know.”
“Are you also anal, neurotic, generally uptight, and possibly insane?”
“No, just twenty-five,” Dana said with an easy laugh, but her look then turned serious. “But do you know why she’s like that?”
“I’ve heard bits and pieces. She’s adopted, acquired some nasty abandonment issues, and then got dumped by the Boulangers.”
“She doesn’t just have abandonment issues, Billy,” Dana said. A wind picked up and she pushed her long locks out of her face. “She is the Abandoned Child.”
Chapter 13
Dana moved in like she was going to tell him a secret, even though nobody was within fifty yards of them.
“She wasn’t adopted through a traditional agency. My mother was picking up my father at the Greenwich train station on Christmas Day, almost twenty-one years ago. But what she found was a four-year-old girl wandering aimlessly along the train platform and crying.”
Billy gazed at the party in the distance. If what Dana said was true, then Beth was the same age as Carolyn when she was abandoned.
“My parents waited with Beth for her parents or guardian to show,” Dana continued. “Hours went by—nothing. So they brought her home. I was a freshman in high school at the time, and my friends and I went around Greenwich putting up flyers. Hours turned into days, and by the time we figured out nobody was coming for her, Mom and I had fallen in love with her. Everybody in the family was against keeping her, but my father could never say no to me, I was his little princess.”
Billy wasn’t surprised people like the Boulangers didn’t have to go through the proper channels to adopt the girl. He saw it firsthand with the Kleins, who never went through systems or waited in lines. But he remained skeptical of the story. “These people just ditched their kid at the train station and there were no witnesses?”
“None that we found. Beth was in therapy and hypnosis for years. For the most part, she could recall general emotions she felt, but not specifics like names or places. The majority opinion is the experience was so traumatic that she displaced the memories to a deep place where they could never be retrieved.
“The only tangible memories she had were that she came from ‘the place with the big buildings,’ which we confirmed when we found a train ticket in her pocket from Grand Central in New York. And the other was Nathan.”
“Nathan?”
“She claimed to have a brother named Nathan, who Beth described as having some sort of disfigurement. She remembers the other children mockingly calling him E.T. after the alien in the popular movie of the time. She thought their trip to New York had something to do with going to see a doctor for Nathan.”
“How many doctors could have treated a disfigured child named Nathan around Christmas time? Did you check every doctor in New York?”
The exhausted look on Dana’s face said this was not a new line of questioning. “Of course we did, and found nothing. The consensus of those with the fancy degrees was that Nathan was an imaginary friend that Beth made up to deal with the trauma. That she created his disfigurement and lack of acceptance, to play out the parallels of her actual existence. In other words, they didn’t believe there was a doctor.”
A great imagination, just like her daughter. I’m not gonna apologize for having a great imagination. On the surface it made sense. Imaginary friends were a common way for children to escape and reveal inner thoughts. Billy had his own imaginary friend as a child. But he could tell Dana wasn’t buying it.
“Even if Nathan is a figment of her imagination, which I doubt,” she said, “her recollection of the emotions from that day were too vivid, especially the way she talked about the scared look on her parents’ faces. A child always remembers the first time they see their parents truly scared.”
“Yet she doesn’t remember anything her parents said to her? No names, no
“Are you also anal, neurotic, generally uptight, and possibly insane?”
“No, just twenty-five,” Dana said with an easy laugh, but her look then turned serious. “But do you know why she’s like that?”
“I’ve heard bits and pieces. She’s adopted, acquired some nasty abandonment issues, and then got dumped by the Boulangers.”
“She doesn’t just have abandonment issues, Billy,” Dana said. A wind picked up and she pushed her long locks out of her face. “She is the Abandoned Child.”
Chapter 13
Dana moved in like she was going to tell him a secret, even though nobody was within fifty yards of them.
“She wasn’t adopted through a traditional agency. My mother was picking up my father at the Greenwich train station on Christmas Day, almost twenty-one years ago. But what she found was a four-year-old girl wandering aimlessly along the train platform and crying.”
Billy gazed at the party in the distance. If what Dana said was true, then Beth was the same age as Carolyn when she was abandoned.
“My parents waited with Beth for her parents or guardian to show,” Dana continued. “Hours went by—nothing. So they brought her home. I was a freshman in high school at the time, and my friends and I went around Greenwich putting up flyers. Hours turned into days, and by the time we figured out nobody was coming for her, Mom and I had fallen in love with her. Everybody in the family was against keeping her, but my father could never say no to me, I was his little princess.”
Billy wasn’t surprised people like the Boulangers didn’t have to go through the proper channels to adopt the girl. He saw it firsthand with the Kleins, who never went through systems or waited in lines. But he remained skeptical of the story. “These people just ditched their kid at the train station and there were no witnesses?”
“None that we found. Beth was in therapy and hypnosis for years. For the most part, she could recall general emotions she felt, but not specifics like names or places. The majority opinion is the experience was so traumatic that she displaced the memories to a deep place where they could never be retrieved.
“The only tangible memories she had were that she came from ‘the place with the big buildings,’ which we confirmed when we found a train ticket in her pocket from Grand Central in New York. And the other was Nathan.”
“Nathan?”
“She claimed to have a brother named Nathan, who Beth described as having some sort of disfigurement. She remembers the other children mockingly calling him E.T. after the alien in the popular movie of the time. She thought their trip to New York had something to do with going to see a doctor for Nathan.”
“How many doctors could have treated a disfigured child named Nathan around Christmas time? Did you check every doctor in New York?”
The exhausted look on Dana’s face said this was not a new line of questioning. “Of course we did, and found nothing. The consensus of those with the fancy degrees was that Nathan was an imaginary friend that Beth made up to deal with the trauma. That she created his disfigurement and lack of acceptance, to play out the parallels of her actual existence. In other words, they didn’t believe there was a doctor.”
A great imagination, just like her daughter. I’m not gonna apologize for having a great imagination. On the surface it made sense. Imaginary friends were a common way for children to escape and reveal inner thoughts. Billy had his own imaginary friend as a child. But he could tell Dana wasn’t buying it.
“Even if Nathan is a figment of her imagination, which I doubt,” she said, “her recollection of the emotions from that day were too vivid, especially the way she talked about the scared look on her parents’ faces. A child always remembers the first time they see their parents truly scared.”
“Yet she doesn’t remember anything her parents said to her? No names, no
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