Soul Survivor (3 page)

Of course, he had no way of knowing, when he rolled over and went back to sleep, that his family was on the cusp of something
utterly unfathomable, something unimaginably fantastic. So, dog tired, he simply fell back to sleep.

If Bruce was under heavy pressure, so was Andrea. Giving birth to James had been very hard. She was thirty-six when he was
born—fast approaching midnight on her biological clock. And it was a rough pregnancy. Andrea suffered from preeclampsia, a
dangerous condition that caused high blood pressure, fluid retention, and seizures. And then, late in the pregnancy, her fetus
inexplicably stopped growing. When the doctors measured her baby’s size on the sonogram, James was a little more than three
pounds and was not getting any bigger. The medical team was puzzled and uncertain that the child ultimately would be “viable.”
And even if he was brought to term, the doctors warned that there was a strong possibility of Down’s syndrome or autism, or
some other physical or intellectual deficit.

Bruce refused to accept the medical opinion. Always the solid rock of optimism, he said: “Bullshit! James will be fine.”

And this was not meant as a careless outburst of bootless hope. Becoming parents was an affirmative, positive commitment that
they had both promised each other, even to the point of picking out the child’s name: James Madison Leininger. No accident.
The name came out of the long genealogical research that Andrea had started early in their marriage. She had discovered that
her great-great-grandfather, James Madison Scoggin, had served in the Confederate army during the Civil War. So her imperiled
little fetus already had a name and a proud history, and fighting parents who would never consider giving up on him.

Finally, on April 10, 1998—Good Friday (an omen)—six weeks before her due date, when the doctors detected weakness in his
vital signs, James was delivered by C-section. Bruce was there in the delivery room, and when the baby reached out to be born,
Bruce took his hand—and, as they like to say in the family, Bruce and James have never let go.

After James was born, the doctors discovered the reason for his lack of development in utero. It was an anatomical quirk.
Andrea’s placenta was no bigger than a grapefruit. It should have been the size of a small watermelon. The wonder is that
James survived at all, with all the reduced intake of nutrients. On the other hand, maybe that trauma in utero would be seen
to play a part in what was yet to come. Maybe James would retain some postpartum memory of that tight spot he was in before
he was born.

In the end, after time in an incubator, James turned out to be perfectly normal—no physical or intellectual deficits.

And he was a delightful baby. He didn’t cry much; he didn’t fuss much. He accepted all the moving and changes with hardly
a peep. He seemed mostly happy and content. In fact, his parents felt that there was something uncanny and amazingly mature
about his everyday good nature—which was part of why that first horrendous nightmare came as such a shock.

Given the brute facts of Bruce’s new status, he had to work hard to keep his family intact. Because of his long work hours,
Andrea kept James up past a two-year-old’s normal bedtime. The reasoning behind this was a trade-off: James could sacrifice
a little sleep to spend some quality time with his father. His bedtime became ten p.m. After they put him to sleep, Bruce
and Andrea had some time for a glass of wine and some catch-up conversation before they, too, went to bed. Two days after
the first nightmare, just after midnight, the bloodcurdling screams began again. It came at a moment when Bruce and Andrea
were slipping into deep REM sleep, and once again it caught them unprepared. Andrea, of course, leaped out of bed and ran
down that long hallway to clasp her son in her arms and try to console him.

In the morning she tried to describe the scary quality of the nightmares to Bruce in some detail so that he would recognize
the gravity of what she experienced, but he shrugged and insisted that they not make a fuss, that night terrors were normal.
But she nonetheless pressed her case, telling him about the wild kicking and violent flailing. Still, Bruce showed little
interest. He was in the midst of his own nightmare trying to help take his company public.

Bruce worked for Oil Field Services Corporation of America (OSCA), an oil company that specialized in deepwater oil well maintenance
and management far out in the Gulf of Mexico. OSCA was in the midst of trying to launch a public stock offering. As the human
resources expert and adviser, Bruce had to formulate sound health plans and compensation packages that met federal guidelines
so that OSCA could become listed on a major stock exchange—no small feat since Bruce was, himself, still being trained at
the time. It was a frantic moment as he dealt with the dizzying details of high corporate negotiations and the needs of several
hundred oil rig workers.

In the midst of all this, the nightmares seemed less urgent.

“Listen,” he told Andrea, playing down the significance of the outburst, “it’s an old house and there are creaks and groans
that routinely come with an old house. It’s all part of settling in here. It’ll stop; you’ll see.”

But the nightmares did not stop. After the second, there was another the next night. James would skip a night, sometimes two,
but the nightmares kept coming with terrifying regularity and increasing frenzy. Often five times a week. And they were all,
every one, spine-tingly creepy.

And so, in that first spring of the new millennium, in a small home near the coast of Louisiana, four or five times a week
it felt as if the rafters shook with the ferocious cries of a little boy. Andrea did all she could at first, but nothing would
soothe little James in those furious moments. Because of James’s premature birth and early weight problems, she was diligent
about medical checkups. Soon after they moved to Lafayette she found a young pediatrician on the next street, Dr. Doug Gonzales,
who could find nothing abnormal when he examined James. When the nightmares began, Andrea called him. He told her that these
were normal night terrors and that they would soon diminish. He was not worried. Meanwhile, confirming what she had read in
her parenting books, he advised her not to wake the boy suddenly or frighten him when he was in the midst of a bad dream.

Andrea now had begun sleeping close to James’s bedroom so she could get a head start on the screams. She slept lightly, listening
for the first cry. And, she told Bruce, James was so deeply asleep during his nightmares that she had to hold him as tightly
as she could to break the spell.

Bruce spoke to his son. “Listen,” he said, “you’ve got to stop this. You’d better get over whatever it is that’s causing this.”
Only it turned out, this wasn’t something that a two-year-old could control, no matter how mad it made Daddy.

Almost two months after the nightmares began, James was still thrashing and shrieking, but this time Andrea set out to try
to discover what he was saying. His cries, she realized, were not just incomprehensible sounds—there were also words. Once
she’d deciphered some of them, she came quickly back down the hallway and shook her husband awake.

“Bruce, you need to hear what he’s saying.”

Bruce was groggy. “What do you mean?”

“Bruce,
you need to hear what he’s saying.
” Bruce was annoyed, but he pulled himself out of bed, muttering, “What the hell is going on here!”

Then, as he stood in his son’s doorway, he also began to pick out the words, and his resentment faded.

He was lying there on his back, kicking and clawing at the covers… like he was trying to kick his way out of a coffin. I thought,
this looks like
The Exorcist
—I half expected his head to spin around like that little girl in the movie. I even thought I might have to go and get a priest.
But then I heard what James was saying…

“Airplane crash! Plane on fire! Little man can’t get out!”

Those were the very words, the actual text of James’s outcries. The child flung his head back and forth and screamed the same
thing over and over and over: “Airplane crash! Plane on fire! Little man can’t get out! Airplane crash! Plane on fire! Little
man can’t get out!”

Now, it was not long after James’s second birthday; he was just learning to speak in complex sentences, just finding a language
to fit his thoughts. And yet, what he was screaming as he thrashed around his bed that spring were words so rich in detail,
so plausibly offered, so unchildlike in their desperation, that Bruce Leininger was struck silent. In all his life, he’d been
the problem solver, the go-to guy, the man who could make things right because he understood the nature of almost any problem,
grasped its geography, and managed to find a solution. But standing in that doorway of his child’s bedroom, he was paralyzed—and
a little frightened. These panicked phrases could not have come out of nowhere; on that point he was certain.

T
HERE WERE PLENTY of tantalizing clues about what was happening to young James Leininger. If Bruce and Andrea hadn’t been so
busy skidding around their own high dramas—a killing workload and yet another domestic realignment—they might have guessed
earlier that it had something to do with airplanes.

But there were too many distractions that kept them from following the trail—an oversight that they would more than make up
for in the coming months. Foremost was getting settled into their new hometown of Lafayette, Louisiana.

The start of the new millennium had been grueling. First, there was the dread of a Y2K meltdown, which, thankfully, didn’t
happen, though it nevertheless spiked everyone’s nerves. Then there was the actual physical move from Dallas to Lafayette—a
hectic, hysterical, complicated repositioning of hearth and home.

The logistics alone were bumpy. But for Andrea there was an added bit of sadness; it was the emotional wrench of leaving her
sisters and her mother four hundred miles away. Nevertheless, she was a good soldier and understood that her husband’s working
life was at a critical juncture and that her job was to support him. And so, on Thursday, March 1, 2000, Bruce and Andrea
closed the deal on their seventy-year-old Acadian house in the leafy upscale subdivision of White Oak.

But even as she tried to get herself into the right spirit, (it was an early spring, and the azaleas were in full bloom—the
town was a heart-catching watercolor of pink and white and red), she was blindsided by a cold bolt of reality. Before they
could move into their charming house on West St. Mary Boulevard, the Leiningers would have to spend a long weekend in a seedy
little room four miles away on Edie Ann Drive, in the industrial basin of Lafayette.

It was only a layover, just until the moving van arrived on Saturday, just until Andrea had enough time to go over and make
her new home livable—which, in her case, meant spotless. Because this time, she told Bruce with clenched determination, she
intended to stay put. “I’m not moving again,” was the way she laid it down.

In spite of that firm declaration, she still had to get through that long weekend at the grubby Oakwood Bend Apartments; which
was where OSCA gave temporary shelter to the soiled and tired oil workers coming off month-long shifts on the deep rigs that
lay far out in the Gulf of Mexico.

Andrea could hardly believe that Bruce had been living in this squalor since November.

When she turned on the light, she felt as if the filth were crawling up her legs. The layers of dirt and the layers of dust,
encrusted over the years by layers of crude oil, had become some new and scary variety of muck.

Even the ceilings were thick with the aftermath of all that unwashed traffic. The inside of the shower curtain was black with
mold and mildew. When Andrea turned on the fan, the dust flew off in fat clumps. Her first thought was that a cat had jumped
off the blades.

“Don’t let James touch anything,” she told Bruce. “I’m going to the store and load up on cleaning supplies.”