Soul Survivor (20 page)

The tingle of the news from San Diego set everything in Andrea’s world in motion. It was too much information. How can you
accept the answer to something that shifts the ground under your feet—the solution to a tectonic mystery—without some thought,
some digestive moment?

Was that all there was?

Jack Larsen was alive!

No, of course not; she had to postpone the explosive moment. She had to wait until she had Bruce sitting there in the living
room, face-to-face, ready to be grilled. You couldn’t just catch the moon in your hands and then go out and set the table
for dinner.

But that was exactly what she had to do. Andrea had a child and a life, and people depending upon her to perform her daily
tasks.

And, as always, life was complicated. Andrea had the normal range of human weaknesses. She might seem like a tower of strength,
but a mass of little character flaws were suppressed behind that bright smile.

In spite of the apparent fruits of having attended the reunion, Andrea felt a tinge of envy about being left behind. Why should
Bruce get to go on a deluxe four-day “fact-finding” trip to California when she had to stay home and… cope? A small, nasty
little grudge.

And so she turned to some nice little compensations—Andrea always managed to find a silver lining. When Bruce was gone, she
had James all to herself. They were like a couple of kids in a conspiracy of play dates and junk food. They went out for Mexican
lunch and saw
Lilo and Stitch
at the movies. And while Bruce insisted on the family ritual of a sit-down dinner with a thick main protein source, she could
go a little wild when it was just James. She staged a “breakfast for dinner night” with scrambled eggs and toast. And she
could prepare the unmanly quiche, which her son ate and actually liked. At night, James would crawl into the Dada bed with
her, and—a small bonus—she had one less bed to make in the morning.

The whole routine at the house took a relaxed breath and underwent a kind of slackening, a loosening up.

James got to ask his best friend, Aaron Brown, over to play in the backyard. They were classmates at the Asbury United Methodist
Church’s pre-K 4 class. Andrea loved the school; she was delighted right off the bat when she saw James jump out of the car,
throw out both arms like wings, then run and skip and twist across the sidewalk, flying into the classroom.

He had made a lot of friends at the school, but no one closer than Aaron Brown, a fair-haired little cherub.

From time to time, Andrea also invited another classmate, Natalie St. Martin, a cute little brunette, to join them in the
backyard playground. Natalie’s mom, Lynette, had become one of Andrea’s own grown-up playmates. The two moms would sit on
the patio sipping coffee while the kids ran around the yard.

But it was when James was with Aaron that Andrea dreamed up the really hot little-guy games. The favorite was the precision
bombing attack on wounded toys. Andrea would fill a bucket of little balloons with water, then haul it out to the yard. The
boys were waiting on the stairway landing of the two-story garage. They would lug the bucket up to the platform, then drop
the loaded balloons on the scattered remnants of designated toy targets at the base. Splash one cracked cruiser! It was a
loud and thrilling game.

Andrea watched from a safe, dry distance as the boys went into their sloppy, squealing bombing runs—two happy four-year-olds
at play.

It was all so innocent. Except that there was a sad undercurrent. Aaron’s mother, Carol, had been diagnosed with cancer and
was undergoing a brutal round of chemotherapy at nearby Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital. Andrea made it her business to find
Aaron a playful distraction from what was going on at the other end of West St. Mary Boulevard.

When the boys had almost run out of balloons, Andrea fixed a hot lunch: pigs in blankets or macaroni and cheese, or grilled
cheese sandwiches and soup; fruit and a vegetable were always part of the meal. They’d all hold hands and say grace and talk
of school or kid stuff—whatever was on their minds. Then it was back to the bombing runs.

By the end of the afternoon, the backyard was a rainbow of multicolored remnants, and James and Aaron were flushed and out
of breath.

They would come in and eat cookies and drink milk and watch cartoons on TV. It was always a soft, sweet, and successful diversion—until
Aaron’s father came to pick him up and take him home. The Leininger house became a sanctuary for Aaron as, day after day,
James and Andrea kept his mind off the hard reality down the boulevard.

Aaron’s mother died three months after being diagnosed.

The Leininger home front was Andrea’s business, and she maintained it with the eagle eye of an IRS auditor. She went shopping
with a calculator and a bag full of grocery coupons. (The local papers didn’t carry the choice coupons, so she had Bobbi send
a batch every week from the
Dallas Morning News.
) Bruce had already been out of work for three months, and the budget was tight. It cost them seven thousand dollars a month
just for the basics—the mortgage, upkeep on the cars, COBRA health insurance, the support of his ex-wife and kids. It left
Andrea seventy-five dollars a week for food. The buyout from OSCA would last only six months. When that ran out… well, there
was no other choice—Bruce simply had to get another job. He planned to start a consulting business in the fall, but Andrea
was dubious.

The trip to San Diego was a big sacrifice. To attend the reunion, they had had to dip into their emergency reserve account.
While Bruce was away, she pictured him staying at a swanky hotel, eating five-course dinners while she and James had to stay
home eating Chef Boyardee ravioli.

But the girls on the panel were adamant. These men from
Natoma Bay
weren’t getting any younger, and as they died off, the memories would die with them. And the possibility of solving James’s
nightmares would shut down, too.

Of course, they were right, and the practical-minded “tightwaddy” Andrea gave in. Bruce had to go. And, as it turned out,
he struck gold. He found Jack Larsen!

On the second morning of the reunion, after learning that the man was alive, Bruce called Jack Larsen from his room at the
Holiday Inn. At the time, he was still under the spell of a possible link between Jack Larsen and James—his son. There had
to be a connection, he reasoned. “Why else would James have given us his name?”

On the phone, Bruce went through the usual routine about writing a book and wanting all the information he could get on
Natoma Bay,
and Jack Larsen was affable and agreeable—couldn’t be nicer. “Fine,” he said, “come to Arkansas. Whenever you’re in the neighborhood.
Be glad to help out.”

After he hung up, Bruce walked over to the Grant and found Al Alcorn, a sailor on
Natoma Bay
who had become an important mover and shaker in the association. They wandered down to the harbor. The veterans were all
going on a tour, sailing past the North Island Naval Air Station, where so many Navy pilots had trained during World War II.

John DeWitt and Leo Pyatt and Al Alcorn, who had appointed themselves Bruce’s wingmen for the reunion, asked Bruce to join
them, but Bruce backed off. He said he wanted to spend some time in the ready room and take another crack at the documents.

When he was alone with the sheaf of papers, he lost track of time. He skipped meals and bent over the tattered, incomplete,
and frustrating records on display. There was just enough material there to whet his appetite, but not enough to answer his
questions. But he was in his element. Records, paper trails—proofs!—were his métier. Not the New Age sensory speculations
that came out of Dallas and Lafayette!

The list of names of the casualties that he got from the Battle Monuments Commission was incomplete (there were, in fact,
twenty-one dead from
Natoma Bay
, not eighteen), and they were scattered over three squadrons. Bruce hadn’t known which names belonged to which squadron—until
he found the material in San Diego. There was also one member of the ship’s company who was killed: Loraine Sandberg. Of the
fliers, four men from VC-63 were killed: Edmund Lange, Eldon Bailey, Eddie Barron, and Ruben Goranson; five men from VC-9:
Clarence Davis, Peter Hazard, William Bird, Richard Quack, and Robert Washburg; and eleven from VC-81: Adrian Hunter, Leon
Conner, Donald Bullis, Louis Hill, Walter Devlin, Edward Schrambeck, Billie Peeler, Lloyd Holton, John Sargent, George Neese,
and James M. Huston Jr., the only man killed during the battle of Iwo Jima.

James Huston Jr., the only man killed at Iwo Jima! That should have set off all the alarms.

But there were times when Bruce’s mind froze. He saw something right before his eyes but could not grasp the meaning. The
name James Huston registered only within the limits of what he had previously accepted as true. He needed evidence.

His son had not mentioned Huston. James had said Jack Larsen. Bruce had heard it from James’s own lips: Jack Larsen. Corsair.
He was stopped cold.

Not Andrea. When he called—as he called every night to report on his day—she felt the icy chill of clarity of a complete answer
to the search.

I knew. I knew it in my bones. Even before he went to the reunion. When I first saw the name on the list of casualties—I always
knew that it was James Huston.

I’m not like Bruce. When I read Carol Bowman’s book, I knew that it was Huston who was the “James” my son remembered. I didn’t
need proof or confirmation. I accepted the past life explanation as the only one that made sense—the only one that promised
a peaceful outcome for my son. James Huston rang a bell. And when Bruce told me from San Diego that this was the only guy
killed during the battle of Iwo Jima, well, of course it was James Huston. Period. That was the end of it. Even before I knew
that detail about him being the only one killed during that battle, even before any of it, I swear that I knew it deep down.

For Bruce, at this stage, they were still just names. He could have been looking at names engraved on a slab of marble, a
World War II monument.

The records showed that James M. Huston Jr. was lost on March 3, 1945. He was flying an FM-2 Wildcat, supporting a bombing
mission against Chichi-Jima, the Japanese supply base less than two hundred miles from Iwo Jima.

Bruce was tweaked—it was a possibility. But there remained his unbending stance against the reincarnation theory—Huston was
flying a Wildcat, not a Corsair! Either it was not Huston, or his son got the plane wrong. Damn it! Why couldn’t things line
up nicely like a mathematical equation? Why did there always have to be these illogical complications?

Nevertheless, his stone stubborn streak kept him probing, overcoming his own objections, it would seem, but unable to stop
himself. Bruce was a hard case.

At the reunion, he met one of the pilots from VC-81, Ken Wavell. He was a rangy, soft-spoken man who remembered the lost pilots.
Walter Devlin, for instance, crashed in the water near the ship, but he couldn’t swim. Wavell tossed a life raft from his
own circling plane, but it was too late. Devlin drowned. He had been a friend, and Bruce could see that speaking of it still
bothered Wavell, so he changed the subject.