Replacement Child (27 page)

My father could not breathe. The fireman caught him just as his knees gave way and lowered him to the curb.

When he mustered his will to look up again, my father saw no evidence of a plane. It looked more like a bomb had hit the row of houses.

He asked the fireman, “Did you see a little girl running away?”

“Everyone who escaped is at Battin High.”

Pouncing on this hope, my father headed across the street.

The school gym, being used for triage, had the look of a battleground. The injured were strewn around the room as paramedics moved quickly from one to another, their quiet work punctuated by moans. Bloodied bandages were piled in heaps. Gurneys were loaded and wheeled across the hardwood floor, sounding like muffled machine gun fire. My father walked slowly around the gymnasium, searching each young face for Donna. The back of one little girl’s head looked like her, but as she turned her face to him, his hope was dashed.

The neighbors,
he thought,
Donna ran to a neighbor’s house. Maybe the Earlmans’ up the street.
He found a phone in the
school office and dialed all the neighbors within walking distance but got no answers.

Back out on the street, he scrutinized each window of his home for signs of life.

“Al Mandel?” He heard a voice, and a fireman touched his arm.

“Al, you should be at the hospital. We’ll look for your daughter, and someone will find you.”

My father walked toward the hospital.

1975—1979

I
WAS TRAVELING WITH
my most recent band on my twenty-first birthday. The band was staying in an old farmhouse in Troy, New York. It was a white clapboard with a wraparound porch and a big backyard. A small kitchen saved us considerable money on food. I had one of the four bedrooms to myself, and I commandeered one of the bathrooms. We drove forty minutes every night to our gig at the Top Hat bar. We usually played at Hiltons and Marriotts, but this job was a low point in our tour. The bar was a run-down establishment where we actually performed on the top of a bar that had been converted to a makeshift stage. Dancing in four-inch heels on the slippery surface was a risky balancing act each night.

The guys in the band were pretty good about having a “chick” with them. They treated me like their sister for the most part. Except our lead guitarist. I had to keep an eye on him.

Early on the morning of my birthday, I took off for a drive by myself, looking for some way to make the day special. Even living this kind of nonstructured life, I was beginning to feel too complacent, like it was all getting to be too normal. On this
birthday especially I wanted to strike out and feel some adrenaline and know that I wasn’t playing it safe even if that was what my parents had tried to instill in me. They were still reeling from the fact that I was traveling alone with five men.

I spotted an airfield in the distance and aimed for it. A sign out in front read G
LIDER
R
IDES
$25.00! A steep price since I was only making $200 a week, but the idea of the flight called to me. Flying on a wisp of wind would be just the thing to set the tone for my twenty-first year.

There were six small planes lining the runway. I found a small man inside a small building on the strip.

“How do the glider rides work?” I asked.

“Hi, I’m Ed,” he said, extending his hand. “Come on over and take a look.”

Ed walked me over to a sleek white plane that sat low to the ground. The wingspan seemed three times wider than the other planes. Very narrow, very long. The cockpit had just enough room for one person. Behind it was a second cockpit with its own controls. He pointed to that one.

“You sit back there and I sit up front. Another plane with an engine,” he laughed, “tows us up to three thousand feet, finds a good gust of wind, and lets us go.”

The glider had no propellers of its own.

“What happens if the wind stops?” I asked Ed.

“We just find the right current and drift back down to the airstrip. Or we drop like a rock!” Ed was quite the comedian.

It was starting to warm up from the cool morning. A few white puffs dotted the deep-blue sky.

“Okay. When can I go up?” I handed him my $25.

“Now is good.”

Ed disappeared for ten minutes and returned with the pilot for the powered plane who taxied a Cessna up to the glider and maneuvered it in to attach a tether line.

He told me to hop in, but there was no door, so I lifted myself over the shallow side of the back cockpit and climbed over the stick in the middle.

“That stick is what makes us go up and down—in case you have to use it.”

I was too paralyzed with fear to ask him why I would have to use it. The fear felt good. The risk made me feel alive.

I strapped myself in, put on a helmet, and tested out the radio that let us talk to each other.

“Well, Judy, here we go,” he said. “When we get up to altitude, I’m going to let you fly her for a while. How does that sound?”

“Great, really great,” I said, my heart pounding in my throat.

Ed gave a thumbs-up to the Cessna. I listened to the engines wind up from a gradual purr to a full-throttle crescendo. We were towed down the runway and were airborne in seconds.

The glider lifted lightly over the trees like a kite on a string.

“Okay, let ’er go!” Ed called to the Cessna pilot.

The engine noise faded and the Cessna dove down and away from us. I heard only a faint whoosh, a quiet wind as we rose higher off the horizon. The peaceful quiet took over my thoughts. More and more land came into my picture-frame view as we soared upward, the expanse spreading out below me. I could see
where each road led, where the ends were dead, where they circled back into themselves. It was a clear vision we never see from the ground, and it gave me a swelling sense of control.

Ed dipped the left wing and we descended slowly, then rode a draft of wind to climb higher.

“I’m a little tired,” Ed said when we were high above the clouds. “I’m going to let you have it now. Take hold of the steering wheel in front of you and just hold it straight to glide for a while. If you feel us going down too much, pull the stick toward you.”

I turned the wheel slowly to the right. The plane dipped down, and I pulled up on the stick to rise in a rush of power.

I felt bright blue. Sun hot. Straining toward the top of the next current.

I
TRIED TO
pinpoint exactly when it started. Was it when I began traveling with the band, or staying out late singing at local clubs? Was it when Steven got a job at an insurance company, and we inhabited different worlds: me sleeping until 2:00
PM
and getting home at 4:00
AM
; him rising at 6:00
AM
to go to work at a desk?

When I thought of us in that small apartment in college, not being able to untangle from each other’s body long enough to go out for pizza, I was at a loss to understand what happened to us. I was blind to the warning signs after the first-lust of our new love started to ebb. I needed affection and reinforcement from him. A touch, a look, a word. Steven was removed, a cool island.

I knew something was wrong when we took a three-hour car trip and didn’t say a word to each other. Usually, I would try to
initiate some kind of conversation, but I decided to test out just how long he could go without speaking to me on this trip. My anger had begun to gestate into a fully formed monster when I started to count the weeks, then months, between having sex. The retreat fed every seed of insecurity that my father had planted. I wasn’t attractive enough, not smart enough, not worthy of love.

As we lost some vital connection, we would not speak for days at a time. When I reached for him, he would pull away. He would feign sleep when I came to bed. He would turn his head when I approached. He was unhappy, and I couldn’t fix it. Then, he hatched a plan to go to South America to be a photographer for
National Geographic
—without me. That plan never materialized, but the thought of it had driven a wedge between us. I was hurt that he’d even considered it. When he decided to take some time, alone, to think things through, our marriage began an unstoppable unraveling.

I was singing at a lounge in a hotel nearby our Connecticut home at the time, just after Steven had moved out. When a guy at the bar started talking me up, I was ripe for an adventure. Gary was a pilot and told me how only a short drive away there was a place to skydive. I had another vodka and tonic.

“It’s fantastic!” Gary told me. “We take up around fifteen skydivers and they all jump out together for a free fall. Then we dive the plane fast to get out of their way, or we might wing a few. You’ll love it!”

I wasn’t sure if I should take the trip with this man I barely knew, but when he described it, I felt a chill down the back of my neck, and I knew I would say yes.

Before I knew it, I was in some kind of military cargo plane. It had a giant hatchback that opened from the top with a ramp for driving in trucks, tanks, and large equipment.

The jumpers piled into the back of the plane, laughing and talking loudly. Their bright orange, red, and yellow jumpsuits rustled against the gray walls.

Gary strapped me in and helped me put on a helmet.

We climbed quickly to ten thousand feet, high enough for the free fall, in the cloudless summer sky. I had a mile-wide view in the copilot seat: a thrush of green, black strips of road, brown and white brushstroke buildings. Straight ahead, a deep-blue pallet. For a while, I recognized some landmarks—the highway, the airport, the center of the town. Then it all blurred to small dots and lines.

“Ready, guys?” Gary said through the loudspeaker to the back of the plane. “I’ll give you a count of ten. Try to jump one right after the other so you don’t get separated. You have plenty of space up here.”

He counted them down, and I felt the weight of the plane shift as they jumped one by one. We lurched into a straight-down dive.

“Hold on, Jude.”

I felt like my ears were going to explode, and I pulled on Gary’s sleeve for help.

“Hold your nose and blow—it will relieve the pressure. Like this.”

I did—and it worked.

We circled the jumpers from a safe quarter-mile distance. I could see them holding hands in their circular formation. A marionette sky sculpture, floating in slow motion, suspended from nothing. Then, all at once, they let go their hands, separated, and pulled their chutes, looking like slices of rainbow cutting the bright blue.

2006

I
’
M SITTING IN
my kitchen, stunned, my hand still on the phone. I have just had a conversation with my sister that confirms, after all these years, what I have always suspected: She was much closer to my mother than I ever was. I know this now because my mother confided in Linda the secret of her life.

I had sent her the draft of the manuscript last week for her comments, and she called me this morning.

“I have to tell you something, but I don’t know if I should,” Linda began the conversation.

I was confused, and I wondered if I had gotten some details wrong in the story.

“No, that’s not it. There’s just something that will make more sense to you if I tell you, but I promised Mom I would never tell you. She was afraid of what you would think of her.”