Replacement Child (25 page)

In October, we camped out with some friends in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Walking through the cathedral-like ceiling of golden leaves in the lavish woods was spiritual, a new religion of fresh green calm in the ethereal light of sunrise. The natural beauty seemed to frame the whole weekend in a transcendent glow.

Late that Saturday afternoon, I stumbled headlong into the lake. When Steven caught me in his arms and gently carried me
up the embankment, I truly fell. We didn’t have sex that night, but sleeping warmly cuddled together in his sleeping bag was almost more intimate for me.

After that we talked about taking our relationship to the next level, the physical one, and the next weekend, I cajoled a friend into lending us her apartment. The bed, with a thick quilt of reds, blues, and greens, took up the entire bedroom. We had to crawl over it to get into or out of the room.

Cat Stevens played on the small stereo. “Oooh baby, baby, it’s a wild world . . . ”

We sipped wine and breathed each other’s essence, his the scent of vanilla, as I rested my head on his chest. We reveled in each other, finding new ways our bodies fit together under the multicolored quilt. Experimenting to the point of exhaustion. Sleeping, waking, and making love again and again. I don’t recall taking any other nourishment that weekend.

The next July, Steven got a summer job that promised to provide the journey across America that he had always wanted. He would be traveling the country buying scrap metal from dentists, who saved all the gold and silver dug from their patients’ teeth. I couldn’t imagine being away from him all summer, and so I hopped a bus to Philadelphia one night to meet him, leaving my poor parents a note. When I called them from Philadelphia, my mother sounded resigned, and my father recited his usual “be careful” and asked me to call every few days.

On that trip, I saw parts of the country I may never have seen otherwise. It felt at times like we were transported back a hundred years when we stopped in one-horse towns in the midwest
that had only a diner, a gas station, and a general store. I found it hard to believe these places still existed in 1973. We navigated miles and miles of corn, every road flat and endless.

We crossed each state border like Marco Polo—looking for the intrigue, noting the characters at the diner counter, the texture of life there. Steven somehow knew the right roads and the right stops to make, and I began to think of him as my life guide. I attributed his cool reserve to his being English, a cultural trait, and figured that I could change that tendency in time. Again, I found myself defining myself from his vision of me. I was an explorer. I was courageous. I was Steven’s girl.

When our red Chevy was laden with gold and silver, the car tilted at a forty-five-degree angle and shocks threatening to break, we headed back east. I ditched my plans to return to West Virginia and attended a local college instead so that I could live at home while Steven finished up his degree in Connecticut. My parents seemed oddly quiet and accepting about my decision.

2006

I
’
M STARING OUT
at the maple tree over the top of my computer screen in my home office. It snowed this morning, and the branches are dipped in white. There’s a huge black crow sitting alone on a branch at eye level, staring me down. He’s probably cawing, but I can’t hear him through my closed, frosted window. My cat has just spotted the bird too and is stalking him on the windowsill.

I’m scanning through the pile of books I ordered online about grief and recovery from the loss of a child. And about replacement children.

I first turn to Freud to try to get a sense of how my parents may have dealt with the grief of losing Donna. In
Mourning and Melancholia,
he said that grieving “involves grave departures from the normal attitude to life, and yet it never occurs to us to regard it as a pathological condition and to refer it to medical treatment. Instead, we look to its being overcome after a certain lapse of time.”

I read further that it’s probable that Donna’s sudden and traumatic death and the destruction of all her possessions and
of her very bedroom were all factors that robbed my parents of some of the usual forms of grieving.

For my mother, the ache of losing Donna never went away. In a way, I don’t think she wanted it to. Her grief was her secret child. She nurtured it, fed it with melancholy, clothed it in her depression.

I could not adequately understand my mother’s grief until I had my own child and felt firsthand how the child that was once part of your body remains an essential part of your being.

I know she tried over the years to rise above the hurt of losing Donna. In the mornings she would say to us, “I can’t go out yet, I have to put on my face.”

Her “face” consisted of delicately applying highlights under her eyes, a demure line of brown outlining them, the pale cream foundation for an even palette. But, for her, it was more than a figure of speech or her makeup—it was her mask. Often, it worked, and she believed what she saw in the mirror. Other times, the happy mask stood out grotesquely against her inner reality. A sad clown with a painted smile.

My father, I believe, did his grieving in private. He also medicated himself with comic relief, which ultimately gave some balance to my parents’ relationship. Victor Borges said, “Laughter is the shortest distance between two people.” And so it was for my mother and father. With an innate understanding of this truth, my father kept my mother from disappearing into the kind of tragedy that could have swallowed any joy.

The research book I ordered about replacement child syndrome just came in the mail, and I rip open the padded envelope.
I read that replacement children often feel they can never live up to the memory of the dead child.

I recognize myself in some of the descriptions of those with this affliction: guilt, a wavering sense of identity, the feeling of responsibility to measure up. In my case, it was guilt at being spared from the crash—from death, but also from Linda’s injury. There was a feeling of responsibility throughout my childhood that I needed to be the one who was easy to care for, that no one had to worry about. I felt this, even as I may have resented the extra attention Linda needed.

After reading about how complicated the syndrome can be for children, I think my parents did well at letting me be an individual in my own right. Some parents never fully separate the replacement from the replaced in their own minds and even continue to dress the child in the dead child’s clothes, name them with the same name, and fully expect them to become that lost child. After some ill-fated hairstyles early on, my mother let go of that expectation for me. My father, too, did the best he could at letting me be me, though I feel he wanted Donna to be here in my place. In any case, I never felt, as some replacements do, that I needed to become Donna.

JANUARY 22, 1952
(THE CRASH)

3:45
PM

A
LOW ROAR
. S
PUTTERING
cracks of backfire. Explosion. Screams.

Witnesses all remembered the sounds. My mother didn’t.

She saw the flash of fire, her children in flames.

My mother’s world came crashing down, literally through her roof. The fire burst from nothing. In an instant, the kitchen was a collage of white-red, blue-yellow against black smoke. Her canary yellow walls faded into gray, crumbled to black. A metallic fume filled her nostrils, her eyes stung and teared. The blast had thrown my mother flat on the linoleum, the floor rumbling beneath her. She felt the heat on top of her, insistently pressing her to stay down. She glanced up to see one clear passageway to safety—down the front stairs to the street.

Fleetingly, she thought, “The oil burner has exploded!” But that was located at the front of the building. It made no sense. She heard screams and realized that some were her own. Her
mind ceased making rational meaning of the scene, and her instinct took over. Her own mother was sprawled just feet in front of her.

“Run!” my mother screamed at her. “Run, Mom, don’t ask questions!“ She grabbed her mother’s arm and hurried her down the front stairs. Hermina, my grandmother, bewildered, stumbled out the door to safety.

Turning back, my mother saw that her daughter’s visiting friend, Sheila, was on fire, and she threw a rug around her to smother the flames and pushed her toward the door. Sheila ran outside to safety, though badly burned.

The fire rushed through the apartment, rolling in on a carpet of thick, white smoke toward the stairway. The screams and cries of her children rose above the crackling roar of the fast-moving flames.

1974

I
T WAS
V
ALENTINE
’
S
Day when Steven asked me to marry him. I was twenty and still living at home, going to school nearby, and he came down from Connecticut for the weekend. When he brought me home from dinner that evening, we sat my parents down in the kitchen and told them the news. Steven had brought a bottle of wine for the occasion. He popped the cork, and I fetched some wine glasses from my mother’s dining room hutch. After our toast, I sensed something was amiss in our happy announcement and glanced over at my father studying his wine glass. My mother was looking his way as well. He looked upset about something, although I was oblivious to what it was. My mother motioned for me to come into the hallway with her.

“Your father expected Steven to ask him first,” she explained. “Before he proposed, he should’ve asked for your hand.”

I was a little annoyed. This was 1974 after all. It was
my
hand.

But after seeing the disappointment in my father’s eyes, I went to Steven.

“You need to ask him,” I said. “It’s ridiculous, but he’s hurt. You have to do it.”

In the interest of equality and feminism, I went with him. The three of us settled downstairs in the family room. The room had a theatre theme. Gold masks of comedy and tragedy hung over the couch on either side of a print of a grand costume ball, with a jester at its center. The lamp on the side table looked just like the jester in the picture.

Steven was positioned on the brown tweed couch against the long wall with my father and me on the matching love seat perpendicular to him. My father took a sip of his coffee and put his cup on the round mica table in front of him. He sat back with his arms folded.

The jester lamp was poking up behind Steven’s head as he spoke in quiet tones that underscored his English accent. I wrestled a nervous giggle to the pit of my stomach.