Replacement Child

by Judy L. Mandel

  When we arrived at the hospice, I felt a calm come over me as the nurses worked to get my mother settled and were able to quiet her cries. I told the hospice nurse, “She lost a child.” That is what she survived, who she was. Somehow it was important that they knew.

  I PICK A secluded spot by the riverbank nestled in the trees where we used to feed ducks and have picnics. A small entourage of family is gathered.

  I hand my father’s urn to my cousin Joel to hold, and I keep my mother’s crooked in my arm like a newborn. We take out the prayer book with notes loosely folded in the front and recite the Kaddish.

  I look at my Aunt Sylvia and see my father’s face, his serious squint, his resolute thin-lipped pout. She is the only one left of his five sisters to say good-bye.

  When I had picked up the black box of my mother’s remains at the post office, the heavy weight of it overwhelmed me. The brown paper wrapper and postal stamp seemed ludicrous. I carried the package gingerly to my car and cried.

  Now, I open up the box to find a plastic bag of ash, closed with a green twist tie. I am a little apprehensive. Will there be chunks of bone? Teeth?

  My son, Justin, takes my father’s urn and lifts off the top, releases the plastic bag’s twist tie. We lower our packages toward the water and pour both sets of ashes together into the river.

  It takes longer than I expected.

  “More to us than you knew!” I hear my mother’s voice.

  The fine gray ash mingles with the brown river water, and we watch as the gray cloud is carried downstream.

  chapter two

  2005

  I’M SITTING ON the deck behind my house in a quiet neighborhood in Connecticut, looking out at the pool and the backyard that needs mowing. My husband, David, doesn’t want me to mow it anymore since I had trouble with my back a couple of years ago. He’ll mow it when he gets home from work. I’ll have a couple of cold beers waiting, and we can take a swim before we put some steaks on the grill for dinner.

  It’s a hot day, even in the shade. A couple of years ago there would have been troops of kids splashing and sliding down the slide. Now, though, Justin is seventeen, and his friends come in twos and threes to quietly swim. This new stage of his life has snuck up on me, and I am sometimes surprised by the way he now towers over me and speaks in a deep baritone.

  With my cell phone and laptop, I can do some of my freelance writing work outside when the weather is nice—which is what I’m doing today. My parents’ deaths had smacked me up against my own mortality and made me take a hard look at my work life. After a twenty-year career in corporate communications, I decided I didn’t want to play in their game anymore. I’m lucky that I’ve been able to develop a good freelance writing business with some of the same companies I’ve worked for over the years. So, I have the chance to structure my life differently.

  I call my sister Linda in Florida. She answers the phone on the first ring.

  We talk for a while about our kids, the weather. Then she mentions a new makeup she wants to try that is more natural looking than her last one. I think of the many different brands of makeup she’s tried over the years to cover the scars on her face. A red and brown relief map traces down her neck from just below her eyes. She wears her hair over the remnants of her ears, which she has pierced herself in defiance—no one would do it for her— so she can wear earrings. Some of the cover-up makeup she’s tried has worked well, while others have left her with a whitish mask. I tell her she should try the one she mentions, and then I tell her I want to go back and see the scene of the crime—the crash site.

  “Why would you want to do that?” she is incredulous.

  I try to explain that since our parents died I’ve had a nagging feeling that there is something left undone in my own life. It may have something to do with the accident, I say, and going there in the flesh feels suddenly important to me. There have always been missing pieces, for me, in the story. Up until now, I’ve dismissed the gaps as irrelevant to my life—but now I suspect it is those missing pieces that may hold the seeds of my own truth about my ambivalence toward my father, my troubles with men, and my schizophrenic attitude toward risk and safety. I’m hoping the trip back will help me understand more about their lives, and my own.

  I remind her that I was never brought back to the scene at Williamson Street, or taken to Donna’s grave. My parents never talked about going back to see the spot, and I have no reason to believe that they ever did. When I get finished explaining my reasons for wanting to visit the crash scene, Linda seems vaguely satisfied with my answer. Nevertheless, she is able to give me specific directions.

  “Go up Broad Street toward East Jersey and follow it until you get to South. Take a left, and Williamson is a block down, then a right into the old neighborhood.”

  On the drive, I realize we must have passed this street many times over the years. Certainly when my father had his jewelry store just up the road. But no one ever mentioned it to me.

  We pass through the lazy suburbs with manicured lawns and two-car garages to the city-like outskirts of Elizabeth. These streets get narrow and are lined with parked cars on both sides. Red brick apartment buildings sprout up between storefronts and three-family houses. Driving down Broad Street, I note that it is transformed from what I remember. It used to be a bustling thoroughfare with Buster Brown Shoes, Levy Brothers department store, specialty women’s shops, and a wide variety of restaurants. Broad Street was a destination in those days, when my father’s shop was right in the middle of it. Now, people are right when they say it has gone downhill. Many stores are boarded up; discount stores showcase cheap clothing and junk jewelry. The deli we used to have lunch in next to my father’s store is now a dollar store.

  With each block we pass, layers of my postcard memory are replaced with the raw red meat of a new reality.

  We turn off Broad Street onto South and quickly come to the cross street of Williamson. I get out of the car and stand in front of Battin High School, fifty yards from the crash site. Directly across the street is a newish red brick building with clean, white-striped awnings. It stands at the site of the original yellow brick house where my parents lived with my two sisters.

  This is a tiny, precise space. I wonder if the pilot avoided the school purposely, knowing he would save the three hundred students inside. I wonder if the story of his signaling his wife by tipping his wing has any truth to it. I think of Linda being carried to this very spot to wait for help.

  The local mailman stops to talk. “One of my customers had family killed in that accident. Everyone remembers it,” he says as he points out the landmarks: a new school, Elizabeth High, across from the old one; the new annex of St. Elizabeth’s Hospital down the street.

  The place is so different from my suburban childhood home that I cannot envision what my life might have been like here.

  But I would not have been here.

  Being here is like revisiting the set of an often-played movie— like I have stepped through a looking glass to my family’s tale.

  At the top of the street, I see for the first time the exact site of the crash.

  This place of an end—and my beginning.

  chapter three

  I ALWAYS KNEW THAT my family was formed out of the blue. My version of the stork. Only this stork exchanged a life for a life, had an engine and silver wings.

  I learned the details in dribs and drabs—never the whole story. At first I thought it was only a fire that took away my sister, and I wondered for a long time what started the blaze. The word “accident” was used most often, and I was left to wonder what it meant.

  “Before the accident . . . ” I would hear my mother say on the phone, or “ . . . after the accident.” It was a way to tell time.

  But, somehow, I knew everything they didn’t tell me. I felt the pain of my family without knowing why. A subconscious link informed me of the depth of lingering grief, bitterness, and anger. I intuited the pain they felt in watchin
g Linda go through so much physical and psychological turmoil. I understood their investment in me, but also my father’s hesitance.

  My sister Linda was hurt; I knew that because she went into the hospital every year to get something fixed, or “reconstructed.” But she didn’t look different to me. In fact, I only noticed her scars when others reacted to them.

  The first time I remember understanding she was different was at Goodman’s Deli when I was six or seven. We’d go there with my father for hot pastrami on rye with a little mustard for me, corned beef on rye for Linda. Egg creams and fries, of course. When we sat down, I noticed a little boy in the booth across the aisle staring at Linda. I watched as she tried not to pay attention, but I saw her glance at him, then look back down at her menu. I knew only that I wanted to protect her from that boy before his hurtful words could leave even more scars. I stared him down until he dropped his gaze.

  After that, I tried to force myself to look at Linda with new eyes. To see what others saw. It wasn’t easy to do. I didn’t know her any other way. But I made myself study the worst scars. Most of the bottom half of her face down her neck had raised red scar tissue. Both of her ears were gone, though her hearing was fine. Her left arm and leg were badly burned, wrapped tight in tough, brownish red where the skin had burned down to muscle. Before she started wearing makeup as a teenager, the scars on her face drew attention away from her wide, green Bette Davis eyes, which were in fact beautiful. The flames had seared the skin under her cheekbone, collared her neck, and descended down her chest.

  At some point, as I got older, I started listening more carefully to snippets of conversations to grasp the entirety of the story of “the accident.” The extended family always talked as if the details were well-known and there was no need to bring up something that was so painful. And certainly never to mention Donna’s name. My father, especially, never uttered it.

  Except that I wasn’t there. Even when there was some talk about it, it would stop when I walked in the room. It felt like a conspiracy to keep me separate. Something told me that I should not ask questions. I might break the spell and disappear.

  I remember being stunned when I first heard it had been an airplane that had crashed and burned in my mother’s kitchen. I’m sure she was telling the story to a new friend on the phone when I overheard her. When I asked her about it, she seemed just as surprised that I didn’t already know.

  “You know about the accident, Judy, right? The plane crash? Your sister is burned . . . ”

  As if it all were as plain as the nose on my face.

  And then, hearing my mother tell about her pregnancies, the way that women tell their horror stories about birth, I was shocked to hear there were three.

  “All three of my babies were big,” she’d say. “My first was over ten pounds! But she came easily. Linda was another story— she had a hard time. She didn’t want to be born. They had to dislocate her shoulders to get her out.”

  My parents must have had some kind of unspoken agreement not to dwell on the accident. Maybe when I was born, they developed this pact to put it all behind them and go on with this new life. Just another reconstructive surgery.

  Then there were the stories told time and again, meant to bring me into the family drama, since I came in during Act II. But, mostly, they reinforced the central focus of the family—my sister.

  There was the bus story. The doctor told my parents that they needed to get Linda out in public soon after the accident so she could get used to the reactions she might get from people and learn how to deal with them.

  The plan was to take a city bus from the apartment to downtown Elizabeth, walk the few blocks to my father’s jewelry store, and all go out for lunch. It was Linda’s first public exposure since the crash. But on the way, she fell on some loose stones and split open the fragile scar tissue on her knee. Just then the bus pulled up. They took seats near the bus driver, and when my mother pulled some tissues from her purse to dab at the bloodied knee, she noticed a woman staring intently at Linda.

  “What happened to her? What did you do to her?”

  My mother took a moment to pull herself together and think about what to say.

  “But, I really couldn’t help myself,” she said when she told the story. “I turned to her and said, ‘She was in an accident. An airplane crashed into my house and killed my other daughter— and my baby here is lucky to be alive. Do you have any more questions I can answer for you right now?’ That woman didn’t have a thing to say for the rest of that ride!”

  My father told about taking Linda to her first Thanksgiving Day parade. I was just six months old, at home while my mother cooked dinner. He told Linda she would see the Shriners in their little hats, in their tiny cars whizzing around. He prepared her for the loud sirens and music so that she wouldn’t be afraid.

  At the parade, shiny new fire trucks showed off their bells and sirens, clanging in time with the tubas in the high school band. Local royalty rode in convertibles waving and throwing wrapped candy to the children that lined the streets. The Boy and Girl Scouts were flanked by the Little League and the Daughters of the American Revolution.

  They found a spot in front of Levy Brothers department store, out of the wind and cold, to watch the parade. My father bought a red balloon from a street vendor, and Linda was happily clutching it when a little boy approached her, pointed into her smiling face, and squealed, “Eeew—what happened to you?”

  Linda burst into tears. The boy’s mother dragged him away with a shake of her head. My father sco oped Linda up quickly to hug her, trying to control her sobs.

  “Honey, don’t ever forget that some people are pretty on the outside, and ugly on the inside. You are just wearing your badge of courage on the outside, and you should always wear it with pride.”

  These were the kinds of stories that filled in the gaps for me as a child. That gave me the definition of what our family was about. I was not a lead actor in this play.

  WHEN I WANTED to go on a trip to Florida with my friends in high school, I learned more about the actual crash. Our family did not fly. My parents had only recently taken their first airplane ride on a business trip, and Linda had never flown. To boot, my flight was scheduled on American Airlines—the very carrier that crashed a plane into their home. I was sixteen years old and totally oblivious to the ramifications of their putting me on that particular plane by myself. They gritted their teeth and let me go.

  chapter four

  JANUARY 22, 1952 (DAY OF THE CRASH)

  7:00 AM

  MY MOTHER WOKE up early, as usual, to get my father off to work, her seven-year-old off to school, and breakfast for her mother and two-year-old Linda.

  They lived on the second floor of a three-story brick building that resembled a stack of faded yellow Lego blocks. It also housed another family and one boarder on the third floor. A candy store on the ground level was a gathering place for local teenagers.

  Sounds filtered up from the store and down from the family upstairs having their breakfast as they got ready for the day. My mother was held hostage in the middle.

  She had planned their day around Linda’s doctor appointment later that morning. A spunky young mother, she had energy to spare. Her hair was always expertly coiffed by her own hand, clothes neatly pressed. My mother was the kind to strike up a conversation in the checkout line at the grocery store and to show up with a Bundt cake at a new neighbor’s door. Her family was her core.

  My father was a generally happy man with thinning black hair and an unwavering smile. He reveled in his young family. My mother took it in stride that he was reserved in showing affection. She had decided she could make up for it by showing him how.

  Two years older than my mother, my father had held a plethora of jobs during the Depression years. Sometimes two or three at a time; at first to help feed his five sisters, later for his own family. He had painted houses with his father, delivered laundry, been a milkman, worked in a pharmacy—and
now he worked in a jewelry store.

  This morning my father wanted only his usual toast and coffee.

  “Some eggs or some oatmeal maybe, Al? You can’t work for hours on a piece of toast.” My mother worried that he didn’t eat right when he was away from her. He was thin as a rail, and she suspected he made time only for coffee and cigarette breaks during the day.

  After fifteen years of marriage, she still thought she could change his habits.

  “Nope, that’s all I need. And hugs from my girls, of course,” he said.

  He reached over to give little Linda a tender squeeze. Donna, the seven-year-old, came over to his chair for a full-on good-bye hug, wrapping her arms around his neck and holding her cheek next to his for a moment. A warm knot took hold of his chest as he hugged her back.

  “Bye, Daddy, have a good day,” she told him.

  He let her hang on for a minute, then extracted himself.

  My mother pecked him on the cheek, handed him his coat and his black Dick Tracy hat, and he was out the door. Whistling, he sprang into his 1950 Buick Special with the black leather seats. He loved getting into that car—the first car he ever owned—and driving the couple of miles to his job at Goldblatt Jewelers. He lit a cigarette with the car lighter, inhaled his first puff deeply, opened the front side-vent window, and slowly began to drive away.

  Donna waved from the window.

  chapter five

  1953

  AFTER THE SURGERY to lift Linda’s chin off of her chest where flames had welded the two together, she needed X-ray treatments to prevent keloid (thickened) scars from forming. She was three and a half.