Soul Survivor (8 page)

Even when this primitive unease about flying was aroused in him, even under great provocation, it was not possible for Bruce
to turn cruelly on his son.

“Daddy’s airplane crash! Big fire.”

Bruce’s hands tightened on the steering wheel, and he said through clenched teeth, “You are not supposed to say that, James!
Airplanes don’t crash! Daddy’s airplane will not crash!”

He had thought he had made it clear to James that he couldn’t say that about airplanes crashing. He had thought James understood
that it upset Daddy. Why was James saying it again? Maybe he just didn’t grasp how disturbing it was.

But James’s outburst did not come out of his mouth with any wicked intent. It was an offhand thing, mild; he might as well
have been saying that he saw a pretty cloud in the sky.

On the flight to New Jersey, Bruce thought more about it. He came up with an explanation of sorts. Children were afraid of
the dark. But they grew out of it. Someday he would stop saying that.

This would soon pass. That was his hope. It was a slim thing to hold on to—hope—but he had no other plan. Hope was his only
strategy.

Andrea, too, tried to figure out a strategy. James’s night terrors were not diminishing, and they were leaching more and more
into the daylight. She saw Bruce’s face tighten when James predicted a crash. She felt her own weariness. She was at the end
of her rope. Something had to be done.

Maybe it was time to convene “the panel.”

T
HEY WERE A TIGHT, lighthearted bunch, the Scoggin girls. That is, they were close in a peculiar, wacky, intense kind of way.
They spoke every single day by phone, and when they spoke, they talked about everything, evaluating every move, every encounter,
every purchase, every decision. Is this the right house? Is this the right job? Is that child just misbehaving, or is it a
diet problem? They twisted and turned over and studied the smallest details of their lives as if they were parsing sacred
texts.

However, when it came to actually solving problems, they often were more like the Ritz Brothers than Dr. Joyce Brothers. Nevertheless,
it was undeniably a great comfort for all of them to have their sisters just a speed-dial away.

They were three: Becky, thirty-four, the youngest, the laid-back mediator; Jenny, thirty-six, the sassy one who was always
ready to leap into the fray; and Andrea, thirty-eight, the big sister, who tried to be everyone’s best friend while explaining
every option.

Their mother, Bobbi, sixty-five, often liked to consider herself just another one of the girls. And there were grounds for
that. She was petite and pretty and very youthful and slightly madcap, and she acted a full generation below her own chronological
age. Bruce had often said that if he hadn’t seen Andrea first, he might have dated Bobbi.

She was definitely not an ordinary parent. In fact, the parenting guidelines that she espoused would never be found in a book
by Dr. Spock.

Consider the famous pajama party. It was Andrea’s thirteenth birthday, April 17, 1975, and she was allowed to invite five
girls from her seventh-grade class for a slumber party. They ate Oreos and potato chips and drank Dr Pepper and stayed up
late and tried to get into some teenage mischief—which, after all, was the whole point of a slumber party. For that brief
evening, they were adolescent outlaws. They made prank phone calls. (“Is this Mr. Fox? You’re wanted back at the zoo!”) They
held a séance and tried to raise one of the girls by uttering incantations: “Light as a feather, stiff as a board!” Soon it
was after midnight, and since they had achieved no levitation, it was time for something really edgy.

Parental supervision had been suspended—that is, both Bobbi and Andrea’s father, Jerry, were asleep down the hall. One of
the girls made a command decision to “wrap” a neighbor’s home in toilet paper. The technical name for this was “TP-ing.” Everyone
agreed that it was the perfect thing to do. They went down to the local 7-Eleven and stocked up on toilet paper—one of those
really big multipack jobs people get when they intend to hunker down for the winter.

When the girls returned home to go forward with the actual raid, they got busted. Standing there in her pajamas was Andrea’s
mother, fully awake and fully aware of what a gaggle of giggling girls intended to do with weaponized toilet paper.

“There will be no vandalizing of property,” she declared firmly; it was a grown-up fiat. However, she was willing to unleash
the hyped-up girls on somebody’s trees.

TP-ing a tree would be sufficiently annoying to satisfy the mischief factor but would not be actual vandalism.

The girls were okay with this, but they had one more suggestion. To make certain they did it correctly—to ensure that there
would be no destruction of private property—the girls asked Bobbi to come along. “Sure!” replied the only grown-up in the
room.

They picked the target house, they picked the trees, they picked the emergency rendezvous, and they unwrapped the paper. The
attack was going perfectly until Bobbi spotted the Winnebago in the driveway. That was too tempting a target of opportunity
to pass up, and like any good combat commander, Bobbi volunteered to lead the assault.

But her first attempt to heave a fresh roll of toilet paper over the RV didn’t quite make it. The roll was stuck on the roof,
so Bobbi climbed up to retrieve it. But just at that moment—up on the roof of the RV with the incriminating paper in her hand—the
porch light came on and the owner of the house came barging out, screaming, “What the hell’s going on here!”

Execute emergency plan B! The girls scattered to the four winds. When they arrived all breathless and excited at the predetermined
rendezvous, they called the “roll,” so to speak. Everyone had made it safely but Bobbi. For ten minutes they waited nervously,
speculating that the owner had nabbed her and called the police. They even imagined this thirty-seven-year-old mother of four
being cuffed and grilled and booked for criminal mischief—when down the street came Bobbi, wearing a sheepish grin.

She explained that the owner came out of his house busting mad, cursing and checking all the damage, but he was so busy shaking
his head at the sorry sight of his tree that he completely ignored the Winnebago. He never even saw her. She had pancaked
herself on the roof of the truck and waited him out. Then, carefully, she climbed down and softly made her way to the rallying
point. It was, nevertheless, a very close call.

The girls spent the rest of the night in the kitchen, laughing and finishing off the Oreos, while Bobbi went back to bed,
exhausted.

This, then, was the makeup of the vaunted “panel” that Andrea would consult about her continually growing worry over James’s
nightmares:

• Jenny (Aunt G. J.), who would bring the torches and pitchforks if it came to that;

• Becky, who would offer sensible, tactful suggestions and, often enough, bright insight;

• Andrea, who would call for unity and a plan and try to mend hurt feelings when members clashed;

• Bobbi, who was capriciously opinionated, maddeningly cautious, and, ultimately, completely unpredictable.

With this formidable posse ready to roll, Andrea believed that she had no real choice but to send out the bat signal. So far,
no one else had had any really good ideas about James. Doctors, educators, friends—they all called the nightmares a normal
stage of childhood. And the fact was that both Andrea and Bruce had accepted the diagnosis, even after James’s first harrowing
airport forecast. But there came an event after which it could no longer be lightly dismissed. One night in late June, James
was kicking and thrashing, and Andrea finally came to hear and understand precisely what her little son was saying.

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

The thing she noticed—the truly unnerving thing—was that he was kicking and thrashing exactly like someone who was really
trapped inside a burning airplane!

It was then that she pulled Bruce out of his sleep. “You have to listen to this. You have to hear what he’s saying!”

That was the night Bruce stood in the doorway, stunned by what he saw and heard.

It was not, as the casual readers of the child care books suggested, something “developmental.” It had nothing to do with
the geographic shift from Dallas to Lafayette. It was no passing whim of a repressed tyke.

They couldn’t figure out what it was.

Bruce shook his head, baffled, but Andrea—always the advocate for action—convened the panel.

The panel functioned in various modes. There was the daily mode in which the everyday gossip was replaced by a definite issue
that needed intense discussion: one or more pregnancies, potty training tactics, choosing between public and private schools,
how and why the husbands were driving them crazy. Then they had their alert mode in which an anxiety was alleviated—we’re
having a Thanksgiving dinner; please bring enough stuffing to avoid a repetition of “Stuffingate,” the year when Becky’s husband,
Derald, exploded when they ran out of stuffing.

The emergency mode, or case red, was only used for true danger, such as when someone lost a job, or a husband was thought
to be straying, or there was a major disease to be dealt with.

So far, Andrea was still operating in the alert mode.

The routine for summoning the panel was set pretty firmly. Every day Andrea made James his hot breakfast—scrambled eggs, cinnamon
toast, pancakes, or French toast—then put him on the potty (which he resisted with the determination of a rock) while she
washed the dishes and made the daily calls. The phone would be cradled between her shoulder and her ear, and she fried more
than one cordless phone when it fell into the dishwater.

She called Bobbi and told her the story and got her opinion. Then she called Becky and repeated the story, along with Bobbi’s
take on it. Finally, she called Jen and repeated the story and Bobbi’s and Becky’s reactions. She had not yet mastered the
conference call. By the third call, she was getting a little dizzy repeating the story and juggling everyone’s answer. But
she was determined to get all the girls in on the case.

At first, they were all pretty dismissive. They had heard this song before. They felt that there were other, bigger items
on the agenda: Jen’s attempt to adopt a child, Becky’s house hunting, Bobbi’s complaints about her boss (she was a paralegal
in a law office).

But Andrea pulled them back. “We have to talk about this, she insisted. It’s four or five nights a week and it’s really, really
loud.”

The next thing she did was to send everyone the passage about night terrors in a child care book. “First read this,” she said.
“It’s homework. Then we’ll talk.”

The consensus was that this was not a true crisis. It was something developmental, normal; it would expire in its own natural
time. You just had to be patient and deal with it—go to his crib and soothe him. It would be difficult, but no more difficult
than getting up three times a night with an infant. As a group, the panel was not very concerned.

The group had an immediate answer: James was too wrapped up in airplanes. Get him distracted with other toys. Bobbi sent boxes
of Thomas the Tank Engine cars, complete with depots and tracks.

Becky thought that James had probably heard something on the news about a plane crash. He was just showing some normal anxiety.
After all, his father was in the air a lot.

Jenny was the only one who took it to a higher level. “Oh, my gosh!” she said. “What did you think? What did you do? Are you
freaked out?” But then, Jenny was the sister who had a
National Enquirer
attraction to high drama.

So Andrea took their collective advice to heart. She hid the Blue Angel video—told James that it broke—and tried to divert
his attention from airplanes. She made certain that he had his naps, screened out all violent newscasts, and tried to repress
showing her panic.