Soul Survivor (4 page)

First she cleaned the temporary home enough to make breathing possible, if not to make things comfortable. Then, in the middle
of it all, the movers called—their truck had broken down on the interstate and they couldn’t get to Lafayette until Monday.

Well, there was nothing else to do but make the best of it—a family shrug that became like a nervous tic, a gesture the Leiningers
used to get through the hassles of life.

Finally, they piled into the car and headed for their new home. As they tried to navigate their way there, the traffic slowed
to a crawl. Both the big roads—Johnston and West Congress Street—had been narrowed to one lane. They were snarled with barriers
and the construction of gaudy food stands. It was Mardi Gras.

Bruce and Andrea knew that Lafayette was in the “Cajun Heartland”—territory originally settled by the Acadian French who were
booted out of Nova Scotia in 1755 when they refused to swear allegiance to the British. But they had no idea that the intensely
Catholic French Cajun culture was still sunk so deep. The descendants of the Cajuns took the pre-Lenten bacchanalia very seriously.
New Orleans was world famous for its Fat Tuesday festival, but Lafayette had its own riotous pride. In Lafayette no one delivers
the mail on Fat Tuesday. The schools close for a week, and for five days the main streets are blocked off two and three times
a day for the elaborate parades.

After the heavy-duty cleaning, stalled traffic, and the pressure of tricky timing, the Leiningers were all exhausted by the
time their moving van arrived early on Monday, March 5. Still, Andrea sent Bruce off to work—she would handle the unloading
and placement of the furniture by herself. No need to have Bruce underfoot as well as James. She had planned exactly where
she wanted everything placed.

But even her supercharged energy had to give out. She simply couldn’t be everywhere at once. She kept losing track of her
son. She had told James to stay inside the house while she directed the movers. But the twenty-three-month-old tyke, who was
still in diapers, slipped out of the house while the moving men brought in the cartons and furnishings—the door had been left
open.

Andrea was like a shortstop, directing the moving men and plucking James out of the hedges and off the lawn, and finally—the
last straw—out of the moving van itself. When she began to imagine her little guy crushed and bleeding under someone’s boots
or a dropped sofa, she knew it was more than she could handle. That’s when she called Bruce on his cell phone and told him
to get right home.

Bruce’s boss, who was also under pressure because of the massive work attached to their company’s going public, grudgingly
agreed that Bruce’s place was at his wife’s side.

Things sort of settled down over the next few days. Neighbors showed up with welcoming pots of food and baskets of flowers
and lists of where to shop and which drugstores were open on weekends and evenings. It was a mellow moment after a bumpy entrance
to their new home.

And life went on. Andrea kept intensely busy putting the finishing touches to the house. Bruce was working fifteen, sixteen,
seventeen hours a day.

It was not until Wednesday, March 14, nine days after moving in, and a few days after the Mardi Gras fever had passed, that
Andrea found time to shop for the matching towels she needed for the bathrooms. She headed for Bed Bath & Beyond, thinking
that James would be fine in his stroller and that they would also get an introduction to the normal downtown life of Lafayette,
without the parades and food vendors and tourist madness.

It was a bright day and she was in a happy mood, the feeling of strangeness in a new town beginning to soften. As they walked
to the bathroom fixture store, they passed a craft and toy store, Hobby Lobby, where she noticed a display outside—bins filled
with plastic toys and boats.

“Oh, look,” said Andrea, plucking a small model propeller-driven plane out of the bin. She handed it to James, who studied
it. “And there’s even a bomb on the bottom,” she exclaimed, hoping this toy would distract James enough for her to browse
comfortably for towels.

But what James said—this little child in diapers—made her stop cold in her tracks. James looked at the toy plane, turned it
upside down, and proclaimed, “That’s not a bomb, Mommy. That’s a dwop tank.”

Andrea had no idea what a drop tank was. It was only when she got home that night and talked it over with Bruce that she learned
that it was an extra gas tank that airplanes used to extend their range.

“How would he know that?” she asked Bruce.

Bruce shook his head. Maybe James noticed that there were no fins on the tank—a bomb would have fins.

But how would he even know that?

“He can’t even say ‘drop tank,’” she insisted. “He said ‘dwop tank.’ He can’t even say ‘Hobby Lobby’—he says ‘Hobby Wobby.’
How would he know about a drop tank?
I
never heard of it.”

It was bewildering, but not anything to worry about. Not yet—not before the nightmares began.

W
HILE THE BAD DREAMS rattled their nights on West St. Mary Boulevard that spring, and in the fuzzy aftermath of the discombobulating
move, no one in the Leininger home was thinking too clearly. Too much work and too much worry and not enough sleep were leaving
both Bruce and Andrea a little dazed and a little battle happy.

By late May they decided that they needed a break—some distance from the “haunted house” in the White Oaks subdivision. They
planned to drive the four hundred miles to Dallas, where the extended family was already assembling to celebrate Memorial
Day, along with a birthday. Hunter, the first child of Andrea’s youngest sister Becky Kyle, would turn four on Monday, May
28. Andrea and Bruce were also eager to see Becky’s younger child, Kathryn, known as K. K., who was three weeks older than
James. The two toddlers, both still in diapers, still drinking out of a bottle, and still trying to figure out who was who,
had a lot in common.

Becky’s house was in Carrollton, a plush suburb on the northern lip of Dallas. But it was too small to pack in all the incoming
Leiningers and Kyles, so Bruce and Andrea decided to stay at a nearby motel. (Another factor doubtless went into this decision—a
vagrant thought, not openly expressed—that James might have another midnight outburst, which would make this holiday unpleasantly
memorable.) So they rented a suite at Amerisuites, where they would have their own kitchenette and a pool and wouldn’t be
underfoot in the Kyles’ busy household.

Still, first things first: they had to get out of Lafayette and into Dallas. The logistics of a Leininger move are strictly
military. The planning stage includes firm timetables, crack discipline, and unwavering phase lines—that is, if left up to
Bruce.

The day before the launch, (D minus 1), all bags must be packed and inspected. The tires of the 1994 Volvo 850 Turbo checked
for exact pressure. The gas tank topped off as if the family were heading out into an unchartered wilderness. Clocks and watches
synchronized for the early start. Briefings held so that each member of the unit is on the same page.

However, as in all such complex operations, life gets in the way. Bruce’s careful plan began to fall apart early on Saturday,
May 26 (or, as referred to by the other family foot soldiers, D-day). First, Andrea’s morning shower took a little longer
than allowed for in the operational plan. And then she had to have her coffee. And then James needed a fresh diaper and a
bottle. All the while, Bruce sang out the hour—every five minutes—and tapped his foot. In the end, they left closer to nine,
rather than the planned H-hour of eight a.m.

No big deal, said Andrea.

The trip itself—measured and timed to take a maximum of seven hours—had built-in rest stops. In Shreveport, the Leiningers
pulled into a familiar and notoriously slow Burger King. The delay set off a low-grade grumble in Bruce, which lasted until
they hit Texas.

Passing into Texas had a strangely soothing effect on the Leiningers. For one thing, there was that huge welcome sign: a twenty-foot
hollow star that looked like a big cookie cutter. At the first sight of it, they would all sing out, “Welcome to the
lonely
star state!” It was a ritual by now, calling it “the lonely star.” Of course, it was supposed to be “Welcome to the Lone
Star State,” the Texas nickname—but somehow James got confused the first time he saw it, and Andrea thought his mistake so
cute that they stayed with his version. That big sign would forever set off for the Leiningers, “Welcome to the lonely star!”

When they finally got to Dallas, Bruce suggested that Andrea visit with her sister (all that catch-up Scoggin talk—not that
they didn’t talk by phone every day), while he took James to the Cavanaugh Flight Museum. It was, after all, the Memorial
Day weekend, an appropriate time to go look at old warplanes. He had taken James there before, and the child had loved it.

In fact, just turning around in the car and looking in the backseat confirmed the wisdom of such a visit. There was James,
strapped into his seat, clutching one of his favorite toys: an airplane.

Some months ago, James had been wild about big trucks. He’d played with them all the time. But from the first moment that
he looked out a car window and spotted an airplane passing overhead, his heart lifted to the skies. Airplanes became his new
obsession. Because of that, Bruce decided that a trip to the James Cavanaugh Flight Museum would be the perfect father-son
outing. Bruce bought him a promotional video of the Navy’s Blue Angels acrobatic flight team, which James almost wore out.
He never got tired of watching it or playing with his toy airplanes. After that first visit, no more trucks, only airplanes.

That first trip to the museum back in February was a honey. At the time, the family was still (just barely) living in Texas;
Bruce was hopping back and forth between his job in Lafayette and his home in Dallas. Every other weekend he’d make the eight-hundred-mile
round trip. Andrea, living alone with James, badly needed a break. She was run down, not yet recovered from one of those loopy
household accidents that strike like thunder. It had happened in mid-January. James had gone into the upstairs bathroom and
turned on the hot water in the tub. Andrea heard the noise and ran upstairs and lunged across the toilet to grab her toddler
before he scalded himself, and in the process, she twisted a back muscle, aggravating an old injury.

It was bad. The former dancer had a weak back to begin with, but now she couldn’t even straighten up or walk. And she couldn’t
begin to carry James down the stairs. Bruce was in Lafayette, so she called her mother, Bobbi, who lived about ten minutes
away. Her mother arrived with a heating pad and a couple of Vicodin tablets (leftover from a tooth implant) and told her to
take it easy. And then she left.

But James still had to be watched and fed. Andrea crawled up the stairs with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich clenched between
her teeth. Since she could hardly stand or walk, it was the only way she could make it to the upstairs nursery. It took her
many sessions with a chiropractor to straighten out her back. But she was a dancer and used to pain, and filled with grit.

She kept managing alone, with Bruce coming home every other weekend to help out. Nevertheless, she dreamed of a long, blissful
afternoon in a beauty parlor, being pampered and primped, having her nails clipped and polished and her hair washed and set—not
having to keep that sentry eye out for her child’s safety.

And so, a month later, on his last weekend home before they all moved to Lafayette, when Bruce offered to take James off her
hands for the day, Andrea leaped at the offer.

Bruce wanted the day to be something special. He thought little James ought to have one more powerful memory of Dallas—something
to remind him of the beauty and charm of the city. They would spend an hour at the air museum, then go for lunch, then maybe
walk around downtown to drink in one last taste of Dallas, then head home. That was Bruce’s plan.

Bruce had been to the Cavanaugh several times. Whenever they had guests come to Dallas, he would take them to see the old
planes from World War I and World War II, the Korean War, and Vietnam. The planes were all so shiny and fresh—gleaming there
on the hangar floor, all in flyable condition, just waiting for a pilot.

James was eager to go. On the drive, Bruce babbled away about all the great things he would see, but James didn’t need convincing.
He was quietly eager. And then, amid an industrial clutter, the museum popped up. The first thing James saw was an old F-104
Thunderchief sitting behind a roped barricade. It looked so casually glamorous, sitting there on the tarmac, as if someone
had just parked a jet fighter while they went in for cigarettes.

James shrieked when he saw the plane.

The ticket office was right next to the museum gift shop, and James spent a lot of time browsing among the toy airplanes.
It took Bruce the purchase of the Blue Angels video “It’s a Kind of Magic” and a toy plane to get him out and into the display
hangars where they kept the real planes.