Soul Survivor (6 page)

The Cajun Dome is only about a mile away from West St. Mary Boulevard, so there was no way for Andrea and Bruce to avoid it—not
when they had to drive down West Congress Street and James’s eyes would bulge and he would plead to be taken to the fair.

And so, armed with antibacterial hand wipes, with their hearts in their throats, Andrea and Bruce took James to the fair.
Well, there was just no way to be careful. Bruce and James went on the Super Slide, which worked by simple gravity—no moving
parts. Bruce kept James between his legs while Andrea watched and took pictures from the sidelines. There was a gentle carousel,
but it didn’t get James’s blood flowing. He wanted one of those risky rides. They let him on the Spinning Bear and the high
Ferris wheel, but his favorite was the little helicopter that dipped and rose. He insisted on riding six or seven times. Nothing
felt safe.

They fed James ice cream and let him have his first cone of cotton candy, and he was a happy boy dancing around to the tinny
jingle—“Welcome to the Cajun Heartland State Fair. Go! Go! Fun! Fun!”—until everyone agreed that they needed a new jingle.

Soon after, the middle of June, something new happened during the nightmare. It was about a week after the fair. When James
started screaming, Andrea did what she usually did: came rushing in and rubbed his back and hovered over the crib. Then she
picked him up and carried him to the rocking chair. By now James was awake, and Andrea cooed soothing noises. Then, almost
offhandedly, she asked if he remembered what he’d been dreaming about.

And he said, “Airplane crash, on fire! Little man can’t get out.”

She didn’t call Bruce out of his sleep; he’d be grumpy and uninterested and dismiss it as no big deal. She would tell him
about it in the morning.

Andrea was unclear about the importance of what James had blurted out—not really blurted out, actually, but declared with
calm, emphatic confidence.

She hesitated to bring in the high priests of family wisdom—her mother and sisters, known collectively as “the panel”—because
she felt she had already used up her credibility with them.

This credibility gap had a long history. It went all the way back to the business with her pregnancy, with all kinds of specialists
and consultants and a long chain of worry that didn’t end with James’s birth. When James was a three-month-old and did not
push up his arms when Andrea laid him on his stomach, she was convinced that there was something terribly wrong with him.
By the time he was six months old, her sisters and her mother were fed up with her constant alarms—she was
always
worried.

During those first six months, Andrea was losing weight; she was sky-high nervous, and she couldn’t stop jabbering about this
sign or that, watching James under a microscope for some sign of trouble. She had spoken about everything incessantly to the
panel, and they finally gave her some useful advice.

“Go to the doctor and get a pill, for the love of God! You’re making us all crazy. James is fine;
you’re
the one with the problem.” And it was the power of their collective exasperation that convinced her.

Andrea’s doctor put her on Paxil. It was a godsend for her and James.

As a result, Andrea did something that she had never done before—she became a little reticent with her family. She withheld
the full horror of James’s nightmares and tried to limit her talk to the routine difficulties of a toddler. But after this
night, she did mention to her mother, almost lightly, that James was not sleeping well.

Bobbi took a conservative, reasonable position on the nightmares. She said it was the new house and the new environment. Then
Andrea spoke to her sister Becky, who asked if he was overtired at night. If he was not getting his naps in the afternoon,
he would be prone to night terrors. Keep him on schedule and make sure that he has his rest during the day, she said. But
even that hadn’t worked.

Andrea had been running around during the day, fixing up the house, and James had not gotten his regular naps. He would fall
asleep in the car, but that wasn’t the same thing. Andrea then made certain that he was home and in his crib for a proper
nap. For a few days, it worked. But then the nightmares returned. Even with the naps.

However, Andrea wasn’t yet ready to bring in the whole team. For one thing, another member of the panel had a greater call
on everyone’s sympathy. Jenny and her husband, Greg, couldn’t have a child and were actively trying to adopt. Furthermore,
they had to move out of Dallas to Trumbull, Connecticut, after he took a new job. And if that wasn’t enough, Jenny had a health
issue, a precancerous condition that had to be attended to.

Bringing up the nightmares again struck Andrea as almost selfish, a little heartless. Andrea already had her baby, albeit
with some sleep issues; Jenny was needier.

Meanwhile, there was still the house to sell back in Dallas. It was new, but Andrea spruced it up to make it more attractive
for the market. And there was the nervous wait for buyers. The house finally sold in late May, and the Leiningers realized
a modest profit, but it had taken a toll on their nerves.

At the same time, Bruce was under pressure to bring all of OSCA’s human resources programs up to date and in line with federal
labor guidelines so that the company could go public and rake in some cash and then be sold. It was not unlike what he’d had
to do with his home in Dallas: sprucing it up so that it could be sold.

This was a common business practice. A large corporation, Great Lakes Chemical, was carving off a small chunk of itself to
raise money.

Not that Bruce knew much about the oil and gas industry—he was a specialist in human resources. That meant that he was flying
back and forth between Lafayette, Louisiana, and Great Lakes Chemical’s corporate headquarters in Indiana to report on his
progress.

In June, the company was days away from making the public offering, and everyone was on edge. No one was more jittery than
Bruce, shaping benefit packages in a completely unfamiliar industry. He was determined to figure out a fair compensation for
guys who were out on the deep rigs, working twenty-one days straight then taking seven days off.

A few weeks later, they were on their way to Lafayette Regional Airport. Bruce was heading to a business trip in Indiana.
James was in the backseat, playing with one of the toy airplanes he had picked up in Texas, and Bruce was wondering if he
had packed enough warm clothing and all the right files. Suddenly, as they turned into the airport road and the big jets came
into view, out of the backseat came this little voice:

“Daddy’s airplane crash. Big fire!”

There was a stunned moment inside the car. Both parents exchanged looks of alarm.

What?

“Daddy’s airplane crash. Big fire!”

Bruce exploded: “No! James, do not say that. Airplanes don’t crash! Do not say that ever again! Do you hear me?” He was barking.

The plane that James held in his hand had no propellers. He had repeatedly crashed his toy plane into a coffee table in the
den, breaking off the propellers. In fact, he had done that to all the planes that Bruce had bought him in Dallas—crashed
them all into the table again and again, breaking off the props.

“Daddy’s airplane crash! Big fire!”

Bruce did not take it lightly. He was the one about to get on an airplane—something he never did without anxiety or without
praying—and here his son was, making this ominous forecast. He thought James had deliberately picked that moment and calculated
its impact to say something terrible. No such thing. James was barely two. And what came out of his mouth was not malice or
perversity; it was the spontaneous report of someone else.

At the time, Bruce didn’t understand. He assumed that James was just being mischievous. The child, aware of his father’s edgy
state, was trying to make him even more nervous, he thought. As if a two-year-old could work out such a complex formulation
to bug Daddy.

A
S THEIR LIVES progressed, each Leininger was busy, wrapped up in his or her own travails: James, having his four or five nightmares
a week and, during the day, crashing his toy airplanes, breaking off the propellers, and turning the wooden coffee table into
distressed furniture; Andrea, fixing up the house while watching James go from nightmare to nightmare, and relating it all
to her family, who had become numb to Andrea’s story, given her tendency for drama; Bruce, working into the night to help
take OSCA public.

The deadline for the initial public offering was June 14, and the filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission had
to be complete and perfect.

I was working hard—very hard—and there was that pleasurably tingly combination of exhaustion and exhilaration when you have
done righteous work and you know it. Pride. Getting it right. I tell you, it took long, long hours to get it right. The health
care and the retirement plan, the insurance and the complicated compensation packages—it took a long time, and it took a lot
out of me. I’d come home just like I said—exhilarated and exhausted, feeling that terrific sense of… accomplishment… and I
was just looking for a quiet place, some peaceful moment, to drink it all in, to savor what I’d done. Then falling into that
deep, deep virtuous sleep… interrupted by shrieks in the middle of the night.

On the evening of June 14, having completed all his work for the company, Bruce came home to another nightmare, and this one
had nothing to do with James.

Bruce expected a happy respite—the reward and relief after the company finally went public. Here was the payoff for all the
hard labor. Now the pressure was finally off. He and his colleagues could relax and savor the prize. He left the office at
six thirty and picked up a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon before heading home to what he thought would be a blissful candlelit
dinner.

But when Bruce came through the front door, the phone was ringing. He assumed it was someone calling to congratulate him on
a job well done, to pat him on the back. But Robert Hollier, his boss, was phoning from an airport to summon him back into
action. “There’s been an accident out on one of the rigs. Get your ass back to the office.… I’m flying back now.”