Replacement Child (32 page)

2006

I
AM SHOCKED TO
notice that it’s dark outside and I’ve been working into the night. David is working late, and I’m alone in the house. I feel that I’m coming to the end of this project, and I have a better understanding of my role in my family and how the accident affected my life.

The realization that I was a replacement for Donna has given my life a new dimension, and I finally feel grateful that I could help my family heal from that devastating tragedy. Working through the layers of my childhood, I have some long-sought answers about how my father’s attitude toward me shaped my choices and relationships with men. And I know that my father loved me the best he could.

Coming to an end is a bittersweet feeling. When I’m really done, I will finally be leaving my family’s tragedy behind me. I’ve turned over each stone, looked into every closet, and shined a flashlight under all the beds.

I won’t leave my parents behind, though. They still live in my head. Their voices, their faces are still clear to me. Even more so now that I understand them as the complex people they were.
My walls are still covered with their pictures. I’ve decided to keep them up in my office. But I’ll take down the crash scenes, the headlines, the photos in the hospital.

The ones I’ll keep on the bulletin board are the happier times: at our home in Cranford when my mother would serve the biggest turkey we’d ever seen, or at the beach together, or my parents dancing—always the cha-cha.

1981

I
LINGERED AT HOME
in the morning, nearly missing my flight to Florida. When my alarm went off, John pulled me back to the warm bed, not wanting me to leave him. His need for me left me weak and trapped me.

“Don’t go. You don’t have to. I mean, you aren’t doing the surgery yourself, are you?”

“It’s my father, of course I have to go.”

My father was having heart bypass surgery, and I was flying to Florida to be with him and my mother and Linda. John seemed to have no understanding of my need to be there. I knew then that this second try at marriage was failing—I was failing, again. I was free-falling in this belly flop of a marriage that was wearing me out.

We met when I had just gone back to college to get my degree. I was singing and playing guitar on nights and weekends to pay for tuition. Steven and I were still married, but our sexual hiatus was taking a toll, and our relationship was wearing as thin as the knees in my old jeans. He had completely stopped coming to my singing jobs.

So it had begun with John’s eyes—bottomless brown—finding mine from a table in the back of the bar where I played guitar. Like pulling a loose thread on a sweater.

He was the opposite of Steven in so many ways. Dark, warm with a hearty laugh, and always surrounded by a gang of friends. His longish near-black hair hung into his eyes. His drooping mustache collected a wisp of white foam from his beer.

He followed me from happy hour to a later club gig and brought his entourage to fill the place. He silently unraveled cords, set up my amp, plugged in my guitar, and sent up drinks while I played. He even lugged all my equipment out to my car at 2:00
AM
. In the dark, deserted parking lot, he took me by the shoulders and leaned into me.

“I’m married,” I pulled away.

“But are you happy?”

It was a trapdoor question that I couldn’t answer.

“Your eyes look very sad,” he said. “At least meet me for lunch tomorrow. Just to talk.”

Our trysts started innocently enough. He told me about his advertising firm and showed me some of his newest work—an ad for sealant, a brochure for a tool company. We talked about my writing class, and I brought him some of my work to discuss. We were just friends, I told myself for a while. But soon I didn’t pull away when he reached for me, and our lunches ended in his bed.

I found I couldn’t lie to my husband, who had first been my best friend. I was no good at sneaking around, taking secret phone calls, making excuses. So pretty quickly, I left the husband for the lover, thinking,
Isn’t this the right thing?
John helped me
find a part of myself that, at twenty-seven, I thought was lost. And he was so unlike my father—so affectionate, so attentive, so demonstrative—that I was sure I would not repeat my fatal error of being attracted to the familiar chill. I was convinced that this new passion was my remedy, unaware that I was just playing the same song backward. I would discover John had familiar insecurities, but that they manifested in his being overly controlling and jealous.

“Be careful what you wish for,” my mother used to say.

In a matter of months after we were together, I realized I had merely exchanged the texture of my loneliness. This man could be my lover, but never my friend. He truly cared about my well-being only if it affected him. He didn’t support anything that could potentially take me away from him, for even a few hours. His jealousy infiltrated every part of our relationship.

He didn’t show up for my graduation from college, something I had worked long and hard to achieve. When I got my first real job as a reporter, John called the bureau office every night I had a story deadline.

“Are you really working? Who’s there with you? When will you be home?”

He complained about the hours. He wanted me home. He wanted me to have dinner ready for him. He wanted sex every night. He ripped the phone from the wall when he thought I was getting calls from my ex and threw raw potatoes at me to get me off the phone. Friends were afraid for me. Then, I became afraid for myself. The stress finally manifested as actual illness with a
flare-up of Crohn’s disease, and I finally couldn’t ignore that I was emotionally, spiritually, and physically miserable.

When I left him, John kept the expensive silk negligee he bought me, with the soft intricate black lace trim. He swore later that he burned it.

T
HEY WAITED FOR
me, the expert on bypassing my father’s heart. They wouldn’t let them open him up until I arrived to wish him luck and maybe say good-bye. I didn’t think they would do that for me.

“See, Flurry, she made it!”

They wheeled my father down the hall, and I walked in step with the
squeak-squeak
of the gurney wheels, holding his hand.

“I love you, Dad.”

He looked straight up at the dimpled ceiling tiles that folded quickly behind him and squeezed my hand.

“You too.”

His words, his wet cheek, were a gift.

APRIL 8, 1988

J
USTIN
’
S BIRTH GROUNDED
me. Changed my chemical composition. A catalyst in the creation of new matter.

“You are perfect,” I whispered to him, only hours old. “You will have what you need to grow strong, the life you deserve. You can count on me.”

His face lit up when I sang to him. “Hush little baby, don’t say a word, Momma’s gonna buy you a mockingbird.”

His eyes followed me; his smile collapsed when I left his room. But, even in the midst of mother-euphoria, I was aware of the precipitous cliff, the seeds of my parents’ warnings fully blossoming.

Anything can happen.

Planes fall from the sky.

Returning from shopping, I imagined Justin’s skull cracked like a watermelon on the pavement. I hallucinated fire engines and ambulances, incinerated baby on the perfect lawn.

My mother’s voice was often in my head:
“Only you will protect your own child. No one else will watch out for him like you.”

But I also felt a swelling calm. Molecules of my mother’s courage, her fortitude, crystallizing into a solid force. I was ready to run into a blazing building, ready to fight to save even one finger.

A
YEAR LATER
, my baby son was pressing his face into my neck, holding his ears. His body shook each time the planes roared overhead. We were watching an air show of jets, entranced by the swoops and dives.

The planes were sleek blue and yellow machines. Each Boeing F/A-18 Hornet was numbered brightly on the tail. We could see U.S. N
AVY
emblazoned across the top of the wings when they turned topsy-turvy. The pilots’ silhouettes could be seen inside the glass cockpits. They first flew in formation, the tips of their wings nearly touching. Dipping in fluid unison, the planes formed stark geometric patterns framed in blue. They trailed white smoke as they soared and looped.

It was a painting of flight until one and then another broke away from the rest. Upside down, sideways, noses down, losing altitude. Each aimed at ground zero.

“They never crash,” I was assured.

I could barely keep still when the planes careered downward, then pulled up at the very last moment. I fought my instinct to turn and run, far and fast, my child fastened to my chest.

Finally, though, the tempting of fate proved to be too much. I tugged at my husband’s arm, pointed to our son, shook my head, headed for the exit. His eyes were a question, “What the . . . ” but I was already gone. Clutching, running, panting. Breaking
through the hot dog–eating, beer-drinking crowd. Ignoring the
ooh
s and
ahh
s elicited by the pilots’ feats. Elbowing and pushing my way out to the clearing. Away from the impending wreckage.

I
’
M SITTING IN
my office looking out at the big maple tree in my front yard. The leaves have just changed to the bright yellow I wait for each year. Some are lying on the front lawn like decorations. It’s a time of year I love here in Connecticut.

As I revisit some of the toughest times of my life, it is from the distance and quiet of a place far removed from the turmoil. That tornado of marriage and divorce is finally over for me. I remember my younger self almost as an old friend, who gratefully has grown up and found her way. Who has somehow left behind the anger at a father who only did the best he could.

Understanding and forgiveness bring healing. This journey into the past has yielded greater understanding of my parents and what they went through from the time of the crash until their deaths. I can’t help but forgive them for anything either of them may have inadvertently done that hurt me. And, maybe most important for me, the project has illuminated my own story for myself, helping me to understand the origins of many of my own issues that got in the way of my choosing the right partner and making a relationship work. I’m able now to forgive myself for my own mistakes, and I am able to love more fully.