be able to open the door to retrieve Linda now lying just inside the door. She rushed down to the door—a move she questioned for the rest of her life—and released Linda into the arms of a man there. The stranger there was Henry Shubecz, who happened to be driving by when the plane crashed directly in front of him. He took Linda’s motionless body from my mother, smoke rising from inside the blanket, and saw the black charred skin and red burnt flesh peeking out. The smell slapped at him like a hand against his chest.

My mother turned to go back inside when she felt a strong arm on hers. Seeing the ferocious flames consuming the stairway,
Henry held her back, saving her life. Two passing patrolmen soon joined him to help restrain my mother just as the wooden staircase snapped, crackled like kindling, and collapsed along with the second floor. Henry handed the baby off to Reverend Schoenborn, suddenly there by his side, who carefully cradled Linda.

Donna heard my mother go to Linda and run down the stairs. She waited for her to come back to help her. She was having trouble breathing through the suffocating cover of smoke and strained to see my mother’s figure emerge from the hot clouds.

In her seven short years, Donna always relied on the steady protection of my parents. My mother was always there to curl her hair, kiss the cuts on her knees, console her disappointments. She had no reason to doubt the outcome of any dire situation, even this last one. She trusted—even as the flames closed in around her. She felt the heat on her torso and arms as she pulled at her mutinous leg, willing it to move. She heard a whoosh of fire, the crackling of burning wood, faint screams in the distance, and she smelled her own burning flesh mixed with the fumes of jet fuel. As the flames began to envelop her face and she lost consciousness in the smoke-filled apartment, Donna still believed my mother would rescue her.

Outside, my mother’s screams merged with Donna’s— “Mommy, help me, Mommy, Mommy . . . ”—until they stopped.

My mother collapsed in a heap on the hot pavement.

M
AKING HIS WAY
through the gathering crowd on Williamson Street, Reverend Schoenborn carried Linda across to the Battin High gym. At that point, it was only a holding area for the
injured, a morgue for the dead. Ambulances had not yet arrived. All the reverend could do was to hold Linda to keep her warm— and pray.

My mother, in shock, was being led from the burning building by her de facto caregivers who had no hope of controlling her screams.

Ambulances raced from four surrounding towns to rush victims to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital.

M
Y FATHER WAS
replacing a tray of watches in the front window of his store when he heard sirens and people yelling on the street.

“It’s another plane crash!”

A phone call from a neighbor confirmed his fear. “You better get home, Al!”

He forgot his car was parked across the street and ran home.

When he got to his neighborhood, it was a war zone. Ambulances were loading the injured and burned. Three fire engines lined the street as firemen fought the flames that shot out from the windows of his building and filled the air with black clouds. He couldn’t see into the opaque blocks of smoke that filled the windows.

He spotted my mother on a stretcher, being lifted into an ambulance. When he called out, she did not respond.

After he identified himself as her husband, the paramedic told him that their baby daughter had been rushed to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital. The ambulance door slammed shut, sirens screamed. My father watched it pull away without a word. Nearby, he heard a reporter say to someone, “ . . . little girl in critical condition.”

Staring up at the scorched remnants of his home, surrounded by melee, my father began to grasp the reality. And where was Donna? Was she still at school? Did she run? His mind raced.

He found a fireman and grabbed his arm.

“I have two daughters. One was taken to the hospital. I can’t find the other. She’s seven.”

“One child was trapped on the second floor, didn’t make it out. Is that your apartment?” The fireman pointed to the second floor.