Soul Survivor (7 page)

Andrea was flummoxed. What was going on? She was throwing hand signals for an explanation while Bruce made “shut up” signs.
He hung up, and his face had turned that grim, ashen shade of trouble.

“What is it?” she asked.

The candles and dinner would have to wait, he said. Andrea was bobbing up and down, trying to get some information, and all
Bruce could say was that there had been “an accident… I’ll call you when I know more…”

And then he was gone.

One of the men working on a rig out in the Gulf had gone into the water. He was a young guy, in his mid-thirties, knocked
off the platform by a loose high-pressure hose during a “fracing” operation—a tricky and dangerous technique to relieve pressure.
The rock under a rig has to be “fractured” so that the gas or oil can escape into the well and up out of the ground. If a
worker gets too close and the hose gets loose, he can be cut in half. In this case, the rigger, a senior equipment operator,
was knocked into the Gulf when the hose burst loose.

The Coast Guard had been called; a helicopter was circling; ships from various companies were on station, performing a night
search around the rig. But it looked hopeless. When you went into the water out there, in the dark, with all the currents
and chop of the sea, unless you were plucked out quickly, the chances of a rescue were slight.

And it had been five long hours since Mike went over the side.

The rigger had a wife and two kids living thirty miles away in a trailer park in Rayne, and nobody wanted the guy’s wife and
kids to hear it on television. It fell to Bruce to break the news. He got to Rayne about eleven p.m. When Mike’s wife came
to the door and saw the grim cluster of men, she immediately knew. She wouldn’t sit down, just paced in a frantic way, and
then she began to shake. She asked if her husband was dead, and Bruce said they knew only that there was an accident and they
were doing everything possible to find him.

She was trying to be brave, Bruce recalled. He could see and sense her effort. He reached out to touch her hand, but she pulled
away and paced in a circle and began to weep. Her face had a haunted, empty expression—a look that Bruce knew would stay with
him forever.

When they got back to the office, they were told that a Coast Guard cutter got to the rig at midnight, but it wouldn’t put
down a diver. It was a matter of policy. Not in the dark, not in the tricky water near an oil rig, where a diver could get
tangled up and die.

Bruce went ballistic. He got on the phone and started yelling at some Coast Guard flunky. “If it was a Kennedy down in that
water, we’d have a fleet out there!” he bellowed. And then he hung up.

The company organized its own dive team and had them in the water by that afternoon. But it was too late. It took the divers
less than twenty minutes to find the lost rigger; he was hung up in the submerged superstructure. When he was knocked off
the rig, the current carried him back under the rig, where he drowned.

It was the only fatality that OSCA had ever had, but its effect endured. Not just because it happened at an auspicious moment
and tore the heart out of what should have been a shining hour—it was a piercing reminder that theirs was a dangerous and
treacherous business. And from then on, the company always kept grief counselors on call.

After this, Bruce became somewhat distant, paying little attention to his son’s bad dreams and obsession with airplanes, or
even to the soft, pesky voice of his wife, alerting him to the fact that the nightmares were not getting better and that a
new ingredient had been introduced—the talk about a crashed plane and the fire and the little man trapped inside, and the
dreams, had started to intrude on James’s waking life.

But to Bruce, this news was vague and unreal and, if he were to take it seriously, disquieting. So he withdrew, which was
understandable. He was still dealing with complications over the drowned rigger and his widow and her young children. He had
insurance issues to settle and a distraught family to be reassured and counseled.

Andrea knew that she had to handle the domestic front. Bruce had his own nightmare. It was up to her to get to the bottom
of James’s troubled sleep.

A
NDREA’S PLAN to crack the mystery of James’s bad dreams had to be crowded in between the difficulties that were falling like
a summer downpour that season on West St. Mary Boulevard. High on the list of Andrea’s requirements was bending the new house
to her will.

Technically, it was an old house, a seventy-year-old Acadian-style home, with old bathtubs and old sinks and old toilets and
old cabinets. But it was new to the Leiningers. For the first time in their eight-year marriage, Andrea and Bruce had moved
into a place that didn’t smell of fresh paint and new wood. It was the first time they weren’t the original owners.

The house had been empty for four months when they moved in, and it had accumulated a layer of grime, in addition to its having
a dated, stuffy style that clashed with Andrea’s lively taste. It would take months before this home measured up to her Mary
Poppins standards. But Andrea thrived on hard work. In fact, it was a welcome distraction from the eeriness that came regularly
in the night.

So she rolled up her sleeves and went at it. She relined the cabinets and drawers, cleaned the claw feet of the old bathtubs,
scrubbed the water stains out of the old sinks, and replaced the toilet seats—but left the large toilet tanks because she
didn’t approve of a dainty flush.

The house was resistant and tough, but so was she. Solid walls and incompatible colors had to conform to her will.

The first thing that struck her was the sickening shade of pale pink in the hallways—a fading eyesore.

Bruce was no help. Not in this. He had experienced a true crisis at work, and between that and the nightmares, he just wasn’t
available when it came to decorating the new house.

Every day, while James took his morning nap, she’d snap into action. Out would come the ten-foot ladder, the paint and mixing
bucket, the brushes and rollers and the blue painter’s tape. Quickly, she would mix the paint, then climb up the ladder. She
would tape the moldings; then it was back down to street level to tape the baseboards. She worked like a demon to slap on
at least one full coat of paint before James woke up from his nap and got underfoot.

The wallpaper in the kitchen was another hideous challenge. Its blue and white gingham clashed with the fabulous hand-painted
Portuguese tile that covered the backsplashes. And for this job she enlisted James’s help. And he was really good at it: tearing
off the old wallpaper. He had a two-year-old’s true gift for destruction.

Andrea failed, however, to make clear to James the big picture. Undeniably, they had fun pulling and tearing off the top layer
of old wallpaper. But the problem then came after she pasted on the new blue toile wallpaper, stood back to admire it, then
took an unscheduled bathroom break without changing James’s marching orders. It was only a moment. But when she returned,
she found her little self-starter tearing down the new wallpaper. It only took one shrill outburst to convince James that
Mommy wanted to keep this new wall covering intact. He was also a fast learner.

James’s bedroom, of course, cried out for a makeover. The dark green solid wood shutters and floral wallpaper gave the room
a dim, suffocating mood. But this paper seemed embedded in the walls. It took a few weeks for her to remove it with a scoring
device and solvent. She replaced the old covering with a tone-on-tone taupe textured pattern with a border of vintage planes
flying over open country. Then she flooded the room with light by removing the sealed-in shutters and replacing them with
venetian blinds.

And it became a brighter and lighter room, with two windows facing south and two facing east and all of James’s familiar furniture
in place.

She would make this home open, warm, welcoming. It would reflect the high hopes of the family. On that score, she was determined.
When she had declared this move into the Lafayette house her last, she meant it. And so she attacked the business of fixing
it up with a certain fierce, protective energy.

“Do you like this, James?” she would ask, laying out the colors and fabrics she would install. He would smile and nod, and
together, chirping and singing, they would go about the job, stripping the walls and tearing down the shutters and letting
in the light—not that it alleviated the nightly terrors.

James’s nightmares had now become Andrea’s nightmares; she didn’t sleep, not with both eyes shut. Some part of her was always
alert, always listening for the first scream. For months, she was never able to drop into a deep, refreshing state of complete
rest.

Nevertheless, even under all this tension and pressure, she carved out one area of perfect peace. Every evening, while Bruce
and James read together or sat quietly talking, she climbed into the tub with the claw feet for a long, lingering bath. She
would light candles, put on a CD, sip a glass of wine, and soak for two hours. She stayed in the bath until she turned into
a prune, until she felt the tension dissolve in the soapy water. Until the pounding stopped in her head and she was ready
to face the dreaded nightmares. It was her secret garden.

In late June, Bruce had to leave for a week to attend to family matters in New Jersey. On the 19th, Gregory, his fifteen-year-old
son from his first marriage, would graduate from the eighth grade. The next day, his twin eighteen-year-old daughters, Andrea
and Valerie, would graduate from Bridgewater Raritan High School, the same school from which Bruce had graduated thirty-three
years earlier. He could not be among the missing.

Bruce remembered the empty feeling he had had during his own graduations. His father, a blue-collar worker and ferociously
proud of it, never got past the tenth grade. And he never got over his antipathy toward school and education. After serving
in the Marine Corps, Ted Leininger had struggled to rise out of the coal mines to become a skilled laborer. He didn’t see
the need for all those fancy degrees, and so he was never there for Bruce’s milestones.

It left a wound, and as Bruce grew older, he vowed that he would never miss one of his children’s commencements.

Nothing was going to stop him from flying to New Jersey to attend the graduations of three of his four children from that
first, failed marriage. Andrea planned to accompany him to the airport on that Monday morning in June, then take the car home.

As the Leiningers headed into the parking lot at Lafayette Regional Airport, Andrea was in the passenger seat, and James was
in the back, lashed into his car seat and holding his toy airplane. Bruce was driving, fretting about this and that, vaguely
worried—as he always was—about flying, not really paying attention to anything but his own qualms, until he heard a little
voice from the backseat:

“Daddy’s airplane crash—big fire!”

He’d heard it before, but it was still a shock. Bruce had to remind himself that James was only twenty-six months old, that
he was unable to gauge the potency of what he was saying. He was still in diapers, still resisting toilet training. He might
seem more grown up, have moments of rare maturity, but he was just a tiny boy, a toddler.

And, of course, theirs was not an ordinary father-and-son relationship. Bruce and James had already forged titanium bonds.
When Bruce came home from work at night, James would run out to the car to greet him, not even letting his father unbuckle
himself. He would leap onto Bruce’s lap and play driver, fiddling with every dial and knob on the dashboard. He was a delight,
filled with all the innocent childish impulses for fast food and candy and harmless mischief.

Bruce had a great tolerance for James’s monkey business. For instance, there was the Saturday afternoon when Andrea went shopping
and Bruce dozed off in his chair. When Andrea came home, Bruce rushed to help with the bundles.

“Where’s James?” she asked.

He didn’t know. There was a scramble as he and Andrea made a room-to-room search of the house. Finally, Bruce made a quick
left turn in the master bedroom, and as he started into the bathroom, he felt the squish, squish of water. There was James,
standing triumphantly on the counter, laughing as the water overflowed the sink and cascaded down the lovely terraces he had
created out of the counter drawers.

Bruce might well have been livid. James had made a terrible mess. But when he saw how inventive James had been—using the drawers
as stairs to get to the sink, then flooding the sink until the water poured down into each drawer until it, too, overflowed
and became a perfect waterfall—he was more impressed than angry.

And out of old guilt and an awakened sense of obligation, Bruce had sworn that James would never miss out on what his other
four children had lost: the steady presence of a loving father. Every Saturday morning he loaded James into a kind of backpack
child carrier, and together they made pancakes. Then they would watch
Looney Tunes
or
SpongeBob SquarePants
until Andrea woke up and set them all off on the rest of the day.