Soul Survivor (30 page)

We met every two weeks for Bible study, discussion, and trying to assimilate the Word into our lives. It was a dramatic journey.
I studied the Bible intensely. The Holy Spirit was demonstrated for me in praying in tongues, faith healing, and discernment.

I have witnessed healings that I know were genuine.

I have personally realized the true power of prayer. I prayed for a second chance after my first marriage failed because I
was spiritually lost. I prayed for a wife with green eyes—and one who was Asian—and my second wife, Andrea, has green eyes
and her mother is one half Filipina.

Suffice it to say that I feel I am a developed Christian on a continuous path of spiritual growth.

If James’s nightmares were truly a manifestation of a past life—a proof of reincarnation—then, as I saw it, it would threaten
the biblical promise of salvation. If the immortal soul can randomly transfer from person to person, generation to generation,
then what does that imply for the Christian orthodoxy of redemption? What happens on Judgment Day if the immortal soul is
handed off like that? It goes against the evangelical teaching of rebirth through a spiritually transformed personal life.

The impact of James’s story on my spiritual well-being… well, it felt like spiritual warfare. My purpose for disproving what
was happening to my son was to establish that this was all a coincidence, as astronomically remote as that possibility seems.

Of course, I was drawn into this by setting up these tests, establishing questions that had to be answered, and all the while,
I was getting closer and closer to something… dangerous… It was like putting my hand in a fire….

And yet, even now that all the evidence had fallen on the other side, so that his holdout seemed perverse, Bruce still was
not completely convinced. There was the old matter of the absence of an eyewitness. A thin reed to hold on to, but something
nonetheless. He would not, could not, say out loud that this was a past life. He just could not take that last step. The word
“reincarnation” violated the Gospels and his own understanding of what the Bible meant.

And it was a period of relative peace. The spiritual crisis seemed to recede. Even the nightmares had almost vanished from
the house on West St. Mary Boulevard. They became rare, breaking out every few months.

Bruce’s concentration was on the search into lives of the dead servicemen of
Natoma Bay.
The families would send their packages of documents and pictures to Lafayette, and Bruce would carefully copy them all and
send them back. The families trusted the Leiningers with the original documents. This made a big impression on Bruce and Andrea,
and they were scrupulous in their care of the material.

The lovingly wrapped bundles contained the original telegrams notifying the family of the death, the newspaper obituaries,
the funeral programs, the enlistment records, the letters home, and the final effects. Bruce made an inventory for each casualty.
He made a loose-leaf binder for each one, and Andrea wept every time a package came in the mail.

Bruce called from work every day, asking if a package had arrived. By the beginning of March, they were swamped with material.
Bruce would spend the evenings calling the families, letting them know that their package had arrived safely. Gently he would
ask and answer new questions that arose out of the material.

Andrea’s attention was on more mundane matters. She was up all night worrying about where James was going to start his formal
education. The 2002–03 school year for the pre-kindergarten class at Asbury United Methodist Church was about to end, and
in her usual thorough way, Andrea searched for a replacement school. It had to be the best private school—she would tolerate
nothing less for James. Ascension Day School passed all her tests.

I had no second choice. I was in a panic over whether or not he would be accepted. I even called the school to see when they
were sending out acceptance letters. I couldn’t sleep. You would think that I was waiting for a letter from Harvard.

One day Mr. John, the mailman, brought the mail to the house. There was a letter from Ascension. James was accepted. I cried.
Then I called Bruce. James was happy, but not as excited as I was.

In the creative parenting department, Andrea had few equals. At the end of February, she attended the St. Jude’s Bike-a-Thon
at Asbury Church. Some of the children were riding two-wheelers. She told Bruce that it was time to make the transition. James
had had training wheels on his bike for a year.

But James was nervous about flying solo.

The training wheels are more like a crutch, since most kids at this stage have already figured out how to balance without
really knowing it. When I was a dancer, I had a crazy teacher who liked to bang her cane on the floor in time with the music.
It made everyone nuts. So the guys decided one day to take her cane to the shop area and cut it down by an eighth of an inch.
An imperceptible amount. She didn’t really notice it.

A few weeks later, they cut another eighth of an inch off the bottom. The teacher was not able to put her finger on it, although
she knew something was different.

A month later, after a few more trims, she had to bend over to bang the cane on the floor. She finally figured it out and
got a new cane with a steel tip. But that prank made the banging bearable.

I decided to use the same trick with James’s training wheels. I raised them a little bit, and he didn’t notice. Then I raised
them a little more. Finally, he had to adjust his balance to stay on the bike.

The trouble was that our driveway was too short to work up enough speed to find the proper balance. One day I took him to
the end of West St. Mary, where there is a cul-de-sac. James could ride around in a circle like he was in the Indy 500. I
took off the training wheels and held the back of the seat, running along with the bike just in case.

When James finally had enough speed, I let go and he took off. He took off riding his bike to our house, and I was screaming
about the stop signs. He blew right through them. Now, I am not a good runner. All the years of ballet trained me to lead
with my toes, not my heels. But I was a mother whose son was in peril. And I ran like the wind, screaming and yelling to stop
at the stop signs.

When we got home, I yelled at him.

“I told you to stop at the stop signs. You went through every one of them! You’re lucky you didn’t get run over by a car.
Why didn’t you stop?”

James said simply, “I couldn’t remember how to stop the bike.”

I had to hobble around for the next three months because I hurt my knee chasing him. But he didn’t need those training wheels
anymore.

All in all, it was a tranquil, happy time. Andrea got her preferred school, and Bruce didn’t have to crack his skull over
the spiritual implications of James’s ordeal.

One night, they were up late transcribing notes and copying records and photos. It was shortly after midnight; Bruce was in
his office. Andrea was in the kitchen. Suddenly, they heard James crying in his sleep. Andrea came down the hall from the
kitchen and met Bruce at James’s door.

They went into his room, and there was James, sitting up in bed, sobbing. But he seemed to be asleep. They both went to him,
held him, and he opened his eyes, but he clearly was asleep.

“Are you all right, buddy?” asked Bruce.

He didn’t answer. He kept crying.

“Are you having a bad dream?” he demanded.

James just stared at his parents and kept crying.

“What’s the matter?” insisted Bruce.

Bruce started to get upset—he wanted an answer. If there was something the matter, he expected to hear what it was. It was
that old didactic streak that he had since college. But Andrea couldn’t tell if James was awake or asleep.

“Go get a glass of water,” she told Bruce, giving him something helpful to do to get him out of the room.

Then she rubbed James’s back and almost chanted, “It’s okay, honey. You’re in your room and you’re safe and everything is
okay.” It was the basic Carol Bowman technique of soothing the child without shocking him, not waking him rudely, not heightening
the fear.

He seemed to come awake gently just as Bruce returned with the water. James took a long drink.

“What were you dreaming?” asked Bruce.

“I don’t remember.”

And as he lay back down to sleep, Andrea told Bruce to go back to what he was doing; she would stay with James for a while.

When Bruce was gone, she cuddled with James, cooing about his safety, until she was certain that he had fallen into a restful
sleep; then she went down the hall to Bruce’s office.

“What do you think that was about?” he asked. “He hasn’t had a nightmare in months.”

Andrea had an idea. It was something she had thought about all day, although it was not something she wanted to bring up,
fearing that it could provoke ridicule.

“Do you know what day it is?”

Bruce blinked. He didn’t know where she was going with this. She had so many twists in her thinking.

“The date? Yeah, it’s March third.”

Andrea nodded. “March third. It’s the anniversary of James Huston’s death,” she said.

Bruce got it; he slapped his head. Of course. Then he thought of something else. “Did you tell him that?” asked Bruce.

“Of course not,” replied Andrea.

“Did you even mention it during the day? Is there any way he could have overheard it?”

“No. No. But you know something, there’s no way we’ll ever know for sure,” she said.

T
HE AIR WENT out of Andrea that spring. Ironically, it was too much
proof!
Too much for her, not enough for Bruce.

Frankly, I was tired of Bruce’s endless
investigation
. Nothing was enough. There was always just ONE more detail that needed to be nailed down, confirmed—then he’d really believe.
My life was simpler. I chose to believe. I didn’t need a dead body in my living room to convince me that James was experiencing
the life of James Huston.

Take the nightmare that came on the anniversary of James Huston’s death; that would seem to tie it down, or at least indicate
a connection to James Huston. At the very least, it was powerfully suggestive. But it didn’t end the controversy under the
Leiningers’ roof.

“We can’t be certain. It was only one nightmare. He’s had a million nightmares.”

“Wait a minute! Wasn’t there another nightmare at roughly the same time, in early March of 2002? Maybe even March third?”

“Yes, but that was in 2002. It had no meaning.”

“Why not?”

“It was before we knew the actual date of James Huston’s death.”

“So?”

“It didn’t count.”