Replacement Child (23 page)

We get around to talking about my writing, and I tell her what I’ve been doing, how I’ve been collecting articles, going through our parents’ letters and hers to me. I take out a folder I brought with me, and we uncover some of the details together. In various news articles, we find that the plane hit 306 and 310 Williamson nearly simultaneously. Number 306 exploded and collapsed, the sides of the house falling outward, the people inside buried.

As the flames roared through my parents building, they also spread through the duplex frame house next door and the concrete house behind them. A car exploded inside a garage.

Rosa Caruso was the lone survivor of 306—pulled out of her flaming kitchen by patrolmen John Mannion and John Long. Her husband was still inside.

The third floor of my parent’s building was completely destroyed. Neither Michael nor Christina Pagoulatos got out. Their boarder, Karl Reuling Jr., missed the crash by those ten minutes he kept his class after school.

All the children got out of the candy store, on the ground floor of my parents’ building, unharmed. The owners of the store, Alfred and Margaret Collins, had a near-tragic confusion. Margaret was behind the soda fountain and thought Alfred was in the back. Their niece, who was waitressing, dragged Margaret
out as she screamed, “He’s in there! Alfred is in there!” But he wasn’t. He was standing outside the building waiting for her.

L
INDA AND
I ruminate about the what-ifs.

“If that day hadn’t been foggy and rainy, Donna wouldn’t have been home. She would have stayed at school to do her project,” Linda says.

“Well, there may never have been the crash in the first place then,” I add.

“You know, Dad always thought it would have come out different if he had been home when it happened,” she says.

“I can’t see how.”

I leave Linda’s house and get back into my rental car and head for my hotel. I’m feeling so close to the accident, looking at it with Linda and still seeing the ramifications of the crash in her life. Thinking about the place she lives in now, I have to pull my car over to just let the tears have their way. Still, I have trouble accepting the unfairness and the contrast in our lives. As I think about how grateful I am to be going home tomorrow to my raised ranch, my husband, and my son, I’m hit with a familiar wave of guilt.

JANUARY 22, 1952
(DAY OF THE CRASH)

3:40
PM

C
APTAIN
R
EID
’
S PLANE
was cleared to 2,500 feet, then 1,500 feet. He was told to start his approach and was cleared for landing at 3:45
PM
on Newark Runway 6.

M
Y MOTHER CHECKED
the kitchen clock to time her baking, watched the second hand bounce and tick the minutes away. Her bright yellow curtains let in as much light as the gray day offered. The black-and-white tiled floor caught a glint by her feet. Her shoes clicked on the tile as she moved from sink to stove to refrigerator.

Donna and Sheila had spread poster boards for their science project on jet propulsion on the floor and were outlining letters in marker. They were quietly engrossed in their work, their markers squeaking across the shiny surface.

Linda was supposed to be napping on the couch, but instead was playing with measuring cups in the living room, contentedly fitting them together and taking them apart to hear the clang of metal on metal.

“What smells so good, Mrs. M?” Sheila asked.

“Come on girls, come sit and have some chocolate-chip cookies. They’re still warm. Tell me how your day was.”

Donna and Sheila took seats at the kitchen table. My mother poured two glasses of milk.

“T
HAT FINGER WON
’
T
be worth a damn. It won’t ever bend. And it may cause infection. She would do just fine without it. It will just be a pest for her,” the doctor said.

Amputation was his recommendation for three-year-old Linda’s left index finger. The joint of the finger was fused, contracted by a patchwork of thick, discolored scar tissue. A stick of a finger with a tiny rock of nail tipping the edge.

“With everything she is going through, I don’t want to take anything more away from her,” was my mother’s reasoning when she told the doctor no.

And so “Pesty” was named and adopted as a favored digit. A pet that was babied and cared for. The small nail chip polished in bright red with each manicure. Pesty was a symbol of defiance and gut decisions that my mother believed were often necessary.

“Sometimes, we just know best,” my mother would say.

2006

I
’
M AT
L
INDA
’
S
new apartment in Florida, a vast improvement over the last one. This one is small but cozy, in a two-family house with a small yard for her little toy poodle to run outside. It’s clean, and everything in it works. It has a real roof and real windows that let light inside, though I worry about the ventilation and how much Linda smokes. She is limping badly now. Although she tries to hide it, I see her wince when she stands from her chair.

It’s no mystery now that her knee replacement a few years ago was too big for her leg. By the time it was discovered to be the problem, no surgeon wanted to do the re-replacement because of complications with her scar tissue. I don’t want her to give up on finding a solution to her pain, and I have urged her to see another doctor. I asked my doctor in Connecticut to recommend a surgeon down here, and she has just seen him. This new doctor has told Linda that he will do it, but that there is a 50 percent chance he will have to amputate her leg if he encounters problems with the surgery. And he anticipates problems.

We’re sitting on her couch talking it over, her dog running between us for attention. I am a poor substitute for my mother. She would have known the right thing to say, how to advise her. I flounder with the words.

“They’re doing wonderful things with prostheses these days,” I tell her. The words escape before I catch their meaning. They fall with a thud between us.

“Let’s do some online research,” I offer. “See what some of the support groups say.” About amputees, I don’t say.

The knee doesn’t bend anymore. A stick of a leg. A painful pest of a leg. But she decides it’s better to have it than to risk losing it.

I look down and see that the nails on the foot of the offending leg are painted with bright-red polish.

JANUARY 22, 1952
(DAY OF THE CRASH)

3:41
PM

F
LIGHT
6780
WAS
over Linden, below 1,500 feet, and was again advised to listen to Newark Radar. Captain Reid seemed to be drifting on and off his flight plan course.

This was the recorded interchange at 3:41
PM
:

“American 6780, this is Newark Radar. How do you hear? Over.”

“Roger, Radar, I’ve been listening to you monitor 6720, and I hear you loud and clear.” Flight 6720 was another American Airlines Convair immediately ahead of 6780. It landed safely on Runway 6 at Newark at 3:39
PM
.

“6780, this is Newark Radar, I have you five and a half miles out, coming up on the glide path, and you’re nine hundred feet to the left of course.”

“American 6780, five miles out, on the glide path, still nine hundred feet to the left of course.”

“Coming back to course now, you’re now four hundred feet left, glide path is good, four and a half miles out.”

At four miles out, Radar Control sent this message: “Three hundred feet to the left and coming back to course.”

Then, “Right on course, and one hundred feet high on the glide path with the courthouse one mile ahead.”

The Elizabeth courthouse was three quarters of a mile from my parents’ home on Williamson Street.

Then, from Radar Control:

“You’re drifting to the right, you’re nine hundred feet to the right of course and one half mile from the courthouse.”

Four or five seconds later, the aircraft vanished from radar screens.

Several requests were sent to Flight 6780 for its position. None were answered.

1954

L
INDA STARTED KINDERGARTEN
at the same school that Donna had attended, Woodrow Wilson School 19. My mother walked her there, along the same streets, but from a different direction now. I was just four months old.