Replacement Child

by Judy L. Mandel

  My mother said that when Linda saw the gigantic X-ray machine, she became hysterical and could not be calmed. As the technicians tried to restrain her, my mother intervened, quickly grabbing Linda up from the table and ordering them to stop. They just shook their heads, realizing their schedule had been blown for the morning.

  “There’s no reason to put her through this now. I’ll bring her back in a week,” my mother told them. “She’ll be ready then. Give me a week.” And she ushered Linda from the exam room.

  At home, my parents built a mini model of the X-ray machine—just the size for Linda’s doll, Sandy, to use. My father was diligent in constructing the X-ray machine model, finding pictures in the library of the actual machine used in the hospital and replicating it with tin foil and cardboard.

  For a week, Linda gave Sandy her X-ray treatments every day, positioning her carefully and lowering the model X-ray machine close to her, but never touching her. My mother explained exactly what would happen to Sandy each time:

  “She just has to lie still while the machine does its job, and she won’t feel anything, see honey?”

  It was a brilliant ploy, putting Linda in charge and showing her that Sandy was unharmed.

  Sandy had black hair and green eyes just like Linda. When Linda went into surgery, Sandy did too. Operating room nurses always made sure that Sandy had the exact same bandages as Linda. And they used the doll to explain what would happen to her before each surgery.

  chapter six

  2005

  MY COFFEE IS getting cold on my desk. There is work for me to get to, but I can’t seem to concentrate on the brochure draft I’m meant to deliver tomorrow to a client. This new insurance product is not holding my interest. I’m searching for new words to say “best” that their legal team will let me use. Improved . . . competitive . . . enhanced . . .

  Instead of working, I wind up heating up my coffee in the microwave and bringing it downstairs to the basement where I’ve stored my parents’ things: the photo albums and memorabilia that I brought back with me from their apartment.

  Years ago, when I first told them I wanted to write, they began giving me clippings from the newspaper accounts of the crash. They started writing down notes for me. Then Linda joined in to add her stories. At the time, I took a look at it all and shoved it into a file folder without much thought. Now their notes are a gift that helps me pull the story together and see my place in it.

  A ragged manila folder holds my mother’s longhand on several yellow legal pads with her many attempts to put the story down on paper. On paper, she had relived it again and again, using different verbs and adjectives, but always ending up with one daughter gone, one daughter brought back from the dead.

  In the same folder is an envelope with yellowed newspaper clippings that chronicle the event and offer journalistic snapshots: the day of the accident; hospital treatment; the funeral; the investigation.

  Reading the news stories, I recognize the familiar feeling of being separate from my family, like I have always been pressing my nose up against the glass trying to get inside.

  The clippings only graze the surface of the story I want to know. Even the notes left by my family tell me only snippets. How did my parents survive losing their firstborn child and watching their other baby go through the agony of being burned over 80 percent of her body and the resulting medical care? How were they able to maintain their marriage through it all? And what was my part? How did they have the courage to even have me?

  Whenever I have a new project, whether it’s writing a marketing piece, a news article, or a feature story, I first immerse myself in the facts surrounding the topic. It’s a technique I’ve used since my early days as a reporter, in hopes that the story will bubble up from the minutest detail.

  This trail is old, fifty years plus, but Elizabeth fireman Gary Haszko remembers it when I call the fire department. He wasn’t there, but he digs in the archives and sends me news clippings and an eight-by-ten-inch photo of the apartment building just after the crash.

  I have never seen this photo before. It didn’t show up in any of the newspapers so far. The detail in it mesmerizes me. It shows smoke still spewing from the building, firemen standing in the front door pointing a hose up the splintered stairwell. It looks like the picture was taken just after they quelled the flames, and I imagine what was going on inside at this moment. I conjure an image of Donna in the scene, lying in a pile of smoldering ash, trapped under a blackened beam, fighting for her life. I try to see her face, but my mind’s eye only registers a small lifeless body, nearly indistinguishable from the black ash surrounding her.

  I picture firefighters sifting through the rubble, spotting her remains camouflaged in the scorched splinters, and I no longer wonder why it took nearly twelve hours to find her.

  I get out a magnifying glass to search the faces, to stare at the second-story window and look for my sister.

  chapter seven

  JANUARY 22, 1952 (DAY OF THE CRASH)

  7:30 AM

  “OKAY, GIRLS, LET’S get going,” my mother announced and clapped her hands for attention.

  “Donna, are you getting dressed? Linda, come on over here, honey, and let’s finish our breakfast. You can see Donna later when she gets home. Mom! We’re going out soon. Your breakfast is on the table. We’ll be back a little after noon.”

  Finished with breakfast, the three readied to head out to walk Donna to school. Donna was pretty and petite with clear green eyes. She had on her black jumper with a white blouse underneath, the lace of the collar tickling the edge of her cheek. The night before, my mother curled her chestnut brown hair into a pageboy. Now, she furrowed her brow.

  “I don’t need those leggings, Mom; I’m too old for them!”

  My little girl is growing up so fast, my mother thought. “At least put your gloves on!”

  Linda was content to be snuggled up warmly in full winter garb, protected from head to toe with wool leggings, sweater, coat, hat, and mittens. My mother threw her coat over herself and buttoned it on the way out the door, grabbing both girls’ hands for the short walk to Woodrow Wilson School 19.

  There was a light mist falling, and in the dense fog my mother could not see around the next corner.

  chapter eight

  1952—1957

  FOR MOST OF 1952, my parents lived in a hotel while Linda stayed in the hospital. Late in the year, they were able to move to the Warinanco Village Apartments in Elizabeth that we called “The Village.” When she was well enough, Linda came home to the new apartment, and my mother got busy lining up friends for her among her new neighbors. She managed to find all the mothers with girls around Linda’s age and recruited them to her cause. As a result, Linda had a group of loyal friends she felt safe with and camaraderie she cherished for a very long time.

  One day, the boys included the girls in their after-school baseball game—mainly because they didn’t have enough players—in the courtyard behind the apartment complex.

  The captains took turns picking girls for their teams, and Linda was left standing alone. At the time, Linda wore a brace on her left leg up to her knee that included a shoe like a man’s work boot.

  Linda ran home, as best she could, crying.

  “They don’t want to play with me.”

  My mother was hesitant to intervene with explanations and her usual plea for understanding. She knew Linda should start taking over this role for herself.

  Just as she considered what to do, she heard a commotion outside. Out the window, she and Linda saw an animated argument between the boys and girls. Hands on hips, fingers pointing, girls shouting, boys cowering. Within minutes, her friend Nancy Boroff knocked on the door, marched in, and pulled Linda’s arm to go back outside.

  “We told those boys we aren’t playing unless you play. JoAnn, Janie, Sue, and me, we all told ’em,” Nancy told Linda proudly. With a grateful lump in her throat, Linda joined the game.

  Nancy was a skinny,
high-energy little girl with wide eyes and ash blonde curls. Later on, I loved her because she always brought me a present when she visited. But her best gift was the friendship she lavished on my big sister.

  Together, they had contests to see who could jump over the hedges from a moving swing. They would roller-skate through clotheslines of clean clothes, chased by the women who had just hung them out. They had wars with wagons full of berries they picked from the bushes behind the apartments. They made costumes and put on talent shows for their parents.

  Linda felt so normal with her friends that she sometimes forgot her limitations.

  “Let’s go play by the brook in the woods,” Nancy suggested one day after school. A small gathering of trees behind the apartments passed for woods. The shallow brook could be crossed by hopping from rock to rock as stepping-stones, requiring a full leap between them.

  Linda had been warned that she shouldn’t go near water, that it would ruin her brace and shoe. But when Nancy hopped from one rock to the next, she followed despite her heavy metal brace.

  Pretty soon, she lost her footing and fell in. The brace and orthopedic shoe were soaked, ruined.

  Linda panicked, “My mother is going to kill me! I can’t get this wet. She’s warned me a zillion times!”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll tell her. I’ll take the blame,” Nancy said. “It’s my fault anyways, I shouldn’t have brought you here.”

  They slogged back to the apartment, the waterlogged shoe and brace weighing Linda down. They stood on the front stoop for several long minutes, and just as Nancy got the courage to knock on the door, it opened.

  My mother saw Linda dripping wet and ushered them both inside.

  She yelled, “Oh, my God, how could you?” Her Hungarian temper flaring, knowing how upset my father would be about the expensive shoe and brace. But she couldn’t bring herself to really be mad.

  Secretly, she thought, This is what normal kids do.

  chapter nine

  I WAS FIVE. I was six. I was seven. I was eight.

  I sat on the edge of Linda’s bed with her little brown and tan plaid suitcase open next to me, watching her pack slippers, underwear, and nightgowns.

  “Don’t worry, Jude,” Linda said. “I’ll be back before you know it. And stay away from my stuff, will ya?”

  Instead of an answer, I started picking apart one of the raised balls of fabric on her white chenille bedspread.

  “Hey, cut that out—you’ll ruin it!”

  I wanted her to yell at me. That just felt more normal. Better than thinking about her going into the hospital again, and about what they would do to her there. There was never much explanation to me about what would happen to her, and so my mind was left to wander about the cutting, the moving of bones and skin, and the reattaching pieces of her like some giant jigsaw puzzle. I tried to imagine it all without any blood, like in the movies when they cut away from the surgery scene and you only see the patient later recovering in bed. All pristine and clean and neat without a drop of blood even at the site of the intravenous needle. But when I closed my eyes, I saw the blood, remembered the raw skin graft sites I had seen when her bandages were changed, the reddened stitches and bloody gauze pads. I felt lucky and guilty about it at the same time, that I didn’t have to be cut with scalpels and prodded with needles. That I could stay safely behind.

  Some of the surgeries were to replace scarred skin with better skin from another part of Linda’s body, so she would have two places she would be healing. One where scar tissue was removed and replaced, and the other at the donor site where healthy tissue was taken from. She had one surgery to try to reconstruct her burned ears, but the donor ears were rejected and had to be taken off.

  When Linda went in for surgery, my mother always went away, too. She’d be in the hospital in New York with Linda when she had the operation, and then she’d stay in her room for the first few nights. After that, she might come back at night, and then go right back in the morning until Linda came home. Every year it was a couple of months before it was over.

  It was very lonely at home without them. Very quiet. My father read the paper when he got home from work, and we would heat up a dinner that my mother left for us. I’d watch the news with him; he’d ask how school was and if I did my homework.

  I was happy to have my father all to myself then, but not without a stab of guilt, feeling that my happiness must mean that I was glad Linda was in the hospital.

  On Saturdays, my father brought me to his jewelry store to help out. When I was too little to wait on customers, I helped wrap gifts and polish rings in the back. When gift wrapping was needed, he’d call me out to the front counter and introduce me to the customer with his arm around me. He’d give me instructions about what kind of gift it was and which paper to use. It felt like we were a team. My pay was sometimes a piece of jewelry: a ruby ring or a new charm for my bracelet.

  At night, when my mother would call from the hospital, I would stand next to my father to hear her. Snippets would filter through to me from their conversation:

  “Why did Linda have a bad reaction to the anesthesia? Was it different medicine?”

  “Well, how long did they say it would be to heal from this?”

  “What do you mean they don’t know if it’s going to take?”

  Mostly, I didn’t know what any of it meant. But I could tell from my father’s voice, the crease in his forehead, or whether or not he sat down heavily on the kitchen chair next to the phone as he listened to the report from my mother.

  After about a week, I could usually go up to see Linda. I liked to bring her candy or a magazine. Even when she was all bandaged up, with tubes coming out of her, or casts on her legs, she always greeted me with “Hey, Jude!” when I came in.

  Visiting Linda with both of my parents felt like the whole family was together again. We would hang around all day, even after visiting hours were over. My father always told some joke that got her laughing. Sometimes she’d even have to tell him to stop. My mother would give him “the look,” and he’d settle down. Most often, though, he’d make her laugh again at least once before we left. He always left her with a laugh, but when we left, he was like a deflated balloon. When my mother stayed behind in New York and he and I would go home alone, it was always a silent ride.

  When I was in second grade, I had eye surgery to correct my crossed eyes. I remember expecting the same level of drama that surrounded Linda whenever she went to the hospital.

  But when I packed my pajamas, slippers, and Tiny Tears doll in Linda’s usual hospital suitcase, no one acted like it was much of a big deal. It was as if I were going to a sleepover party.

  Linda looked a little worried when I left with my parents. She hugged me and said, “Don’t worry, Jude, you’ll be home before you know it!” That made me feel better, and I tried to make myself remember to say that to her the next time she left.

  The hospital in New York City was gigantic inside, and even though I was holding my mother’s hand, I felt lost.

  Everything was white metal and glass. The ceiling was so high I had to put my head all the way back to see it. People were moving everywhere around me, but I couldn’t hear them. They were silent walkers in white and green. I shivered with goose bumps.

  The doctor explained something about putting me to sleep for the operation with “magic gas” so he could fix my eyes with tiny tools. I pictured him tying knots in the muscles in my eyes to make them tighter, pulling my eyeballs to the center.

  We went up to the fourth floor and into a long hallway full of beds. I counted fifteen before we got to mine.

  A nurse pulled a curtain all the way around my bed, and I changed into the hospital nightgown. It was very thin, and I shivered more.

  I had expected that my mother would stay with me at the hospital, as she always did with Linda, but on the elevator my father talked about how they were going home and would be leaving soon.

  “We’ll be here when you have the
surgery tomorrow, kiddo,” he said. He smiled and squeezed my shoulder, but I was having none of it and shook him off.

  My mother put a shopping bag next to my bed with the books she brought for me. She went to a sink down the hall and filled a water pitcher, put it on my nightstand next to a plastic cup, fluffed the pillows behind my back, and tucked my Tiny Tears doll in next to me. She looked as if she wanted to stay, but my father took her hand and they gave me a hug and left.

  I couldn’t catch my breath, and my eyes filled up when I watched them walk away down the hall. I thought about how Linda did this all the time and tried to be a “good little soldier” like her. But there was no one to see me do it, so I just curled up with Tiny Tears.

  chapter ten

  2005

  THIS AFTERNOON IS quiet at home. Justin is still at school, and David won’t be home from work for a few more hours. The energy in the house is different when I’m alone here. David is my best friend and confidant. We talk through dinners about our day, what’s on our minds, our schedules, the news we heard. Even though we’ve been married a short time, we seem to have a shared past. Maybe because we are nearly the exact same age, or because we grew up in similar suburban New Jersey towns and come from Jewish backgrounds. Whatever the reason, we have felt like old souls from the beginning of our relationship. I can count on his steadiness in any situation, and I am spoiled by this man who puts my feelings and happiness ahead of his own. At times, I think he is too good for me.

  David and I were early adopters of online dating in 1997. He was just coming out of a divorce and was struggling to make a new life for himself while still being there for his three sons. I had been divorced for nearly six years. We joke that it was kismet that we both bought computers the same week and happened to try out a new dating site. Neither one of us was into the bar scene to meet people. It was even more amusing that he lived about five minutes from me. We both shopped at the same Stop & Shop supermarket around the corner.